The Righting America Blog

Weaponizing Amish Culture: NPR Academic Minute and Interview with Susan Trollinger

Jan 9, 2025 | 0 Comments

Susan Trollinger is Professor of English at the University of Dayton. Among other publications, she is the author of Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia (Johns Hopkins, 2012). She is also co-author (with William Trollinger) of Righting America at the Creation Museum (Johns Hopkins, 2016), and “Is Resistance Proving to be Futile?: The Amish Amidst the Advance of Fundamentalism,” in Rhetoric and Religion as Resources for Resistance, ed. William Duffy (Peter Lang, 2025).

Gun-related merchandise in Amish Country. Image by Susan L. Trollinger.

Here is Susan Trollinger’s NPR podcast: Weaponizing Amish Culture. And below is our interview with Sue.

How did you – a woman who grew up in a thoroughly secular family in the exurbs of Chicago – end up spending thirty years studying and writing about Amish Country Tourism?
- I like writing about puzzles—things that, on the face of them, just don’t make sense. In the summer of 1996, I lived with my then-in-laws in Walnut Creek, OH—one of the three central tourist towns in one of the country’s largest Amish settlements. I thought that the draw for the millions of tourists who visited the settlement every year was the plain and simple life of the Amish. But what I saw on offer in the main tourist towns was anything but plain and simple. Walnut Creek was all about a Victorian aesthetic with lots of lace, elaborate tea sets, and Thomas Kincaid prints. Berlin was all about craft malls (selling quilts made in China), antique malls, and all manner of clutter. Sugarcreek showcased a manufactured Swiss theme with a giant cuckoo clock and a Swiss festival featuring Swiss-costumed yodelers, a parade starring a Swiss queen, and guys blowing alphorns and throwing boulders. What has any of that to do with the Amish, I wondered. It took me 15 years to figure that out.
Your first book was Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2012. In a paragraph, could you explain the book’s title?
- My book is about how the Amish get figured in Amish Country tourism as the guarantor of authenticity in a made-up world that invites tourists to enjoy a fantasy of an American life that never existed. I borrow from the theoretical insight of my sister, Barbara Biesecker, about nostalgia for a future. In the book, I argue that Amish Country tourism is not about remembering a perfect past. It is about projecting onto the future an imagined way of being that never was—a life in which gender is simple (it’s obvious who the guys are and who the gals are), gender roles are complementary and easy, women have plenty of time to produce comforting home-cooked meals, men spend their days engaged in productive and satisfying masculine labor, patriarchy rules, and White people are dominant. In this tourist economy, the Amish (supposed relics of the past) bring an apparent legitimacy to this fantasy. They seem to embody all of the components of the fantasy. They make it seem as if such a fantasy can be achieved, especially if you buy the right cookbook, or a woman’s devotional Bible, or 1950’s retro-style toaster (all for sale in Amish Country).
Two years ago you were invited to give a conference presentation on Amish country tourism today — a paper which really was an update of Selling the Amish. For that paper you revisited the tourist towns of Holmes County, Ohio. Can you briefly describe what you found in your first morning of research, and how did this make you feel?
- For Selling the Amish I interviewed shop owners, observed tourist behavior, and took thousands of photographs of merchandise in shops, restaurants, and museums aimed at tourists. But after the book came out, I shifted my focus. I gave talks around the state of Ohio for the Ohio Humanities Council on the Amish (and their profound economic shift from being an agrarian people to being an entrepreneurial people who excel at business). I also teach a course at the University of Dayton on the visual rhetoric of fundamentalism and the Amish. With the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Core program, and the English Department, I have taken my students once a year to the Amish settlement in eastern Ohio for a day. We didn’t go to tourist sites. With the help of Shelly (who owns Heartland Group Tours) we visited a New Order Amish school, a candle shop owned by five unmarried Old Order Amish sisters, and a Swartzentruber Amish farm (they are among the most tradition-minded Amish—no windshields or slow-moving signs on their buggies), finishing the day with dinner in an Old Order Amish home.
- All this is to say that for perhaps a decade I didn’t visit those tourist shops. And then for this conference presentation I returned. I was shocked. White Christian nationalism is everywhere: personal beverage containers in the shape of bullets, coffee mugs listing various calibers of guns with the quote “All faster than dialing 911,” and Christian crosses with images of the American flag superimposed on them. The Amish are pacifists. They won’t go to war. Sure, they own guns for purposes of hunting, but they don’t think that “the second amendment is [their] gun permit.” The disjuncture between who the Amish have been and how they are figured today in the context of Amish Country tourism by white Christian nationalism is nothing short of stunning.
In response to your Conversation article on this topic a reader commented: “I am having trouble getting my mind around the guns/patriotic merchandise. Are the Amish making money from the merchandise or do non-Amish own the stores and sell it? I would think the community would draw the line.” How do you respond?
- None of the stores that I visited in the three central tourist towns selling this kind of merchandise are owned by Amish. The Amish certainly supply stores and restaurants in these towns with baked goods, jams and preserves, fresh produce, furniture, and so forth. But, to my knowledge, the Amish are not making wood crosses with images of the American flag superimposed upon them or signs claiming that the Second Amendment is “my gun permit.” The shops selling White Christian nationalist merchandise tend to be owned by Mennonites and non-Mennonites who have embraced Protestant fundamentalism and/or evangelicalism and who go to trade shows to learn the latest retail trends for shops aimed at the kinds of tourists who make up the largest contingent of visitors to Amish Country: White middle Americans.
While your scholarship is not limited to the Amish – among other things, you have co-authored Righting America at the Creation Museum (John Hopkins, 2016) – you continue to write on the Amish. Could you briefly describe the article that is coming out later this year?
- When Bill and I visited the Creation Museum for the first time, we were taken aback by much that we encountered: animatronic T-Rexes playing alongside animatronic children (and not eating them), culture war narratives in which White evangelical Christians are persecuted while mainline Protestant Christians raise children who become drug and video gaming addicts, and mini dioramas depicting God’s global Flood slaughtering all but eight human beings – Answers in Genesis posits that there may have been as many as twenty billion people on Earth at the time of the Flood – because the rest, including the unborn, were so sinful that God had to exterminate them.
- Also present at the museum were a group of Old Order Amish (and, in fact, there have been Amish present virtually every time we have visited the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter). What? Taking the Lord’s Prayer absolutely seriously, the Amish forgave (almost immediately) a man who intended to sexually abuse Amish girls in a one-room school house in West Nickel Mines, PA and then shot and killed almost all of them before killing himself. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” If the Amish are to be forgiven their sins, they reason, they must forgive the sins of others. That being so, how could they possibly worship the extraordinarily vengeful God of young-Earth creationism?
- Bill and I have written an article about the influence of creationism and evangelicalism/fundamentalism on the Amish. For about a century, the wisdom was that modern technology— the tractor, radio, telephone, and television – would bring an end to the Amish. The Amish would simply not be able to resist such technologies. Soon the Amish would connect to the electrical grid, and purchasing automobiles would shortly follow. But the smart prognosticators had it wrong. The Amish are not plugged into the grid. And they remain committed to the horse and buggy (along with e-bikes).
- That said, it turns out that evangelicalism/fundamentalism and young Earth creationism have found a foothold among certain Amish groups. Fundamentalism can seem like serious Christianity—a Christianity that takes the Bible seriously, which is to say literally. Our argument (coming out soon as an article in a collection of essays on rhetoric, religion, and resistance) is that while the assumed great threat to Amish life has been modern technology, it seems that this threat might be eclipsed by modern Protestant theology in the form evangelicalism and fundamentalism, which challenge Amish centuries-old commitments and practices from the inside, convincing Amish that their historical Christian witness pales in comparison to the “authenticity” of White evangelicalism/fundamentalism and young-Earth creationism.
- As David Weaver-Zercher tells the story so well, Americans have had a long and deep investment in the Amish (for good and for ill) to either make them over in their own image or demonize them. Looks like the former is well underway in Amish Country these days. May the Amish find a way to remain wonderfully other.

Whither The Progressive Church Vision? How to Be Christian in the Empire

Dec 30, 2024 | 0 Comments

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. In February we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with Kennedy about this book.

Book Cover of Walter Rauschenbusch’s *A Theology for the Social Gospel*. Image via TheViewFromThisSeat.

The church is called as faithful witness in the age of empire. By empire I mean the unholy coalition of MAGA evangelicals and authoritarian politicians (previously known as the Republican Party).

I borrow my theme from Harold S. Bender’s 1944 “The Anabaptist Vision,” an essay exploring the faith of the original Anabaptists. Bender believed in returning to and recovering an old faith. He outlined three basic components of the Anabaptist vision: discipleship, brotherhood, and nonviolence.

According to Bender (1897-1962) – a Mennonite historian – discipleship was central to the understanding of the Anabaptist movement: “The great word of the Anabaptists was not ‘faith’ as it was with the reformers, but ‘following’ (Nachfolge Christi).”

I too believe in returning to and recovering an old faith – the faith of the early Christian church in Acts. Make no mistake, I am not promoting a literal restoration of the early church (a la the Campbellites). Instead, I promote what James W. McClendon calls the baptist vision: “The church now is the primitive church and the church on judgment day.”

Progressives are not trying to create an idolatry of some imagined golden age of the church. We are attempting to recover our “first love” and act it out in bodily ways.

The results of the 2024 election traumatized me. One of my colleagues said to me, “We’re all in mourning here, too. Our country has betrayed us.”

Everything I had written and warned about Trump seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. As a student of presidential rhetoric and a preacher of the gospel I felt all my convictions were threatened. I took a deep breath and decided to do what I do – write my way to a new vision of the future.

Three critical traditions offer an alternative vision to Empire. The first is the early church practice of parrhesia (risky truth-telling). The second is the prophetic imagination rooted in the Hebrew prophets and the Black Christian experience. The third is the political imagination of Jesus: social gospel, social justice, and the gospel for the poor.

Risky Truth-telling

That a congenital liar could win the presidential election threw me back into the well-worn pages of my copy of Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech, a series of lectures about parrhesia. The term is usually translated in English as “free speech.” The French translation, franc-parler, suggests that the meaning is “frank speech.”

An age embracing lies so huge as to become believable needs to be checked by a new emphasis on truth. Foucault says, “Parrhesiaxesthai means ‘to tell the truth.’ …. To my mind, the parrhesiastes says what is true because he knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true.”

The speaker risks his life because he sees truth-telling a duty to help others, especially those in power. There is a recognition of the tension between truth and power. The speaker chooses the risk of death instead of security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of moral apathy. This positive meaning of parrhesia shows up most often in the New Testament book of Acts as a characteristic of the followers of Jesus.

New Testament professor, C. Kavin Rowe, refers to Acts as “a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life.” The early church offers a model for dealing with the power of Empire.

Luke shows the early church as a people with no interest in taking or dominating the state. In Acts, according to Rowe, “Christians do not want to replace the Emperor, nor do they want a Christian to be the Emperor. That would be a far too conservative politics.” The witness of the early church determined to “turn the world upside down.”

Here’s the prayer that needs to be on the lips of every progressive preacher:

“And now, Lord, look at their threats, and grant to your servants to speak your word with all boldness” (Acts 4:29).

Here’s the scene that should unfold in every progressive church:

“they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).

Here are the actions that should identify every progressive preacher:

“So he went in and out among them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord” (Acts 9:28); “So they remained for a long time speaking boldly for the Lord, who testified to the word of his grace by granting signs and wonders to be done through them” (Acts 14:3); “He entered the synagogue and for three months spoke out boldly and argued persuasively about the kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8).

And here is how progressive preachers should be remembered:

“proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31).

In Acts, the witness of Stephen suggests that he qualifies as a primary “truth-teller,” as a saint for the progressive church. Stephen gives bodily, fleshly reality to the word witness. The empire, of course, was “enraged” at the message of Stephen and “ground their teeth”:

“They covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul’ (Acts 7:57 – 58).

Speaking truth can contest a culture dominated by hyperbole, untruthful claims, lies, and threats. Speaking truth can restore the conviction that words matter, reasons matter, and rational deliberation matters in how we make decisions.

The Prophetic Imagination

MAGA evangelicals now occupy a position as defenders of the status quo of power. They traffic in established truth told by an Empire built on lies. Official truth is now carried by evangelical voices taking directions from Empire officials. They are allied with secular political parties, a sort of modern version of Pharisees mixed with Herodians and Sadducees. The MAGA god of nationalism has polluted the evangelical church.

The progressive task – assume the role of the prophet. The Christian Nationalists, the MAGA evangelicals, the network of independent Pentecostals in the place of power have the role of Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, declaring, “O progressives, go, flee away, and prophesy somewhere else; but never again prophesy in [D. C.] for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

We have an even more immediate prophetic resource at our disposal in the Black prophetic tradition. “The Black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf,” Cornel West claims. “What has kept American democracy from going fascist or authoritarian or autocratic has been the legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer. This is not because Black people have a monopoly on truth, goodness or beauty. It is because the Black freedom movement puts pressure on the American empire in the name of integrity, decency, honesty and virtue.”

Those who speak the truth will last because the truth never dies. The courage to be prophetic gives us a vision for moving forward.

The Social Gospel

Nothing enrages MAGA evangelicals like the social gospel of Jesus. In Luke 4, Jesus lays out his radical politics of a social gospel of neighbor and hospitality. He insists God loves foreigners. “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.”

Evangelicals have dominated Christian thought in America with an individual gospel of personal salvation. The stage is set for a vision of salvation as the practices capable of saving us from what Stanley Hauerwas calls “those powers that would rule our lives making it impossible for us to worship God.”

One glaring goal of Empire we can resist: The deportation of 11,000,000 migrants. Here we are on solid biblical ground: “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:34).

One question can be thrown at the feet of the MAGA prophets: Who is our neighbor? Our best neighbors may turn out to be non-American brown refugees in search of a better life. A progressive church will insist on a good neighbor approach, a place of refuge for immigrants.

During his 2024 campaign Donald Trump claimed, “Remember …. They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags,” Trump added. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.” The irony: The cross is not antithetical to social justice flags. The American flag is antithetical to the cross.

Asserting the politics of Jesus as the social gospel of “good news for the poor” here and now is the most powerful statement we can make in the face of the new outburst of Empire in America. There is no better way for progressives to respond than to present Christianity as a body always prepared to give hospitality to strangers.

Given the teaching of Jesus about the rich and the poor, I am fearful for the billionaires falling over one another in the new Trump administration. “Blessed are the poor,” says Jesus. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation,” says Jesus. “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23 – 24).

Jesus tells horror stories about the fate of the rich. The rich man who failed to be neighbor to Lazarus, “lifted up his eyes in hell to beg for a cup of water.” The rich man who was going to build bigger and more barns was told, “This night is your soul required of you.” Jesus is clear: If you are rich or desire to be rich, you have an immense problem. And now we think “riches” will save us and billionaires will rescue us.

A More Particular Word about Walter Rauschenbusch

If Baptists had a calendar of saints, Walter Rauschenbusch would be the first one admitted. Baptists have produced so few great theologians. Anabaptist theologian, James W. McClendon, in Ethics (vol. 1 of his systematic theology) wryly observes, “That there are few baptist theologies of merit will be granted by most observers.” And then he adds: Walter Rauschenbusch (1861– 1918) alone has attained cosmopolitan stature— and significantly, his starting point was ethics. For Rauschenbusch, salvation was fleshly, bodily, and material. He was not a Gnostic Baptist with all those layers of spiritualization and individual salvation.

His most important book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, was published in 1917. This was at the beginning of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in America. Rauschenbusch insisted the church adjust its theology to include a growing social consciousness.

Rauschenbusch still takes shots from conservative critics. Theologically, there’s Rauschenbusch living rent-free in conservative minds; politically, there’s FDR. One preached the Social Gospel, the other attempted to make it official U. S. government policy.

Rauschenbusch’s great-grandson, Walter Rauschenbusch, in Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21^st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church, includes a series of essays from well-known scholars: Phyllis Trible, Tony Campolo, Joan Chittister, Stanley Hauerwas, Cornel West, Jim Wallis, and Richard Rorty.

Even in this volume the criticisms of Rauschenbusch are included, particularly, criticisms of Rauschenbusch’s alleged lack of evangelical faith. I haven’t the space to refute these criticisms of Rauschenbusch, so I turn the arguments back on his critics. Why not take the evangelical faith and add the social gospel? Why not preach both individual and corporate salvation? A progressive preacher knows that the two belong together.

I agree with Stanley Hauerwas: “After Rauschenbusch, there is no gospel that is not ‘the social gospel.’ We are permanently in his debt.”

These are three powerful visions aiding our dissent from Empire – parrhesia (truth-telling), prophetic tradition, social gospel – that offer progressives a rock-solid foundation. Progressives offer a form of life that insinuates a thoroughgoing antagonism to the present powers.

The progressive alternative is a clear vision: “With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him” (Romans 12:1, J. B. Phillips New Testament).

Resisting the Evangelical Power Grab

Dec 3, 2024 | 4 Comments

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).

Attendees prayed during a Commit to Caucus event held by former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Image by Jordan Gale for *The New York Times.*

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 18^th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. This evangelical victory lasted until December 5, 1933, when it was repealed by the 21^st 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

Nov 26, 2024 | 0 Comments

by William Trollinger

First-grader Thanksgiving Drawing. Via BlogHoppin.

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

Nov 19, 2024 | 2 Comments

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.

President-elect Donald Trump, joined by Melania Trump and Barron Trump, on Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. AP Photo/Alex Brandon

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.

A man in a blue suit speaks to a crowd with his one hand raised. In the background is a large billboard of Mastriano Delrosso — Evangelist Lance Wallnau speaks during a September 2022 rally for Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Chambersburg, Pa. Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

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

Nov 4, 2024 | 0 Comments

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).

Artistic rendering of a 19th century Hush Harbor.

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

Oct 29, 2024 | 2 Comments

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.

Screenshot image of Ken Ham and Jessica DeFord’s *Climate Change for Kids…and Parents Too!*

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

Oct 22, 2024 | 3 Comments

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.

A Secular Worldview, according to Ken Ham in *The Lie*.

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 20^th 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 (1^st ed), and then go through the later (3^rd ed), modifying what I had written to show the development of the movement of which AiG is a part. (Unless otherwise stated, everything in 1^st ed is also in 3^rd 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 1^st ed, but has become much more prominent in 3^rd 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 3^rd 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 3^rd 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 3^rd 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 3^rd 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, 3^rd 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?

Oct 8, 2024 | 0 Comments

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.

A 3D image of the US showing a heat dome above it. — High pressure in the middle layers of the atmosphere acts as a dome or cap, allowing heat to build up at the Earth’s surface. NOAA

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.

An illustration shows how ridges create high pressure to the south of them and troughs create low pressure to the north of them. — Ridges and troughs created as the jet stream meanders through the mid-latitudes create high (H) and low (L) pressure systems. Reds indicate the fastest winds. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

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.

A stagnant polar jet stream can trapped heat over parts of North America, Europe and Asia at the same time. This example happened in July 2023. UK Met Office

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.

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