What the Jet Stream and Climate Change had to do with the Hottest Summer on Record − Remember all those Heat Domes?
by Shuang-Ye Wu
The folks at Answers in Genesis (AiG) work overtime to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Attacking scientists who make this case as “climate alarmists” who are part of a “climate cult,” AiG has produced a raft of publications all designed to make the case that: the Earth is not warming and may even be cooling; or, if it is warming it is not significant and is not caused by humans; or if it is warming and it is significant that is a good thing – and any way, it will be God who destroys the Earth and not human beings. All this to say that we should just keep letting fossil fuel corporations – which fund much of the climate change denial business – do their thing, unencumbered by government regulations.
Not surprisingly, much of the “science” designed to deny anthropogenic climate change is laughably thin. For a refreshing contrast, see here an article – originally published in The Conversation — by Shuang-Ye Wu, Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences at the University of Dayton.
Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day.
Phoenix reached 100 degrees for more than 100 days straight. The 2024 Olympic Games started in the midst of a long-running heat wave in Europe that included the three hottest days on record globally, July 21-23. August was Earth’s hottest month in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 175-year record.
Overall, the global average temperature was 2.74 degrees Fahrenheit (1.52 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.
That might seem small, but temperature increases associated with human-induced climate change do not manifest as small, even increases everywhere on the planet. Rather, they result in more frequent and severe episodes of heat waves, as the world saw in 2024.
The most severe and persistent heat waves are often associated with an atmospheric pattern called a heat dome. As an atmospheric scientist, I study weather patterns and the changing climate. Here’s how heat domes, the jet stream and climate change influence summer heat waves and the record-hot summer of 2024.
What the jet stream has to do with heat domes
If you listened to weather forecasts during the summer of 2024, you probably heard the term “heat dome” a lot.
A heat dome is a persistent high-pressure system over a large area. A high-pressure system is created by sinking air. As air sinks, it warms up, decreasing relative humidity and leaving sunny weather. The high pressure also serves as a lid that keeps hot air on the surface from rising and dissipating. The resulting heat dome can persist for days or even weeks.
The longer a heat dome lingers, the more heat will build up, creating sweltering conditions for the people on the ground.
How long these heat domes stick around has a lot to do with the jet stream.
The jet stream is a narrow band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere, about 30,000 feet above sea level. It moves from west to east due to the Earth’s rotation. The strong winds are a result of the sharp temperature difference where the warm tropical air meets the cold polar air from the north in the mid-latitudes.
The jet stream does not flow along a straight path. Rather, it meanders to the north and south in a wavy pattern. These giant meanders are known as the Rossby waves, and they have a major influence on weather.
Where the jet stream arcs northward, forming a ridge, it creates a high-pressure system south of the wave. Where the jet stream dips southward, forming a trough, it creates a low-pressure system north of the jet stream. A low-pressure system contains rising air in the center, which cools and tends to generate precipitation and storms.
Most of our weather is modulated by the position and characteristics of the jet stream.
How climate change affects the jet stream
The jet stream, or any wind, is the result of differences in surface temperature.
In simple terms, warm air rises, creating low pressure, and cold air sinks, creating high pressure. Wind is the movement of the air from high to low pressure. Greater differences in temperature produce stronger winds.
For the Earth as a whole, warm air rises near the equator, and cold air sinks near the poles. The temperature difference between the equator and the pole determines the strength of the jet stream in each hemisphere.
However, that temperature difference has been changing, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. The Arctic region has been warming about three times faster than the global average. This phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, is largely caused by the melting of Arctic sea ice, which allows the exposed dark water to absorb more of the Sun’s radiation and heat up faster.
Because the Arctic is warming faster than the tropics, the temperature difference between the two regions is lessened. And that slows the jet stream.
As the jet stream slows, it tends to meander more, causing bigger waves. The bigger waves create larger high-pressure systems. These can often be blocked by the deep low-pressure systems on both sides, causing the high-pressure system to sit over a large area for a long period of time.
Typically, waves in the jet stream pass through the continental United States in around three to five days. When blocking occurs, however, the high-pressure system could stagnate for days to weeks. This allows the heat to build up underneath, leading to blistering heat waves.
Since the jet stream circles around the globe, stagnating waves could occur in multiple places, leading to simultaneous heat waves at the mid-latitude around the world. That happened in 2024, with long-lasting heat waves in Europe, North America, Central Asia and China.
Jet stream behavior affects winter, too
The same meandering behavior of the jet stream also plays a role in extreme winter weather. That includes the southward intrusion of frigid polar air from the polar vortex and conditions for severe winter storms.
Many of these atmospheric changes, driven by human-caused global warming, have significant impacts on people’s health, property and ecosystems around the world.
Politics and Religion
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and sometime in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).
Author’s Note: While I don’t believe the Bible draws straight lines to our politics, I do believe there are analogical and imaginative connections available. For sixty years I have written sermonically. By that I mean writing without a text presents extraordinary challenges for me. Therefore I have written this article in the sermon genre. It helps me think more critically. The text for “Politics and Religion” is James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8.
Introduction
Politics and religion never mixed when I was a young preacher. Preachers of my ilk – Southern Baptists – were told in very certain terms to stay out of politics. The adage was to preach anything, but don’t talk about politics, sex, or money.
As the decades passed in a blur, money entered the conversation of the church. For some churches, money ascended above the gospel. In fact, the gospel acquired a defining word: “Prosperity.” Preachers who claim the “social gospel” is no gospel have no qualms about embracing the “prosperity gospel.” How odd!
Then preachers discovered “sex” would attract a crowd, even in church. Some pastors flirted with the excesses of sexual language with a perverted rhetoric. Other pastors attacked homosexuality and abortion. Sex invaded the pulpit even as denominations grappled with sexual abuse and misbehavior cases piling up against leaders.
But even after all these revolutionary changes, politics remained mostly on the outside looking in as far as the church was concerned. Then evangelicals discovered politics. Now, the merger of faith and politics makes it hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. When you mix bad religion with bad politics, you should know you have a problem.
A Question for All Politicians
James asks of us a question that fits like a fine leather glove with American politicians: “Who is wise and understanding among you?” Political campaigns always leave me wondering if any are wise and understanding among us. Each side smears the other candidate with unspeakable accusations. The skeptical observer comes to believe that there are none that do good, “no, not one.”
James connects wisdom with a good life and good works. How’s that for moral virtue? Strong Christian character? That’s not part of any political agenda. The evangelicals, America’s most political Christian group, has decided character no longer matters. As Rev. Robert Jeffress put it, “What matters are this president’s wonderful policies.” Forget character. Winning is what matters.
James shines a bright light on our darkness: “Those conflicts and disputes among you” nail us to the floor. We have conflicts and disputes climbing the walls, flowing in the streets, and corrupting Congress and even the Supreme Court.
Paul Krugman has written that
The fact is that a large segment of the U. S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves, or lives. We don’t have to speculate whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.
Faith in democracy is fractured. Our climate is political alienation, demagoguery, violence, and advancing authoritarianism. You can dress this American “hog” in religious robes, give it biblical authority, put a gold ring in its nose, give it an American flag and teach it to sing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and it will still be a “hog.”
Nearly half of Americans believe the U. S. is likely to cease to be a democracy in the future. Politicians have become demolition experts, bomb throwers, and fearmongers. They evince a nihilistic pathos. They promise, according to rhetorical professor Robert L. Ivie, a kind of “salvation by demolition.” Vitriol pours forth from every mouth with political distrust and anger, vitriol that ravages democratic norms and values, undermines civic culture, and inhibits deliberation.
One of our cultural critics (of all people, Jerry Springer) says we should have seen it coming:
We have raised two generations of Americans who believe that anything the government does is horrible, all politicians are corrupt, ah . . .. Washington is evil. And then every commercial we ever see, politically, on frankly on both sides of the aisle . . .. is how the other guy is a bum, the other guy should be in jail, the other guy is a pervert, whatever. Well, if you raise two generations of kids to believe that about our own government . . . you can’t then be surprised that eventually someone would run for president who is absolutely anti-government. . .. So, we should have seen it coming that eventually someone would run for president who was an entertainer and totally against government.
It’s 20 centuries after, but this sounds like James.
Naming Our Political Sins
James names our political sins: bitter envy and selfish ambition. He condemns our political practices: bragging and lying. This text, wow, it may be too hot to preach, too much truth for a Sunday morning crowd. The preacher may need security guards. There will be people running from the sanctuary, covering their ears as they hear the truth.
If James is right, and I think he is, then our political ways have turned us into “earthly, unspiritual, and devilish” creatures. Not one to leave us hanging, James shows us the consequences of our political sins of bitter envy and selfish ambition: Disorder and wickedness of every kind.
Evangelical churches are up to their steeples in secular politics. Tim Alberta, in The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory demonstrates how politics has poisoned the evangelical church. A great dis-ease afflicts the churches over the mix of religion and politics.
God Chooses Sides
The answer to “bad politics” is “good religion.” In God’s mind religion and politics mix; economics too. “Good news for the poor” is good religion and good economics. Jesus said so.
God chooses sides. God sides with the poor, with those who suffer deprivation and oppression. God never sides with tyrants and oppressors and dictators and human rights abusers. If God were neutral, God would be indifferent and malevolent. But God chooses a side. “I have seen the affliction of my people and have heard their cry.”
God chooses sides, and it may not be the side many Christians are on. Do religious people ever stop to think, “What if we are not on God’s side?” Do you think evangelicals lose sleep over being on the side of lying, cheating, and defrauding others? I doubt it. People can be smug about being on God’s side.
For example, in Leviticus 19 God sides with the immigrants. The Bible calls them various names like “aliens,” “strangers,” and “sojourners.” Evangelical preachers who like to play with Hebrew words have gone to extraordinary lengths to make “alien” not mean immigrant. What a piece of humbuggery!
Look, read the text:
When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. You shall not cheat in measuring length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them: I am the Lord.
God chooses sides and God’s choice is to be on the side of justice. And please note how God connects treatment of immigrants with economics. Immigrants are our neighbors, and we are to have honest, hospitable relations with them.
We Must Choose Sides
Let me help you a bit here. God expects us to choose sides. Joshua puts it in plain speech:
But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
When American “hogs” are at the trough and eating all the food, we cannot be neutral. When American “sharks” are eating up all the wealth, we cannot be neutral. We can try to be neutral, but God always sides with “widows, orphans, and aliens” (read: illegal immigrants). Pick a side.
Can we claim to know God if we don’t join her on the side of the oppressed? If you are screaming about “Marxism,” “communism,” and “socialism” you are not on the side of the poor, the oppressed, or the immigrant. If you are believing conspiracy theories about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing cats and dogs and eating them, you are not on God’s side.
If you are shouting, “we are going to totally stop this invasion. This invasion is destroying the fabric of our country,” you are not on God’s side. If you are spreading lies that immigrants are driving up the price of houses in America, you are not on God’s side.
If you are ranting, “They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world — Asia,” you sound like the deranged false prophet Paula White-Cain chanting that angels were coming from the coasts of Africa and South America to save the 2020 election for Trump.
God is on the side of justice. Mary, the blessed mother of our Lord, knew this in her pondering heart:
He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away (Luke 1:52 – 53).
If Donald Trump ever read Mary’s prayer, he would have called her a Marxist. What Trump and MAGA fail to realize is that “Stalinism is to Marxism what the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity; a manipulation of the chief symbols, yet diametrically opposed to the central values” (Cornel West).
God doesn’t side with the status quo
Walter Brueggemann offers us a prophetic perspective:
Culture characteristically traffics in established truth about which there is general agreement among the parties that matter: the state, the church, the corporate structure, the academy, and so on. These several institutions are skillful in articulating and maintaining truth that can readily be seen as allied with status quo power.
One of the hardest things Christians struggle to admit is that God is against the status quo. In our case, millions of Americans are also guilty of thinking God wants to bring back an unjust and racist status quo. What else can “Make America Great Again” mean? That little word, “again” contains the entire history of American oppression against women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants. “Again” is contrary to the will and word of God. An unjust America can’t be great. An inhospitable America can’t be great. A hateful, prejudiced, exclusive America can’t be great. A racist America can’t be great. Make America great again is an empty slogan preaching a fake gospel to a scared people.
Conclusion
As Christians, there’s no way for us to stay out of politics. With confidence in justice we take our stand with the poor, the oppressed, and the immigrant. Our politics will be the politics of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. Our politics will aim toward the ultimate realization of God’s will: The first Jubilee in history.
So until we create Jubilee – where all ill-gotten gains are returned, where all stolen property is restored, where all debts at exorbitant interest rates are forgiven, where the poor are given back what belonged to them in the first place – we will be in politics until “justice rolls down like mighty waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”
And if that make you call me a “socialist,” feel free to vent. But I’m telling you that I am a Christian attempting to bring about the prayer Jesus taught me: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven.” AMEN!
Life After Fundamentalism: Carl Ruby, Cedarville University, and Haitians in Springfield
by William Trollinger
As most Americans know, it has been a hellish two weeks in Springfield, Ohio. And they have Donald Trump and J. D. Vance to blame. Despite all factual evidence to the contrary, the Republican presidential/vice-presidential candidates have continued to repeat the lies – started on Facebook and amplified by the KKK and other Far Right groups – that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating the dogs, cats, and other animals of “legitimate” Springfield residents. The result has been a Haitian community on edge, and a spate of bomb threats, forcing the closure of schools, hospitals, and government offices. Despite all this, Trump and Vance are doubling down on their false claims; appallingly, Vance says it does not matter if these stories are actually true, as they help make his political point. And he has expanded his invented story of immigrants eating pets to include the nearby city of Dayton.
But there is also some heartwarming news. Many non-Haitian residents have made it a point to show their support by, for example, patronizing Haitian-run restaurants. More than this, “many of Springfield’s churches are giving support by way of English classes, correcting misinformation, and displaying solidarity” with their Haitian brothers and sisters. One of the leaders in this effort is Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, a church that states on its website that “the Bible is very clear that God loves immigrants and refugees, and expects us to as well.” Ruby has welcomed Haitian community leaders to Central Christian – telling them that “We love you [and] we are glad you’re here” – and has called on Trump and Vance to stop the pet-eating stories (while also imploring President Biden to send resources to his embattled city).
More than any other Springfield faith leader, Ruby has been thrust into the national spotlight for his efforts. But what most news reports leave out is that Ruby has been working with immigrants in Springfield not for two weeks, but for twelve years. More than this, he started this work after having been summarily forced out of an administrative position at a nearby fundamentalist university, forced out for being the sort of Christian leader he has proven himself to be in Springfield, forced out for being the sort of Christian who, as a former trustee at that fundamentalist school put it, actually cares for “people on the margins.”
For the rest of the story, here’s what I wrote about Carl in 2018:
Evangelical colleges are always having to prove – to parents, donors, and evangelical leaders such as James Dobson or Ken Ham – that they are, to quote Adam Laats, “guardians and teachers of a necessarily vague dream of eternal and unchanging orthodoxy.” Sometimes the only way for an evangelical school to reassure doubters is to purge its ranks of supposedly “unsafe” faculty and administrators.
As we describe in Righting America at the Creation Museum, this is precisely what happened at Cedarville University between 2012-2014. One of those forced out of Cedarville was Carl Ruby, vice president for student life. His departure was a shock to many students, one of whom told The New York Times that Ruby “made Cedarville feel more like Heaven. If you thought someone would be untouchable, it would be Carl.” But as a former Cedarville trustee noted in the same article, Ruby was pushed out because conservative trustees “were threatened by Carl’s . . . ministry to people struggling with gender identification [i.e., LGBTQ students], [and] how he ministers to people on the margins.”
As we noted in our book, Ruby was but one of 43 administrators, faculty, and staff members who departed Cedarville between the fall of 2012 and the summer of 2014, “some of whom [having been] forced out (having signed nondisclosure statements) while others quit and moved on to less hostile professional and religious climes.” This does not include the exodus of 15 members of the Board of Trustees, many of whom left in displeasure over the fundamentalist crackdown.
In our book, that is where the Cedarville tale ends. But it turns out there is more to the story. Take, for example, Carl Ruby.
Departing Cedarville, Ruby founded Welcome Springfield (OH) a non-profit organization that serves immigrants while also encouraging community members to sign a “Statement of Support for Immigrants in Clark County” that says in part:
While I recognize and support reasonable steps to ensure our national security, I also stand opposed to all forms of communication and policy that fail to recognize the human dignity and innate value of our global neighbors, especially those fleeing hardship, violence, poverty, and persecution.
While maintaining his position with Welcome Springfield, in the fall of 2014 he accepted the position as pastor of Central Christian Church in Springfield, which describes itself as a church where “we strive to keep Jesus at the center” and where “we care about justice” and “love our neighbors.”
In Springfield, where there are two mosques, “neighbors” includes Muslims. In an effort to build bridges between the Muslim and Christian communities (and as featured in a CBS Faith in America documentary) in May 2017 Central Christian members attended Friday prayers at one of the mosques and Muslims attended Sunday worship at Central Christian. As Ruby reflected on his Red Letter Christians blog,
I was overwhelmed by the strong sense of human connection. [Emphasis Ruby’s.] The events did not feel like an awkward mingling of strangers who were working hard at being polite and finding things to talk about. It felt like a reunion of longtime friends. There was an eagerness on both sides to connect and to love one another.
On the Central Christian website Ruby does not mention Cedarville or the purge, but he does describe – in winsome and gracious fashion – the journey he has been on:
I grew up in churches that tended to be pretty conservative. I met many beautiful people and learned lots about scripture, but I also encountered a tendency to neglect certain areas of the gospel such as our mandate to care for the poor and to commit ourselves to issues of social justice. I also experienced a church culture that added many rules and expectations that are not found in scripture . . . God didn’t save us just so that we could go to heaven. He saved us so that we could go to work trying to help bits of heaven to break through into our world through the sacrificial service of the body of Christ.
Life after fundamentalism, indeed. (And for the original blog post, see here.)
Stories of Death Row
by William Trollinger
Next Tuesday evening the University of Dayton Campus Ministry, the Catholic Mobilizing Network, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Social Action Office and the Marianist Social Justice Collaborative will hold a panel discussion on capital punishment at 7 p.m. Sept. 24 in the Kennedy Union ballroom. Panelists include: Kwame Ajamu, death row exoneree and board chair of Witness to Innocence; the Rev. Crystal Walker, mother of a murder victim ad co-chair of Ohioans to Stop Executions; and, the Rev. Neil Kookoothe, a lawyer and prison chaplain who helped exonerate Joe D’Ambrosio from Ohio’s death row. The discussion will include information about bipartisan bills in the Ohio General Assembly to abolish the death penalty. Information about the event, speakers and registration can be found at go.udayton.edu/deathrowpanel.
I am serving as the moderator of this panel discussion. And I, too, have a death row story, a story that reached its dreadful culmination exactly 27 years before the evening of this event.
Just after midnight on September 24, 1997, I was sitting with five other civilians and four security guards in a tiny, cramped room in the bowels of the maximum security Potosi Correctional Institute, just southwest of St. Louis. The civilians were seated in two rows of chairs, facing a glass window and closed mini-blinds. I was in the front row, and I could look through a crack in the blinds to see the lower part of a man’s face, including a mouth and jaw. And I knew that was my friend Samuel McDonald, who in just a couple of minutes was going to be injected with a lethal combination of sodium pentothal (which would render him unconscious) and pancuronium bromide and potassium bromide, which would stop his breathing and his beating heart.
I had opposed capital punishment since the ninth grade. In this, as in many other things, I was at odds with my evangelical parents and my evangelical Baptist church. I was surrounded by folks who – while not bloodthirsty – wholeheartedly supported the notion of state execution. Interestingly, it was growing up in a “Bible-believing” church led me to dissent from my family and church, as my reading of the Gospels convinced me that capital punishment violates the essence of Christ’s teachings to choose mercy over revenge, to love our enemies, and to forswear violence (which is why the Catholic church and almost all of the major Protestant denominations have come out against capital punishment).
In my teenage years my opposition to the death penalty remained an abstraction. This was because by the late 1960s capital punishment had almost disappeared from the American landscape. What seemed to be the final blow to a barbaric institution came in 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court held that the death penalty is “arbitrary” and “capricious.”
But then, just four years later, the Court ruled that capital punishment does not violate the Constitution, as long as the state has “adequate” due-process procedures in place. Soon, 40 or so states re-instituted the death penalty for certain types of murder.
One of the states that has proven to be most enthusiastic about applying capital punishment is the state of Missouri. Since 1976 Missouri has executed 99 human beings, ranking #5 among states that kill, behind Texas (589), Oklahoma (125), Virginia (113), and Florida (106).
Having completed my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1984 I accepted a teaching position at the School (now College) of the Ozarks, near Branson, Missouri. Now in a death penalty state, I felt I needed to do something. But I was not aiming to be heroic. What I settled upon was corresponding with someone on Missouri’s death row. I contacted the Death Row Support Project (which is under the auspices of the Church of the Brethren) for the name of a condemned prisoner with whom I could exchange letters. This is how I became acquainted with Samuel McDonald.
Over the next decade I was able – through conversations with Sam, newspaper reports, and open access court records – to piece together Sam’s story. He grew up in a poor, churchgoing family in inner city St. Louis. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the Army. It was 1967, and Sam ended up – as did so many poor black males – in Vietnam. He proved to be an efficient soldier, earning a raft of medals. But the experience traumatized him, particularly when, in the process of “sweeping” a village, he more-or-less deliberately killed an elderly woman and an infant (an incident about which he would have nightmares for the rest of his life, even the week before his execution). Like a host of other Vietnam veterans, Sam returned to the States mentally and emotionally unhinged, addicted to heroin, and without anything in the way of adequate medical and psychiatric support. Over the next decade, he lived the life of a petty criminal.
Then, on the evening of May 16, 1981, the downwardly spiraling Sam McDonald encountered someone whose life had been going in precisely the opposite direction. Robert Jordan had been a St. Louis County police officer for 19 years; not only was this former Marine (who had earned both his BA and MA degrees) just the second African American to be hired as a police officer by the county, but he was president of the St. Louis County Association of Minority Police Officers. Besides his full-time job, Jordan moonlighted as a security guard. Which is what he was doing on the evening of May 16. And when he got off work and arrived home, where his wife Emma Jean was waiting for him, he discovered there was no beer in the fridge, and not much in the way of snacks. So, with his eleven-year-old daughter Rochelle in tow, he drove to the local liquor store.
At the store, they made their purchases and headed out the door. In the parking lot, they encountered Sam. Sky-high on “T’s and blues” (a heroin substitute), and accompanied by a drugged-up girlfriend (who was waiting for him in the car), Sam was looking for someone to rob, for the money that would provide him with his next stash of drugs. Encountering Robert Jordan, Sam pulled out a gun and demanded that he hand over his wallet. Jordan’s daughter ran back into the store and watched through the window. Robert handed over his wallet, which also held his St. Louis County police badge. Whether Sam actually saw the badge was a matter of dispute at the trial. But we do know that he took the wallet, shot Robert twice in the chest and once in the side, and ran for the car. Dying, Jordan managed to pull out his service revolver and shoot six shots, one of which hit Sam in the side. Obviously showing the effect of the drugs, Sam had his girlfriend drive him to the local VA hospital for treatment. It was there that he was arrested for the murder of Robert Jordan.
A poor African American drug addict who killed a well-respected off-duty police officer in full view of the officer’s young daughter: it is obvious that Sam’s chances in the justice system were bleak. But things were made worse by the fact that the district attorney decided to try this case himself. The normal procedure would be for the DA to give the case to one of his subordinates, but the DA was in the middle of a re-election campaign in which he was promising to get tougher in capital cases, and this provided him a great political opportunity. Worse, Sam was assigned an inexperienced and overworked assistant public defender who got into shouting matches with the judge (at one point the judge responded by swiveling his chair around so that his back was to Sam’s attorney). Worst of all, the judge refused to allow testimony regarding the impact of Sam’s Vietnam experiences on his mental and emotional health, even though there was solid evidence that Sam was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
So, it was no great surprise that, on February 22, 1982, Samuel McDonald was sentenced to die by lethal injection . . . the 17th man placed on Missouri’s death row.
Three years later, I sent Sam my first letter. We soon became regular correspondents. I also visited him in the state penitentiary.
But when I took a teaching job in Pennsylvania, I was no longer able to visit him. So, while Sam kept writing, he also began calling, generally on weekends, and generally every other weekend. I know it may seem peculiar, but we spent much of our time laughing and joking and making fun of each other; in fact, if friends were visiting they would often be stunned to learn that I was talking with a man on death row. Sam and I spent a lot of time talking about sports. We were both particularly convinced that we had special insights into football. We had an annual contest to see who could pick the most winners in the college bowl games, with the winner – usually Sam – getting to keep the “traveling crown” that Sam had cut out on typing paper (and sent to me before he was killed).
But in our conversations we also talked about conditions in the prison, and the state of his appeals up and down the court system (appeals which focused on the failure of the original trial judge to allow his psychiatric history to be considered at sentencing). We talked about politics, including the Supreme Court (which would consider his final appeal – Sam particularly disliked Clarence Thomas). We talked about God, and church, and the efficacy of prayer. We talked a lot about our families. I commiserated with him when his son – who was only three when Sam went to prison – was caught in the middle of a gang fight, and was shot and paralyzed. Sam commiserated with me when my mother died of cancer. In fact, he was probably more sensitive to my grief than anyone outside my family; a few times he called out of the blue just to see how I was doing.
All this to say that, much to my surprise, Sam McDonald and I became very close friends. I had started corresponding with him assuming that I would be the one giving to him. It turned out that I was receiving from him at least as much as he was receiving from me.
In all of this I tried very hard not to think about the fact that the state of Missouri was determined to end Sam’s life. But in the spring of 1997 reality hit. Sam’s appeals had come to an end: the Supreme Court would not stay his execution; that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran with war-induced psychiatric problems was irrelevant. The governor of Missouri was adamant that he would not grant clemency; my letter pleading for Sam’s life could not have been more irrelevant. Sam was given a firm execution date: September 24, 1997.
Sam handled these developments with remarkable grace, but I went into an emotional tailspin, as I grappled with the fact that my friend was going to be killed. More than this, I started to wonder what sort of friend I was. I had a pretty strong suspicion that Sam wanted me to serve as one of his witnesses to his execution. I was a middle-class white academic who had grown up in the suburbs, and who had never seen anyone die . . . much less seen anyone be killed. So, throughout the summer of 1997 I tried to ignore Sam’ s oblique hints that he wanted me there for him.
Then, on Labor Day, Sam asked me to serve as one of his six “family and friend” witnesses: “I don’t want to die alone, and I need to see you there.” I said yes.
The week before the execution was surreal. I ended up in a minor media vortex, as Missouri newspapers and radio stations apparently had some fascination with the fact that a college professor from Ohio was coming out to witness the execution of a person they clearly considered a “low-life.” I was a novelty act, and I ended up doing a number of phone interviews from my office in the University of Dayton’s Humanities Building. I liked talking with the newspaper reporters, but the radio folks were annoyingly superficial: one even suggested that I should be happy if Sam’s execution were televised, as I would not then have to drive from Ohio.
The night before his execution, Sam called me to tell me that I would be allowed to visit him at 5 PM, seven hours before his execution. (It turns out that I was the last “civilian” to see Sam). When I arrived at the isolated, fortress-like prison, a guard – who made no effort to disguise the fact that he despised me – led me to Sam. We descended endless flights of stairs into the depths of the prison. This is where the “death cell” is located, where all death-row inmates spend the last two days of life. The guard knocked on the door. It opened, and I walked in.
There was Sam, rumpled and weary-looking, and markedly heavier than when I had last seen him. He was in a tiny cage with a bed, a chair, a toilet and not much else. Instinctively I walked up to the wire fence and put my hand against it. But before Sam could respond a voice behind me barked, “Get away from there!” Alarmed, I looked at Sam, who pointed at the floor: a white line marked off a “no-man’s land” between the rest of humanity and the condemned man’s cage. I backed up behind the line and sat down in one of two chairs bolted to the floor. The guard who had yelled at me sat at a desk behind me, clattering away on a very loud typewriter, presumably reporting on what was being said in the cell (although there was also a video camera recording all). Sam McDonald’s final 48 hours were without privacy, in part to ensure that he did not commit suicide and thus cheat the executioner.
At first I struggled to make conversation with Sam. But in a few minutes, we were talking freely. In some ways, it was no different from our phone conversations. We talked about sports and our families; we had a few laughs; we talked about our friendship. But Sam also talked about himself in ways he never had before. He regretted how he had messed up his life, and he expressed remorse for what he had done. He assured me that he was prepared to die – “things on the other side have to be better than they have been here” – and to face God. For the first time in the 12 years I had known Sam, he was resigned to his impending death.
At 5:58 my angry escort returned to the cell. I stood up. Sam and I said “I love you” to each other. The door opened, and I left the death cell. Soon after I departed, Sam ate his last meal, of steak, catfish, and eggs. Soon after that, prison authorities began to prepare him for execution.
Six hours later I was being marched to the observation booth for friends and family (in Missouri there are three such booths, with the other two for family of the crime victim, and for state witnesses). We were sternly warned by a guard that “there will be no standing, crying out, or knocking on the window.”
Just after midnight the guards raised the blinds. There lay Sam, on a gurney with a white sheet up to his neck. He had obviously been told where we would be, as looked only at us. He spoke rapidly, but we could not make out what he was saying. And then, after only a minute or two, the drugs kicked in, Sam shuddered, and then was still.
We were then escorted out, in the process instructed that we could not stop until we were out of the prison. Not even to pray.
I felt filthy, and over the next few days I took 3-4 showers a day. Capital punishment demeans us all. And it does not bring back the victim of the crime.
In that regard, last year I received an email from the son of the man who was killed by Samuel McDonald. He ran across an article I had written about this experience, and felt compelled to write:
I too was at the execution and I prayed for Sam, and his family . . . That experience was traumatic for all involved in every facet. I would love to engage you in conversation one day. I am sure the conversation would be great. God Bless. Robert T Jordan Jr.
Worst. Book about the Scopes Trial. Ever!
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.
_(2898243103)_crop.jpg)
In the summer of 1925, a young teacher, John T. Scopes, was on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating a recently enacted state law, the Butler Act, which forbade educators in the state’s public schools to “teach any theory that denies the truth of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The Scopes trial was instantly a national sensation, partly thanks to the participation of two national figures — William Jennings Bryan on the prosecution team and Clarence Darrow on the defense team — and the reportage of a third, the brilliant but mordant journalist H. L. Mencken. With its hundredth anniversary just around the corner, the Scopes trial is understandably attracting attention again, with recent treatments including Randy Moore’s The Scopes “Monkey Trial” (2022), Gregg Jarrett’s The Trial of the Century (2023), and Brenda Wineapple’s Keeping the Faith (2024). These are all more or less readable and accurate guides to the context, personalities, conduct, aftermath, and significance of the trial. And then, in contrast, there is Jerry Bergman’s The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial (2023).
What is the thesis of The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial? According to its subtitle, At Its Heart the Trial was about Racism, while within the text, Bergman awkwardly declaims, “The trial was about human evolution, and more about racism and eugenics than religion and evolution” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Later, a section complaining that commentators on the trial ignore the racism and eugenics of both classroom textbooks and the American scientific community of the 1920s is entitled “Denying the Core of the Scopes Trial”; in the following chapter, Bergman writes, “That the teaching of eugenics was at issue in the Scopes Trial was obvious to those who understood what eugenics is all about is clear” (p. 61); and the chapter after that is entitled “The Scopes Trial: A Struggle Against Eugenics and Racism.” And in the final chapter, Bergman concludes, “The racism and eugenics that was central in the Scopes Trial has been ignored, even though it is a well-documented part of the record” (p. 195). Thus, although there is a certain perplexing vacillation between racism and eugenics, the book’s thesis appears to be that the Scopes trial was about these issues.
There is a glaring obstacle to the thesis, which in fact Bergman briefly acknowledges: that “in the entire Scopes court transcript the topic of eugenics and racism was avoided” (p. 81, link added). He then clutches at a counterfactual straw, suggesting that if Bryan, a prominent Democrat, had been a Republican, then he might have focused “on the racism and eugenics core of the Hunter textbook [A Civic Biology, from which Scopes taught]” (p. 81). But as matters stand, the Scopes trial was clearly not about racism and eugenics. It is equally clear that a number of the participants in and observers of the Scopes trial held various attitudes toward racism and eugenics, which were matters of public controversy in the 1920s — but there would be no point in writing a book to document the fact. Is there a thesis in the neighborhood that is neither clearly false nor clearly trivial? Perhaps that the attitudes toward racism and eugenics of the participants in and the observers of the trial significantly and substantially influenced the conduct of and the public understanding of the trial? That suggestion threads the needle, but it would require meticulously collected and judiciously assessed evidence to make the case.
No attempt to make such a case is visible in The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and meticulous collection and judicious assessment of evidence are likewise absent. Instead, there is hagiographizing, conspiracy theorizing, and mudslinging. For example, amid Bergman’s fulsome praise for Bryan, there is no mention of what his biographer Michael Kazin described in A Godly Hero (2006) as “Bryan’s habit of ignoring the ‘race problem’ or minimizing it with fatuous rationales,” which culminated with his last political success: convincing the 1924 Democratic National Convention not to adopt a party platform plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan by name. Bergman alleges that the leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union, which coordinated Scopes’s defense, “no doubt openly, or covertly, agreed to ignore the most important part of the Scopes case, namely its racism” (p. 74), a claim for which there is no rationale evident except for the need to protect his thesis come what may. Chapter 10, the longest chapter of the book, is a sustained attempt at assassinating the moral character of Mencken — who, to be sure, was not exactly a paragon on matters of race, gender, and religion.
Even independently of the fact that it consists entirely of a string of decontextualized quotations from Mencken’s voluminous oeuvre with Bergman’s perfunctory and sometimes bizarre comments on them, intended to portray Mencken as, inter alia, a vicious racist, eugenicist, and bigot, chapter 10 is deeply problematic. The problem is that Bergman’s discussion is conspicuously similar to Vincent Torley’s 2012 blog post “H. L. Mencken: Is this your hero, New Atheists?” — not only in the selection and order of the quotations but also in the language used to summarize and criticize them. For example, Torley asks, with respect to a whimsical suggestion of Mencken’s that God should have used platinum rather than carbon as a basis for life, “But has Mencken even thought for a moment about how a platinum organism would eat, excrete, reproduce and for that matter, evolve?” while Bergman declares, “Mencken had obviously not thought about how platinum-based organisms could possibly eat, grow, excrete and, for that matter, evolve” (p. 161). Bergman cites Torley’s blog post only once (p. 128, n. 15), regrettably not in a way that adequately acknowledges his apparent debt to it.
Bergman’s scholarly practices are otherwise troubling. He often cites subpar scholarship, including from his fellow creationists, without any evident discernment. He repeatedly interpolates unwarranted text of his own into verbatim quotations, including in a passage from Martin Gilbert’s history of the twentieth century (p. 9), a letter from Leonard Darwin — a son of Charles Darwin, writing on behalf of the Eugenics Education Society — to Scopes (p. 61), and a passage from Edward J. Larson’s book about the trial (p. 195). Similarly, he claims that “a survey of AAAS members found that close to 99 percent are functional atheists, meaning that they live their lives as if there is no God”: he is evidently referring to a Pew Research Center survey in 2014 that found that close to 99 percent of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science accept that humans have evolved over time: the “functional atheism” claim is a confabulation. He wrongly claims that the pistol-packing pastor J. Frank Norris came to Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes trial, citing “Larson, ‘Classroom Controversy,’ 54”: the article in question begins on p. 63 of The Panda’s Black Box (2007) and Norris is not mentioned in it.
A particularly interesting error is not entirely Bergman’s fault. Relying on James Gilbert’s account in Redeeming Culture (1997), he claims that Bryan argued to the West Virginia legislature in 1923 that evolution is precluded by the second law of thermodynamics. (He then proceeds to endorse the argument, unaware or uncaring that it is scientifically bankrupt.) That would be strange if true, not only because Bryan fails to use the argument in his most famous antievolution writings, such as In His Image (1922) and his planned closing address in the Scopes trial, but also because the argument seems to have gained currency only with the work of two British creationists, Robert E. D. Clark and E. H. Betts, in the 1940s. (The wrinkle that the second law is the objective correlative of the Fall would later be introduced in The Genesis Flood [1961], by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris.) But it is not true. And it would not have been difficult for Bergman to locate Bryan’s speech, reprinted as the second part of Orthodox Christanity versus Modernism (1923), and there to find that the closest Bryan approaches the second law of thermodynamics is invoking the distinct phenomenon of radioactive decay.
Bergman repeatedly, and correctly, emphasizes that the Butler Act, under which Scopes was prosecuted, only concerned the teaching of human evolution. He accordingly devotes chapter 9 to a discussion of human evolution. The result is inaccurate and incompetent. He claims that the scientific evidence for human evolution presented at the Scopes trial consisted of “Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Java Man, and Neanderthal Man fossils” (p. 106), and devotes most of the chapter to “Nebraska Man,” repeating whole sentences and paragraphs in the process. “Nebraska Man” was known only from what proved to be a fossil peccary tooth — not, pace Bergman, a fossil pig tooth — and was not presented at the Scopes trial, although it might have been if Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History and the chief promoter of the fossil, had testified. Perhaps exhausted by his Nebraskan efforts, Bergman dismisses “Java Man” as “another race of humans called Homo erectus” (p. 118) — not exactly a devastating rejoinder — and fails to rehearse the standard, long-ago-refuted, creationist complaints about “Piltdown Man” (a never tremendously convincing hoax) and Neanderthals.
Not all of Bergman’s myriad errors are tendentious. Stephen Jay Gould is misquoted as referring to the “populace” rather than the “populist” thinking of Bryan (p. 26); the anthropologist Ruth Benedict is rechristened Ruth Bennet (p. 37); the polling organization Gallup departs at a gallop (p. 55). Bergman reports that “the Supreme Court refused to hear the Scopes appeal” (p. 103): if he’s thinking of the Tennessee Supreme Court, he’s wrong because the court indeed heard the appeal, overturning the verdict, while if he’s thinking of the United States Supreme Court, he’s wrong because the case was not appealed to it. Two paragraphs of chapter 12, which contains only six paragraphs, rely on the conclusions of “Georgianna,” with no full name or bibliographical information provided. (“The Moral Majority and Fundamentalism: Plausibility and Dissonance,” Sharon Linzey Georgianna’s 1984 dissertation at Indiana University, was presumably intended.) The sole appendix presents the text of a Tennessee law: not the Butler Act, but House Bill 368/Senate Bill 893 of 2012, nicknamed “the monkey bill” and codified as Tennessee Code 49-6-1030. No explanation is offered.
Early in The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Bergman writes, “The present work is an attempt to fill in this important gap” (p. 7). Characteristically, there is no explicit description of a gap in the preceding text, but he appears to mean that there’s a lack of discussions of the trial sympathetic to the prosecution, which overlooks any number of works, including Marvin Olasky and John Perry’s Monkey Business (2005), which appears in Bergman’s bibliography. A shoddy and biased apologia for creationism, Monkey Business is nevertheless head and shoulders over The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial: not nearly so badly conceived, researched, organized, written, and edited. After offering his description of “the present work,” Bergman continues, “and it is up to readers to determine how successful this tome was” (p. 7) — for all the world as if readers are unaware of their prerogatives. Only readers who are already relatively familiar with the trial are guaranteed to recognize the abject failure of the book, unfortunately; despite the crudity and incompetence of what can only be described as Bergman’s propaganda, there is a risk that the uninformed and the gullible will be misled.
Fight Laugh Feast: Christian Nationalists Gather at Ark Encounter
by William Trollinger
According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 29% of Americans and 50% of Republicans are full-blown Christian nationalists or Christian nationalist sympathizers. Approximately 80% of white Christian nationalists believe that anti-white discrimination is as prevalent as anti-Black discrimination; 71% of Christian nationalists and 57% of Christian nationalist sympathizers believe that we are enduring an invasion of immigrants who are “replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
And 2/3 of white evangelicals identify as Christian nationalists or Christian nationalist sympathizers. So it is not surprising that last October Answers in Genesis (AiG) – which caters to white evangelicals, and which has its primary mission (as we established in Righting America at the Creation Museum) “preparing and arming crusaders for the ongoing culture war” (15) – hosted the annual “Fight Laugh Feast” conference at Ark Encounter. This gathering at the Ark of militant Christian nationalists included the notorious Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho and promoter of a “militant masculinity” that demands “the submission of wives to husbands” in all matters (DuMez, Jesus and John Wayne: 178-179).
Befitting the event’s location, the conference theme was “The Politics of the 6 Days of Creation,” which was “explained” in conference publicity as “the difference between a fixed standard of justice and a careening standard of justice.” So of course, one of the featured speakers was AiG’s own Christian nationalist guru, Ken Ham. Ham never wearies of using (or, more accurately, misusing) Genesis 1-11 as support for a Radical Right, “anti-woke,” political agenda, and who enthusiastically pronounces those who disagree with his political views – particularly, re: abortion and the LGBTQ community — to be enemies who will someday find themselves burning in Hell.
In a fascinating and horrifying podcast by National Public Radio’s Heath Druzin, “Onward Christian Soldiers: Joyful, Jolly Warriors,” we get an inside look at this Ark Encounter conference. (Thanks to Dan Phelps for alerting me to this podcast.) Druzin brings home how the folks behind “Fight Laugh Feast” seek to reach a younger audience (the PRRI report highlights the fact that 60% of Christian nationalists are over the age of 50) with a cool and hipster Christian nationalism that includes a love of drinking whisky and smoking cigars. More than this, and hence the title of the podcast, they work overtime to present themselves as “joyful, jolly warriors” (the incongruity of that phrase is, well, jarring).
So what do these hipster Christian nationalists want? As Druzin reports from the conference, they want
- An America which is run by Christians in behalf of Christians.
- An America in which each individual is subject to “biblical law.”
- An America in which (to quote Doug Wilson) “the authority of the Lord Jesus [is] confessed by the House and Senate,” and “the president signs it” into law.
- An America in which only Christians are allowed to vote and run for political office.
- An America in which all non-Christians are understood to be “the enemy” (a point that conference organizers made clear, albeit it in “friendly” fashion, to Druzin, who happens to be Jewish).
- An America in which patriarchy is the rule, with women knowing their place as homemakers and child-bearers (there was a contest at the conference to celebrate the family with the most children – ten was the winning number).
- An America in which only Christian men vote (and the 19th Amendment is repealed).
It may be tempting to laugh off militant Christian nationalism as an absurd and minority movement. But that would be a mistake, especially given that these ideas have found a home in one of our two political parties, and in a significant segment of American Christianity. We need to take this movement seriously. As historian Jemar Tisby has pointed out, “White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the church in the United States today.”
Of course, the quintessential white Christian nationalist organization is the Ku Klux Klan! In that regard, I am very pleased to invite those of you in the Dayton region to attend my September 05 talk on the “Second KKK,” which will be given in UD’s brand-new Roger Glass Center for the Arts.
Creationist Astronomer Calculates Age of the Flood from Utah Arch Collapse
by Dan Phelps and Brandon Nuttall
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Panda’s Thumb. We have re-published it here with the authors’ permission.
This article, “How Long Have Arches Been Around?,” by Dr. Danny Faulkner, describes creationist “research” into geomorphology. It is laughably bad, even for creationists. Natural arches and bridges are aesthetically interesting, but are only a tiny part of some geomorphology studies.
In this piece, Dr. Faulkner* extrapolates backward to “show” that arches in Arches National Park, Utah, have formed since Noah’s Flood, about 4,500 years ago. He claims this timeframe because of
- Biblical literalism. Employees of Answers in Genesis must sign a Statement of Faith that posits that the earth and universe are 6,000 years old, and that most geology is a result of Noah’s Flood, approximately 4,500 years ago.
- An exponential rate of arch collapse. Faulkner states he doesn’t use a linear decline in numbers of arches because no arches would remain after 4,500 years. No consideration is given to the possibility of much longer time scales, or changes in climate and erosion rates. Change in regional climates over time is ignored, possibly because the young earth creationists at AIG cram the nearly 2 million years of Pleistocene glacial maxima into a single ice age of only 200 years after the Flood.
Conveniently, AiG uses this denial of the Pleistocene to also ignore evidence for past climate changes and the evidence scientists use to support anthropogenic climate change in the present. Faulkner has invented his model by assuming that an exponential model is the best for arch collapse, and then he fits things assuming the rate is 43 arches in 29 years.
However, his scholarship is abysmally shoddy. Conceivably, it would be possible to make a plot of cumulative arches lost vs. time. This would be a more accurate method for modeling. However, Faulkner just assumes the loss rate was constant (a cumulative arches-vs.-time chart would show the accuracy of that assumption).
He also seems to assume that the collapse of arches in Utah is related solely to the minerals cementing the sandstone that the arches are formed from. He doesn’t document any effort to examine records to see if any collapses were associated with long term climate changes, intense storms, seismic events, vandalism, and innumerable other possible causes.
Faulkner also assumes a uniform rate of arch formation. He then uses his model and that assumption to show that, in his view, there would have been an implausible number of arches if the Earth were as old as earth scientists claim.
All his equations are a smoke screen, an appeal to look like scientific research when religious apologetics is what is actually being presented. In short, this is a parody of how science is actually done. The 4,500 year time frame and the Flood are required by AIG’s peculiar version of a “Biblical Worldview,” which is more than a bit of a science stopper and a weird excuse to start with creationist conclusions and work backwards.
Dr. Faulkner oddly discusses Kentucky arches in Red River Gorge in addition to Arches National Park, but cannot do a similar calculation for the Kentucky arches, as arch collapse here in Kentucky has not been documented. The reported observations in Kentucky are another smoke screen in the article, basically a non sequitur. The discovery/documentation rate of arches in Kentucky has no bearing on their rate of formation or collapse (and the same holds for Utah).
Dr. Faulkner’s apparent assumption of the evolution of arches from formation to collapse is naive. Surely, the height, span, and dimensions of the suspended material are factors to consider. Not all arches are formed in the same fashion: some are formed by wind or water erosion; some by collapse. Not all arches are in the same topographic position: some are isolated and exposed on points; some are parallel to cliff faces. The relationship to and importance of natural fracturing differs among arches. If Dr. Faulkner considered these factors, he didn’t document his efforts. Our assumption is that he was unaware of these complications or deliberately chose to ignore them (and didn’t document why he did so).
The nonscientific method used by Answers in Genesis “researchers” results in the publication of materials that don’t reflect reality very well; yet AiG’s conclusions are held by millions of our fellow citizens. Faulkner’s piece is a dazzle-them-with-sciency-sounding-stuff faux research that confirms AIG and their audience’s preexisting biases. The public deserves better. It should be part of our job as earth scientists to do a better job of explaining science to the public.
*Faulkner’s Ph.D. is in astronomy; he works as a researcher for Answers in Genesis. He has some family ties to the region and occasionally has led paid AIG creationist hiking tours of Red River Gorge and its arches.
Appendix. If you are interested in Kentucky geology, here and here are field guides to the Red River Gorge area written by geologists (and you can use these guidebooks to visit the public sites for free!). The Kentucky Geological Survey has a project and map service dedicated to Kentucky arches for the hiking public. (Arches on private land are generally excluded from this database.)
Shall the Christian Nationalists Win?
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and sometime in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).
My subject is the Christian nationalist controversy which threatens to divide the American churches, as though there’s already not enough trouble over abortion, gay marriage, transgenders, and immigration. Let’s begin by looking at Acts 5. The Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court, is about to order the execution of two Christian apostles. In opposition Gamaliel speaks: “Refrain from these men and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God” (Acts 5:35 – 39, KJV).
We now face a similar situation crying out for the voice of reason, in dire need of a Gamaliel to speak truth to power. The Christian Nationalist program is essentially illiberal, intolerant, and idolatrous. They are on a campaign to roll back the gains in human rights and control the levers of political power.
The leader of this pack of “wolves in sheep’s clothing” is David Barton. His wingman is Robert Jeffress. In his sermon, “America Is a Christian Nation,” now available as an illustrated coffee table book for a $30 donation, Jeffress borrows from Barton to make – as documented by historian John Fea – “wildly exaggerated claims” while also “peddl[ing] false notions” about the First Amendment and filling his sermon with “one problematic historical reference after another.”
Fea is not alone in pointing this out. Nearly every serious American historian, “including those who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges,” has debunked Barton’s claims. May the Lord bless the historians for a faithful witness.
Barton, Jeffress, and their fellow ahistorical Christian Nationalists claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that the major institutions of American government and culture are to be operated by and controlled by Christian Nationalists. Let’s examine these claims.
America Was (Not) Founded as a Christian Nation
Christian Nationalists affirm, “America is a Christian nation.” How can I go against the preaching of Dr. Robert Jeffress? He is the pastor of the 12,000 member First Baptist Church of Dallas. He is on Fox and has an online ministry to hundreds of thousands.
Who am I to go against such authority? Well, I am a Baptist preacher with a word from the Lord. That’s how. And Jeffress is a false prophet of Christian Nationalism, and his church is “the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”
American historian David L. Holmes, in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, notes the influence of deism, agnosticism, and some Christianity among our founders. The makers of America were a mixed bunch. Some of the Christians among them were “lukewarm” and not much for church attendance. A few were strong evangelicals. Many were strongly influenced by the Enlightenment.
Two of the most prominent founders, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, had a combination of deist beliefs and Christian ones. Actually, Jefferson and Franklin succeeded in using the Christian God to form the American God. As Mark Noll discovered, America’s God is America, and Americans do not need to believe in God because they believe in belief. And in our time, belief has been reduced to “opinions.”
There is no Jesus in our founding documents. You would think a nation founded as a Christian nation would be rooted in the teachings of Jesus: “conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.” There’s none of the Sermon on the Mount in the Constitution. There’s a Bill of Rights, but no Beatitudes. There’s none of the suffering, sacrificing servant of God in our founding documents. God is not portrayed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but, instead, as “Divine Providence.”
America’s god is a generic god, more deist than Christian. And, as David Ray Griffin notes, it is deism that opened the door to what would become materialistic atheism. Benjamin Franklin, who was a paradigm for the religious beliefs of the founders, clearly laid out his beliefs:
Here is my Creed, I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe …. As for Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see; …. and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts to his Divinity; tho’ it is a Question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, where I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.
One has only to recall Jefferson taking a razor blade and cutting out all the miracles and claims to the divinity of Jesus as the son of God to realize the founding fathers were a mixture who were not easily capable of producing a Christian nation, but who were wise enough to leave in a god amenable to almost every American.
America Should (Not) Be a Christian Nationalist Government
Let there be no mistake as to the goals of Christian Nationalism. These self-proclaimed “apostles” and “prophets” believe they have been anointed by God to serve as God’s agents in ushering in his future kingdom – a “bringing of heaven to earth.” Their goal is to bring every aspect of American culture under their control: family, government, arts and entertainment, media, business, education, and religion.
Christian Nationalists are not, in fact, Christian. As Stanley Hauerwas reminds, “The Christian God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is not some further specification of the generalized god affirmed in the Pledge, but the Trinity is the only God worthy of worship. The Christian pledge is not the Pledge of Allegiance, but rather is called the Apostles’ Creed.”
Let me help you see this biblically. Jesus tells his disciples “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave” (Matthew 20:25 – 27).
Christian Nationalists want to be lords instead of servants. They want to be self-righteous rulers, not slaves of righteousness. They want to “lord it over” instead of serving the needs of the people. The Christian Nationalists are like godless Gentiles in our midst, godless Gentiles with an unmitigated lust for power. Their spirit has nothing in common with the One who said he “came not to be served but to serve” (Matthew 20:28).
Moreover, Christian Nationalists are not good nationalists. They have forgotten that the church is supposed to be an alternative to the politics of Pharaoh and Caesar. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. says, “Nationalism, at the expense of another nation [or the people of our nation], is just as wicked as racism at the expense of another race. In other words, a nationalist is a bad patriot.”
While Jeffress, in “America Is a Christian Nation,” cherry-picks sayings from the founding fathers, he has almost nothing from Scripture. Apart from his reference to Hosea 4:6 and Psalm 33:2, there’s not much guidance from God’s Word. He ends his ahistorical lecture, disguised as a sermon with Psalm 33:2 like a preacher who has forgotten to preach from his text and throws it in at the end for good measure. I don’t trust preachers without texts.
Various types of Christian Nationalists are selling us guide maps to buried treasure, pulling out yellowed parchments with “sayings of the founding fathers” (a patriot’s Gospel of Q) and trying to convince us these dated guides tell us the truth about America, about our past, about our present. But their maps are flat, and we feel like they are hiding something. We feel there are whole regions of our biblical and national experience they’ve never set foot upon – as if they claim to have mapped New Orleans because they visited the Super Dome.
I’m not buying the maps of Chrisitan Nationalism, and I will not be guided by their false prophets – Barton and Jeffress. I’d rather go to a fortune teller for my future predictions than trust the misinformation and lies of David Barton about our past, our present, and our future. I’d sooner read my horoscope than the horrors of Jeffress predicting the apocalypse in the next twenty years.
The story of Israel wanting, even demanding a king, is a major theme of the Old Testament. I would argue Israel’s unraveling as God’s faithful servant people started in the lust for a king. The Israelites said to Samuel, “Appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” Israel never quite came to grips with the hard parts of freedom: responsibility, accountability, and the common good. There was always something in the heart of the people wanting to abdicate freedom to a king.
Let me refresh your biblical memories of God warning Israel of the perils of having a king. You can open your Bibles to I Samuel 8 and read for yourself what happens when you turn over your God-given freedom to a group desiring to rule over us in the name of God. This is the biblical expression of Christian Nationalism – a monarch.
Do Americans want to abdicate our freedoms? Do we want to sit in bars, sipping on Bud Lites, telling bad jokes, complaining about the government, and allow a bunch of pious, stressed-out Christian leaders tell us what to do and how to do it? Do we want to surrender our freedom to people who don’t care about us? Do we wish for the Christian Nationalists to tell us what our children can read, what they can study in school? To tell us what we can do in our bedrooms? To tell us what we can watch on our Smart TV in our living rooms? Do we want these people in charge of all aspects of our lives? I say, “No.” A million times no.
Please allow me to help you one more time biblically. Flip through the pages from I Samuel to II Chronicles and stroll through the Hall of Kings. A king like Saul, who performed so badly, God had to step in and take the “anointing” away from Saul. A king like Solomon, who enslaved his own people. A king like Ahab – a sniveling, pouting king willing to steal the land of one of his subjects and allow his murder. And a long list of little, maniacal, greedy, evil kings. The words of the Old Testament, “He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” – words which sound like clods of clay landing on the top of a casket – resound throughout Israel’s history. .
There could be no greater tragedy than that the Christian Nationalists gain control of the government. And I do not believe for one moment they are going to succeed. Their agenda demolishes democracy, destroys truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, their own people, and our nation. It is a negative, debilitating, fake cure for the problems we face. A Christian Nationalism based on bigotry, narrowness, and lack of empathy is not a good nationalism. And it flies in the face of the very prayer Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
Now, do we understand? God’s will, not David Barton’s will. God’s will, not Robert Jeffress’ will. God’s will, not MAGA’s will. God’s will, not the will of SCOTUS. “Thy kingdom come.”
Shall the Christian Nationalists win? No. Hell no! That said, liberals need to become more vigilant and more involved. This is not a Sunday picnic. We are in a fight, and it must be waged by Christians and those of other religious commitments and those of no religious commitments – all those who are unwilling to live in a nation without democracy.
In Benjamin Franklin’s terms, our nation is in better hands with “virtuous” heretics than “wicked” Christians.
(Biblical texts for this article: 1 Samuel 8:1-22, II Chronicles 36:1-14, Acts 5:33-42, Matthew 6:7-13).
Motivated Cognition and Self-Deception
by Terry Defoe
Pastor Terry Defoe is an emeritus member of the clergy who served congregations in Western Canada from 1982 to 2016, and who ministered to students on the campuses of the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Evolving Certainties: Resolving Conflict at the Intersection of Faith and Science, a book which, among other things, chronicles his transition from Young Earth Creationism to evolutionary creation. Evolving Certainties is endorsed by scientists in biology, geology and physics, with a foreword written by Darrel Falk, former president of BioLogos, an organization that has as its goal the facilitating of respectful discussion of science / faith issues. Defoe has been educated at: Simon Fraser University (BA Soc); Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (M.Div.); and, Open Learning University, Burnaby, British Columbia (BA Psyc).
INTRODUCTION
Modern technology has fostered a revolution in communication technologies. Individuals are on the receiving end of more information now than ever before. And that information is increasingly provided by partisan news sources and social media whose journalistic standards are less than optimal. Individuals are called upon to assess the trustworthiness of this information and now with A.I.-generated disinformation making inroads, discernment is more important than ever.
Modern media affords consumers the ability to sort through an array of information choices, picking those that tell them what they want to hear. Many individuals respond to information that challenges their beliefs by using the various heuristics and psychological shortcuts (McRaney and Hagen 2011, 268) which are mentioned in this paper. This paper outlines the findings of the social sciences on the phenomenon of denial in relation to important social policy decisions such as those related to climate change, which may be made on the basis of politicized, less-than-factual information. The paper also discusses strategies for dealing with denial in its various manifestations.
DENIAL
The phenomenon commonly known as denial has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Researchers in the social sciences are investigating the mental gymnastics involved in denying or suppressing threatening information. Denial is prompted by exposure to dissonant information that contradicts existing beliefs. It is about finding comfort in beliefs contradicted by evidence. Denial has been defined as motivationally distorted information gathering and processing (Balcetis 2008). It is multifaceted and multi-causal — a key component of the human psychological immune system.
Confirmation bias is the promotion of information that supports a particular point of view, excluding any impartial consideration of contradictory evidence. Confirmation bias seeks out information that confirms a particular viewpoint. Denial avoids or discounts information that is uncomfortable. It is more often motivated by emotion than it is by rational thought (Clore and Gasper 2000, 39). Denial protects a fragile ego. It minimizes ideological discomfort and dismisses contradictory information. It is essentially a social rather than an individual phenomenon. It is encouraged by interaction with individuals who hold similar views, individuals who typically come to know each other through common social media interests (Bardon 2019, 33). Denial is destructive on several different levels — with individuals, with society, and sometimes globally as well.
Science denial stands in the way of scientific progress and muddies the water when it comes to scientifically-informed social policy decisions. The greatest danger to social policy formulation comes not from ignorance, but from a willful blindness to the truth (Musil 1994, 268–86).Challenges to ideological beliefs are typically met with anger, avoidance, and interpretive bias. Human beings hate to be wrong. They don’t take kindly to being challenged or contradicted. Our picture of the world is regularly distorted by self-interest, peer influence, prejudice, fear, and favoritism. As we will see, denial restores a sense of peace, but often at a price.
GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION
Conservatives are ideologically predisposed to be suspicious of government intervention in society. Conservative critics of government-assisted programs such as George Will criticize those programs as being nothing more than socialism under another name. Socialism, it is argued, can eventually lead to totalitarianism. Somewhere along the line, folks on the right have surreptitiously redefined socialism, linking it with dog-whistle themes such as Marxism, fascism, and autocracy. This mental sleight of hand can be quite easily accomplished when your target audience lacks the requisite background knowledge. A little study would reveal that progressive social democracies like Sweden and Denmark are doing very well, with a high standard of living and a generally happy populace.
Concern over government intervention came to the fore during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic took hold, especially in the United States, the relevant medical science was politicized, and for many, pseudoscience took charge, encouraged by a scientifically illiterate president. During the pandemic, right-wing media told people what they wanted to hear and provided support for those beliefs. Individuals who lack scientific literacy are easy marks for flim-flam artists like Donald Trump. During the pandemic, the world was given a first-hand lesson in the power of denial to upend legitimate public policy decisions, and in this case, potentially life-saving policy decisions.
As the pandemic gained momentum, and in the interest of public safety, governments made the difficult decision to close down public meeting places, including houses of worship. Conspiracy theorists got to work immediately. They argued that governments were closing down churches not because they wanted to protect people’s health, but because they wanted to eliminate those houses of worship altogether. Such, of course, was not the case. Based on this kind of fallacious reasoning, and purportedly in defense of their very existence, many conservative churches defiantly did remain open, and many of their members died unnecessarily of COVID-19 as a result.
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
Many conservatives complain that their beliefs are ridiculed or attacked by a liberal elite, including a liberal media and education system. Many conservatives are of the opinion that secular universities are indoctrination centers for liberalism. It’s ironic that those who make this claim are more than willing to use the same techniques themselves. Those who make this claim are more than willing to ban books they don’t like. The 2012 official party platform of the Texas GOP opposed the teaching of critical thinking skills in schools because it was argued that would disrupt the parents’ right to socialize their children as they see fit (Bardon 2019, 303). In other words, the Texas GOP argued that it was supporting parents’ right to socialize their children apart from government interference.
Many conservatives prefer homeschooling. This is especially true in religious communities. Homeschooling allows for greater control over the content of curriculum. A substantial proportion of evangelical Christians oppose the teaching of evolution. And this is typically one of the places where science denial takes root in American culture. Research indicates that up to 70% of the American population denies evolutionary science in some form (Liu 2013).
THE MEDIA
Individuals on the right habitually refer to the media as if it was monolithic. They argue that the media is biased against traditional Christianity. They seem to be unaware of the fact that media outlets exist on an ideological spectrum from left to right and everything in between. The arrival of the internet, social media, Facebook and the like brought huge changes to the way information is discovered, distributed, received and shared. Behind the scenes in social media, algorithms direct individuals to topics of interest and to communities of like-minded individuals.
With a minimum of effort, individuals can align themselves with media outlets that tell them what they want to hear. Many folks have their favorite partisan news source on at home throughout the day. Each day, for hours on end, they marinate in a particular political point of view. What they are hearing is best described as opinion rather than news. Add to that the fact that these news sources curate what they want their viewers to know. That involves what they share and also what they fail to share.
RELIGION
Religion has persisted as an important part of the human story for many reasons. Germane to the present discussion, religion satisfies profound emotional needs (Jost et al. 2014, 4) . It deals with existential issues such as reassurance, purpose, certainty, stability, inclusion, superiority and protection of cultural identity. Religion calms anxiety over mortality. Evangelicals pride themselves on reading the Bible literally, which, when it comes to scientific truth, makes them susceptible to pseudoscience and outright science denial (Geiger 2017). Evangelical religion and mainline science are natural cognitive sparring partners.
Acceptance of the theory of evolution is not so much about science as it is about a person’s religious beliefs. Religion can be an effective tool for maintaining the status quo. Partisan media outlets and right-wing politicians know very well how religion can be used as a means of control. Evangelical patriarch Billy Graham (1918 – 2018) once said, “I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.” (Frost, Bauer, and Graham 1997)
SCIENCE
Science generates knowledge via a methodology designed to protect against confirmation bias. Lack of scientific literacy among evangelicals means that many do not know or understand how scientific methodology actually works. Evangelicals insist that scientific claims should conform to common sense and to their religious traditions, in a sense arguing that science should be kept on a short leash. Republican Governor Chris Christie, who, with Donald Trump, has a similar dismissive attitude towards science, once claimed that he didn’t need science because he has an intuitive sense of how things work. At the end of the day, science is a human endeavor and exists in a social and cultural context. Cultural biases are identified and hopefully kept in check by scientific methodology, most commonly described as methodological naturalism.
An individual’s political ideology typically predicts their beliefs about science. Donald Trump succeeded in politicizing science during his time in the White House. That politicization blunted the nation’s response to COVID-19. Many individuals died unnecessarily because they or their loved ones believed the pseudo-science they were hearing on partisan media. In a keynote address to the American Scientific Affiliation’s 2024 conference, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic (and Dr. Fauci’s boss), estimates the number of unnecessary deaths at more than 230,000.
Conservatives face a steady stream of dissonance-inducing discoveries and information from mainstream science. Young Earth creationism (YEC) is a classic example of science denial. YEC is at least partially responsible for the science denial that came out of the closet during the Trump administration. YEC is denial on steroids. Actually, it’s more than denial. It’s denialism (Kahn-Harris 2018), which is based on the idea that if the truth doesn’t work for you, then go ahead and construct a new truth and propagate that. There’s been a major increase in science denial in the last few decades, and this has occurred at a time when scientifically accurate information can literally make the difference between life and death. Evangelicals have been at the center of science denial for decades and ought to be held accountable for misleading large numbers of people.
SOCIAL FACTORS
Not surprisingly, denial has a strong social component. Individuals are attracted to groups that share their worldview. Implicit in group membership is the expectation that individuals will share and defend group beliefs, and when those views are challenged, as they surely will be, group members will circle the wagons, so to speak, and vigorously defend their views. Human beings have a powerful need for belonging, and an equally powerful need to be right. If we conform to the group and its standards, our standing in the group will be enhanced. We learn early on that it’s not a good idea to betray our tribe by publicly challenging its beliefs or practices (Suhay 2015). When the group achieves a victory, group members share in it, and when the group is criticized, individuals share that too.
Consider the following scenario. A barber from a small, tight-knit community in the U.S. Bible Belt would soon be out of a job or have his customer base dry up if he was to stray too far from what is culturally acceptable in his small town (Kahan 2012). For instance, if he was to become a card-carrying Democrat or announce to all his friends that he’d given up his young Earth creationism and adopted an evolutionary point of view, townspeople would have their ways, some subtle and some not so subtle, of indicating their displeasure with the barber’s newfound radicalism.
At the end of the day, in this case and in many others, behind-the-scenes social pressure would ensure that conformity is rewarded and radical views sanctioned. A process psychologists call “groupthink” takes place when group members keep their opinions to themselves for the sake of group unity. The tribe comes first. The superiority of the group is beyond question. Group members quickly learn what is expected of them, and in most cases, comply.
CHANGING MINDS
Social factors, as we have demonstrated, often cause problems in terms of implementing social policy. Thankfully, social factors also suggest solutions. Social identity theory (Trepte and Loy 2017) claims that the best way to change minds is to work alongside individuals in their local contexts, promoting goals that are important to you and to them. In addition, challenges that require the cooperation of both groups [i.e., superordinate goals] in order to be successful are helpful. Ask someone who has taken on the new paradigm to speak to fellow members and explain their decision. An in-group messenger has more credibility with the group than someone from the outside.
Persistent personal contact helps build trust, and an in-person meeting is better than a virtual meeting in this regard (Young 2017). People do not want to be forced to take a stand, They do not want to be put on the spot. There is no place for condescension or overconfidence; no place for scolding or coercion. Tell your story and encourage others to do the same. Individuals are reluctant to change their minds on ideologically-charged positions. In dealing with denial, it’s best to be honest right up front and ask a person what sort of evidence would change their mind.
Atmospheric scientist and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe knows the evangelical subculture well (Von Bergen and Mannon 2020). I recently attended an online seminar in which Katharine was the main speaker. At the end of her presentation, time was set aside for Q and A. I submitted a question asking Katharine if evangelicals ought to take the blame in some way for climate science denial. Her answer surprised me. She said that if there is blame to be assigned, it should be laid at the feet of US evangelicals. They are the only evangelicals globally who obsess about this particular issue.
Full acceptance of anthropogenic global warming has increased slowly over the years, from 45% in 2014 to 57% in 2024 (Kiley 2015). 74% of Americans believe that climate change is in fact occurring, but the number who would admit that humans are causing it is 57%, 17% less. Global warming is indeed an existential threat to humanity. But many people are emotionally and materially invested in the fossil fuel industry. They would take umbrage with that claim. Their views are supported by deliberately mendacious and, I would add, well-funded merchants of denial.
Too many citizens have no idea how to apply critical thinking to the situations they encounter in everyday life. Some strategies for initiating change have the potential to change minds. For example, conservatives may move in a pro-environmental direction if the focus is changed from economics to the stewardship of God’s creation (Doran 2017). Issues can be presented in such a way as to foster audience agreement. It’s important to find common ground.
CONCLUSION
A vibrant democracy depends on an informed electorate. That goal is far from being accomplished in the US. Many Americans, unfortunately, are decidedly uninformed. One third of the American population cannot name a single branch of government. Many of those who call for tax breaks in the name of trickle-down economics cannot explain how it works. Many do not understand how wealth is distributed. Most of the population has no idea what percentage of GDP is spent on foreign aid (“Voter Ignorance Threatens Deficit Reduction | The Fiscal Times,” n.d.). Many overestimate the number of immigrants in the country, especially immigrants with an Islamic background.
Most Americans cannot locate Iraq on a map. Many are woefully inadequate in science and political literacy. An uninformed electorate is ripe for deception – fair game for the purveyors of misinformation. And politicians given the responsibility of formulating social policy often let party politics get in the way of what is best for the people. And when it comes to issues of global warming, decisions made in Washington, D,C, can have global consequences.
The Bitter Heart of Martha-Ann Alito: How the Meaning of Signs Change
by Tucker James Hoffmann
Tucker James Hoffmann is a graduate student at the University of Georgia in the Rhetorical Studies program housed in the school of Communication Studies. During his undergraduate tenure at the University of Dayton, Tucker worked closely with Drs. Susan and Bill Trollinger to analyze Turning Point USAs history and involvement in the evangelical Christian and white Christian nationalist movement. Tucker has his eyes set on the future as he continues his work studying far-right Christianity as a political movement in the US. He is enrolled as a Masters student and has the goal of securing a PhD in Rhetorical Studies.
A notable landmark between my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio is a waste management plant in Walton, Kentucky. Atop an overgrown waste dump is a huge American flag with a semi-truck trailer below that usually brandishes pro-conservative slogans. From 2016 to 2022, it featured the standard “TRUMP: Make America Great Again” banner. To my mind, the juxtaposition of a huge American flag and slogans on behalf of the former White Christian Nationalist president on an odorous dump speaks volumes about politics in the US.
This past June, as I was returning home from a wedding in Dayton, Ohio, I noticed something more peculiar than the usual evangelical, White Christian Nationalist messaging I’ve grown accustomed to on my drive. Behind the tree line of the highway a new flagpole appeared, this one flying a flag divided into four quadrants separated by a white cross. The center features a heart pierced by a spear and surrounded by thorns, topped by a cross engulfed in fire.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a symbol that was adopted by the Catholic Church as early as the 7th century. In the 12th century, Christ’s bleeding heart was a common homiletic tool for Franciscan and Dominican Friars preaching across the world. According to the Sacred Heart Basilica in Hanover, Pennsylvania, the preaching of these friars made the focus of Christ’s heart the marquee symbol of Divine Love. According to the Catholic Church, during an apparition to St. Margaret Mary, Jesus Christ revealed his heart, saying “My Divine Heart is so passionately in love with humanity, and with you in particular, that it cannot keep back the pent-up flames of its burning charity any longer. They must burst out through you.” It was from this apparition of Christ that the illustration of the Heart itself originated.
So what is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Catholic symbol meant to encapsulate the everlasting love of Christ for humanity, doing next to an American flag in rural Kentucky? Why did it appear in June of 2024? Why did those who select the flags to fly in this location choose this symbol to hoist and not, say, the Christian flag that appears in so many Protestant churches?
To answer such questions, we don’t need to go back to the 12th century or Pope Pius XI. Rather, we only have to go back to early June of 2024 and Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito. Mrs. Alito was recorded expressing extreme frustration with her Virginian neighbors who were flying an LGBTQ+ Pride flag for Pride month. In the secret recording taken by Lauren Windsor, an American progressive political consultant and self-described “advocacy journalist,” Mrs. Alito said she wanted to fly a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because she had “to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.” After being told explicitly not to fly the Sacred Heart as a symbolic retort to LGBTQ+ rights advocacy by her husband, she went on to exclaim in the six-minute recording that she wanted to “send them a message every day, maybe every week.” She aimed to do so by “changing the flags,” and even developing her own flag featuring yellow and orange flames emblazoned with the word “Vergogna,” which means “Shame” in Italian.
When the recording of Mrs. Alito reached The New York Times on June 10th, it had an effect on political iconography as a whole, refiguring the meaning of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in popular culture.
Historically, the Sacred Heart of Jesus symbol has traditionally referred to the Catholic tradition of Saint Margaret Mary, her vision of Jesus Christ and the message He had for all of humanity – love one another as much as God loves humanity. However, when Martha-Ann Alito used the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a way to engage in a counterprotest against her neighbors’ pride flag, she effectively shifted the message. That is, instead of serving as a symbol of God’s love for all, she put it to use for the message that God’s love has limits, especially when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. To Martha Ann-Alito, God’s love does not extend to gender and sexual minority groups, and God frowns on their presumption to celebrate their identities and advocate for their rights.
When Franciscan and Dominican Friars proclaimed that Christ’s heart bled out of love and sacrifice for humanity, they did so with the message of love and compassion for all. To quote John 13:34, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” For centuries, the meaning of the Sacred Heart of Jesus has been about loving one’s neighbor just as God loves humanity–enough even to incarnate and sacrifice His only Son. The Sacred Heart of Jesus was understood by Catholics to embody Christ-like loving.
When Martha-Ann Alito hoisted a flag featuring the Sacred Heart of Jesus in protest of signs celebrating Pride month, she was equating Jesus with her conservative social and political views. The anti-LGBTQ+ movement in the United States is led by evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. When Mrs. Alito chose the Sacred Heart of Jesus as her response to the Pride flag, she equated this Christian symbol to the message many Americans experience each Sunday in church, a message that says that the expansion of rights to the LGBTQ+ community is something to fear, something to hate.
Mrs. Alito’s usage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an anti-Pride symbol combined with her now-public rant against LGBTQ+ people aim, in my opinion, to refigure the symbol from a symbol of God’s universal love to God’s very conditional love. That is to say, for Martha-Ann Alito and her ideological soulmates, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is not about loving or caring for our fellow human beings. Instead, it is but another tool to continue the oppression of a historically marginalized group.
So what we have here is yet another effort by a conservative Christian to turn Jesus’ teachings and the message of love he brought to humanity inside out.
