Bay, that’s because they are privileged. Seriously. If you can’t see that, you’re not paying attention. Not all Christians, not all white men, but the ones who take it upon themselves to speak for their groups. And it’s not just that they are privileged, they act as if they deserve that privilege, and as if their privilege extends to schooling the rest of us on their superiority. I’m tired of this manufactured “victim” narrative that those who are insulted by their lack of absolute control have come up with. Fact: if you’re white, you are more likely to get away with minor crimes than if you’re black. Fact: no other religionists are trying to foist their beliefs on others. The most other religions in this country ask for is acknowledgment that they exist. Fact: if you wander around with a gun in plain sight, and you’re black, you’re more likely to get shot than if you’re white. Hell, even if you’re not carrying a gun, you’re more likely to get shot if you’re black than if you’re white, even if you’re a child.
And intelligent design is not science. Creationism is not science. For scientists to admit we don’t know everything yet is not the same as denying all that we do know, because faith. A science class should consist of teaching what we have so far determined, through scientific method, to be truth; the nature of science is that that knowledge is constantly being extended, altered, developed, abandoned, refined. No good teacher tells her students that knowledge is finite and complete.
I would point out that religion isn’t constant, either. What the Church fathers said in 240 CE was different from what they said in 1240 CE, and 1540 CE, and 1940 CE. What was doctrinal, what was heretical, what was unthinkable, have all changed, many times. Jesus and his followers, Paul and his followers, all thought the world was going to end any minute, and said so repeatedly. When it didn’t, the Church adapted. Jesus had brothers, but Mary was declared, hundreds of years later, to have been a virgin all her life. In 1531, in England, Bilney was burned at the stake for beliefs that, ten years later, were being preached in every church; fifteen years after that, he would have been burned again, and five years later, the pendulum had swung again. That’s extreme, but take another example: predestination was central to both Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine, bedrock. No one could be saved who hadn’t been chosen before birth by God for salvation. No such thing as conversion; either you were or you weren’t, and no point talking about how “Jesus loves you.” Few American Protestants nowadays even know of this idea, and even fewer subscribe to it, yet they consider themselves Protestants. Today’s fiercely-held beliefs have always been susceptible to change, which ought to engender at least a little bit of humility in the faithful.
Churches, all of them, choose to emphasize certain teachings over others. The current obsession of Catholic bishops with birth control and abortion ignores many other important foci that Catholics have traditionally been concerned with, as the Nuns on the Bus have tried to point out. The obsession with homosexuality and same-sex marriage comes at the expense of real and present dangers to the institution of marriage, such as domestic abuse, wage inequality and inadequate childcare (money problems are at the bottom of most marital disputes). Churches could choose to address those things–and, to do them justice, sometimes do, but not as loudly and sternly and absolutely–and politically.