What the Scopes Trial Meant: Bryan, the Modernists, and Science
by Edward B. Davis
Edward B. (“Ted”) Davis, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Messiah University, writes about Christianity and science in the Scientific Revolution and modern America. His new book, Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era (Johns Hopkins, 2024), is the source of most of the information and some of the wording here. He was an advisor for recent exhibits about science and religion at the National Museum of American History and the Museum of the Bible. For additional information about the book as a whole, stream a podcast hosted by the Congregational Library & Archives (Boston).

This July marks the one hundredth anniversary of the most famous event in the history of American religion and science, the trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee high school. The rookie teacher was convicted of violating a new state law prohibiting public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.” Ironically, both the prosecution and the defense wanted a conviction. Responding to a solicitation from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Dayton school board had asked Scopes to stand trial, hoping to find him guilty so the law itself could be overturned in higher courts—a strategy that ultimately failed.
Scholars have generated an enormous literature related to Scopes in the century since it happened. WorldCat database returns more than 1,200 books catalogued with “scopes trial” as a keyword, including more than 500 with that phrase in the title of the book or one of its chapters. Using the single word “scopes” multiplies both numbers by factors of four and three, respectively. Why did I write one more book about a topic so well explored? Serendipity. Decades ago, while doing research on antievolutionist Harry Rimmer before the internet revolutionized historical research, I stumbled upon a virtually unknown tract about “Science and Religion” from 1926. The author, naturalist Samuel Christian Schmucker of West Chester (PA) State Teachers College, was prominent in Nature Study, an early form of environmental education that stressed taking students outside, Under the Open Sky, to borrow the title of one of his books. He was also a nationally known popularizer of evolution in the 1910s and 1920s, especially at Chautauqua where his lectures (illustrated with lantern slides) drew the largest crowds. Two of his books were used as texts by the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle, rather like a college without walls. He had been such a popular teacher that the science building at West Chester, dedicated twenty years after his death, was named for him—only to have his name removed three years ago when his strong support for eugenics became widely known on campus; one of my articles was cited in the process.

When I first saw Schmucker’s pamphlet, I could not identify the American Institute of Sacred Literature, the now-defunct entity named at the top of the front cover (above). Soon I learned it was a correspondence arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, and that Regenstein Library holds a large archive of papers and correspondence related to it. There and in the correspondence of Shailer Mathews, the theologian and Dean of the Divinity School who supervised the AISL, I found letters from dozens of leading scientists about their religious beliefs, which are mostly unknown to historians. They were surrounded by other documents about the “Science and Religion” pamphlets, some of which were listed when I turned the page. Ten were published between 1922 and 1931. The full set of authors and titles (see the table of contents from my book) included some important names in American history: Nobel Laureate physicists Robert Millikan (president of Caltech) and Arthur Compton (who chose Fermi and Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project), Mathews, and the most famous liberal preacher of his generation, Harry Emerson Fosdick. All but one—Columbia physicist Michael Pupin, a Serbian Orthodox believer who was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1925—were religious modernists. In other words, the pamphlets were written by the very people whose ideas William Jennings Bryan most despised, those liberal Protestants who wanted to “modernize” Christianity by discarding biblical miracles and the orthodox creeds, in favor of the Social Gospel and vaguer notions of God that (in their view) did not conflict with modern science.
Intended to diminish opposition to evolution and to persuade Christians to adopt more positive attitudes toward modern science, the pamphlets were distributed to high school principals in every state, university campuses, scientists, clergy, and legislators. Very scarce today, the pamphlets and their history constitute a revealing window on the Protestant modernist encounter with science, adding new context for understanding Bryan and his religious opponents at the trial. Hundreds of books scrutinize Bryan and his fundamentalist friends, but the modernists are typically seen only as Bryan’s foil or the obvious alternative to Bryan’s folly. That is why I wrote the first book about modernist views of science and religion between the world wars: it’s high time someone took a closer look at them.
What did I learn? Bryan’s concerns about evolution and education were partly shared by the modernists, especially his view that survival of the fittest undermines human decency and morality. They also agreed with Bryan view that college professors were undermining the religious beliefs of students. Where for Bryan this problem was also rooted in evolution, the modernists blamed philosophical reductionism, the view that science somehow “explains away” our humanity, since chemicals have no values and we are nothing more than pre-programmed biochemical machines. Bryan rejected all efforts to baptize evolution, while the modernists sought to base their theologies of nature heavily on evolution and modified their conceptions of God, often in radical ways—tossing divine transcendence under the bus in favor of a purely immanent god who had not created nature or its laws. Many modernists also embraced eugenics as an effective means to bring about the kingdom of God on earth through the elimination of undesirable traits and behaviors from the germline. At the same time, perhaps surprisingly, the modernists still accepted design in nature, despite rejecting the traditional Christian theology embraced by many advocates of “intelligent design” today. Finally, the modernists uncritically accepted the “Conflict Thesis” of Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper—the idea (now rejected by historians) that Christian theology has always been unable to engage science in fruitful conversation and must be discarded in order to make social and intellectual progress. For more on each point, see the longer version of this essay at BioLogos.
Is there a middle way between Bryan’s uncompromising rejection of all forms of “theistic evolution” and the modernists’ wholesale rejection of classical theism in the name of “science”? In the culture war of the 1920s, Protestant thinkers who accepted both evolution and the Nicene Creed, as Asa Gray and others had done in the 1880s, were thin on the landscape. None of the pamphlet authors qualify, since Pupin was not a Protestant. For the person in the pew, the stark choice seemed to be Bryan or the modernists. Those with more discernment were hard to hear amidst the din of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.
We still find ourselves today in a culture war involving religion and science, and in one way it’s even more polarized. Young-earth creationism, which had no traction among fundamentalist leaders in 1925, is so dogmatically literalist that even Bryan gets criticized for betraying the Bible. A list of “compromised” evangelical leaders compiled by Answers in Genesis includes not only Bryan, but a virtual who’s who of evangelical leaders past and present: Billy Graham, Reuben Torrey, James Orr, Charles Spurgeon, Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, James Montgomery Boice, Gleason Archer, Bill Bright, Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Bruce Waltke, and Tim Keller. They all made the mistake of interpreting Genesis differently than AiG. They did not “uncompromisingly contend for the literal historical truth of Genesis 1–11, which is absolutely fundamental to all other doctrines in the Bible.” (For more on creationism’s uncompromising tone, see my comments here.)
Nevertheless, in another way the situation has changed fundamentally. In 1925, there was no one like Francis Collins, an adult convert from atheism to evangelical faith who succeeded the outspoken atheist James Watson as director of the Human Genome Project and later headed the National Institutes of Health. Nor was there anyone like the late Charles Townes, one of the greatest experimentalists of the last century and a traditional Christian who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the maser (ancestor of the laser). Another Nobel Laureate, physicist William D. Phillips, identifies as an “ordinary” Christian, sings in his church’s gospel choir, believes that science cannot deny miracles and affirms the bodily Resurrection. Astrophysicist Joan Centrella, a leading expert on general relativity, became a Christian early in her career and led Bible studies for her departmental colleagues. Distinguished climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is an active member of an evangelical church in Texas, where her husband Andrew Farley is the head pastor. These names could be multiplied dozens of times. Two organizations of Christians in STEM fields, the mainly Protestant American Scientific Affiliation and the recently formed Society of Catholic Scientists, have several thousand members, most of them traditional Christians who accept evolution and some of them as accomplished as Compton or Millikan. Neither organization existed in Bryan’s day, when nearly all eminent American scientists whose beliefs are known to me were agnostics, atheists, or modernist Protestants.
The contemporary conversation about religion and science is certainly subtler, broader, and deeper than when John Scopes walked into Rhea County Courthouse.
Mike Huckabee: A Scary Dispensationalist Huckster
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, was the focus of this rightingamerica interview. And there are more books to come!

The New York Times daily word game of Connections asks participants to match four words that fit the same category. Here are four words that might not seem to fit the same category, but they do: Zealots, Mike Huckabee. red heifers and the rapture. All of them belong to the genre of false prophecy.
Zealots
The Zealots were a violent political party of Judaism in the first century. They believed violence was the only acceptable response to Roman rule.
In his most explicit statement about the futility of Zealot violence, Jesus said: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:28 – 31).
Jesus, the “green wood” of peace and nonviolence, is the polar opposite of the “dry wood” – the violent Zealots.
The Zealots lived and breathed the toxic fumes of anger, resentment, and revenge. The word “zeal” means “hot under the color.” The root of “zeal” means “dark red” and it connotes the face when it is enraged. Red, therefore, is the perfect color for MAGA Republicans.
The last stand of the Zealots occurred at Masada – a mountain fortress. According to Josephus, when the walls were breached in 73/74 CE, the Romans found nearly 1,000 inhabitants had died by mass suicide—a claim that remains debated among historians.
MAGA evangelicals dream of the final battle of Armageddon (Megiddo). Armageddon is, according to the dispensationalists, the site of the climactic battle in the world – “the mother of all wars.”
The distance between Masada and Megiddo is 138 miles, but the distance in political and theological miles is immense. Zealots always live on the edge of suicidal tendencies. They cannot abide this world and would rather leave it if they can’t control it.
Our current batch of Zealots – MAGA evangelicals – burn with zeal against immigrants, gays, transgenders, university professors, minorities, and an array of alleged enemies of America. They dream of Jesus returning “soon and very soon” to destroy in flames all their enemies.
They have no idea that their final moments are more likely to resemble Masada than fictional victory at Armageddon.
Mike Huckabee: A Modern Zealot
Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, is a Zealot. He is also a Southern Baptist preacher who holds to and promotes end times dispensational theology.
Historian Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy in Modern American Culture should be required reading for anyone trying to understand what has gone wrong in America in the past ten years. How America has fallen under the influence of crazed, right-wing “prophets and apostles” seizes the mind. Boyer reminds us, “Prophecy belief is far more central in American thought than intellectual and cultural historians have recognized …. The popularizers of a specific belief system – dispensational premillennialism – have played an important role in shaping public attitudes on a wide range of topics ….”
President Trump sent a man filled with theological nuclear material to the most explosive region in the world. Huckabee, in full dispensationalist mode, has visited Shiloh, an ancient site of God’s tabernacle. He held an official meeting in Judea and Samaria. This marks the first time in history that an American ambassador has held a meeting in Judea and Samaria with a representative forum of Israeli authorities beyond the Green Line, which demarcates the area captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War.
Ambassador Huckabee said, “I cannot imagine coming to Israel and not seeing Shiloh, because it is one of the most important biblical sites that validates the Jewish connection to the homeland, going back 3500 years.”
Huckabee seemed oblivious to the history of Shiloh. Psalm 78:60 notes that God “abandoned his dwelling at Shiloh.” The house at Shiloh fell down. Caryle Marney said in a sermon, “For 900 years in a long, slow way the waters of Shiloh trickled downhill until Samuel’s early days when old Eli was really old, his sons defected, and the ancient holy man fell, broke his neck, and someone named the newborn baby Ichabod. The ‘glory of the Lord’ had gone away.”
Huckabee has claimed “there is no such thing as a Palestinian.” He has insisted there is plenty of land outside of Israel for a Palestinian state. In addition, Huckabee opposes the two-state solution. He supports Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria (the territory’s biblical name). There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Believing he can wipe away history with denials suggests Huckabee is more humbug and huckster than holy man. And his Christian nationalist, dispensationalist spin on Israel’s history makes a mockery of Paul’s claim that Christians are “ambassadors for Christ.” Instead, Huckabee offers a revisionist history of Israel that rivals David Barton’s fictional history of America.
Ambassador Huckabee sent an exceedingly sycophantic and dangerously explosive text to Trump:
Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century—maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you. I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s. You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave. I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU! It is my honor to serve you!
Along with the fawning flattery of President Trump, the Christian nationalism and pseudo patriotism, and overweening theodicy, this message crawls with theological inconsistencies and contradictions that would require a book length refutation.
I have compared the words of Huckabee with the words of Ezekiel, a true prophet. No prophet had more firsthand experience with false prophets than Ezekiel. His prophetic counterparts attempted to twist the truth, tried to discredit Ezekiel’s credentials as a preacher of the word, and caused great trouble for his work among the exiles.
Huckabee, like the false prophets in Ezekiel, has been irresponsible by exceeding his commission and giving a message dictated by his own caprice. Huckabee entertains the absurd idea that God directs the decisions of President Trump. “I believe you will hear from heaven.” Ezekiel: “They have envisioned falsehood and lying divination; they say, ‘Says the Lord,’ when the Lord has not sent them, and yet they wait for the fulfillment of their word!” (Ezekiel 13:6). “Its prophets have smeared whitewash on their behalf, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ when the Lord has not spoken” (Ezekiel 22:28)).
Huckabee feeds Trump’s illusions. Yet Ezekiel warns, “For there shall no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel” (12:24). The audacity of Huckabee’s claim that God will speak to President Trump unravels in the light of Ezekiel’s condemnation of false prophets claiming to have a word from God when God has not spoken at all. Where are the prophecy police when you need them? Never has a preacher more needed someone with a badge, wearing a mask, to arrest Huckabee, slap handcuffs on him, and lead him away.
Huckabee couches his message in the language of religious war. Like most MAGA evangelicals, Huckabee has replaced truth and faith with a sickening nationalism. Here are Will Campbell’s word regarding such nationalism:
It is the insistence that what we have done is sacred. It is that transference of allegiance from what God did in creating the whole wide world to what we have done with a little sliver of it. Patriotism is immoral. Flying a national flag – any national flag – in a church house is a symbol of idolatry. Singing “God Bless America” in a Christian service is blasphemy.
The Red Heifer
Huckabee’s dispensationalist view moved into the category of exceedingly weird when he visited a farm in the occupied West Bank where five red heifers are penned. The five red heifers came from Byron Stinson, a Texas rancher.
Hoping to hasten the End Time a group of ultra-Christian Texas ranchers helped fundamentalist Israeli Jews breed a pure red heifer, a genetically rare beast that must be sacrificed to fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy found in the biblical Book of Numbers. The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, “This is a statute of the law that the Lord has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect, in which there is no blemish and on which no yoke has been laid. You shall give it to the priest Eleazar, and it shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence” (Numbers 19:1 – 3).
There is nothing here about end times, but dispensationalists find biblical evidence even where none exists. When our nation’s foreign policy involves “red heifers,” we should know we have a problem.
The red heifer is supposed to be the first animal sacrificed on the altar of the new Temple when it is finished. The problem: the second most sacred holy site of Muslims – the Dome of the Rock – currently stands where the Temple will need to be built. This would, of course, mean total war between Israel and the Muslim world.
The idea of the world’s fate wrapped in a perfect red heifer seizes the mind.
The Rapture
Millions of Americans believe that we are approaching the day when Jesus will rapture his Church. MAGA prophets are making wild claims that Trump is a prophet sent by God to usher in the End Times, and that attacking Iran is necessary to bring about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ.
White evangelical Christian fundamentalists have a perverted relationship with Israel. On one hand, they believe that Jews are damned to eternal hell because they don’t accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah; on the other hand, they consider themselves very pro-Israel because of the role they think Israel will play in the End Times.
Ambassador Huckabee sits in Jerusalem with what he thinks is the plan of God and the timetable for the return of Jesus. His position in Israel makes him the most dangerous false prophet in the world.
1 in 4 Americans Reject Evolution, A Century After the Scopes Monkey Trial Spotlighted the Clash between Science and Religion
by William Trollinger and Susan Trollinger
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation. We are grateful to the editors to republish it here.
The 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Dayton, Tennessee, teacher was charged with violating state law by teaching biological evolution, was one of the earliest and most iconic conflicts in America’s ongoing culture war.
Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” published in 1859, and subsequent scientific research made the case that humans and other animals evolved from earlier species over millions of years. Many late-19th-century American Protestants had little problem accommodating Darwin’s ideas – which became mainstream biology – with their religious commitments.
But that was not the case with all Christians, especially conservative evangelicals, who held that the Bible is inerrant – without error – and factually accurate in all that it has to say, including when it speaks on history and science.
The Scopes trial occurred July 10-21, 1925. Between 150 and 200 reporters swooped into the small town. Broadcast on Chicago’s WGN, it was the first trial to be aired live over radio in the United States.
One hundred years after the trial, and as we have documented in our scholarly work, the culture war over evolution and creationism remains strong – and yet, when it comes to creationism, much has also changed.
The Trial
In May 1919, over 6,000 conservative Protestants gathered in Philadelphia to create, under the leadership of Baptist firebrand William Bell Riley, the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, or WCFA.
Holding to biblical inerrancy, these “fundamentalists” believed in the creation account detailed in chapter 1 of Genesis, in which God brought all life into being in six days. But most of these fundamentalists also accepted mainstream geology, which held that the Earth was millions of years old. Squaring a literal understanding of Genesis with an old Earth, they embraced either the “day-age theory” – that each Genesis day was actually a long period of time – or the “gap theory,” in which there was a huge gap of time before the six 24-hour days of creation.
This nascent fundamentalist movement initiated a campaign to pressure state legislatures to prohibit public schools from teaching evolution. One of these states was Tennessee, which in 1925 passed the Butler Act. This law made it illegal for public schoolteachers “to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
The American Civil Liberties Union persuaded John Thomas Scopes, a young science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, to challenge the law in court. The WCFA sprang into action, successfully persuading William Jennings Bryan – populist politician and outspoken fundamentalist – to assist the prosecution. In response, the ACLU hired famous attorney Clarence Darrow to serve on the defense team.

When the trial started, Dayton civic leaders were thrilled with the opportunity to boost their town. Outside the courtroom there was a carnivalesque atmosphere, with musicians, preachers, concession stands and even monkeys.
Inside the courtroom, the trial became a verbal duel between Bryan and Darrow regarding science and religion. But as the judge narrowed the proceedings to whether or not Scopes violated the law – a point that the defense readily admitted – it seemed clear that Scopes would be found guilty. Many of the reporters thus went home.
But the trial’s most memorable episode was yet to come. On July 20, Darrow successfully provoked Bryan to take the witness stand as a Bible expert. Due to the huge crowd and suffocating heat, the judge moved the trial outdoors.
The 3,000 or so spectators witnessed Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan, which was primarily intended to make Bryan and fundamentalism appear foolish and ignorant. Most significant, Darrow’s questions revealed that, despite Bryan’s’ assertion that he read the Bible literally, Bryan actually understood the six days of Genesis not as 24-hour days, but as six long and indeterminate periods of time.

The very next day, the jury found Scopes guilty and fined him US$100. Riley and the fundamentalists cheered the verdict as a triumph for the Bible and morality.
The Fundamentalists and ‘The Genesis Flood’
But very soon that sense of triumph faded, partly because of news stories that portrayed fundamentalists as ignorant rural bigots. In one such example, a prominent journalist, H. L. Mencken, wrote in a Baltimore Sun column that the Scopes trial “serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land.”
The media ridicule encouraged many scholars and journalists to conclude that creationism and fundamentalism would soon disappear from American culture. But that prediction did not come to pass.
Instead, fundamentalists, including WCFA leader Riley, seemed all the more determined to redouble their efforts at the grassroots level.
But as Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan made obvious, it was not easy to square a literal reading of the Bible – including the six-day creation outlined in Genesis – with a scientific belief in an old Earth. What fundamentalists needed was a science that supported the idea of a young Earth.
In their 1961 book, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, fundamentalists John Whitcomb, a theologian, and Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer, provided just such a scientific explanation. Making use, without attribution, of the writings of Seventh-day Adventist geologist George McCready Price, Whitcomb and Morris made the case that Noah’s global flood lasted one year and created the geological strata and mountain ranges that made the Earth seem ancient.
“The Genesis Flood” and its version of flood geology remains ubiquitous among fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants.
Young Earth Creationism
Today, opinion polls reveal that roughly one-quarter of all Americans are adherents of this newer strand of creationism, which rejects both mainstream geology as well as mainstream biology.

This popular embrace of young Earth creationism also explains the success of Answers in Genesis – AiG – which is the world’s largest creationist organization, with a website that attracts millions of visitors every year.
AiG’s tourist sites – the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky – have attracted millions of visitors since their opening in 2007 and 2016. Additional AiG sites are planned for Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
Presented as a replica of Noah’s Ark, the Ark Encounter is a gigantic structure – 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, 51 feet high. It includes representations of animal cages as well as plush living quarters for the eight human beings who, according to Genesis chapters 6-8, survived the global flood. Hundreds of placards in the Ark make the case for a young Earth and a global flood that created the geological strata and formations we see today.
Ark Encounter has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars from state and local governments.
Besides AiG tourist sites, there is also an ever-expanding network of fundamentalist schools and homeschools that present young Earth creationism as true science. These schools use textbooks from publishers such as Abeka Books, Accelerated Christian Education and Bob Jones University Press.
The Scopes trial involved what could and could not be taught in public schools regarding creation and evolution. Today, this discussion also involves private schools, given that there are now at least 15 states that have universal private school choice programs, in which families can use taxpayer-funded education money to pay for private schooling and homeschooling.
In 1921, William Bell Riley admonished his opponents that they should “cease from shoveling in dirt on living men,” for the fundamentalists “refuse to be buried.” A century later, the funeral for fundamentalism and creationism seems a long way off.
Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America: Three Reviews
by Sean Swain Martin, Andrew McNeely, and Laura M. Tringali

Editor’s Note: The phenomenon of Catholic fundamentalism is finally starting to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. In 2024 Chelsea Ebin’s The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building was published by the University of Kansas Press (sometime in the next few weeks my review of Ebin’s book will appear in American Catholic Studies).
And now, from Oxford University Press, comes Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America. Below are three reviews of this important book, which are followed by a wonderfully gracious response from the author himself. Enjoy!
Sean Swain Martin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. His American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism (October 2021) published by Pickwick Publications, explores the centrality of epistemological certainty in the work of Scott Hahn, attributing to Hahn a specific Protestant fundamentalist approach in his very popular Catholic theological contributions. Sean specializes in American Catholicism, Christian Fundamentalism, John Henry Newman, and early modern philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in theology from the University of Dayton as well as an M.A. in philosophy from Georgia State University. When not teaching or endlessly grading, Sean and his wife, Beth, are raising two insanely adorable children, Gwen and Milo, and a wildly destructive dog, Luna, in Onalaska, WI.
Newly published in March, 2025, Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America should be regarded as the standard to which all subsequent works must be measured. An unassuming 200-page Oxford University Press text with a relatively plain black dust jacket and simple red and yellow typeface, Massa’s work bears all the markings of yet another obscure, academic tome destined for the shelves of a few university libraries. Inside, however, hides a masterful account of how mid-20th century Catholic sectarian organizations laid the foundation for the bombastic hard-right Catholic media and internet vitriol plaguing the American Church today.
The crowning achievement of Massa’s account lies in his demonstrating the theological and historical depth of what so often gets dismissed as a thoroughly anti-intellectual and unserious phenomenon. Beginning with the story of Jesuit Leonard Feeney, whose St. Benedict Center developed in response to the liberalism across the street of Harvard University, Massa successfully navigates the confusion of Feeney’s derisive, mocking rhetoric blended with a deeply historical (even if problematic) theological tradition. While it often seems that it is only the antagonism and ridicule of Feeney, and then subsequently Gommar Depauw, Mother Angelica, and several others, that gets bequeathed to the next generation of fundamentalists, Massa properly identifies and then dismantles the theological tradition that undergirds the fundamentalist position. This allows the reader to recognize these theological commitments at work in Massa’s accounts of the more contemporary fundamentalisms of Christendom College, Crisis magazine, and Church Militant. That is, Massa allows his readers to recognize theological method to the (oftentimes literal) madness of the current expressions of Catholic fundamentalism.
While Catholic Fundamentalism in America largely succeeds in the heavy theological lifting of critiquing the fundamentalist framework by employing the contributions of Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, and, specifically, Thomas Kuhn, what rescues it from sharing the fate of so many excellent academic texts is Massa’s commitment to following the discussion into the horrifying depths of internet and social media communities. Massa understands that while Michael Voris’s fundamentalist attacks on the American Catholic Church is important, to fully understand it is to also cite the theological musings of, for instance, “baseballmomof8” and those like her who haunt the halls of Church Militant and Crisis blog comment sections. For better or for worse (and it seems to me that it is much worse), the majority of Catholic theological discourse takes place in these spaces. For academic theologians to overlook these discussions, as has almost entirely been the case, is a terrible mistake. Not only is Massa able to highlight the importance of these internet communities, but he is also able to introduce his readers to the work of those already at work in these places, such as the contributions of the incredibly insightful Mike Lewis (mistakenly identified as “Mile Lewis” by Massa), co-founder of the website Where Peter is.
Despite all of its many successes, the one failing of Massa’s excellent work lies in a mistake that he inherits from one of the first researchers of Christian fundamentalism, George Marsden. Massa identifies fundamentalism, in keeping with Marsden, as a particular Christian militarism, that is, a willingness to describe one’s position as being at war with the remainder of popular, and popular religious, society. Where Marsden, and thus, Massa, fail is not in naming militarism as the hallmark of fundamentalism. I actually agree with them that it is.
But, rather, they fail in situating militarism as a subsequent expression of a particular theological ideology. Massa comes incredibly close to recognizing the heart of fundamentalism when he refers to the theological systems of the early portion of his discussion as solipsistic. He understands that, for many of these fundamentalist voices, their perspectives depend upon epistemologies that are informed entirely upon their own contributions. That is, every fundamentalist is completely and absolutely certain of their conclusions, and there is nothing external to themselves that can shake them from their certainty. What Massa and Marsden fail to recognize is that certainty, epistemological solipsism, is itself a militarism. To reject our own fallibility and the reality that we are irrevocably imbedded in a myriad of communities that stretch out across the world around us, into the generations of the past, and extend into the future, is to be at war with the remainder of the human community.
Certainty is, in its very essence, violence.
Andrew McNeely is a Ph.D. student in Theology at the University of Dayton. McNeely’s research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century evangelicalism and fundamentalism at the intersections of theology, education, politics, and American culture. His dissertation research documents the twentieth-century Christian Day School movement and its contributions to contemporary American evangelicalism and the formation of the Christian Right.
The last decade or so has witnessed an abundance of scholarly exposés highlighting the ever indefatigable energy of American Protestant fundamentalism. A whole slew of scholarly studies have demonstrated that no realm of American culture seems to be untouched by fundamentalism. Aside from the low hanging fruit of politics, studies as of late have explored the following realms of fundamentalism’s extensive reach. To name only a few: education, Wal-Mart, big oil, music, publishing, film, sport industry, the military, the FBI, suburbanization, literary fiction, museum exhibits, fast food, social media spaces, tourist city destinations, and theme parks. The list goes on.
Until recently, however, few studies have explored fundamentalism’s reach into American Catholicism. Can one be Catholic and fundamentalist? In his Catholic Fundamentalism in America, Mark Massa takes up this question and argues, through seven case studies, that some quarters of American Catholicism have indeed succumbed to fundamentalism. Massa locates the origin of Catholic fundamentalism in the controversy surrounding Leonard Feeney, S.J., of the St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, prior to Vatican II. According to Massa, the events that unfolded with the so-called Feeneyites “crafted the paradigm for American Catholic fundamentalism–an anti-modern, reactive, and sectarian impulse that has been with us ever since” (p. 9). Massa identifies five protracted characteristics of Catholic fundamentalism that the Feeneyite controversy birthed: “its sectarian impulse, its championing of an older paradigm of Catholic identity…, its use of American political monikers, its militant tone in denouncing its enemies…of the True Church, and its appeal to apocalyptic urgency in denouncing fellow Catholics…” (p. 18).
Limited space does not permit me to comment on each of Massa’s seven case studies of Catholic fundamentalism, all of which are simultaneously fascinating and bizarre. I would, however, like to introduce a few remarks concerning historiography. Of course, as George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, and an earlier generation of historians portrayed them, fundamentalists aspired to purity in both doctrinal certainty and practice, militantly separating their boundaries from modernism. Massa predicates and develops his five distinctives of Catholic fundamentalism on and from this Marsden-Carpenter paradigm. But as my opening remarks suggest, a new school of historiography has taken shape since the turn of the century, qualifying and overturning previous conceptions and categories that the Marsden-Carpenter paradigm established. Fundamentalists were never really all that isolated; nor were they always militant. In fact, many remained quite amiable. Of course, some leaders militated against secular authorities in order to safeguard their own intellectual resources and institutions, but this didn’t always stem from an anti-modern or sectarian persuasion. As historian Brendan Pietsch noted in his 2015 study of first-generation Dispensationalists: “They did not reside in marginal social positions, read the Bible literally, or militantly oppose modernity.” Fundamentalists, to the contrary, often viewed themselves as distinctly modern, sometimes even suggesting that their organizational efforts were more modern than secular authorities and their related institutions. Under the Marsden-Carpenter paradigm, it’s difficult to square the current GOP’s political platform with the supposedly sectarian, isolated, and anti-modern fundamentalists who helped shape it.
Massa’s exploration of Catholic fundamentalism does not engage sources of the recent historiographical turn in fundamentalist studies. This by no means negates the fact that these groups are Catholic fundamentalists, but one wonders if engagement with the new historiography might have better illuminated the modern strategies at play in these groups’ increasing popularity. In other words, are Catholic fundamentalists, especially those associated with Mother Angelica, EWTN, Crisis magazine, ChurchMilitant, or Dr. Taylor Marshal, Ph.D. (who never fails to broadcast his credentials), really just isolated, sectarian, and anti-modern Catholics? Each respectively appear quite comfortable using modern technologies and being socially active both culturally and politically. Perhaps they see themselves, as the later historiography of fundamentalism concurs, as thoroughly modern actors competing in the spiritual marketplace of consumption, pioneering a new “old-time” vision of Catholicism? These are important questions that remained unexplored in the study.
But Massa has nevertheless conducted a deep amount of spade work for further interpretative developments and studies on Catholic fundamentalism–a subject that remains all too neglected. Therefore, let us thank him.
Laura M. Tringali is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include the intersection of religion, gender, and culture in the United States. Her publications include “Enraptured by Rapture: Production Context, Biblical Interpretation, and Evangelical Eschatology in The Rapture, Left Behind, and This is the End” in Journal of Religion & Film, co-authored with Meghan R. Henning and Robert G. Joseph (Oct 2024); “Life-Giving Bodies: Towards an Analogical Relationship Between Breastfeeding and the Eucharist” in New Horizons (2023); and” The Female Standard: Evaluating Cultural Expectations for Women in Scripture and Politics” in Lumen Et Vita (2020).
Mark Massa’s timely Catholic Fundamentalism in America comes in an early wave of scholarly interest in the parallels between Catholic and evangelical conservatism in the United States. His argument is framed by Thomas Kuhn’s now famous notion of paradigm revolutions, a linchpin also found in George Mardsen’s historical work on American Protestants. In the field of scientific study, Kuhn argued, science did not progress as if it were a cumulative process or compilation of discoveries. Scientific progress, rather, is better understood as disjunctive, marked by major paradigm shifts in which a dominant scientific model was demonstrated to have too many anomalies to continue to be the reigning paradigm. At such a point, it would be replaced by a new paradigm. In Massa’s text, the paradigm shift that created Catholic Fundamentalism was the mid-twentieth century transition from a “Church as perfect society” Catholicism marked by an uncompromising claim that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church, to a “People of God” Catholicism marked by ecumenism.
Massa offers five characteristics of Catholic Fundamentalism: sectarianism, the paradigm of Tridentine Catholicism, an ahistorical understanding of the Catholic past, the use of political monikers in the presentation of Church teaching, and rhetoric of apocalyptic urgency. Through a thematic exploration of exemplars including Leonard Feeney, the Society of St. Pius X, and Mother Angelica, he makes a compelling case for not only the existence of but also the prevalence of the Catholic Fundamentalism that has surrounded us for decades.
Massa makes an important point that a movement of fundamentalism among Catholics emerged before the Second Vatican Council. Since conservative Catholic distaste for the novus ordo and other reforms following the council is a salient characteristic of the movement in our present moment, one may be tempted to mark Vatican II as the birth of a traditionalist counter-movement. Massa points to Leonard Feeney and the religious order he founded after he was dismissed from the Jesuits, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as an early source of fundamentalist thought among Catholics in the United States. He describes the group as illustrative of “an anti-modern, reactive, and sectarian impulse that has been with us ever since” (9).
The Second Vatican Council, though, does mark a significant moment. Feeney’s contingent found themselves at odds with the post-Vatican II Church because, like the Protestant Fundamentalist who came before them, there was a paradigm shift that they rejected. Not “higher criticism” of the Bible that challenged the perfect truth of the Scriptures or Darwinian theory that transformed scientific thinking, as were significant factors in the shaping of Protestant Fundamentalism. But rather, a paradigm shift toward ecumenism for the Catholic Church that seemed, for Feeney and those that followed, to make too many concessions to modernity and to undermine the Catholic claim to being the One True Church.
As Massa explains and draws comparisons to Protestant Fundamentalism in the United States, he relies heavily on the influential work of George Marsden and Margaret Bendroth to the detriment of engaging more recent scholarly work. The texts Massa frequently cites from Marsden and Bendroth were published in 1980 and 1993, respectively. Though Massa’s writing predates a second Trump Administration, scholarly and journalistic interest in evangelical support of Donald Trump and the political power of this voting bloc has dominated the conversation about American evangelicals (Fundamentalists) in the last decade. Fundamentalist Catholics, to use Massa’s apt label, share the militant and “culture war” mindset with American evangelicals. In 2025, the alignment of Catholic and evangelical Trump-supporters is a crucial part of the conversation about the political and cultural significance of both groups.
Massa’s historical and theological work in this text is both timely and important. His historical narrative makes illuminating connections that will catalyze scholarly discourse on contemporary Catholicism in the United States.
Author’s Response:
I want to thank Sean Swain Martin, Andrew McNeely, and Laura M. Tringali for their very smart and insightful reviews of my monograph on Catholic fundamentalism. All three make important observations that I need to consider and incorporate into my text for the book’s second edition (e.g., more of a focus on militarism as an essential feature of the movement, the inclusion of “amiable” fundamentalists who don’t want to break away, etc.). And as I always tell my own doctoral students, “you will soon be offering smart rejoinders to my scholarship that I will have to consider in revising my scholarly work.” These three young scholars have done just that, so I’ll head off to the library today to look up the texts they mention and ponder how I will rewrite the next version of the text. -Mark S. Massa, S.J.
What is it about ‘the Jews,’ American Protestants, and Israel/Palestine?
by Jim Sleeper
Jim Sleeper, a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics, was a lecturer in political science at Yale from 1999-2020. His reportage and commentary have appeared in most major American newspapers and magazines. In the 1990s he appeared occasionally on The PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Charlie Rose show, and National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” and was a commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Sleeper writes frequently about American civic culture, ethno-racial politics and identity, early America history, electoral politics, foreign policy, higher education, and freedom of speech. (See “Recent Work” on this site.)

Author’s Preface
Israel invaded Gaza 28 centuries ago, but few Americans know that such ancient “undercurrent events” ever really happened, let alone that they still drive “current events” that divert our attention from deeper realities. The following essay, revised slightly from one that I wrote for Salon in 2024, doesn’t track or parse current events in Israel/Palestine. Instead, it takes a dive, or at least a dip, into long–running undercurrents that are still shaping the conflict — especially as it figures in American Jews’ and Protestants’ preoccupations with it.
Not only Jews obsess about Israel/Palestine. So do some descendants and legatees of early American Puritans who infused that obsession into America’s civic-republican culture from its beginnings. Still more obsessive are today’s evangelical Christian Zionists, sometimes in ways that imperil Jews’ full standing and security in the United States, as I warned in 2019 in Tikkun and on the London-based website openDemocracy.net.
The original Salon essay was posted in March, 2024, and re-posted almost immediately by the international website Reset.doc, which also translated it into Italian. It was also excerpted and assessed on the website of The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. But if you’re inclined to read the essay itself after you’ve read this brief preface to it, please read the updated version that’s right below it here on screen.
When Salon posted my essay under the headline, “Israel and the Puritans: A Dangerous Historical Romance,” charges that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were becoming plausible. But equally plausible were doubts about the protestors’ motives and intentions. Since mid-summer of 2024, however, Israel’s strategies have become genocidal in reality and in some of its strategists’ intentions. At the least, the strategies amount to brutal ethnic cleansing.
Explanations of its causes and origins differ, but anyone who thinks that I’m interpreting the biblical and 17th-Century undercurrents to justify the current events is misreading this essay, which has been updated only slightly here below to add some of my references but not to change my assessment. Having grown up in an intersection of my family’s ancestral Jewish tradition and education and, on the other hand, my youthful encounters with strong Protestant, Calvinist traditions that dominated my hometown, I’m trying here to depict converging, conflicting realities that drive many Americans’ ‘Judeo-Christian’ preoccupations with the Israeli/Palestinian war.
Some commentators and editors have dived under their desks or jumped out of windows instead of reporting or sharing what I actually show here. But others have commented in ways that can enhance our understanding of what’s developing.
For example, the head of a private school who teaches in Columbia College’s Contemporary Civilization curriculum sent a message to a mutual friend calling this essay
“a fascinating and intellectually rich article, the difficult paradoxes of which may escape most modern readers…. But if we are ever to escape the binary thinking of every political and civic argument that plagues us currently, we need historically nuanced analyses like Sleeper’s. The ancestral thread tying Calvinists and ancient Hebrews together is a lens I hadn’t seen through before, though most of us know the two sides of each (culture? religion?) — its ambitious, questing, covenantal side and its ‘manifest destiny’ brutality.”
A political and intellectual historian in New York wrote me, “Thanks for sending this amazing piece. I devoured it immediately. I know a bit about the Biblical influence on New England’s elimination of America’s very own Canaanites, but most of the works you cite were new to me. I am also glad you appreciate the work of my friend Adam Shatz. Anyway, it seems to me you have the core of a book condensed into a few pages here. I hope you keep developing this line of thought.”
Dive in with me now as I keep on developing this line of thought. Here’s a link to the essay. Help me develop these ideas by sending your comments to me at jimsleeper12@gmail.com.
How the Scopes Trial was Almost Scooped
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.

In 1925, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted of violating a state law that forbade the state’s educators “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Especially now, as its centennial year is being commemorated in various ways across the nation, the Scopes “monkey” trial is widely known. But the details of a similar controversy in New Mexico three years earlier deserve to be remembered as well.
Famously, the antievolution crusade of the 1920s was launched by William Jennings Bryan, a politician of national stature, who began to encourage the passage of bans on the teaching of evolution at both the state and the local level early in the decade. Probably as a result, in the summer of 1922, the school board in Fort Sumner, New Mexico — perhaps most famous as the site where the outlaw Billy the Kid was shot and killed — adopted a resolution forbidding the teaching of evolution in the town’s schools, and calling for the resignation of any offending teacher.
Fort Sumner’s superintendent of schools, F. E. (for Finis Ewing: he was evidently named after the founder of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church) Dean, was summering in his home state of Missouri when he received a copy of the resolution. He decided that it would not be useful to argue about the resolution at a distance, planning instead on his return to Fort Sumner to argue in person to the board that “I had not been teaching the…doctrine of evolution in the form attributed to me” and moreover to explain that the antievolution resolution was unworkable.
“A good many of the texts used in every high school teach evolution,” Dean later explained in the local newspaper, the Fort Sumner Leader. “In fact, all modern science, even in elementary texts …, is written from the evolutionary point of view. It is even true[,] as LeConte says, that evolution is more than half of modern thought.” (Not quite: in his Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought (1889), Joseph LeConte wrote that evolution “is literally one half of all science.”) Dean added, “[T]here is no entering even the vestibule of modern thought except thru [sic] a knowledge of evolution.”
While still in Missouri, Dean wrote to the New Mexico superintendent of schools to ask whether the board could legally insist on the resignation of any teacher who taught evolution. The superintendent referred the question to the state attorney general’s office, which answered that it could not. But the board got wind of Dean’s inquiry, and demanded his immediate resignation “on the ground of my manifest insincerity in agreeing to the resolution and then going over their heads to the Attorney General,” as Dean later explained in the Fort Sumner Leader.
According to Dean, certain members of the board sent him letters “assuring me of the friendly feeling of the Board for me” and blaming the resolution on “public sentiment.” Yet, he was told, “my usefulness was at an end in Fort Sumner and that if I insisted on holding to my contract and returning the school would be torn to pieces.” Unable to return immediately to defend himself, Dean decided to acquiesce, explaining, “I have pioneered long enough. … If the community wants this sort of injustice done to itself, or will even stand for it, it is none of my affairs.”
The front page of the next issue of the Fort Sumner Leader, published August 18, 1922, was almost entirely consumed with reactions to Dean’s resignation. The Alumni Association of the Fort Sumner High School expressed its “love and appreciation” for Dean, and reassured him, and the public, that “we HAVE NOT learned from your teachings that the ‘Mottled ape is our grand-father.’ [Emphasis in original. I don’t recognize the allusion seemingly indicated by the quotation marks.] Neither has it shattered our faith in the bible and made infidels of us.”
Not everybody was supportive. Someone, possibly a minister, with the surname of Smith — the initials are unclear: possibly P. L. S. — wrote in opposition to evolution, invoking various authorities, including “Dr. [Robert] Etheridge, Fossiologist [a word sadly no longer in vogue!] of the British Museum,” “Prof. [Lionel Smith] Beale, of King’s College, London,” and the British biologist William Bateson, who supposedly rejected evolution. Smith added, “Woodrow Wilson does not believe that man came from the beast. So I suppose he is a back number [i.e, out of date].”
Thanks to Smith’s contribution, a vestige of the Fort Sumner controversy would later appear in the Scopes trial. Dean apparently asked his former teacher Winterton C. Curtis, a professor of zoology at the University of Missouri, to investigate Smith’s authorities. Etheridge and Beale were both dead, but Curtis duly wrote not only to his fellow scientist Bateson but also to the former president Wilson, who replied, “Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.”
Three years later, when Curtis was among the expert witnesses for the defense in the Scopes trial, he included the reply from Wilson (who died in 1924) in his affidavit, prefaced by the explanation “Evolution has been generally accepted by the intellectually competent who have taken the trouble to inform themselves with an open mind. The following letter was written in response to a request to state his position, it having been alleged that he was not a believer in organic evolution.” But because the judge decided to exclude expert witness testimony, Wilson’s reply played no role in the Scopes trial.
The only scholar to have taken note of Dean, A. G. Cock (in his “Bateson’s Two Toronto Addresses, 1921: 2. Evolutionary Faith,” published in the Journal of Heredity in 1989), suggests, “Dean deserves to be remembered, along with John T. Scopes, as an early hero of the continuing fight for the right to teach evolution in U.S. schools.” But Cock wasn’t able to follow Dean’s career further: after Curtis told Bateson in November 1922 that Dean hadn’t secured a new position yet, “at least as far as the sources available to me disclose, he disappears from the record.”
I was luckier, having found Dean’s obituary in the Arizona Independent Republic for April 11, 1941. Apparently Dean moved to Arizona in late 1922 or 1923, where he taught in St. David for two years, served as a principal in Benson for seven years, and served as a superintendent of schools in Williams for seven years. After he was discharged from the latter position, he left the education field, engaging in the real estate business and operating a bookstore. He died on April 9, 1941, at the age of 64, owing to complications after a fall in which he broke a left thigh bone.
It isn’t clear why Dean decided to resign from his position in Fort Sumner. He thought that the majority of townsfolk were on his side, and he seems to have been right: the local parent-teacher association adopted resolutions protesting his treatment and urging the board to revoke its resolution and refuse his resignation. His health may have played a role: although he was only 47, he complained that he was “worn out” by the controversy. But if he had fought the board, the resulting trial might have scooped the Scopes trial.
That is, it is perfectly reasonable to imagine that in 2022 we might have devoted great attention to the centenary of the Dean “monkey” trial.
Built to fail: Gaza’s new U.S.-based aid system, and its Trump-supporting Christian Zionist director
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.
Blockade has brought Gaza to the brink of famine. The aid system recently imposed by the US and Israel is unfit for purpose. People trying to get to the aid centers are being killed. None of this was necessary. [1]
Trump is an effective mafioso, and as such he is at pains to reward those who have brought him to power. Among them, the vaccination conspiracy theorists, rewarded with the appointment of RFK Junior to the position where he can do the most harm. Intellectual nihilists, rewarded with the appointment of one of their own as Vice President, and the onslaught on the intellectual independence of the Universities. Lunatic fringe Christians with the establishment of Paula White’s Faith Office within the White House.
For Christian Zionists, Trump’s reward is the appointment of Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, and now the appointment of Johnnie Moore as head of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Huckabee does not even recognize that the Israeli presence on the West Bank is an occupation. He describes the area in biblical terms as Judaea and Samaria, and regards Israel as having a natural right of possession, by virtue of what God told Abraham in Genesis 15.
Another self-proclaimed Christian Zionist is Johnnie Moore, chosen to lead the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has been responsible for the distribution of aid since 26 May 2025. GHF seems to have the backing of the US and Israeli governments. However, it is a private not-for-profit based in Delaware, and as such is not responsible to Congress and is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. Its funding sources have not been made public and it is not clear who is in charge. Trump had earlier appointed Moore to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Moore began his career at Liberty University, which is an explicitly six day creationist school, where he became a Professor of Religion. He was at one time a supporter of Ben Carson’s presidential run (Carson regards evolution as a lie from the pit of hell), butbecame co-chair of Trump’s 2016 Evangelical Advisory Board, was a strong supporter of Trump’s 2017 moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, advised the first Trump administration that “those that bless Israel will be blessed,” and welcomed Huckabee’s appointment as ambassador. He has long described himself as an advocate for Israel because of his religious beliefs, sayingthat “Israel has impacted me far, far more than almost anything else. I almost can’t think of my life as inseparable from Israel in some ways.”. He has no relevant organizational experience, and has echoed Israeli claims (see below) that reports of Palestinians being shot by the IDF are terrorist-inspired lies.
Reporting on Gaza is difficult, with BBC and other journalists complaining about lack of access. As The Guardian reports, since 7 October 2023 foreign journalists have only been allowed entry to Gaza under Israeli military escort, have no freedom of movement, and are not allowed to directly address Palestinians. Mortality has been high among Palestinian journalists and media workers, with over 180 dead, at least 19 of whom, according to the US non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists, were directly murdered by Israeli forces.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 54,000 Palestinians have been killed in the current conflict (as of 4 June 2025), more than 15,000 of them children. The Israeli authorities invariably dispute such figures, claim that their forces have acted in self-defense or as necessary for purposes of combat, or (especially with regard to the events discussed here) believed themselves to be threatened by unauthorized moving crowds, and have attributed deaths to shooting by Hamas, but as explained above it is difficult to verify these claims. The horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023 had left 1,175 dead, including 800 civilians, with Hamas claiming to have taken some 200 hostages, with 50 more being held by other groups.
The delivery of adequate supplies of food and other essentials to Gaza is the responsibility of Israel, as the occupying power. This is not in dispute. Until March of this year, aid was distributed by UNRWA, which the Israeli government has long accused of being infiltrated by Hamas. In March, this was shut down, to be replaced by GHF, which did not begin operations until the very end of May.

There was a good report on the immediate effect of this change by Sky News, while the Guardian has described the related organizational tumult. There are only four aid distribution centers, compared to hundreds when the UN was in charge. They are poorly positioned, and aid recipients have to walk at least a mile and a half through the combat zone.
It is almost as if the main function of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is to ensure that as little humanitarian aid as possible actually reaches the people in Gaza who need it. The day before GHF began distributions, the director, a former Marine, Jake Wood, resigned, having found his position impossible. Boston Consulting Group, involved in managing the logistics, has also withdrawn, citing lack of “buy-in from multilateral stakeholders.” A recent (8 June 2025) Sky News interview with a British doctor just returned from Gaza describes the effects of the two-month interruption of aid, the effect of malnutrition on patients’ wound healing, and the inadequacy of GHF compared with the UN-based system that it replaces. Sky News is preparing a documentary, based on the experience of outside doctors working in Gaza. (Disclosure: I support their work, by donating to Médecins sans Frontieres.)
I have done my best to unravel a chaotic series of events, using several accounts from what I judged to be reliable sources. [2] There is already severe malnourishment, and according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, nearly 71,000 children in Gaza under the age of five are expected to be acutely malnourished over the next 11 months. GHF has been overwhelmed, with chaotic scenes as hungry crowds pushed over the wire fences meant to control them. On three (update; now apparently four) separate occasions during GHF’s first ten days of operation, Israeli troops fired on people seeking aid, killing 30 on June 1, and 27, including children, at the same site on June 3, with hundreds wounded. Médecins Sans Frontières has independently reported on the June 3 incident as evidence of GHF’s structural inadequacy. According to a Gaza civil defense spokesman, the IDF opened fire using tanks and drones. After this incident, GHF announced that it would temporarily be closing its centers, to avoid further casualties and for update and efficiency improvement. That same day, Tammy Bruce, US State Department spokesman, said that inquiries should be addressed directly to GHF, and that the Department would not speculate about its plans. On June 4, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire, release of hostages, and full resumption of aid, although all other Council members, including (unusually) the UK, had voted in favor. That day GHF was urging civilians to follow routes that had been designated as safe, while at the same time the IDF was designating the same routes as a combat zone. On June 5, the German Foreign Minister asked Israel to admit more aid. This is noteworthy because German criticism of Israel is highly unusual.
As I finished writing this, there was news that, after more shootings, GHF is now planning to use its own vehicles to distribute food. It is difficult to see how such a system could be established on a scale sufficient to prevent widespread starvation.
(Disclosure; I have two cousins in Israel, at opposite ends of the political spectrum there, and both of them inside Kibbutz Sa’ad next to the Gaza border, whose defenders came close to being overwhelmed by the terrorist onslaught of October 7, 2023.]
1] Dr Victoria Rose, interviewed on Sky News as discussed below, said she had never seen military uniforms or weapons when working in Gaza, other than IDF, and spelled out the fact that maintaining adequate food supplies would in any case pre-empt the possible problems of looting and control by Hamas, ostensive reasons for the new system.
2] U.S. Vetoes U.N. Resolution Demanding Immediate Gaza Cease-Fire https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/middleeast/un-security-council-gaza-cease-fire.html
US vetoes UN Security Council demand for Gaza ceasefire https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-backed-gaza-aid-group-halt-distribution-wednesday-un-vote-ceasefire-demand-2025-06-04/
Israeli troops open fire as US-backed food logistics group loses control of Gaza centre https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/27/israeli-troops-open-fire-aid-group-loses-control-distribution-centre
Starving Palestinians fear being shot dead for a bag of lentils as Gaza aid points close
2025 Gaza Strip aid distribution incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_Strip_aid_distribution_incidents (Wikipedia is frequently accused of bias by special interest groups, but gives detailed citations for its claims)
In Emaciated Children, Gaza’s Hunger Is Laid Bare https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/world/middleeast/gaza-children-hunger.html
More Than 20 Killed Near Aid Distribution Site in Gaza, Health Officials Say https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-distribution-site-attack.html
Palestinians gunned down while trying to reach food aid site in Gaza, hospital says https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/01/palestinians-gunned-down-while-trying-to-reach-food-aid-site-in-gaza-hospital-says
Israeli Soldiers Open Fire Near Gaza Aid Site. Gaza Officials Say 27 Are Killed. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-site-shooting-israel.html
At least 27 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire at food point, Gaza officials say https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/03/palestinians-killed-israeli-fire-aid-point-gaza-officials-say
Dozens of Palestinians massacred at US-Israel backed food distribution sites https://www.msf.org/dozens-palestinians-massacred-us-israel-backed-food-distribution-sites
Israeli-Backed Aid Sites in Gaza Close Temporarily After Deadly Shootings https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/middleeast/israeli-aid-sites-gaza.html
Gaza food hub stops operations for second day as access routes remain ‘combat zones’ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/04/israel-warns-palestinians-against-travel-on-roads-to-gaza-aid-hubs-labelling-them-combat-zones
See also embedded links. Coverage certainly incomplete. Information as of June 9, 2025
My Brother Mike, Autism, and the Ignorance and Incompetence of RFK, Jr.
by William Trollinger

If it weren’t so terrifying, the ignorance and incompetence of the Trump Administration would be hilarious.
We have a Secretary of Homeland Security who has no idea what habeas corpus is or where in the Constitution it is detailed. We have a Secretary of Defense who shared details of a secret military operation in Signal group chats that included his wife and an Atlantic editor. We have a Secretary of Education who refers to AI as A-1 (like the steak sauce), and who thinks banning racist Indigenous high school mascots is, well, racist.
This is just the tip of the Iceberg of Ignorance and Incompetence when it comes to officials in the Trump administration. Take, for example, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who – among other things – has claimed that COVID-19 poses little danger to children, and that the real danger to kids is the COVID vaccine itself.
And now Kennedy has weighed in regarding autism. According to Kennedy, autism “destroys families.” Children with autism “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date,” and “many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
More ignorance from the Trump Administration. And when it comes to autism, this is very personal.
My brother Mike was born with autism spectrum disorder. Contrary to RFK’s absurd statement, Mike paid taxes, held multiple jobs, played baseball, wrote short stories, and – I can’t believe I have to say this – used the toilet unassisted. And while his autism challenged our family, it absolutely did not destroy our family. In fact, there are all sorts of ways in which Mike brought our family together.
Mike died May 20, in Denver. The memorial service was last Friday, and I gave one of two eulogies. An abridged and slightly revised version of that eulogy is below.
It is a distinct honor to have this opportunity to say a few words in behalf of my brilliant, creative, hilarious, and sweet – most of all, sweet – younger brother.
Mike was 17 months younger than me. Growing up with him there were times when I felt as if we were attached at the hip. Not only did we walk to and from elementary school together every Monday through Friday, but I roomed with him until I went off to college at the age of 18.
But from an early age I knew why I was walking to school with Mike and why I was rooming with him. He was different. Mike was born with autism spectrum disorder, which is characterized – as many or most of you know — by difficulties in social interaction and communication, a great need for predictability, a dislike of being touched, a struggle to understand emotions, and more. In 1994 he was diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a type of autism spectrum disorder. He was the second adult so diagnosed in the state of Colorado.
But that was 1994. When Mike was born in 1956 autism had yet to be defined. There was no autism diagnosis; there were no special services for those with autism; there were no special accommodations. When it came to Mike, the educational and medical authorities were worthless. The result was a child and adolescent who was often isolated from his peers, who was repeatedly called the “r word” (and not just by kids), who was bullied and sometimes beaten up.
My parents were at a loss as to what to do about Mike. But what my mother figured out – and this was a recurring theme throughout his life – was that he needed to be protected. And while she did that at home, when Mike went off to school, she gave that job to me. What that meant was that I would walk with him to and from elementary school; I would respond when kids taunted him; I would intervene to keep him from being beaten up. I was not the best at that latter task: while I had a very smart mouth, I was not – much to my father’s chagrin – a great fighter.
But here’s the thing. Through all of this Mike remained an incredibly sweet human being. My friends (especially my dear friend, Jim Bryan) loved him, and did not mind in the least when I brought him along on various excursions, including Denver Bear baseball games or Denver Rocket basketball games. Actually, by junior high I had developed the “Mike Test”: if you couldn’t be kind to Mike, if you couldn’t overcome the fact that he was different, I couldn’t be friends with you. (And I came to regret the couple of times when I did not hold to this test).
Mike followed me to Bethel College (MN), where he was a popular and hilarious fixture in the office of the college newspaper where I was editor (just a few days ago I received an email from my associate editor, telling me how much she liked Mike – and it was clear Mike had a crush on her). And when I graduated from Bethel he went off to Colorado State University, where he happily roomed with Jim and other members of the CSU baseball team. He was protected, he was happy, and he was incredibly sweet.
Sweetness. This was Mike. The reality is that Mike was not defined by his “disability,” as so many people assumed he was. Such mistaken assumptions are all too common regarding people with disabilities. But the disability is not who they are as human beings. So it was with Mike. He was so much more than his autism.
There are many examples of this, including his happily energetic work as a volunteer at the American Red Cross and at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. But, oddly enough, I think it became most evident that Mike was much, much more than his autism spectrum disorder after his leg injury in 2013 (which happened at our house in Ohio, a day after we took him to the Creation Museum, a place that he experienced as unbelievably bizarre). As a result of this injury Mike spent the last twelve years of his life in assisted living residences. Protected and cared for by folks who loved him (and whom he loved), Mike was free to indulge his brilliant, creative, inexhaustible intellectual energy.
For example, in these years Mike created and managed (with my brother Paul’s crucial assistance) the website Each Day in History, which includes thousands of birthdays of famous people as well as innumerable historical events. I am a historian, but it’s my computer-science-major brother who created this. Even more remarkably, this man located on the autism spectrum wrote and self-published four books of fiction . . . and just a month or two before he passed he and I had a series of conversations about what was to be his fifth book, another collection of short stories about people who have seemingly (but not totally) disappeared.
Autism absolutely did not define Mike. But he hated that he was on the autism spectrum – he talked about it as his great regret. And in the last few years he asked Paul and myself – more than once, actually – if he would be autistic in heaven. Well, heaven is where he is now: completely protected, and tightly wrapped in love.
But I am very sad for us. His departure leaves such an enormous hole, such a sweetness deficit. We love you, Mike.
One final comment. Lots of experts on autism have “the data” to demonstrate that Mike – as a person with autism spectrum disorder – was not an anomaly in his rich life and experience. That the creative potential, intellectual and artistic abilities, and social warmth of people with autism would be erased in a few sentences uttered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services is shameful. If you agree, consider signing this petition.
Klandamentalism: Bob Jones at the Intersection of Revivalism, Politics, and White Supremacy
An Interview with Camille Kaminski Lewis
by William Trollinger
Camille Kaminski Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Rhetorical Studies with a minor in American Studies. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism, was a scholarly attempt to stretch the boundaries of both Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory on tragedy and comedy as well as stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. (The story of that publication is available at The KB Journal.) In 2020 she published an edited volume, White Nationalism and Faith: Statements and Counter-Statements on American Identity (Peter Lang). In 2023 she published a remarkable piece here at rightingamerica: “The Unholy Trinity in Fundamentalist Parenting: A Rhetorical Analysis.” And in the past few weeks Clemson University Press has published her newest book, Klandamentalism, which is the focus of this interview.

1. In Klandamentalism you critique (rightly so, I have to say) the ways in which both Bob Jones University-trained historians and outside historians have told the story of Bob Jones in particular, and the KKK-fundamentalism connection in general. Could you talk a little about what you find problematic in these historical treatments?
There are three problems with the historical treatment of Bob Jones, Inc. First of all, gross inaccuracies get repeated. Secondly, scholars have no desire to interrogate those inaccuracies. Lastly, there is an inability to look across several sources at once.
Let me explain how these problems happen: Scholars presume that if you want to get the facts about anything, you need to go to “the source.” They presume that the information you get there will be comprehensive and accurate. I have noticed over the years that if I read an article or a book that mentions that they visited the BJU archives in their research, then their conclusions will pivot toward an overly glowing view of all things BJU.
I surmise that in the scholar’s process the BJU archivist insinuates himself (gendered pronoun is intended). I have several examples of this over the years – where a BJU alum pivots to BJU’s Aura of Goodness.™ I don’t mind including those, but it’s a little off-topic. Since I am banned from the BJU campus, I cannot go to the archives. So I had to start elsewhere or even everywhere else. Frustrating this presumption that “the source” is accurate and comprehensive is a simple failure to check the source’s story.
Maybe it’s a lack of curiosity. Maybe it’s a need to prove a different point and not wanting to get waylaid, to get too far into the weeds. I think there’s a naivete in all this. Since fundamentalists claim to be super-duper pious, they wouldn’t lie, would they? ::clutches pearls::
I know BJU, Inc. lies. So I started there. What actually happened with X? What does BJU, Inc. say happened? What do BJU’s neighbors say? Their allies? Their antagonists? And what shape does their lie take? Is it consistent?
Here are two mistakes that, I believe, can be eliminated when you look across several sources: One of the mistakes I found was from an exceptionally fine historian, Wayne Flynt. He repeated a mistake about the 1889 Dothan Farmer’s Alliance riot. In Poor But Proud, he said it occurred in 1899 (254). If you dig into his footnotes, his source is a single Alabama newspaper that cited the wrong date. It happens. And it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Because of the digitization of American newspapers, I can look across many, many locales, dates, and audiences. While Professor Flynt was likely looking at a microfilm version of a single-page of a single edition of a newspaper, digitization allows the scholar to go back and forth looking in every which way to get a fuller picture.
Another fine historian Sean Wilentz uses the “Stollenwerck Panorama” in the introduction of his Oxford UP book, Chants Democratic. It kind of cracked me up because he uses that invention to describe Pierre Martin Stollenwerck as a kind of “Yankee Yeoman,” a middle-class everyman. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just a few years prior his family was trafficking human beings in the Caribbean as part of the Code Noir. Is this important to Wilentz’ larger point about upward mobility in the early 19th-century? Heck yeah, it is! If the Stollenwercks were able to come to this country because of the wealth they accumulated from enslaved labor, that says a lot about the white supremacy cloaked in “upward mobility.”
2. At the heart of this book is the metaphor of a puzzle. How you make use of that metaphor in the book? And when it comes to Bob Jones, what is the final piece of the puzzle?
I struggled for a way to explain all this data I collected from fifty years of Bob Jones’ life. Kathleen Turner’s metaphor of the puzzle in her Rhetorical History seemed like a concrete and accessible explanation. Rhetorical theory is just a metaphor that has been cemented in some way after all. While I was thinking all that through, we were putting together that “magic puzzle” at my in-laws that Thanksgiving. And everything made sense to me too.
The final piece of the puzzle is this: Bob Jones, Sr., the founder of my alma mater Bob Jones University, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He repeatedly denied it. His biographers ignore it or deny it. Other historians don’t want to take it on (for whatever reason). But after all of all my work, the evidence is plain.
3. You make the argument that “throughout his entire career, at least from 1911 through the 1940s, women are his most consistent target.” And you back this up with innumerable examples, including his infamous “Modern Woman” sermon. What did Jones in particular and the KKK in general have against women?
This one was the hardest one for me to confront. It really, genuinely alarmed me. And frankly, I’m still processing this one. If I were to say it simply, it would be this: women do not conform to the middle-class masculine code of conduct (whatever that means), and, thus, they are nearly impossible to control.
Now others don’t conform to that code of conduct either. Anybody who is not-them (cis-het-white-Protestant men) cannot have power. There are some men that are not yet at the center of power, but they might grow up to be. And the Klandamentalist power players are fine with them. But everyone else must be kept on the sidelines. The Klandamentalist must receive all the attention.
Women can keep busy with their womanly things: childcare, housekeeping, cooking, praying. But those are all done outside of the masculine sphere. So, in sum, I think what they have against women is that they are potentially uncontrollable and distracting.
4. What sorts of responses to this work have you received/do you imagine receiving from folks within the Bob Jones University orbit? Put another way, given how thoroughly you have researched this story, what possible objections could they make?
Funny story: A few weeks ago in a BJU alumni “in good standing” Facebook group, an unwitting member posted a link to this book from Clemson University Press. I am not a member of this group, by the way, because I am a Persona Non Grata in fundyland. But countless people sent me the screenshots of this conversation. Within twenty-four hours, the post was deleted. So most BJU alumni will pretend this book doesn’t exist.
I sent a copy to Bob Jones III with a note saying that I hoped he would read it because when “we know better, we can do better.” I doubt he will read it. His second wife has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, so she might, but I doubt it.
The hate hasn’t come yet, but I am bracing myself. When you live in Greenville, you are an easy target. I anticipate that someone will try to bring me up on charges for church discipline or threats. Both of those things have happened in the recent past, so it might happen again.
5. In your conclusion, in particular, you connect Bob Jones and his Klandamentalism with Donald Trump and contemporary Klandamentalism. Could you elaborate on this connection?
This startles me too. I can’t NOT see the parallels, to be honest. Donald Trump and Bob Jones, Sr. are both the centers of their universe, both demand complete loyalty (as they capriciously define it), and both have no credentials. Further, both demand a certain “appearance” for women around them, both have a cadre of young and compliant men to do their bidding. They both superficially use a vocabulary of religion, both draw stark divides between themselves and their cohort and everyone else, and they both violence on the “everyone else.” Donald Trump and Bob Jones, Sr. are both malignant narcissists, what we rhetoricians used to call demagogues.
If I were to continue this analysis, I would need to map out Trump’s rhetoric. I mean, is he the subject of all his sentences? If he is, then Donald Trump and Bob Jones, Sr. are the same.
6. Given the prodigious research involved in producing Klandamentalism, it makes all the sense that you take a break from research and writing. That said, do you have any projects in the work?
In my 2023 self-evaluation at Furman, I summed up the year be calling it a “year of rejection.” I had so many rejections that year. It was demoralizing. I have a book chapter coming out this year in from University of Pennsylvania Press, Bodies and Beliefs: Purity Culture and the Rhetoric of Religious Trauma. My chapter is called, “A Working Brain, Womb, and Mouth: The Female Body in Bob Jones University’s Purity Culture.” It’s an autoethnography, so that was a different kind of interrogation of the same thing.
I’m also in the middle of producing an edited volume with several fine scholars, called William Jennings Bryan: Haunting American Populism for 100 Years through University of Tennessee Press. Bryan died 100 years ago this summer, so we are looking back at his legacy as a way to understand our current political climate.
But the thing I’m most excited about is this: a volume called She Sang, He Sang: What Dolly and Bruce can Teach America. I’m working on this with my ethnomusicologist friend, Joanna Smolko. She and I both see hope in how Dolly Parton and Bruce Springsteen respond to public conflict. That’s what I’m working on this summer.
When America Goes Nativist, America Becomes Less Christian
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, is the focus of this interview. And there are more books to come!

Thanks to Donald Trump and his MAGA cult, nativism is having one of its extended moments in our nation’s history. Nativism is the political policy of promoting or protecting the interests of native-born over those of immigrants, and it often includes the support of extreme anti-immigration laws.
Nativism as a movement opposes immigration on the basis of fear. Immigrants are “poisoning the blood,” “distorting or spoiling” American values. Of course, and as seen in social media memes, the irony of white people claiming to be natives isn’t lost on Native Americans.
- “You have to walk to school fifteen miles in the snow, uphill both ways? Try walking to Oklahoma.”
- “Immigrants threatening your way of life? That must be tough.”
- “Feed a man corn, he eats for a day. Teach a man to plant corn, he steals your land and kills you.”
Of course, nativism has a long history in the USA.
- In the 1830s President Andrew Jackson’s nationalism, populism, and commitment to democracy was deeply charged with racial hatred and the defense of white supremacy.
- In the 1850’s white evangelical fear of Catholic influence led many evangelicals to find a home in the American, or “Know Nothing,” Party. The Know-Nothing Party was built on the belief that American was a Protestant nation. The Know-Nothing Party, like MAGA, had a flag banner with the words: “Native Americans: Beware of Foreign Influence.”
- WWI saw a deep fear of German immigrants, to the point that speaking in German was banned in some states.
- In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan – which had 4-5 million members across the nation – was virulently anti-immigrant, and (with the help of Klansmen in Congress) pushed through the Immigration Act of 1924, which eliminated immigration from Asia and drastically limited immigration from southern and eastern (i.e., Catholic and Jewish) Europe.
- WWII stoked both anti-German and anti-Japanese fears, and resulted in internment camps.
All movements share the ebb and flow of popularity and slump. When it comes to politics, there are flashes of populism and nativism. Something disturbs the usual hospitality of Americans and turns it into something quite ugly. A frightened, aggrieved and angry people are woven into a collective.
The current mixture of populism and nativism, a real devil’s brew, is enjoying a longer shelf life than usual. The natives are restless. Even in towns and villages with no immigrants, Americans have been aroused by images of immigrants as rapists and murderers. The whole movement takes on an religious apocalyptic tone. The protections of the “people” from hordes of immigrants pouring across our borders have broken down. The illegal immigrants are taking “our jobs,” killing our children, and destroying America. In biblical terminology, they are like a plague of locusts.
The current outburst of nativism feeds off a MAGA evangelical faith “grounded in a highly problematic interpretation of the relationship between Christianity and the American founding,” according to historian John Fea. “It is a playbook that too often gravitates toward nativism, xenophobia, racism, intolerance, and an unbiblical view of American exceptionalism. It is a playbook that divides rather than unites.”
A major nativist theme has been saving America from destruction. This fits the evangelical fear of losing the country to immorality. And this evangelical fear is old.
For example, see fundamentalist Baptist preacher, J. Frank Norris. In the 1920s and 1930s Norris worked overtime to stoke nativist fears. In keeping with the Second Ku Klux Klan, Catholics were his focus: “They would behead every Protestant preacher and disembowel every Protestant mother. They would burn to ashes every Protestant Church and dynamite every Protestant school. They would destroy the public schools and annihilate every one of our institutions.” But in places like El Paso and Birmingham, “the American people, the real white folks, the Protestant population rose up and put the Catholic machine out of business, and a Roman Catholic is not even allowed to clean spittoons in the Court House of City Hall in Birmingham.”
According to Norris, Catholics could not be real Americans. He called the Catholic faith “anti-American and unconstitutional.” Anti-Catholicism, American nativism, and white supremacy mixed together as one. Norris saw Russian Jews, Mexicans, and others as “low-browed foreigners.” “Let other do as they may,” he said. “As far as we are concerned …. we stand for 100 per cent Americanism; for the Bible, for the home, and against every evil and against every foreign influence that seeks to corrupt and undermine our cherished and Christian institutions.”
Norris and his nativism faded from the public eye. With the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, Catholicism became more acceptable in mainstream America. This positive development is now undermined by MAGA’s anti-immigrant outrage.
At stake here is the public rise of nativism in tandem with the rise of Trump authoritarianism. Kenneth Burke named this experience consubstantiality. The magic of consubstantiality is its ability to merge people together in language that is also material. Burke says it is about being “both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.” The various entities “stick” to one another.
For example, at Trump rallies, red Trump hats bob alongside American flags and Hitlerian emblems. Patriotism, nationalism, white nationalism, and antisemitism meld. The #MAGA hashtag of Trump’s campaign sloganeering accompanied Sieg Heil salutes in person and Twitter celebrations of the violence by “Proud Boys” identifying as “western chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”
All the fears and hatred of various interest groups have merged into MAGA. Journalist Natasha Lennard noted, “This is not to say that each, or even the majority, of the hundreds of pro-Trump attendees sympathize with the Venn Diagram of white supremacist, alt-right, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi groups which intersect with the president’s broader support base.” Rather, “the point is that the constellation of hate gets interwoven at all levels irrespective of varying individual attitudes.”
Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, nativism, Christian nationalism, anti-science and anti-history ideologies, Nazism, white supremacy – all the demons of American political hell are now consubstantial, of one substance, with the Evil One.
We now face a legion of J. Frank Norris disciples, as fear gives rise to demons.
(Editor’s note: For an excellent biography of J. Frank Norris, see Barry Hankins, God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism.)
