Like father, like son: Jeffrey Dahmer’s claims about evolution in light of Lionel Dahmer’s creationism
by Glenn Branch
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
Lionel Dahmer, the father of the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer – the “Milwaukee Monster” who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys (mostly African Americans) – died on December 5, 2023. Lionel was the author of A Father’s Story, a memoir of his son’s youth first published in 1994. According to the obituary in The New York Times, “Mr. Dahmer described himself in his book as ‘almost totally analytical’—a chemist, comforted by the scientific predictability of his work, whose emotional life resembled a ‘broad, flat plain.’” But in fact, Lionel underwent a conversion experience in 1989 that affected not only his conception of the relation between religion and science, but also how his son is remembered.
Interviewed by Dateline NBC’s Stone Phillips in 1994, Jeffrey characterized evolution as the idea that “we all just came from the slime,” described it as “a complete lie … [with] no basis in science to uphold it,” and contended that “the whole theory cheapens life.” Implicit in his rambling remarks is the following argument: evolution entails that there is no God to whom we are morally accountable; only if there is a God to whom we are morally accountable is there reason for us to behave morally; therefore, accepting evolution robs us of any reason to behave morally.
For the benefit of any reader inclined to take their scientific or philosophical pointers from a college drop-out like Jeffrey, it should be noted that the scientific consensus on evolution is overwhelming, with over 98 percent of American scientists accepting human evolution in a 2014 survey; that evolution, like science in general, is typically regarded as intrinsically silent on the existence of God; and that there are a plethora of philosophical accounts of morality in which God is not central. It’s also not clear why slime is supposed to be a worse origin than the Biblical alternative, the dust of the ground.
Yet creationists are disturbingly fond of invoking Jeffrey Dahmer. To take a few examples at random: the creationist ministries Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International discuss Jeffrey in virtually identical terms, reflecting their common ancestry; a professor of philosophy at a fundamentalist university paraphrased the Dateline NBC remarks while participating in a three-way internecine creationist debate; and Jeffrey is credited by IMDB as appearing in “Kent Hovind: An Atheist’s Worst Nightmare,” a 2006 self-promoting film from a flamboyant creationist and convicted felon.
Sometimes these invocations reach a broader audience. In 2009, for example, as the Texas state board of education was conducting a revision of the state science standards, members of the radical Christian right were hoping for the retention of “strengths and weaknesses” language that was invoked as a pretext to undermine the teaching of evolution. The Texas Freedom Network reported at the time on a lobbying email with the unsubtle all-caps subject line “JEFFREY DAHMER, SERIAL KILLER, BELIEVED IN EVOLUTION—WHY ‘WEAKNESSES’ NEEDS TO STAY IN TEXAS SCIENCE STANDARDS.”
But is Jeffrey’s claim that he formerly believed that evolution licensed his ghastly crimes actually evidence of anything? Even if he was sincere and accurate, it would be unwarranted to generalize from his single case, as Lionel conceded in the appendix to the 2021 edition of A Father’s Story. And while he may have been sincere—Roy Ratliff, who ministered to him in prison, reported similar remarks from him in his book Dark Journey Deep Grace: Jeffrey Dahmer’s Story of Faith —there is no reason to regard him as insightful about his own twisted psyche, and no evidence that he was interested in evolution before his imprisonment.
Moreover, there is a plausible source for Jeffrey’s claim independent of his own murderous career: creationism itself. In the appendix to the 2021 edition of A Father’s Story, Lionel revealed that from 1989 onward he was sending “tapes and articles” espousing creationism to his son, who (according to Lionel) ignored them until after his imprisonment. Roy Ratliff reported that while in prison Jeffrey continued to receive material from his father discussing “the creation of the world and how evolution is untrue,” which Jeffrey credited with bringing him to God.
It is inevitable that the creationist materials that Lionel plied Jeffrey with, before and after his imprisonment, contained a hefty dose of the claim that acceptance of evolution causes moral bankruptcy. Indeed, the idea that accepting evolution is connected to religious apostasy, moral turpitude, and social decay is among the so-called pillars of creationism, the main rhetorical themes used by creationists hoping to influence the public. Subsisting on such a doctrinaire diet, it is hardly surprising that Jeffrey was primed to repeat the claim during his Dateline NBC interview.
But why was Lionel sending creationist materials to Jeffrey? In the initial edition of A Father’s Story, Lionel was circumspect about his own attitude toward evolution. He wrote that while in prison in 1992, his son used $130, anonymously donated, to purchase thirteen creationist books, neutrally adding,
It amazed him that a scientific theory that had been received as an unarguable scientific fact during all the years of his education might rest on questionable assumptions. It seemed to delight him that so thoroughly accepted an idea could be questioned, that nothing stood on truly solid ground.
In the appendix to the 2021 edition of his book, however, Lionel disclosed, “In 1989, I myself ‘returned’ fully to God, being influenced by the urging of my son, Dave, and profoundly affected by a seminar presented by a scientist from Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Bert Thompson.” Thompson was indeed a scientist, earning a Ph.D. in microbiology from Texas A&M University in 1975, but he spent the bulk of his career “spread[ing] young-earth creationism throughout the Churches of Christ,” as the historian Ronald L. Numbers wrote, including through a ministry called Apologetics Press.
Inspired by Thompson, Lionel was briefly active in organized creationism himself, presenting a poster at the 1990 International Conference on Creationism and publishing a 1991 paper in the conference’s proceedings. The research purported to challenge the scientifically ascertained dates of dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous:
Our radiocarbon dates of dinosaur bones and the other information in this report should be alarming to the evolutionary community and should be given serious study considering our preliminary results.
Spoiler: the “evolutionary community” was unmoved (PDF, pp. 72-79).
Ironically, in light of the proclivity of creationists to quote Jeffrey’s Dateline NBC interview to illustrate the claim that accepting evolution causes moral bankruptcy, the career of the second author of Lionel’s paper—Dmitri A. Kouznetsov, then a superstar of Russian creationism—imploded in the mid-1990s owing to accusations of scholarly dishonesty. According to the historian Ronald L. Numbers, Kouznetsov then reinvented himself as a supposed expert on the Shroud of Turin, “using fake samples from nonexistent museums,” and subsequently served time for passing bad checks in Connecticut.
It is similarly ironic that Bert Thompson, whom Lionel credited with his return to God, was fired from Apologetics Press in 2005, amid accusations of sexual misconduct. According to a story in The Christian Chronicle, which serves the Churches of Christ, a member of the church alleged that “Thompson started sending him cards and letters when he was 13, then pressed him to go out to dinner after he turned 16, the legal age of consent in Alabama.” After dinner, Thompson took the youth to his home and “lured him to a bedroom, disrobed and touched him inappropriately.” It was not the only such accusation.
Whether or not Lionel was aware of or troubled by the alleged moral failings of his collaborator and his inspiration is unclear. In any case, he seems not to have been active in organized creationism after 1991, which is not surprising given the disruption of his life by his son’s arrest, trial, conviction, imprisonment, and murder. But he continued to harbor doubts about the scientific bona fides of evolution, judging from the appendix to the 2021 edition of his memoir, and he still appears in propagandistic lists of scientists who accept creationism, including the list put out by Creation Ministries International.
100 years ago, the KKK planted bombs at a U.S. university – part of the terror group’s crusade against American Catholics
by William Trollinger
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation.
It was Dec. 19, 1923 – 100 years ago. The first day of Christmas break at the University of Dayton, with fewer than 40 students still on campus.
At 10:30 p.m., the quiet was shattered by a series of explosions, as 12 bombs went off throughout campus. Frightened students discovered that, while damage was minimal, there was an eight-foot burning cross on the edge of campus. Running to tear it down, they were confronted by several hundred Klansmen screaming threats from 40 to 50 cars.
It wasn’t the first time Dayton’s residents had endured terror from the Ku Klux Klan. Hundreds of neighbors poured out of their houses and charged at the hooded invaders. The Klansmen sped away, and the students and others extinguished the fire and tore down the cross.
The KKK is most infamous for violently terrorizing African Americans. But in the 1920s its hatred also had other targets, especially outside the South. This version of the KKK, known as the Second Ku Klux Klan, harassed Catholics, Jews and immigrants – including students and staff at Catholic universities like Dayton, where I am a historian of American religion. All of this is the focus of my 2013 article, “Hearing the Silence.”
The Second Ku Klux Klan
The KKK emerged in the South in the years immediately after the Civil War. Its goal was to use whatever means necessary – including a great deal of murderous violence – to force newly freed African Americans into conditions close to slavery.
Having succeeded, the original Klan all but disappeared by the end of the 19th century. But in the wake of the blockbuster film “Birth of a Nation” – which celebrated the original KKK as having “redeemed” the defeated South – the organization was reborn in Georgia in 1915.
This second KKK only attracted a few hundred members over the next few years. But it exploded upon the national scene in the early 1920s, thanks to anxieties about immigration, race and communism. In fact, the white-robed Klansmen with their fiery crosses – a symbol borrowed from “Birth of a Nation” – very soon attracted between 1 million and 5 million members.
The second KKK was truly national, with more members in the Midwest and West than in the South. As the reporter Timothy Egan powerfully chronicles in his book, “A Fever in the Heartland,” “the Klan owned the state” of Indiana. In 1925, “most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.”
It is possible that Ohio had nearly as many members in the 1920s. Historian David Chalmers – who counted 400,000 Ohioans in the KKK at the organization’s peak – commented that “there was a time when it seemed the mask and hood had become the official symbol of the Buckeye State.”
The second KKK presented itself as a supremely patriotic organization: “100% American.” And to be 100% American, in their eyes, you had to be white and determined to keep African Americans in their place. Emulating the first KKK, the second Klan used horrific violence, including lynchings, to try to terrify African Americans into submission.
To be “100% American” also meant that you were Christian. The second KKK was the quintessential white Christian nationalist organization, and it defined ideal citizens by their race, creed and birth. When Klansmen were initiated into the organization, members sang “Just as I am Without One Plea,” a hymn that adores Jesus as the “Lamb of God.” Yet the group portrayed Jesus as one of them: the First Klansman.
Anti-Catholic campaigns
Actually, being Christian wasn’t enough. To be 100% American, in the Klan’s view, meant that you were a white Protestant Christian.
In the years between 1890 and 1920, a flood of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe came to America, a large percentage of whom were Catholic or Jewish.
While the Klan was – and still is – strongly antisemitic, in the 1920s its members were particularly worried about Catholics, as there were many more of them. This was certainly the case in Dayton, where 35% of churchgoers were Catholic, thanks to an influx of immigrants who worked in the city’s factories.
In response to the Catholic “threat,” at least 10% of Daytonians – some 15,000 people – joined the KKK in the early 1920s, with some estimates placing the number as high as 40,000.
As was the case elsewhere in the Midwest, the Klan’s presence in Dayton was visible in rallies and parades that attracted thousands of Klansmen, Klanswomen and supporters – not to mention the burning crosses intimidating Catholics and Jews in working-class neighborhoods. As one Dayton resident of those years later recalled, the “threat of Klan violence was always there.”
The Klan directed much of its anti-Catholic hostility against the University of Dayton, which was founded by the Society of Mary, also known as the Marianists. As part of their intimidation campaign, KKK members repeatedly slipped onto campus to set crosses on fire. Rumor had it that the police force was filled with Klansmen; whether or not that was true, city authorities made little effort to intervene.
But as historian Linda Gordon has noted, “targets of Klan aggression were not always passive or nonviolent themselves.” Students at the University of Notre Dame, for example, stopped a KKK parade and rally, then damaged the headquarters of the local Klan.
University of Dayton students fought back, too. They repeatedly chased Klansmen off campus, calling on them to “show their faces.” At one point, football coach Harry Baujan, hearing that another cross burning was about to commence, exhorted his players to “take off after them” and “tear their shirts off” or “whatever you want to do.”
Lingering legacy
The second KKK peaked in influence and membership around 1925. Over the next few years, however, the Klan was afflicted by a series of scandals, the most famous of which involved the leader of the Indiana KKK – in effect, the most powerful Klansman in America – who raped and murdered his secretary. The KKK had faded from view by 1930, but not without achieving many of its aims.
For one thing, its extraordinary violence, including lynchings, helped ensure that white supremacy would remain the order of the day in the South – as it did for the next few decades.
In addition, the Klan and its sympathizers won the fight on immigration. In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which remained on the books until the 1960s. This law drastically reduced the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S. from Southern and Eastern Europe – that is, reducing the number of Catholic and Jewish immigrants – and essentially cut off all immigration from Asia.
One of the tragic effects came in the 1930s and 1940s, as the act made it very difficult for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust to get into the U.S..
While the second KKK faded from view in the late 1920s, a third emerged in the 1950s and 1960s to lead the charge against the Civil Rights Movement. Today, Klan membership is miniscule, as the KKK has been supplanted by more tech-savvy hate groups.
The Second Ku Klux Klan argued that to be truly and fully American one must be the right race, the right ethnicity, the right religion. One century after the Dayton bombing, such sentiments persist in the United States.
Before he was House speaker, Mike Johnson represented a creationist museum in court. Here’s what that episode reveals about his politics.
by William Trollinger
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been the subject of considerable media attention following his elevation to the post on Oct. 25, 2023. Since his appointment, news reports have highlighted the fact that he was one of the House leaders against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden to the presidency, and that he is known to be stridently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+.
Comparing himself to Moses, in a speech at a gala on Dec. 5, 2023, Johnson suggested that God cleared the way for him to be speaker of the House.
In the words of Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones, Johnson is “a near-textbook example of white Christian nationalism – the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”
As historian John Fea has noted, Johnson is “a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right.”
While it might not seem obvious, one of those connections includes his legal work on behalf of Ark Encounter, the massive tourist site in Kentucky run by Answers in Genesis, or AiG, and its CEO, Ken Ham. Ark Encounter and its companion site, the Creation Museum, propagate Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, which is the notion that the Earth is but 6,000 years old and that the geological formations seen today were formed by a global flood that took place around 4,000 years ago.
The state of Kentucky offers tax incentives for large tourist sites. In 2014, two years before Ark Encounter opened, the state determined that the tourist site was ineligible for these tax rebates. A primary reason for rejection was that all Ark Encounter employees are required to affirm a lengthy faith statement, which, according to Tourism Secretary Bob Stewart, “violates the separation of church and state provisions of the Constitution.”
As an attorney for Freedom Guard, a conservative religious legal advocacy law group, Johnson sued on behalf of Ark Encounter, arguing that in denying the tax rebates, the state was discriminating on the basis of religion. Johnson and the Ark prevailed, and Ark Encounter received the state’s tax incentives.
As a scholar of American evangelicalism, I argue that Johnson’s association with Ark Encounter makes much sense, given the very strong connection between Young Earth Creationism and Christian Right politics. And this connection is old.
Answers in Genesis and the Christian Right
In his 2021 book, “Red Dynamite,” historian Carl Weinberg established that for the past century, Young Earth creationists have made the case that evolutionary science makes people behave in “an immoral, ‘beastly’ or ‘animalistic’ way,” especially when it comes to sex and violence.
More than this, Weinberg argues that, for Young Earth creationists, evolution has been understood as the “backbone” of a communist philosophy, a “socialist, Marxist philosophy” that promotes a “spirit of rebellion” in America today.
As rhetorical scholar Susan L. Trollinger and I document in our 2016 book, “Righting America at the Creation Museum,” AiG continues this Christian Right tradition through its extensive online presence, its museum and now Ark Encounter.
According to Ham and AiG, “public schools are churches of secular humanism and … most of the teachers are … imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students.” Sexual immorality, LGBTQ+ activism and the rejection of patriarchy are, according to AiG, signs of the resultant cultural corruption. Ham claims that a once-Christian America – with Bible-believing founders who had no intention of separating church and state – has, since the 1960s, been dragged downward. In his 2012 book, “The Lie,” Ham asserts that this will eventually “result in the outlawing of Christianity.”
In the past few years, AiG has doubled down on its culture war commitments. For example, in March 2021 the AiG Statement of Faith – signed by all employees and volunteers – was expanded from 29 provisions to 46 provisions. This includes article 29, which requires signers to affirm that “‘social justice’ … as defined in modern terminology” is “anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing.” Then there is article 32, which says that “gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated.”
Rejecting the dangers of global warming and the notion that governments should intervene to reverse this trend, AiG’s Ham has asserted that “zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets.” According to him, climate activists are misled because they begin with human reason and not the Bible, and because they hold to evolution and an ancient Earth.
In a similar vein, an AiG spokesperson blasted mainstream scientists and others who focused on the dangers of COVID-19, arguing that they were simply generating hysteria “about a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.” AiG’s CEO lamented on his social media post that “the COVID-19 situation has been weaponized in many places to use against Christians.”
Mike Johnson and AiG beliefs
Johnson has effusively praised Ark Encounter as “a strategic and really creative … way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”
Johnson also shares with AiG’s Ham that government should not intervene when it comes to global warming, particularly given that, like Ham, he does not believe “that the climate is changing because we drive SUVs.”
He also shares with the folks at AiG the conviction that belief in evolution results in immoral behavior. For example, Johnson has blamed school shootings on the fact that “we have taught a whole generation … of Americans that there is no right and wrong. It’s all about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from primordial slime,” and so “why is that life of any sacred value?”
In this, Johnson is echoing AiG authors and speakers. For example, in response to the 2007 shooting in a high school in Jokela, Finland, which left nine dead, including the shooter, Bodie Hodge, an AiG researcher and author, asserted: “So long as evolutionism is forced onto children (no God, people are animals, no right and wrong, etc.) and so long as they believe it and reject accountability to their Creator, then we can expect more of these types of gross and inappropriate actions.”
In short, Johnson’s political commitments fit neatly into the politics of AiG and the Young Earth Creationism ecosystem. This matters politically, particularly given that a significant subset of American evangelicals adheres to Young Earth Creationism.
Agency, Authority, and the Bible: What Has Happened to Evangelicals?
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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April.
A group of PhD students at the University of Dayton are wrestling this semester with the question of whether evangelicals have surrendered their agency – their reading of the Bible – to pastoral authorities. Since I’ve never known a PhD seminar that I didn’t want to join, I am going to barge into this class and offer a single argument: Loss of agency means the rise of authoritarianism in church and in democracy.
My contention that people are reading the world’s best-selling book less deserves some warrant. Paul Combs, in an article on the Bible, says, “90% of people don’t read the Bible, and the other 10% lie about it.” Articles on American “biblical illiteracy” are too numerous to list. The point is that agency among evangelicals is pulling a disappearing act.
Hebrew scholar Richard Elliott Friedman has written a book called The Disappearance of God, in which he chronicles divine recession in the Hebrew Bible. Analogically, I am convinced that a book waits to be written titled The Disappearance of the Bible.
An Autobiographical Prelude
On an autobiographical note, in the 1950’s and 1960’s Southern Baptists had not surrendered agency. Not only was Bible reading a primary act of faith, but it was also encouraged in multiple ways. We were expected to read our Bibles daily. As youth we participated in Bible Memory Drill and Sword Drill. Baptist deacons were often biblically astute and informed. There was an expectation that reading the Bible gave us the right to disagree with one another and with the pastor. And this dissent was an honored trope in Baptist life.
By the 1980’s this agency was disappearing. The Word of God went into the age of declension.
First, Baptist laity put the interpretation of the Bible into the hands of the pastor. Then dissent was disallowed at the local church level, and at the denominational level. After two decades of Southern Baptist control by fundamentalists, like agency, had disappeared. Once the Pattersons and the Mohler’s took control, the period of a priesthood of the believer and the agency of church members began to come to an end. As the 21st century enters its third decade, dissent continues to retreat.
The Bible has virtually retired, leaving only clergy as the keepers of knowledge. The acts of dissent are over. The authority of the preacher prevails. The evangelical church is no longer a place where a gathered people discerned the will of God, but a place where the preacher telss people what to think and do.
When Agency Became Authority
I would argue that the evangelical opposition to science has damaged evangelicals by taking away the necessary elements of agency, dissent, and a free search for truth.
There’s something about the evangelical disdain for science that irritates me. The blatant disregard for new truths, new discoveries, and new theories turns me cold. But the most irritating of all is the refusal of evangelicals to apply the hard work of science to our study and preaching of the Bible.
What we lose sight of is how much science and faith have in common – the pursuit of truth. The two are not identical twins, but they share a God-given desire for truth. If faith would allow science into the church, and if science would be more open to alternative explanations that are not physical, we could have an alliance in search of truth.
For example, with the aid of science, we could stop debating about the age of the earth. The “age of the earth” is not a question Christians even need to ask. The argument is as harebrained as the debates about how many angels would fit on the head of a needle. Arguing about the age of the earth resembles the comedic question, “How many clowns can you put in a Volkswagen ‘Bug’”? There’s not really any biblical evidence and certainly no scientific evidence for a young earth, but the debate still attracts many Christians. It’s a cottage industry gone mega at the Creation Museum and The Ark Encounter.
The Baptist churches prior to the fundamentalist takeover produced a wealth of godly, righteous, and faithful Christians. The healthy mixture of agency, dissent, disagreement without anger, discernment, and prayer helped maintain the “unity” of brothers and sisters. As the psalmist puts it, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1). And this unity didn’t require allegiance to an inerrant Bible, a double-edged predestination, or a substitutionary atonement theory. Nor did it involve the intrusion of the denomination on the freedom and autonomy of the local church.
What, in other words, has been gained in the move from agency to authority? In a word, “Nothing.” Even more telling, much has been lost. The loss of agency has resulted in an array of toxic tropes that undermine the traditional politics of Baptist life. The fundamentalists among us have managed to construct their usual cathedrals to certainty and infected the baptist spirit with political alienation, demagoguery, and advancing authoritarianism. These “godly” men have turned the evangelical movement into a “total war” rather than the deliberation and mediation of differences.
The evangelicals haven’t advanced Christian faith or American politics. Instead, they now define an oppositional movement dismissive of democratic norms. Their promises of “saving the faith from liberals” has turned out to be a sort of salvation by demolition. They have created mistrust and animosity that “ravages democratic norms and values, undermines civic culture, and inhibits deliberation,” say rhetorical theorist, Robert L. Ivie.
I want to make a radical suggestion that I believe would have a chance to save evangelicalism and our nation from authoritarianism. Agency needs to be recovered among evangelicals. These closed-to-the truth institutions would benefit from a few deacons dispersed here and there who are stubborn, dissenting, argumentative, disagreeing, and godly men and women. Their preachers would be blessed by church members who quietly, reverently, and truthfully say, “Pastor, I don’t think that is what the Bible says.” Or saying, “I’m tired of all this secular politics in the church. I think it is poisoning the church.”
The evangelical demagogues need exposing. They have not been advancing the gospel; they have been shutting it down by scapegoating and oversimplifying complex issues. Demagoguery has aligned with authoritarianism as a propaganda that takes advantage of congregations already predisposed to such “fear” messages because of the fear and hatred that exists in their midst.
An Anabaptist Guide
A return to “agency” requires a guide. In this case, we have the best guide possible in the Anabaptist theologian James McClendon.
McClendon calls our reading strategy the “baptist vision,” or the prophetic vision. Two traditional elements of this reading strategy are the centrality of Jesus Christ and the “this is that” of the baptist vision. The role of Scripture is the clue to the baptist vision. Scripture forges a link between the church of the apostles and our own. McClendon expresses the baptist vision in this way: “Shared awareness of the present Christian community as the primitive community and the eschatological community.” In a motto, “the church now is the primitive church and the church on judgment day.”
McClendon asserts that
the baptist vision sees that the narrative the Bible reflects, the story of Israel, of Jesus, and of the church, is intimately related to the narrative we ourselves live. Thus that vision functions as an interpretative grid. Construing our experience by way of Scripture, it shows how the two are properly joined. Scripture + Experience. For Baptists this is the way of Christian existence. A reading of the Bible as interpreting the present situation is characteristic of the baptist vision.
Consider the following as baptist distinctives:
- The biblical story as our story.
- Liberty as the duty to obey God without state help or hindrance.
- Discipleship as life transformed into obedience to Jesus’ lordship
- Community as the daily sharing in the vision.
- Mission as responsibility for costly witness.
A Scientific Guide
The second guide that I offer may seem an odd match for an anabaptist, but I am convinced that the scientific community has a methodology of truth-searching that offers a way back to agency. The study and preaching of the Bible need the benefit of the scientific method of research and theory.
There is humility in the heart of scientists. Kenneth Miller says,
Scientific explanations are always, to some extent, incomplete. For all of their apparent precision, even gravitational theory and atomic theory are incomplete in their descriptions of the mechanics of nature.”
When a scientist refuses to take a stance of certainty toward something as elemental as “gravity,” the certainty claims about the inerrancy of the Bible or the authority of the pastor stands on sinking sands.
Good science has a streak of disrespect for authority that evangelicals have evaporated into authoritarianism. Young scientists are expected to challenge the theories of their teachers. They are required to be innovative, creative, rebellious, outside the box. An embracing of the scientific paradigm of research and the search for truth holds the key to a recovery of agency.
This work has been ongoing in our universities and seminaries, as our brightest biblical scholars have used the research techniques of science to provide alternative readings and challenge us with radical ideas. Yet there seems to exist a wide gulf between the academy and the congregation.
Biblical scholars have been bringing us “gifts from God” for centuries. But even among progressives, there’s been a tendency to leave behind all that scholarship at the seminary. In our churches we are reluctant to disturb our people with new ideas, with innovative readings of the Bible. We are afraid we may disrupt their faith.
Jesus commands us to ask, seek, and knock. Where are the young preachers ready to slay the dragons of close-minded intolerance? The young preachers have been bold on social issues and ethical issues, but where is our boldness with it comes to the Bible and theology?
I am suggesting that preachers learn the lessons of scientific research and experience the freedom of scientists seeking to improve or overturn existing paradigms of science. In the crucible of searching, asking, and questioning, we will discover the “newness” of God’s Word.
A Rhetorical Guide
Historically, there’s a dispute over whether Jews, Anabaptists, or Baptists are the most argumentative. I grew up with the truism, “Where two or three Baptists are gathered, there’s bound to be at least four opinions.”
Perhaps no one loves to argue as much as the Jews. Even more important, the Jews have maintained a detailed written account of all their arguments. Ellen Davis reminds us that Christians have no material even remotely related to the written history of the “sayings of the rabbis.” Davis has argued eloquently for these “arguments” as already embedded in the transmission of the Scripture. She names this process “critical traditioning.”
For instance, Davis helps readers interpret Leviticus 19. In the chapter there is a definition of “neighbor” as fellow Jew. Also, there is a command that the “alien” is the neighbor of the Jews. The two seem to contradict one another, but both remain in the book of Leviticus. The reason, according to Davis, is so that each new generation can keep arguing about what it means to be “the neighbor.”
The introduction of argument to this discussion opens the door for an appearance of the tropes of my own academic discipline: Rhetoric. Argument and persuasion are essential elements in theology and politics. The Greek word, for faith, in ancient Greek, means “probability.” Aristotle defined rhetoric and persuasion as the use of all the available possibilities.
Theological work has always been premised on deliberation, pluralism, multiple meanings, and reciprocity. Now we face advocates who insist on, as James Kloppenberg puts it, as “framing disagreements as all-or-nothing struggles between good and evil, between freedom and oppression,” instead of seeing that theology involves endless arguments and openness to competing values and worldviews.
The closed fist approach of evangelicals to truth harms evangelicals as it harms the rest of us. I challenge the “zero-sum” story of evangelicals that “a voice for liberals and progressives” is a loss for evangelicals and the truth. It would be better for faith and democracy if we were not exploited by the cult of certainty sowing the seeds of division and mistrust. We need to invest in a larger perspective and in more diverse voices.
I am fully aware that the multidimensional work of providing multiple readings of the Bible and faith cannot be undertaken without the rowdiness of democratic give and take. But it is the price we must pay to embrace diversity as a benefit and not a curse.
In summary: There isn’t a reason in the world to be distrustful of new knowledge. Some new knowledge turns out to be a dead end and is discarded. The process of knowing what to keep and what to discard is the very heart of biblical work.
I have argued for dissent as an affirming gesture for faith that will allow the potential for new truth to emerge. This, in my view, provides a constructive starting point for restoring agency and resisting the demagogic regression from mating with authoritarianism. The bridge from pastoral authority to political authoritarianism is a walking bridge – a very short one. An authoritarian government will destroy democracy and impose control that Americans would need to resist with all our minds, hearts, and bodies.
The Debate over Biblical Cosmology: A Case Study in Gracious Forbearance
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).
Biblical cosmology is phenomenological — reflections of earth-bound observers seeking to explain various aspects of the natural realm. The ancients were without the benefit of modern science and its associated technologies. Their understanding was limited to what the eye could see. In the Old Testament book of Job, (42:3), Job admits his lack of knowledge of both material and spiritual realities when he says, “I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” The issue of phenomenology is at the root of much of the current conflict between science and faith. Old Testament professor John Walton of Wheaton College says, “There is not a single instance in the Old Testament of God giving scientific information that transcended the understanding of the ancient Israelite audience” (106).
The author of Genesis is not aware of the limitations of his own knowledge. In the Hebrew Scriptures, important theological truths are often embedded in prescientific contexts. Modern-day believers do not base their faith on scripture’s statements about the natural world. Denis Lamoureux asserts that
The earth “looks” flat, “seems” to be surrounded by water, and “feels” stationary; the sky gives the “impression” of being a blue body of water overhead, and the sun “appears” to cross the dome of the sky, rising and setting every day.… to ancient peoples like the biblical authors and their readers, these are descriptions of the actual structure and operation of the universe.
The Firmament
The Hebrew word translated “firmament” or “expanse” is “raqia,” or metal pounded flat. The ancient authors of scripture believed that the firmament supported God’s footsteps. Job 22:14 in the New English Bible says, “He walks to and fro on the dome of heaven.” The ESV translation says, similarly, “He walks on the vault of heaven.” Job 37:18 has a question for God’s servant: “Can you join God in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?” And Isaiah 40:22 says, “God sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and his people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” The builders of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) were convinced they could build a tower that would reach the firmament.
The Israelites believed that the stars were quite small and fixed to the firmament. The stars sometimes dislodged, falling to the earth. This idea was carried forward into the New Testament (Revelation 6:13), where the apostle John says “… the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.” In the fifteenth century, some scholars (called “philosophers” in those days) began to question the idea of a firmament. Luther (1483-1546) insisted on a literal interpretation of the relevant texts:
Scripture says that the moon, the sun, and the stars were placed in the firmament of the heaven, below and above which heaven are the waters… It is likely that the stars are fastened to the firmament like globes of fire, to shed light at night… We Christians must be different from the philosophers in the way we think about the causes of things. And if so far beyond our comprehension like those before as concerning the waters above the heavens, we must believe that rather than wickedly deny them or presumptuously interpret them in conformity with our understanding (30).
Israel’s cosmology was similar to that of surrounding near eastern nations, especially Egypt and Babylon. There were differences, however. And those differences were theologically significant. For example, the author of Genesis carefully pointed out that astronomical bodies were not autonomous divinities able to control human behavior, as was believed in neighboring nations, but were inanimate entities under God’s control.
Paradigm Shift
A typical sixteenth-century scientist, Polish priest Nicholaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a man of faith. Somewhere around 1514 (the date is uncertain) he proposed a radical new theory, subsequently called heliocentrism, arguing that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa. Physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out that the theory was first circulated anonymously, perhaps fearing that Copernicus would be labeled a heretic (3). Heliocentrism caused consternation among theologians because of verses like 1 Chronicles 16:30: “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.”
Galileo (1564-1642) was asked to write an account which would lay out the arguments pro and con. He was instructed not to take sides. But that’s exactly what he did. Galileo displayed what Stephen Jay Gould called “… a fatal impetuosity,” the behavior of “…a frightfully undiplomatic hothead who brought unnecessary trouble on his own head” (88). Incidentally, in 1992, 350 years after Galileo’s death, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) admitted, on behalf of the Catholic church, that errors had been made by the theological advisors in their persecution of Galileo.
Accommodation
Martin Luther was a contemporary of Copernicus. He shared the geocentric cosmology of the learned people of his day. Luther refused to budge from the standard scriptural interpretation which claimed that the earth did not move. This, however, is not the end of the story. The Lutheran Church never took an official position against the Copernican theory. As Russell Moulds has established, Luther and his colleagues at Wittenberg University included the Copernican heliocentric model in their curriculum, despite the radical, counterintuitive, and exegetical problems status of that theory (40). Paradoxically, the Lutheran University of Wittenberg actually played a central role in promoting heliocentrism.
Despite Luther’s biblically grounded skepticism, Lutherans openly considered and embraced heliocentrism without fear of reprisal. According to Moulds, “this approach fostered the study of what was current and emerging in the arts, letters, and sciences without necessarily endorsing the content as conclusive” (40). Lutherans granted early scientists the autonomy to understand nature on its own terms, and for this they played a key role in shaping the modern scientific enterprise.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a devout Lutheran, best known for his laws of planetary motion. As A. J. Swamidass explains:
Kepler’s introduction to Astronomia Nova included a careful exegetical study, analysis of Psalm 104 and Joshua, showing these passages did not put science at odds with the Bible. . . . As a scientist, I admire Kepler’s obvious and diligent brilliance. I identify with his worshipful devotion to the Creator in his study of creation. I also aspire to Luther’s graceful forbearance of those who disagreed with him (84)
Kepler pointed out that science could assist investigators in learning about God’s creative will. (Gribbin, 2003, p. 52) Faithful individuals the likes of Augustine, Kepler and Galileo encouraged the church to acknowledge scientific advances and let those insights inform church teachings. As Ted Davis says:
Kepler used the Augustinian principle of accommodation to justify the figurative interpretation of biblical references to the motion of the sun. The Bible, he noted, speaks in a very human way about ordinary matters in a manner that can be understood, using ordinary speech to convey loftier theological truths. Thus, the literal sense of texts making reference to nature should not be mistaken for accurate scientific statements (36).
Conclusion
Many Christians are unaware of the fact that the Big Bang theory was initially proposed by Father George LeMaitre, (1894-1966) a Jesuit priest, friend of Albert Einstein and leading scientist in Belgium. According to the theory, the universe expanded from a high density state approximately 13.8 billion years ago. In 1951, LeMaitre’s theory was officially pronounced to be in accordance with Roman Catholic teaching.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old. In order to assist viewers in grasping the magnitude of that number, producers of a Nova TV Special used the analogy of a vehicle traveling at the rate of one million years per minute. This vehicle would have to travel nonstop just over three days (74 hours) to reach the equivalent of 4.5 billion years. As explained in PBS’ “Australia: First Four Billion Years” that’s at the rate of 1 million years per minute.
A growing number of Christians today believe that God has continuously supervised an evolutionary process, a point of view called evolutionary creation. The New Testament book of Hebrews, chapter 1, verse 3, says that God “… sustains all things by his powerful word.” The Apostle Paul adds “… All things were created through him, and for him: and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:16-17) In Romans 1:20, we read: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…”
You Can’t Be a Literalist in a Metaphorical World, or, Conservatives Like Mike Johnson Have a “Daddy” Issue
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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April.
George Lakoff asks penetrating questions in his work, The Political Mind: “Why do certain people, most of them self-identified as conservatives, find certain acts of love—premarital, extramarital, or homosexual—more sinful than war or torture? Why should a conservative living in the Midwest find it personally threatening when gays get married in San Francisco or Massachusetts?”
I add: Why do conservatives have such an emotional need to reduce SNAP benefits?
Why indeed? Conservatives seem to have a single mind that informs their approach to every social issue. Lakoff, in another work, one that inspired my doctoral dissertation, argues that we live by a series of metaphors that constitute our reality.
Conservative modes of thought are sweeping across the nation, creating a kind of soft authoritarianism. Egged on by a deep emotional fear of losing, evangelicals are comfortable with the idea of minority rule. Any form of authoritarianism – even fascism – entices those who are determined to be in charge. No conservative I know is bothered by the fact that 72% of Americans accept gay marriage. They are not deterred by the reality that more than 65% of Americans believe that there should be some access to abortion. They are not the least bit intimidated by a secular culture and progressive Christian majority that embraces diversity.
They no longer have any qualms about reducing direct democracy, empowering the minority, or eliminating the primary guarantees of democracy.
Building on my 1993 book, The Creative Power of Metaphor, I suggest that conservatives live by a single, dominant metaphor.
In the 1990s I thought that dominant metaphor was LIFE IS WAR.
Now, I believe that I only discovered one of the tertiary metaphors of the conservative movement. Borrowing again from Lakoff, I think the primal metaphor is the strict father metaphor.
Definition of The Strict Father Metaphor
Lakoff defines the strict father as the moral leader of the family, and he is to be obeyed. The family needs a strict father because there is evil in the world from which he must protect them—and Mommy can’t do it. The family needs a strict father because there is competition in the world, and he has to win those competitions to support the family—and Mommy can’t do it.
You need a strict father because kids are born bad, in the sense that they just do what they want to do, and don’t know right from wrong. They need to be punished strictly and painfully when they do wrong, so they will have an incentive to do right to avoid punishment.
The Strict Father metaphor depends upon a deeper metaphorical structure: God is the Strict Father. For instance, evangelicals operating out of the strict father frame struggle with the story of the prodigal son. The younger son did what all strict father adherents abhor – he wasted everything. He was lazy, promiscuous, careless with money, had evil friends, and refused to work.
The only way evangelicals can “stomach” the prodigal son story is to turn it into a revival testimonial. In this framework, the prodigal son is a sinner in need of grace. There’s no economic reality involved in this reading. It is sloppy spiritualization attempting to hide from messy reality.
In the strict father metaphor, we would have a different prodigal son story.
When his father saw him he was filled with indignation. He waited at the front door with his arms folded and his face showing a bit of a scowl and an ocean of indifference. Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
But the father, feeling no sympathy said to his slaves, “Quickly, get the chains and lock the boy in the cellar and leave him there with no food and water.”
The father then called the elder son and said to him, “Order the fatted calf to be killed, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine has to learn how to be an adult in this home.” And they began to celebrate.
And the father said to the Older Brother: “You are my son, my Beloved. You have worked hard, obeyed my every word, and you have always respected my authority. To you I leave my entire estate as your reward.”
In the Strict Father version, the prodigal doesn’t get a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet; he gets chains on his body and the sting of a whip on his back. Disobedience must be punished. The son must once again learn the total authority of the Father; he must be obedient, and most of all, he must return to work in the field every day.
A softer version of the Strict Father prodigal story would have left out the chains and whip, but the issues remain the same: Authority, discipline, obedience, and punishment. This is the Strict Father template.
Strict Father (Mike Johnson) v. the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
During Thanksgiving week, there is another defining example of the strict father metaphor. This one has to do with food supply. Instead of a table loaded with turkey and dressing with all the goodies, there is the reality that 30,000,000 Americans suffer from food deficiency.
Why would an affluent member of Congress be concerned about the amount of food assistance received by a poor person? The irony of affluent members of Congress debating food assistance for poor people without consulting a single poor person is thick.
When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson claims that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program,” he conveniently ignores the facts that 41 million Americans receive SNAP benefits, and that the alleged fraud in the program doesn’t exceed 2% of the budget. As for the emotional argument that SNAP is “bloated,” the reality is that SNAP comprises a very small portion of the federal budget and it is not a key driver of our federal debt. In 2022, spending for SNAP made up 2.4 percent of total federal spending.
Johnson’s miserly politics looks suspiciously like Pharoah cutting the rations of Hebrew slaves and nothing like the amazing generosity of God. Walter Brueggemann says,
From the outset, Pharaoh, blessed by God’s Nile, was the leader of the breadbasket of the world (see Gen. 12:10). By his own actions and those of his food czar, Joseph, Pharaoh advanced the claims of the state against his own subjects, achieving a monopoly on land and on the food supply. That land and food supply became a tax base whereby wealth was systematically transferred from the peasant-slaves to the central monopoly.
The strict father operates on merit, competition, hard work. In a strict father family, hierarchies of power and wealth are justified on “merit.” If a person is “given” food benefits, the desire to compete, to win, to provide disappears. Conservatives really believe that cutting welfare benefits will build discipline, improve lives, and make America great again.
President Reagan Gave Conservatives a Permanent Metaphor for Opposing Welfare Benefits
Conservatives are not void of metaphorical construction. Ronald Reagan, for instance, invented the metaphor of the “Welfare Queen,” and it served as the defining principle of conservatives for decades.
Whether or not the Welfare Queen was a total fabrication, or a real woman, is not relevant. The power of the metaphor is that the Welfare Queen came to stand for all African Americans on welfare. She was a lazy, uppity, sexually immoral black woman who was a cheater living off of the taxpayers, driving a Cadillac paid for by taxpayers, having children just to get money for them.
Despite the fact that most welfare recipients are white, and few own vehicles of any kind, conservatives eagerly accepted Reagan’s metaphor. Match “Welfare Queen” with “Strict Father” and you have a shotgun wedding made in conservative heaven.
Reagan’s description of the Welfare Queen driving a Cadillac enabled him to reach southern poor whites. The Cadillac symbolized something valuable and upper-class that was not earned. He also deftly employed the racist and sexist tropes that whites were above nonwhites, and men were above women.
The rhetorical trope for this was metonymy. The definition of metonymy: the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant. For example, “suit” for business executive, or “track” for horse racing.
Here’s how metonymy works: In Reagan’s created frame the welfare recipient is a lazy uppity immoral black, and that fits a social stereotype of blacks. Eliminating welfare is giving those unworthy blacks what they deserve—nothing!
Reagan’s prodigious powers of persuasion convinced poor, white, worthy welfare recipients to vote against their own self-interest. They supported Reagan’s stand against welfare because they already lived out of a more powerful metaphor: the Strict Father. They knew that Reagan didn’t include them in the Welfare Queen trope. They were on welfare, but they didn’t drive Cadillacs.
The Welfare Queen and Strict Father metaphors explain how Speaker Johnson can ignore facts and reality to insist on cutting SNAP benefits. The “Welfare Queen” haunts the dreams of all hardline, strict father legislators.
“And I Will Show You a More Excellent Metaphor”
In the rich language of the Bible there are better metaphors to live by than the strict father. There’s a phrase that appears frequently in the Bible: “Made a feast.” From Abraham making a feast for his guests with unleavened bread to Jesus feasting with his disciples at the table with bread and wine, there is a sense of joy and generosity in the air.
Instead of the clutching greed of the Strict Father guarding all the benefits, we get God’s inexhaustible creation, limitless grace, relentless mercy, enduring purpose, and fathomless love. No wonder the Strict Father metaphor struggles to find its footing in the kingdom of grace.
The feast that God provides gives us a vision of God “cutting a rug” with all peoples of all backgrounds – rich and poor. When you think about it, an appeal to rhythm makes perfect sense: without the satisfaction of certain appetites, nothing gets born – neither songs nor babies.
Imagine feasting, singing, dancing, the sense of rhythm in the nurturing God’s kingdom as the ingredients for a stronger metaphor.
The Hebrew prophet Isaiah imagined the reality:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 25:6-8)
The shroud in this passage is the Strict Father metaphor – the illusion of white male superiority – that separates the rich from the poor, and from God. Strict father types believe that extravagance is waste, that generosity is a sign of weakness, and that feasting is somehow not acceptable.
Evangelicals have “daddy issues;” more seriously, evangelicals need better metaphors for framing reality. Evangelicals need a new primal metaphor.
Roger Miller sang, “You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd.” Well, you can’t literalize in an ocean of metaphors and symbolic language.
Pot Calling the Kettle Black: Ken Ham Attacks “Secular Media” for Its Lies
by William Trollinger
Ken Ham has to be thrilled.
Mike Johnson – young Earth creationist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion extremist, and election denier – is now Speaker of the House. More than this, Johnson has done legal work for Ark Encounter, helping to ensure that Ham’s big (albeit unseaworthy) boat annually receives a sales tax rebate of $1.825 million, as part of Kentucky’s tourism development program.
But despite the fact that his ideological and work buddy is now, after the Vice President, next in the line of succession for the presidency of the United States, Ham is angry, angry that news stories on Johnson and Ham make the point that “Kentucky taxpayers helped fund” the Ark:
Do we even need to be reminded that we can’t trust much of the secular media and that they will lie for the purpose of maligning those they don’t agree with . . . At Answers in Genesis, we have stated so many times that the Ark was funded 100% by private funding. Let me say it again: the Ark Encounter project and the Creation Museum were both funded 100% by private funding.
Let’s leave aside the question of whether the sales tax rebate qualifies as public funding. For all of his self-righteous bluster re: the “secular media,” Ham conveniently and consistently fails to acknowledge that the little town of Williamstown provided the Ark with all sorts of public assistance:
- The town gave Answers in Genesis (AiG) $175,000.
- The town gave the Ark 98 acres for the princely sum of $1.
- Most important, the town underwrote $62 million of junk bonds for the Ark construction project, in the process (and here’s what makes this deal so sweet) agreeing that 75% of the Ark’s property taxes would go to repaying the bonds, and not to the local government.
If this is not public funding, I don’t know what is.
Of course, Williamstown agreed to subsidize the Ark in hopes that this fundamentalist tourist attraction would result in an economic boon for the town. The town was sold on this dream thanks to AiG’s feasibility report, which claimed that the Ark would attract an estimated 1.6 million visitors in the first year, and that these numbers would go up for the next decade by an average of 7% each year after that.
Well, Ark Encounter annual attendance has never reached 1 million. And last year (July 2022-June 2023) the Ark welcomed 782,660 visitors – not an insignificant number, but only 36% of the 2.18 million that had been projected.
Williamstown has not come close to enjoying the economic boon it had imagined when it was sold on the junk bond deal by AiG. As David MacMillan – featured in the brilliant documentary “We Believe in Dinosaurs” – has put it, “Ham fleeced a town that gave him his Ark Encounter.”
But not only does Ham refuse to come clean about the fact that Williamstown helped subsidize the Ark, but he has (appallingly) claimed that this little town has only itself to blame for its lack of economic growth, in that it happens to be on the wrong side of the interstate (which, of course, is precisely where it was located when AiG made its sales pitch).
Do we even need to be reminded that we can’t trust much of what Ken Ham has to say?
Not to mention his compatriot, Mike Johnson.
Mike Johnson: Not for the People, and Not a True Evangelical
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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April..
Rep. Mike Johnson and I are Louisiana natives. We both were born and raised in North Louisiana. We both were raised as Southern Baptists. We both graduated from LSU, he from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center, and I from the Ph.D. program in the Department of Communication.
I imagine that he, like me, attended the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport numerous times in his childhood. I am sure that he, like me, grew up pulling for the LSU Fighting Tigers on Saturday nights.
He has become a powerful politician and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. I am an American Baptist preacher and writer.
We both profess to be evangelicals. But his understanding of what it means to be evangelical is dramatically different from mine. Perhaps the differences in a pair of Louisiana guys maps the major differences within American evangelicalism, within American Christianity:
- Johnson is an election denier who believes Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. I know that Joe Biden was legitimately and fairly elected as our president.
- Johnson is a MAGA supporter of Donald Trump; I believe Trump is the most dangerous and evil politician in America. I have written two books attempting to tell evangelicals the truth about Trump. In The Immaculate Mistake I argue that evangelicals gave birth to Trump and his demagoguery. In Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, I argue that Trump is philosophically, biblically, rhetorically, and politically evil, as his political alienation, demagoguery, violence, and authoritarianism are shaking the foundations of democracy.
- Johnson is a young Earth creationist who believes the world was created 6,000 years ago. He has defended Ken Ham, the Creation Museum, and the Ark Encounter in court, helping Ham receive millions of dollars in tax breaks and funds from the Kentucky Department of Tourism. I find young earth creationism to be fake, false, and unchristian, as the Creation Museum is nothing but the visualization of right-wing ideologies.
- Johnson is a virulent opponent of the LGBTQ community, even to the point of lamenting the dissolution of anti-sodomy laws in a dozen states. Perhaps his most egregious statement came when he claimed,
- “Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone. Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”
- In contrast, I am a supporter of the LGBTQ community and am the interim pastor of a welcoming and affirming American Baptist and UCC church.
- Johnson is a hardline anti-abortionist, to the point of asserting that doctors who give abortion care should be “imprisoned at hard labor.” I am not a hardline anti-abortionist, and am appalled by the unending crusade to criminalize more and more people who are involved in helping women.
- Johnson believes America was founded as a “Christian nation, following the lead of the American history “hobbyist,” David Barton. But Barton’s views have been convincingly contradicted by the overwhelming majority of actual historians in America, including some very conservative ones. In contrast with Johnson, I know America was not founded as a Christian nation.
- Johnson is a Christian Nationalist, and his Christian Nationalism is rooted in an American Gnosticism and idolatry that is but one example of the failure of the Southern Baptist Church to be the church. On the other hand, I believe that Christian Nationalism is a form of idolatry.
- Johnson opposes the separation of church and state. Maintaining my Baptist roots, I am a firm supporter of the separation of church and state.
- Johnson defines his Christianity as a commitment to culture war politics. I define my Christianity as a commitment to the politics of Jesus – an alternative to the secular politics of violence and death.
I will address two problems that I have with Rep. Johnson’s political/theological understandings: His use of the word “people” and his claim to be an “evangelical.” I want to clarify who Johnson actually is; that is to say, I want to clarify what makes him so dangerous.
Johnson Doesn’t Care about the “People”
I don’t trust smiling, hand-shaking, back-slapping politicians and Baptist preachers going on until doomsday about the “people” and loving the people. There’s an agenda hidden behind the theatrics.
He voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. He even wrote a court brief that argued that polling irregularities stemming from COVID protocols invalidated the results in four key states. He has been willing to violate Constitutional rules to do permanent damage to democracy. Thomas Friedman has reminded us, “The peaceful, legitimate transfer of power is the keystone of American democracy. Break it, and none of our institutions will work for long, and we will be thrust into political and financial chaos.” The new Speaker of the House attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power, and in so doing he was trying to break the ties that bind us together as one people.
All this political activity may be deemed necessary by Johnson, but it’s not a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It is a government of right wing culture warriors and the rich. Over the course of the last ten years, Republicans like Johnson have resurrected a social Darwinism that allows the strong to control the majority with strict laws and authoritarian ways. These strange Republicans push for a lack of government intervention in issues that matter to them – Wall Street, evangelical church “freedoms,” and the environment – while at the same time demanding extreme government intervention in the sex lives of the people. These folks have no empathy for the poor and no desire to enlarge the social safety net, and they are persistent in their effort to reduce voting rights, especially for minorities. In the name of “the people,” Johnson’s party works hard every day to destroy truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, and U. S. democracy.
Mr. Johnson made it clear what his agenda will be as Speaker: “You’re going to see an aggressive schedule in the next few days and weeks ahead. You’re going to see Congress working as hard as it has ever worked, and we are going to deliver for the American people.”
Crack open Johnson’s agenda, and you will not see one benefit for the people. Mr. Johnson, like the ancient Gibeonites, is the hewer of wood and drawer of water for Trump.
The promise that the new Speaker will work hard for the “American people” can’t be trusted.
Johnson Is Not a Real Evangelical
The media has already made a big splash about Johnson being an evangelical. But while Johnson was born in what was once the “Bible Belt,” his birthplace of Shreveport, Louisiana, the region is now the “Gambling Belt.” Where the First United Methodist Church and the First Baptist Church of Shreveport once dominated Shreveport, they have been replaced by Bally’s Shreveport Casino & Hotel, Boomtown Casino Hotel Bossier City, Eldorado Resort Casino Shreveport, and Margaritaville Resort Casino Bossier City. Shreveport has gone from the Bible Belt to the Altar of Mammon.
The same erosion has afflicted evangelicals in general. The word “evangelical” has morphed from “preacher of the good news,” to political supporters of the right-wing of the Republican Party. Evangelicals “ain’t what they used to be.”
I challenge the right of Christians like Mr. Johnson to even use the word “evangelical.” Prior to the 20th century evangelicals were preachers and prophets who called for justice, who honored the teachings and example of Jesus, who asked his followers to act as peacemakers and to care for “the least of these.” Evangelicals supported voting rights for women, rights for African Americans, working people, and care for the poor.
Today’s evangelicals are much less substantive as they promote a religion based on success, the prosperity gospel, and “church growth.” With the triumph of right-wing Christianity, evangelicals are not nearly as interesting. The people who once “turned the world upside down” in defiance of Caesar have now made alliance with Caesar to obtain worldly political power.
Evangelicals, for centuries, had a biblical calling: “The kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe the good news!” To repent is not to feel bad but to think differently. But evangelicalism, in its concern for gaining power and control, has confused the kingdom itself with the benefits of the kingdom. So, the prosperity gospel preachers, the positive-thinking preachers, the charismatic preachers who promise that God will make you rich, healthy, and happy have an individual prescription for life. But all this is not the Gospel, nor is it historic evangelicalism.
The historian Randall Balmer has suggested
an evangelicalism for the twenty-first century that takes seriously the words of the Hebrew prophets who called for justice, an evangelicalism that honors the teachings and the example of Jesus, who asked his followers to act as peacemakers and to care for “the least of these.” Such an evangelicalism, I am confident, would look rather different from that of recent years.
Amen. But this is not Mike Johnson. He is not a true evangelical, and he is not for “the people.”
He is, however, perfect for MAGA Republicanism.
Racist Birds and Woke Conservatories: Ken Ham’s Colorblind Racism Knows No (Logical) Bounds
by William Trollinger
Ken Ham’s obsession with denying structural racism has gone completely off the rails.
Take, for example, his bizarre response to a Los Angeles Times article that discusses how there are remarkable contrasts in bird species in different parts of Los Angeles, as “wealthier, and typically whiter, areas attract a larger and more diverse population of birds.” Drawing upon an article in Ornithological Applications, the author points out that
the difference in bird populations [in Los Angeles] is a lasting consequence of racist home lending practices from decades ago, as well as modern wealth disparities.
So here we have a fascinating, sobering, and powerful article that draws upon a wonderfully researched study. More than this, it builds upon decades of scholarly work that has demonstrated the long-term impact of historical redlining and contemporary maldistribution of wealth in America.
Ok, this is one response to this article. Then there’s the response from Ken Ham. In an Answers in Genesis (AiG) blog post entitled “Is the Los Angeles Bird Population Racist?” – no, I am not joking – Ham argues that
those who look at the world only through the lens of so-called race will see racism everywhere – even observing “remarkably segregated” birds! Such ideas are permeating our culture.
What? What is Ham talking about? Does noticing the effects of historic housing discrimination equal birds that are racist? Is this what counts as a logical argument in the world of AiG apologetics?
Not satisfied with inanities about racist birds, Ham goes on to assert that:
This kind of thinking can now be found everywhere – from bird studies like this to which classical music is selected for students to learn to play. I was recently speaking with a piano and voice teacher who has a passion for high-quality music education. He shared that progressivism has completely overwhelmed the fine arts, including music, to the point where the standard canon of Western classical music (think Bach, Beethoven, Handel, etc.) is being ignored in favor of only [Ham’s emphasis] minority or underprivileged group music (so music isn’t selected based on merit or even historic value but on intersectionality).
There is so much to be said here:
- In contrast with the nicely researched LA Times article, there is no evidence here, there is no listing of all the conservatories that teach only “minority or underprivileged group music,” there is no listing of all the major symphony orchestras that play only “minority or underprivileged group music.” This article was supposedly “written with the assistance of AiG’s research team”; surely this research team had an hour or two to list all of the conservatories and all of the major symphony orchestras that have eliminated from their syllabi and from their repertoires music by white male composers.
- In contrast with Ham and his “research” team, I spent 15 minutes on the website of the famous Juilliard School. There I found a statement by the Dean of the Music Division, in which he notes that we are “taking important steps to broaden our knowledge by creating a faculty-research list of works by Black composers to embrace and work toward a more representative world of classical music.” So is that the problem? Noticing that for centuries the classical music world shut out composers (and conductors) who were people of color (not to mention women)? That is to say, is the point that Ham and AiG hate seeing anyone disturbing the white male (and unrepresentative) classical music world?
- And it is here where Ham’s racism becomes more blatant. Once that you decide to intentionally include classical music by people who have been traditionally left out (that is, people of color and women) you will end up with music that “isn’t selected based on merit or even historic value but on intersectionality.” Not very subtle, Ken.
(Side note: according to article #29 (!!) in the AiG Statement of Faith, “the concepts of ‘social justice,’ ‘intersectionality’ (my emphasis), and ‘critical race theory’ as defined in modern terminology are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing (Ezekiel 18:1-20; James 2: 8-9).” Of course these Bible verses have virtually nothing to say about rejecting social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory . . . and I say of course because article #29 is not about aligning with biblical faith, but, instead, about aligning with MAGA politics.)
In a recent talk at the First Baptist Church in Columbia, Missouri, historian Jemar Tisby – speaking to a predominantly white audience – asserted that
If I could get all the White Christians in the room – all of you, all together – and I could teach you one thing, it would be that racism is not solely an issue of attitudes or interpersonal relationships, but racism has its doing in institutional manifestations . . . [But] that’s controversial for a lot of people. That’s what they’re arguing against when they cry ‘critical race theory’ or ‘wokeism.’ They don’t want to deal with the systemic aspects of racism.”
Yep. That’s Ken Ham and AiG. They are resolutely determined not to see systemic racism.
Instead, how about those racist birds and woke conservatories?
Amish Culture Prizes Peace − But You Wouldn’t Necessarily Know It from a Stop in Amish Country Tourist Towns
by Susan Trollinger
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation. We are grateful to republish it here at rightingamerica.
Ohio’s Amish Country, located in the northeastern part of the state, draws over 4 million visitors every year – second only to Cedar Point amusement park as the Buckeye State’s most popular tourist attraction.
October, with its cooler temperatures and spectacular colors, is the region’s peak month for tourist traffic. Hundreds of thousands of tourists descend on the area in the fall to shop for Amish-made furniture, enjoy buggy rides and visit small towns that many Americans romanticize as bucolic escapes from the world.
And what will they find in the shops that line the main streets of towns like Berlin, Sugarcreek and Walnut Creek? Among other things, a plethora of items that feature Christian nationalist motifs, intense patriotism and ominous suggestions of violence – all antithetical to the core values of the Amish.
The reality is that Amish Country tourism has long been at odds with the plain and simple life of the Amish – a discrepancy at the heart of my 2012 book Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia.
A life apart
Descended from Anabaptist immigrants who fled religious persecution in Europe, the Amish typically live in rural areas where they seek to live a different sort of life, resisting aspects of contemporary American culture that undermine their commitments to church, family and community.
To live at a slower pace, they drive horse-drawn buggies instead of cars. To pursue their calling to follow Jesus rather than chase personal ambitions, they stop school after eighth grade. To avoid the distractions of consumer culture, they prohibit TVs and internet connections in their homes. And to keep themselves humble, they yield to communal rules about dressing plainly, living in modest homes and keeping their businesses small.
Seeking to follow Jesus, they embrace nonviolence and find inspiration in the story of a 16th-century Anabaptist, Dirk Willems, who was imprisoned for his faith. He escaped, but because of his commitments to love his enemy, he turned back when he saw that his captor had fallen through the ice. His captor survived to witness Willems being burned at the stake.
Out of their deep commitment to separation between church and state, the Amish refuse to swear oaths, receive Social Security benefits or join the military. That’s why you won’t see an American flag in an Amish school or hear Amish students recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
The ‘Amish brand’
Yet tourist towns capitalizing on what has become the “Amish brand” are full of gift shops selling merchandise you would not expect to find in an Amish home – Uncle Sam cutouts, Mickey Mouse yard flags, ornate lace curtains and Elvis Presley figurines.
As a scholar of rhetoric and religion, I’ve long been curious about Amish Country tourism, since it seemed – at least on the face of it – to have so little to do with the Amish themselves. Selling the Amish was my attempt to explain why many Americans found Amish Country so compelling.
My answer was that Amish Country tourism afforded visitors a nostalgic experience of a “simpler time” when Americans could imagine that they were in control of technology; that men were “men” and women were “women”; and that families sat down to Mom’s home-cooked meal every evening.
The region’s tourist towns play into this nostalgic desire that visitors have for a future that resembles an imagined past. In that imagined future, they would, like the Amish, escape cultural forces that they think have compromised America’s ability to be the Christian nation it supposedly once was.
A glimpse of real life
Since 2008, I’ve taken students from the University of Dayton to the Amish settlement located in Holmes and Wayne counties in northeastern Ohio.
In the course of the day, we visit a two-room school run by New Order Amish, whose rules for daily life are among the least strict among the Amish. Then we’re off to a candle shop owned and operated by five Old Order Amish sisters, followed by a visit to a Swartzentruber Amish farm. The Swartzentrubers are among the strictest Amish groups. In the small shop located between the house and a woodworking shop, a young woman sells woven baskets, homemade preserves and wood furnishings crafted by her father. We also enjoy meals and conversation at two Amish homes.
Of course, the stops we make are part of the tourism industry. And many Amish make their living from that industry, whether they are crafting solid wood furniture, serving diners in Amish-style restaurants or preparing hotel rooms for guests.
Importantly, the Amish don’t own the big Amish-style restaurants or gift shops or hotels. And because I want my students to have conversations with the people they have been studying, we spend very little time in these tourist towns.
When I was invited to present a paper last summer on Amish Country tourism – an update of “Selling the Amish,” as it were – I was obliged to spend some time in those tourist towns.
Guns and crosses
What I saw blew me away. There I was in the heart of the biggest Amish settlement in the world, when measured by the number of congregations. This area is home to nearly 40,000 Amish people deeply committed to pacifism: people who would rather suffer solitary confinement and reduced rations – as some did during World War I – than participate in “the war machine,” and who would never sing the national anthem.
Yet, I saw the Stars and Stripes everywhere: on T-shirts, ball caps, decorative wreaths, candles and, perhaps most strikingly, wooden crosses. There were concrete statues of soldiers kneeling at crosses, patriotic bunting and images of the Founding Fathers, with facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence, the Ten Commandments and the Pledge of Allegiance nearby.
A large display in one Berlin shop featured merchandise from “Hold Fast,” a company whose website says its merchandise is designed “for freedom loving Americans who want to see Biblical values preserved and are taking a stand and letting their voices be heard.” Flags figure prominently across the merchandise, along with messages like: “One nation under God. Psalm 33:12. Hold Fast.”
I was even more taken aback by home decor items announcing that the “2nd Amendment is my gun permit,” along with thermoses challenging government authorities to “come and take it” – “it” being a gun – and coffee mugs that listed gun calibers (.22, .380, 9 mm, .40, .45) and proclaiming, “All faster than dialing 911.”
Amish Country tourism has never simply been about the plain and simple life of the Amish. But these days, sites that fuse Christian symbols and sacred texts with a brand of nationalism that celebrates masculine bravado, guns and the military marks a further and dramatic remove from the character of Amish life.
Still, if one ventures down a back road and ends up behind a slow-moving buggy, or ducks into an Amish-owned shop selling bulk foods, handmade brooms or half-moon pies, they can still encounter a people whose life is wildly at odds with so much that characterizes mainstream America today.
