Ken Ham: The Majority of Evangelical Colleges are Unsafe for Christian Students
by William Trollinger
Ken Ham has launched a full-scale, no holds barred attack on evangelical colleges.
In his video, “This is Truly Awful: Seriously?!: This is What ‘Christian’ Schools are Teaching,” the Answers in Genesis (AiG) CEO repeatedly and dramatically proclaims that “Compromise is Rife in ‘Christian’ Colleges.” And while the video begins with 15 seconds on “drag” classes and pride celebrations at Texas Christian University, the bulk of Ham’s diatribe is aimed at evangelical professors who instruct their students that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, who claim that there is very little evidence that the Flood was global, and who suggest that one can incorporate evolution into a Christian worldview. Incorporating an image of Bibles being burned, he asserts that “biblical compromise” is widespread throughout evangelical higher education (actually, at a majority of so-called Christian colleges). To make his point, he specifically calls out Abilene Christian, Baylor, Biola, Covenant Seminary, Messiah, Westmont, and Wheaton.
Ham asserts that what these schools are teaching is leading these young people to leave the church. (For evidence that supports a very different explanation as to the rise of religious “nones,” see my chapter on this topic.) So he exhorts parents to investigate evangelical colleges before sending their children there. But as Ham sees it, the challenge for parents is that these schools are often quite deceptive in how they present themselves:
You have to be very careful about how you ask questions concerning what the colleges are going to be teaching, because a lot of times you will ask these questions in a particular way, and [you will] think that they’re going to teach my children to stand on God’s Word and to be bold about God’s Word. And then you are shocked to find out that those kids end up getting brainwashed with ideas that undermine God’s Word.
To counter this, at AiG’s annual Creation College Expo parents and their children are introduced to Christian Colleges that “won’t plant seeds of doubt in your child or teach them to compromise.” These very “safe” schools include Appalachian Bible College, Bob Jones University, Cedarville University, Emmaus University, and Maranatha Baptist University.
As Adam Laats makes clear in his excellent Fundamentalist U, both fundamentalist colleges (see the Creation Colleges listed above) and evangelical colleges (see the colleges attacked by Ken Ham) have over the years sold themselves – to donors and to parents – as “safe” schools for their students, safe intellectually, culturally, and of course religiously. And when an evangelical or fundamentalist school’s “safe” label has been challenged, the result has often been a purging of “unsafe” faculty members.
So now Ken Ham has labeled the majority of evangelical colleges – with certain schools specifically mentioned — as unsafe places for Christian parents to send their children. How will these schools respond? Will they simply ignore Ham? Will they reason that they are not competing with Bob Jones and Cedarville and Maranatha Baptist, and so they don’t have to worry about what the young Earth creationist gatekeeper (Ken Ham) has to say? Or, on the other hand, will they see a threat to their enrollment and donations? Given that so many of their students come from fundamentalist backgrounds (having taught at one of the schools Ham attacked, I know whereof I speak), will they now work overtime to re-establish their credentials as “safe” schools, in the process removing “unsafe” faculty members?
I don’t know. What I can say is that how evangelical colleges respond to this attack will be a very telling indicator of the reach of Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, and young Earth creationism in mainstream evangelicalism. Stay tuned.
Spouting Venom from their Fire Ant Mounds: Evangelical Preachers v. James Talarico
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
In Texas, the plagues tend to be fire ants, armadillos and coyotes. A new plague has invaded with Ken Paxton’s primary win in the US Senate race. The Texas-size showdown between state Representative James Talarico and attorney general Ken Paxton in their Senate race is bringing out a plague of evangelical preachers comparable to one of the plagues of Moses.
The alleged biblical faith of evangelicals will demand center stage in this shootout. And it will not be nice, meek or mild.
The Democratic nominee, Talarico, is a Presbyterian seminarian, with deep commitment to the teachings of Jesus and the social gospel. Paxton is a MAGA darling, a Trump actor with an ethical rap sheet almost as long as the president.
Paxton has already issued his first ad: “Talarico threatens everything we hold dear.” I think he’s telling an accidental truth. The problem is what MAGA holds dear. They have been retreating from empathy. There are rumblings about Jesus being too meek and mild, too weak and woke.
When an evangelical makes an argument against a progressive Christian, for example, you will not hear him say, “I disagree with his interpretation.” Instead, you will hear that “He’s a heretic, a false teacher, a blasphemous prophet.”
After her sermon at the presidential inauguration worship at the National Cathedral, Bishop Budde was called a “demonic princess.” Rev. Franklin Graham claimed the cathedral was “taken over by gay activists,” Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, published a post on X suggesting Budde, a U.S. citizen, should be deported.
Rev. Jack Graham, Southern Baptist pastor, was beside himself: “See the face and hear the voice of a woke ideologue who represents the reason apostate churches are dead and dying. This is religion at its worst. No Jesus. No Bible. No future.”
Seems hell has no fury like an evangelical confronted with the clear teaching of Jesus.
In 2016, when I wrote The Immaculate Mistake, I thought the best metaphor describing MAGA evangelicals was fire ants:
Writing off evangelicals as a bunch of dummies is like ignoring a small fire ant bed that suddenly appears in your back yard. Once the fire ants are at full strength, if you poke a stick in the mound, they will send out waves of warrior ants intent only in afflicting as much pain on your body as possible. They spread out in formations, covering the ground around the next in circular attacks within ten seconds of the alarm.
The outrage of MAGA evangelicals over the Senate campaign of James Talarico has brought the “fire ant” metaphor back into clear focus. It’s hard to determine if there are more fire ants or more Baptists in Texas, but either way the “warriors” of the Right are circling Talarico as if he has stuck a stick in the middle of their mound.
Paxton has already called Talarico a “vegan,” as if such an appellation equals membership in a satanic cult. A bemused Tallarico responded, “I’m an 8th-generation Texan and I have been eating bar-b-que my entire life.”
Inexplicably Paxton then labeled him a transgender candidate.
Speaking with a conservative podcast host earlier this month, Paxton complained that everything Talarico says “is as far from the gospel of Jesus Christ as could possibly be imagined,” and darkly alluded to Jesus’s remark that it would be better to tie a millstone around one’s neck and dive into the sea than to mislead God’s children.
Paxton sounds like President Trump claiming Talarico is “insulting to Jesus.” I wonder if Trump was wearing his Jesus costume when he made this ludicrous remark.
According to Allie Beth Stuckey, a Plano, Texas, native who is a popular evangelical writer and podcaster, “Talarico is a leftist atheist’s idea of a good Christian.” Stuckey, whose lack of theological understanding is only topped by her bad rhetoric, went on to proclaim that Talarico was “a progressive culture warrior in lockstep with the secular world,” completely “uninterested in foundational Christian principles like sin, repentance, or salvation.” Piling on, a spokesperson for the conservative group Turning Point USA accused Talarico of speaking “the language of an evangelical while completely undermining the central truth claims of the Scripture.”
Where are these off-the-wall accusations originating? Have they not heard Talarico insist on loving neighbors and enemies, not seeking revenge, and following the teachings of Jesus? These arguments are as disgusting as Paxton’s lack of character.
And it’s not even hot weather in Texas yet. The venom will increase exponentially between June and November – prime hot weather for fire ants in Texas.
Why such an outpouring of disdain for Talarico? To understand means returning to the scene of the Scopes Trial a century ago in Dayton, Tennessee. Clarence Darrow embarrassed fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan and Baltimore Sun news reporter H. L. Mencken made such fun of these Christians they disappeared from the public eye for decades. Since Scopes, evangelical resentment has grown deeper. In attacking Talarico, they are attacking a century of modernist, liberal and progressive Christians.
In this sense, I believe that the angst and anger of conservative evangelicals is more akin to that of young Saul, the zealous Pharisee, than it is to any kind of righteousness that derives from God. In Acts 9:1, Luke describes the pathos of Saul: “Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and asked for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any that belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” This biblical description fits evangelical attitudes like a fine leather glove – an amalgamation of perceived persecution, bitterness, anger, revenge, and a need to strike out at the enemy.
Ellen Davis, Duke Divinity School, observes that “It is a sad fact of history that authoritative texts held in common but read differently are less likely to create mutual sympathy than bitter division between religious communities.” This is exactly what we see taking place in the attacks on Talarico.
Evangelical insistence on character and moral behavior has crashed right into a limit: their love for power. Lovers of the Ten Commandments, the holiness code of Leviticus, the moral strictures of some passages in Paul, have been driven to deny the necessity of integrity, truth-telling, moral conduct and ethical practices. Once you elect a president who committed adultery with a porn star and then paid to cover up the moment, the barn door has swung open and all the cattle in Texas are free on the range.
Paxton is small potatoes compared to Trump, but he’s riding Trump’s willingness to work his way through disobeying all the Ten Commandments. This means that evangelicals – who claim to be lovers of Jesus and followers of the Son of God – are scrambling to offer justifications and rationalizations for supporting candidates without a shred of moral character.
For instance, evangelical preacher Josh Howerton, attempts to push the camel through the eye of the needle: “Ken Paxton has personal baggage. I don’t deny that . . . [But] Here’s the truth: I would rather vote for almost anyone else who is going to at least advocate for conservative ‘policies’ over a literal heretic who wears my faith like a skin suit, advocates for policies that harm children, [and] endorses immorality.”
The problem, of course, is Howerton defines “faith” only from his Southern Baptist perspective, and his view departs significantly from the faith of the Christian Church across the centuries.
Talarico faces an army of evangelical apologists in the Texas senate race. Every MAGA preacher in Texas will stand on his fire ant hill believing he is on top of Mount Sinai delivering the thundering judgments of God to an ungodly people.
The angels in heaven will be laughing so hard they will be crying at these little would-be gods pontificating from their small mound of a Texas pest.
Sinking Further and Further Below Their Projections: The Facts of Ark Encounter Attendance
by William Trollinger
In 2013 Ark Encounter sold the little town of Williamstown on the idea of issuing $62 million worth of junk bonds to get the Ark up and running, a sweet deal sweetened even more by the agreement that 75% of what Ark Encounter would pay in property taxes over the next three decades would instead go to paying off the loan.
Central to the sales pitch made by Ken Ham and colleagues was the “Ark Encounter, LLC Feasibility Report,” which was presented to Williamstown officials, and which included “Visitation Projections.” On the first page of this section there is the confident claim that “the Ark Encounter is expected to attract between 1.2 million and 2.0 million visitors (or an estimated average of 1.6 million visitors) during the first year of operation.” And this would be just the beginning. Later in the report, in the “Financial Projections” section, there is the prediction that there would be “Annual Attendance Growth” in the first ten years of the Ark’s existence. 4% annual increase would be the norm, but there would be a few years (thanks to new exhibits) in which there would be a 10% growth in attendance.
Using the “estimated average of 1.6 million visitors” in the first year, here are the projected attendance numbers contained in the feasibility study:
- Year 1: 1,600,000
- Year 2: 1,664,000 (4% increase)
- Year 3: 1,730,560 (4% increase)
- Year 4: 1,903,616 (10% increase)
- Year 5: 1,979,761 (4% increase)
- Year 6: 2,177,737 (10% increase)
- Year 7: 2,264,846 (4% increase)
- Year 8: 2,491,331 (10% increase)
- Year 9: 2,590,984 (4% increase)
Not to put too fine a point on it, Ark Encounter has not come close to meeting these projected attendance numbers. Each month the indefatigable Daniel Phelps – founder and president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society – asks Williamstown officials for the total amount collected that month from the safety fee, a number which gives us a clear picture of Ark attendance.
And here are the actual attendance numbers:
- Year 1(JY 2016-JE 2017): est. 800,000 (50% of projected attendance)
- Year 2 (JY 2017-JE 2018): 865,761 (52% of projected attendance)
- Year 3 (JY 2018-JE 2019): 875,882 (51% of projected attendance)
- Year 4 (JY 2019-JE 2021): 841,772 (44% of projected attendance)
- Given the impact of COVID on Ark attendance, I left out March 2020-February 2021
- Year 5 (JY 2021-JE 2022): 775,731 (39% of projected attendance)
- Year 6 (JY 2022-JE 2023): 782,660 (36% of projected attendance)
- Year 7 (JY 2023-JE 2024): 764,258 (34% of projected attendance)
- Year 8 (JY 2024-JE 2025): 682,101 (27% of projected attendance)
- Year 9 (JY 2025-JE 2026): 664, 813 (26% of projected attendance)
- For May-June 2026 I used the attendance numbers from May-June 2025. If history is any guide, this may serve to overestimate Year 9 attendance.
Note that Ark Encounter has never gotten close to the 1.2 million attendance mark that was projected to be the lowest possible attendance in the first year. And as each year passes the Ark sinks further and further behind the numbers contained in the feasibility report, numbers that helped convince Williamstown to issue $62m of junk bonds, and to forego 75% of the Ark’s property taxes.
What a government subsidy . . . and this does not include the $1.825 million/year sales tax rebate from the state of Kentucky. And as one can see by driving through Williamstown, and as is made clear in the wonderful documentary, We Believe In Dinosaurs, this little town has not enjoyed the economic benefits that it hoped would come from subsidizing the Ark.
These are facts. And it would be lovely if Ken Ham would acknowledge all or even some of these facts.
But that’s not happening. Ark Encounter is doing God’s work, and critics who point out inconvenient facts about the Ark are at war with God. End of story.
When it comes to the Bible, the Vicar of Christ trumps the Apostle of Trump
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
Robert Jeffress, pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church and Fox News contributor, is never at a loss for words. He invents sound bites in his head for public consumption. The more outrageous, divisive, and hate-suggestive, the better. Jeffress is a Texas-sized “red meat” kind of guy.
And he has been a gusher of misleading claims on behalf of President Trump for more than a decade. Historian John Fea has dubbed Jeffress one of Trump’s “court preachers.” Texas Monthly headlined him as “Trump’s Apostle.”
His latest bit of rhetorical “rare steak”: “It looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the pope has.”
Since I inhabit a world where credentials still matter, I have to point out that Pope Leo XIV has a Master of Divinity degree and a Ph.D. in canon law. To state the obvious, he is a man very well acquainted with the Bible.
On the other hand, Trump is not.
Trump knows less about the Bible than an Amish second grader in Ohio. The man “knows neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).
Yes, Trump has been a Bible salesman. He held aloft a copy of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, upside down, in a photo op outside an Episcopal Church in Washington to claim that God supported his attack on peaceful protestors. But he is not a man of the Bible.
When Mr. Trump was asked what his favorite Bible verse is, he managed to say, “an eye for an eye.” This puts Mr. Trump in league with a host of biblically illiterate Baptists who when asked by the pastor at Wednesday night supper, “What’s your favorite Bible verse,” blurt out “Jesus wept.”
Trump seems more like the character in the movie “Metropolitan” who confesses that he has never read the Bible, “but I have opinions about it.” While Trump has denied keeping a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by his bed, the idea is more plausible than him having a Bible by his bed.
More than this, Trump doesn’t speak the language of the Bible. Trump’s vocabulary has no biblical footprint. He fills his rambling speeches with hyperbole, untruthful, often incoherent claims. He mixes in threats, profanity, outrage and constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery unrelated to the Bible.
Then there’s Rev. Robert Jeffress, and his very unproblematic and politically convenient reading of Romans 13:1-7:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there Is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval, for it is God’s agent for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s agents, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them: taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.
Here’s the case Jeffress makes for the meaning of Romans 13: “Look, the godly principle here is that governments have one responsibility, and that is Romans 13 …. avenge evil-doers. God gives government the power of the sword, of capital punishment, of executing wrong-doers.”
Jeffress views the Bible as self-interpreting. For Jeffress Romans 13 settles all arguments about Trump’s border wall, the deportation of all immigrants, the DACA program, the war with Iran, the desire to imprison leading Democrats and remove all Muslims from the US.
Romans 13 serves as Trump’s template for doing whatever he wants to do. Blow up fishing boats in the Caribbean? Romans 13. Invade Venezuela, take the president of the country hostage and return him to the US for trial? Romans 13. Bomb Iran and kill Muslim school children? Romans 13.
And here’s the irony. Interpreting the Bible for himself, Jeffress misreads a biblical passage while attempting to prove Trump knows his Bible.
On the other hand, Pope Leo reads the Bible in the context of the Church. He assumes Scripture can be interpreted only in the context of an “interpretative community” – the Roman Catholic Church. The Church is prior to Scripture. The meaning of Scripture is not left to common sense, not left to individual, private interpretation. Scripture is interpreted in light of the Church.
The Eastern Orthodox Church also insist Scripture and tradition reflect all readings. Georges Florosky, in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, argues that “Only within the Church is it revealed as a whole and not broken up into separate texts, commandments, and aphorisms.”
The Episcopal Church centers interpretation in Scripture, Tradition and Reason. United Methodists add Experience to the three-legged stool of Anglican belief.
Anabaptist theologian James McClendon adds, “The church, as the apostolic community, necessarily reads (in community) the apostolic writings, the Old Testament, and the New Testament.”
Scripture has no original, fixed meaning. Scripture. Texts of Scripture do not have a single meaning limited to the biblical era. Scripture has multiple possible meanings. Faithful interpretation of Scripture involves participation in a Church where the Bible is read in community.
Jeffress and his fellow MAGA preachers waving their verses of Scripture in the air look like the prophet of Baal, I Kings 18 tells the story: “They limped about the altar that they had made. “At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, ‘Cry aloud!’ As midday passed, they raved on until the time of the offering of the oblation, but there was no voice, no answer, and no response” (I Kings 18:27, 29).
Jeffress has a narrow, restrictive reading of Romans 13. He rips it from his larger context of Romans 12 – 13 to construct his own personal view of evil and the government’s role in stamping out evil. Jeffress strays far from the opening of Romans 12 – “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:1 – 2).
I find Jeffress utilizing an interpretative framework exposed to subjectivity and arbitrary methods. Historian John Fea says, “The problem is that Jeffress defines the evil from which the government should protect us according to his own reading of the Bible.” His reading of Romans 13 sounds more like the MAGA evangelical playbook than an honest understanding of Scripture.
Jeffress’ reading of Romans 13 has nothing of Paul’s insistence the present era is passing away, Paul’s proclamation that “Jesus is Lord” not Caesar, Paul’s assertion that our true citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) and that every ruler and authority and power as being done away with in preparation for Christ’s reign (I Corinthians 15:24).
Ironically, Jeffress reads Romans 13 through a Constantinian lens, marrying church to state in an authoritarian, cruel and coercive system. Nothing could be less Pauline. Paul and the Church had no desire to take the state or replace the Emperor or want a Christian to be the Emperor. That would be a far too conservative politics.
Instead, Paul preaches the ceaseless, exuberant good news. There’s been a break between God and the pagan world, the power of Christ and the Pax Romana, the lordship of Christ and the lordship of Caesar. As Stanley Hauerwas puts it, Paul “does not see in Christ one religious option among others. He sees in Christ nothing less than the whole of creation and all of humanity under God’s final judgment and grace. . . . Paul is uncompromisingly focused on a single, incomparable, final, and exclusive theological reality which constitutes, includes, and determines all other reality: Jesus Christ.”
A new reality formed in the resurrection of Jesus. A new mode of being was created even though Caesar was still on the throne. The new order is one of peace, persuasion and working out the perfect will of God.
Jeffress turns a blind eye to how often government is unjust and cruel. Jeffress’ argument crashes against the politics of our modern democratic nation where authority derives immediately and ultimately from the people. What Romans 13 does so admirably is point out that no government, including Trump’s one-man rule, is a law entirely unto itself. Ultimately, Romans 13 tells us, “God is God and we are not.”
I conclude Jeffress is wrong at every turn. He asks Romans 13:1 – 7 to carry a weight it can’t lift. The New Testament never approves of Caesar in any form.
Pope Leo not only knows far more about the Bible than President Trump (it was not a fair contest), but he also knows far more about the Bible than Rev. Jeffress. The Vicar of Christ trumps the Apostle of Trump.
Trump Isn’t Jesus: A Message from Answers in Genesis
by William Trollinger
Over the past three decades, I have had the great privilege of teaching M.A./Ph.D. seminars on American evangelicalism/fundamentalism in the Religious Studies Department here at the University of Dayton. The students have been terrific, and it has not been difficult to convince them that this topic matters in contemporary America, given the ascendancy of the Religious Right, and given (much of) white evangelicalism’s obsequious devotion to Donald Trump. In light of all this, the question keeps coming up in seminar: Does the Bible and theology still matter to evangelicals and fundamentalists, or is it all simply right-wing politics?
Well, it turns out that there is evidence that there are indeed fundamentalists whose commitment to the Bible places limits on their allegiance to the Trump regime. And some of this evidence comes from an unlikely quarter: Answers in Genesis (AiG).
Roger Patterson – who has his B.S. Ed. in Biology from Montana State University – is AiG’s Education Specialist. In his AiG video, “Trump Isn’t Jesus,” he responds to the now infamous meme put out by the President. Rejecting Trump’s ridiculous after-the-fact claim that the image actually depicts him as a Red Cross doctor, Patterson observes that he “wasn’t really surprised” by the meme: “Why? Because it matches the character of President Trump and the people he has surrounded himself with.”
Patterson’s particular target is White House “faith advisor” Paula White, who has compared Trump’s political travails to what Jesus went through on the way to the Cross, and who assured the President that “’Because of his resurrection, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious. And I believe that the Lord said to tell you [that] because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hands to.’”
Patterson responds:
This is nothing but prosperity gospel garbage, and blasphemy that should make any Christian cringe. . . . Despite Paula White’s claims, God is not interested in promoting the proud and making all they do to prosper. How do I know that? God’s Word makes this very clear. In James 4 we read . . . “God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.” That’s the message President Trump needs to hear from Paula White. No one has paid the price Jesus has paid, and no one gets to claim the glory that he alone deserves.
This is a striking rebuke from AiG. Of course, none of this is coming from the mouth of Ken Ham. More importantly, AiG has ignored and continues to ignore what has been a decade of Trump blaspheny; see, for example, the fact that – after years promoting the QAnon notion that liberal secularists promoted and engaged in pedophilia – Ham and company have been absolutely silent about the Epstein files and Trump’s connection to this predatory pedophile.
Obviously, much more could be said about Ham’s and AiG’s fealty to the Trump regime. Still, Roger Patterson’s video is a heartening sign that there remain fundamentalists who, in the end, are more identified with the Gospel of Jesus Christ than to the reign of Donald Trump.
The Flat-Earth Flank of Young-Earth Creationism
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.
William Trollinger’s recent post “Answers in Genesis: The Bible Is to Be Read Literally, Except When It’s Not” mentioned how young-earth creationists, such as the folks at Answers in Genesis, are outflanked by biblical geocentrists like Gerardus Bouw. “[I]n fundamentalism,” Trollinger explained, “the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that ‘I am more literal than thou.’” In a comment, I noted, “The Institute for Creation Research’s Duane Gish once complained that a scientist with whom he debated had hit below the belt by comparing the Creation Research Society with the Flat Earth Society. ‘Not a single member’ of the former was a member of the latter, he protested.” I added, “A letter subsequently published in Flat Earth News set him straight.”
Having alluded to the episode, I may as well tell the whole story. Duane Gish (1921–2013) was the most avid debater associated with the Institute for Creation Research. His tendency to try to overwhelm his opponent with a flood of arguments was so famous it won the enduring sobriquet from Eugenie C. Scott of the Gish Gallop. But he wasn’t invulnerable as a debater. And when the paleontologist Michael Voorhies, in a debate with Gish, charged that the Creation Research Society resembled the Flat Earth Society, the accusation apparently stung. Gish took umbrage. Writing in the May 1979 issue of the ICR’s periodical Acts & Facts (no longer on-line), he protested, “Not a single member” of the Creation Research Society was a member of the Flat Earth Society.
Subsequently, a letter was published in the September 9, 1979, issue of Flat Earth News, the periodical of the International Flat Earth Research Society of America, operated by Charles K. Johnson (1924–2001) in Lancaster, California. The author, identified only by his initials “G. J. D.,” complained of Gish that “[h]e doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as I belong to both [the Creation Research Society and the Flat Earth Society], and I am writing to him to let him know that he is wrong.” A few years later, Robert Schadewald — a science writer with a strong interest in flat-earthery — explained in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer that “Gish may have created a fact. To protest this attack on the flat-earthers, ‘G. J. D.’ dropped his membership in the Creation Research Society.”
I was reminded of the episode in 2019, when I was preparing a talk on the flat-earth movement. Robert Schadewald died in 2000, but I knew that his sister Lois Schadewald prepared his book on flat-earthery, The Plane Truth (2015), for publication, so I asked her to look through his notes for G. J. D.’s identity. Lo and behold: G. J. D. was Gerald J. Dodelin (1905–1988) of Philadelphia. Amusingly, Dodelin, according to Schadewald’s notes, “was thrown out of the Flat Earth Society in about 1981 for the crime of talking to me!” Schadewald too had been expelled from the society, although not before Johnson asked him to take over running it, “an offer he declined” — as Christine Garwood nicely puts it in her Flat Earth (2007) — “due to his globular convictions.”
Schadewald’s notes revealed little further about Dodelin, except that his involvement with flat-earthery was of long standing. In 1969, he wrote to Samuel Shenton (1903–1971), the sign-writer who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in Dover, England, in 1956, expressing interest in joining. (Johnson’s society was in effect the continuation of Shenton’s.) I wasn’t able to add significantly, although I found a 1956 letter from Dodelin in a Catholic magazine called the Liguorian in which he complained about a previous article that described certain chapters of the Bible (e.g., Esther) as largely fictional. (The editors replied that the fact that those chapters are fictional doesn’t mean that they’re not inspired.) Dodelin’s complaint tends to confirm that he accepted Biblical inerrantism.
When Johnson died in 2001, his society boasted about 100 members, down from (what Johnson claimed was) its mid-1990s peak of 3500 members, according to the obituary for Johnson in The New York Times. The young-earth creationists at the Institute of Creation Research and Answers in Genesis might have assumed that their flank would be generally safe from the flat-earthers. But flat-earthery came roaring back, evidently enabled by the internet. In a 2025 on-line survey conducted by Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire among a nationally representative sample, 10 percent of respondents agreed with “The Earth is flat, not shaped like a globe.” It was not a fluke: Hamilton reported the same result from a 2021 survey conducted by telephone.
Apparently Answers in Genesis is especially perturbed by the threat to its flank. Danny R. Faulkner, who is listed on its website as a researcher, author, and speaker from 2013 to 2025, not only regularly inveighed against flat-earthery online but also published a book — Falling Flat: A Refutation of Flat-Earth Claims (2019) — devoted to doing so. As I noted in my review for Skeptical Inquirer, about half of his book offers a competent discussion of the science. But Faulkner’s historical treatment is tendentious. In particular, I wrote, “he neglects the fact that for a century and a half, the leading figures of flat-earthery not only identified themselves as Bible-believing Christians but also cited verses from the Bible in the service of their flat-earth belief.”
Concluding my review, I acknowledged that today’s flat-earthers, though still invoking the arguments of their precursors, are not so visibly committed to the inerrancy of the Bible. But, I added, “the diminished emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible among flat-earthers ought to be of no comfort to Faulkner, because biblical inerrantism is on the decline anyway.” As evidence of the decline, I cited a 2017 poll from Gallup that found that 24 percent of respondents — fewer than one in four — agreed that “the Bible is the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word” comes closest to describing their views about the Bible. The decline continues: according to a 2022 poll from Gallup, only 20 percent of respondents — one in five — favored the inerrantist option.
Answers in Genesis: The Bible Is to Be Read Literally, Except When It’s Not
by William Trollinger
At the height of the pandemic, Georgia Purdom of Answers in Genesis (AiG) instructed Christians to ignore the medical experts and evolutionist academics (some of whom teach at supposedly Christian colleges!) who were recommending that people get COVID vaccines, given that this is “a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.”
Now Purdom has turned her attention to making the fundamentalist case that there are no contradictions in the Bible, her example being the death of Judas. The ever-attentive Paul Braterman looks at Purdom’s argument in a recent blog post at Primate’s Progress:
Biblical exegesis; how did Judas die? Answers in Genesis has the answer.
Matthew 27:5 And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.
But Acts 1:18 Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.
How can these both be true?
No problem, says Answers in Genesis. Since the Bible contains nothing inaccurate, both of these must be the case, and therefore they must represent two perspectives on the same event. But bear in mind that the bowels are held firmly in place by the abdominal muscles and skin. So what must have happened is this; first of all he went and hanged himself, but after a while the rope snapped, flesh goes off quickly in the hot Mediterranean sun, and his rotten corpse exploded.
That’s exactly what they say. I am not making any of this up.
So what’s my point? My point is that the Answers in Genesis style of literalism is absurd, offensive, and in its own way deeply irreverent.
Absurd, offensive, irreverent. Yes. Ludicrous. Yes.
And yet it turns out that, as is the case for all those who hold to a strict inerrantist view of the Bible, Purdom and her AiG compatriots are also, to understate the case, extraordinarily selective when it comes to their biblical literalism.
Let’s take the example of geocentrism. As Susan Trollinger and I discuss in Righting America at the Creation Museum, “one could easily assume,” from the multiplicity of biblical texts to this effect, that AiG would “proclaim and defend the idea that the sun revolves around a stationary Earth.” See, for example, Joshua 10:12-13:
On the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the LORD; and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in mid-heaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.
Seems pretty clear that the biblical author is describing a geocentric universe!
The folks at AiG, however, beg to differ. They reject such a reading as “hyper-literal” (as opposed, I suppose, to what Purdom does with the death of Judas).
But they have a problem. As Susan Harding makes clear in her wonderful study, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, in fundamentalism the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that “I am more literal than thou.” Enter the late Gerardus Bouw, who – as director of the Association for Biblical Astronomy – went after the AiG young Earth creationists with great enthusiasm:
So, if Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is a clear statement that God created, then Ecclesiastes 1:5, “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose,” is just as clear a statement of geocentricity. And with that, we come to the real issue: Is the Scripture to be the final authority on all matters which it touches . . . The issue is final authority, is it to be the words of God, or the words of men.
So the folks at AiG are absurd, offensive, irreverent, AND quite inconsistent in their biblical literalism.
But in their defense, there are and can be no consistent biblical literalists. Read this verse literally, do not read that verse literally. No matter how often inerrantists argue for a plain, common sense reading of the text, interpretation is always required – and for these Protestant fundamentalists, there is no interpretive magisterium.
So it goes with biblical inerrancy.
“The Testament of Ann Lee”: A Review
by Vincent Miller
Vincent Miller is the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton and a Sustainability Scholar at its Hanley Sustainability Institute. He is the editor of The Theological and Ecological Vision of Laudato Si’: Everything is Connected (T&T Clark). He is writing a book about hope in the Anthropocene. This review was originally published in Commonweal (see the link at the end).
I have sat tearfully through the final credits of many films in the comforting dark of The Neon—Dayton’s arthouse cinema. But never before have I openly wept with everyone else in the theater. Others who have seen The Testament of Ann Lee report the same experience.
A biopic of Mother Ann Lee, the leader of the “United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” commonly known as the “Shakers,” is an unlikely project. The film’s writers have spoken about the difficulty of crafting an elevator pitch for a musical based on songs and dialogue from the writings of an eighteenth-century religious sect. The Shakers strived for millenarian perfection: creating a celibate, pacifist, socialist community that practiced gender and racial equality. Today they are remembered for graceful furniture design, “naïve” celibacy, and a dubious legend about Ann’s invention of the circular saw. Aaron Copeland and Martha Graham played the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” as a motif of American innocence in Appalachian Spring. The Shakers’ theologically rich images, such as Hannah Cohoon’s Tree of Life, adorn scarves in the kind of catalogues sent to public-radio subscribers.
The Testament of Ann Lee opens in far less domesticated territory: dancing figures emerge from the mist, their movements inscrutable and discomfiting, their breathing rhythmic and sharp. It is not clear where the scene is going. The film’s director, Mona Fastvold, describes the choice to make Testament a musical (although she isn’t sure it qualifies as one) as an attempt to honor the Shakers’ form of life. Daniel Blumberg’s soundtrack and Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography are as central to the film as its plot or dialogue. The musical form lends a liturgical frame to a biopic that might otherwise collapse into voyeuristic sensationalism. Early Shaker worship is portrayed as a disorienting blend of Georgian propriety and religious frenzy: the characters pray and confess sin with breaths and moans that verge on the orgasmic. Their individual movements and vocalizations coalesce into and emerge from communal rhythms.
The pre-released songs from the film’s soundtrack are tellingly safe. “Hunger and Thirst” reworks a Shaker hymn in the mode of contemporary praise-and-worship music. “Woman Clothed by the Sun” sounds like Christian alt-folk. Both are beautiful and compelling, but conventional. The rest of the soundtrack is strange, disturbing, and far more powerful. Blumberg’s setting of “I Never Did Believe” conveys the disorienting power of Shaker worship in a way utterly unlike contemporary praise music. The scene takes place in a British manor, where members of the Wardley Society—the group from whom the Shakers emerged—have gathered. The music begins with eerie string saws, cries, and rhythmic moaning, out of which emerges a quavering Georgian tenor singing “I never did believe / that I ever could be saved / without giving all to God.” Rowlson-Hall’s choreography captures the interplay of freedom and order in this raucous worship in which the “Shaking Quakers” (as they were mockingly called) move in individual ecstasy and flow together into swells, surrounding and lifting up those who cry out the refrain. After three days of this, constables arrive to break up the gathering and drag Ann away. The sequence ends with Ann (played by Amanda Seyfried) bloodied, in prison, singing the final verse: “So I freely give the whole / My body and my soul / To the Lord God, Amen.”
I watched Testament a few days after ICE agents had killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti. That week, Bruce Springsteen released the “Streets of Minneapolis” and Tom Morello performed “Killing in the Name” in Minneapolis, shouting with the crowd “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Grief and outrage were in the air. But it was Seyfried’s voice singing the Shaker verse of total commitment that echoed in my head that week, more powerfully illuminating the demands of our dark moment than those protest songs.
Ann’s body—violated and ill, in labor and in ecstasy—is at the center of the film. Her revulsion against “fleshly cohabitation” is portrayed from early childhood. Ann marries Abraham Standerin, a Quaker blacksmith who brings a libertine novel with pornographic woodcuts into their bedroom for use as a marital manual, lauding the book for its “unrelenting attack on the traditional clergy.” There follows a series of four awful conceptions, labors, and infant deaths. If Ann is portrayed as barely consenting to Abraham’s sexual impositions, she is active in motherhood: laboring through exhaustion and hemorrhage, expressing milk in a desperate attempt to nourish an infant too ill to nurse, clinging passionately to her stillborn child. Seyfried (with the aid of a dizzying array of prosthetics) appears naked throughout these excruciating scenes.
Some have criticized this portrayal of overwhelming trauma for reducing Lee’s faith to a compensation for suffering and loss. But something far more interesting is going on here. Blumberg’s setting of the Shaker hymn “Beautiful Treasures” combines a nursery tune, which we first hear hummed by Ann’s mother, with what sounds like a horror soundtrack. Love and grief are mixed with tension and dread. Ann’s sexual subordination and heroic yet futile struggle to give life to her dying children are interspersed with scenes of ecstatic freedom and sisterly support as she dances in worship with the Shakers. The bridge of the song—and climax of the sequence—is a grief-stricken wail, not of madness but of Ann in labor. The film is founded on this interplay of motherly love and death, bodily vulnerability and fierce resolve.
Fastvold has said that she does not share Ann Lee’s faith but found herself “moved deeply” by her “implausible” prophecies. Her statement that Ann took “horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world” reads, at first glance, like artist-statement speak. But her film—by means of drama, music, and dance—conveys this connection with the utmost seriousness and power. Ann’s cry of labor returns later in the film, this time ecstatic, ferocious, and unbound: opening the sequence “Building and Growing,” where the Shakers dance in the sunlit warmth of a beautiful Shaker barn. Seyfried’s wailing visage in this scene provides the cover image for the soundtrack album.
The connection between natural and spiritual motherhood, between childbirth and spiritual labor, is true to the historical Ann Lee. While it is unclear whether she considered herself to be the second incarnation of Christ, she definitely did consider herself to be “Mother.” If her experience of reproductive loss was behind her condemnation of lustful “natural generation,” it’s also true that she repeatedly used words such as “labor” and “travail” to describe her spiritual struggle and her ministry to “birth” children into “regeneration” in Christ. As her later followers wrote:
Ordained of God…to be the first Mother of all souls in the regeneration, she had, not only to labor and travail for her own redemption, through scenes of tribulation, and to set the example of righteousness, and mark out the line of self-denial and the cross for her followers, but also to see and feel the full depth of man’s loss, and the pain and judgment which every description of lost souls were under. Hence she was destined to pass through inexpressible sufferings for their redemption.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Seyfried’s powerful performance in Fastvold’s film gives voice to Ann now amid the rise of an exclusionary Christian nationalism, when pious politicians attempt to justify violent deportations with platitudes about the limits of love, while ordinary people risk their lives in the streets to care for those who are not their kin but are nonetheless their neighbors.
(For the complete review in Commonweal, see here.)
MAGA Evangelicals Attack James Talarico, or, the Never-Ending War on the Social Gospel Continues
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
The fierce MAGA evangelicals’ attack on Texas Representative and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico belongs to an ancient blood feud between fundamentalist/evangelical Christians and moderate/liberal Christians.
Evangelicals remain known by the enemies they selected in the late 19th century: Evolution, biblical criticism and the social gospel. All three enemies still unsettle the evangelical mind.
Now, deep in the heart of Texas, we are in the early stages of an all-out war against the social gospel. That is, an all-out war against James Talarico. And let’s be clear. It’s not that Talarico is preaching a new gospel. His message has been preached for generations. And it’s not that Talarico is preaching an anti-biblical gospel. His message is grounded in the Scriptures.
But it’s a gospel message that evangelicals simply cannot abide and have not been able to abide for 150 years.
The term social gospel refers to a Protestant movement that came to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Promoters of the social gospel sought to apply Christian principles to social problems.
In the social gospel, heaven and hell can wait. Meeting human need in material, fleshly, bodily ways has to happen now. Practices and politics meeting human need constitute salvation. The radical community called “Church” is more important than individual salvation.
Originally both liberals and evangelicals supported the social gospel. That is to say, evangelicals were for the social gospel before they were against it. Randall Balmer reminds us that evangelicals used to support women’s rights, labor unions, care for the poor, and voting rights.
But those days are gone, and have been gone since the 1920s. Today evangelical preachers are preaching a gospel with none of the politics of Jesus (that is, nothing from Matthew 25 and nothing from most of Luke’s gospel), nothing about economics, nothing about health care, nothing about care of the stranger, nothing about support of LGBTQ+ individuals.
Theirs is an empty gospel, “all hat and no cattle.”
Evangelicals attacking Talarico today are just carrying on an old family tradition. Their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers and great, great grandfathers hated and berated the social gospel.
Two prominent critics of the social gospel in the early 20th century were William Bell Riley and J. Frank Norris. Compare the arguments of Riley and Norris with the attacks on Talarico, and one finds that they are the same boring, contrarian arguments.
Riley’s idea of the government’s role was to “restrain evil. Today Robert Jeffress says, “Governments have one responsibility …. to avenge evil-doers.” He then rephrased, “The goal of government is to protect us and leave us alone to practice our faith.”
William V. Trollinger, Jr., in God’s Empire, refers to an article Riley wrote in School and Church: “In this piece Riley asserted that a modernist confederacy had recently emerged which sought to unify Protestantism around the banner of the social gospel. This confederacy was such a threat that ‘the life of the true Church is at stake, and the interests of the Kingdom are in the balance.’” With a nice touch of historical sarcasm, Trollinger goes on to say: “Fortunately for Christendom, the Holy Spirit had inspired Christian leaders like Riley to create a countermovement to fight the modernists.”
For J. Frank Norris, the social gospel was of one piece with the higher criticism of Scripture, evolution and liberalism. His sermons attacked modernism as an attack on America. As Barry Hankins notes in God’s Rascal, Norris believed “the whole American way of life was threatened.”
And now, a likable, cherub-faced neophyte politician pops up in Texas proclaiming a gospel of compassion, a social gospel of care for the body, for all bodies. Evangelicals can’t stand to be told that there is a social gospel rooted in the teachings of Jesus.
Texas seems an odd choice for a revival of the social gospel, but I think the Holy Spirit, from time to time, calls certain ones to make clear the meaning of the Gospel. The Spirit often calls these holy ones into action in the most unexpected places. So while the Holy Spirit could have called someone to run for Senate as a social gospel preacher in Vermont, Washington, or Wisconsin, I think it is poetic justice to call James Talarico to raise the banner of the social gospel in Texas. Maybe God made Texas in order to give the social gospel a vast land to conquer.
I think one reason that Talarico spooks MAGA evangelicals is because he looks, talks and smiles like another Texas deeply involved in politics as a professing Christian, David Barton. The difference: Talarico speaks truth, while Barton has made a career of concocting an untrue revisionist history of America and selling it to conservatives as truth.
The arguments swirling around Talarico are as old as Western civilization. Socrates knew this practice well. He named it dialectic, meaning argument as the process of sorting through a host of ideas about justice in search of what is the most true, most good.
Of course, there is good argument and bad argument. And the hyperbolic ad homimen outrage of MAGA evangelicals is uncivilized argument. Calling Talarico names doesn’t make the social gospel less true or less just.
But these ad hominem attacks grow out of the reality that evangelicals are more obsessed with rooting out the social gospel than Senator Joe McCarthy was with exposing all communists. McCarthy is a good model for MAGA evangelicals because they consider the social gospel as socialism. The MAGA attack on the social gospel is leftover anti-communism.
Two towering Americans paved the way for Talarico. Walter Rauschenbusch and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rauschenbusch basically wrote the social gospel; Roosevelt implemented it.
The social gospel is in its second century of existence. Walter Rauschenbush, the intellectual and theological father of the social gospel, has been dead for 108 years. His book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, was published in 1907.
Rauschenbusch identified the economic exploitation of the poor as nothing less than a national sin. He argued, “The essential purpose of Christianity is to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God. , , , , The Christian Church has never undertaken to carry out this fundamental purpose of its existence.”
As long as evangelicals are counting the souls saved and the number baptized, as long as they are asking preachers, “How many you run?” (that is, “What is your church attendance?”) – instead of asking how many hungry have you fed, how many homeless have you housed, how many sick have you healed, and how many prisoners have you restored – the evangelical church will fail the gospel.
Evangelicals attacked Rauschenbusch for being soft on sin, badly mistaken on the nature and purpose of the church, and wrong about the second coming of Jesus and Scripture. In other words, he was not a Fundamentalist. But such attacks did not (and does not) make Rauschenbusch’s theology and the social gospel less true.
And then there’s Franklin Roosevelt. Talarico is not the first politician to embrace the social gospel. In the 1930’s Franklin Roosevelt promoted the values of community, cooperation, prudence, and sacrifice. With his Good Neighbor Policy and with his overhaul of the government, and as limited and flawed the New Deal was, Roosevelt has been the only president to ever attempt to legislate the Social Gospel into the soul of America.
But the values promoted by Roosevelt have been almost completely submerged by an evangelical leadership suspicious of – even opposed to – empathy.
Attacking the social gospel as if it were a form of secular politics – i.e., socialism – caused evangelicals to become the champions of capitalism, despite the fact that Jesus clearly says “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24), and despite the fact that Paul clearly connects the love of money (greed) with idolatry (Colossians 3:5).
In contrast, evangelicals have embraced wealth as a form of godliness, baptizing greed as virtue and empathy as vice, in the process blatantly contradicting the message of Jesus. With the inclusion of independent pentecostals into the evangelical circle, the prosperity gospel has found a church home.
Evangelicals are reaping the whirlwind because decisions made politically have consequences. To put it bluntly, wealth made war a necessity. Evangelicals would never admit we go to war to protect American wealth. But President Trump has said the quiet part out loud: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”
In contrast, Talarico represents the spirit of Rauschenbusch, Gladden, Fosdick and Roosevelt. He gives renewed hope to Christian churches taking the lead in radical social change.
Perhaps the opportunity of the church to liberate America from evangelical reduction of faith to the individual has arrived once more in Texas. Maybe the 19th century passion of evangelicals for the poor can bring about revival.
Think of the possibilities when an evangelical community adds the social gospel as part of its theological commitments. When an evangelical community returns to its historic roots. This is not an either/or, but, instead, a both/and possibility.
When this happens, we can all then sing the social gospel hymn of Katherine Lee Bates while we work together to reduce, even eliminate, the grinding inequalities in our nation:
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw
. . . . . .
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
In the Room Where Death Row Prisoners Say Final Goodbyes, He Learned He Would Live
By Liliana Segura
Last week we published an article on the planned execution of Sonny Burton, an horrifying commonplace in Alabama and America. But then, Burton’s death sentence was commuted, as wonderfully celebrated in this article by Liliana Segura in The Intercept. Check out The Intercept, and consider contributing to this beacon of independent journalism.
On the day after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey commuted his death sentence, halting his execution two days before he was supposed to die, Charles “Sonny” Burton sat in his wheelchair in a visiting room at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., drinking a Coke and eating a Reese’s peanut butter cup.
He could not stop smiling.
“I’m feeling wonderful,” Burton told me.
Burton, 75, wore white sneakers and a brace on his right hand, his tan quilted jacket and slacks fitting loosely over his thin frame. A tan helmet, given to him by the prison to protect from his occasional falls, sat on the table next to an array of photos taken with family earlier that day, along with a bag of quarters for the vending machines.
Burton identified the people in one of the photos for me. Several were still in the visiting room: his sister Eddie Mae Ellison, his son Charles Burton III, and his grandson Charles Burton IV. No sooner had one group of relatives left the visiting room than another showed up — a rolling family reunion.
Burton had been sitting in that same visiting room with his lawyers 24 hours earlier, on Tuesday, March 10, when his longtime paralegal Nancy Palombi got a phone call in Montgomery, 120 miles away. While the rest of the legal team was at the prison without access to their cellphones, Palombi had stayed behind to field any communications from the U.S. Supreme Court, which had just received their final filings aimed at stopping Burton’s execution.
Instead, she got a call from a reporter she knew. The reporter was screaming, “Have you heard?” The governor’s office had just sent out a press release with the subject line, “Update from Governor Kay Ivey: Charles L. Burton.” And that’s how Palombi learned that her client of 20 years would not be executed.
“I was the first member of the team to find out,” Palombi told me that morning, her voice still trembling with a mix of shock, joy, and relief.
Palombi called the prison and spoke to the warden’s secretary, who entered the visitation room with a smile on her face. She told Burton’s lead attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Matt Schulz, that he should call his paralegal right away. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, it happened,’” Schulz said. “But I still didn’t want to let myself believe it, because I didn’t know yet.”
Schulz rushed to his car, drove out of range from Holman’s cellphone blockers, and called Palombi. He then sped back.
Describing the scene the next day, Burton turned and pointed toward the hallway that runs along the perimeter of the visiting room. That’s where prison staff celebrated as the news spread on death row. Nurses and officers waved and gave him thumbs ups through the horizontal window slats. “Guards were saying, ‘Sonny got clemency! Sonny got clemency!’” Burton said.
A day later, everyone was still a bit shellshocked. Burton’s son, who had flown in from New York, got the news while loading up his rental car for the drive to Atmore. Burton’s sister was at the doctor’s office in Montgomery, where she saw a local news alert. She ran outside and dropped to her knees. “And then the tears just flowed,” she said.
For decades, the visiting room had been the site of agonizing goodbyes between the condemned and their loved ones in the hours before an execution. Now it was home to warm hugs and tranquil smiles, no one’s bigger than Burton’s. He invoked the famed blues harmonica player Snooky Pryor: “I’m too cool to move.”
Burton’s commutation was historic: the third time in the modern history of Alabama’s death penalty that a person facing execution received clemency by the governor. Ivey, a staunch Republican, has presided over 25 executions since she took office in 2017. Although she commuted the sentence of Burton’s neighbor, Rocky Myers, last year due to serious doubts over his guilt, few were optimistic that she would exercise such mercy again.
Burton would have been the ninth person executed using nitrogen gas in Alabama in just over two years. The method was adopted following complications carrying out lethal injection, a wider trend that has reshaped the landscape of executions across the country. The state’s last execution prompted a forceful dissent from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who described the psychological torture in visceral detail. “You want to breathe; you have to breathe,” she wrote. “But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.”
Burton’s commutation also came as a searing documentary about the state prison system, “The Alabama Solution,” was in the race to win an Oscar. The film, which was produced using footage from contraband cellphones, forced politicians to acknowledge the deadly conditions and inhumane punishments inflicted on people incarcerated in their state. On the day I visited Burton, lawmakers met in Montgomery to discuss legislation to impose oversight on Alabama’s prisons. It was this kind of public pressure that undoubtedly saved Burton’s life. “I would have 100 percent died without it,” Burton told me. In Montgomery, activists held vigils every Monday for weeks in front of the governor’s mansion, while downtown businesses posted flyers about Burton’s case in their front windows. On the eve of Ivey’s decision, two of Burton’s daughters led a march to the state Capitol to deliver petitions to her office.
The campaign for clemency was launched by Burton’s legal team, who believed they had nothing to lose. They highlighted Burton’s remorse, his advanced age and poor health, and, above all, his lack of culpability for the murder that sent him to death row. “This is one of those cases that shocks people,” Schulz said in a clemency film produced last year. “And it shocks people in a totally different way than most death penalty cases.”
Burton was 40 years old when he led a group of younger men in an armed robbery at an AutoZone in Talladega, Alabama. A 34-year-old father and military veteran named Doug Battle walked in as the crime was underway — and one of the young men fatally shot him in the back.
At first, Burton denied any role in either the robbery or the shooting. His apparent lack of remorse helped convince jurors at his 1992 trial that he should be punished as severely as the man who actually shot Battle, a 20-year-old named Derrick DeBruce, who had already been sent to death row. After a four-day trial, Burton, too, was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to die.
But a federal court eventually threw out DeBruce’s death sentence, finding that his lawyer failed to effectively represent him during the punishment phase of his trial. The Alabama attorney general’s office initially appealed the decision, contending that it would be “arguably unjust” to allow Burton to be executed for his co-defendant’s actions. But in 2015, the state agreed to reduce DeBruce’s punishment to life without parole. He died five years later.
The notion that Burton should now pay with his life for another man’s crime spurred outrage among people in Alabama and beyond. The campaign to save Burton was bolstered by six of the eight living jurors who voted to send him to death row, as well as by Battle’s daughter, Tori Battle, who was outspoken in her opposition to the execution. “What is the execution of Mr. Burton supposed to accomplish or solve?” she asked Ivey in a letter that was submitted as part of Burton’s 88-page clemency petition. “Is it for my father? For me? To deter crime? I honestly do not understand.”
The petition argued, first and foremost, that Burton never killed anyone. “He did not pull the trigger that killed Douglas Battle,” his lawyers wrote. In fact, he didn’t even witness the murder. “Mr. Burton was already outside of the AutoZone building where the shooting took place.” Although Alabama’s felony murder statute allows defendants to be held responsible for the actions of others, Burton was only supposed to be eligible for capital murder if he intended to take somebody’s life — and there was nothing to prove that this was the case.
The state’s star witness against Burton was a teenager named LuJuan McCants who agreed to testify in order to avoid the death penalty. He said that Burton had gathered the group with the intention of committing a robbery — and if something went wrong, “he said let him take care of it.” According to prosecutors, this directive proved that Burton intended to kill anyone who might stand in the way of the robbery. But even this weak evidence was undermined by McCants’s own testimony, as well as by an interrogation video discovered by Burton’s lawyers years after the trial. It showed McCants repeatedly telling investigators that Burton had not wanted anyone to get hurt — and that he’d been upset upon learning that DeBruce shot Battle.
Some of the jurors who spoke out against the execution said they were haunted by their decision. “I have questioned whether death is an appropriate punishment,” one woman wrote in a letter submitted with the clemency petition. “I have often thought about Mr. Burton’s mother, who was no doubt devastated by the sentence.”
But for most, it came down to the obvious unfairness of executing Burton for DeBruce’s crime. “Had I known the shooter would later be taken off death row,” one juror wrote, “I would not have voted for the death sentence.” Another juror wrote that Burton may have been the ringleader, “but if Charles Manson can get a life sentence for leading his group to kill many people, it is fair for Mr. Burton to serve life without parole.”
Like most people living on death row, Burton bears no resemblance to Charles Manson — or to the people Americans picture when they hear the term “worst of the worst.” His early life had many of the familiar hallmarks of those who are put to death in the United States: poverty, racism, childhood abuse, and trauma. By the time Alabama came close to executing him, he’d long since apologized for his actions and was in frequent pain from rheumatoid arthritis, unable to walk on his own.
But he was also lucky, he told me. If there was anything that sustained him during his years at Holman, it was a strong family structure, which many of his neighbors lack. Indeed, Burton’s clemency petition was filled with letters from relatives, pen pals, and advocates who described Burton as a positive and nurturing presence in their lives.
I was supposed to attend Burton’s execution — not as a media witness, but as one of the people placed on his personal list. Burton did not wish for his family to be subjected to his death, and his legal team decided that, should the killing move forward, they wanted the world to know what Alabama had done. They invited me and two other journalists to join them in the witness room.
One of them, Lee Hedgepeth, had already witnessed seven executions in Alabama, including three by nitrogen gas. The last one had been the longest to date, lasting 40 minutes. Schulz had seen two of his clients killed with nitrogen. Their accounts were harrowing: Terror and panic was visible on the faces of the condemned, who gasped and thrashed on the gurney. As Burton’s execution date neared, Schulz wondered how it would compare. Would his elderly client suffer more or less due to his age and poor health? Could his more shallow breathing cause the execution to last longer? Or would the fact that he does not have as much oxygen in his lungs to begin with mean it would be shorter?
What was certain was that executing Burton would have been a horrifying spectacle. Guards would have had to lift him onto the gurney, adjusting the thick black straps to fit more tightly over his withered body, and putting a mask over his face. Witnesses would then have watched as Alabama suffocated an elderly man, who killed no one, in the name of justice.
Instead, Burton is now poised to live out the rest of his days behind bars. On the day after our visit, he was moved out of the prison where he spent more than three decades and driven up to Kilby Correctional Facility outside Montgomery, where newly incarcerated people are housed before being transferred to their designated prisons. The move is sure to be a shock to the system for a man who has hardly begun to process the trauma of his near-execution and who has spent much of the past 10 years between his cell and the prison infirmary. After age 65, Burton told me, he slowed down. “I haven’t been outside in eight years,” he said.
In a less punitive system, it would be obvious that Burton should go home to spend the rest of his life with his family. As he said, “I ain’t got much longer to live.” His relatives harbor some hope that he may some day be eligible for medical release. But for now, according to Schulz, Burton was in good spirits when they spoke on the phone from his new location. “He said he knew many of the nurses there, and that they all were greeting, and treating, him warmly,” he said.
“And he’s alive,” Schulz added. On Thursday at 6 p.m., the hour he had been scheduled to die, Burton planned to eat ice cream at the same time as his attorneys and savor the feeling of gratitude. “God has given me a second chance,” Burton told me. This, he believed, was God’s work. “He put the right people in my path.”
