Well Put

Lifted from the comments in the previous thread, straight provides a much clearer and more concise statement of what I was trying to say about the young-earth creationists not being "conservative":

Fundamentalism is a reaction to "modern" criticisms of the Bible and Christianity. It started out defending what have traditionally been regarded as the core beliefs of Christianity (e.g. that Jesus was the divine Son of God, that he was really raised from the dead, etc.), but in the process of making that defense they came up with (seemingly without quite realizing it) a new approach to reading the Bible, arguing that every word of it was "inerrant" (whatever that means). This tossed out the window a couple thousand years of traditional, orthodox approaches to reading and interpreting the Bible in favor of this new standard which was initially defined in reaction to the German Higher biblical criticism, but which has morphed in various weird ways since as subsequent people have all had different ideas about what exactly it means for a book to be "inerrant."

Seven-day creationism (the way it is taught and believed in the 21st century USA) is the child of one of the attempts to apply this modern "inerrant" standard to Genesis.

Precisely.

It's a bit odd, perhaps, to say that "morphed in various weird ways" is a precise statement, but it's about as accurate as one can be in trying to describe the strange new mischief that has been introduced by this imprecise notion of "inerrancy."

That weird morphing also explains why the claim that beliefs like young-earth creationism or PMD rapture mania are "conservative" is false, but not disingenuous. These are new and radically innovative ideas introduced or adopted by people who had set out, initially, to uphold "the authority of the scriptures" (to use one of their favorite phrases). That this effort to defend the Bible's "traditional" meaning has resulted in their introducing replacement meanings that override and disregard its traditional meaning is bitterly ironic, but this irony is lost on them.

A comment from inge neatly summarizes the irony of these "traditional" views that would be unrecognizable to those in the main stream of that tradition:

If you tried to explain it to a person who lived 150 years ago, they would think you were on crack, if they knew what crack was.

None of which is to say here that a more "conservative" or more "traditional" or more "orthodox" view is necessarily the correct view in every case — only that those words have meanings that cannot be stretched to accommodate the claims of young-earth creationists to be any of those things. Bracketing the question, for the moment, of whether or not young-earth creationism is true, the point here is that it cannot be accurately or truthfully described as conservative, traditional or orthodox.

(Un-bracketing the question, youth-earth creationism is also glaringly un-true, and unlike being liberal, innovative or heterodox, that's a fatal problem.)

Well put