That said, the story that never gets told is how a sizable but still minority segment of the protestant population has now been christened int he media as the true “Christians” and get their views presented as the “Christian” message. Not that the Catholic Church is the poster child for progressive, er, anything, but like many mainline protestant groups the Church does not find a problem with evolution, although I think they would favor the devine guided version - whatever that means.

PS - the mechanism for the “great flood:” a bursting of the portals of the sky, i.e., the Mediterranean firmament, and the fountains of the deep, or guysers. The ancient belief, going all the way back to the earliest writing from Uruk in the late 4th Millenium BC, was that the earth is surrounded by waters “above” the firmament - a thin dome to which the stars are attached - and waters “below, i.e. the abyss” from which guysers originate. This is the view in the Bible, and there is a great Jewish Midrash from the early Common Era that describes the firmament as only a “few fingers” thick.

To put it somewhat kiddingly, the YEC think God had everything he needed and got it done immediately and the IRs think he kept having to make trips to the cosmic Home Depot to get ‘just one more thing’ to finish. (grin). The more modern Christian position would be that God hired subcontractors and they took their own sweet time to finally finish.

But yeah, the degree of support for Creationism (Young Earth Creationism especially) is disturbing….