Reflections and Projections on American Feminism and Culture: An Interview with Gloria Steinem
by Susan Trollinger
In the spring of 1995, I received my PhD in rhetoric and communication from the University of Pittsburgh. That summer, I moved to Iowa City to teach a couple of courses while I looked for a more permanent teaching position. There, I met Melissa Friedling, who was finishing up her dissertation in rhetoric. She invited me to join her in an interview with Gloria Steinem that would appear in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. Steinem was going to be in Iowa City to give a series of talks at the University and made herself available for a couple of young women to talk with her. When Melissa asked me to join her for this interview, I was thrilled! I had written my dissertation on what was being called the Third Wave of Feminism, and one of my chapters focused on Steinem’s Revolution from Within. What was so striking about Steinem in that interview was not only her thoughtful articulation of the challenges related to achieving gender equality and how to respond to them, but also her grace, generosity, and peace. Unlike so many angry voices we hear today, Steinem was calm, reflective, and thoughtful. She struck me as something like “feminism grown up.” She knew the history. She had lived the struggle. And she was full of kindness toward everyone—even her so-called enemies. I learned a lot from her in that interview—about a movement that made my life choices possible and about how to work hard for change and love the other at the same time.
Q. In your Playboy bunny expose as re-released in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions you reveal that the well-paid, glamorous, on-her-way-to-stardom bunny was really an underpaid and sexually harassed cocktail waitress, squeezed into a corset. From this article we learned that the Hugh Hefners of this world lie, and that the women who work for them, do so out of necessity. Thus, you helped us to understand that duped bunnies are really exploited waitresses. In Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem you expanded our understanding further by showing us how education, religion, the fashion industry, etc., seduce women into wanting to think linearly, or worship god-the-father, or sport a miniskirt. Thus, you inspired us to call ‘sister’ not only the bunny who is really a waitress, but also the waitress who really wants to be a bunny. This expanded analysis seems terribly important because it helps us to have grace for the masculinist mistakes we all make, and to have empathy for even the most ‘duped’ among us. Yet, if we say that our desires are culturally produced, in order to have empathy for one another, on what grounds can we fight for, or even know, what it is women want?
A. I think we begin to suspect that our choices may be political when we see that we are following an existing pattern in society. That doesn’t per se mean that it’s not a personal choice, but the alarms go off when we see that we are impelled toward or there seems to be no choice other than what is the predominant one, two, or three. When we’re faced with more subtle choices, as women are now more likely to be (compared to, say, 25 years ago), I think we have more opportunity to examine what we really as individuals want to do or should do or “what’s right for the individual.” The interplay between culture and individuality and between community and person is always going to be very complicated and very subtle, because we are both unique human beings and communal creatures.
So the question becomes, “What are we impelled toward?” Now, this is a hard argument to make in a materialist-rationalist society that in education, even at its best, tends to treat kids like blank slates on which you can write anything and, at its worst, treats them like little animals whose spirits have to be broken. But I think it’s true. You know, I think that anyone who’s ever met a baby knows that there’s a person in that baby already. There’s the seed of what can become. If we flout too much what is already in the baby, that baby will grow up thinking there’s something wrong with a portion of herself or himself and that feeling that there’s something wrong seems to be the source of most future problems. It’s the source of addictions, the source of violence, the source of feeling you must be in a hierarchy in order to be better than others or worse than others or dependent.
So while we both respect each other’s choices and the pressure under which we make those choices, I think there are unmistakable signs in us of what is more suited to us as a unique person. The signs are joy. The signs are interest. The signs are forgetting everything that’s around you because you’re doing, whether it’s making a bookcase, or solving a computer problem, or talking to another person, whatever it may be. It’s a kind of forgetfulness of all that’s around you and a feeling of satisfaction that means that you might continue to do it whether you get paid or not. I don’t mean to be romantic about it, because that isn’t a feeling that happens all the time, but it happens in moments of unity with the task at hand. And if we allow ourselves to be guided by those moments, I think we will continue to make progress and support each other in our search for those moments.
The Melancholy, Outrage, Resentment, and Shame of MAGA Historians
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 righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
David Barton, Robert Jeffress, and Eric Metaxas are three current popular history revisionists. And these revisionists don’t have much interest in the facts.
With the backing of President Trump they have launched a war against American history and historians. Trump, for instance, ordered the interior department to display signs in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that accuse the institution of inaccuracy.
What in the name of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is going on here? If our nation didn’t already have more than 17,500 history museums, this trio might be building a “Christian America Museum” next to the Ark Encounter outside Wilmore Kentucky.
As John Fea scans the work of the revisionists, he concludes, “Their understanding of the past has been debunked by nearly every serious American historian, including those who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges.” As a pastor and, just as importantly, a scholar trained in the history and theory of rhetoric, my contribution is to engage the revisionists rhetorically precisely because their arguments are emotionally-grounded.
A Rhetorical Issue
Barton and company are bad rhetoricians. Plato would have called them Sophists. According to Plato the rhetoric of Sophists was “an experience in producing a sort of delight or gratification.” It was predicated on “flattery.”
In Plato’s dialogue the Gorgias, for example, Socrates compares rhetoric to “cookery”—the equivalent of junk food—and observes that although some rhetoric might taste good, consuming it too readily or mindlessly could condemn your soul to an overweight hell of reincarnation. Barton, Jeffress, and Metaxas are junk food rhetoricians.
Joshua Gunn says, “Junk food is pleasurable or exciting or intoxicating, at least until the first swallow. At least until the burps of shame come up.” And the revisionists serve “junk food” as comfort to people in need of a fantasy of a Christian America. Judged as rhetorical arguments, the revisionists are fantasists, flatterers, fake tellers of a facile promise of national salvation. It is a puerile gospel of redemption void of responsibility and repentance.
MAGA has an emotional template for criticizing American historians. It goes like this: For too long, students have been taught a distorted, liberal version of American history. Teachers intentionally make students feel bad about America’s many crimes from its checkered past—slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and the oppression of women.
Emotion coupled with reason has tremendous potential. There is powerful emotion everywhere in history. Our best historians arouse our deepest emotions when telling the stories of our nation. We feel joy, remorse, sadness, anger, outrage, happiness, pride, shame. MAGA sifts through the emotions and deletes any capable of making them feel bad.
As a teenager from Louisiana, I flooded my bed with tears as I relived Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and the terrible blunder of General Robert Lee. I have laid furious in my bed after reading a letter from one of my ancestors. He fought for the Confederacy and sent a letter to his “Mama” from Gettysburg. He talked about the soldier next to him having his head blown off by a cannon ball. He wrote of the hell of war. He wanted to come home. He later became a prisoner of war. At the time, I felt sure I could have made better command decisions. But you have to be born Southern to feel that bitter in the dark.
In email correspondence, University of Dayton history professor, William V. Trollinger, wrote me: “Here’s my favorite defense of history, from the great W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (1935): ‘Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?’”
The Fallacy of Emotional Arguments
MAGA evangelicals make emotional arguments in favor of a contrived history of an American golden age. But this reveals the weakness of their argument. Unable to make the case on the facts, realities and interpretation of history, MAGA evangelicals have resorted to emotional proofs. MAGA argues not through sustained reasoning (logos) but through pathos – hyperbole, misinformation, threats, repetition and fantasy.
Are we witnessing an entire nation caught up in an emotional storm? Has America lost its mind?
The temptation for these writers of “Back to the Future” ideologies, prejudices, beliefs and commitments is to make characters remarkably like themselves. I shudder at the thought of George Washington looking remarkably like Barton, Jeffress like Thomas Jefferson and Metaxas like John Adams.
MAGA historians connect their audiences with a pathos-filled tale that, in effect, is saying: “Look at our wonderful evangelical founders. They were evangelicals just like us.” They have produced a history of affects – a litany of emotions designed to make people feel good and feel free.
Do they know they are lying? Do they know the absurdity of wish-fulfilment told as truth? The evangelical baptism of Franklin would be a spectacle. As US ambassador to France, Franklin dressed in Quaker garb and described himself as a “Quaker philosopher.” In his speeches and writings he was a secular Deist. He even testifies to being a “thorough Deist.” When Franklin arrived in Paris, his French counterparts told him they were worried about him having religious convictions. Later they told him they were gratified to learn he had none.
Randall Balmer clarifies what is at stake:
We tend to take history—and historians—for granted. But that is a grievous mistake. An understanding of history helps us understand who we are, where we’ve been and even provides a clue to where we’re headed. It’s no accident, for example, that David Barton masquerades as a historian. He’s a fabulist, of course, not a historian, as has been amply demonstrated by his habit of wrenching quotations out of context and fabricating “evidence” out of whole cloth. Barton is a fraud, but he recognizes the power and importance of history, which is why he’s fashioned a career out of creating this elaborate, false narrative of the American past.
The rhetorical form of evangelical argument consists of four interrelated and mutually reinforcing emotions. Practically devoid of logos and ethos, the four emotions dominating the soul of MAGA and her apologists are melancholy, outrage, resentment and shame.
Melancholy
The first emotion permeating all of MAGA and its revised history is melancholy. It may seem odd to think of melancholy as one of the primary effects of the MAGA movement and its revised history. The tales the revisionists fabricate are melancholic throughout. They represent a failure to confront the crimes of America against African Americans and Native Americans, and our involvement in slavery, colonialism and racism.
I feel a deep sadness for my fellow Americans captured by the emotional arguments of the revisionists. Casey Kelly’s Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood examines contemporary white masculine victimhood and its compulsion toward death and self-destruction. He identifies the white male melancholia for better days – when “men could be men” – and the white male politics of resentments as tethering white masculinity to a fantasy of annihilation—both their own and others.
What evangelicals claim as a loss turns out to be a lack. They mourn what has never existed. There’s an empty tomb but not by resurrection. There was never a body in the evangelical tomb.
Melancholy has become a death trap for evangelicals. They maintain fealty to the notion of a Christian America, refusing to renounce their attachment to it. Evangelical melancholy is dishonest. They have turned it into feelings of persecution and victimization.
Slavoj Zizek says the melancholic is guilty of committing a kind of paralogism of the pure capacity to desire, which resides in the confusion between loss and lack. Insofar as the object-cause of desire (Christian America) is originally lacking, melancholy interprets this lack as loss, as if the lacking object was once possessed and then lost. Evangelicals have not only created a fantasy history. They have also created a false claim of loss.
The evangelical revisionist historians turn out to be politically naïve, nostalgic, and reactionary. They defend a nonexistent entity, a “purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself,” making the entire enterprise delusional.
Outrage
The MAGA emotion machine produces outrage 24/7. These revisionist history writers are furious with what they see as the moral decline of America. And battalions of outrage disciples are on call to respond instantly to every manufactured instance where outrage is considered necessary. MAGA has already given away the rhetorical nature of their attack, as they make primary use of a negative trope – ad hominem – to attack the character of historians, and not the content of what they have written. This is the emotional rhetoric of demagogues, Sophists and evil rhetors.
Attacking American historians as liberal, socialist, atheist, “woke,” or biased has nothing to do with the quality of historical research. Even if a few of the character attacks were factually true, their point is also completely irrelevant to whether historians are writing a biased account. It does not matter if a historian engaged in human sacrifice at every full moon and therefore wrote America was not founded as a Christian nation. Some historian might have kicked puppies and screamed at her editor, and that’s actually irrelevant to whether or not their research and conclusions are true.
“Breathing threats and violence” (Acts 9:1) are apt descriptions of MAGA evangelicals. Those who disagree need to be deported, imprisoned, or killed. Evangelicals often speak of “Lynching,” “firing squads,” “deportation,” “imprisonment” for liberals, Democrats and immigrants.
James Fishback, a GOP candidate for governor in Florida told a Black voter he “should be lynched.” President Trump called Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and five other Democrats “traitors” who should face trial for sedition – a crime punishable by death. A Republican congressman called for Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s deportation after her sermon at President Trump's 2025 inaugural prayer service, where she urged compassion for marginalized groups.
Outrage is the key to virality, success and power for the evangelicals. Read the blogs, listen to the podcasts of Doug Wilson, Sean Feucht, Al Mohler, and a host of MAGA evangelicals. They ooze outrage. It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks.
Resentment
The third MAGA emotion is resentment. And evangelicals and fundamentalists developed a chip on their shoulders in the first decades of the 20th century. For example, fundamentalist patriarch William Bell Riley complained that conservative ministers had “about as good a chance to be heard in a Turkish harem as to be invited to speak within the precincts of a modern State university.”
Evangelical resentment has grown to a Sequoia sized log. At the ceremony opening the Creation Museum, Ken Ham spoke of repairing the damage done to Christianity eighty-two years ago when Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial. “It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. “We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum.”
MAGA has a particular resentment when liberals presume to teach them about the Bible. Evangelical attacks on the social gospel, liberation theology and progressive thought are as vicious as any political attack. Evangelicals are prone to snap, “Who are you to tell me what the Bible teaches? Who are you to tell me I should accept gays, welcome immigrants or forgive my enemies?”
Shame
The most pernicious emotion haunting MAGA evangelicals is shame. MAGA runs from shame, hides from shame, denies feeling any shame. The previous masters of shame can’t abide being shamed. I believe the consistent evangelical support of Trump comes from his rhetorical ability to offer a facile salvation where they are free to avoid shame and feel dignity.
Most of all, evangelicals don’t want to be made to feel bad even when they deserve to feel bad. They are tired of playing the “bad guy” in the Exodus stories of all the minorities, Jews, women and homosexuals. In 37 states, hiding behind children, they have passed laws to prohibit the teaching of materials that make white students feel bad. When history is reduced to “not feeling bad” we should know we have a problem.
Evangelicals were once the masters of shame, understanding that shame leads to repentance. Ironically, it is now progressives who have embraced shame as a pedagogy for learning how to treat minorities. As Donovan Shaefer observes, “Orientation to shame is one of the cardinal principles of progressivism. Shame on the move—an openness to shame, a trafficking in shame — is how left-wing politics feels.”
But MAGA is having nothing to do with liberal shame. Instead, MAGA’s response to shame has been a furious refusal of culpability. In its desperate attempt to avoid shame, MAGA has perverted love, destroyed empathy and abandoned all pretense of following Jesus’ love for those who are different. The attempt to Christianize America is an attempt to avoid the shame of America’s sins and trespasses, and thus to repeat them.
Conclusion
Christianity represents both the best and the worst of the nation’s history. At its best, it invokes a “good neighbor” policy to the world, gives voice to the voiceless, and a place for the Other. At its worst, it produces an uncompromising resurrection of Jim Crow white supremacy and nativist, exclusionary and American exceptionalism, all of which violates the most basic of Christian principles. And the evangelical revisionist historians attempt to cover all these transgressions with a political/theological ideology fueled by melancholy, outrage, resentment and shame. The revisionist historians are fantasists dwelling in a fantasy world where emotional arguments flourish. When the costume and mask is ripped away, MAGA is left without a history, without a way out and without the promised salvation. They are scarecrows without brains, lions without courage and tin men without hearts – a perverse reversal of the Wizard of Oz fantasy tale.
Instead they are left with a harsh reality: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6).
Doug Wilson Says Mamdani Voters “Should Lose Their Citizenship”
By Brian Kaylor
Editor’s Note: Rev. Brian Kaylor is editor of Word and Way. This post appeared originally in the Word and Way enewsletter, A Public Witness, and is reposted here by permission.
Doug Wilson, a Christian Nationalist pastor in Idaho and a self-described “paleo-Confederate,” wants to strip the citizenship of anyone who voted for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. As leader of the denomination that includes Pete Hegseth, Wilson previously sparked headlines for wanting to repeal the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote and for seeking a return to religious tests for officeholders. But during a recent forum on Christian Nationalism, he went a step further to argue people should lose their citizenship for voting for the first Muslim mayor of the Big Apple.
“Citizenship is more of a privilege, dependent upon ancestry, background, how long you’ve been here, whether you meet the qualifications or not,” Wilso said as he insisted citizenship was not a right. “And if America is a creedal nation, then you have to have creedal standards. So anyone who voted for Mamdani should lose their citizenship.”
Wilson’s comment during an event in Moscow, Idaho, sparked applause from the audience that had gathered for a conference hosted by his church. The session on Christian Nationalism featured comments and dialogue by Wilson, Joe Rigney (an associate pastor with Wilson), Albert Mohler (president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), Paul Miller (a professor at Georgetown University who was mostly offering a counter voice opposing Christian Nationalism), and moderator Jared Longshore (an associate pastor with Wilson). The “Which Way, America?” session was sponsored by Canon Press, a publishing house Wilson founded and that has published many of his works. Canon just published a book, Five Views on Christian Nationalism, featuring Wilson, Rigney, Mohler, Miller, and R.R. Reno — and the session promoted the book by having four of the authors offer remarks and then engage in discussion and debate over various church-state issues.
Before making his remark about Mamdani voters, Wilson argued in the session that he thinks the United States could be considered a creedal nation, calling it “a Christian nation with a Christian consensus, Christian history.” As a result, he insisted that to participate in decision-making, people must acknowledge “the historical reality of our Christian history — which I think is undeniable” and must want to “preserve” the “overwhelmingly Christian ethos” of the United States. He therefore condemned the Biden administration for allowing immigrants to come into the country with a different history and worldview. Wilson insisted that because of immigration, “we’ve lost our bearings.”
Although Wilson did not explicitly explain why he felt Mamdani voters deserved to be stripped of their citizenship, his remarks came after comments by Rigney and Mohler that the immigration of Muslims threatened the United States. Mohler argued that since he believes the U.S. Constitution and polity “is based upon Christianity,” then “one of the biggest problems we face right now” is immigrants who practice Islam. Rigney made the point even more directly, insisting that “religious diversity is destructive. It’s not our strength. Islamic and Hindu immigration erodes America’s Christian core.”
“Hindu and Islamic immigration in particular are harmful because, quite frankly, statues to monkey gods anger the living God,” Rigney added. “He doesn’t like it. Idolatry is offensive to him and we can’t expect his blessing while engaging in that kind of idolatry. Moreover, Islam in particular is adept at manipulating Western Christian and post-Christian structures and policies in order to establish beachheads.”
Wilson previously argued that Muslims and Hindus should not be allowed to hold political office in a “Christian” nation. And he insisted that Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, and other non-Protestants should not be able to worship in public spaces in a “Christian” nation.
In the forum on Christian Nationalism, he did not explain any details for how he would strip citizenship from someone because of the faith of those they vote for. Such a proposal would apparently mean that voting could no longer be done by secret ballot.
As Miller, the author of The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism, pushed back on some of Wilson’s rhetoric, Wilson said he rejects the idea of government neutrality when it comes to religion. He said that while he wanted “denominational neutrality” since “the state should stay out of Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist” disagreements, he wants the Protestant Bible to serve as a governing guide. As an example, Wilson argued that the tax rate should not be more than 10%, which he claimed was based on his reading of the Bible. Wilson later added he wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, which switched the election of U.S. senators from state legislators to a vote of the people in each state, because the new system is too democratic.
Once considered a fringe far-right Christian figure, Wilson in recent years has found himself increasingly embraced by the broader evangelical world and the conservative political movement in the age of Donald Trump. The biggest evidence of his rise is that Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “secretary of war,” is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches and invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon in February. Wilson’s CREC launched a church in Washington, D.C., last year that Hegseth often attends. Rigney recently preached the installation service for its pastor, Brooks Potteiger, who has preached at the Pentagon three times.
Mamdani won the election as mayor of New York City on Nov 4, 2025, with more than 1.1 million votes. Since then, he has been a key target of a surge in Islamophobic rhetoric by Republican politicians and rightwing preachers — including those preaching inside the Pentagon during a war against an Islamic nation.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
A Flat-Earth Preacher’s Understandable Silence about the Scopes Trial
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 his new book, The Power of the Flat Earth Idea (2026), the historian Edward Guimont notes a small mistake in Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods (1997). There Larson wrote, “Relatively little comment about the trial survives from African Americans. A few black evangelists, such as Virginia’s John Jasper, endorsed Bryan’s position.” Guimont comments, “It would be an impressive feat for Jasper to endorse the attack on evolution twenty-four years after his death—although, as mentioned earlier, modern parishioners of the Sixth Mount Zion Church believe his spirit to haunt it, so Jasper could perhaps provide feedback in that manner.” As it happens, I noticed the same mistake while rereading Summer for the Gods in 2025, although it was news to me that Jasper’s spirit is believed to haunt his old church!
Guimont and I were both ready to detect such a mistake because we’re both interested in the history of flat-earthery, and Jasper was, as it happens, a well-known flat-earther. Indeed, Guimont devotes a chapter of his book to him, entitled “The Unmatched Negro Philosopher”—the title is taken from the subtitle of a 1908 biography. Born a slave in Virginia in 1812, Jasper underwent a religious experience in 1839, leading to his becoming a Baptist minister in the following year, while still enslaved. He was not emancipated until 1865, when Richmond, Virginia, was captured by federal forces. In 1867, he was called to lead the Sixth Mount Zion Church. There, in 1878, he first gave the sermon that made him famous, “The Sun Do Move.” A powerful orator, Jasper would deliver “The Sun Do Move” hundreds of times, often to large audiences, including the Virginia General Assembly, before his death in 1901.
Judging from a printed version published in 1882, “The Sun Do Move” took as its text Exodus 15:3 (“The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name” [KJV]), but he turned from the military to the astronomical about halfway through, in the course of a discussion of the book of Joshua. Jasper cited Joshua as proving geocentrism—“the Sun Do Move around the earth”—also citing verses from Malachi, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Isaiah, and Judges by way of corroboration. He then turned to Revelation 7:1, which refers to the four corners of the earth, arguing, “Now the four angels that stood on the four corners of the earth are an evidence that the earth is squar and not round, for anything that has got four corners is not round, but squar! So we is living on a four-cornered earth sot steady.” (I think that “sot” is a variant past tense form of “set.”) He closed by urging his audience to “stick to the Bible!”
(Parenthetically, printed versions of Jasper’s sermons tend to employ “eye dialect”—“misspellings that are based on standard pronunciations (such as sez for says or kow for cow) but are usually intended to suggest a speaker’s illiteracy or his use of generally nonstandard pronunciations,” per the Encyclopedia Britannica. I quoted from the 1882 version because its use of eye dialect is minimal. A different version, printed in the 1908 biography, renders the discussion of Revelation 7:1 thus: “What do John, und’r de pow’r uv de Spirit, say? He say he saw fo’ anguls standin’ on de fo’ corners uv de earth, holdin’ de fo’ win’s uv de earth, an’ so fo’th.” This is both difficult to read and arguably insulting to Jasper. But I have to admit that I like the challenge that Jasper proceeds to pose in the 1908 biography’s version: “’Low me ter ax ef de earth is roun’, whar do it keep its corners?”)
Guimont offers a possible diagnosis of Larson’s mistake about Jasper, observing, “In March 1925, several months before the Scopes Trial, James S. Hatcher, Reverend of the Third Street Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Richmond, preached a sermon titled ‘The Sun Do Move and the Earth Has Corners,’ a conscious attempt to echo Jasper.” Guimont adds that a contemporary black journalist, Ernest Rice McKinney, reacted to the sermon by explicitly connecting the dots between flat-earthery and antievolutionism, jokingly speculating that “friend Hatcher may have been talking with William Jennings Bryan.” Hatcher and Bryan weren’t in cahoots, of course, but Guimont reports that in the wake of the Scopes trial, Hatcher was asked to preach against evolution in Richmond, concluding that “it does seem that at least in one case, the trial’s outcome led one Flat Earther to Creationism.”
For what it’s worth, I arrived at a different possible diagnosis. Henshaw Ward, a teacher of English turned science popularizer, contributed a piece entitled “Uncle Jasper and Mr. Bryan: Fundamentalism and Absurdity” to The Independent for May 2, 1925. In it, Ward imagines introducing William Jennings Bryan to William E. Hatcher (no discernible relation to the Reverend James S. Hatcher), the author of the 1908 biography of Jasper. “What a funny old darky crotchet it was to preach in these enlightened days that the sun moves,” Bryan exclaims. But Hatcher compares Jasper’s attitude toward the roundness of the earth to Bryan’s attitude toward evolution. “John Jasper was excusable because he was unlettered,” Hatcher charges Bryan. “But what excuse is there for you ... to be sixty years behind theological thought and to use this negro’s logic against the scientists?”
On Guimont’s hypothesis, Larson must have read about Hatcher’s flat-earth sermon echoing Jasper’s, learned or inferred that Hatcher was opposed to teaching evolution, and confused the two preachers. On my hypothesis, Larson must have read Ward’s fiction suggesting that Jasper and Bryan agreed in their basic attitude toward the Bible and misremembered it as documenting that Jasper agreed with Bryan in understanding the Bible to be inconsistent with evolution. To be frank, neither seems to me to be tremendously convincing, especially when Hatcher and Ward were not the only writers to have compared Jasper and Bryan. For example, a black newspaper, The New York Age, suggested in 1922 that Jasper “would find himself reinforced today by the weight of such authorities as the Kentucky legislature [which considered a ban on teaching evolution in 1922] and the Hon. William Jennings Bryan.”
Here, in lieu of a decisive diagnosis, is a closing irony. Although Larson wrote, “Relatively little comment about the trial survives from African Americans,” there was more than he recognized. Among the commentators on the Scopes Trial was the great scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Writing in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, of which he was the editor, in September 1925, Du Bois described the situation in Dayton, Tennessee, as “no laughing matter. It is menace and warning. It is a challenge to Religion, Society and Democracy.” A quarter century earlier, Du Bois was the primary organizer of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Included in the exhibit was a collection of a few hundred books written by American blacks. And among them, according to a report in The New York Times about the collection’s visit to Buffalo, New York, in 1901, was John Jasper’s “The Sun Do Move.”
Is MAGA a Cult?
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 righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
Is MAGA a cult? My first inclination was to use a bit of paralipsis (a way of saying two things at once): “I’m not saying MAGA is a cult, I’m just saying there’s cult-like ideas and actions prominent in MAGA.” Such a strategy would be disingenuous on my part. I would be using the favorite misleading trope of the demagogue.
If labeling MAGA as a cult is more than shameless name-calling, and it is in fact a cult, then our inquiry has other questions to address. Why has this idea gained such popular support? Why are millions around the country tempted to support the president? These are questions that matter, and they matter for reasons that extend all the way to the issue of American democracy itself.
This is an investigation, not an inquisition. Therefore, I have chosen to use comparison as my primary argumentative strategy. I will compare Trump/MAGA to Jim Jones/converts. The argument is simple: Jim Jones’ movement was a cult. Comparing MAGA to Jones’ movement determines whether or not MAGA is a cult.
If we agree cults are dangerous and anti-democratic, and I think most Americans do, then we want to understand what happened in a historical cult that enabled one man to rise to power and lead an entire group of converts to a tragic ending.
It’s important, therefore, to see, when it comes to MAGA, if there really is another cult under construction, and not just fling that accusation at any group we dislike.
And maybe MAGA is merely a loose collection of unhappy Americans, each convinced he or she is right. As David French puts it, “After all, when you’re absolutely certain that you’re right — that the policies you advance will defend liberty and defend justice — then isn’t zealotry called for?”
Maybe MAGA is just an amalgamation of mistrustful, angry and frustrated voters who are disillusioned with the establishment, and who have watched too many campaign ads portraying the Democrats as demons, haters of America and destroyers of faith.
That said, correspondents are writing long articles insisting MAGA is a cult. Nick Cattogio’s Dispatch column on Ken Paxton’s victory over John Cornyn in the Texas GOP Senate primary argues “Republican voters are …. Hellbent on purging incumbents in primaries: They are in their Jonestown phase. Disappointed in Trump’s economic failures yet psychologically unable to hold him (or themselves) accountable, they’re coping by turning more radically cultish and flogging heretics like Cornyn, Thomas Massie, and Bill Cassidy instead.”
The paradigmatic tragic cult in American history is Jim Jones and his followers. Jim Jones has been dead for almost 50 years. It seems wise to remind ourselves of this fact given the continued use of his movement in our politics. Jim Jones and “cult” are twinned in our memory. While people may not know the historical details, the mention of Kool-Aid, cyanide, Jonestown and suicide are still prevalent in our language. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is still hurled at those we wish to discredit and remains a well-used trope of derision in our politics.
Jimmy Kimmel made fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Here’s a woman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, she chugged it. I mean, she drank all the Kool-Aid. And not just the regular flavors like Close the Borders and The Election Was Stolen.”
The phrase to drink the Kool-Aid has three meanings:
- To accept foolish and irrational ideas as truth.
- To commit suicide
- To demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty.
Unquestioning obedience is in itself a kind of political suicide. Blind obedience includes membership in the tribe and deference to its leader. The followers abdicate judgment to the leader. Belief and obedience are almost automatic. Followers accept and believe that the past was as the leader portrays it, that the present is as he depicts it, and that the future will be as he predicts it. And they follow without hesitation his prescriptions for action.
MAGA abdicates personal critical thinking for a cult-like level of commitment, an allegiance to an authoritarian leader and blind obedience to the leader. MAGA submits to Trump’s authority. In this regard, it acts like a cult.
Jim Jones' Cult
Jim Jones was a charismatic preacher with a stormy and controversial professional career. Jones carefully developed a pattern of speaking unceasingly of the “enemies.” As a skillful evangelist, Jones made real an array of enemies within the lives of his converts.
His movement, rooted in suspicion, mistrust and fear, especially of the government, the FBI and the CIA, was defined by paranoia. The movement evolved from a church to a political movement.
Jones started claiming he was God. Not satisfied being a servant of God, “God’s anointed,” Jones claimed he was God. He claimed, “I came as the God to eliminate all your false Gods.”
Jones vividly pictured himself as a God invulnerable to death. “You have never seen anyone shot down before your eyes and heal themselves. I, yet I have done it. I’m the only God you’ve ever seen, with blood gushing out of his chest, who, after the nurses put their fingers in the bullet holes, just wiped his hand across his chest, and closed him. Your God is one of the people. He is the instrument of all you’ve ever desired, all that freedom embraces., all that justice embodies, all that sensitivity involves. This is what your God is.”
During a sermon, Jones would take the Bible and throw it on the floor and shout, “Too many people are looking at this and not at me.” All eyes, all attention, all adoration had to be on him. He was the ultimate authority.
Jones was a preacher of questionable character. He resorted to tricks (demagoguery) to influence converts: he frightened and manipulated his followers; the espoused religious values at variance with Christian faith but called it Christian; he proclaimed political ideals contrary to the American system; he preached hatred; he made empty promises. The focus of the movement was on Jones as the divine one, the Chosen One, the anointed one. He was the ultimate authority, the ultimate source.
Do Trump and MAGA check all the boxes of the cult form? Our task becomes investigating whether or not he is another Jones-like figure, playing his evil tunes, luring people down the Jonestown road. If, as his critics insist, Trump is deeply flawed and a clear and present danger to democracy, all Americans should want to know and act in democratic ways to make sure MAGA never evolves into a powerful cult with the capacity to destroy democracy.
Charismatic Leader ✓
Trump is a powerful charismatic leader. Charismatic leadership requires complete acquiescence and submission from all followers. It is a relationship of pure hierarchy because it can withstand an extraordinary amount of disconfirming evidence (that the leader is a serial liar, a sexual pervert, not a good person, does not have the character to be president, is out of his depth, makes emotional decisions which are bad) by simply rejecting them. Any admission of a flaw on the part of Trump would destroy the relationship. Therefore dissent can’t be allowed.
Multiple Exigencies ✓
Trump is a genius at exigency marking: immigrants, the “Deep State,” the Justice Department, Democrats, communists. The Trump “Enemies Factory” churns out enemies as needed.
Trump successfully made the federal government, the Judiciary, Congress, civil service and the media enemies of the people. The CIA and the FBI were enemies. Scapegoats were firmly established within a framework of paranoia, distrust and suspicion. Even scientists and historians have been cast as “the enemy.” Trump sees as many “enemies’ in the academy as Senator McCarthy saw communists in Hollywood.
Trump’s shifting collection of enemies changes with the political winds. For almost a decade, immigrants have been Trump’s enemy du jour. Yet in his July 3 and July 4th speeches, he recycled an old enemy – communism. He mentions communism 13 times in the two speeches designed to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary of independence. Trump raised from the dead his long-time personal attorney, Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy’s lead prosecutor in the campaign to root out all communists.
MAGA keeps standing by their man even through his disastrous architectural destruction of the White House and grounds. The reflecting pool has become the defining trope of Trumpism. And MAGA keeps drinking the Kool-Aid even though it has turned green in the pitcher.
The Authoritarian Threat to Democracy ✓
The real danger is that Trump’s magical potion has poisoned American trust in democracy. Democracy itself is in the crosshairs of a warring MAGA. Trump has injected his magical potion with deep mistrust and suspicious. The government is seen as working against the people. Historians, scientists, government workers, military generals and admirals, election officials, the judiciary, the media, the television networks, universities, the health care system, the hurricane watchers, the environmentalists – all lumped under the label of “Don’t trust.”
According to Trump logic, the system has been poisoned by the Democrats with election-stealing, wokeness policies, waste, moral decay and chicanery. And Trump intends to clean up the corruption. And he believes he has the right to use any means to prevent the enemy from victory. And MAGA keeps drinking the Kool-Aid. At least 60% of Republicans, against all reason and evidence, still believe the 2020 election was stolen.
David French, in a New York Times op-ed, “Is America’s MAGA Wing Giving Up on America?,” raises the question of the future of democracy. Timothy Snyder warns of the danger of tyranny. James Miller asks, Is Democracy Possible? Anne Applebaum writes of the “twilight of democracy.” Cornel West, in Democracy Matters identifies three dogmas threatening democracy: free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism and escalating authoritarianism. American historian David Blight warns, “It is time to see the real enemy – a long-brewing American-style neo-fascist authoritarianism, beguilingly useful to the grievances of the disaffected, and threatening to steal our microphones midway through our odes to joy.”
Faith in democracy is shaken in the USA. According to a Yahoo News-YouGov poll nearly half of Americans (55% Democrats, 53% Republicans and 49% overall) believe the US is “likely to cease to be a democracy in the future.” Thomas Edsall says, Trump’s “MAGA movement shows no signs of abating.”
Sean Wilentz, prizewinning author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, asserts, “We’re on the verge of what Hamilton in ‘The Federalist’ called government by brute force.”
In other words, MAGA renders all publics precarious.
A God Complex ✓
It’s worth asking: does Trump think he’s God? Or is he simply riding the wave of religious zeal in MAGA to take political advantage? After the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump said, “I’m supposed to be dead.” Four days later he said, “I’m not supposed to be here.” And he added: “But something very special happened. Let’s face it. Something happened.” “It’s … an act of God.” In his victory speech in November, 2024, he claimed, “God spared my life for a reason. In his second inaugural address, he asserted, “I was saved by God to make America great again.” “It changed something in me,” he said in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in February.
Trump seems personally convinced by the evangelical campaign to make him God-like. Professor of philosophy at the University of New England, David Livingstone Smith, said, “Trump is a sacred leader. His evangelical followers often refer to him as a ‘savior’ or ‘anointed one’ chosen by God.”
Conclusion
Even when all the ingredients for making a cult are present, it still may not be a cult. Having the ingredients for gumbo and making a good gumbo are not the same.
MAGA contains all the ingredients for making a cult, but falls short. It is on the road to Jonestown but lacks the twisted will necessary to take the final step. Too much narcissism, too much unmitigated desire for power and too much insistence on being right about everything holds them in check. The vices of MAGA will save them from suicide; their virtues have all been eaten away by the moths.
MAGA is still dangerous. It is a conviction and a freedom. MAGA refuses to tolerate the age of liberal tolerance. They have rebelled against it while swearing on the Bible they are not racists or sexists. They have been granted, by Trump, the freedom to act on their conviction. They claim they are holy, reasonable and honorable people. They are acting in clarity to restore Western civilization and American Christianity. They are starting a New Order of things, which is actually the old order of white male supremacy.
MAGA turns out to be Americans stuck in the 1950’s who are unable to transition to the 21st century. Probably not a cult, but dangerous as hell.
Christian Nationalism Echoes the Ideology of the Ku Klux Klan
by Tony Klimek
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the Dayton Daily News. We are grateful for permission to share it on RightingAmerica.
Tony Klimek is a retired engineer who regular columnist for the Dayton Daily News.
History can help our nation understand its past, provide clarity about current events, and help us move forward and fulfill the ideals of our country. As we commemorate our 250th anniversary, we should acknowledge our successes and our darkest moments, including the painful history of the Ku Klux Klan. After the civil war, the first Klan was a local, southern organization focused on terrorizing newly freed Black Americans. The second Klan of the 1920s was a larger nationwide political force and had a strong presence in the Miami Valley.
I recently attended a presentation about the second Klan by William Trollinger, a retired professor from the University of Dayton. The presentation provided information about our region’s history and the basis to see similarities between the second Klan and today’s Christian nationalism.
Many changes were occurring in America in the 1920s. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were continuing to arrive, folks from the country were moving to cities, women were gaining more freedom and rights, and the great migration of Black workers from the south to northern and Midwest cities was beginning. The second Klan exploited these changes by spreading fear that our traditional way of life was in danger and only white Protestants were 100% American. The Klan said that the character of America was being erased by outsiders, and that they were protectors of our country’s heritage. They wrapped their bigotry and white supremacy ideology in the symbols of Christianity and patriotism. American flags and Bibles were prominently displayed during their events. They said that their burning cross represented the sacrificial service of Christ, but it soon became a symbol of terror.
The Klan conflated American history with their bigoted brand of Christianity and proclaimed themselves as defenders of 100% Americanism. Blacks, Jews and Catholics were identified as threats to the American way of life. Klan literature, and pro-Klan ministers asserted that “Jesus was the first Klansman” and proposed that white supremacy was a mainstream Christian duty. Protestant clergymen supported the movement and Klan ideology.
During the second Klan, Ohio had more Klan members than almost any other state in the country, with approximately 400,000 members. It had a strong presence in the Miami Valley and operated as a visible, mainstream organization with an estimated 15,000 members in Dayton. In 1923, more than 7,000 hooded Klansmen held a massive parade in Dayton. The group held regular rallies and cross-burnings at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds.
The local targets of the Klan included the growing Black population and the region’s large Catholic and immigrant communities. Klan propaganda warned that the University of Dayton (UD) was the headquarters of Catholic subversion in southwest Ohio. They even claimed that UD’s ROTC program was training a Catholic army to fight religious wars on behalf of the Pope. In December 1923, the local Klan exploded twelve bombs on campus and lit a cross on fire on the west side of campus. There were no more bombings after that event, but cross burnings continued until 1926. The Klan terrorists that placed and exploded the bombs were never identified or brought to justice.
The Klan collapsed in the late 1920s because widespread financial corruption and moral scandals within the organization. Politicians stopped espousing the Klan rhetoric and, in an effort to avoid confrontation, people and organizations quit talking about the Klan and tried to bury its history.
Unfortunately, as we face changes and uncertainty today, the Klan ideology has been resurrected and repackaged as Christian nationalism. Members of the movement do not wear white robes or burn crosses, but their rhetoric is similar to the Klan’s and they promote the false narrative that America was founded as divinely ordained white Christian nation. They create and exploit the fear of immigrants, a changing world, and uncertainty. They blame immigrants and those that are different for our problems and promote the false nostalgia of a mythical time of pure white protestant bliss.
The concept of Christian nationalism is false and un-American. The creed and the success of our country is not aligned with rhetoric and policies of the Klan and Christian nationalism. Americans are not defined by race, ethnicity, religion, or where your ancestors are buried. We and our leaders need to acknowledge and reject the dark history of the Klan and the false narrative of Christian nationalism.
We will continue to be a great country by continuing to attract and welcome a diversity of smart and hardworking people from around the world, upholding the ideals of our creed, and creating an environment for continued success for all Americans.
Despite the Failure to Meet Attendance Projections, the Kentucky GOP loves Ark Encounter
by Daniel Phelps
Daniel Phelps is a retired environmental geologist for the commonwealth of Kentucky. He has also taught part-time in Kentucky’s Community College system. Phelps is founder and president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society. His work to expose the pseudoscience behind Ham’s Ark Encounter was featured in the award-winning 2019 documentary, “We Believe in Dinosaurs.” And in 2021 the Paleontological Society – the world’s leading scientific organization devoted to studying invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology, micropaleontology, and paleobotany – awarded Phelps the prestigious Strimple Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in paleontology by someone who does not make a full-time living from paleontology.
Recently, Answers in Genesis CEO Ken Ham has produced a lot of propaganda celebrating the fact that the Ark has been open for 10 years in July. Propaganda that fails to acknowledge that the Ark has never come close to the 1.2 to 2.2 million annual visitors projected by Answers in Genesis.
But in early July, an Ark representative gave questionable testimony about Ark attendance to the Kentucky Legislature Committee on Tourism. A few days later the Kentucky House GOP posted this video to YouTube. Apparently, Representative Kim King once counted 15 out of state license plates in the Ark parking lot!
Wowie!
The purpose of the Tourism committee meeting – which consisted primarily of Ark propaganda – is unclear. Could the long-term goal be to give the Ark more tax incentives or some other Kentucky taxpayer money? At about 44 minutes in the Ark's representative claims a million visitors a year, while Dr. William Trollinger, based on information from my monthly Kentucky Open Records Act requests, demonstrates the Ark has never come close to their attendance projections that were made when bullying the state, Grant County, and the City of Williamstown out of perks to build the Ark. (Note: These numbers don't include free admission for children under 10 and yearly or lifetime pass holders.)
In June 2026, the Ark sold 96,004 tickets according to my monthly Kentucky Open Records Act request. This is up 4,520 tickets compared to June of last year, but much lower than 2024 numbers. Although this is better than last year's precipitous drop, it is still not good news for the Ark.
Because the Ark will have been open ten years, it means the Ark's $1.825 million/year sales tax incentive rebate will expire either in July, 2027 or at the end of the fiscal year. How will they adapt to losing this annual chunk of change from the Commonwealth of Kentucky's teat? Will they get a Christian Nationalist legislator or perhaps a future Republican Governor to help them find more money from Kentucky's treasury? (Perhaps a tax incentive package for their long-planned Tower of Babel reconstruction and ride?)
I predict, at a minimum, the Ark will go from for-profit to non-profit so they won't have to pay Williamstown the safety-fee money. Thus, Williamstown and Grant County will be on the hook for police, fire, and infrastructure costs for a non-profit ministry that once promised them streets of gold.
With gasoline and other expenses soaring, it will be interesting to see how the Ark amusement park fares in remaining summer months. Despite low ticket sales, the Ark and Answers in Genesis seems awash in cash. The Ark opened a new "Welcome Center" for visitors in March, presumably with more opportunities for visitors to spend money. It is amusing to see how outrageously expensive admission has become (adult 1 day tickets are approximately $55) and how the operators find new ways to all but vacuum money out of visitor's pockets with extras such as the virtual reality rides ($16.50), zip lines ($59 to $144), tree sloth experience ($60), macropod (kangaroo and wallaby) experience ($40), bird of prey experience ($50), camel encounter ($5), mining sluice (mineral and fossil bags) ($10 to $55), plus guided Ark tours ($25), and parking ($15).
In any case, these numbers indicate that the Ark will never come near the 1.2 to 2.2 million projected by Answers in Genesis when they were begging and bullying for financial perks from various governmental entities.
P.S.
by William Trollinger
I am sure it goes without saying that Ken Ham never acknowledges how Ark attendance has fallen far short of the projections made when, to quote Dan Phelps, “bullying the state, Grant County, and the City of Williamstown out of perks to build the Ark.” According to those projections, Ark attendance in Year 8 of its existence would have been at just about 2.5 million; at 682,101 visitors, the Ark reached but 27% of its projected attendance.
This failure to come close to their own attendance predictions may explain why Ken Ham has taken to making the case that The Ark Encounter, which teaches the gospel clearly through various exhibits, attracts many non-Christian visitors – they make up about 30% of its total visitors – and our extensive guest surveys reflect that an estimated 70,000+ people a year trust Christ for salvation as a result of their visit. I would call that a fantastic investment in people’s eternity.
Oh my. Here are just a few observations about Ham’s claim:
- Sue Trollinger and I have visited the Ark numerous times, and the notion that 30% of Ark visitors (in year 8,204,630 individuals) are “non-Christian” seems, well, ludicrous. Listening to our fellow visitors, and talking with others who have visited the Ark, it has been obvious that the vast majority of folks in attendance are evangelicals and fundamentalists. Of course, these numbers come from Ham and company, and besides everything else, they are the ones deciding which folks qualify as “non-Christian.” (Fundamentalists who have “backslidden,” perhaps?)
- Accepting their numbers as legitimate, this would mean that in Year 8 61,389 individuals decided to “trust Christ for salvation as a result of their visit.” Again, this seems, well, ludicrous. Again, these numbers come from Ham and company. But perhaps the Ark’s extreme emphasis on Hell – represented here by the global Flood which (according to Ark placards) drowned up to 20 billion (billion, not million) individuals – so frightened 61,839 individuals in Year 8 that they claimed a religious experience. Maybe it is like the camps I attended as an adolescent, when the sermons on hell inevitably resulted in evangelical teenagers (often the same teenagers, year after year after year) streaming forward to “rededicate” their lives to Christ.
- The overwhelming emphasis on Hell makes obvious what sort of “gospel” the Ark is teaching so “clearly.” A gospel of eternal torture for the vast majority of human beings. Sermon on the Mount? Matthew 25? Not so much.
Kingdom or Nation: Why the Divide between Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism Is Primarily Theological, Not Political
by Sudabée Lotfian-Mena
Sudabée Lotfian-Mena will begin her fourth year as a doctoral Theology student at the University of Dayton in Fall 2026, where she is working on theology arising in the wake of economic realities and the project of colonization in the Age of Discovery. She is also ABD at the University of Valladolid in philosophy of aesthetics. She has lately co-authored a book on philosophy of religion, to be published later this year, as well as recently co-authored a chapter on Latin American Marian devotions. She is dedicated to teaching theology, her latest courses being Faith and Justice in the context of Catholic Social Teaching and East Asian Religions.
“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” — Matthew 7: 20 (KJV)
Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism are usually situated on opposite ends of the political spectrum, one on the Left, the other on the Right. This shorthand obscures more than it reveals. Though it is true that both currents are political, and that both trade in public expressions of Christianity, “Left vs. Right” categorization/labelling ignores the more fitting scenario of “Kingdom vs. Nation.”
Liberation Theology is theocentric, oriented toward God, born from the reading and interpretation of Scripture by the poor and their pastors. Christian Nationalism, however sincerely felt by many of its adherents, is better described as an anthropocentric ideology that borrows Christian symbolism to sacralize a nation-state. Liberation looks up toward God, seeking the source of the love and justice necessary to heal and mend society; Christian Nationalism, following Feuerbach, projects an idealized idea of nation upward and calls this projection God.
Authentic Liberation Theology
Anglophone accounts of Liberation Theology often begin the story with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s 1971 treatise, A Theology of Liberation. Perhaps in a bid for academic legitimization, these accounts often provide Gutiérrez with European predecessors, most often Jürgen Moltmann and Johann Baptist Metz. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, writes that Latin American theologians “have acknowledged their indebtedness to the European development of political theology,” even as he concedes that “the Latin American situation cannot be characterized by secularization and privatization but rather by dependency and exploitation.”
But Liberation resists this global-North treatment because it is, by its very Latin American nature, different. It is, therefore, better understood as the cry of a people first colonized and then neocolonialized into oppression (by that same global-North). It is what Leonardo and Clodovis Boff call “a cultural and ecclesial phenomenon by no means restricted to a few professional theologians.” Gutiérrez, for his part, describes his landmark text as “an attempt at reflection, based on the Gospel and the experiences of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America.”
Accordingly, the Boff brothers introduce Liberation Theology with a scene very descriptive of one of the theological loci of Liberation:
A woman of forty, but who looked as old as seventy, went up to the priest after Mass and said sorrowfully: “Father, I went to communion without going to confession first.” “How come, my daughter?” asked the priest. “Father,” she replied, “I arrived rather late, after you had begun the offertory. For three days I have had only water and nothing to eat; I’m dying of hunger. When I saw you handing out the hosts, those little pieces of white bread, I went to communion just out of hunger for that little bit of bread.” The priest’s eyes filled with tears. He recalled the words of Jesus: “For My flesh [bread] is real food indeed . . . whoever feeds on me will draw life from me” (Jn 6: 55, 57).
The plight of this woman is a “starting point” for Liberation Theology. She does not replace God; instead her hunger forces the theologian to ask “more basic questions about the nature of actual oppression and its causes.”
Is Liberation Theology Communism?
Almost inevitably, the accusatory question of Marxism dressed up as Catholicism is leveled at Liberation Theology. And so, it becomes necessary to reassure those less familiar with Liberation Theology that it is neither synonymous with Communism nor a product of Marxism. Is it socialist? One could describe it as such, but on those terms the first Christian community was socialist too: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common... Neither was there any among them that lacked” (Acts 4: 32, 34, KJV).
Gutiérrez is candid about why socialism was acceptable for the Latin America of the 1960s and 1970s: the “untenable circumstances of poverty, alienation and exploitation” in which most people lived, and the fact that socialism was widely seen as “the most fruitful and far-reaching approach” available after centuries of mercantilist extraction and dehumanizing capitalism. But Liberation Theologians have always been explicit that they treat “Marxism purely as an instrument.” The Boffs borrow terms like “dialectical” and “historico-structural” from Marx, yet Marxism itself is transformed in relation to the poor. As they put it, “It does not venerate it as it venerates the gospel.” Because Liberation remains oriented toward God, there is no mechanism within it for idolatry. Neither Marxism nor even the poor themselves can be made into gods.
The Base Ecclesial Communities and the CIA
That theocentric orientation has not reassured the powers that be. In a declassified 1986 study titled, “Liberation Theology: Religion, Reform and Revolution,” the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Liberation Theology “can pose a serious threat to US interests when its critique of capitalism and US development policy finds a receptive audience.” The “base ecclesial communities” (comunidades eclesiales de base) are singled out as the place where that audience is found.
However, base ecclesial communities are not revolutionary cells. They are parishioners who gather outside of Mass to read Scripture together, finding both similarity in it with the oppression they suffer, and the permission to long for liberation in their own lives. In that light the Exodus is a story about being led out from under the bootheels of the pharaohs of the present age. And parishioners can find sense in Amos thundering: ”Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream (Amos 5: 24, KJV). For Marcello de C. Azevedo these communities are “a new way of experiencing the Church, of being Church and of acting as a Church.” Pilar María Aquino adds that women, “doubly oppressed and marginalized,” become “active subjects” of the Church for the first time in these spaces.
The CIA report misreads these communities, defining them as “parallel institutions to the government” set up “to create local civic responsibility and to provide services.” That an intelligence agency could look at Acts 4 and see some sort of parallel bureaucracy is telling. What Langley cannot recognize, the base community sees clearly: government cannot and will not bring salvation, and dependency on the state, dressed up as “development” or “progress,” is a counterfeit of the dependency we owe to God alone. In a moment of cynicism, the same report allows that Liberation might “promote US interests by assisting popular efforts to bring democratic rule to authoritarian states”—a line one must be forgiven for reading as the enduring temptation of empire to subvert communities like these into instruments of Washington’s preferred regimes. However, liberation has proven mostly resistant to this treatment. What keeps it focused on the poor is what also keeps Marxists from co-opting it and capitalists from purchasing it: “Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ” (Mt 23: 10, KJV).
Inauthentic Christian Nationalism
The starting point for Christian Nationalism is very different. Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry define it as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.” What they mean by “Christian” does not primarily involve faith or religious expression. As they note, “Christian nationalists can be quite secular.” The term instead refers to beliefs about “historical identity, cultural preeminence, and political influence.” Paul A. Djupe and his co-authors add that the nation is imagined as “of, by and for Christians,” and Michael W. Austin notes that the culture in question is specifically Anglo-Protestant, its adherents fusing their American and Christian identities and pursuing political power to exert control over the country.
I would qualify the latter, observing that Catholicism in the United States has been very influenced by Protestantism. This might explain the allure Christian Nationalism has for many Catholics as well. Nevertheless, this is why Chrisitan Nationalism is better described as an ideology rather than a theology. Its focus is the nation. God, when He appears, appears as a warrant, a genie in a bottle.
Kingdom versus Nation, Biblically
The biblical term “nation” deserves a closer look. In Genesis 12: 2 Israel is promised to Abraham as a great nation, and “the nations” in later texts denote other peoples, most of them idolatrous (Dt 7: 1–6; Ps 2: 1–12). The New Testament interprets these texts in the light of Christ. Jesus tells the chief priests that “the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Mt 21: 43, KJV); at the end of Matthew He commands us to make disciples of “all nations”—peoples, not modern geopolitical states. Revelation completes the redemption of the term: “for Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Rev 5: 9, KJV).
If Christian Nationalism were truly Christian, it would not treat the nation as an objectifiable state. Biblically, the nation is a people, and we come under judgment when we fail to build the Kingdom. Catholic Social Teaching, from Lumen Gentium onward, insists that Christian kingship is service: serving Christ in their fellow men they might by humility and patience lead their brethren to that King for whom to serve is to reign (36).
The deep theological problem with Christian Nationalism is that it inverts this order. It is itself a manifestation of chaos: it decentralizes God and His Word, dispenses with the doctrine of His Son, and quietly ignores the gifts of His Spirit. Ignacio Ellacuría’s distinction applies precisely: structures of sin objectify the power of sin and turn it against the life of men, while structures of grace objectify grace and convey life. Christian Nationalism, however piously advertised, functions as a structure of sin in its service of empire. Liberation Theology, however imperfectly, labors against empire to build structures of grace.
The Cintas Largas and the Fruit of the Nation
If this sounds abstract, an episode from 1963 might help to make it concrete. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett open Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon with a story about a man named Ataide Pereira confessing to Fr. Edgar Smith that he had taken part in a genocide. The victims were the Cintas Largas, a small indigenous tribe that lived along the Aripuana River. Because Brazil’s Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI) legally protected them, foreign companies who wanted their land resorted to subterfuge. Approximately four hundred Cintas Largas were attacked by Pereira and others under the command of a man known as “Champion Indian Killer,” who was also the general manager of a local rubber company. The aggressors used both bullets and machetes to kill the unarmed tribe members until only a little boy and a little girl were left. Pereira described their deaths to the priest in lamentable detail.
The subsequent investigation implicated 134 SPI officials, none of whom ever stood trial, and revealed that the agency had been corrupted by “starvation of government resources and ‘the disastrous impact of missionary activity.’” The mission in question was the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), known in the United States as Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL denied the genocide; a year later The Sunday Times of London reported that mining was under way on Cintas Largas land, with American and European companies flying planeloads of rare metals out. Colby and Dennett describe the arrangement bluntly: “The missionaries came in on the cultural, social and political side of the conquest,” as part of “a counterinsurgency network shaped by Nelson Rockefeller’s development goals,” teaching the Indigenous through Bible translation that they must obey the government because “all authority comes from God.”
In light of what happened to the Cintas Largas and countless other tribes, a letter from Baptist minister Frederick Gates to John D. Rockefeller Sr. celebrating the “peaceful conquest of the world” that Christian missions would enable can only be described as lamentable. But it better serves as an invitation to contemplation. Marveling at the word “peaceful,” one recalls that Saint Paul tells us the law is written on the hearts even of those who do not know God, their conscience also bearing witness (Rm 2:15).
What erases that law? Part of the answer is the idol of nation. But nations are made of people—some of them numbed by the red-and-blue squabble that passes for spiritual discernment, others so divorced from the human condition that they simply personify the will to power. The genocide of the Cintas Largas and countless other Amazonian peoples is the fruit Christian Nationalism yields when the empire it sacralizes turns outward.
Liberation Theology answers with granular fruit: base communities, Scripture read from the margins, women becoming subjects in their own churches, structures of grace built one parish at a time. It is an unsatisfactory solution for most because it does not bring the swift justice and accountability of the Hollywood happy ending. Instead, it is the justice of the Bible, slow, steady, individual but collective; a justice that involves trust in God and solidarity with one’s neighbor. It is an ancient prescription for an ancient ill.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them
Again, the core difference between Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism is not Left versus Right, but theological. Liberation is oriented toward God and intent on building His Kingdom, manifesting as base ecclesial communities that peacefully dismantle structures of sin. Christian Nationalism is anthropocentric and oriented toward the nation, mistaking its agenda for the Will of God. However dominant its Anglo-Protestant inheritance, that is only the sheep’s clothing. Inwardly, as Matthew 7: 15 warns, it remains a ravening wolf.
The disciple Liberation forms reads Scripture from the margins and sees the crucified Christ in oppressed brothers and sisters. The Church that emerges is a true “church of the poor,” a true nation in the biblical sense, drawn from every tongue and people by the Blood of Christ. The disciple Christian Nationalism forms reads Scripture through mythopoetic jingoism that dispenses with the Sermon on the Mount in favor of the most violent Old Testament episodes, as though the New Covenant had not been sealed in the Blood of Christ. Its churches serve the nation, and the regalia of empire furtively displace the Cross.
Setting the CIA report beside Colby and Dennett’s account of the Cintas Largas, the conventional worry about Liberation being Marxist becomes hard to sustain. It is not Liberation Theology that has proved a threat to human life in the Americas; it is the Christian Nationalist project of empire that has done so. Liberation evangelizes from within the communities that survived 1492 and the ravages it brought in its wake; Christian Nationalism arrives from without, in disguise, intent on the same sort of “peaceful conquest.” Only one of these currents remain standing. Liberation has the force of God behind it as the blessed poor come together to build His Kingdom. Nationalism, Christian or otherwise, like every empire it has ever animated, will fall by the Will of God—whether now or in a thousand years.
The Dominoes Fell, and Next Thing You Know, I Had Exited the Southern Baptist Convention
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 righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
In Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America, Stanley Hauerwas suggests that the Bible should be taken from North American Christians. Not a point that Southern Baptists would take well.
Neither would they appreciate what the Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard had to say about the Bible in his Journal (p. 150):
Fundamentally a reformation which did away with the Bible would now be just as valid as Luther’s doing away with the Pope. All that about the Bible has developed a religion of learning and law, a mere distraction. A little of that knowledge has percolated down to the simplest classes so that no one any longer reads the Bible humanly. As a result it does immeasurable harm where life is concerned. Its existence is a fortification of excuses and escapes; for there is always something one has to look into first of all to have the doctrine in perfect form before one can begin to live – that is to say, one never begins. . . . Christendom has long been in need of a hero who, in fear and trembling, had the courage to forbid people to read the Bible. That is something quite as necessary as preaching against Christianity.
I was born in the deepest recesses of what is now known as the “Right Wing.” There’s no doubting how deep in my mind Southern Baptist preachers planted the notion of being afraid. My mother awakened me one night. I was standing up in my bed, running in place. When I gained consciousness, I pleaded, “Mama, don’t let the devil get me.”
My journey away from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) started early. I didn’t so much leave as almost unconsciously move further and further away. My moving away from the SBC could be compared to a long row of dominoes. I nudged one of the dominoes and it fell onto the next one. Frightened, I stopped the line of dominoes from falling and put the first two back in place.
But from the moment I questioned why the Bible contains more than one creation story, more dominoes started crashing, and I didn’t stop them. Cain’s wife, the death of Abel, the flood, the sons of God and the daughters of men, the Tower of Babel, the young age of the earth and on and on the dominoes tumbled until they were a runaway train. At age 8, I told my mama, “The Sunday school story of the flood gives me nightmares. How could God be so cruel?” I couldn’t imagine our family ever being one of the eight saved by the Ark.
That is to say, Genesis, on a literal level, was of no comfort. Enough terrible things happen in life without adding God to the list of predators. The death of Abel still affects me personally.
Biblical literalists think in abstract terms about God’s mysterious ways. On the other hand, I see every broken, torn and mangled human body in history and ask, “Why?.” I need a gentler God than the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards and his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Their concern for a “pure, literal” Bible exceeds their empathy for fellow humans. They pray over sins too small for a man like Adam or me to notice.
The first time I heard someone say of the death of a three-year old to the ravages of spinal meningitis, “God needed another angel,” at least a dozen more dominoes hit the ground.
When I listened to our preachers teach our relationship with God was transactional, I felt I was breathing the toxic air of bad religion. And I knew I had to get away from bad religion. God doesn’t need more angels. God doesn’t need anything. I could hear the click-clack of all the falling dominoes and not only did I let them all fall, I exulted in it.
I knew I was home when I realized Genesis tells us we were made by God’s love and freedom alone and the age of the earth is of no consequence. I put my trust in God’s almightiness, not the exegetical expertise of Al Mohler, David Barton, Ken Ham or other dull lights of Christian fundamentalism.
As I have reviewed the twisted, tortured Southern Baptist reading of Scripture about the role of women, I realized they are guilty of selective literalism. It’s not the Bible, but the preacher-leaders who determine what is literal truth. It was a sneaky but effective move for the preachers to claim authority over the Bible while continuing to hide behind the “authority” of the Bible. All my dominoes fell here with a loud crash like God speaking from Sinai.
In any event, I am glad to still be a pilgrim progressing. My ongoing journey led me in a wilderness period away from the left edge – it seemed an abyss – back in the direction of an ambiguous center. I’m not sure there is a center, but I have learned how zealous the disciples on each side can be. I am also not persuaded the “Left-Right” metaphor is an honest take on our situation.
What I’ve noticed is how easy it is to move more and more to the left or the right. We are already a fractured, divided nation filled with people unwilling to respect different perspectives. I am puzzled when Facebook friends accuse me of “not knowing the Bible,” of “twisting the Scripture,” and of “biblical ignorance.” Having spent 70 years reading, studying, pondering, researching and preaching the Bible, I can’t imagine how people reach these conclusions. I have decided not to take them literally but hyperbolically. They are actually saying, “Yuck” to my views. They are saying I’m wrong and they don’t like my views.
As regards the Southern Baptists, they have set sail for an excursion deeper into the dark seas of the right wing. I haven’t seen any SBC “ships on the horizon” moving to the center. The SBC seems guided by ancient maps plotting the world as flat. Written on those maps were words scrawled across the expanse of the oceans, “Beyond this point, monsters.”
I have no explanation for Albert Mohler embracing Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who is not a Southern Baptist and believes women should not have the right to vote. Earlier, the SBC welcomed all sorts of independent network Pentecostals such as the Seven Mountain Dominionists. These groups don’t possess a single page of historic Southern Baptist theology, but the SBC sailed gladly into these camps.
Mohler seems to have contracted an old Jerry Falwell, Sr., flaw. Falwell famously said, “If you see someone further to the right than me, let me know, and I will move over.” My movement to the left center seems simple compared to the SBC ships falling off the edge of the right rim of a “flat earth.”
Ironically, the SBC may not have noticed the absence of their fellow right-wing cohorts on the issue of women in ministry. Pentecostal groups of all kinds have women prophets, apostles, and preachers. The SBC has moved more to the right than Paula White. There are no more dominoes.
I don’t inhabit a universe with edges. Our planet is not flat and one-dimensional. It is sort of round. I possess the spirit of the explorers who first dreamed of sailing around the world. There is much to yet to learn. In that regard, the epistemological certainty of the SBC feels like a millstone around the neck.
Ecclesiastically homeless – I am a catholic baptist communing in the Episcopal Church – I look forward to the new lessons of each new day. Literalism is boring except when it is scary, as in the teachings of Jesus. That’s the journey I’m on now – attempting to take Jesus’ words as words he intends us to actually obey.
Maybe the literalist SBC will take a literal view of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ sermon at the synagogue at Nazareth. But I am not hopeful because the SBC suffers from selective literalism. They have a gift for turning a literal statement into a metaphor. “Jesus didn’t really mean that” is a standard SBC statement.
What a fascinating world we inhabit.
Somewhere in my subconscious mind, the dominoes keep falling, but I barely notice these days. God has given us a fully equipped, flourishing universe of diversity, inclusion and grace. I’m at peace.
The Freedom Trucks are the Creation Museum of American History
by Karen Elizabeth Park
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared at Ex Voto, Karen's Substack. We are grateful for her permission to re-post the article here.
Karen Elizabeth Park is a writer and historian who examines religion as a lived and public force. She writes about sacred space, authority, gender, and belief in American life. For any inquiries please contact karenparkwriting@gmail.com.
At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, the underlying question is: Do you trust God’s Word in the Bible or the flawed scientific theories of fallen humanity?
At Freedom250 the underlying question is strikingly similar: Do you trust patriotic institutions like PragerU, Hillsdale College, and Freedom250—or the historians, teachers, and scholars who have spent decades complicating America's founding story?
For nearly twenty years, I taught religious studies, American religious history, and historical theology to college students. On the first day of class, I often told them that my goal was not for them to finish the semester with a set of answers. My goal was for them to leave my classroom able to ask more questions and better ones about history, the church, and even the nature of God, than they could have asked before taking the course. Good books, good art, good science, good theology, and good history ought to raise questions—not insist on settled answers.
Earlier this month, I toured one of the PragerU Freedom Trucks. It was parked outside of a Catholic Freedom 250 rally in LaCrosse, WI that I wrote about for both Religion News Service and National Catholic Reporter. The trucks are billed as “mobile museums” and include lots of screens where, for example, an AI George Washington talks about how this country was founded on Christian principles. PragerU’s website describes its trucks this way:
History Brought to Life
The Freedom Trucks celebrate America’s 250th birthday by bringing key Founding events and figures to life with state-of-the-art storytelling, artifacts from the American Revolution, and awe-inspiring audiovisual experiences.
The whole family can engage and learn through:
- First-of-their-kind AI portraits bringing the Founders to life
- Interactive touchscreen activities and games
- Artifacts from Glenn Beck’s American Journey Experience
The New York Times recently did its own in-depth examination of the Freedom Truck exhibit, focusing carefully on the “Wall of Heroes” section in order to notice who is included (lots of white male Christians and baby boomer entertainers) and who is left out (anyone whose achievements might challenge the conservative political imagination). Throughout the Freedom Truck exhibit and the history section of the Freedom 250 website, visitors, both in-person and virtual, are presented with a providential narrative consisting of “answers” about this country without inviting a single question that might encourage authentic historical curiosity.
After touring the Freedom Truck, and exploring the AI online “Founders Museum”, I realized that they were familiar and that I had seen this type of “museum” before—a place which used the trappings of high tech exhibits and the imprimatur of a small cadre of “experts” in the service of the reinforcing pre-determined conclusions, not forming new questions. What the Freedom250 history exhibits reminded me of are the Kentucky Creation Museum and its sister site the Ark Encounter—expensive pseudo-museums designed to reinforce the “truths” held by those who designed and created them.
I have visited these religious attractions multiple times over the years as part of my research into lived American religion. Like PragerU and Hillsdale College, they are less interested in investigating questions than in affirming answers that are already known. At the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter the subject is evolution; at Freedom250 it is the American founding.
James’ Bielo’s 2018 book Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park describes the goals of the creative team who designed this extraordinarily ambitious destination hoping to “create an immersive experience so successfully that visitors say to themselves: ‘Wow! Maybe that was possible. Maybe that did happen.’”1 Bielo describes the Ark Encounter design teams imagining the various audiences who would visit Ark Encounter, then voic(ing) the ideological stances they imagined these audiences would take when experiencing particular exhibits.”2 In a similar way, the PragerU Freedom Trucks have created an immersive experience shaped for imagined audiences of Americans who are there to hear a particular providential version of America’s founding. George Washington’s actual words are readily available in countless archives—but in the Freedom Truck, his AI avatar and script are wholly imagined.
The Creation Museum’s slogan is “Prepare to Believe,” and while the Ark Encounter is more of an imaginative “Disney-esque" experience (although one where the literal truth of Noah’s Flood is the organizing principle), the Creation Museum, opened in 2007, takes the form of a traditional natural history museum, while simultaneously inverting the purpose of such spaces. There is only one goal at the Creation Museum, to believe the creation story of Genesis as a literal description—and as the slogan makes clear, all the exhibits prepare visitors to believe this.
At the Creation Museum dioramas and displays about the natural world, from insects to dinosaurs to the formation of the Grand Canyon, are presented as superficially interactive museum exhibits. Questions are often posed, but never as open-ended prompts for discovery. For example, here is the question. “Did humans live with dinosaurs?” and the answer provided is: “Yes.” Why? Because “God made Adam and Eve on the same day as land animals (Day 6.) so that means dinosaurs and people lived at the same time.”
It looks like a museum, but the answers to every prompt have already been answered by a literal reading of Genesis.3
Creation museum question and answer.
In an exhibit about insects, visitors to the Creation Museum are exhorted to “Think Critically!” in this case about how it could be possible that male crickets and female crickets evolved to both make musical sounds and respond to them as part of their mating communication. But here, “thinking critically” turns out to mean its opposite—rejecting the possibility of these traits evolving or trying to understand how, and turning instead to the book of Leviticus 11:22 where God “gave the Hebrews grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids as food.”
The pseudo-history presented at the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, like that of the Freedom Trucks, is interactive entertainment with an agenda. In one case the story is that God created the world in six days, then flooded it, killing everyone except one family and two of every kind of animal. In the other case, the story is that God specially chose the United States as the greatest nation on earth and then we proceeded to live up to it—always. In both cases, challenges to these narratives are unwelcome and the work of either the ungodly who are not true Christians or “woke leftists” who are not true Patriots.
In the end, the Freedom Trucks and Freedom250 online Founders museum are no more “historical” than the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. They all present a predetermined understanding of truth under the guise of authentic learning.
Like the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, the Freedom Trucks are designed to attract families. Many of the visitors I encountered in La Crosse were parents and children experiencing the exhibit together. Outside the truck, I spoke with one such family—a father, mother, and teenage daughter. I asked them each what they thought of the exhibit and then asked the girl if she had learned anything new inside that she hadn’t learned in school. She told me that she hadn’t learned any “real” American history in her public school, but since she and her family watched PragerU history documentaries regularly, she had already learned these truths there.
Yes, their family “knew the answers already” her mother told me, but it was “good to see them being reinforced.”
Children "learning" at the Creation Museum (left) and PragerU Freedom Truck (right)
Footnotes
1 James S. Bielo, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 26.
2 Bielo, Ark Encounter, 81
3 For a compelling scholarly treatment of the Creation Museum as a form of religious and political storytelling, see Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
