When I was growing up, it didn’t seem like a stretch for a person to be a Christian and also to believe that evolution was the way that God chose to create the world. These days, though, Intelligent Design seems to mean that very clear lines are drawn and you have to pick a side. What’s especially confusing is that each side has information on how the other side is distorting the facts. Or flat-out lying. I’m not science-y enough to want to invest a whole lot of time in it, so I mostly tune out that whole conversation. I know people I trust on both sides of the debate: thoughtful, considerate people who think evolution is a lie from hell and committed Christians who believe in evolution. I used to know more in the first group, but lately I meet more in the second.
Maybe I’m just being dense, but I don’t understand why there’s a problem with believing that God used evolution. To me, that doesn’t take away from God at all. And I assume I’ll get all kinds of hate mail and comments about . . . I don’t know, the fossil record or something, but, as I said before, both sides seem to have different facts and interpretations. It just makes me tired.
Which brings me to this book: Evolution, Me, & Other Freaks of Nature. Mena, a high school freshman, was basically in the youth group from Saved! before she got kicked out for doing something she thought was right. Now they’ve turned all their venom on her, pushing her into lockers and generally making her life miserable. Mena makes a new friend in her lab partner, Casey, and when the science teacher, Ms. Shepherd, begins teaching a unit on evolution, Mena watches her old friends’ antics (turning their backs on the teacher, interrupting to demand that Intelligent Design be taught) for the first time as an outsider.
I loved this book. I loved that Mena continued to believe in God even though the church kicked her out, that she didn’t write off God even though her former friends weren’t acting in a very Christlike way to her. I liked that she learned about both science and faith and that they don’t have to be at odds. I loved Ms. Shepherd, who was passionate about science and teaching, and who infected her students with that excitement. My favorite character was probably Casey, her lab partner. Mena’s family is very strict about media, and when he found out she had never seen or read The Lord of the Rings, his dramatic response had me laughing out loud.
The only thing I wasn’t sure about was how realistic Mena’s parents’ response was to her getting kicked out of youth group. For most of the book, they gave her the silent treatment, because they were affected by the decision Mena made that got her kicked out of youth group. I am not a parent, and I agree that Mena should probably have talked to someone about what was going on before she did what she did, but it’s hard for me to believe a parent wouldn’t have been proud of Mena for standing up for what was right (and I think Mena did what was right, not just what she thought was right). At the very least, wouldn’t they have talked to her about it? I would have liked that relationship to be fleshed out a little more, I think, because even the confrontation in the end wasn’t quite enough for me. Maybe it was too much to believe that Mena’s parents would understand her right away, though, and we are just supposed to see them taking steps to work out their differences. That’s real life, to be sure. We don’t wrap things up like a sitcom. But it did leave me a little unsatisfied.
In the end, Mena learns a powerful lesson about science, belief, and the separation of church and state. Not only that, but she also gains a little perspective on her parents and her old friends, learning to consider how her decisions affect other people. This is Robin Brande’s first book, which comes out in August, and I look forward to reading more of her work.
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6 Comments
I’m in the second group. I respect the first group’s right to have an opinion, but I really can’t respect the opinion.
[See? I'm an ass.]
And yeah, I find a parent giving a kid the silent treatment for that to not hold water, either.
I am actually not comfortable with you saying that it doesn’t hold water, because that’s not quite it. I probably didn’t explain it well. It’s not that they gave her the silent treatment, necessarily, that was my problem. Church was incredibly important to them, and she got kicked out, and people from church were suing them, and they could lose their business, and all of that made their relationship really difficult.
What left it unsatisfying for me was [and this is getting into the end a bit] that she was left the whole time thinking that they were mad for one thing when really they were mad about another. They were really inflexible and kept grounding her . . . but they weren’t ever talking about it. In addition, when they were having the big confrontation, her mother didn’t give as much as I really thought she ought to (I will admit that I like nice neat endings, so that’s mostly my own thing there).
But I see parents do much worse things than silent treatment, so when I say it was hard for me to believe it, I didn’t mean, “This is a plot hole.” I meant, “This is so far out of my realm of experience I don’t exactly know what to do with it.”
What was unsatisfying, I think, was their lack of growth. But they were starting from a place I found believable but very hard for me to understand, so the amount of growth I would want probably isn’t possible.
Ahhh, okay. But see, I would still have a hard time believing that parents could never really communicate why they were mad with their kid’s actions in such a realm—I can see it for bigger things, to be sure, but for something like this, I can see he dad blurting out, “You’re costing me money!” Of course, my experience is totally colored by my experience with my own parents, who’re generally pretty communicative. Whenever I got into trouble, BOY DID I EVER KNOW WHAT I DID WRONG. Ahem.
So yeah, it’s out of the realm of my experience, and heck, I haven’t read the book anyway. Ha.
I’m going to go ahead and clarify it, because I think it’ll make more sense if I say this. But stay away if you don’t want some of the story spoiled.
[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]
It’s not really the money, though. It has to do with the fact that, the year before, the people in her youth group (on the orders of the pastor, I believe) had targeted this kid at school who maybe was gay and tried to “save” him. But basically what they were doing was making his life miserable. So miserable, in fact, that he tried to kill himself. Mena hadn’t participated in these activities, but she felt bad that she hadn’t stopped them, either, so she sent him a letter saying she was sorry. HIS parents then used that letter to sue all the other kids’ parents.
In the end, her parents were more mad that she had done that without consulting with them than about the church or the money, even though that’s what SHE thought they were mad about. But I think the reason that I can believe it, even though it was outside of my experience, is that it did have to do with homosexuality, and it was believable that that would be, in that family, such a taboo subject that they wouldn’t know how to express themselves.
What I wanted was some kind of acknowledgment from her parents that they were proud of her for standing up for the boy (there may have been something, it’s kind of hazy at this point) or that they were sorry that she’d had such a hard time at school this year or something. Instead, her mom was like, “Well, that was your own fault for sending the letter,” because the LETTER was what the problem for them. But they hadn’t really created an environment in which she COULD talk to them about the letter, either. There was just . . . something missing for me there as far as her mom being flexible or compassionate. They did agree, in the end to change churches, at least.
Hi Kari! You probably won’t even see this because you’re moved on to other posts, but unfortunately I’m a little slow at commenting. One thing I’ve heard about theistic evolution (and this is if you believe the Bible is truth) that God created everything…. when he created man he said it was “very good.”….perfect. But for God to have used evolution to bring us about, there would have had to be death and suffering for however long (some say millions) until we existed. That’s not a perfect creation to me. Because of Adam’s sin there is death and suffering, not the other way around. That’s just a little tidbit I have heard. I got interested in Creation/Evolution when I was taking some biology classes in college and decided to study up on both sides so I did some reading and went to a seminar, etc….after studying both sides of the coin I just can’t make evolution work in my mind. The world is too complex, even the single cell is soo amazing that I can’t imagine it just happening even given millions of years.
Maybe I should leave well enough alone, but was reading and thought I’d like to reply. I find myself on the fence. I mean, I believe in evolution, but not so far as we actually evolved from single-cell organisms. I do think we have evolved over time, though. For instance, there is scientific evidence that at one time most people were born with six fingers. Now, although it still happens, that is more the exception than the norm. Also, what about our appendix? Why would God give us an extra organ that had no purpose? I think at one time there was probably a use for it. So, I believe evolution is possible and even probable, but not to the point that we started as amoebas.