Righting America

by William Trollinger

Last Friday Ken Ham — sadly and emotionally — tweeted his concern about evangelical leaders whose inconsistent approach to the Bible is leading folks to abandon the faith: 

It’s our contention that compromising Christians (as I call them) have an inconsistent approach to Scripture that unlocks a door to undermine biblical authority in Genesis – and puts people on a slippery slope toward unbelief through the rest of Scripture. And I’m passionate about not compromising biblical authority. In fact, because we are so burdened by the rampant compromise in the church regarding Genesis, we work hard in contending for the faith by exposing and challenging this compromise. This is particularly true when it comes to Christian leaders and Bible college/seminary professors. . . . That’s why, as much as I hate it, it’s so important for us at AiG to do all we can to passionately reach out to these leaders. We plead with Christian leaders to apply a consistent hermeneutic to Scripture and reject compromise that undermines the authority of the Word, which has such a negative impact on the people they influence.

If Ham is really so determined to challenge and correct compromising Christian leaders, it would make sense that he start with the fellow he sees in the mirror.

In doing our research for Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan Trollinger and I were surprised by the fact that, for all the supposed emphasis on the Bible, what was presented to visitors was a multitude of placards with tiny (sometimes just a few words) snippets of biblical text. More stunning was the museum’s strikingly loose approach to the Bible, As we note in the book, we discovered at the museum an “inconsistent use of translations; . . . the creative editing [of biblical text]; the lack of ellipses indicating where text has been removed from a passage; [and] the failure to provide relevant context for the passages that are displayed” (pp. 136-137)

How does all this fit with Ham’s commitment to biblical inerrancy?

Then there are the Jesus Rooms, which were added to the Museum ten years after its 2007 opening. There one finds the “Teachings of Jesus” placard, which includes a section entitled “Rebukes” (which would better titled “Condemnations”). Here’s one of the condemnations included on this placard: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). Given the emphasis on culture war at Answers in Genesis (AiG)– training evangelicals to become culture warriors is a (if not “the”) central aim of AiG – it seems obvious that the museum expects visitors to understand the “cursed” as those individuals who are LGBTQ/LGBTQ-affirming, those women who have had abortions and/or are not submissive to their husbands, those folks who are secular humanists and hold evolution to be true, those individuals who believe in the separation of church and state, and so on.

These culture war commitments help explain why the Creation Museum excised the verses that follow Matthew 25:41. Here’s the full passage:

“Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life (Matthew 25: 41-46).

Is it possible to imagine a more blatant example of “compromising biblical authority” than the removal of these verses? 

Well, ok, perhaps it is matched by the 46 (!) point AiG “Statement of Faith” that all employees must sign. Each of these 46 propositions is accompanied by Bible verses that allegedly provide a divine imprimatur for that particular statement. Here, for example, is proposition #29 (a proposition which fits neatly with the biblical excision noted above): “The concepts of social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory as defined in modern terminology are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing” (Ezekiel 18:1-20; James 2: 8-9).” But when one looks at these verses, one finds nothing to confirm that social justice, intersectionality and critical race theory are anti-biblical.

How is blatantly using the Bible as a mere prop for right-wing culture war arguments NOT the quintessential example of “compromising biblical authority”? 

For all their bluster about Christians who “compromise” the Bible, the folks at AiG and elsewhere in the Christian Right elide the fact that it is their own compromises, their own turning from the Gospel, that have driven people away from the faith. As I pointed out in my 2021 essay, “Religious Non-Affiliation: Expelled by the Right,” the “quantitative and qualitative evidence strongly support the argument that the Christian Right has been a primary reason for the remarkable rise of the religious nones in the United States since the 1990s” (186). 

I ended this essay on a personal note:

With the Christian Right’s enthusiastic support of Donald Trump . . . their cover is blown. We can now see (some of us had already seen) that the Christian Right is not about personal morality and Christian/religious values, but is instead about a particular right-wing politics – a politics in keeping with the history of fundamentalism – involving white nationalism, hostility to immigrants, unfettered capitalism (which includes a disinterest, at the least, in global warming), and intense homophobia . . . [And] if I thought the Christian Right = Christianity, or Christian Right = religion, I would want nothing to do with it, either. But as a person of faith, I understand Christianity to be something else. I understand it to be centered in the Gospels, in the message (stated quite clearly in Matthew 25) that in the end, we are to be judged on how we treat our brothers and sisters, on how we treat “the other.” So while I appreciate the clarity with which we can now see (much of) white evangelicalism, I am also saddened by the fact that the secularizing of America occurs in part because the Christian Right has been so successful in articulating what it means to be Christian (189-190).