Whoaaa...you don't think a Christian man who goes off to school and comes home an atheist (due to a professor's ridicule of the existence of God while teaching him evolution) and goes to a party and dies of a drug overdose or in a terrible car accident afterward is lost?
I consider that scenario, at face value, absurd.
What is more likely to have happened is this:
That Christian man was raised being taught that evolution was wrong and possibly evil and satanic, and Creationists taught him that evolution is "atheistic" and therefore incompatible with Christianity. That to accept the theory of evolution was to reject the inspiration and authority of the Bible. Et al. Once that man went off to higher education he encountered something he was entirely unprepared for: The preponderance of evidence which backs up the theory of evolution. The man attempts to challenge what he is being told, but is entirely ill-equipped at dealing with a professor with degrees and possibly decades of experience and knowledge to back him up. Overwhelmed, the man begins to wonder if perhaps everything he had been raised to believe was a lie. If the evidence points to biological evolution as a truthful explanation of the diversity of life on earth, and ergo the Young Earth Creationist interpretation of Genesis may be in error, then as he sees it, it's not merely the interpretation of the Bible that was the issue, but rather "this is what the Bible says" and therefore the Bible must be wrong. And if the Bible is wrong about this, he reckons, what else might it be wrong about? After all, he had been taught that if the Bible is wrong about one thing, it must be wrong about everything else. So what the Bible says about Jesus, about God, about God's historical work through Israel, the covenants, the promises, etc--that now collapses down upon him because he has built the entire structure of his faith upon the premise that the Bible says that God created everything in six literal days only several thousand years ago.
It was not the theory of evolution that wrecked the man's faith. It was not the professor "ridicule of the existence of God", as that probably isn't very likely. There are plenty of professors who teach biology and other fields of science who are faithful and believing Christians. There are also many God-believing professors who are Jews, Muslims, or belong to other religious traditions. Are there agnostic and atheist professors, of course. But the idea that a professor teaching the theory of evolution is "ridiculing the existence of God" is something that is quite unlikely to happen.
In high school my biology teacher was a Roman Catholic, a Christian. While he obviously did not force his Christianity on anyone in class, he didn't hide it, it was well known that he was a believing Christian. When I, a Young Earth Creationist, objected to what we were being taught in class (I had been raised, hitherto, in religious private schools, both Baptist and non-denominational), he educated me and, yes, I felt embarrassed and even angry at the time. But he wasn't mocking my belief in God, he believed in God, the same God, he believed in Jesus Christ, the same Jesus Christ.
So I am, on the whole, entirely skeptical of the scenario itself--of professors ridiculing a student's belief in God. Has that happened? Maybe. Is that a regular occurence? I seriously doubt it. Does teaching evolution lead to atheism? No. Does teaching an impressionable child that their faith in God depends on a belief in a literal six day creation week and that the universe is ~6,000 years old have potentially devestating implications when they come into contact with objective reality? Almost certainly.
I consider myself rather fortunate in that I transitioned from being a Young Earth Creationist to what I am now primarily because my foundations had been already established on my faith in Christ. I had, when that happened, already been going through a period of religious deconstruction as years earlier I had come to realize that the things I had been taught most of my life didn't line up with Scripture and with historic, normative Christian teaching. So when my Young Earth Creationism began to fade, it was because I already knew at that point that there will millions of Christians who were Bible-believing and orthodox but fully accepted evolution, and that Young Earth Creationism had never been a major issue, and in fact, there had from antiquity been Christians who understood that the creation narrative in Genesis ch. 1 probably shouldn't be taken too literally. For example, St. Augustine of Hippo.
And I've become aware, even since then, that Young Earth Creationism, as a kind of dogmatic movement, is actually rather modern. It was a very big deal for Seventh-Day Adventists in the 19th century, but didn't really become a key issue for American Evangelicals until the mid-20th century. For example, in the early 20th century most Fundamentalists were Old Earth Creationists. See most Christians had come to accept that the earth was old in the 18th and 19th centuries as geologists began learning more about the age of the earth, with many of those geologists themselves being not only Christians, but often Christian ministers. So the evidence of the rocks showed the earth was old, at least millions of years old based on their observations and experiments; so by the time evolution began to become controversial at the turn of the 20th century, that the earth was quite old was already well accepted--and in fact even evolution was becoming accepted in many churches. But evolution became entrenched into the Modernist Controversy, and so evolution became associated with the Liberal Theological schools of Western Europe which began to make their way across the Atlantic, resulting in the Fundamentalist Movement.
In the mid-20th century, a second wave of that occurred as, in the years following the Second World War, Fundamentalism had largely become insular, Modernism and Liberal Theology had, in many ways, found themselves killed off in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In the United States post-war society began to buckle as a confluence of societal changes began to take effect, the Civil Rights Movement and Feminist Movements, and by the 1960's the Anti-War Movement. In this societal upheaval as long-standing societal structures were starting to become challenged, we also see, for example, the end of school-led prayer, the forbidding of teaching religious-based instruction in public schools.
We can't forget the Cold War in all of this too. Though the Soviets had been our allies during WW2, our alliance with the Soviets was always going to be an alliance of convenience. So while the Stalinists and Soviets effectively made themselves the enemies of religion and imposing a kind of "State Atheism", in the US our anti-Soviet and anti-Communist sentiments meant we were going to go the other direction. So, for example, we added "One Nation under God" to our national pledge of allegiance, we added "In God We Trust" to our currency.
So when social upheaval began to show up, and major societal changes began to happen, like the ending of Segregation, various Civil Rights legislature coming onto the scene, young people rebelling against societal norms such as opposing the war in Vietnam, rebelling against sexual norms, etc. And at the same time, for example Bob Jones University got in trouble for keeping its school segregated; then school-led prayer being abolished, etc. Well, it was a ripe opportunity for people to find their own cause. That's where we find Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson becoming deeply influential in the shaping of mid-to-late 20th century Evangelicalism, a movement which had originated in the 30's and 40's partly in response to Fundamentalism's insularity. The rise of the Moral Majority, and the beginnings of what, today, we still refer to as the "Culture War".
Evolution, therefore, became co-opted into the socio-religio-political "culture war" that began in the 60's and lasts even to this day.
But evolution itself simply isn't an issue. The real issue is the ways in which conservative Christianity has largely been hijacked by particular ideologues who have a vested interest in the maintenance of power, rather than the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and true discipleship under the Lordship of Jesus.
-CryptoLutheran
