by William Trollinger

To say that Ken Ham devotes a great deal of energy and time to vilifying gay marriage and LGBTQ rights is an understatement.

As we noted recently, over the past year Ham – who apparently has no comment on, say, immigrants, refugees, or white nationalism – has written numerous posts on topics such as transgender bathrooms, millennials’ unbiblical tolerance of gay marriage, and “Rainbow Fries and Flags: A Sign of Our Secular Times.”

But to get a real feel for the depth of Ham’s fury over tolerance for gays and lesbians, let’s go back to July 2013. It was just a few weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, and Ham used the occasion of the “Answers Mega Conference” (Sevierville, Tennessee) to deliver a hour-long diatribe entitled,  “The Great Delusion: The Spiritual State of the Nation.”

For the first thirty minutes or so Ham fulminated that the tolerance of homosexuality and gay marriage was the clearest evidence that America had abandoned God’s Word and was now in “catastrophic spiritual decline.” President Obama bore much responsibility for this state of affairs, as he and his anti-Christian comrades actively and successfully promoted the gay/lesbian agenda in the culture and the courts, with legalized polygamy and worse just around the corner.  

The result of all this was a nation mired in depravity akin to the “days of Noah.” Ham then asked a rhetorical question: “What does God think of a nation like this?” His verdict:

A sign that God is giving a culture over to judgment, a sign that God is withdrawing the restraining influence of the Holy Spirit, is that sign of homosexual behavior, gay marriage, that is permeating the nation. Therefore it is my assertion that America is under judgment. It is under judgment by an almighty God.

Ratcheting up the rhetoric, Ham then asked how we should view President Obama, who has

pushed the gay marriage/homosexual agenda in a big way [and] has condoned the killing of 55 million children that makes what Hitler did at the Holocaust pale in comparison.

Ham responded with a truly apocalyptic pronouncement:

President Obama has been appointed by God to be where he is. Scripture makes it clear. If America is under judgment, then . . . the leader is there for America’s judgment. . . Wow. We need to fall on our knees . . . before a holy God and repent.

In short, God was abandoning America because it tolerated gay marriage, leaving it to endure a judgment facilitated by a president who resembled Adolf Hitler, a judgment akin – as Ham explicitly noted – to the drowning of billions in the global Flood.  As we summarized Ham’s menacing message in Righting America:

Judgment Day is nigh, Judgment Day for those who have abandoned God’s Word for man’s word, Judgment Day for gays and lesbians who refuse to repent of their vile affections, Judgment Day for Barack Obama and his minions who have helped carry out the homosexual agenda. As it was in the time of Noah, so it is now. Judgment Day is almost here, and Ken Ham, safely inside the ark of salvation, is ready to watch God pour down his terrible and violent wrath on this wicked president and this wicked culture. (170)

A coda. It is now 2017, and the United States has a new president. In keeping with so many of his fellow evangelical leaders, Ken Ham has had nary a negative word to say about Donald Trump. For Ham and others in the Christian Right it makes sense that God would delay Judgment Day while a Republican occupies the White House.

For many other Americans, however, Trump is himself hastening the Apocalypse.