Serious question, not meant to ridicule anyone: but does all of this come from a lack of proper education in the US?
I'm from the Netherlands, I went to a high school that was officially catholic (a holdover from when the school was founded in the 50s). But even though our school was catholic, religion was never thought in that way in our school. No morning prayers or anything like that (I think the vast majority of students weren't religious, like most of the country actually). What we learned about religion was only limited to a specific class, and that handled all big world religions, their history, their teachings (none of it was treated as truth, nor specifically as false either - just presenting what people of various religions believed with a ton of humanistic philosophy thrown in).
Meanwhile the actual sciences just presented science as what it is - either facts or ruling theories. The idea that concepts like climate change or evolution could be in question were completely foreign to us.
As a result I think, I never really heard anyone - either a political group or a protest group or what have you - deny climate change here, or other weird things like that. It's just not something you do.
(also, things like forbidding gay marriage aren't even a question for even the most far-right political groups as far as I know. It's just not something anyone is seemingly interested in - which in part has to do with the fact that the majority of our population isn't religious so that doesn't factor into it, and that it has been legal since 2001 (I think we were the first?), so everyone is pretty used to it by now - I was hoping that is what would happen in the US as well, but who knows at this point). Same goes for abortion etc.
The other major factor is the mix of religion and state. That's just not done here (something similar to the president saying 'God Bless America', or getting the option to swear on the bible in court would be incredibly ridiculed here). We have religious political parties (particularly a christian one), although the influence of religion there is more guided by their faith - religion isn't really a factor in choosing to vote or not vote for them.
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What I'm trying to ask: is the level of influence of religion in education and the state too big in the US (and is that the fault of these viewpoints staying so strong in the face of actual research), and is that likely to change at all?
Edit: rereading my post I realize it may come across as me bragging about my country and making fun of Americans. Really not my intention. To make it up to you some miserable facts about my people: we have a horribly outdated and incredibly racist tradition called Zwarte Piet with too little people being able to admit that it's disgustingly racist, and we have our own Trump like 80s movie villain politician who wants to ban all muslims and who has actually said he wants to burn every copy of the Koran in the country - and he has an actual reasonably sized following - I'm so scared about the upcoming elections
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I hope that evens it out a bit.