This increase in fundamentalism is a huge problem in the United States for many reasons. Not least is that these conservative Christians don't believe in the findings of science, not even medical science.

I wrote an article last week about a teenage boy whose conservative Christian parents sent him to a troubled-teen camp in the Dominican Republic (run by American seeking to avoid American legal responsibility) because he's gay and thought the camp could "cure" him. Staff at the camp literally beat and tortured him.

That's a problem in itself, obviously, and it's down to his religious parents rejecting empirical knowledge about sexual orientation and change.

To make things worse, in the course of writing the story I learned about a teenage girl at the same camp whose parents sent her there because she suffered from medically diagnosed, debilitating panic attacks.

Her parents didn't believe their doctors, choosing to believe instead that the panic attacks were caused by demons. Literal demons. Evil spirits.

Staff beat the shit out of that girl and forced her to exercise until she coughed blood. Because demons.

So is it any wonder that when conservative Christians see Satan symbology, that they don't even try to understand that the Satanists aren't being literal?

We've got a big problem going on in the United States with this kind of regressive worship of ignorance and superstition — usually paired with racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist ideologies.

Right now, any Americans are horrified that the state of Texas tried to force a woman to give birth to a non-viable fetus even though giving birth would threaten her health and future fertility.

What many Americans don't understand is how superstitious the people are who are doing this. They're fundamentalist Christians who believe the fetus has a soul and that the soul is being harmed by not having a chance to live, even though life isn't actually possible.

These are very ignorant, very stupid people. They like it that way, and they want to force their ignorance and superstition on the rest of us!

Events in Iowa illustrate that very well.