by William Trollinger

Movie poster for Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark (2024). Image via IMDB.

It was another good year for rightingamerica, both in the variety of authors’ voices and topics, and in the number and variety of viewers. Below are the top ten read posts that were published in 2024, with quotes from each the posts. Enjoy reading (or re-reading!) 

10. Payday Someday for the Evangelicals (Ahab) and Trump (Jezebel), by Rodney Kennedy (April 22)

         “Evangelicals and Trump have a payday coming – a judgment they will not be able to bear. Like Jezebel and Ahab, Trump and the evangelicals are scoundrels and villains. They spread crooked speech, wink the eyes, shuffle the feet, point the fingers, with perverted minds devising evil and sowing discord. There’s no joy or satisfaction in my heart making this harsh accusation against my evangelical brothers and sisters . . . [But] This is the judgment. Evangelicals and Trump will have their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving religious zeal riddled in hypocrisy.”

9. The Bitter Heart of Martha-Ann Alito: How the Meaning of Signs Change, by Tucker James Hoffmann (August 06)

         “Mrs. Alito’s usage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an anti-Pride symbol combined with her now-public rant against LGBTQ+ people aim, in my opinion, to refigure the symbol from a symbol of God’s universal love to God’s very conditional love. That is to say, for Martha-Ann Alito and her ideological soulmates, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is not about loving or caring for our fellow human beings. Instead, it is but another tool to continue the oppression of a historically marginalized group. So what we have here is yet another effort by a conservative Christian to turn Jesus’ teachings and message of love he brought to humanity inside out.”

8. Worst. Book about the Scopes Trial. Ever!, by Glenn Branch (September 10)

         “What is the thesis of The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial? According to its subtitle, At Its Heart the Trial was about Racism, while within the text, Bergman awkwardly declaims, ‘The trial was about human evolution, and more about racism and eugenics than religion and evolution.’ . . . There is a glaring obstacle to the thesis, which in fact Bergman briefly acknowledges: that “in the entire Scopes court transcript the topic of eugenics and racism was avoided.’” . . . Instead of “meticulous collection and judicious assessment of evidence,” in this book “there is hagiographizing, conspiracy theorizing, and mudslinging.”

7. At Ark Encounter, It’s All About Hell, by William Trollinger (June 18)

         “As the folks at AiG see it, if you have trouble accepting the notion that a ‘righteous and holy’ God drowned up to 20 billion human beings (including children, infants, and the unborn) – if you struggle to wrap your head around this sort of genocidal God – you might also doubt the notion that there is a God who is planning to subject billions of humans to eternal torment. On the other hand, if you believe in the notion that God drowned up to 20 billion human beings . . . then you should have no trouble believing that God is quite capable of consigning billions of human beings ‘to conscious and everlasting punishment in the lake of fire (hell).’”

6. The Zone of Interest, Auschwitz, and Ark Encounter, by William Trollinger (June 11)

         “While I was watching this incredible film, I confess that I could not stop thinking about the striking similarities between [the family home at Auschwitz] and Noah’s family/boat at Ark Encounter. . . . [But] In contrast with The Zone of Interest, Ark Encounter is quite blatant in encouraging visitors to identify with the comfortably content, albeit morally vacuous (to understate the case), Noah family. . . . To make this point unmistakably obvious, Ark Encounter has positioned a ‘keepsake photo’ placard near the door that they assert God shut and locked before the waters rose, before – to say it again – up to twenty billion people were drowned. Smile for the camera!”

5. The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism: A Review, by Andrew McNeely (March 21)

         “Chronicling the evangelical ecosystem . . . Alberta illustrates what evangelicalism actually looks like on the other side of total depravity. Zealous alter calls for the beleaguered and downtrodden no longer hold sway over radical calls to ‘drain the swamp’ of an evil cabal of politicians. What Alberta renders is a monstrous-like evangelicalism akin to Nietzsche’s famous dictum: ‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.’ In Alberta’s telling, evangelicalism has not only fallen into Nietzsche’s abyss, but it’s emerged a monster.”

4. Shall the Christian Nationalists Win?, by Rodney Kennedy (August 20)

         “Christian Nationalists want to be lords instead of servants. They want to be self-righteous rulers, not slaves of righteousness. They want to ‘lord it over’ instead of serving the needs of the people. The Christian Nationalists are like godless Gentiles in our midst, godless Gentiles with an unmitigated lust for power. Their spirit has nothing in common with the One who said he ‘came not to be served but to serve’ (Matthew 20: 25-27). . . . Their agenda demolishes democracy, destroys truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, their own people, and our nation. It is a negative, debilitating, fake cure for the problems we face.”

3. A Cautionary Tale: Dwell/Xenos Christian Fellowship, Evangelical Assumptions, and the Jesus People Movement, by Ben Williamson (January 02)

         “Conservative evangelicalism takes for granted its ability to interpret and apply the Bible, considered absolute in its authority, to the lives of its members in a manner that is also absolute in authority. This confers a high degree of power to the pastor and/or small group leader. In the case of Xenos/Dwell, the church consists of a large and varying number of small groups . . . [whose] leaders naturally hold a high degree of authority in their interpretation of the Bible by [as explained by Kathleen Boone] ‘effacing the distinction between text and interpretation . . . claim[ing] that the interpreter does nothing more than expound the ‘plain sense’ of the text.”

2. Climate Change Denial for Creationist Kids, by Glenn Branch (October 29)

         “Climate Change for Kids . . . and Parents Too!, the latest entry in a spate of climate change denial books aimed at a young audience, invites the reader to . . . ‘[discover how science . . . reflects the history and truth found in God’s Word.’ . . . The authors . . . are Ken Ham, the founder of the young-earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, and Jessica DeFord, who, armed with a master of science degree in wildlife ecology, works for the same organization. In consequence, their book is a mix of error and fantasy, with the errors resembling those of secular climate change deniers and the fantasies emanating from their own reading of – and creative additions to – the Bible.”

1. “’Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark’ : Two Reviews, by Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch and Laura Tringali.

         “I find the emphasis on the Christian message confusing, due to the amount of theft required to make this pilgrimage to the Ark . . . Perhaps they should have painted ‘Ark or Bust’ on the windows of the various stolen or borrowed vehicles, in case viewers needed more clues about the film’s main message.”

         At the end “the audience is left without closure as we watch a criminal, who is perhaps a good friend by some distorted standard I am sure we could imagine, ride off on the back of a train, in the process evading both law enforcement and any continued relationship with his children.”

Note: The top four most-read posts in 2024 were all published earlier. Here are the links to these posts: