I recognize this correspondence, and am concerned about the consequences of both. At the same time, I think we need to be aware of the possibility of confounding. It may be that both can be explained by something like authority bias leading to a greater trust of authorities from one’s group and a corresponding distrust of authorities and institutions (perceived as) outside of the group. Do young Earth Christians distrust science and the universities where it is conducted because they are “secular” and therefore must be wrong about the age of the Earth and the origin of species, or is it the teaching of an old Earth and evolution that makes those institutions generally untrustworthy? Either way, there are outcomes that I would prefer to see changed, but accomplishing that change may require getting the causal relationships correct. And getting the causal relationships correct will also inform which harms are the result of young Earth teaching and which are coincident with it.
I don’t have answers to those questions at the societal level, but I can speak to personal harm. I’ve written here previously about my own childhood and education in conservative Christian churches and schools that were exclusively young Earth. I won’t repeat all the details, but the short version is that I was a young Earth believer, then an age-of-the-Earth agnostic once I learned that there were other Christian perspectives. It wasn’t until I started taking seriously the creationist (and ID) encouragement to see for myself where the evidence pointed and followed up the papers they cited that I discovered how much the case for a young Earth and against evolution relied on rhetorical obfuscation (at best) of the actual data and research and very little if at all on the scientific method.
This has led to what I have called a crisis of fellowship rather than a crisis of faith. I am still content to affirm the Nicene Creed and I stand by my confession from 5 years ago–except for the part about going to church on Sunday. A variety of events, most of them related to scientific issues, have broken my ability to trust the Christian communities I was a part of. How can I fellowship with people who tell me privately that it is OK to be a Christian who affirms evolution, but from the pulpit misrepresent science, make jokes about how dumb you have to be to believe evolution, and sing songs about how evolutionists are liars? How can I fellowship with people who explicitly dismiss the field of public health that I’ve spent my career in? And how do I trust that they aren’t wrong about other areas where I am not an expert when I can see how wrong they are in the areas where I am?
More recently, I have also begun to reflect on the less consequential but still personally significant harm of having missed out on studying interesting science. From my personal investigations of the past 5-10 years, I’ve discovered that I find evolutionary biology quite fascinating and enjoyable to study, even going so far as developing my own simulation to understand it better. I can only imagine how differently my scientific career might have turned out if I had started on that path two or three decades earlier. At the very least, a better understanding of evolutionary dynamics could only have helped my work as it relates to infectious disease biology and epidemiology.