Forget the “Sweet By and By”: For MAGA Evangelicals, Apocalypse is Now
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is the focus of this interview. And there are more books to come!
As a child in a North Louisiana Baptist Church, I wondered why we were grinning while singing, “Are You Ready for the Judgment Day?”
But now I realize we were grinning because we were sure we were the sheep, the chosen people of God.
Nothing has previously thrilled MAGA evangelical hearts like preachers describing the end of the world. Evangelical dreams of apocalypse have always been a dark secret of wanting revenge on the wicked even though they couch their message as one of love and salvation. Rev. Robert Jeffress has written several books on what he thinks will happen. All the scenes he depicts contain chaos, destruction, annihilation, and the wrath of God loosed upon the wickedness of humanity.
But now, these resentful and angry MAGA evangelicals — tired of waiting on Jesus to return, frustrated that Jesus isn’t doing anything to help them – have decided to release the wrath of God now. Jesus is an afterthought. His name is invoked, but the power behind this movement is Trump. “It’s judgment day in America. Bring it on!”
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s fake offer of “Make America Great Again.” This is a salvation by demolition and destruction. As Lance Wallnau once said of Trump, “He’s the chaos candidate.” And now he is unleashing the terrible swift sword of God’s eternal wrath on liberals.
The rhetoric of dismantlement and destruction now lays waste the foundation of our government – the civil service. As Trump rules by executive order, he seeks to destroy all in his sight. His imperial militancy knows no bounds.
Rhetorical scholar Robert L. Ivie says, “Trump personifies chaos. Demolition is his rhetorical hammer. Cataclysm is the political entailment of demolition.” MAGA evangelicals are on board with the unfolding scenes of destruction.
MAGA has manufactured a national narrative of a chosen people in a Christian nation with an apocalyptic mission, an innocent righteous people opposed by the forces of evil. Trump has always offered a message of salvation, but it is clothed in lies. Ivie labels it “a true revelation of crisis but a false diagnosis of what is wrong and how best to respond.” And “Trump’s deception hinges on a facile promise of national salvation. It is a puerile discourse of redemption by demolition and deal making.”
For example, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purge of tens of thousands of federal workers has halted efforts to collect data on everything from cancer rates in firefighters to mother-to-baby transmission of HIV and syphilis to outbreaks of drug-resistant gonorrhea to cases of carbon monoxide poisoning. If a nation doesn’t have safeguards in place for the appearance of epidemics and plagues, the door swings open for a real apocalypse.
The evangelicals have long warned of the four horsemen of the apocalypse as pestilence, war, famine, and death. Now, the four horsemen of apocalypse are a ream of executive orders, a group of compliant billionaires, and a compromised Congress. Instead of bombs dropping from the sky, we have a chaotic tariff policy, the destruction of entire departments of the federal government, and revenge on Trump’s personal enemies.
The point is revenge.
Apocalypse now makes MAGA evangelicals giddy with excitement. Dropping all pretense of salvation, they now unashamedly promote Trump’s horrible campaign of revenge. This is the evangelical war to end all wars. MAGA has taken on the task of forcing the nation into line. Eric Metaxas, after the election of Trump, exclaimed, “Let the AWESOMENESS begin! God bless America!” Our ambassador to Israel, former Gov. Mike Huckabee says President-elect Trump might as well be called “President Lazarus” after his sweeping victory.
Owen Strachan couldn’t contain his glee: “We have been granted a reprieve, a temporary stalling of evil as driven by the modern political left. God has shown up. God has answered our prayers. Let us use this truth to keep praying, and keep hoping, and keep loving …. It’s morning in America.”
Evangelicals are not talking about the devastation to nations cut off from needed food and medicine by the severe cutbacks at USAID. They ignore the tragedies of government workers fired without cause. They don’t care about Trump trampling on the Constitution and eroding the First Amendment. Legal immigrants kidnapped by ICE agents in plainclothes and disappeared are cheered. Evangelicals are a happy bunch. This is like a Trump rally where Trump and his followers enjoy one another’s cruelty; but now it’s better because real people are being punished.
MAGA evangelicals would be dancing if they danced. Given the absolute absurdities of MAGA evangelical theology in its capitulation to Trumpism, I’m wondering, “How many evangelicals can dance on the head of a pin?”
The gleeful, giddy evangelicals are heedless of the innocent casualties of the culture wars they started. War always destroys more than soldiers in combat. Civilians died from genocides, massacres, bombings, disease, and starvation. According to statistics from The National WWII Museum, 45 million civilians were killed in WWII.
Trump’s apocalypse has disrupted thousands of innocent bystanders. Civil service workers have been fired without explanations. Elon Musk, with no apparent plan, has rampaged through the government in a helter skelter way to close departments, reduce departmental efficiency, and fire workers. The image of Musk with a chain saw is suggestive of his approach. When any reformation of the federal government should require precise surgical tools, Musk and his crew are loose with chainsaws. This apocalypse has become a “chainsaw massacre.”
To MAGA evangelical eyes, the demolition is long overdue. They righteously believe this is the true judgment of God. President Trump has the full backing of an evangelical crowd convinced beyond any semblance of doubt that he is doing what must be done.
We are not witnessing a reformation of our government; we are witnessing a feckless mob of people who have gathered to witness the mayhem.
MAGA have presumed the right to be at God’s right hand as judges of the nation. They parade and preach as if they have just returned from the top of Mount Sinai with stone tablets of instruction from God entitled, “The Destruction of the Deep State.”
Their fondest dreams are coming true before their eyes. Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, the apocalyptic blueprint, says he is delighted with Trump’s policies. “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans said.
Even as Project 2025 and Trump’s executive orders look like exact copies, Dans insists any correlation is merely the result of great minds swimming in the same sea. Still, Dans claims, “Trump is seizing every minute of every hour. I’m not sure that you’d be able to implement Project 2025 without Donald Trump’s ability to bring people together and Elon Musk’s ability to focus the direction of the work.”
As for MAGA evangelicals, they are acting as if the Rapture has occurred in the second coming of Trump. They are busy selecting targets for the president. Wallnau wants Trump to really go after the universities because he believes they are “the hotbed of resistance. Time to make them a priority of reformation. For real!” As Trump attacks history and science, he embraces the two greatest enemies of the evangelical tribe.
MAGA evangelicals like Jeffress, Wallnau, and David Barton are doing flips over Trump’s executive order targeting history and the Smithsonian. Now, at last they see an opening for their fake, revisionist history claiming America was created according to God’s will and as a Christian nation.
Ken Ham must be deliriously happy as he watches Trump destroy the department of Education and attack science on multiple fronts. What more could a man who believes the earth is only 6,000 years old want more than the undoing of real science?
A political power determined to demolish and destroy can’t be allowed to dominate American politics. The MAGA evangelicals are no longer harmless Bible-thumpers; they are giving President Trump all the support he needs to create Apocalypse Now. And as Trump would put it, “It’s happening. It’s happening. It’s happening.”
And MAGA is not prepared for the horrific outcomes.
A(nother) Frontal Attack on Democracy: The Trump Administration Eviscerates the National Endowment for the Humanities
by William Trollinger
On April 03 the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) sent an email – from a nongovernmental email address (which meant that many of these emails ended up in SPAM folders – this is efficiency?) – informing hundreds of recipients that their National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants had been terminated. These grantees include museums, teachers, and state humanities councils. As the American Historical Association (AHA) has rightly pointed out, “this frontal attack on the nation’s public culture is unpatriotic, anti-American, and unjustified” and “imperil[s] both the education of the American public and the preservation of our history.” These grant terminations are in keeping with other Trump executive orders that “prioritize narrow political ideology over historical research, historical accuracy, and the actual historical experiences of Americans.”
This attack was then amplified by an email sent the evening of April 03 – again from a nongovernmental email address – informing 75-80% of NEH staff that they were being placed on “administrative leave.”
One of the casualties of this anti-American assault is the Ohio Humanities Council (OHC). The OHC has funded a variety of projects that “tell stories that are essential to our cultural infrastructure,” including the remarkable documentary film, “The Lincoln School Story,” which tells the story of African American mothers in Hillsboro, Ohio and their heroic effort to desegregate the local school. More than this, it is OHC policy to “serve everyday Ohioans statewide, from school children to veterans, living everywhere from one-stoplight communities to big cities.”
The OHC is an invaluable resource for the state. And besides everything else it does, it maintains a Speakers Bureau which includes 27 scholars in the humanities. Libraries, museums, and the like apply for (modest) OHC support to bring in one of these scholars to speak at an event that is free and open to the public.
Sue and I are both Ohio Humanities speakers. Sue gives presentations on “Moving Off the Farm and Trying to Stay Amish” and “Rebels in Corsets: The Embodied Rhetoric of the Women’s Suffrage Movement”; I speak on “Statues, Flags, and the Ongoing Battle over the Meaning of the Civil War” as well as “Terrorizing Immigrants and Catholics: The Ohio Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.” And in keeping with OHC’s stated goal to serve Ohioans “living everywhere from one-stoplight communities to big cities,” in the past decade we have given talks in the following locations (sometimes we have each spoken in the same locale, and sometimes we have given both of our presentations at the same venue):
- Athens
- Barberton
- Bellville
- Celina
- Cincinnati
- Columbus
- Coshocton
- Dayton
- Granville
- Greenville
- Lima
- Loudonville
- Marietta
- Milan
- Niles
- Northmont
- Peninsula
- Sandusky
- Shawnee
- Springboro
- Versailles
- Wapakoneta
- Warren
- Zanesville
- Zoar
We have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see towns we would never have visited otherwise. Even better, we have thoroughly enjoyed the people we have met at these events. In particular, we have been repeatedly struck by how eagerly folks want to learn the history we have to share – which is contrary to the bad rap that the humanities often receive in contemporary American culture (sometimes even in institutions of higher education). More than this, attendees are quite eager to interact, with questions that are often terrific and smart (“how is that there are now Catholics in white Christian nationalist organizations, given that they used to be the enemy?”), and with comments that expand our knowledge (“if a Swartzentruber Amish person shows up at the hospital, you have to give them your immediate attention, as it has to be very serious since they never seek medical treatment.”)
The public humanities work supported by the NEH and state humanities councils really does matter. And the Trump Administration’s attack on the public humanities is, indeed, thoroughly unpatriotic.
A Century After Scopes: Much Has Not Changed, and Much Has Changed
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
Here we are, at the centenary of the Scopes Trial. And last week was very much a Scopes week. On Tuesday afternoon the Society of Biblical Literature devoted a session in its Global Virtual Meeting to “Scopes 100 Years Later,” which was expertly presided over by the University of Chicago’s Shailer Matthews Distinguished Service Professor, Margaret Mitchell. (Given how the first generation of fundamentalists absolutely despised Matthews, Mitchell’s presence was extra-sweet.) Then, on Friday, at Vassar College’s wonderful “Science and the Culture Wars” conference, there was a session devoted to “Science and Religion in Culture and the Courts.” Pepperdine’s Ed Larson spoke on the populism of William Jennings Bryan; Stephen Weldon from the University of Oklahoma discussed how the culture wars have moved from creationism to other issues; Pepperdine’s Christina Littlefield talked about the power of the right-wing media, with particular attention to Charlie Kirk; and Glenn Branch from the National Center for Science Education discussed the recent effort in North Dakota to mandate that Intelligent Design be included in the state’s science standards.
William spoke at the “Scopes 100 Years Later” session (Sue was in class, and could not participate), and we presented together at the session devoted to “Science and Religion in Culture and the Courts.” It was a distinct honor to present at both conferences, and at both conferences we gave a variation of the following talk.
100 years after the Scopes Trial. And there is no question that there is much that remains unchanged, including the conviction of many fundamentalists and evangelicals that: mainstream science is at odds with a faithful reading of the Bible; there should be equal time for biblical creationism alongside mainstream science in public school classrooms; and, this conflict between faith and science involves not only the nature of public education but, in fact, the very soul of America.
So it was in 1925, and so it is in 2025. But much has changed in the past 100 years, and it is these changes – we will focus on three — that we want to highlight here, as we think it is crucial for biblical scholars, scientists, and interested Americans to have a clear-eyed sense of how – when it comes to creationism in the US (and beyond) — 2025 is not 1925.
The first involves the very nature of biblical creationism. At the time of the Scopes Trial most fundamentalists were “old Earth” creationists. They adamantly and passionately rejected mainstream biology, understanding evolution to be both profoundly antibiblical and – in its emphasis on humans as highly developed animals – morally and socially corrosive. But they simultaneously accepted mainstream geology, holding either to the “gap theory” – there was an indeterminate gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, during which time God used six days to order his creation – or the “day age theory,” in which each “day” of Genesis 1:1 represented an indeterminate period of time.
William grew up with old Earth creationism in a very tangible way. His father was a fundamentalist in theology if not in behavior – he made prodigious use of very colorful expletives, and won a great deal of money playing poker — and he passionately opposed evolution. But as a geologist who used aerial photographs to create maps that could predict where oil would be found, he also passionately held to the idea of an “old Earth,” particularly, the day-age theory.
So he was horrified by the 1961 publication of John C. Whitcomb’s and Henry Morris’ The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications. Borrowing heavily (without attribution) from the Seventh-day Adventist geologist, George McCready Price, Whitcomb (a fundamentalist theologian) and Morris (a civil engineering professor) argued that Noah’s Flood was a yearlong global event that produced the geological strata that provided the appearance of an old Earth. More than this, they argued that not just the Earth but the entire universe was created in six twenty-four hour days less than 10,000 years ago.
Replete with footnotes, photographs, and the occasional mathematical equation, The Genesis Flood gave conservative Protestants what seemed to be a serious alternative to mainstream science. More than this, their young Earth creationism fits much better with taking the Bible literally than does old Earth creationism. As a result, young Earth creationism took conservative Protestantism (and beyond) by storm; much to my father’s dismay and anger, within a few decades it supplanted old Earth creationism as the dominant form of biblical creationism. And one very important consequence of this shift — from holding to the idea that the Earth is billions of years old to the idea that the Earth is but a few thousand years old – is that it dramatically widened the gap between biblical creationism and mainstream science. And this is significant..
A second and related change is that the role of the Bible in the arguments for a young Earth creationism seems, at least in some very influential quarters, to have become increasingly unserious, even irrelevant. Why do we say this? As we began research for our book, Righting America at the Creation Museum, we assumed that we would find lots of Bible at the museum. And in one sense, there is indeed some Bible, or better, there are many little snippets of Bible. But as we looked closely at the museum’s ubiquitous placards – and here we had the assistance of a very bright doctoral student – we discovered an inconsistent use of translations, extraordinarily creative editing of biblical passages, a lack of ellipses to indicate where text (sometimes whole verses) had been removed from a passage, and the failure to provide relevant context for the passages that are displayed. To give one example of the latter (and keep in mind that the threat of Hell is very important to Answers in Genesis (AiG)), in the Museum’s “Jesus Rooms” there is a placard with Matthew 25:41: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” That’s it. No mention of the verses before and after, which make clear that those condemned to the everlasting fire are those who did not give the hungry food, the thirsty drink, the naked clothing, and so forth. Proof-texting on steroids.
Of course, it is no accident that these verses are omitted. The emphasis on caring for “the other” as the condition for salvation does not fit with AiG’s ideological agenda. And when one looks at the AiG’s 46 point statement of faith, which all employees must sign, one finds this ideological agenda combined with a proof-texting that is carried even further, on occasion beyond any text at all. Each of the 46 propositions includes references to Bible verses. So here’s proposition #29: “the concepts of social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing (Ezekiel 18:1-20; James 2:8-9). We looked up these passages and found nothing to indicate that social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory are anti-biblical. But as we are not biblical scholars, we turned to Abingdon’s New Interpreters Bible Commentary, where we discovered nothing to corroborate AiG’s assertions.
All this to say that for AiG and its museums, the Bible is often little more than a prop used in behalf of young Earth creationism and its right-wing culture war arguments. Let us be clearer. Young Earth creationism is not simply an argument that biblical creationism is true, nor is it simply an argument that biblical creationist science is the true, factual way we should understand the universe. As we discovered in our research, what matters most at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and the virtual Answers in Genesis is preparing conservative evangelicals to serve as right-wing culture warriors who attack (among others) feminists, the LGBTQ+ community, DEI initiatives, and “woke” thinking, and who argue in behalf of Christian nationalism and patriarchy.
More than this, the young Earth creationist juggernaut that is AiG is very busy attacking what they see as the scientific and academic conspiracy that works to brainwash us into believing that evolution is true, that global warming is real (“the climate cult”), and that COVID vaccines are efficacious.
Of course, to hold such conspiratorial views is made much easier when one resides within a bubble that protects adherents from what many of us would see as facts. In this regard, over the past few decades the right-wing media industry – Fox News and much, much more – has exploded, providing a wonderful landing spot for the most outrageous conspiracy theories.
But there’s also education. In the Scopes Trial the controversy was about what would be taught in the public schools, schools that were, with few exceptions (in some places, Catholic schools) the only game in town. But this is radically changing. Today we have a plethora of Christian schools and homeschools, schools which are often equipped with fundamentalist textbooks from publishers such as Bob Jones University Press, Abeka Books, and Accelerated Christian Education. These schools suffuse their students with a heavy dose of young Earth creationism, white Christian nationalism, and more. And then many of these students head off to “Creation Colleges” – you can see a list of them on the Answers in Genesis website – where they are inculcated with a very similar messages.
Folks like AiG’s Ken Ham have been quite aggressive about promoting this alternative educational system, And now there are states that are funding or seeking to fund private schools. So the fight now is not just about getting creationism, the Bible, and white Christian nationalism into the public schools. It is also about funding private schools, including fundamentalist schools. It is about expanding the right-wing subculture. It is about taking dominion over the culture.
This is where we are. 100 years after Scopes.
Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit: An Interview with Rodney Kennedy
by William Trollinger
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is the focus of this interview. And there are more books to come!
1. One of the things I most love about this book is its passion – it permeates very chapter. I am particularly struck by this quote from your introduction: “I am interested in the work of preparation – the long hours that take place every week in the life of the preacher. We have so much to learn from novelists, poets, philosophers, and rhetoricians. Let the dance begin!” (16). Could you say a little bit about where your passion comes from, and could you say something about why some preachers may not be doing “the hard work” you describe here?
First, thanks for mentioning the passion of my book which is an extension of my passion for preaching. I have always felt uneasy about the church calling half of the church year, “Ordinary Time.” I understand the meaning, but “ordinary” doesn’t quite fit the power of the faith. My fear is that preachers can treat every Sunday as “ordinary.” I believe passion must come to the pulpit every Sunday. So I remind myself, that every Sunday, even during Lent, is a “mini-Easter.” And there is nothing ordinary about resurrection.
In my introduction to homiletics class, my first lecture is always about reading – the reading life of the preacher. I encourage my students to have a file for new words they “discover.” And to find ways to use those words in sermons. A preacher is a reader. I give my students a reading list of 200 books from multiple disciplines. As impossible as it is, I want my students to be Renaissance persons. For example, I’m currently reading David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Since preachers have to face the nonsense of biblical creationism, I always give them books to read by scientists. Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, Francis S. Collins, The Language of God, and Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. In the memorable words of physicist Freeman Dyson, ours is a “universe that knew we were coming.”
My passion for the preparation phase of the sermon comes from the more than 20 years I spent playing baseball. My father, frequently my coach, taught me that what happened on game day came down to how well I practiced. I believe the sermon comes down to how well the preacher has practiced the gathering of the very best materials. This has always been my passion.
Every book, article, or essay I read always has one question for the material: “Will it preach?” I have spent a lifetime gathering materials for sermons. I’m sure you would laugh at the sight of me scribbling a quote from a movie on the side of a bag of popcorn at Cinema 11.
While I know there is a tremendous amount of great preaching every Sunday in America, I sense preachers are being squeezed into a giant cauldron of busyness – most of it good work, but it takes away precious hours needed for sermon preparation.
One of my favorite Flannery O’Connor pearls of wisdom is when she is talking about writing: “I go to the typewriter every day for three hours so that if anything comes, I am prepared to receive it.”
2. In your chapter, “What the Poets Teach Us About Preaching,” you make the claim that “to speak of, about, or for God, poetry is required. No other language suffices” (82). Why do you say this?
I don’t quote a lot of poetry in my sermons, but I am always imitating the way the poets use language. For me, poetry is life and life is poetry. Writing and life for the preacher becomes the search for an imaginative space to find ways of expressing truth even though everything appears to have been said before. The poets lead the preachers into the rich world of metaphor. Here we discover metaphors are not mere stylistic flourishes, but rather a strategy used to speak old truth in new ways and create new realities.
The poets allow us a linguistic freedom as we attempt to develop our own unique voices over against our precursors. Harold Bloom argues that meaning occurs as part of an agon or struggle with previous meaning.
Metaphors produce a new kind of knowledge, a new vision as a defense against literal meaning. Literal meaning feels like a prison, a life-sentence handed down by stern-faced masters insisting on binding all creativity and imagination.
Nothing helps preachers to be poets like the 150 poems in the book of Psalms. Andre Chouraqui says, “We are born with this book in the depths of our being. A little book: a hundred and fifty poems: a hundred and fifty steps set between life and death.” And the psalms are an unending reservoir of metaphors.
And I am grateful for the poetry of the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer. Both are products of the 17th century and both are still filled with joy and deep pathos.
Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet still rings with truth. Flat prose is not the language of preaching. Flat prose is what gives preachers the sobriquet – “Boring.” Poetry is our language. Approach it as a throne of grace and mercy even if you never publish a book of poems.
In the book, I use Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook almost as a preaching textbook. She’s a worthy guide for preachers.
I find a deep connection to preaching in Jane Kenyon’s poem “Otherwise.” She reflects on her daily life after she was diagnosed with leukemia.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
And I must say, “Letters from a Father,” by Mona Van Duyn, is a powerful sermon. A father, convinced of his approaching death, receives the gift of a birdfeeder from his daughter. He grumbles: “I don’t see why you want to spend good money on grain for birds and you say you have a hundred sparrows, I’d buy poison and get rid of their diseases and turds.”
In the conclusion, the father has come to life and joy again:
I am going to keep
feeding all spring, maybe summer, you can see
they expect it. Will need thistle seed for Goldfinch and Pine
Siskin next winter. Some folks are going to come see us
from Church, some bird watchers, pretty soon.
They have birds in town but nothing to equal this.
So the world woos its children back for an evening kiss.
3. Please expand upon this quote from your chapter, “What the Philosophers Teach Us About Preaching”: “I refuse the binary choice between a populist, evangelical ministry and a progressive ministry. I believe both evangelicals and progressives have much to learn from the secular disciplines, as the early preachers in the church so amply demonstrated” (99).
In our postmodern, post-truth age where opinions dress for the ball as if they were the truth, the preacher has never so needed the company of the philosophers. Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Wittgenstein – the list is endless. From the philosophers we learn how to think.
Dualism is the enemy of the preacher. We keep thinking binary choices are our only choices. For example, I have found a way to take Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel and combine it with the awful criticisms of evangelicals to create a third way: an evangelical social gospel. “Either/or” bores me.
Preaching was born in the house of philosophy and rhetoric. From St. Paul to St. Chrysostom to St. Augustine, the early church filled her pulpits with men trained in philosophy and rhetoric. Any move the churches make against this intellectual grounding is detrimental to the cause.
My preaching students were reluctant to read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, for example. Most of this revulsion came from the book being almost a thousand pages long. But beyond my students being too busy to read philosophy, they didn’t enjoy the struggle to grasp the complexities of what it means to be faithful witnesses in a secular age.
I’m not suggesting sermons be filled with philosophical diatribes, but I am saying preachers increase their intellectual firepower by spending time with philosophers. Paul spending time with the Greek philosophers in Acts 17 always fills me with a sense of adventure. Here’s how Paul’s sermon to the philosophers ended: “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers.”
4. In your conclusion, so wonderfully entitled “For God’s Sake Feel the Sermon,” you assert that “the perfect word” for a preacher’s attitude is “parrhesia.” Could you explain what this means, and could you talk about (as you do in the conclusion) the danger that comes from this in the year 2025?
Michel Foucault has a small volume on parrhesia – the word translated as “boldness – that is so powerful. Foucault says parrhesia involves risk, truth, danger, and a willingness to speak truth to power. Parrhesia may be the most needed virtue for preachers. Some preachers belong to the status quo and they preach the gospel of “the king’s temple.” Others are Amos and they preach the truth that clashes with the status quo.
None of this is easy. And no preacher should put on the mantle of the prophet every Sunday in every sermon. She or he will become to be more of a scold than a faithful preacher. But in our time, in our dangerous political environment, I believe the preacher simply must bring to bear the truth of Scripture. I believe the Word has plenty to say to our current political malaise. The anger, the mistrust, the outrage, the lack of civility, and etc. cries out for homiletical application.
5. Related to this, you ask in the introduction, “Why are progressive preachers often such wimps”? Why do you say this, and how do you answer your own question?
George Lakoff, in The Political Mind, asks, “Why are Democrats such wimps?” The question hit me hard and I applied it to preaching. Lakoff says progressives are stuck in the Age of the Enlightenment and don’t understand the importance of emotion in today’s culture. We are not so good when it comes to pathos. We still think if we can just tell people the facts, they will see the truth. This is no longer the case. This, of course, also relates to parrhesia. Speaking truth to power is never an easy task. As Otis Moss, Jr. reminds us, “We don’t like prophets.”
I think the reaction of the Nazarene synagogue crowd to the preaching of Jesus scarred preaching. I think the pain of that moment went deep into the sinews and bones of every preaching. The crowd, after all, was “outraged” and tried to kill him.
6. Besides your passion for preaching, you also have a deep passion for writing, Could you tell us a little about your latest writing project?
Most of my writing over the last several years has focused on the threat I believe we face as a nation and as a democracy. The irony for me is MAGA evangelicals are driving this movement and my mind seizes at the idea. I have a book of essays on President Donald Trump that will be published later in 2025. I have compiled 30 of my essays about Trump that were originally written for Baptist News Global, added an introduction, and a concluding analysis. I believe democracy is in danger. I cannot sit on the sideline and not respond. We live in dangerous times. I am glad I am alive for such a time as this, because “dissent” lives in my Anabaptist DNA.
As usual I am working on a new book about preaching. I am especially interested in how evangelical and progressive preaching seems to miss the mark with what I deem an excessive attention to anthropologically centered sermons instead of theocentric sermons. The title, Preaching in Doxology, is intended as my most definitional understanding of the preacher’s task. Doxology is not just chanting the psalms; it is whole different language.
I have one basic regret for Dancing with Metaphors. The book was already too long and I had to cut two chapters, “What the historians teach us about preaching” and “What the scientists teach us about preaching.” Since evangelicals are engaged in a cultural war against American history and science, I saved those chapters and I am now writing a tribute to historians and scientists.
In the meantime I pray a congregation somewhere will take a chance on this allegedly radical preacher and allow me the privilege of preaching for them one Sunday. The art of preaching, after all, only comes alive in a pulpit.
State Police Proselytized during K9 Training at Ark Park; No Word on How Dogs Reacted
by Dan Phelps
Note: This article originally appeared at Panda’s Thumb. We are pleased to republish it here with the author’s and editor’s approval.
Back in 2020, the Kentucky State Police (KSP) were embroiled in a controversy after it was discovered that a training PowerPoint presentation quoted Adolf Hitler and advocated ruthless violence. In spite of this horrendous exception, the Kentucky State Police is well-respected and noted for their professionalism and devotion to duty. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the KSP paid Answers in Genesis (AIG) to send an officer on a K9 training class on February 1 to 4, 2025, at the Ark Encounter. Besides K9 training, the class included Fundamentalist Christian and Christian Nationalist propaganda. With the government agencies and politicians increasingly becoming entangled Christian Nationalism, this incident is particularly disturbing.
On February 7, 2025, Ken Ham bragged in his daily blog that the AIG Department of Public Safety had hosted numerous law enforcement organizations in K9 training at the Ark. Photos indicated a Kentucky State Police officer was there with his vehicle, as were several other regional law enforcement agencies. Moreover, an organization known as TACTICA Ministries (Teaching Authorities Christian Truth in Central America) was also present. My curiosity was immediately piqued by the presence of the KSP trooper. The questions I immediately had were, “Why is a major law enforcement organization being trained by AIG?” and “Why isn’t AIG going to a major organization like the KSP for training instead?”
I then wrote a Kentucky Open Records Act (KORA) request. Surprisingly, perhaps as a delaying tactic, my initial request was rejected. The rejection claimed I was not a Kentucky resident, even though I specifically said I was a resident in the KORA request. (I was born here and have owned a house which I have lived in in Lexington for more than 20 years. Many of my ancestors came to the state with Daniel Boone in the late 18th Century.) I resubmitted the request and received a small number of documents. Some of the requested information was not available; no mileage records were kept, and the KSP trooper did not save all of his training materials. Additional withheld information included the redaction of the identities of all third-party instructors “…due to sensitivity of their respective jobs and the need for anonymity.” Were these third-party instructors members of government law enforcement? We may never know.
The open records information showed that Kentucky taxpayers paid approximately $225 for the training of one officer. This doesn’t include money spent by other Kentucky law enforcement agencies. Kentucky law enforcement from Villa Hills Police Department and the Boone County Sheriff’s Office participated. Some out-of-state regional law enforcement that participated included the Genesee County Ohio, Twinsburg (Ohio) Police Department, and the Collier County (Florida) Sheriff’s Department.
The event included several breakfasts and lunches, as well as one diner that was sponsored by Nutramax Laboratories (a company that produces supplements for pets and does a lot of evangelism on the side). Interestingly, the event Welcome Package showed that each lunch included “testimony.”
The Welcome Package for the event also included a message from AIG’s Department of Public Safety’s Sgt. Adam Witherspoon:
Also, AIG Dept of Public Safety makes no effort to hide who we are. We care deeply about your working relationship with your dog and want to do everything we can to help you improve as a K9 team. More importantly though we care about you as an individual. God created all of us in His image. Due to our sin, and we are all sinners, Romans 3:23-24. 23.
…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24. being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; we are condemned to spend eternity separated from God. Jesus Christ however took our punishment on the Cross. Our most sincere prayer is that if you don’t know Jesus Christ as your savior, come and talk to us. We would love to share with you the Good News of the Gospel, which grants us eternity with God in heaven.
So, let’s get to some great training, enjoy some great food, fellowship, and learning, and I look forward to meeting and getting to know each one of you.
In His Service,
– Sgt Adam Witherspoon
A presentation at the K9 training (and a major vendor/sponsor) was by a Michigan-based TACTICA Ministries. This ministry apparently gives police/paramilitary training plus substantial religious instruction to police forces in Central and South American countries. Disturbingly, there are numerous YouTube videos available of TACTICA paramilitary training set to high energy Christian music (see: examples here, here, and here). Figure 2 is a hat that TACTICA Ministries sells. Apparently, part of the TACTICA “training” at the event included memorization of Bible verses on a “Memorization Card.” What do any of these verses have to do with K9 training?
TACTICA Ministries is run by Ryan Rought. At least one presentation was done by Mr. Rought. The training documents give this biography and description of Rought’s work:
Ryan is a man fervently committed to his Christian faith, his family, and serving others. His energy is contagious as he is unashamedly committed to investing in the public safety community through high quality training, relationship building, and Gospel centered teaching.
Several other participants’ biographies mention going on mission trips and long term training in with TACTICA Ministries, including Marty Buffenbarger (2.5 years with TACTICA in Costa Rica), Chris Carpenter of Livingston Security Solutions (several training mission trips), and Bill and Cindy Gruppen (also of Association of Baptists for World Evangelism). The Gruppens’ bios indicate that their “mission is to share God’s good news through creative and impactful avenues.”
According to the itinerary, a good deal of the first day of training (14:00 to 19:00) involved signing in and “roaming” the Ark. This visitation combined with the speakers’ bios and other activities, such as lunchtime “testimonials” show that religious instruction and evangelism of law enforcement officers was a substantial portion of the K9 training.
There is some evidence that the KSP and other Kentucky law enforcement has participated in similar past events. On July 9, 2024, conservative Republican Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman posted pictures of “K9 Officer Charity” in front of the Ark Encounter. Officer Charity is a K9 with the Attorney General’s Office’s Department of Criminal Investigations. This sweet doggie has her own Instagram page. (The Attorney General’s post mentions that the KSP and the Boone County Sheriff’s Office participated in K9 training at the Ark in early July 2024. The instruction in February 2025 is probably one of several similar events that have used taxpayer money for an odd combination of training and evangelism.)
More disturbing than the use of taxpayer funding to evangelize law enforcement is the likelihood of the officers being indoctrinated in Christian Nationalism. Answers in Genesis is becoming more and more an advocate for far-right politics. On February 25, 2025, Founder CEO of Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham, posted an essay on his blog titled “What Happens When Your God Dies.” In this political essay he attacks “wokeness,” “racist” DEI hiring, pronoun use, and transgender ideology while praising the new administration and attacking Democrats. This theme is common throughout AIG’s online publications.
On July 15, 2023, Bodie Hodge (Ken Ham’s son-in-law) had an essay on AIG’s page called “The Religion of Sexual Humanism” (you may now find it on the Wayback Machine here). In this post, Hodge claims what he and AIG represent is “God’s Religion” while most other people belong to “Not God’s Religion.” Note that “Not God’s Religion” has a sub-section “Counterfeits of Biblical Christianity” that includes Roman Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, “Moonies,” and even more bizarrely (if possible) Jews, Muslims, Freemasons, and Satanists (isn’t that special?) among many others. Eastern religions and secularism are given separate categories in this incredible (in the literal sense of the word) chart. I almost find this chart comical, but considering the very real possibility of Christian Nationalism becoming an arm of the government, the graphic is simply horrifying. AIG is very well-connected in state politics and apparently is looking to expand their reach. At one point Ken Ham was scheduled to speak at an event on April 24 along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Franklin Graham. Recently, Hegseth backed out, presumably because of other duties, but a list of the originally scheduled speakers is available on the Internet Wayback Machine as recently as January 17, 2025.
Every July the Tri-State Freethinkers have a protest near the entrance to Ark Encounter to protest the fake science plus the sales-tax rebate incentives and other handouts that the Ark has received from state, county, and Williamstown governments. I have avoided participating in this event in the past because of concerns about the event’s effectiveness and the possibility of a creationist provocateur causing a disruption. I was recently asked to speak at this event. I am frankly very hesitant. I have to wonder whether law enforcement will look the other way if the protest is attacked, actively disrupt the protest, or find another way of punishing or harassing the participants. In any case the government should not be paying to give their employees religious instruction especially when the employees are in a position where fairness and equanimity should be standard.
Originall published at Panda’s Thumb. Provided under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License 4.0.
The Los Angeles Fires, or, Hollywood Had It Coming
by William Trollinger
It is striking – but not surprising – how often fundamentalist leaders and preachers proclaim that this or that natural disaster or this or that act of violence is divine judgment on a community for sin. In response to Hurricane Katrina Franklin Graham observed that New Orleans is well known as home to “Mardi Gras,” “Satan worship,” “sex perversion,” and “every type of drugs and alcohol” as well as “orgies.” As a result “there’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years,” but now it seems that “God is going to use that storm to bring revival” to this “wicked city.”
Then there’s Jerry Falwell’s explanation of 9/11, in which he mashed together a potpourri of sins and sinners:
I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say, “you helped this happen.”
And no discussion of this topic would be complete without reference to Pat Robertson, who not only invoked God’s judgment to explain Katrina and 9/11, but also to explain the 2010 earthquake in Haiti which killed over 100,000 people. More than two centuries before the earthquake the Haitians
got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the French.” True story. And so, the Devil said, Ok, it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. . . . But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another . . . That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti [and] on the other is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God.
As one commentator noted, the implication of this claim is that “if only they had stayed virtual slaves under French rule, God would have been pleased and they would have been earthquake free.”
Sex perversion and orgies. Abortion, feminism, LGBTQ, and the ACLU. All of this has brought God’s wrath down upon America (not to mention Haiti and its Satanic pact). Not greed and unfettered capitalism, or sex abuse in families and churches, or racial inequities in arrests and imprisonment.
And now there’s a new sin that may have provoked God’s violent anger. Taking God’s name in vain. Combined with wokeness, this may have, in the words of Answers in Genesis founding CEO Ken Ham, brought “a judgment from God on Hollywood, on woke California” in the form of the devastating January 2025 fires. For elaboration on this point, he encouraged readers to watch the video, “Hollywood Mocks God. Then This Happens,” produced by Ray Comfort of Living Waters.
Yes. That Ray Comfort, of the infamous banana video. The same Ray Comfort who has declared Halloween as National Evangelism Day, and who came up with the plan to pass out three million tracts at the 2023 coronation of King Charles in London. One side of the tracts appeared as if they were 1,000,000 pound notes (with a picture of King Charles), and on the other side there was an evangelistic message.
And now there’s “Hollywood Mocks God. Then This Happens.” In this video, Comfort, referencing the January 05 2025 Golden Globes awards ceremony, piously observed that “mocking God and using his name as a cuss word is nothing new for Hollywood.” But
less than 48 hours after the Golden Globes blasphemy, Hollywood was on fire. Are these fires some sort of judgment of God? No one really knows. But one thing we do know is that a good solid rain would immediately fix this terrifying nightmare. And the Bible tells us that God is the one who sends rain, the one Hollywood so joyfully mocks. The concept of God withholding rain is a form of judgment found throughout Scripture. And there to remind humanity that He’s the one who’s in charge.
Despite the classic distancing phrase – “no one really knows” – it is obvious that we are supposed to understand the L.A. fires as a judgment on Hollywood’s blasphemy and wokeness. Bringing this point home, Comfort then heads to the beach, where he asks folks, “What would fix the fire problem really quick? . . . What about rain? . . . Who’s in charge of the rain? . . . Why do you think He’s withholding rain from Hollywood? . . . Do you think God is judging Hollywood?”
The video ends with Comfort in evangelizing mode, asking beachgoers if they are good people, if they think they are going to heaven, and if they have ever lied, downloaded music off the internet that’s not theirs, and/or taken God’s name in vain. Having established that they are sinners, he makes clear that hell awaits if they don’t repent and put their trust in Jesus. As he told one person at seaside:
Steve, sin is so serious to a holy God that He’s given you a death sentence. You are on death row, you are in a holding cell that has a nice blue roof, good air conditioning, good lighting. But this life is a holding cell, and your death will be evidence to you that God is deadly serious about sin.
In quizzing these beachgoers about their sinfulness and suggesting their possible condemnation, Comfort could have quoted from the one place in the Gospels where Jesus speaks about the Last Judgment:
‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit.’ They will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or naked or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment. (Matthew 25: 41-46)
But of course Comfort was not going there. Cursing and wokeness. These are the sins that brought God’s wrath onto Hollywood.
With the Texas Voucher Bill, taxpayer money will go to private schools that teach anti-science and Young-Earth Creationism
by Mara Richards Bim
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with Baptist News Global (BNG) and as program director at Faith Commons. She is a spiritual director and a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023. This is an abbreviated version of her February 03, 2025 BNG article, which can be found here.
Texas Governor Abbott has made “school choice” his mission over the last few years, going so far as to spend 2024 actively campaigning against rural Republicans who opposed to ensure that he would have enough votes in this legislative session to pass it.
There are many reasons for Texans to oppose school vouchers including that they are tools used to enforce racial segregation and to harm students with disabilities whom private schools are not legally obligated to accept. But, as I listened to the recent testimony at the Texas Senate Education Committee hearing, new red flags were raised for me. The Committee—in order to stack the deck in its favor—began the hearing with 2.5 hours of conversation between the Senators and invited guests who spoke glowingly of the bill. A little too glowingly, actually.
Some Highlights from the Invited Testimony
In the invited testimony before the Senate Committee on Education, something kept coming up over and over that raised alarm bells for me. The guests repeatedly expressed gratitude to the Senate committee for the “freedom” afforded to them in SB2 and dismissed any legal concerns around church and state separation.
Nathan Cunneen, Texas State Director at the American Federation for Children (an advocacy organization)
This proposal maximizes freedom for families and students while placing common sense guardrails for providers, vendors, and the EAOs that would help administrate the program. Guardrails are not the same thing as strings attached. Numerous school choice programs around the country have had similar accountability measures as these for decades and not in one instance has that led to the government takeover of private schools or the further regulation of homeschoolers. I would encourage this committee to be incredibly clear with their language in making it clear that this program will not attempt to infringe on the protections placed on private schools and students.
Arif Panju, Managing Attorney of the Texas Office of Institute for Justice (a national legal advocacy organization pushing for school choice in states across the country)
It is our opinion at [Institute for Justice] that SB2 fully complies with the U.S. Constitution and with the Texas Constitution—referring to the education clause, which is what you hear about often…What’s left with opponents is education clauses. And they like to weaponize a state constitution’s education clause, which requires a very simple thing: creating and maintaining a public education system. It’s just a mandate. These things per the text in Article 7 section 1 of our state constitution, are not prohibitions on the legislature’s power to create additional educational options. The Texas Supreme Court has held that decades ago—and the plain language of the provision says as much—as long as there’s a public school system before and after the program, we’re fine. There’s nothing stopping the legislature from enacting SB2.
Matt Ticzkus, Regional Director of the Mid-South American Association of Christian Schools which is affiliated with American Association of Christian Schools (a school credentialing organization):
The autonomy and religious liberty language contained in the bill is exceptionally strong as it conveys to participating schools that they’re free to carry out the mission of their school with no impact to curriculum admissions or hiring, and that a participating school is not a recipient of federal financial funds or a state actor.
Taxpayer Funds, School Choice and Accreditation
What Arif Panju failed to mention in his testimony before the Texas Senate Committee was that a bill identical to Texas’s was just ruled unconstitutional in South Carolina by that state’s Supreme Court. Perhaps he failed to mention it because his organization has is now involved in and has a financial stake in seeing this issue make it to the Supreme Court.
What Matt Ticzkus failed to mention in his testimony is more interesting. He introduced himself as follows:
I’m a volunteer board member for the Texas Private Schools Association representing the 941 accredited nonprofit Texas schools who serve more than 300,000 students. I’m here today in support of SB2. At the outset of my testimony, I want to affirm on behalf of our members that we appreciate the work that public schools do, and we consider them to be partners in educating the next generation. For nine years, I served as head of school at a small private school in North Texas, and today I serve as a regional director for a nonprofit. I’m not a highly paid lobbyist or some big donor, nor do I represent one.
To quote Shakespeare, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
It turns out that Tisczus is the Regional Director of the Mid-South American Association of Christian Schools which is a subsidiary of American Association of Christian Schools, a credentialing organization for Christian private schools focused on delivering curriculum that embraces a “Biblical worldview.”
As SB2 currently stands, there is no requirement that private schools be accredited to receive taxpayer funds.
It is here we land at the crux of just why people like Tisczus are especially pleased with the current iteration of the bill and the “religious freedom” it affords private schools.
Last year, Huffington Post conducted an audit of 7,200 private schools across the country receiving taxpayer funding through school choice programs. They found that 75 percent of participating schools are religious, specifically: 42% are non-Catholic Christian, 31% are Catholic, 23% are non-sectarian/secular, 2% are Jewish and 1% are Muslim.
They did a deep-dive into the curriculum being taught by the 42% non-Catholic Christian and found that 33% were using textbooks from the leading publishers selling curriculum emphasizing a “biblical worldview” marked by creationism and a rejection of science.
By comparison, I did a deep dive into Texas Private Schools Association (TPSA) and the 941 schools currently credentialed by one of its member credentialing organizations. I found that roughly two-thirds of them advertise that they teach “a biblical worldview.” Many utilize curriculum produced by Abeka, Purposeful Design Publications, Accelerated Christian Education (ACE School of Tomorrow) and Bob Jones University Press (BJU Press).
To be clear: Modern-day Catholics and Mainline Protestants do not see a conflict between science and faith. It is only certain kinds of extremist Christian sects that do.
Taxpayer Funds, School Choice, Anti-Science and Young-Earth Creationism
I was curious about these schools that advertise using “comprehensive, biblically-based curriculum” from these providers and what, exactly, is in the curriculum. So I purchased some to review for myself from Abeka, the largest of the “biblical worldview” curriculum provider including: 7th Grade Science Textbook Science: Order and Design, 8th Grade Science Textbook Science: Earth and Space and 10th Grade Science Textbook Biology: God’s Living Creation.
Each of the three textbooks devotes a chapter to dismissing the theory of evolution as “superstition” and “bad science” in favor of young-earth creationism. The ramifications of this belief touch every aspect of each of the three textbooks.
The 7th grade section on mammals claims that “Although man has the physical characteristics of a mammal and was created on the same day as the land animals (Gen. 1:24–26), he is unique and separate from animals, including mammals.” The review section at the end of the chapter includes the question: “What are some reasons that man should not be considered a mammal? Use scripture to back your reasoning.”
The 7th grade textbook also states that the wide variety of felines today (from tigers to the domestic cat) “probably came from the two ‘cats’ that got off Noah’s ark.” The 8th grade textbook goes even farther with this notion by including a section analyzing the dimensions of Noah’s ark to make the case that all of life today could easily have come from the inhabitants of the ark.
All three textbooks attribute the biblical flood to every known phenomenon in our world from the extinction of the dinosaurs (who, the textbooks claim roamed the earth with humans) to the erosion of rocks.
The textbooks also warn students to distrust science. The 8th grade section on geology states:
Geology also covers such topics as the features of the earth’s surface, the formation of the earth’s features, earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion, and fossils. Unfortunately, some areas of geology, especially the study of fossils, have become dominated by evolutionary philosophy. Therefore, we must be careful not to assume that the hypotheses and theories of modern evolutionary geologists are the best explanations for the existing features of the earth. God, the only eyewitness to the formation and geologic history of the earth, sheds light on these areas in His Word; and His statements are irreconcilable with evolutionary philosophy. For example, the great Flood in Genesis 7 and 8 is undoubtedly responsible for most of the earth’s present features and fossils, although evolutionists reject the Flood as a myth.
All three textbooks then go on to claim that the universe, solar system and earth are all less than 10,000 years old. The 7th grade textbook includes a special section that states, in part:
Evolutionists do not reject the biblical age of the earth because scientific evidence indicates that the earth is billions of years old; rather, they reject it because their faith in the unproven and unprovable ideas of uniformitarianism and evolution requires an old Earth. In fact, when the scientific evidence for the age of the earth is examined without evolutionary assumptions, the evidence agrees with the biblical teaching that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Like the choice whether to believe in evolution or Creation, the choice whether to believe in an old Earth (billions of years old) or a young Earth (only thousands of years old) depends entirely on where one chooses to put his faith: in matter, energy, and error-prone hu-man reason, or in God and His perfect and true Word.
The 8th grade textbook reinforces this belief with thought-provoking review questions like: “If the earth is less than 10,000 years old, as a straightforward reading of the Bible indicates, why must the continents have moved much faster in the past if they were ever together?”
Reinforcing young-earth creationism, the 10th grade textbook, when introducing the fossil record states:
Fossils are the remains or impressions of plants, animals, and humans preserved in sedimentary rock. Countless billions of fossils are found in the earth’s crust, most of which were probably buried during the worldwide Flood of Noah.
Especially troubling in each of the three textbooks are the chapters on ecology.
Each textbook emphasizes Genesis 1:28 which states that humankind is to have “dominion” over the earth. Before exploring the subject of renewable resources, the 7th grade textbook warns:
As Christians, we need to be careful to follow scriptural commands and avoid getting caught up in the world’s preservationist attitude. The following are some things we should remember: 1) Human life is sacred; animals and nature are not (Gen. 9:2–6); 2) God has given man dominion over nature (Gen. 1:28); 3) Man is charged with taking care of nature (Lev. 25:1–5).
Later, on the issue of climate science and climate change (the textbook does acknowledge that humans are at least partially responsible for the latter), the text warns:
Knowledge of science is essential to being a well-informed Christian who follows God’s commands to subdue and have dominion. Environmental hysteria comes from misinformation. To avoid misinformation, you should wisely use the scientific method to experiment and to interpret facts without bias, just as scientists should do. Collect the facts. Learn about advancements. Practicing conservation as part of good stewardship (managing nature for God as caretakers) brings glory to God.
The 8th grade textbook includes the same warning as above with this added text preceding it:
Many people hold unbiblical perspectives about the environment. One unbiblical perspective that people take is placing the earth’s needs above the needs of mankind. Some environmentalists disapprove of the harvesting of trees or the use of fossil fuels for any reason. Often, environmentalists treat humans as unimportant or as nature’s enemy and, in their attempt to protect nature, are a detriment to man. The most dangerous aspect of modern environmentalism is that it promotes a reverence for creation that should be reserved for God alone. The idea that nature is god is pantheism.
The 10th grade textbook modifies the above warnings of getting involved in the fight against climate change:
Unfortunately, some people take conservation to such an extreme that they stress the welfare of nature above that of man. In their zeal to protect the environment, they dismiss man’s needs as unimportant. For example, some environmental extremists object to the harvesting of trees for any reason. Yet God created trees to provide people with lumber for homes, furniture, paper, household heating, and cooking. Forestry not only benefits mankind but also benefits the ecosystem by thinning a forest of diseased and dying trees to make room for new growth. Of course, if too many trees are cut down in an area the results can be detrimental, but cutting down a few trees where a high way or building is planned is reasonable. Logging companies can replant in forests where they harvest, and trees will reproduce on their own unless too many are harvested.
This curriculum teaches young people to reject all kinds of science from geology to biology. What are the implications for this kind of education for the fields of medicine, ecology, meteorology and more?
If you’d like to read some of the curriculum for yourself, click here.
A New Frontier in the Fight Against School Vouchers?
Multiple courts have ruled that using taxpayer funds to teach young-earth creationism and, more recently, “intelligent design, violates the both state and First Amendment establishment clauses.
The major U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this matter was decided in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard in which the Court declared Louisiana’s “Creationism Act” unconstitutional. More recently, U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III issued a judgement in 2005 in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover striking down the school board’s policy of teaching “intelligent design” alongside evolution.
In his 139-page ruling, Judge Jones issued a scathing rebuke of creationism which had been renamed “intelligent design” stating, for the record that this “is not science and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community.”
Parents have a right to educate their children as they wish—even if that means teaching them junk science. But that right must be balanced by the rights of taxpayers who do not wish to see their taxes diverted to religious teachings they disagree with.
The President and the Paleontologist: Jimmy Carter’s Dalliance with Creationism and Stephen Jay Gould’s Stumble in Rebutting It
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.
When Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, the nation lost not only its 39th president but also a prominent born-again Christian who accepted evolution. In chapter 5 of his 2005 book Our Endangered Values, entitled “No Conflict Between Science and Religion,” Carter insisted, “The existence of millions of distant galaxies, the evolution of species, and the big bang theory cannot be rejected because they are not described in the Bible, and neither does confidence in them cast doubt on the Creator of it all.” Yet in the late 1980s, he proposed a creationist argument to no less a figure than the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould — whose rebuttal, surprisingly, was inadequate.
As Gould related in a postscript to his 1988 essay “In a Jumbled Drawer” (reprinted in his 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus), Carter called him out of the blue one day in the late 1980s, “simply to express his good wishes and his hopes for my continued good health” (Gould was in remission from cancer). In gratitude, he then sent Carter a copy of Wonderful Life (1989), his new book about the Cambrian fauna of the Burgess Shale. As was typical with Gould, the paleontology served as a springboard to explore a larger theme: “the ‘pageant’ of evolution as a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable.”
Having read Wonderful Life with pleasure while attempting to defuse armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa, Carter nevertheless offered a counterargument:
You seem to be straining mightily to prove that everything that has happened prior to an evolutionary screening period was just an accident, and that if the tape of life was replayed in countless different ways it is unlikely that cognitive creatures [such as humans] would have been created or evolved. It may be that when you raise “one chance in a million” to the 4th or 5th power there comes a time when pure “chance” can be questioned. I presume that you feel more at ease with the luck of 1 out of 10 to the 30th power than with the concept of a creator who/that has done some orchestrating.
Gould described Carter’s argument, a bit fulsomely, as “a brilliant riposte … a brilliant twentieth-century version of natural theology … fascinating.”
But he insisted that Carter’s argument was nevertheless wrong, and wrong for the same reason that a similar argument he discussed in “In a Jumbled Drawer,” due to the 19th-century Harvard paleontologist Nathaniel Shaler, was wrong: “because a probability cannot even be calculated for a singular occurrence known only after the fact.” (It’s because of the similarity of Shaler’s and Carter’s arguments that Gould added the postscript to “In a Jumbled Drawer.”) Gould approvingly quoted the 19th-century Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James, as writing, in a letter to Shaler, “Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of ‘probability’ at all.”
Gould’s answer to Carter thus presupposed that attributions to probability to individual events are not legitimate: it’s wrong to say that the chance that the next toss of a coin will be heads is 1 in 2, or that there’s a 30 percent chance of rain in Chicago tomorrow, or that the probability that a given atom of cobalt-60 will decay in about 5.27 years is 0.5. Such a view is indeed accepted by a few (such as the mathematician Richard von Mises, who famously declared, “The phrase ‘probability of death,’ when it refers to a single person, has no meaning at all for us”), but it is hard to square with the abundance in ordinary life and scientific practice of attributions to probability to individual events.
And Wonderful Life itself abounds in such attributions. Early in the book, Gould explained, “This book is about the nature of history and the overwhelming improbability of human evolution under themes of contingency and the metaphor of replaying life’s tape”; toward the end, he mused, with reference to Homo sapiens, “we are an improbable and fragile entity,” and interpolated a new adjective in a familiar Shakespearean line: “O brave — and improbable — new world, that has such people in it!” In light of these and similar passages, it is hardly fair for Gould to have faulted Carter for wanting to discuss the improbability of human existence.
What should Gould have said to Carter instead? Carter in effect was arguing that because the probability of human existence is very low on the hypothesis of evolution without divine guidance, and humans yet exist, the hypothesis of evolution without divine guidance is therefore false. But the form of inference is incorrect, as the philosopher Elliott Sober (among others) observes. To see why, take a homely example exactly parallel to Carter’s. Suppose that you buy a single Powerball ticket. If the drawing is conducted properly, it is very improbable (about 1 in 300 million) that you hold a jackpot ticket. But if you turn out to hold a jackpot ticket, are you entitled to infer that the drawing was rigged in your favor? Surely not.
Endorsement of the incorrect form of inference is not limited to creationists. The biologist Richard Dawkins, who is about as far from creationism as anyone could be, fell into the trap in his discussion of the origin of life in The Blind Watchmaker (1986), for example. But it is common among creationists, and Carter’s argument was creationist, at least in a broad sense, for he thought that it showed that it was scientifically necessary to appeal to divine guidance in explaining the facts of life. That was apparently a deviation from his settled views on science and religion, however: in Our Endangered Values, he relates, “I had always understood that we didn’t need scientific proof of the existence or character of God.”
It actually isn’t clear what Carter himself thought of Gould’s rebuttal. In Living Faith (1996), he wrote that Gould “later contradicted my argument — with good humor.” But in his later book Our Endangered Values, he seemed a little miffed, writing, “He didn’t respond directly, but subsequently quoted and slyly ridiculed my opinion.” Any rancor evidently subsided by the time of Faith: A Journey for All (2018), in which Carter listed the influences on his thinking about theology and philosophy, ending with Gould. Although he alluded to their arguments “about facts or principles,” he stressed their agreement about science and described Gould’s Rocks of Ages (1999) as one of his favorite books.
In any case, despite his dalliance with the creationist argument he proposed to Gould, Carter was a stalwart defender of the teaching of evolution. In 1980, as the presidential contest was peaking, his challenger Ronald Reagan declared that evolution “is a scientific theory only” and that “the biblical theory of creation” deserved a place in public schools. Carter replied, through his science adviser, that the scientific evidence for evolution was convincing and that schools ought to respect the constitutional separation of church and state. Since creationism was favored by about 44 percent of the American public at the time, Carter’s reply was — typically for him — both principled and courageous.
More Crimes Against History: Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical Indoctrination”
by William Trollinger
Last Wednesday the Trump Administration issued an executive order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which has as its goal to end “federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” As regards the teaching of U.S. history, the 1776 Project – established by the Trump administration in November 2020 and terminated by the Biden administration the following January – is reinstated, its goal being to produce a “patriotic education” that presents “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling” treatment of American history that makes clear how “the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles,” and that promotes “the concept of America’s greatness and history is proper.” Such an approach to America’s past will end the day when students “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of . . . actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin, in which the individual played no part.”
In other words, with Trump’s federal mandate fragile white males can finally feel good about themselves again!
The American Historical Association has it right:
This executive order . . . provide[s] a blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy. It requires teachers to rely on discredited conclusions that lack professional credibility or even to ignore the work of historians entirely. This includes the notorious 1776 Report, whose factual deficiencies render it little more than ideological polemic.
This “notorious” report – and the 1776 Project in general – was designed as a response to The 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize-winning project from The New York Times Magazine that “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The Trump-created Commission issued its report on (not coincidentally) Martin Luther King Day 2021, just before it was dissolved by the incoming Biden Administration. Interestingly for a group with the goal of telling the “true history” of America’s past, it did not include one single historian whose work focuses on U.S. history. On the other hand, the Commission was chaired by the president of the very conservative Hillsdale College. It also included in its ranks College of the Ozarks president Jerry Davis. Davis, who arrived on campus the very week I left to take another teaching position, made the school (rated the most LGBTQ-unfriendly school in the nation) a hyper-militaristic right-wing bastion.
It turns that a good part of the report is plagiarized from other right-wing publications, without citations to let readers where the material is coming from. More than this, it is poorly written and chock-full of errors and “beliefs without history.” I suffered my way through the entire report (which means you don’t have to). Thankfully, it is not very long, with twenty pages of text and twenty pages of appendices. The first nine pages consists of a mind-numbing paean to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, highlighting what the authors see as their “universal principles,” such as “human equality, the requirement for government by consent, and the securing of natural rights” (7).
But it is in the next eleven pages that the authors get down to the task with which they had been charged, that is, to “’enable a rising generation to understand the . . . accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling’” history of the United States (1). (Notice the repetition of this language in the recent executive order). As I noted in a blog post just after the 1776 Report was published, here are a few lowlights from the last half of the report, along with my commentary:
- “The most common charge levelled against the founders. . . is that they were hypocrites who [in their protection of slavery in the Constitution] didn’t believe in their stated principles . . . This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.” (10)
- Let me get this right. What has damaged America is not its 250 year tradition of enslaving human beings, and it is not the “long shadow of slavery” that resulted in a pervasive individual and institutional racism that continues to this day. Instead, what has really damaged America is noticing and commenting on the huge gap between the founders’ ideals and the institution of slavery. Check.
- “The compromises at the Constitutional Convention were just that: compromises” (11).
- The Constitution – with its fugitive slave clause, and with its provision that the Southern states could count for representation 3/5 of each enslaved person who, of course, had no rights under the law – was simply a document containing necessary compromises. So we Americans should just chill out. Or, at least, we white Americans. The authors do not mention who constituted the compromising parties: white elite males. Black slaves had nothing to say about these compromises (just as their descendants had nothing to say about the thousands of Confederate monuments erected in the late 19th and early 20th century to honor those who fought to keep them enslaved). That is to say, these compromises were erected on the backs of African Americans.
- All of the above fits with the fact that in this document the discussion of slavery is remarkably abstract, as if it were a temporary legal glitch. No mention of family separation, sadism and torture, rape, on and on: not a word here in this “accurate, honest” document about the realities of slavery in America. Instead, what matters is that we focus on the “inspiring and ennobling” notion that slave-owning whites really did hold to the universalist ideals contained in the Declaration and Constitution . . . even while enslaving millions. Once again, black people vanish.
- In the 1850s South Carolina’s John C. “Calhoun added a new theory in which rights inhere not in every individual by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ but in groups or races according to historical evolution. This new theory was developed to protect slavery” (12).
- Let me see if I understand. Prior to Calhoun promulgating his “group rights” theory there were lots of slaveowners who held to the idea that their black slaves had inherent rights as individual human beings? Even while the enslavers denied them their “inherent rights”? What is the evidence for this absurd suggestion? Once again, the realities of slavery disappear.
- This conflict [between Calhoun’s group rights and the Declaration’s individual rights] was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives” (12).
- The scholars behind this “accurate, honest” retelling of American history have devoted this one sentence to the Civil War. That’s it. And note the passive voice: “conflict was resolved.” No mention of who was responsible for all these deaths. No mention of the fact that the South was determined, by any means necessary, to maintain slavery as an institution, and so instigated this war. No mention of the fact that the Confederates maintained that they were the ones who were truly loyal to the sentiments of the Declaration and Constitution. No mention of Confederates at all. Only, the “conflict was resolved.”
- In line with Calhoun’s theories, “Progressives believed there were only group rights that are constantly redefined and changed and change with the times . . . Based on this false understanding of rights, the Progressives designed a new system of government” that led to “what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state” (13). The four paragraphs devoted to Progressivism are not only badly written (even worse than other sections of the document), but remarkably vague. But in Appendix IV – which includes discussion starters for civics classes — one finds this proposed question regarding the economic views of “progressive presidents” Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt: “In what ways do they differ from the principles and structure of the Constitution?” (39).
- Can we say loaded question? And right: If we could only go back to the 19th century!
- “Like the Progressives, Mussolini sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts” (13).
- Well, that is clarifying. Progressivism/New Deal = Fascism. Check.
- “Everywhere American troops went [in World War II), they embodied in their own ranks and brought with them the principles of the Declaration, liberating peoples and restoring freedom.” (14)
- Really? Are the authors unaware that the U.S. military was segregated in the Second World War? Or do they understand Jim Crow segregation to comport with the “principles of the Declaration”?
- “Communism’s relentless anti-American, anti-Western, and atheistic propaganda did inspire thousands, and perhaps millions, to reject and despise the principles of our founding and government. While America and its allies eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres. The increasingly accepted economic theory of Socialism, while less violent than Communism, is inspired by the same flawed philosophy and leads down the same dangerous path of allowing the state to seize private property and redistribute wealth as the governing elite see fit.” (14)
- Apparently the only good American is a right-wing free-market ideologue who dreams of dismantling the safety net for the most vulnerable citizens. The rest of us have been poisoned by Communist propaganda, thanks to professors and pop stars!
- “Despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves, the postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery.” (15)
- Once again, when it comes to racial oppression, the report moves into the passive voice: “the postbellum South ended up devolving.” No. The postbellum South did not devolve. Instead, white southerners actively “redeemed” (their word) the region by quickly and thoroughly re-establishing their supremacy, with the active support of political, legal, and religious institutions in the South and the North. And the system of racial oppression remained in force for a century after the end of the Civil War. And the folks maintaining and reinforcing this system understood themselves to be acting in keeping with ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution (and the Bible). Is it anti-American to point this out?
- “The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding.” (15)
- The second sentence is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous. Whole swaths of the American public (including my family and my church) hated the movement and hated Martin Luther King, Jr. And as Kevin Kruse has pointed out, these furious opponents to civil rights claimed “that it was their resistance that reflected the ‘principles of the founding.’ When Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for instance, he pointedly recited the entire Declaration of Independence to link his act of defiance to the colonists’ acts.”
- “The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders . . . Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of ‘group rights’ not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers. The justification . . . was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities . . . We have [today] moved toward a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of ‘social justice, demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into ‘protected classes’ based on race and other demographic categories . . . This is the opposite of King’s hope that his children would ‘live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’” (16)
- More of the ridiculous. For one thing, while the authors want (in keeping with many white conservatives) to persuade Americans that the “I Have a Dream” speech is all we need to know about King, the reality (here comes another one of those pesky facts!) is that King strongly supported affirmative action – “special treatment” (in Christian terms, “repentance”) in response to the 350 years of slavery and oppression that African Americans had endured. Moreover, to quote Kruse again, “drawing a straight line from the South Carolina politician Calhoun, one of the most infamous defenders of Black enslavement, to the African Americans who advocated affirmative action as a remedy for that very enslavement is, to say the least, an incredible stretch.” Revisionist history, indeed!
- “Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for American principles and history alike, in the process weakening attachment to our shared heritage. In order to build up a healthy, united citizenry, scholars, students, and all Americans must reject false and fashionable ideologies that obscure facts, ignore historical context, and tell America’s story solely as one of oppression and victimhood . . . [This is] historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth.” (18)
- This is an exercise in projection on the part of the authors, as their resentment and contempt for the academy in general and historians in particular is not in the least subtle. And when it comes to obscuring facts, ignoring historical context, and engaging in “historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth,” all I can say is: Look in the mirror. This document resembles nothing so much as the Lost Cause historiography after the Civil War, in its blatant historical inaccuracies and in its nostalgia for an America that never existed.
- This sort of “deliberately destructive scholarship . . . is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.” (18)
- “Defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.” What “statues” are being defamed, other than a few Confederate monuments? Is that what is upsetting the authors – the fact that some folks (particularly, but not only, people of color) do not want to honor the leaders and soldiers who fought against the Union in behalf of slavery?
- Just as striking: This report came out two weeks after the “insurrection,” when the U.S. Capitol was violently breached and defamed by right-wing protestors who threatened democratically elected representatives. To understate the point, the folks who attacked the Capitol were not inspired by “leftist” or “liberal” academic historians to perpetrate these violent acts, but, instead, by a commitment to racism and white supremacy, and by a commitment to the president who commissioned this dreadful report.
We need more, not less, historical scholarship that honestly and straight-forwardly addresses the racism that has permeated American history for five centuries. This is not anti-Americanism, but, instead, the best means by which we can create a more just America. Instead of the 1776 Report, I wish that we would heed the wise words of W. E. B. DuBois:
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?” (Black Reconstruction, 1935)
(Note: this post is a revised version of my January 28, 2021 post on the 1776 Project.)
Tim LaHaye, David Barton, and Russell Vought: Pseudoscience, Pseudohistory, and Christian Nationalism
by Paul Braterman
Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is now interested in sharing scientific ideas with the widest possible audience, and was involved in successful campaigns to persuade both the English and the Scottish Governments to keep creationism out of the science classroom. He blogs at Primate’s Progress, paulbraterman.wordpress.com.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where Braterman is a regular contributor. You can find the full article here. And we are grateful to the editors for their permission to republish.
Tim LaHaye gives us a bridge between traditional morality, anti-Communism and Reaganism, and present-day Christian Conservatism, with humanism having taken the place of Communism. His claim that evil humanists had successfully conspired to take over the American power structure is echoed in today’s denunciation of the “deep state,” the end-of-the world thinking of his highly successful Left Behind novels underlies much of the religion-linked opposition to action on climate change, and his rejection as satanic of every idea that he regards as unbiblical now surfaces as anti-wokeism, along with opposition to examining America’s racist past and to the teaching of evolution.
Add to this his lamenting a morally superior past, his claim that American exceptionalism is biblical, along with capitalism, and his appeal to moral patriotic Americans (he repeatedly links those adjectives in his writing) to take back the country from the forces of evil, and we have a direct link to the doctrines of evangelical Trumpism. His claims that the US constitution is Bible-based, that the US “was founded on a basic consensus of Christian principles – more so than any nation in history,” and that the division of powers was inspired by a biblical awareness of the fallen nature of man, fall short of more recent assertions that the constitution itself was divinely inspired, but nonetheless point the way to the explicit Christian Nationalism now about to assume power.
LaHaye graduated in 1950 from Bob Jones University, then as now strictly six-day creationist and socially conservative, and at the time strictly segregationist, and proud of it. He later became pastor of Scott Memorial Baptist Church (a.k.a. Shadow Mountain), in the suburbs of San Diego. Here he served for 25 years, developing the church into a megachurch, while embarking with his wife on a broadcasting career, offering family advice from their socially conservative Christian perspective. In the 1960s he committed himself to anti-communism, joining the John Birch Society. He was also powerfully influenced by the philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who regarded faith as absolute, Genesis 1 – 11 as foundational to our knowledge of space and time, and all secular thinking that ignored this foundation as misguided.
In 1970, he helped establish Christian Heritage College (now San Diego Christian College) adjacent to Scott Memorial Baptist Church, with Henry Morris, the most significant figure in 20th century Young Earth creationism, as Academic Vice President. Morris’ Institute for Creation Research was intimately connected with the College. The College’s Doctrinal Statement is Six Day creationist, and asserts the imminent return of Christ.
LaHaye’s The Battle for the Mind was published in August 1980 at the height of Reagan’s US Presidential campaign. It already contains, fully developed, the doctrines of Christian Conservatism. It takes the doctrine of guilt by association, which McCarthy applied to Communism and extends it to association with humanism. Humanism, in turn, is defined so broadly that LaHaye can apply the term to any doctrine that is not to his liking. Creationist science is the best science, and humanists only reject it, along with belief in God, to justify their own lack of morality. Here LaHaye shows an obsession with abortion and homosexuality, and defends capitalism on (unstated) biblical and moral grounds. He then justifies American exceptionalism by claiming that the separation of powers is inspired by a specifically Christian vision of humanity as fallen, so that institutions and rulers are not to be trusted. This in turn shows that the US was built “on biblical principles and a clear recognition of God.” Thus defending US national interests is doing God’s work. He claims that the US should have won in Korea and Vietnam, but was prevented by the influence of humanists. Disarmament is immoral because it weakens America. It is the duty of the religious to mobilize in order to capture the levers of political power, and in particular the judiciary. Evolution is part of man’s wisdom, as opposed to God’s, directly contradicts the Bible, and destroys the basis for morality. Those who accept it, even if they profess Christianity, are not really religious in their thinking, because they have been influenced by humanist ideas. It is therefore the duty of moral Americans to oppose them, and they must organize accordingly, in order to gain control of the centers of political power, as well as the judiciary and the school boards.
According to LaHaye:
- The history of humanism can be illustrated by a bookshelf that runs from Aristotle through Paine and Hegel (!) to Bertrand Russell. There is also a favorable mention of Morris’ suggestion that it can be traced back to Nimrod at Babylon.
- Humanism is the world’s greatest evil: “Humanists have totally rejected God, creation, morality, the fallen state of man, and the free-enterprise system [note the unexplained coupling of this last to religion]. As such they are the mortal enemy of all pro-moral Americans, and the most serious threat to our nation in its entire history. Unless both Christians and non-Christian lovers of virtue stand together as upright citizens, humanists will turn this great land into another Sodom and Gomorrah.”
- True wisdom comes from God. Philosophy is foredoomed if it depends on unaided human thought, rather than God’s biblical revelation. This revelation, which teaches that man was created by a direct act of God, is easy to accept this because of the scientific evidence. The biblical precepts of morality are absolute, and are expressed in the last six Commandments, as well as in the much higher moral code of Christianity.
- Whatever does not rely on God’s word, but on human judgement, is humanism. Humanist governments have imposed humanist education on the tax-paying public, with no regard to their wishes.
- The Puritan work ethic, free enterprise, private ownership of land, and capitalism” emanate (in some unstated way) from biblical teaching.
- A humanist does not think like a pro-moral American, and humanism has ingeniously conceived the plan to introduce an inordinate number of humanists into government, where they continually pass laws that favor the advancement of humanism and chaos, at the expense of the biblical basis for moral society that produced the liberty, peace, and safety we once enjoyed.
- Evolution is scientifically unsound, but humanists accept it in order to do away with God, hence their advocacy of sexual activity and promiscuity. Their rejection of a personal God who is interested in the affairs of man is itself an “unscientific religious belief,” especially as the evidence for the existence of God is so convincing.
- The feminist movement is led by humanists.
- The humanistic ideas of psychology lead to permissive child raising, as opposed to the biblical practice of applying correction (he means spanking).
- Leniency to criminals is another humanist error, based on the mistaken belief that humans are basically good.
- The evils advocated by politicians under humanist influence include “abortion-on-demand, legalization of homosexual rights, government deficit spending, the size of big government, elimination of capital punishment, national disarmament, increased taxes, women in combat, passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, unnecessary bussing, ad infinitum.”
In a direct echo of what McCarthy said about communists in the State Department, he says that a group of 600 people with influence, including Congressmen and particularly State Department employees since 1940, have been humanists, which explains “our present status of military inferiority to Russia.” 275,000 Humanists control American social organizations such as the ACLU, the National Organization of Women, and the unions. They control TV, radio, newspapers, Hollywood movies, magazines, and porno magazines. They also control (remember that he was writing in 1980, not long after Roe v. Wade) the Supreme Court, state governments, government bureaucrats, public education, colleges and universities, textbooks, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations.
LaHaye warns us against things are many of us would regard as achievements. Among these are the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union (which he links to communism), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Organization of Women, as well as UNESCO, UNICEF, and the UN World Health Organization, which government diplomats often quote “on such issues as population control, birth control, abortion, and so forth.” Through these, “they have used the vast fortune paid by the United States for support of the UN to advance the cause of world humanism.”
LaHaye advocates Christian control of school boards, to prevent the teaching of evolution, which has resulted in “approximately 50 million school-age children . . . growing up in a moral vacuum, misled by educators to think of themselves as amoral primates.” The other campaign issues that he lists include making sure that no tax money is used to fund abortion, which he repeatedly refers to as murder. There should be stronger laws against homosexuality, and elimination of pornography and prostitution. He is opposed to infanticide and euthanasia, since “only God can exercise the right to decide who has the right to live.” (This despite his support of the death penalty.) Lawmakers should defend parents’ rights (unspecified). There should be no legalization of drugs. And finally, “any and all forms of religious humanism should be vigorously opposed, particularly in government and education.” (Remember: he regards evolution, and all questioning of biblical literalism, as humanist doctrine, and labels humanism a religion.)
In A Minimum Morals Test for all politicians, he suggests candidates be asked 21 questions, beginning with
Do you agree that this country was founded on a belief in God and the moral principles of the Bible? Do you concur that it has been departing from these principles and needs to return to them?
There are also questions on abortion, the legalization of drugs such as marijuana, prostitution, laws that would allow known homosexuals to teach school, and the right of parents to send children to private school, protecting the tax-exempt status of churches and of church-related schools, and, tellingly, whether candidates favor busing to desegregate schools (correct answer: NO), and “capital punishment for capital offences” (correct answer: YES).
All of this brings us to the Christian Nationalism of the 21st-century. All we need is a pseudohistory, to parallel creationist pseudoscience. This we have with the work of the highly imaginative author David Barton. Barton’s only qualification is a 1976 BA in Religious Education from Oral Roberts University, which tells us that it seeks “To develop Holy Spirit-empowered leaders through whole-person education to impact the world.”
His 2012 book, The Jefferson Lies, which maintains that Jefferson and nearly all the founding fathers were believing Christians, had the rare distinction of being officially disowned by its publisher, Thomas Nelson, despite having reached the New York Times Best Sellers List, because of its manifold inaccuracies. It was, however, reissued as a paperback in 2016 by WND, a far-right news and opinion site and publisher better known for promoting various conspiracy theories. In any case, Barton had himself bought 17,000 copies of the Thomas Nelson edition, which continues to be available through third parties.
Barton is the founder of an organization ironically entitled Wallbuilders, whose main ambition seems to be undermining the wall of separation in the US between Church and State. His prominent followers include Mike Huckabee (now ambassador-designate to Israel), Michele Bachmann, and Mike Johnson, at the time of writing Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Huckabee, while Governor of Arkansas, said that he was not convinced by evolution, and that the theory of creation should be taught alongside. In 2017, he denied that Israel is “occupying” the West Bank, on the grounds that the Bible gives it title to what he describes as “Judaea and Samaria.” Bachmann, like Tim LaHaye, was powerfully influenced by Francis Schaeffer. She also rejects evolution, and thinks that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. We have described Johnson’s views here before. He considers Young Earth creationism the only valid kind of Christianity, believes that the US constitution was divinely inspired, and sees himself as a watchman on the wall (a deliberate echo of the name of Barton’s organization?)
Russell Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, obtained his first degree from Wheaton College, whose Statement of Faith, to which faculty must recommit annually, specifies “that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race.” He does not to my knowledge repeat Barton’s specific claims, but nonetheless argues that Christianity is part of the nature of American nationhood. In an unintentionally self-revealing article titled Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’ , written in response to criticisms, he answers his own question. He begins by justifying the concept of a nation by quoting words attributed to Moses in Deuteronomy, over 2000 years before the modern concept of a nation even existed. He goes on to impose an equally tortured and anachronistic interpretation on Psalms 2:1-2, saying that these verses “recognize the healthiness of a people, including public officials, consciously and publicly positioning themselves for the Lord or under God.” He perversely interprets George Washington’s words, “The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself as ordained,” as invoking Heaven rather than morality as fundamental to society, cherrypicks a statement from a 19th-century Supreme Court judge who described Christianity as necessary to support a civil society, asserts that such views were common at the time, and concludes that it is appropriate to regard America as a Christian nation. In conclusion, he contrasts this attitude with those of its critics, who “have their own agenda: progressive, secular globalism.”
Not surprisingly perhaps, the structure of the argument is identical of the arguments used by creationists from Henry Morris’ The Genesis Flood onwards. An uncritical acceptance of Scripture with no attention to historical context, unstated reinterpretation of that Scripture to further an agenda, selecting and misconstruing quotations, claiming a monopoly of Christian thought for his own wealth-friendly version, and finally and most dangerously, grouping together wildly disparate opinions, to make it seem as if our choice is restricted to two alternative worldviews, only one of which is sanctioned by God.
In conclusion, let me quote his final two sentences in response to critics:
It’s their right, under our system, to have that view and to participate themselves. But let’s not pretend — and I say this with great respect to pastors and writers like Tim Keller [who maintained that evangelical Christianity should not commit to a political party] — that their agenda is about anything other than power.
Vought is direct-designate of the US Government’s Office of Management and Business, where he is expected, according to the Washington Post, to help enable Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations, and to impose his views by staffing the civil service with loyalists.
Power indeed.
