Science

For all its issues, the Catholic Church has had to adapt to survive as an institution, so mechanisms for change and ideological wiggle room were built in over the last 500 or so years. This is in contrast to groups like Southern Baptists and other fundamentalists, whose purpose is to be an ideological lock on other institutions, namely slavery and then Jim Crow. The point of Biblical literalism is to demand ideological obedience without wiggle room.