Resisting the Evangelical Power Grab
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).
The anti-science, anti-history Bible thumpers have invaded America again. In the past, they have suffered massive defeats. In the 1920’s in Dayton, TN, they were unmercifully mocked and destroyed by Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken.
But they have not forgotten nor forgiven. At the ceremony opening the Creation Museum, Ken Ham revealed the smoldering resentment evangelicals still feel. He swore that he would repair the damage done to Christianity eighty-two years ago when Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial. “It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. “We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn’t prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science.”
A Review of Evangelical Wars
The fundamentalists/conservatives/evangelicals were only getting started. “Here they come again.” They returned with a vengeance in the 1910s with a campaign known as Prohibition. Led by Billy Sunday, J. Frank Norris, and an army of temperance workers, they managed to pass the 18th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. This evangelical victory lasted until December 5, 1933, when it was repealed by the 21st Amendment.
Evangelicals are always attempting to stop everyone else from doing something. It is their most distinguishable mark.
After decades of adding more layers of resentment, the evangelicals returned in the 1950’s as allies of American corporate tycoons. Kevin Kruse, in One Nation Under God, chronicles how corporate America created Christian America. Evangelicals managed to secure a few trophies that looked more like carnival trinkets: “In God We Trust” on our money, and “Under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance.
Then came the 1960’s and all hell broke loose for evangelicals. They were flotsam in a secular storm of anything goes. They nearly drowned fighting free love, drugs, the Civil Rights movement, and protesters against the Vietnam War. Evangelical angst festered and their desire for revenge multiplied exponentially.
In the 1960’s they attempted to rally around the support of segregation, but this failed. Racism is a bad look for Christians. (By the way, if you think anti-immigration isn’t racism, then you are as misguided as your 1960’s evangelical kin.) Randall Balmer, in Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, shows it was government interference in ‘segregation academies’ such as Bob Jones University [and Liberty University] that sparked the growth of the religious right.
Finally, they landed on abortion as the issue capable of reviving the moribund movement of evangelical faith.. To be clear, opposition to abortion was an afterthought for evangelicals.
The birth of the Moral Majority under Jerry Falwell aided in the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. But evangelicals were disappointed in Reagan, and in George H. Bush and in George W. Bush. Reagan and George W. Bush each served 2 terms – 16 years. 20 years of Republican presidents, and yet they were unable to bring evangelicals any victories. Roe v. Wade remained the law for more than 50 years.
Evangelicals rallied again in the 1990’s with the Tea Party and Newt Gingrich – a bomb throwing politician. Gingrich was the pre-Trump. He set the course for the politics of polarization that finally erupted in 2016.
Like a giant dragon awakened from his mountain lair, the evangelicals went whole hog for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Dana Milbank documents the “web of conspiracy theories,” designed to “restrict voting and discredit elections,” while “stoking fear of minorities and immigrants.” Trump is the full-grown man-child of this movement, this old, angry, resentful movement of fundamentalist and evangelical believers. As Robert L. Ivie puts it, “The Republican Party became ‘authoritarian’ and ‘deconstructionist’ over the course of the last twenty-five years, destroying truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, their own party, and U. S. democracy.”
As they marched into the corridors of power they were singing “God’s truth is marching on.”
With the overturning of Roe v, Wade, evangelicals were finally winners. The result has been cruel “red state” laws that have imposed inhumane penalties on women seeking abortions, on doctors providing abortion, and on friends aiding women in obtaining abortions.
The Evangelicals Are Back with a Vengeance
While I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, I see signs of impending doom. Evangelicals are big on signs, fake signs of the end. I am big on seeing with clear eyes what evangelicals have in store for the nation.
In previous evangelical movements, the rule of law, the courts of the land, including the Supreme Court, thwarted the evangelical goal of rule by the minority. Now, they have a president-elect who plans to shape the Constitution into his own image, with a compliant Supreme Court ready to revisit past evangelical losses and transform them into victories.
Let me state this plainly: Evangelicals are coming for our schools and universities, our First Amendment freedoms, our science and history curricula, our right to not be religious, our scientific knowledge of the reality of global warming, our trust in medical science and vaccines, our belief in the rights of women, minorities, and migrants, our sexuality, our freedom to love, our right to live in peace.
They offer a force-fed kind of salvation that destroys the freedoms of the First Amendment. They put school prayer and Bible courses along with David Barton-inspired “America was born as a Christian nation” history books in the curriculum.
They are coming to return prayer and the Bible to public schools. See, for example, Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida.
They are coming for gay marriage and transgender rights. How long do you think it will be before lawsuits are filed with the aim of making the way to the Supreme Court to declare gay marriage illegal?
Evangelical disgust with social justice will lead to serious attempts to defund the social safety net. The dismantling of the Affordable Health Care Act, the privatizing of Medicare, the eradication of the Department of Education, reducing SNAP, welfare, and protections for transgenders. Evangelicals believe in unconditional revenge, not the conditional eye for an eye.
The evangelical movement thrives on authoritarianism, certainty, and anger that combines with a pre-existing culture of fear and hatred. Trump’s demagoguery has taken the chains of a lethal evangelical movement and intends to wrap them around all our anchor institutions. This movement shows no signs of abating.
George Lakoff reminds us, “American values are fundamentally progressive, centered on equality, human rights, social responsibility, and the inclusion of all. Yet, the majority of Americans have voted for the most radical right-wing government in our history. “
Lakoff’s words are of the majesty of the prophetic. As he notes, the radical evangelicals are coming “with an authoritarian hierarchy dominated by evangelical leaders; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken government; no balance of power; priorities shifted from the public sector to the corporate and military sectors; responsibility shifted from society to individuals; and patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics, and the market.”
The evangelical movement is an unmitigated quest for power by using Trump and his minions to violate Constitutional rules and push the nation into a far-right mode.
A Resistance Movement
I can no longer pretend a kinship with the people who introduced me to faith. It is a terrible ripping of the cords of unity, but here I stand.
I hate, I despise your excessive praise songs and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me positive thinking, prosperity-promising sermons, I will not accept them; and the disgust you have for the social gospel, I can no longer tolerate. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your drums, guitars, trumpets, and saxophones. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
Our only choice is resistance against these “religious” people. I am unable to pretend there is a middle ground for mutual understanding, a symbolic space for negotiation, or a way to work with evangelicals.
I declare myself an enemy of the evangelical movement and its evil twin, Christian Nationalism. They are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. They are a generation of snakes and vipers who have enthroned a congenital liar, a thief, a fraud, a fascist, and the incarnation of evil as our next president. I will defy them at every opportunity.
Like Salieri arguing with God, over his disgust of Mozart, I declare, “From this day forward, you are my enemy. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile man-child and give me for reward only the ability to watch in horror as he destroys democracy …. Because you are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your victory.”
Tom Cotton’s White Christian Nationalist Thanksgiving Story
by William Trollinger
Anyone who is paying attention at all knows that White Christian Nationalism is alive and well and on the rise in America. It’s everywhere, and these folks are thrilled that Trump the autocrat-wannabe has been elected president. See, for example, Art Jipson’s brilliant article on the New Apostolic Reformation.
Not surprisingly, White Christian Nationalists need a “usable past,” a history that comports with their understanding of America as a divinely ordained nation that was from the beginning rooted in the Christian faith. See, for example, the dreadful 1776 Report, which – in its deliberate effort to whitewash American history of its past and present racism – really is a crime against history.
Well, here we are, two days before Thanksgiving, a holiday that some White Christian Nationalists are determined to rescue from the clutches of “woke” historians and native American activists. At the forefront of the “Save Thanksgiving” campaign has been Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.
On November 18, 2021 Cotton delivered a 15 minute speech on the floor of the Senate in which he, as one blogger noted, address[ed] what he saw as “a pressing issue: the disturbing lack of patriotic appreciation of the Pilgrims and their contributions to freedom and democracy in the USA.” According to Cotton, the lack of Thanksgiving celebrations had to do with the fact that “the Pilgrims have fallen out of favor in fashionable circles.” And why is that? Because of an apparent loss of “civilizational self-confidence,” evinced by the fact that the New York Times ran an article in the Food Section (the Senator from Arkansas had time to scour the Food Section for attacks on American pride?) that referred to the traditional Thanksgiving story as a “myth” and a “caricature.”
Cotton (whose last name seems so appropriate) would have had to work hard to be less subtle in his racism, but then again, lack of subtlety is precisely the point, for Cotton in particular and White Christian Nationalists in general. “Civilizational self-confidence” certainly does not refer to the Native Americans, who had been here for millennia when the Mayflower landed (and who were dying and would continue to die in great numbers). Nor does “civilizational self-confidence” refer to the millions of Africans brought to the Americas in chains, with North America receiving its first slaves one year before the Pilgrims’ arrival.
But for Cotton, focusing on American slavery was precisely the problem. He connected the lack of “commemorations, parades, or festivals to celebrate the Pilgrims” not to the pandemic, but instead to “revisionist charlatans of the radical left [who] have lately claimed the previous year [1619] as America’s true founding.” Here Cotton was continuing his campaign – an ongoing campaign joined by all sorts of other White Christian Nationalists – against the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a campaign which has included an effort to have this project banned from public schools, as this effort to educate Americans about slavery and its legacy misses the point that slavery was a “necessary evil” that allowed America to be the great nation that it is today.
As regards Cotton’s effort to restore white pride in the Pilgrim story, he informed Americans that the Pilgrims came here “seeking the freedom to practice their faith.” In saying this he was suggesting a commitment to religious freedom that the Pilgrims absolutely did not have. On the contrary, the Pilgrims wanted the freedom to establish a community where their faith and only their faith would be allowed – a point that Cotton chose to elide (but would seem to fit the White Christian Nationalist vision for America.)
Cotton also mentioned that the Pilgrims “had to conquer the desolate wilderness” without noting why the wilderness was so desolate (the silence of the first winter in New England was rather terrifying for the Pilgrims). English traders had brought disease to the region for which the Indians had no immunities, and between 1616 and 1619 80% or more all Indians in the region were killed. As two scholars coolly put it in the Centers of Disease and Prevention’s journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases, this epidemic – these authors suggest chicken pox, trichinosis, or leptospirosis as the culprit – “may have been instrumental to the near annihilation of Native Americans, which facilitated successful colonization of the Massachusetts Bay area.”
Again, not a story that Cotton wanted to tell.
But the most remarkable omission in Cotton’s story may have had to do with Squanto. As I tell my students, the Squanto story is true. As Cotton rightly explained, he did come out of the wilderness to help the Pilgrims, teaching them how to grow corn and other crops, giving suggestions as to where to hunt and fish, and so forth. As William Bradford put it, Squanto “was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”
When I ask my students how they imagine Squanto communicating with the Pilgrims, most suggest “sign language.” A reasonable guess. But wrong. And here Cotton is right again: “Squanto spoke fluent English,” to the point that he served as the Pilgrims’ “interpreter” with other tribes.
But what is astonishing – or not, given Cotton’s White Christian Nationalist commitments – is that Cotton never explained why Squanto spoke fluent English.
Did Squanto stumble upon an English grammar book inadvertently dropped on the shore by one of the traders bringing disease to the region? Did one of those traders take the time to provide this Indian a crash course in the English language? Did Squanto’s role as a “special instrument sent of God” for the sake of the Pilgrims include receiving from the Holy Spirit the gift of speaking in English?
No.
The reason that Squanto spoke fluent English is that in 1614 an English trader named Thomas Hunt tricked Squanto and two dozen or so other Wampanoag Indians into boarding his ship. Then Hunt chained them below deck and set sail for Spain, the goal being to sell them into slavery.
We do not know how many Indians survived the voyage, or how many were actually enslaved in Spain. We do know that Squanto escaped – perhaps with the help of Catholic friars – and made his way to England, where he learned English.
In 1619 he was employed as a guide for a ship heading to New England. When he arrived, and disembarked near the village where he had grown up, he discovered that disease had killed all his family and their fellow villagers; all that remained were bones and rotting corpses. Taken in but held in tight control by Wampanoag Indians, as they did not trust him, in the spring of 1621 Squanto was allowed to serve as an emissary to the struggling Pilgrims.
The Pilgrims must have freaked out when they heard Squanto speak English. But why he spoke English is not of interest to Sen. Cotton. He wants an American history whitewashed of the horrors of slavery, be it slavery of Africans or Native Americans. He wants an American history whitewashed of Protestant religious intolerance, whitewashed of the annihilation of the native inhabitants.
In short, Sen. Cotton and other White Christian Nationalists want a grade-school history that inspires “civilizational self-confidence” among white students.
That is to say, they want to cancel history for their own political purposes. With Trump’s election, with the ascent of the Project 2025 agenda, there is much more historical erasure to come.
(Note: this post is an update of a November 2020 post.)
New Apostolic Reformation Evangelicals see Trump as God’s Warrior in their Battle to win America from Satanic Forces and Christianize It
by Art Jipson
Art Jipson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton. His research areas include white racial extremism, social movements and collective behavior, white collar crime, fraud, and corporate crime, sociological and criminological theory, unions and labor movements, Internet community, and the sociology of popular music.
Editors Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation. We are grateful for permission to share it here.
A growing movement believes President-elect Donald Trump is fighting a spiritual war against demonic forces within the United States. Trump himself stated in his acceptance speech on Nov. 6, 2024, that the reason that “God spared my life” was to “restore America to greatness.”
I have studied various religious movements that seek to shape and control American society. One of these is the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, whose followers believe that they are waging a spiritual battle for control of the United States. NAR is an offshoot of Protestant Christian evangelicalism.
NAR advocates claim they receive divine guidance in reconstructing modern society based on Christian spiritual beliefs. In 2015, an estimated 3 million adult Americans attended churches that were openly part of NAR. Some scholars estimate that the number of active NAR adherents may be larger, as the movement may include members of Protestant Christian churches that are not directly aligned with the NAR movement.
The beginning of the movement
NAR emerged in the late 1990s when theologian C. Peter Wagner popularized the term “New Apostolic Reformation.” Wagner argued that God was creating modern-day apostles and prophets who would lead Christianity in remaking American society.
The roots of the New Apostolic Reformation can be traced to the broader charismatic movement that sees spiritual forces as an active part of everyday life.
This view does not separate sacred experience from regular everyday life. For the much larger network of charismatic Christians and Pentecostal movements that emphasize a personal relationship with God, the world is full of the active presence of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts and direct divine experiences.
Core beliefs
Central to NAR is the belief that Christian religious leaders should be the main source of cultural and political authority in America.
NAR proponents argue that select leaders receive direct revelation from God, guiding the direction of churches and fighting spiritual warfare against demonic influences, which they believe corrupt the behavior of individuals and nations.
NAR advocates for a hierarchical structure in which religious leaders and their political allies hold authority in society.
They believe in “The Seven Mountains Mandate,” a way to represent Christian control of society through a strategy that Christians should infiltrate, influence and eventually control seven key areas in society – business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion – to bring about cultural transformation.
By doing so, NAR proponents believe they can establish a pure and true form of what they believe is a society ruled by divine guidance and strict adherence to biblical ideas.
Lance Wallnau, a prominent Christian author, speaker, social media influencer and consultant associated with NAR, has promoted the idea that such engagement where NAR Christian leaders hold authority through a government tied to divine will is essential for advancing societal transformation.
Wallnau has been a vocal supporter of Trump, viewing him as a significant figure in NAR’s vision.
Spiritual warfare
Followers of the NAR believe that they must engage in spiritual warfare, which includes prayers and actions aimed at combating perceived demonic influences in society.
This practice often involves identifying “strongholds” of evil, around cultural issues, such as gay marriage, transgender rights and LGBTQ+ activism, and working to dismantle them. An example of this is a recent series of religious-based political rallies led by NAR leaders known as “The Courage Tour” that advocated directly for Trump’s second election.
The NAR emphasizes that Christians should expect to see miraculous signs, where extraordinary events, such as Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt, are interpreted to be explained only by divine or spiritual intervention.
The movement’s adherents also believe in faith-based healing and supernatural experiences, such as prophetic utterances and speech.
Trump as divinely ordained
Many NAR leaders and followers support Trump, viewing him as a divinely appointed figure who would facilitate NAR’s goals for societal reconstruction, believing he was chosen by God to fulfill a prophetic destiny.
They position Trump as a warrior against a so-called demonically controlled – and therefore corrupted – “deep state,” aligning with NAR’s emphasis on spiritual warfare and cultural dominion as outlined in the “Seven Mountains” mandate. NAR leaders followed Trump’s understanding of a corrupt government.
The NAR led a “Million Women” worship rally on Oct. 12, 2024, to Washington, D.C., in which the organizers sought to encourage 1 million women NAR adherents to come to pray, protest and support Trump’s campaign. The event was promoted as a “last stand moment” to save the nation by helping Trump win the election as a champion against dark, satanic forces.
Several prominent politicians, legislators and members of the judiciary, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, have flown the NAR-based “Appeal to Heaven” flag.
For NAR evangelicals, the presidential election is interpreted through a Christian apocalyptic rhetoric. In this rhetoric one candidate is a force for good, a warrior for God – Trump – and the other is led by demonic forces such as Harris. Trump’s 2024 win is seen as a critical moment of spiritual warfare where the forces of God defeat the forces of evil.
Criticism from many Christian denominations
Despite its growing popularity, NAR faces substantial criticism. Many mainstream Christian churches argue that the movement’s teachings deviate from traditional Christian orthodoxy.
Critics highlight abuse of authority by people who claim God is directing their actions and the potential for abuse of authority by those claiming apostolic roles. The embrace of Trump raises concerns about blending evangelical faith and political ambition.
Critics argue that the NAR’s support for Trump compromised the integrity of the gospel, prioritizing political power over spiritual integrity. The events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol further complicated this relationship, exposing the potential dangers of conflating religious beliefs with partisan politics.
Moreover, the NAR’s emphasis on spiritual warfare and the idea of taking control over society has raised other Christian groups’ concerns about its potential to foster an “us versus them” mentality, leading to increased polarization within society.
The New Apostolic Reformation represents a significant development, blending charismatic practices with a strong emphasis on politics and cultural transformation.
However, a large majority of Americans disagree that society should be remade based on religious theology. Thus, for now, the NAR movement’s fundamental views about religion and government are starkly at odds with most Americans.
Trump Dumps His Garbage in the Public Sphere: The Demolition of Hush Harbors
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and sometime in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).
When did the practice of saying and writing every prejudice, feelings of bitterness, and list of grievances go public? When did political communication descend to the bottom of a murky swamp filled with buffoonery, lies, conspiracy theories, deep hatreds, and total disrespect? Some scholars of communication argue social media unleashed the flood of inappropriate conversations. Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson attribute the explosion in vitriolic words to Twitter: impulsive, simplistic, and uncivil. Jonathan Haidt, in an article for The Atlantic, argues that social media has made “American life uniquely stupid in the past ten years.”
How did this happen? When did we decide to say in public what previous generations only said in private or in like-minded or racially inclusive communities? There is a historical communication space that once kept our worst secrets. This space was known as hush harbors. I argue that one politician has demolished the hush harbors of white males to the detriment of our nation’s politics and struggles with issues of race.
A story from my family history is the best metaphor I have found for what has happened to America in the past nine years and for the open hostility of our communication. There was a gas fire in the kitchen of Shep Kennedy’s home. His wife cried “Fire.” Shep, thinking the house was burning to the ground, started throwing his wife’s china out of the kitchen window. Later, he moaned, “I was only trying to help.”
Something akin to my grandfather’s overreaction has been going on in America at least since 2015. Someone has been screaming “Fire” in the media, the social media, and at political rallies. We are told the country is burning to the ground. And the response has been to throw the family china out the window.
Allow your imagination to expand the metaphor to include democracy as the family china. We are breaking the bonds that have long tied us together even in our differences. Something has gone wrong as we speak obscenities and nastiness into the air. Rhetorically, we have destroyed good manners with vulgarity and perverseness.
Hush Harbor Origins
During slavery, African Americans invented the rhetorical space of hush harbors for intimate and private conversations. Historically, a hush harbor suggests the whispering of an oppressed people scarred by their experiences at the hands of white men. James C. Scott, in Weapons of the Weak, calls these conversations, “hidden scripts.” Scott says, “Most subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity. Or, better stated, such activity was dangerous, if not suicidal.”
“The struggle between rich and poor is not merely a struggle over work, property rights, grain, and cash. It is also a struggle over the appropriation of symbols, a struggle over how the past and present shall be understood and labeled, a struggle to identify causes and assess blame, a contentious effort to give partisan meaning to local history.” Rhetorically, the struggle was carried out in “hush harbors.”
Hush Harbors Are An Emotional Necessity
A people without voice becomes invisible. In Exodus 2, the voicelessness of the Hebrew slaves condemned them to oppression for four hundred years. Then, without emotion, the text announces, “After a long time the king of Egypt died.” Then and only then was a voice heard down in Egypt: “The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning.” The Hebrew slaves had been whispering in “hush harbors” for centuries, but no one noticed. Now, God enters the scene, and the groaning turned into, “Let my people go.” Oppressed people must have a voice, even if they are the only ones who hear what they are saying, singing, and playing.
John Pearson, the itinerate preacher in Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934/1990), refuses to call witnesses and refuses to speak in his own behalf. When Hambo inquires about his silence, Jonah’s response illustrates what I will argue is a primary strand of an African American rhetorical tradition: “‘Ali didn’t want de White folks tuh hear ’bout nothin’ lak that. Dey knows too much ’bout us as it is, but dey some things they ain’t tuh know. Dey’s some strings on our harp fuh us to play on an sing all tuh ourselves.’”
Hush harbors have enabled African Americans to survive from slavery through Jim Crow segregation, racism, and oppression. They, according to Vorris L. Nunley, in “From the Harbor to Da Academic Hood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition, “have used camouflaged locations, hidden den sites, and enclosed places as emancipatory cells where they can come in from the wilderness, untie their tongues, speak the unspoken, and sing their own songs to their own selves in their own communities.”
Vaclav Havel in The Power of the Powerless calls this the power of dissent. Havel says, “There are thousands of nameless people who try to live within the truth and millions who want to but cannot, perhaps only because to do so in the circumstances in which they live, they would need ten times the courage of those who have already taken the first step.”
In his speech, “A More Perfect Union,” given in Philadelphia during his first campaign for president, Barack Obama issued a prophetic call for blacks and whites to acknowledge the other. He brought up the concept of “hush harbors” as places where blacks were free to speak outside the presence of white people.
Obama also noted that white people had their own “hush harbors.” Here white rage could be expressed without attracting public shame. After the Civil Rights movement, white racism went undercover. For decades, a portion of the white population expressed anger at being considered privileged. They cried, “No one’s given us anything. We had to work hard for every dollar.” White men felt like they were being victimized by a diverse and liberal culture. They were being shamed for their racism. Resentment built over time.
I argue the destruction of hush harbors, for blacks and whites, damages society, undermines democracy, and puts at risk the power of a demagogue to use race as a framing metaphor for gaining power.
Trump has demolished white hush harbors to the point that what was once said in private is now said in public to everyone’s detriment. The demolition of “hush harbors” has released expressions of lament not meant for public consumption. Now, the secret and unspeakable has gone public. Trump says whatever crosses his mind. At times the shock is not in Trump’s words but that he would say such things at all.
Donald Trump has thrown open the doors of white hush harbors and released all the toxins and poisons into the streets of our country. He has drenched the country in a flood of lies. He has promoted racism, sexism, and Islamophobia daily. Trump has destroyed the hush harbors and he and his entire movement have gone public. Having burst open the doors of the white hush harbors, the tongues of MAGA have been unleashed to spew poison everywhere in our nation.
Trump has released white males from feeling shame and given them not only dignity but permission to publicly express their sense of white superiority and racism while denying they are racists. Trump deconstructed decorum, politeness, empathy and replaced them with the vices of ugliness, division, and resentment.
Prior to Trump, rich and powerful white males carried their whiteness like a talisman. They didn’t need to brag about being rich. They didn’t need to flaunt their power and their sense of superiority. Trump, however, is a horse of a different color. Coates suggests, “Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”
Like a dam that for decades held back raging waters, Trump has burst open the dam and released the raging dark waters of open racism into the towns and cities and countryside. Instead of engaging in productive discussions about America’s racial legacy, Trump has made racial warfare his dominant metaphor. White resentments are proving counterproductive to democracy. As white males vote with their feelings, they end up voting against their own interests. They are squeezed by a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and an enormous greed; a political system dominated by lobbyists, special interests; and economic policies that favor the one percent over the many.
Trump has thrown everything out of balance. Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman analyzed the words of Trump in “95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, from Donald Trump’s Tongue.” They discovered his language was peppered with “constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use.”
Trump is the political equivalent of Flannery O’Connor’s “Misfit” in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The haunting words of the Misfit to the grandmother are words fitting for Trump: “Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course,” he said, “they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”
As Robert L. Ivie pinpoints with clarity: “Racial warfare is the framing metaphor of Trumpian demagoguery, regardless of whether the designated enemy is a Chinese virus, illegal immigration, economic displacement, the great replacement theory, Black urban violence, gun-control legislation, critical race theory, [political correctness, wokeness], a stolen election, or reverse racism.”
Trump, instead of being a famous builder, has become the demolisher of “hush harbors.” His own unfiltered, unfit rhetoric has slowly poisoned the American democracy with a demolition project designed to destroy all the progress our nation has made in diversity, pluralism, racial and gender equality, and scientific knowledge. And he hasn’t done this to benefit white males but to create what historian David Blight labels a “hopeless white utopia for the rich and the aggrieved.”
Everyone needs somewhere to dump the mud. “Hush harbors,” in our dangerous world, still provide a safe refuge for private expressions of grievance and anger for all persons. Doing so in private serves as a release valve, a way of handling the resentment and rage as we all work toward solutions that are mutually beneficial.
We should resist the siren call of Trumpism with his rage emanating from a perspective of embattlement taking the form of a call to arms to defend whiteness from the colored horde. Trump’s public declarations of exclusion, domination, hatred, resentment, rage, and authoritarianism need to return to the locked doors of “hush harbors.” Otherwise, we risk the existence of our democracy.
Climate Change Denial for Creationist Kids
by Glenn Branch
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
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 “[d]elve into the science of climate change and discover how science, removed from assumption and speculation, reflects the history and truth found in God’s Word” (in the words of the back cover). The reference to God’s Word is distinctive: the propaganda efforts in the same vein from the CO2 Coalition, Mike Huckabee’s EverBright Kids, and PragerU are ostensibly secular. But the authors of Climate Change for Kids 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.
A fair amount of the eighty-page book purports to address the evidence for climate change and for anthropogenic climate change from the historical record. It would be tedious to describe all of its errors, but a central misunderstanding deserves attention. Acknowledging that “[t]he observational data shows [sic] that the global surface temperature of the earth has been warming over the past 100 years or so since it has been recorded” and reporting that the amount of warming is estimated to be about 1.5–1.8 °C, Ham and DeFord then caution, “But this warming estimate didn’t come solely from the observational data collected at weather stations and by satellites. It’s based on computer models. What you input into these models will decide what predications [sic] the computer model provides” (p. 18). A footnote offers a 2022 paper by meteorologist Roy W. Spencer and climatologist John R. Christy, both at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, as evidence for the middle sentence.
So what’s the problem? Well, the cited paper, “Dependence of Climate Sensitivity Estimates on Internal Climate Variability During 1880–2020,” is prominently labeled “This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal.” So Ham and DeFord have no business citing it. A version of the paper was later published in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, although it seems not to have attracted significant scientific attention. More importantly, though, in neither version of their paper do Spencer and Christy claim that the warming estimate is based on computer models. And that is simply because the warming estimate is not based on predictive computer models! Rather, it is based on observational data, namely, measurements taken by surface and satellite thermometers. True, both data sets require adjustment and correction in light of factors that introduce biases. But their close agreement, unmentioned by Ham and DeFord, is strong confirmation that the climate is warming.
Ham and DeFord conclude, “So the predictions don’t necessarily reflect the real-world, observational data” (p. 18) — which is odd, since no predictions are under discussion. They add, “And one study that compared computer climate models to the observational data found every single climate model they studied overpredicted warming,” citing a 2020 paper by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, and Christy. But the paper focuses on the ability of a certain class of models, not all models, to predict tropospheric, not surface, temperatures. (It is a robust scientific finding that we live on the surface of the planet.) A comprehensive analysis of climate models published between 1970 and 2007 found them to be “skillful in predicting subsequent GMST [global mean surface temperature] changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.”
Illustrated here is Ham and DeFord’s general approach to handling the scientific literature on climate change: cite a single source that seems to offer evidence for the necessary point without worrying about whether it is legitimate, relevant, or confirmed by the bulk of scientific research. Sometimes, however, they abandon the approach in favor of bald assertion. Continuing, Ham and DeFord assert, with dubious coherence, “Climate researchers generally assume Earth maintains a constant average temperature and that our atmosphere traps more heat from the sun than what is returned to outer space” (p. 19), but they provide no examples of any researcher making such assumptions. Similarly, they claim that there is evidence that both of these “assumptions” are wrong, thus invalidating any models incorporating them, but they provide no references to such evidence. In any case, the views of climate scientists on these questions are not a matter of assumption but of evidence.
Despite their view that there’s no telling how much Earth has warmed since the 1880s, Ham and DeFord are apparently willing to concede that recent global warming is real. But they misrepresent the argument for its anthropogenic nature, writing, “Since humans burn fossil fuels and burning fossil fuels produces CO2 and CO2 traps heat … we must be responsible for any warming … right?” (p. 20, ellipses in original). In fact, climate scientists have not jumped to their conclusion as Climate Change for Kids suggests; rather, they have meticulously examined all of the known mechanisms capable of changing the climate and have concluded that greenhouse gases released by human activities are responsible for recent global warming. Popular explanations of the way in which they reached their conclusion are easy to find. For Ham and DeFord to misrepresent the argument so badly suggests at best that they are incompetent to write a book about climate science.
Paleoclimatology is dismissed on the grounds of a general skepticism about scientific knowledge of the past: “You can’t directly test, observe, or repeat the past!” (p. 33). “Scientists cannot 100% accurately describe past events if they were not there to directly observe them,” Ham and DeFord assert (p. 33), ignoring the fact that, far from claiming 100% accuracy, scientists typically report their findings with error bars. From a secular point of view, their emphasis on dismissing paleoclimatology is odd: until recently, paleoclimatological data (as well as historical data) were not considered to be as reliable as data from climate models, so the best evidence for the anthropogenic nature of climate change was from climate models — which are, of course, rooted in basic physics as applied to observational data. But Answers in Genesis, as a young-earth creationist ministry, is heavily invested in disputing the possibility of scientific knowledge of the past, and Ham and DeFord evidently want to put the investment to work here.
Thus Climate Change for Kids insists, “God and His Word is the ultimate authority by which we must discern all climate and weather information” (p. 53), and Ham — who nominally takes over the narration from p. 54 onward — explains, “As I’ve read the Bible to understand ‘climate change’ events that affect us to this day, God has revealed 7 climate ages divided into the history in the Bible” (p. 58). There are seven of these ages, presumably to rhyme with the seven days of creation; Answers in Genesis similarly discerns seven eras of history: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, and Consummation. The alliterative muse apparently having deserted him, and no explicit nomenclature to be found in the Bible, Ham calls the seven climate ages Perfect, Groaning (i.e., postlapsarian, the label referring to Romans 8:22: “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” [ESV]), Flooding, Icy, Shifting, Fiery, and Heavenly.
Like the displays at Answers in Genesis’s attractions, the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, the discussion of the seven climate ages (sprawled from p. 60 to p. 77) presents a reading of the Bible that both confabulates details that aren’t visible in the text (starting with the seven climate ages themselves) and fails to acknowledge a diversity of opinion among Bible-believing Christians. (On the attractions, see, for example, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger Jr.’s Righting America at the Creation Museum and James S. Bielo’s Ark Encounter; for organizations of evangelical Christians who accept climate change, see, for example, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action and the Evangelical Environmental Network.) Puzzlingly, the Groaning climate age is described as “continuing to this day, because God has not yet made a new heavens and earth to restore perfection” (p. 65); what’s the point of distinguishing among seven climate ages if there’s going to be overlap among them?
Climate Change for Kids is purportedly aimed at readers nine years and older, and there are features, beyond the color illustrations on every page, clearly aimed at a young audience, such as boxes headed “Let’s ask” and “Why then?” and “From God’s Word” (with highlighted and annotated verses from the Bible). Still, having a four-page introduction from a septuagenarian Australian complaining about the secularism infecting his college education in the early 1970s seems like not the best way to attract the intended readership. Similarly, a fourth-grader might gaze upon the admonition “When climate change panic is induced and alarms are sounded in the media or in the halls of academia, we must exercise discernment” (p. 11) with a degree of puzzlement. Many of the cited sources (with details crammed, in tiny text, on p. 80) would certainly be beyond the ability of a young audience even to comprehend, let alone assess for scientific credibility. (A number of those works are in fact not scientifically credible.)
But probably none of its readers are going to exercise discernment while poring over the arguments of the book. A five-star review posted at its publisher’s website comments, “I have it sitting on our coffee table in the living room (strategically placed!) and the kids have all flipped through it and learned so much!” “Flipped through” rings true. Rather, Climate Change for Kids is geared for a readership that expects Answers in Genesis to have answers — so to speak — to all questions of importance to the Bible-believing Christian and so is less concerned about the quality than about the existence of the answers. Owning a copy of the book, and thus manifesting solidarity with Answers in Genesis, is what matters. Unfortunately, the same attitude is likely to bolster continuing efforts to derail, delay, and degrade action on the very real disruptions caused by anthropogenic global warming that are already afflicting people, including Ken Ham’s base, around the world.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Paul Braterman for useful discussion and to Barry Bickmore, Andrew Dessler, and Spencer Weart for discussion of the climate change literature.
A Review of Ken Ham’s The Lie: Unravelling the Myth of Evolution/Millions of Years, and Why We Need to Pay Attention
by Paul Braterman
Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is now interested in sharing scientific ideas with the widest possible audience, and was involved in successful campaigns to persuade both the English and the Scottish Governments to keep creationism out of the science classroom. He blogs at Primate’s Progress, paulbraterman.wordpress.com.
Editor’s Note: This review originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where Braterman is a regular contributor. You can find the full review here. And we are grateful to the editors for their permission to republish.
You need to take Ken Ham seriously. This entrepreneurial Brisbane high school teacher has put together the world’s largest Young Earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG). This has a worldwide presence, publishes its own magazine, Answers, and emails a constant stream of highly repetitive messages to its followers. It has built the Creation Museum in Kentucky, as well as the Ark Encounter, featuring a (very unbiblical) so-called replica of Noah’s Ark, and now plans a replica of the Tower of Babel. Its annual income (June 2022 filing) was over $60 million, its YouTube channel has 667,000 subscribers, and its website claims over a million visits each month.
So what? Bible Belt lunatic fringe? Unfortunately no. AiG has allies who are close to the center portion of power, and who will be even closer to the center of power should Donald Trump once again become President.
Ken Ham has among his friends Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, whose law firm represented AiG pro bono in a successful attempt to ensure Kentucky State funding for its activities, despite its fundamentally religious nature, which goes so far as to require all employees accept its six-day creationist Statement of Faith. And among the contributors to its magazine is Calvin Beisner, director of the Cornwall Alliance, whose entire purpose is to deny the importance of human-caused climate change. Cornwall in turn has direct links to the Heartland Institute and to the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025.
If you have not studied modern creationism, you may well think that it is a curious aberration, like flat-earthism, regrettable in its denial of whole areas of science, but otherwise (!) harmless. Not so.
The modern creationist movement in the US is not only about the beginning of the world, but about its ending. Genesis is pivotal, but so is Revelation. So are the many hints of the end of the world that are explicit in the New Testament, and can be discovered with sufficient ingenuity in the Old.
Such thinking underlines the apocalyptic tone that underlies current US right-wing politics. If the Earth does not have a deep past, we cannot expect it to have a prolonged future. We should not be concerning ourselves with conservation, but with righteousness.
The individual responsible more than any other for the resurgence of Young Earth creationism in the second half of the 20th century is Henry Morris, co-author with John Whitcomb of The Genesis Flood, the movement’s foundational document. But a decade before this, Morris had written a much shorter book, The Bible and Modern Science, whose final chapter is devoted to claims that biblical prophecies are being fulfilled in our own times, and are signs of Christ’s imminent return. Prominent among these is the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. Similar thinking explains why US fundamentalist evangelicals are now among Israel’s most unquestioning supporters.
You will find a succinct summary of Young Earth thinking, and clues to how Young Earth creationism has developed politically, in The Lie, the book whose 1987 and 2024 editions I am reviewing here. (I suspect that few readers here will need persuading that the Young Earth position is misguided, and that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, but for reference let me mention the Index of Creationist Claims, and 29+ Evidences for Evolution.)
My method was to write a review of the older version (1st ed), and then go through the later (3rd ed), modifying what I had written to show the development of the movement of which AiG is a part. (Unless otherwise stated, everything in 1st ed is also in 3rd ed, though I have ignored minor changes in wording and layout.) I was shocked by what I found. The connection between creationism and right-wing American politics goes back over a century, as discussed in Carl Weinberg’s Red Dynamite, and is present in 1st ed, but has become much more prominent in 3rd ed, which raises issues completely unrelated to its ostensive theme while promoting the agenda of present-day American Christian Nationalism.
Otherwise, there is not much difference between the two editions, though 3rd ed is more repetitious and, where direct comparison is possible, less vigorous use of language, and more hectoring, than the original.
According to Ham himself, it was The Lie that positioned Answers in Genesis as a biblical authority ministry. That is a strange reading of history, since when it was published in 1987, Ham was an employee of Morris’ Institute for Creation Research. Ken Ham had come to the US in 1984, after establishing himself as an effective creationist spokesman in Australia. He then worked for seven years with Morris’ Institute for Creation Research, achieving great success as a writer and speaker, before breaking away to form his own organization, which developed into Answers in Genesis, while his Australian partnerships gave rise to what is now a completely separate organization, Creation Ministries International (here I pass over much unseemly and litigious infighting). Ken Ham has a great talent for self-promotion, and very recently, Answers in Genesis has announced the opening of an Australia-based branch, thus continuing its long-standing policy of out-competing its own colleagues
Ham’s approach is unsubtle, uncompromising, and unburdened with excess erudition. It is also completely devoid of originality, since all the ideas he expresses are already there in the writings of Henry Morris and his precursors. The book describes itself as concerned with “the foundational nature of the book of Genesis to all Christian doctrine.” By “the book of Genesis,” Ham means a plain literal meaning, with a 6-day 24-hour creation, ignoring two millennia of exegesis and two centuries of literary and archaeological scholarship, and reducing the beautiful, complex, many-layered text to a cardboard cutout.
The title of the first chapter tells us that “Christianity is Under Attack,” or, in 3rd ed, “Under Massive Attack”. Modern society has moved away from Christ, but the book promises to outline “a Biblical (and therefore successful)” approach. Note the assumption that calling something “Biblical” guarantees that it is in every way correct.
The 3rd ed takes the opportunity to claim victimhood for Christianity, and to attack an unspecified secular wokeness, signaling the book’s political tendency. It then shows a figure cataloguing our modern ills; Abortion, Pornography, Paedophilia, Transhumanism, racism, LGBTQ, CRT (Critical Race Theory, which accuses our social institutions of structural racism), Inclusion, Identity Politics, Social Justice, Transgenderism, Mandates, Intersectionality (which advocates common cause between the victims of different kinds of social injustice), No Religious Freedom, and Woke, all combined together in the Secular Worldview.
This is an extraordinary list. Something very strange is happening when those who call themselves followers of Christ object to the idea of social justice. Of the 16 items on this list, seven (CRT, Inclusion, Identity Politics, Social Justice, Mandates, Intersectionality, and Woke) express political views, with some of which one might have expected a follower of Jesus to sympathise, and none bear any relationship to the book’s ostensive agenda.
It gets worse. The 3rd ed at this point questions the concept of separation of church and state, asserts that the public education system is not neutral, since it teaches naturalistic explanations, quotes Matthew 12:30 that one is either for Christ or against him, and says that:
To help parents understand the reality of the situation, I suggest we say “anti-God schools” instead of public (secular) schools to remind us of what these institutions really are.
Since the public school system teaches naturalistic explanation, it is indoctrinating into a religion of atheism, thus undermining Christianity and Christian morality. Here we have the reason for creationist advocacy of voucher schemes, designed to use public funds for children to be educated at creationist schools, and for homeschooling.
We soon meet an asymmetry of argument that is foundational to Ham’s approach. He denies that he needs to tolerate different religious beliefs, since
[T]his ‘tolerance’ really means an intolerance of the absolutes of Christianity
[Emphasis in original, here and throughout] and
It is not a matter of whether you are dogmatic or not, but which dogma is the best dogma with which to be dogmatized!
For Ham, tolerance means acceptance of his right to impose intolerance and when people argue for tolerance, they are themselves showing intolerance towards the absolute truth of Biblical Christianity. There are only two possible world views – man’s word and God’s word – and there is no such thing as neutrality between them.
We soon meet Ham’s obsession with sexual behavior, especially homosexuality. Here the book is disarmingly open. We know that homosexuality is wrong because marriage is defined in Genesis as union between one man and one woman for life, and because homosexuality is condemned in numerous Bible verses. But without the Bible, we would not have convincing reason for calling it wrong, although it clearly is. Thus, in a typical creationist circular argument, homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so, and the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality confirms that biblical morality is correct.
Ham pre-empts the scientific case for evolution by arguing that since it concerns past history, it is not science at all. For science involves repeatable observations, and we cannot repeat the past.
This argument is central to the creationist claim that the evolutionist and creationist perspectives are philosophically at the same level, since they both depend on using faith to go beyond the evidence. It is what Ham used, when teaching, to undermine students’ confidence in the scientific curriculum. It is also very attractive argument, since those who accept it believe that they have been granted a superior insight, and he commends its use in schools.
Logically at least, it is easily refuted. In geology and paleontology, we have multiple examples on which we can repeat our observations. Devonian marine sandstones always date within the same age range, and always contain Devonian fish, never ichthyosaurs (much later), or whales (later still). And even when we are interested in a singular event, we do not need to repeat the past in order to repeat our observations about it. Scientific evidence – DNA tests of relatives – has shown that the biological father of Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, was not the man named on his birth certificate, and we can repeat the tests, if we wish, without having to beget more archbishops. And it is DNA testing, more than any other single method, that present-day evolution science uses in order to establish family relationships, common ancestry, and the relative times of divergence between different groups of living things.
There follows an argument that to most readers will seem a bizarre self-serving sophistry, but to which I think Ham is completely committed. Unbelievers, and scientists (for him the two terms seem at times interchangeable) claim to be following the evidence, but the evidence is always interpreted in terms of their own prior beliefs (this is true). It follows that they cannot be persuaded by evidence, since that would involve their ceasing to be unbelievers. Thus, in emphatic font,
It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias as the best bias with which to be biased.
Here Ham is claiming that for all of us, presupposition and identity trump evidence. Indeed, it is virtuous to cling to presuppositions, as long as they are the right ones. That’s faith, and faith is of course necessary for salvation. I think that he is genuinely incapable of understanding the scientific commitment to fallibilism, the acknowledgement, at least in principle, that what we now believe is always open to revision in response to new arguments and evidence. For him, invulnerability to evidence is a virtue, an attitude that may explain why he and those like him are able to carry on supporting Trump.
It gets worse. There is only one way and people can come to believe in the Bible, and that is with the operation of the Holy Spirit. We are, all of us, either “for Christ or against Him.”
Evolutionists (I will accept his term for those who accept the standard scientific account of deep time and common descent) are unable to understand the creationist position, which is:
As creationists, we understand that God created a perfect world and fell into sin, the world was cursed, God sent Noah’s Flood as judgment, and Jesus Christ came to die and be raised from the dead to restore all things.…
At this point, 3rd ed tells us that
At the Creation Museum, we summarize biblical history as the Seven C’s of History — Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, and Consummation.
As Susan and William Trollinger point out in their book about the Museum, these 7 C’s are strongly reminiscent of the 7 D’s of dispensationalism, a premillennialist interpretation of history. Both editions continue with
However, because evolutionists are used to thinking in “uniformitarian” terms (i.e. basically the world we see today – the world of death and struggle – has gone on for millions of years), they do not understand this creationist perspective of history.
Ham is incapable of even considering the possibility that unbelievers, and believers whose theology is different from his own, understand his position perfectly well but reject it. As for the mountains (literally) of evidence for the uniformity of nature over time, he will claim that he is free to reject all of it, since, as we have seen, inferences about the past are assumption-ridden and unscientific. Since his own thinking is, as he says, presupposition, he sees views opposed to his as imposed on the evidence, rather than emerging from it. We do not merely presume that rain in the distant past was the same as rain today; we see raindrops on desert sandstone that predates the dinosaurs.
Worse, he appears completely oblivious to the fact that his own interpretation of Genesis is heavily laden with assumptions. Or if he is, he no doubt attributes them to the operation within him of the Holy Spirit.
Christians who accept the findings of secular science are being inconsistent. If they choose to accept millions of years, they have succumbed to the disease of naturalism, of which evolutionism is merely a symptom. And naturalism is itself a religion, since by denying God’s role it is a form of atheism.
. . . . . . . . .
It is difficult to know how to deal with an argument so confidently presented while being totally at variance with reality (right now, the problem also arises in areas other than evolution). The evidence for evolution was conclusive, by all reasonable standards, over a century ago. Moreover, the time interval between the 1987 and 2024 editions of the book have produced further layers of evidence, based on the DNA similarities that I referred to earlier. The creationist organizations themselves are well aware of these developments. However, as I mentioned earlier, Ham has set up his rules of evidence in advance, in such a way as to be free to ignore them. We see here the rhetorical device of demanding the impossible. Ham is asking for proof, but has already stated that the relevant evidence is unacceptable. He then uses the absence of proof that he would regard as acceptable, as conclusive evidence that his opponents are arguing in bad faith.
What the Jet Stream and Climate Change had to do with the Hottest Summer on Record − Remember all those Heat Domes?
by Shuang-Ye Wu
The folks at Answers in Genesis (AiG) work overtime to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Attacking scientists who make this case as “climate alarmists” who are part of a “climate cult,” AiG has produced a raft of publications all designed to make the case that: the Earth is not warming and may even be cooling; or, if it is warming it is not significant and is not caused by humans; or if it is warming and it is significant that is a good thing – and any way, it will be God who destroys the Earth and not human beings. All this to say that we should just keep letting fossil fuel corporations – which fund much of the climate change denial business – do their thing, unencumbered by government regulations.
Not surprisingly, much of the “science” designed to deny anthropogenic climate change is laughably thin. For a refreshing contrast, see here an article – originally published in The Conversation — by Shuang-Ye Wu, Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences at the University of Dayton.
Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day.
Phoenix reached 100 degrees for more than 100 days straight. The 2024 Olympic Games started in the midst of a long-running heat wave in Europe that included the three hottest days on record globally, July 21-23. August was Earth’s hottest month in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 175-year record.
Overall, the global average temperature was 2.74 degrees Fahrenheit (1.52 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.
That might seem small, but temperature increases associated with human-induced climate change do not manifest as small, even increases everywhere on the planet. Rather, they result in more frequent and severe episodes of heat waves, as the world saw in 2024.
The most severe and persistent heat waves are often associated with an atmospheric pattern called a heat dome. As an atmospheric scientist, I study weather patterns and the changing climate. Here’s how heat domes, the jet stream and climate change influence summer heat waves and the record-hot summer of 2024.
What the jet stream has to do with heat domes
If you listened to weather forecasts during the summer of 2024, you probably heard the term “heat dome” a lot.
A heat dome is a persistent high-pressure system over a large area. A high-pressure system is created by sinking air. As air sinks, it warms up, decreasing relative humidity and leaving sunny weather. The high pressure also serves as a lid that keeps hot air on the surface from rising and dissipating. The resulting heat dome can persist for days or even weeks.
The longer a heat dome lingers, the more heat will build up, creating sweltering conditions for the people on the ground.
How long these heat domes stick around has a lot to do with the jet stream.
The jet stream is a narrow band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere, about 30,000 feet above sea level. It moves from west to east due to the Earth’s rotation. The strong winds are a result of the sharp temperature difference where the warm tropical air meets the cold polar air from the north in the mid-latitudes.
The jet stream does not flow along a straight path. Rather, it meanders to the north and south in a wavy pattern. These giant meanders are known as the Rossby waves, and they have a major influence on weather.
Where the jet stream arcs northward, forming a ridge, it creates a high-pressure system south of the wave. Where the jet stream dips southward, forming a trough, it creates a low-pressure system north of the jet stream. A low-pressure system contains rising air in the center, which cools and tends to generate precipitation and storms.
Most of our weather is modulated by the position and characteristics of the jet stream.
How climate change affects the jet stream
The jet stream, or any wind, is the result of differences in surface temperature.
In simple terms, warm air rises, creating low pressure, and cold air sinks, creating high pressure. Wind is the movement of the air from high to low pressure. Greater differences in temperature produce stronger winds.
For the Earth as a whole, warm air rises near the equator, and cold air sinks near the poles. The temperature difference between the equator and the pole determines the strength of the jet stream in each hemisphere.
However, that temperature difference has been changing, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. The Arctic region has been warming about three times faster than the global average. This phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, is largely caused by the melting of Arctic sea ice, which allows the exposed dark water to absorb more of the Sun’s radiation and heat up faster.
Because the Arctic is warming faster than the tropics, the temperature difference between the two regions is lessened. And that slows the jet stream.
As the jet stream slows, it tends to meander more, causing bigger waves. The bigger waves create larger high-pressure systems. These can often be blocked by the deep low-pressure systems on both sides, causing the high-pressure system to sit over a large area for a long period of time.
Typically, waves in the jet stream pass through the continental United States in around three to five days. When blocking occurs, however, the high-pressure system could stagnate for days to weeks. This allows the heat to build up underneath, leading to blistering heat waves.
Since the jet stream circles around the globe, stagnating waves could occur in multiple places, leading to simultaneous heat waves at the mid-latitude around the world. That happened in 2024, with long-lasting heat waves in Europe, North America, Central Asia and China.
Jet stream behavior affects winter, too
The same meandering behavior of the jet stream also plays a role in extreme winter weather. That includes the southward intrusion of frigid polar air from the polar vortex and conditions for severe winter storms.
Many of these atmospheric changes, driven by human-caused global warming, have significant impacts on people’s health, property and ecosystems around the world.
Politics and Religion
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and sometime in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).
Author’s Note: While I don’t believe the Bible draws straight lines to our politics, I do believe there are analogical and imaginative connections available. For sixty years I have written sermonically. By that I mean writing without a text presents extraordinary challenges for me. Therefore I have written this article in the sermon genre. It helps me think more critically. The text for “Politics and Religion” is James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8.
Introduction
Politics and religion never mixed when I was a young preacher. Preachers of my ilk – Southern Baptists – were told in very certain terms to stay out of politics. The adage was to preach anything, but don’t talk about politics, sex, or money.
As the decades passed in a blur, money entered the conversation of the church. For some churches, money ascended above the gospel. In fact, the gospel acquired a defining word: “Prosperity.” Preachers who claim the “social gospel” is no gospel have no qualms about embracing the “prosperity gospel.” How odd!
Then preachers discovered “sex” would attract a crowd, even in church. Some pastors flirted with the excesses of sexual language with a perverted rhetoric. Other pastors attacked homosexuality and abortion. Sex invaded the pulpit even as denominations grappled with sexual abuse and misbehavior cases piling up against leaders.
But even after all these revolutionary changes, politics remained mostly on the outside looking in as far as the church was concerned. Then evangelicals discovered politics. Now, the merger of faith and politics makes it hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. When you mix bad religion with bad politics, you should know you have a problem.
A Question for All Politicians
James asks of us a question that fits like a fine leather glove with American politicians: “Who is wise and understanding among you?” Political campaigns always leave me wondering if any are wise and understanding among us. Each side smears the other candidate with unspeakable accusations. The skeptical observer comes to believe that there are none that do good, “no, not one.”
James connects wisdom with a good life and good works. How’s that for moral virtue? Strong Christian character? That’s not part of any political agenda. The evangelicals, America’s most political Christian group, has decided character no longer matters. As Rev. Robert Jeffress put it, “What matters are this president’s wonderful policies.” Forget character. Winning is what matters.
James shines a bright light on our darkness: “Those conflicts and disputes among you” nail us to the floor. We have conflicts and disputes climbing the walls, flowing in the streets, and corrupting Congress and even the Supreme Court.
Paul Krugman has written that
The fact is that a large segment of the U. S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves, or lives. We don’t have to speculate whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.
Faith in democracy is fractured. Our climate is political alienation, demagoguery, violence, and advancing authoritarianism. You can dress this American “hog” in religious robes, give it biblical authority, put a gold ring in its nose, give it an American flag and teach it to sing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and it will still be a “hog.”
Nearly half of Americans believe the U. S. is likely to cease to be a democracy in the future. Politicians have become demolition experts, bomb throwers, and fearmongers. They evince a nihilistic pathos. They promise, according to rhetorical professor Robert L. Ivie, a kind of “salvation by demolition.” Vitriol pours forth from every mouth with political distrust and anger, vitriol that ravages democratic norms and values, undermines civic culture, and inhibits deliberation.
One of our cultural critics (of all people, Jerry Springer) says we should have seen it coming:
We have raised two generations of Americans who believe that anything the government does is horrible, all politicians are corrupt, ah . . .. Washington is evil. And then every commercial we ever see, politically, on frankly on both sides of the aisle . . .. is how the other guy is a bum, the other guy should be in jail, the other guy is a pervert, whatever. Well, if you raise two generations of kids to believe that about our own government . . . you can’t then be surprised that eventually someone would run for president who is absolutely anti-government. . .. So, we should have seen it coming that eventually someone would run for president who was an entertainer and totally against government.
It’s 20 centuries after, but this sounds like James.
Naming Our Political Sins
James names our political sins: bitter envy and selfish ambition. He condemns our political practices: bragging and lying. This text, wow, it may be too hot to preach, too much truth for a Sunday morning crowd. The preacher may need security guards. There will be people running from the sanctuary, covering their ears as they hear the truth.
If James is right, and I think he is, then our political ways have turned us into “earthly, unspiritual, and devilish” creatures. Not one to leave us hanging, James shows us the consequences of our political sins of bitter envy and selfish ambition: Disorder and wickedness of every kind.
Evangelical churches are up to their steeples in secular politics. Tim Alberta, in The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory demonstrates how politics has poisoned the evangelical church. A great dis-ease afflicts the churches over the mix of religion and politics.
God Chooses Sides
The answer to “bad politics” is “good religion.” In God’s mind religion and politics mix; economics too. “Good news for the poor” is good religion and good economics. Jesus said so.
God chooses sides. God sides with the poor, with those who suffer deprivation and oppression. God never sides with tyrants and oppressors and dictators and human rights abusers. If God were neutral, God would be indifferent and malevolent. But God chooses a side. “I have seen the affliction of my people and have heard their cry.”
God chooses sides, and it may not be the side many Christians are on. Do religious people ever stop to think, “What if we are not on God’s side?” Do you think evangelicals lose sleep over being on the side of lying, cheating, and defrauding others? I doubt it. People can be smug about being on God’s side.
For example, in Leviticus 19 God sides with the immigrants. The Bible calls them various names like “aliens,” “strangers,” and “sojourners.” Evangelical preachers who like to play with Hebrew words have gone to extraordinary lengths to make “alien” not mean immigrant. What a piece of humbuggery!
Look, read the text:
When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. You shall not cheat in measuring length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them: I am the Lord.
God chooses sides and God’s choice is to be on the side of justice. And please note how God connects treatment of immigrants with economics. Immigrants are our neighbors, and we are to have honest, hospitable relations with them.
We Must Choose Sides
Let me help you a bit here. God expects us to choose sides. Joshua puts it in plain speech:
But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
When American “hogs” are at the trough and eating all the food, we cannot be neutral. When American “sharks” are eating up all the wealth, we cannot be neutral. We can try to be neutral, but God always sides with “widows, orphans, and aliens” (read: illegal immigrants). Pick a side.
Can we claim to know God if we don’t join her on the side of the oppressed? If you are screaming about “Marxism,” “communism,” and “socialism” you are not on the side of the poor, the oppressed, or the immigrant. If you are believing conspiracy theories about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing cats and dogs and eating them, you are not on God’s side.
If you are shouting, “we are going to totally stop this invasion. This invasion is destroying the fabric of our country,” you are not on God’s side. If you are spreading lies that immigrants are driving up the price of houses in America, you are not on God’s side.
If you are ranting, “They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world — Asia,” you sound like the deranged false prophet Paula White-Cain chanting that angels were coming from the coasts of Africa and South America to save the 2020 election for Trump.
God is on the side of justice. Mary, the blessed mother of our Lord, knew this in her pondering heart:
He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away (Luke 1:52 – 53).
If Donald Trump ever read Mary’s prayer, he would have called her a Marxist. What Trump and MAGA fail to realize is that “Stalinism is to Marxism what the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity; a manipulation of the chief symbols, yet diametrically opposed to the central values” (Cornel West).
God doesn’t side with the status quo
Walter Brueggemann offers us a prophetic perspective:
Culture characteristically traffics in established truth about which there is general agreement among the parties that matter: the state, the church, the corporate structure, the academy, and so on. These several institutions are skillful in articulating and maintaining truth that can readily be seen as allied with status quo power.
One of the hardest things Christians struggle to admit is that God is against the status quo. In our case, millions of Americans are also guilty of thinking God wants to bring back an unjust and racist status quo. What else can “Make America Great Again” mean? That little word, “again” contains the entire history of American oppression against women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants. “Again” is contrary to the will and word of God. An unjust America can’t be great. An inhospitable America can’t be great. A hateful, prejudiced, exclusive America can’t be great. A racist America can’t be great. Make America great again is an empty slogan preaching a fake gospel to a scared people.
Conclusion
As Christians, there’s no way for us to stay out of politics. With confidence in justice we take our stand with the poor, the oppressed, and the immigrant. Our politics will be the politics of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. Our politics will aim toward the ultimate realization of God’s will: The first Jubilee in history.
So until we create Jubilee – where all ill-gotten gains are returned, where all stolen property is restored, where all debts at exorbitant interest rates are forgiven, where the poor are given back what belonged to them in the first place – we will be in politics until “justice rolls down like mighty waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”
And if that make you call me a “socialist,” feel free to vent. But I’m telling you that I am a Christian attempting to bring about the prayer Jesus taught me: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven.” AMEN!
Life After Fundamentalism: Carl Ruby, Cedarville University, and Haitians in Springfield
by William Trollinger
As most Americans know, it has been a hellish two weeks in Springfield, Ohio. And they have Donald Trump and J. D. Vance to blame. Despite all factual evidence to the contrary, the Republican presidential/vice-presidential candidates have continued to repeat the lies – started on Facebook and amplified by the KKK and other Far Right groups – that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating the dogs, cats, and other animals of “legitimate” Springfield residents. The result has been a Haitian community on edge, and a spate of bomb threats, forcing the closure of schools, hospitals, and government offices. Despite all this, Trump and Vance are doubling down on their false claims; appallingly, Vance says it does not matter if these stories are actually true, as they help make his political point. And he has expanded his invented story of immigrants eating pets to include the nearby city of Dayton.
But there is also some heartwarming news. Many non-Haitian residents have made it a point to show their support by, for example, patronizing Haitian-run restaurants. More than this, “many of Springfield’s churches are giving support by way of English classes, correcting misinformation, and displaying solidarity” with their Haitian brothers and sisters. One of the leaders in this effort is Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, a church that states on its website that “the Bible is very clear that God loves immigrants and refugees, and expects us to as well.” Ruby has welcomed Haitian community leaders to Central Christian – telling them that “We love you [and] we are glad you’re here” – and has called on Trump and Vance to stop the pet-eating stories (while also imploring President Biden to send resources to his embattled city).
More than any other Springfield faith leader, Ruby has been thrust into the national spotlight for his efforts. But what most news reports leave out is that Ruby has been working with immigrants in Springfield not for two weeks, but for twelve years. More than this, he started this work after having been summarily forced out of an administrative position at a nearby fundamentalist university, forced out for being the sort of Christian leader he has proven himself to be in Springfield, forced out for being the sort of Christian who, as a former trustee at that fundamentalist school put it, actually cares for “people on the margins.”
For the rest of the story, here’s what I wrote about Carl in 2018:
Evangelical colleges are always having to prove – to parents, donors, and evangelical leaders such as James Dobson or Ken Ham – that they are, to quote Adam Laats, “guardians and teachers of a necessarily vague dream of eternal and unchanging orthodoxy.” Sometimes the only way for an evangelical school to reassure doubters is to purge its ranks of supposedly “unsafe” faculty and administrators.
As we describe in Righting America at the Creation Museum, this is precisely what happened at Cedarville University between 2012-2014. One of those forced out of Cedarville was Carl Ruby, vice president for student life. His departure was a shock to many students, one of whom told The New York Times that Ruby “made Cedarville feel more like Heaven. If you thought someone would be untouchable, it would be Carl.” But as a former Cedarville trustee noted in the same article, Ruby was pushed out because conservative trustees “were threatened by Carl’s . . . ministry to people struggling with gender identification [i.e., LGBTQ students], [and] how he ministers to people on the margins.”
As we noted in our book, Ruby was but one of 43 administrators, faculty, and staff members who departed Cedarville between the fall of 2012 and the summer of 2014, “some of whom [having been] forced out (having signed nondisclosure statements) while others quit and moved on to less hostile professional and religious climes.” This does not include the exodus of 15 members of the Board of Trustees, many of whom left in displeasure over the fundamentalist crackdown.
In our book, that is where the Cedarville tale ends. But it turns out there is more to the story. Take, for example, Carl Ruby.
Departing Cedarville, Ruby founded Welcome Springfield (OH) a non-profit organization that serves immigrants while also encouraging community members to sign a “Statement of Support for Immigrants in Clark County” that says in part:
While I recognize and support reasonable steps to ensure our national security, I also stand opposed to all forms of communication and policy that fail to recognize the human dignity and innate value of our global neighbors, especially those fleeing hardship, violence, poverty, and persecution.
While maintaining his position with Welcome Springfield, in the fall of 2014 he accepted the position as pastor of Central Christian Church in Springfield, which describes itself as a church where “we strive to keep Jesus at the center” and where “we care about justice” and “love our neighbors.”
In Springfield, where there are two mosques, “neighbors” includes Muslims. In an effort to build bridges between the Muslim and Christian communities (and as featured in a CBS Faith in America documentary) in May 2017 Central Christian members attended Friday prayers at one of the mosques and Muslims attended Sunday worship at Central Christian. As Ruby reflected on his Red Letter Christians blog,
I was overwhelmed by the strong sense of human connection. [Emphasis Ruby’s.] The events did not feel like an awkward mingling of strangers who were working hard at being polite and finding things to talk about. It felt like a reunion of longtime friends. There was an eagerness on both sides to connect and to love one another.
On the Central Christian website Ruby does not mention Cedarville or the purge, but he does describe – in winsome and gracious fashion – the journey he has been on:
I grew up in churches that tended to be pretty conservative. I met many beautiful people and learned lots about scripture, but I also encountered a tendency to neglect certain areas of the gospel such as our mandate to care for the poor and to commit ourselves to issues of social justice. I also experienced a church culture that added many rules and expectations that are not found in scripture . . . God didn’t save us just so that we could go to heaven. He saved us so that we could go to work trying to help bits of heaven to break through into our world through the sacrificial service of the body of Christ.
Life after fundamentalism, indeed. (And for the original blog post, see here.)
Stories of Death Row
by William Trollinger
Next Tuesday evening the University of Dayton Campus Ministry, the Catholic Mobilizing Network, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Social Action Office and the Marianist Social Justice Collaborative will hold a panel discussion on capital punishment at 7 p.m. Sept. 24 in the Kennedy Union ballroom. Panelists include: Kwame Ajamu, death row exoneree and board chair of Witness to Innocence; the Rev. Crystal Walker, mother of a murder victim ad co-chair of Ohioans to Stop Executions; and, the Rev. Neil Kookoothe, a lawyer and prison chaplain who helped exonerate Joe D’Ambrosio from Ohio’s death row. The discussion will include information about bipartisan bills in the Ohio General Assembly to abolish the death penalty. Information about the event, speakers and registration can be found at go.udayton.edu/deathrowpanel.
I am serving as the moderator of this panel discussion. And I, too, have a death row story, a story that reached its dreadful culmination exactly 27 years before the evening of this event.
Just after midnight on September 24, 1997, I was sitting with five other civilians and four security guards in a tiny, cramped room in the bowels of the maximum security Potosi Correctional Institute, just southwest of St. Louis. The civilians were seated in two rows of chairs, facing a glass window and closed mini-blinds. I was in the front row, and I could look through a crack in the blinds to see the lower part of a man’s face, including a mouth and jaw. And I knew that was my friend Samuel McDonald, who in just a couple of minutes was going to be injected with a lethal combination of sodium pentothal (which would render him unconscious) and pancuronium bromide and potassium bromide, which would stop his breathing and his beating heart.
I had opposed capital punishment since the ninth grade. In this, as in many other things, I was at odds with my evangelical parents and my evangelical Baptist church. I was surrounded by folks who – while not bloodthirsty – wholeheartedly supported the notion of state execution. Interestingly, it was growing up in a “Bible-believing” church led me to dissent from my family and church, as my reading of the Gospels convinced me that capital punishment violates the essence of Christ’s teachings to choose mercy over revenge, to love our enemies, and to forswear violence (which is why the Catholic church and almost all of the major Protestant denominations have come out against capital punishment).
In my teenage years my opposition to the death penalty remained an abstraction. This was because by the late 1960s capital punishment had almost disappeared from the American landscape. What seemed to be the final blow to a barbaric institution came in 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court held that the death penalty is “arbitrary” and “capricious.”
But then, just four years later, the Court ruled that capital punishment does not violate the Constitution, as long as the state has “adequate” due-process procedures in place. Soon, 40 or so states re-instituted the death penalty for certain types of murder.
One of the states that has proven to be most enthusiastic about applying capital punishment is the state of Missouri. Since 1976 Missouri has executed 99 human beings, ranking #5 among states that kill, behind Texas (589), Oklahoma (125), Virginia (113), and Florida (106).
Having completed my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1984 I accepted a teaching position at the School (now College) of the Ozarks, near Branson, Missouri. Now in a death penalty state, I felt I needed to do something. But I was not aiming to be heroic. What I settled upon was corresponding with someone on Missouri’s death row. I contacted the Death Row Support Project (which is under the auspices of the Church of the Brethren) for the name of a condemned prisoner with whom I could exchange letters. This is how I became acquainted with Samuel McDonald.
Over the next decade I was able – through conversations with Sam, newspaper reports, and open access court records – to piece together Sam’s story. He grew up in a poor, churchgoing family in inner city St. Louis. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the Army. It was 1967, and Sam ended up – as did so many poor black males – in Vietnam. He proved to be an efficient soldier, earning a raft of medals. But the experience traumatized him, particularly when, in the process of “sweeping” a village, he more-or-less deliberately killed an elderly woman and an infant (an incident about which he would have nightmares for the rest of his life, even the week before his execution). Like a host of other Vietnam veterans, Sam returned to the States mentally and emotionally unhinged, addicted to heroin, and without anything in the way of adequate medical and psychiatric support. Over the next decade, he lived the life of a petty criminal.
Then, on the evening of May 16, 1981, the downwardly spiraling Sam McDonald encountered someone whose life had been going in precisely the opposite direction. Robert Jordan had been a St. Louis County police officer for 19 years; not only was this former Marine (who had earned both his BA and MA degrees) just the second African American to be hired as a police officer by the county, but he was president of the St. Louis County Association of Minority Police Officers. Besides his full-time job, Jordan moonlighted as a security guard. Which is what he was doing on the evening of May 16. And when he got off work and arrived home, where his wife Emma Jean was waiting for him, he discovered there was no beer in the fridge, and not much in the way of snacks. So, with his eleven-year-old daughter Rochelle in tow, he drove to the local liquor store.
At the store, they made their purchases and headed out the door. In the parking lot, they encountered Sam. Sky-high on “T’s and blues” (a heroin substitute), and accompanied by a drugged-up girlfriend (who was waiting for him in the car), Sam was looking for someone to rob, for the money that would provide him with his next stash of drugs. Encountering Robert Jordan, Sam pulled out a gun and demanded that he hand over his wallet. Jordan’s daughter ran back into the store and watched through the window. Robert handed over his wallet, which also held his St. Louis County police badge. Whether Sam actually saw the badge was a matter of dispute at the trial. But we do know that he took the wallet, shot Robert twice in the chest and once in the side, and ran for the car. Dying, Jordan managed to pull out his service revolver and shoot six shots, one of which hit Sam in the side. Obviously showing the effect of the drugs, Sam had his girlfriend drive him to the local VA hospital for treatment. It was there that he was arrested for the murder of Robert Jordan.
A poor African American drug addict who killed a well-respected off-duty police officer in full view of the officer’s young daughter: it is obvious that Sam’s chances in the justice system were bleak. But things were made worse by the fact that the district attorney decided to try this case himself. The normal procedure would be for the DA to give the case to one of his subordinates, but the DA was in the middle of a re-election campaign in which he was promising to get tougher in capital cases, and this provided him a great political opportunity. Worse, Sam was assigned an inexperienced and overworked assistant public defender who got into shouting matches with the judge (at one point the judge responded by swiveling his chair around so that his back was to Sam’s attorney). Worst of all, the judge refused to allow testimony regarding the impact of Sam’s Vietnam experiences on his mental and emotional health, even though there was solid evidence that Sam was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
So, it was no great surprise that, on February 22, 1982, Samuel McDonald was sentenced to die by lethal injection . . . the 17th man placed on Missouri’s death row.
Three years later, I sent Sam my first letter. We soon became regular correspondents. I also visited him in the state penitentiary.
But when I took a teaching job in Pennsylvania, I was no longer able to visit him. So, while Sam kept writing, he also began calling, generally on weekends, and generally every other weekend. I know it may seem peculiar, but we spent much of our time laughing and joking and making fun of each other; in fact, if friends were visiting they would often be stunned to learn that I was talking with a man on death row. Sam and I spent a lot of time talking about sports. We were both particularly convinced that we had special insights into football. We had an annual contest to see who could pick the most winners in the college bowl games, with the winner – usually Sam – getting to keep the “traveling crown” that Sam had cut out on typing paper (and sent to me before he was killed).
But in our conversations we also talked about conditions in the prison, and the state of his appeals up and down the court system (appeals which focused on the failure of the original trial judge to allow his psychiatric history to be considered at sentencing). We talked about politics, including the Supreme Court (which would consider his final appeal – Sam particularly disliked Clarence Thomas). We talked about God, and church, and the efficacy of prayer. We talked a lot about our families. I commiserated with him when his son – who was only three when Sam went to prison – was caught in the middle of a gang fight, and was shot and paralyzed. Sam commiserated with me when my mother died of cancer. In fact, he was probably more sensitive to my grief than anyone outside my family; a few times he called out of the blue just to see how I was doing.
All this to say that, much to my surprise, Sam McDonald and I became very close friends. I had started corresponding with him assuming that I would be the one giving to him. It turned out that I was receiving from him at least as much as he was receiving from me.
In all of this I tried very hard not to think about the fact that the state of Missouri was determined to end Sam’s life. But in the spring of 1997 reality hit. Sam’s appeals had come to an end: the Supreme Court would not stay his execution; that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran with war-induced psychiatric problems was irrelevant. The governor of Missouri was adamant that he would not grant clemency; my letter pleading for Sam’s life could not have been more irrelevant. Sam was given a firm execution date: September 24, 1997.
Sam handled these developments with remarkable grace, but I went into an emotional tailspin, as I grappled with the fact that my friend was going to be killed. More than this, I started to wonder what sort of friend I was. I had a pretty strong suspicion that Sam wanted me to serve as one of his witnesses to his execution. I was a middle-class white academic who had grown up in the suburbs, and who had never seen anyone die . . . much less seen anyone be killed. So, throughout the summer of 1997 I tried to ignore Sam’ s oblique hints that he wanted me there for him.
Then, on Labor Day, Sam asked me to serve as one of his six “family and friend” witnesses: “I don’t want to die alone, and I need to see you there.” I said yes.
The week before the execution was surreal. I ended up in a minor media vortex, as Missouri newspapers and radio stations apparently had some fascination with the fact that a college professor from Ohio was coming out to witness the execution of a person they clearly considered a “low-life.” I was a novelty act, and I ended up doing a number of phone interviews from my office in the University of Dayton’s Humanities Building. I liked talking with the newspaper reporters, but the radio folks were annoyingly superficial: one even suggested that I should be happy if Sam’s execution were televised, as I would not then have to drive from Ohio.
The night before his execution, Sam called me to tell me that I would be allowed to visit him at 5 PM, seven hours before his execution. (It turns out that I was the last “civilian” to see Sam). When I arrived at the isolated, fortress-like prison, a guard – who made no effort to disguise the fact that he despised me – led me to Sam. We descended endless flights of stairs into the depths of the prison. This is where the “death cell” is located, where all death-row inmates spend the last two days of life. The guard knocked on the door. It opened, and I walked in.
There was Sam, rumpled and weary-looking, and markedly heavier than when I had last seen him. He was in a tiny cage with a bed, a chair, a toilet and not much else. Instinctively I walked up to the wire fence and put my hand against it. But before Sam could respond a voice behind me barked, “Get away from there!” Alarmed, I looked at Sam, who pointed at the floor: a white line marked off a “no-man’s land” between the rest of humanity and the condemned man’s cage. I backed up behind the line and sat down in one of two chairs bolted to the floor. The guard who had yelled at me sat at a desk behind me, clattering away on a very loud typewriter, presumably reporting on what was being said in the cell (although there was also a video camera recording all). Sam McDonald’s final 48 hours were without privacy, in part to ensure that he did not commit suicide and thus cheat the executioner.
At first I struggled to make conversation with Sam. But in a few minutes, we were talking freely. In some ways, it was no different from our phone conversations. We talked about sports and our families; we had a few laughs; we talked about our friendship. But Sam also talked about himself in ways he never had before. He regretted how he had messed up his life, and he expressed remorse for what he had done. He assured me that he was prepared to die – “things on the other side have to be better than they have been here” – and to face God. For the first time in the 12 years I had known Sam, he was resigned to his impending death.
At 5:58 my angry escort returned to the cell. I stood up. Sam and I said “I love you” to each other. The door opened, and I left the death cell. Soon after I departed, Sam ate his last meal, of steak, catfish, and eggs. Soon after that, prison authorities began to prepare him for execution.
Six hours later I was being marched to the observation booth for friends and family (in Missouri there are three such booths, with the other two for family of the crime victim, and for state witnesses). We were sternly warned by a guard that “there will be no standing, crying out, or knocking on the window.”
Just after midnight the guards raised the blinds. There lay Sam, on a gurney with a white sheet up to his neck. He had obviously been told where we would be, as looked only at us. He spoke rapidly, but we could not make out what he was saying. And then, after only a minute or two, the drugs kicked in, Sam shuddered, and then was still.
We were then escorted out, in the process instructed that we could not stop until we were out of the prison. Not even to pray.
I felt filthy, and over the next few days I took 3-4 showers a day. Capital punishment demeans us all. And it does not bring back the victim of the crime.
In that regard, last year I received an email from the son of the man who was killed by Samuel McDonald. He ran across an article I had written about this experience, and felt compelled to write:
I too was at the execution and I prayed for Sam, and his family . . . That experience was traumatic for all involved in every facet. I would love to engage you in conversation one day. I am sure the conversation would be great. God Bless. Robert T Jordan Jr.
