Storytelling the Bible: An Interview with Paul Brian Thomas
by William Trollinger
Paul Brian Thomas is Professor of Religious and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Radford. He is also the author of Storytelling the Bible at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and Museum of the Bible (T & T Clark, 2020). You can read my review of this terrific book here. We here at rightingamerica are very pleased that Thomas was willing to be interviewed about the book.
- In your preface you explain how you ended up writing this book by observing that the Answers in Genesis [AiG] focus on “the Genesis creation and flood narrative attracts me like a moth to flame. Add to this the fascinating detail that AiG is a parachurch young-earth creationist organization; then the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter becomes a veritable playground for a scholar with interests like mine” (ix). Could you elaborate on this, that is, could you elaborate on how you came to write this book?
My interests in religious studies, and in biblical studies, have always drifted toward what some might call marginal expressions of religion and usual interpretations of biblical texts. Regarding the Bible, there are many little mysterious nuggets, like Genesis 6:1-4, that have become a playground for creative Bible interpretation. Those interpretations run the gamut from space aliens (benevolent and malevolent) to cryptozoology. As I note in my book, the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter flirt (quite heavily) with these ideas. They do so, however, using a suggestive register that allows enough wiggle room for plausible deniability. For me, there is something inherently fascinating about the belief that the Earth is about 6,000 years old and that humans walked the earth with dinosaurs. More importantly, in this age of “alternative facts” and suspicion of mainstream academics, I think the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter are symptomatic of the “post-truth” era while simultaneously deepening the problem.
- For those who may not be familiar with this scholarly approach, what do you mean when you say that this project is a Bible reception study of the AiG sites and the Museum of the Bible? Could you talk about the methodology you used, and explain how this work moves Biblical reception studies in new directions?
Bible reception studies examine the myriad ways biblical texts are interpreted. At its best, reception studies look at the factors that give rise to interpretive communities, how those ideas are disseminated, and how they then create new interpretations. For many years much of this analysis focused on the works of higher culture—like Shakespeare and Melville. I maintain, however, that popular culture artifacts, while often dismissed as trivial, tell us a lot about a culture and thus merit study. In recent years there has been more work on Bible reception studies in popular culture (ranging from children’s books to dolls). I wanted to help continue this trend. Moreover, looking at contemporary popular culture created an additional opportunity because these people are still around and I can ask them questions. While we can’t go ask Melville about his understanding of the Bible, I did have an opportunity to ask these questions of Creation Museum and Ark Encounter visitors. I developed an interview protocol and initially asked Answers in Genesis for permission to interview patrons on site. They denied my request. I fell back to plan B, which was to approach people who left reviews of the Creation Museum, the Ark Encounter, and the Museum of the Bible on sites like Trip Advisor and Facebook. From those requests I secured about 30 interviews. I also scraped online reviews and coded that material. I believe the interview protocol and the content analysis are my biggest methodological contributions to reception studies.
- What are cryptozoology and pseudoarcheology, and what do they have to do with the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter?
Cryptozoology is the study of cryptids. Cryptids are creatures that are thought to exist (or once existed) but are not recognized by mainstream academics. Bigfoot is a classic example of this. Likewise, works of pseudoarcheology make claims about history, often relying on eccentric interpretations of archaeological evidence, that are not supported by mainstream historians and archaeologists. The idea that the Nazca lines are UFO runways is an example of this. Both are characterized by a type of discourse that maintains their conclusions are being suppressed by a mainstream knowledge machine conspiratorially working to maintain its own agenda. The first display in the Creation Museum, the Dragon Legends exhibit, links dragons to dinosaurs and proposes that they have been seen as recently as the late nineteenth century. This is an exercise in cryptozoology. Additionally, the Ark Encounter argument that ancient humans were much smarter and more advanced that we usually recognize echoes pseudoarchaeological arguments. The discourse employed by Answers in Genesis is strikingly similar to that found in works of pseudoscience. Answers in Genesis views their work as scientific in nature, but as being repressed by mainstream scientists exercising a conspiratorial agenda.
- You make the argument (in keeping with our own research) that the AiG sites are not primarily about evangelizing non-Christians, but, instead, are focused on educating Christians in young Earth creationism. That is to say, the primary audience is made up of white evangelicals, which is why you expected to “encounter people who would demonstrate a high level of biblical literacy” (167). What did you find instead, and could you give some examples? And what should we make of this?
This is what I think a lot of people misunderstand about the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. These sites are not meant to minister to unbelievers. Rather, Answers in Genesis is trying to reach believers who have compromised on the literal truth of parts of the Bible, particularly the Book of Genesis. This compromise, Ken Ham would argue, lies at the heart of many cultural problems. I expected that, given this target audience, there would be a higher level of biblical literacy. What I found is that interviewees would often rate their overall Bible literacy higher than their answers to specific questions would seem to merit. This led to an important observation that there are actually two levels of Bible reception happening at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. The attractions themselves represent a Bible interpretation by the Answers in Genesis team. The visitor is then engaging in an interpretation of that interpretation. Without a high level of Bible literacy the average visitor seems ill-equipped to “double-check” the interpretation offered by Answers in Genesis.
- Quoting from my review: “In analyzing visitor responses, Thomas brilliantly observes that what the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter produce in their evangelical guests is a feeling, a sense of ‘longing, homesickness, and nostalgia – what I termed biblical hiraeth – for a time and place governed by biblical principles” (72). How did you come to such an arresting insight, and what do you think this tells us about American evangelicalism?
In many ways this relates to my answer to the prior question. Since, for the average visitor verifying Bible exegesis seems less of a concern, I started wondering what visitors are getting out of these attractions. More powerful, I think, is the discourse speaking to a minority of people who feel lost in their own culture (broadly speaking), those who are longing for a time when culture reflected their values. For example, I found people talking in romantic terms about living the life of Noah. This seemed to be something more than nostalgia, and something more akin to homesickness. But, if we recognize that biblical narratives are ideological texts that were written by a particular segment of society to further its own agenda, and if we further recognize that AiG adds an additional layer of interpretation that furthers its own agenda, then we come to realize that the history presented by AiG never really existed. Thus, visitors are expressing homesickness for a home that never was. The Welsh term hireath, which is a homesickness for something lost (but that never really existed) that results in grief really seems to capture the mood of Creation Museum and Ark Encounter visitors.
- As I suspect is true for you, I have encountered a number of folks – including scholars – who see the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter as very different sites from the Museum of the Bible. And given the aforementioned cryptozoology and pseudoarcheology, that’s an argument that seems to have some merit. But as I understand your preface and final chapter, you argue that the similarities between the three sites are much more pronounced than the differences. Could you elaborate upon this conclusion?
I view the Creation Museum, the Ark Encounter, and the Museum of the Bible as different cogs in a larger system. It is correct that the Museum of the Bible does not engage in the cryptozoology and pseudoarcheology of Answers in Genesis. However, they both are certainly grounded in a vision of biblical authority. I would argue that the Bible is totemized to a greater degree at the Museum of the Bible. Having so many Bibles on display, even in different languages, conveys a sense that the object itself, not just its words, have authority. Both AiG and the Museum of the Bible also construct a version of history where the Bible is presented as central to a Godly society. They both trace this thread from ancient history to modern America. I think a good next step in this research is examining how these institutions function symbiotically to bridge the gap between midwestern families and the monied interests of the Green family and Washington D.C. politics.
- Have you embarked on a new research project, or is there one on the horizon? Given your eclectic scholarly interests, I am very curious as to what this might be!
I have things pulling me in too many directions. I have started another reception studies project examining how Bible themes/narratives are presented in modern board games. I also do some work in the study of monsters (I wrote my dissertation on giants in the Hebrew Bible) and will be embarking on a study of monster folklore in Central and South Central Appalachia. In deep Southwest Virginia they call Bigfoot a Wood Booger. I can’t help but check that out.
The Appallingly Bad History Taught at Fundamentalist Schools
by William Trollinger
If you know anything about history, this post will make you laugh and/or cry.
And/or make you angry.
And the latter emotion is particularly appropriate.
In her book, Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters, Kathleen Wellman (Professor of History at Southern Methodist University) reports on world history textbooks produced by Abeka Books (published by Pensacola Christian College), Accelerated Christian Education [ACE], and Bob Jones University Press [BJU]. These textbooks are popular among fundamentalist homeschoolers and are often adopted at fundamentalist Christian schools.
For example, the Answers in Genesis K-12 school, Twelve Stones Academy, uses the BJU text.
Wellman heroically examines these texts in great detail. Why did she subject herself to such a painful task? As she notes in her introduction, these fundamentalist textbooks
have an influence that has extended far beyond the confines of fundamentalism . . . Their views, as indeed the textbooks insist, increasingly define American Christianity. These curricula’s narrative of Christian history has been grafted onto right-wing political and economic positions. And right-wing political interests have promoted these views. (2)
Here are just a few examples from Hijacking History:
- “These textbooks label [ancient] Africa the Dark Continent . . . ‘the fear, idolatry, and witchcraft associated with animism’ [Abeka text] prevented African economic and cultural development” (74).
- “The Abeka curriculum claims the Greeks made no progress in science, even though Greek scientific works set the standard for virtually every science for over fifteen hundred years . . . [More generally, Greek] civilization was fundamentally flawed, and their efforts ultimately produced no benefits.” (83)
- According to ACE, “God never sanctioned communism. The early church practiced a limited form of socialism, but it was 1) voluntary, 2) short-lived, and 3) for a specific situation. Socialism promotes laziness which is definitely contrary to Scripture’ . . . [and] ‘private property and individual labor are parts of God’s plan for our lives.’” (160)
- “In articulating the theology of the Mass, the early Christians became pagans, and so they remain until the arrival of Luther, as these errors ‘grew and developed into the false teachings and practices of the medieval church’ [Abeka text] . . . The early Christians were Protestants until they became paganized Catholics.” (88)
- According to the BJU text, “Mohammed was inspired by Satan.” (89)
- The ACE text “frequently prais[es] gender inequality in the past; it approves of the historical restriction of women to the domestic sphere to reinforce it in the present.” (104)
- “The Middle Ages experienced a ‘distorted form of Christianity,’ and the Renaissance merely created beautiful art while promoting pagan philosophies. Only the Reformation would free Europe from Catholicism and revive biblical Christianity, ‘which had been suppressed though never destroyed by leaders of the Roman church through the Middle Ages’ [Abeka text] . . . These educational materials essentially dismiss 1500 years of history as little more than a waiting period between the earliest Christianity and the coming Reformation.” (106-107)
- “The Abeka textbook [claims] that Isaac Newton was ‘a devout Christian’ who tried ‘to imitate in his mind the divine simplicity by which God governs the universe.’ Newton, an avid practitioner of alchemy, numerology, and other occult sciences, held heterodox religious views at the very least.” (129)
- ACE concludes [that] ‘in spite of his lip service to Roman Catholicism and his probably Jewish background, Christopher Columbus was very possibly a secret Christian.’ He lived up to his name ‘Christ-bearer,’ intending to bring Christ’s teachings to the lands he explored. Columbus thus becomes a proto-Protestant missionary to the New World . . . [More than this,] ACE continues to teach the patently false claim that Columbus was one of the few who believed that the world was round . . . contend[ing] that Columbus came to believe that the earth was round by understanding the biblical passage in Isaiah 40:22, ‘it is God that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.’ The Bible gave Columbus privileged knowledge unavailable to his contemporaries, particularly heretical Catholics.” (131-132)
- “The stance of these curricula on the eighteenth century could not be clearer: the BJU history concludes its chapter by ridiculing the ‘age of reason’ for its irrational fashions; the Abeka text textbook declares unequivocally, ‘The Enlightenment was a new Dark Ages.’ That claim of a ‘new Dark Ages’ is more common and more insidious than one might assume, as its current use among white supremacists attests. It rests on the assumption that all modern-day problems derive from the end of the Middle Ages with its presumably white, homogeneous society in the West.” (152)
- “Native inhabitants of the New World are scarcely mentioned. The BJU textbook merely notes the five tribal regions with ‘no knowledge of the one true God.’ The Abeka history claims that Native Americans had been dispersed in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel and ‘forsook the things they knew about God.’ Certainly, the colonists’ harsh treatment of Native Americans has no part of this heroic tale.” (163)
- “Another tack these textbooks take is redefining the ‘revolution’ out of the American Revolution . . . For the BJU curriculum, the success of the revolution was ‘due to its conservative nature, rather than a ‘rebellious’ nature.’ It further deradicalizes the revolution as a simple tax protest . . . In these textbooks, one would hardly know that a revolution against the British occurred. The Abeka textbook suggests that it was almost inadvertent: ‘George III proclaimed the colonists to be in rebellion . . . In effect, the American colonies were thrust out of the British Empire.’ Those who participated did so extremely reluctantly, [as they were guided by] ‘biblical values.’” (176)
- “These textbooks . . . proselytize for a Christian nation by reducing the intellectual complexity of the period to a set of claims: (1) the founding of the nation was untainted by the Enlightenment except insofar as that movement can be Christianized; (2) the American Revolutionary War was a minor protest and not a revolution at all; (3) the leaders of the new nation were orthodox Christians who shared a vision of a Christian nation; (4) documents central to the nation’s founding reflect this commitment.” (187)
- According to Abeka, “religious revival made England’s economic success possible but for a bizarre reason. Before John Wesley, the English depended on astrology to know when to plant their crops, but Wesleyanism eliminated superstition and thus completely altered the economic terrain and ‘work was given a new sense of nobility.’” (191)
- “The Abeka curriculum even claims that, because of the social and institutional benefits British colonialization provided, none of her colonies wanted [independence] but hoped instead to become ‘Little Britains . . . enjoy[ing] the Christian influence that made Victorian England great.’” (194)
- The BJU textbook approvingly quotes William McKinley’s quote that “’the Philippines had dropped into our laps’ [and as] they were unfit for self-government . . . there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all [and] uplift and civilize and Christianize them.’ Unmentioned is the ensuing three years of war with approximately 200,000 civilian deaths.” (200)
- “The BJU textbook uncritically describes slavery as integral to Southern culture. While noting the obvious disjuncture between slavery and ‘all men are created equal,’ it points out that, on the eve of the Civil War, ‘some even insisted the Southern slave culture cultivated the virtues of honor, courage, duty, and dignity.’ It also comments, ‘Slavery also provided educated Southerners the time to better themselves intellectually.’” (201)
- “The Abeka history identifies Andrew Carnegie as a hero who understood the benefits of capitalism in terms reminiscent of modern trickle-down economics: ‘the race is benefited thereby. The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford.’ The efforts of robber barons ‘brought manifold benefits to others . . . they not only provided thousands of jobs but also stimulated other industries.’” (204)
- “The BJU textbook insists unequivocally that the New Deal did more harm than good. It claims that, although it provided temporary relief, the New Deal was ineffective and failed to end the Depression or provide any real economic recovery . . . Roosevelt’s policies put the United States on the wrong path with ‘increased government involvement in economic and social matters, accelerating the trend in the United States toward a welfare state.’ It ‘introduced the United States to socialism.’” (240)
- “These curricula largely exculpate Europeans who supported fascist regimes. According to the BJU history, most Italians were not fascists; they were simply tired of the unrest caused by labor unions and socialists. Many Germans were simply distressed by the economic situation, due to high government spending and the resulting government debt.” (242)
- “These Christian histories have no quarrel with McCarthyism. The Abeka history commends McCarthy’s efforts to expose communists in government and Hollywood: ‘He came under severe criticism and personal attack, but many of his conclusions, although technically unprovable, were drawn from the accumulation of undisputed facts.’” (252)
- “Despite the obvious and well-recognized injustice of [Rhodesia’s] practice of racial segregation and suppression of the Black majority, ACE essentially endorses apartheid: ‘Rhodesia was accused repeatedly of being an all-white, racist regime, which was totally false.’ It compares Rhodesia to the American colonies on the eve of the Revolution: white Rhodesians, with the virtues of early Americans, were subjected to ‘terrorist attacks by Communist guerillas.’” (259)
- These textbooks “question the rationale and benefits of the US civil rights movement. The Abeka US history textbook notes that Southerners resented federal officials telling them what to do. ‘Segregation had become a way of life, and both white and black Southerners had a difficult time changing their ways,’ it explains. Furthermore, Black Americans ‘did not believe’ they were treated fairly. For these textbooks, social problems are based on the misperceptions of the aggrieved, who inaccurately believe they suffer and fail to understand sin as the source of their suffering.” (263-264)
What these textbooks are doing is very much in keeping with the dreadful 1776 Report.
Quoting from Wellman’s powerful conclusion:
Bad history matters. It empowers, as these textbooks do, myths with powerful resonance in contemporary settings. Bad history refuses to tell truths that might embarrass a nation. It empowers nationalism at the expense of a patriotism grounded in a more capacious or measured understanding of a nation’s history. Bad history justifies actions that might otherwise be condemned as anathema: for example, repression of religious or ethnic minorities. The mythic founding of a Christian nation has been used to assert white nationalism and has incited hate crimes against Muslims, Jews, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Neo-Nazis and the alt-right have put bad history from the Lost Cause of the Confederacy to anti-immigrant crusades of the nineteenth century and present-day America back on our streets.
Fundamentalism. The gift that just keeps giving.
Storytelling the Bible at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and the Museum of the Bible: A Review
by William Trollinger
Note: The following is taken (with slight edits) from the original version of my review, which appeared in the March 2022 issue Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Full citation information and a link to the article is included at the end.
In Storytelling the Bible (T & T Clark, 2020) Paul Thomas – Professor of Religious Studies at Radford University – provides a “Bible reception study of Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and Museum of the Bible [MotB] readings of the Bible” (6). Toward this end, he examines how MotB and especially Answers in Genesis [AiG] use the Bible in their tourist sites to make rhetorical arguments. As regards the AiG tourist sites, Thomas rightly notes that their primary goal is not to save the lost, but to educate the saved in the young Earth creationist reading of Genesis, a reading which – according to the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter – has implications for understanding the rest of the Bible. Interestingly, so much of what one finds in both sites consists of efforts to convince visitors that creation science is truly scientific. As Thomas astutely observes, “the manner in which AiG presents its argument reveals a tacit assumption that visitors require the narrative to be rationalized, tempered by reason, supported by material evidence, and placed within a scientific framework . . . If these events can be proved in a naturalistic sense, then faith becomes less of a stumbling block” (74). Actually, Thomas could have noted how this focus on (obsession with?) empirical evidence and reason as opposed to faith and the witness of the Holy Spirit fits squarely within contemporary fundamentalist apologetics.
Befitting a scholar who has written on how UFO cults make use of biblical themes, Thomas does a wonderful job of noting how both the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter range far beyond the Bible to use rhetoric and arguments that draw from cryptozoology and pseudoarcheology, both of which are pseudosciences that claim that a conspiracy on the part of mainstream scientists has kept us from seeing the truth about the animal past and the human past. Thomas demonstrates that both tourist sites are tightly linked to cryptozoology, best evinced by the museum’s Dragon Legends exhibit, which suggests “that the widespread nature of dragon myths . . . can be taken as evidence of the existence of dinosaurs in recorded human history” (82). More than this, Thomas notes that AiG borrows from pseudoarcheology to hint that, in building the Ark, Noah may have made use of unspecified technologies that rival those found in the contemporary world; interestingly, if the author had gone beyond the museum and the Ark to AiG’s website, he would have discovered that Ken Ham has made even more specific pseudoarcheological arguments in online posts, asserting, for example, that it is quite possible Noah used cranes and concrete.
Beyond examining how these tourist sites use the Bible, Storytelling the Bible includes analysis of “visitor perceptions of Bible narratives as presented in the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter” (7). Toward this end, Thomas examined Facebook and TripAdvisor reviews, and then conducted phone interviews and online surveys with some of these visitors. . . . Thomas embarked on this project assuming that he would “encounter people who would demonstrate a high level of biblical literacy” (167), but he soon discovered that this is definitely not the case, to the point that visitors invest with biblical authority the flood (apologies for the pun) of extrabiblical material at the AiG sites – including, to give one example, the Ark’s imagined animal watering and feeding system. While at times the author suggests that the museum and Ark seek to avoid producing such confusion in visitors’ minds (pointing to, for example, the occasional disclaimers at the Ark regarding “artistic license”), it seems pretty clear that, in actuality, AiG exploits the biblical illiteracy of visitors, both to its website and to its tourist sites, to promote its own idiosyncratic and ideologically-freighted understanding of the Bible as the Truth.
But then again, and for all of AiG’s emphasis on a plain reading of the inerrant Bible, it turns out that the biblical text is very much beside the point. In analyzing visitor responses, Thomas brilliantly observes that what the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter produce in their evangelical guests is a feeling, a sense of “longing, homesickness, and nostalgia – what I termed biblical hiraeth – for a time and place governed by biblical principles” (72). Of course, these visitors have no idea that such a place never existed. But this too is beside the point. As Thomas concludes, the invented world of AiG is “like the longed-for homecoming that even inspires some to tears . . . it is uniquely real for many visitors, an idealized vision of a Bible society, for a group of people who feel like strangers in their own land” (168).
Interestingly, Thomas argues that the Museum of the Bible produces precisely the same response on the part of visitors . . . Despite the claims of certain evangelical scholars, the similarities between the AiG sites and the MotB are much more pronounced than their differences . . . All three venues promote a conservative religious and political worldview, including, as Thomas powerfully argues, when it comes to race, as all three sites fail to address “what it is about the [biblical] text, and its Christian readers, that [has] inspired racist readings” over the years (159). In fact, these three sites can be seen as working in tandem: as Thomas observes . . . , “the sense of oppression and persecution fostered by the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter fires up the base,” while the Washington-based (and DeVos-supported) MotB “funnels that energy into real political influence” (66).
In short, these three Bible-based museums/tourist sites are visible and popular Christian Right institutions, designed to comfort, educate, and energize the “homesick” faithful. And as the Christian Right has established itself as one of the (if not the) most important constituencies in the Republican Party, I suspect there is more scholarship to come on the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and the Museum of the Bible.
(For the full article, which also includes a review of Kathleen Oberlin’s Creating the Creation Museum: How Fundamentalist Beliefs Come to Life, see: Journal of the American Academy of Religion 90:1 (March 2022): 290-294. Here’s a link to the article.)
“Shall the Evangelicals Win?”: A 2022 Update of Harry Fosdick’s 1922 Sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists 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. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. And his sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – has just been published by Wipf and Stock (Cascades).
NOTE: As many evangelical churches will have 4th of July Celebrations in worship on July 3, I offer a dissenting approach. One hundred years ago, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon that disrupted the world of fundamentalism. His sermon still possesses the ring of truth. With evangelicals, the militance, the anger, the chip on the shoulder, the dogged certainty never changes. Only the issues change. My sermon includes some of Fosdick’s sermon and offers an updated version. The words of Fosdick are in italics.
This morning we consider the evangelical controversy which divides not only the American churches, as though already they were not sufficiently split and riven, but also our nation and democracy. A scene, suggestive for our thought, is depicted in the fifth chapter of the book of the Acts, where the Jewish leaders have before them Peter and other of the apostles because they have been preaching Jesus as the Messiah. Moreover, the Jewish leaders propose to slay them, when 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.”
The evangelicals are a large subset of American Christians. Their apparent intention is to control church and state. I speak of them more freely because there is no group more dominated by the evangelicals than the Baptists – my tribe.
A wave of progressive civic virtue has overwhelmed the moral scruples of evangelicals. Instead of interpreting these movements as moral progress, the evangelicals see them as moral decline. The result of this progressive pedagogy has been the shaming of evangelicals as narrow-minded, homophobic, nativist, ablest, heteronormative judges. The previous masters of shame now face a shaming they refuse to accept. And they have responded in outrage.
While the defense of segregation was what first aroused this new wave of intolerant Christians, the issues they finally claimed as their own are abortion, gay rights, and feminism. Now the evangelicals are out on a campaign to reverse the gains in human rights. They seem to be saying, “How dare you call moral what we insist is immoral!”
It is interesting to note where the evangelicals are driving in their stakes to mark out the line in the sand. Back in the 1920’s these marks were all doctrinal: the virgin birth of our Lord; the inerrant Bible; the substitutionary theory of atonement; and the belief in the literal second coming of our Lord that will culminate in a rapture of all true believers and the destruction of all others on the planet.
The question is: has anybody a right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him on such points and to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship? Back then the Fundamentalists said that this must be done. If they had their way, within the church, they would have set up in Protestantism a doctrinal tribunal more rigid than the Pope’s.
But the modern version of the Fundamentalists, the evangelicals, and their political partners in the Republican Party, don’t give a fig’s leaf for dry doctrines. They have deserted theology for secular political power. They are determined to use the Supreme Court to impose their minority positions on the nation.
The shift in emphases is drastic and dangerous:
- From the Virgin Birth to anti-abortion.
- From the substitutionary atonement to atonement by guns and violence.
- From the inerrant, literal Bible to climate change denial.
- From the literal second coming of Jesus (premillennialism) to Christian nationalism (postmillennial dreams of a Christian America).
That we may be entirely candid and concrete and may not lose ourselves in any fog of generalities, let us this morning take three of these evangelical issues and see with reference to them what the situation is in the Christian churches. Let us face this morning some of the differences of opinion with which somehow, we must deal.
Abortion
We may well begin with the vexed question of abortion. I know people in the Christian churches—ministers, missionaries, laymen, devoted lovers of the Lord and servants of the Gospel—who, alike as they are in their personal devotion to the Master, hold quite different points of view about abortion.
Here, for example, is one point of view; abortion is a crime, and the women, doctors, health care operators who engage in abortion should be arrested and prosecuted. The Supreme Court, embracing the evangelical insistence on anti-abortion, has eliminated Roe vs. Wade, and made abortion illegal according to federal law. That is one point of view, and approximately 25% of the citizens of the USA hold this view.
But, side by side with them in other churches is a group of equally loyal and reverent people who would say that the abortion is not a crime, that abortion should be legal, and that the rights of women are being violated. To insist the pro-choice persons are “baby killers” is one of the familiar ways in which the evangelicals demonize people for disagreeing with them.
Here in the Christian churches are these two groups of people, and the question that the evangelicals raise is this: In addition to eliminating the right to abortion, what other rights should also be taken away? Has intolerance any contribution to make to this situation? Will it persuade anybody of anything? Is not this nation large enough to hold within her hospitable fellowship people who differ on points like this, and agree to differ until the fuller truth be manifested? The evangelicals say not. They say that liberals are immoral. Well, if the evangelicals should press their abortion victory to other human rights issues, how far will they go?
Separation of Church and State
Consider another matter on which there is a sincere difference of opinion among Christians: the separation of church and state.
One point of view is that the original documents of the Constitution and the ideas of the Founding Fathers did not include any separation of church and state. Whether we deal with the revisionist history of David Barton and his tribe or the haughty claims by Representative Lauren Boebert that the separation of church and state “is junk,” we are dealing with an attempt to impose evangelical understandings of church and state on a diverse nation.
Barton has turned in his red, white, and blue clown suit for the regal black robes of the Supreme Court. His ideas are now calling the shots as the Supreme Court participates in the demolition of the wall of separation of church and state. Some evangelicals would be content if the Supreme Court put evangelical Christian prayers back in public schools and the teaching of the Bible by evangelical teachers back in the curriculum. There are other, much more specious, and dangerous proponents of Christian nationalism, who would replace the Constitution of the USA with the laws of the book of Leviticus.
Then there are lovers of our democracy who insist that there never be even one crack in the wall of separation. In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and the Baptists of his day, these Christians hold sacred the necessity of keeping the church out of the business of running the government. Indeed, that awful notion of a theocracy seems to them a positive peril to the spiritual life. In this respect, the evangelicals look more like the Jihadi Muslims than Christians.
There’s historical irony that a Supreme Court filled with Roman Catholics are demolishing the First Amendment. Have they overlooked that when Catholics first came to this country, it was a Protestant nation fueled by anti-Catholicism?
A strong anti-Catholicism poured forth from Rev. J. Frank Norris, fundamentalist preacher in the 1920’s. Claiming that “many of my warmest personal friends are Catholics,” Norris still insisted that Catholics should not be elected to political offices. Of the Catholic Church he said, “It knows allegiance to the Pope. They would behead every Protestant preacher and disembowel every Protestant mother. They would burn to ashes every Protestant Church and dynamite every Protestant school. They would destroy the public schools and annihilate every one of our institutions.”
In case you think that the ravings of Rev. Norris are long forgotten, listen to the voice of the Rev. Dr. Robert Jeffress as he expresses his sentiments about Catholics: “A Babylonian mystery religion that spread like a cult around the world and infected the early church and corrupted it.” He described the Catholic church as a “cult-like religion” and “showing the genius of Satan.”
Attack on Science
Another issue the evangelicals are pushing is an attack on science. The evangelicals push anti-science ideas that endanger the future of our planet. From their anti-evolution movement in the early 20th century to their climate denial movement today, they are promoting a politics of precarity. The entire human race now dwells in the land of precarity. Humans are on the endangered species list.
Progressives have long insisted that faith and science are not enemies. Ministers often bewail the fact that young people turn from religion to science for the regulative ideas of their lives. But this is easily explicable. Kenneth Miller, cell biologist, reminds us, “Science serves as an incubator of ideas, an engine of creativity that has lifted the condition of humans everywhere. We have a scientific spirit of exploration, ingenuity, and deep desire for the finding the truth.”
The evangelicals threaten our scientific spirit. They want us to go back to a naïve time when Eve cavorted with dinosaurs, Elijah made the sun stand still, and Jonah was swallowed by a large fish only to be burped out three days later.
I do not believe for one moment that the evangelicals are going to succeed. Like a biblical plague of locusts, they appear from time-to-time, sweep across the land, and then disappear again. They are more of an uprising than a movement – the fundamentalists in the 1920’s, the Moral Majority in the 1970’s and now the Christian nationalists in 2022. Americans are constitutionally unfit for long periods of intolerance. Having dismissed prohibition from the Constitution after only thirteen years, America recovers from moments of moralistic intolerance. We have a stubborn commitment to returning to the better angels of our nation after a period of craziness.
The evangelicals may not know what monster they have released from the deep – the political Leviathan. The devil exacts a high price for allowing a people to use his dark potions to claim power. Power’s corrupting influence always produces envy, jealousy, and selfishness.
The person that evangelicals have chosen to lead them to the kingdom on earth, Donald Trump, doesn’t play well with others. Testimony at the January 6 hearings told of an enraged president throwing a bottle of ketchup against the wall in the White House. The evangelicals may think they will control a theocracy, but they will we swallowed up by an autocrat that enforces fascism on all of us. “We should not be surprised that a 17th-century Asian table sauce – made of pickled fish” – would show up on the White House wall – “slung from an octagonal bottle of sugary red pulp known as ketchup.” (Joshua Gunn, Political Perversion). The metaphor puts us squarely into the junk food jungle of perverse politics.
Unwilling to face truth, unwilling to hear truth, possessed only by the lust for power, the evangelicals simply put ketchup on everything to obscure not only taste, but vision, reality, and truth. The evangelicals have sold the nation junk food. Nothing is as dangerous to the digestive system of the planet as climate denial. Denying the Christian doctrine of stewardship, with a rhetorical bit of Barnum humbuggery that keeps the fossil fuel flowing and the corporate coffers full, is a heresy. The sacrifice of the environment – water, land, and air – has been turned into a means to make money by the anti-science crowd. These “hawkers of holiness,” in the words of Kelly Johnson, profit millions by selling us a bill of goods.
If then, the evangelicals have no solution of the problem, where may we expect to find it? In two concluding comments let us consider our reply to that inquiry. The first element that is necessary is a spirit of tolerance and Christian liberty. When will the world learn that intolerance solves no problems? This is not a lesson which the evangelicals alone need to learn; the liberals also need to learn it. It was a wise liberal, the most adventurous man of his day—Paul the apostle—who said, “‘Knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up.“
The second element which is needed, …. is a …. sense of penitent shame that the Christian church should be quarreling over …. matters when the world is dying of great needs.
The present world situation smells to heaven! And now in the presence of’ colossal problems, which must be solved in Christ’s name and for Christ’s sake, the evangelicals propose to control church and state. What immeasurable folly! Well, they are not going to do it, certainly not in this vicinity. I do not even know in this congregation whether anybody has been tempted to be an evangelical. Never in this church have I caught one accent of intolerance. God keep us always so and ever-increasing areas of the Christian fellowship: intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant, not with the tolerance of indifference as though we did not care about the faith, but because always our major emphasis is upon the weightier matters of the law.
(The quotes from Fosdick’s 1922 sermon are taken from: The Riverside Preachers, ed. Paul H. Sherry (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1978), 27-38.)
At the Bar, the Night after Roe v. Wade was Overturned
by William Trollinger
Last Saturday night, Sue and I were at the Hilton Netherland Plaza bar in Cincinnati. We fell in love this bar after our very first visit to the Creation Museum, and it remains our go-to stop after yet another visit to the museum or Ark Encounter (“Morgan [our favorite bartender], we need stiff drinks – please don’t tarry!”)
Despite the fact that it is very close to the Answers in Genesis sites, Hilton Netherland Plaza is an entirely other universe. As it is an urban bar with both a tourist and local clientele, the patrons are remarkably diverse, which means when we visit, we often end up in some very interesting conversations.
Take Saturday night, for example. Our first conversation – brief, because they had places to go – was with three very happy young people (festooned in rainbow apparel) who were downtown for Saturday’s Pride festival.
Then there was the much lengthier discussion with an African-American woman who was in town for the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) quadrennial meeting, which began Saturday morning. Over 5,000 delegates and their families came to Cincinnati for the convention, and many of them were staying at the Hilton.
It is hard to imagine a better-dressed or friendlier group of people than the CME folks.
And while they filled up the bar area, they tended to imbibe ice tea or water. But our delightful interlocutor, who talked to us about the CME (and its connection to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church), was not going to follow the denominational crowd: “My husband is a delegate, but I’m not, so I don’t care what anyone thinks: I’m going to have a cocktail!”
And so she did.
But our lengthiest and liveliest conversation came near the end of the evening, with two sweet middle-aged white women. It started as a standard bar chat. The woman who did most of the talking (I will call her Betty) asked where we were from, we said Dayton, and she said, “Oh, I am a University of Dayton (UD) graduate!” We told her we were UD professors, which led to a conversation as to how the school has changed (the area next to campus with UD student houses is now “the Neighborhood” instead of “the Ghetto”) and has not changed (the Neighborhood remains a lively scene).
Then for some reason – maybe because we are profs at her Catholic alma mater – Betty turned the conversation to the preceding day’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. And she became quite emotional, saying over and over again that she could not understand how anyone could be in favor of ending the life of a fetus. But Betty didn’t say fetus. She kept saying “super cute baby.”
After listening to this for a little bit, Sue and I began to respond. “Pro-life” has to be more than pro-fetus. To be truly pro-life one has to be concerned with life after birth. To be truly pro-life is to recognize the link between poverty and abortion. To be truly pro-life is to fight for health care for all, fight for publicly-funded parental leave and childcare, fight to limit access to guns, fight to end capital punishment.
It was clear that our argument really upset Betty. (On the other hand, we could tell her friend – let’s call her Joan – was with us.) Betty didn’t want to hear all this; she kept coming back to the “super cute baby.” Sue responded by saying that Betty was stuck with a one-dimensional moral position. It was minimal. It was “a dot.”
Angered, Betty got up and, with Joan in tow, marched out of the bar.
As Sue and I sipped our wine and talked about this encounter, we agreed that – her dramatic departure notwithstanding – Betty was not a culture warrior who saw us as the Other, the Enemy. Instead, it was clear that she had never thought of pro-life as meaning more than protecting the life of the “super cute baby.”
Much of the blame for this, of course, lands at the feet of Christian Right leaders who have deliberately limited “pro-life” to “forced birth,” who absolutely do not want to see universal healthcare and childcare, and who do not want to see a significant increase in public funds going to “the least of these,” even if such funding would allow babies, children, teens and adults to live, even to thrive.
If we had seen this statement from the Vatican – which came out just hours before our conversation with Betty – we would have told her that the Catholic Church’s response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been to assert that “anti-abortion activists should be concerned other issues that can threaten life, such as easy access to guns, poverty, and rising maternity mortality rates” in the United States.
As we were preparing to pay our bar tab, we saw Betty and Joan come back into the bar, and toward us. I thought that perhaps Betty had some final words for us. Nope. It was hugs all around. And then they left.
How are we to understand this story? I don’t know. But it sure as hell is not the latest battle in the culture war.
Whither Evangelical Colleges?: The LGBTQ+ Moment is Here
by William Trollinger
Fact #1: Approximately 2/3 of evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 35 now support same-sex marriage.
Fact #2: Many or most evangelical colleges continue to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty.
Put these two facts together, and it’s obvious that the moment of decision is nigh for many of these schools. Will they maintain their discriminatory policies, or will they abandon them?
Before we look at two evangelical colleges that are at this moment embroiled in controversy regarding this issue, a little background is helpful.
As we reported here, here, and here, last March the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP) filed a class-action lawsuit, charging that the U.S. Department of Education has failed to uphold Title IX by not protecting “sexual and gender minority students at taxpayer-funded” schools, including “private and religious educational institutions.” In failing to live up to its legal obligations, the Department of Education has left
students unprotected from the harms of conversion therapy, expulsion, denial of housing and healthcare, sexual and physical abuse and harassment, as well as the less visible but no less damaging, consequences of institutionalized shame, fear, anxiety, and loneliness.
The lawsuit continues to attract plaintiffs – originally there were 33, but now there are 40 – who attend or attended evangelical and fundamentalist educational institutions (plus a Mormon and a Seventh-Day Adventist school, as well as a fundamentalist preK-12th grade academy):
- Azusa Pacific University (CA)
- Baylor University (TX)
- Bob Jones University (SC)
- Brigham Young University (UT)
- Cedarville University (OH)
- Clarks Summit University (PA)
- College of the Ozarks (MO)
- Colorado Christian University (CO)
- Covenant Christian Academy (TX)
- Dordt University (IA)
- Eastern University (PA)
- Fuller Theological Seminary (CA)
- George Fox University (OR)
- Grace University (NE)
- Indiana Wesleyan University (IN)
- La Sierra University (CA)
- Lee University (TN)
- Liberty University (VA)
- Lipscomb University (TN)
- Messiah University (PA)
- Moody Bible Institute (IL)
- Nyack College (NY)
- Oklahoma Baptist University (OK)
- Regent University School of Law (VA)
- Seattle Pacific University (WA)
- Toccoa Falls College (GA)
- Union University (TN)
- Westmont College (CA)
- York College (NE)
(Note: I have the dubious distinction of having taught at two of these schools.)
The REAP lawsuit is pointing to Bob Jones University [BJU] v. United States (1983) as its precedent. In that decision the Court asserted that BJU’s biblically-based ban on interracial dating meant that the school could not maintain its tax-exempt status, given that the government’s interest in prohibiting racial discrimination overrode the religious exemption claimed by BJU.
That is to say, REAP wants the Court to apply the same logic to questions of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Not surprisingly, Christian Right leaders are apocalyptic over this prospect. Here’s what Ken Ham had to say on Facebook:
As we at Answers in Genesis have warned, gay “marriage” was the door that opened the LGBTQ agenda. It ramps up more each day. And for those who profess Christianity who support such an agenda, “If one turns away his ear from hearing the law [God’s word], even his prayer is an abomination” (Proverbs 28:9).
In response I asked Ken two simple questions:
- If racial discrimination is not allowable at institutions benefitting from tax monies – despite the raft of biblical arguments made in behalf of racial discrimination – then why should discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation be acceptable at such institutions?
- Were the prayers of the millions of white evangelicals who used the Bible to support slavery and segregation, not to mention the prayers of contemporary Christian white supremacists and neo-Confederates, also an abomination before the Lord?
Not surprisingly, no answer has been forthcoming.
The REAP lawsuit comes at a very challenging moment for evangelical colleges. On the one hand, many of their students and prospective students – not to mention many of their faculty members – find anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination to be not only nonsensical, but even anti-Christian. So administrators at many of these institutions, to quote the co-founder of Campus Pride, are actively seeking “to cloud this issue and come off as supportive [of LGBTQ students] because they know it’ll impact recruitment and admissions.”
But while seeking to placate students and faculty, these same administrators have to work overtime to reassure older evangelicals – parents and donors and board members and denominational officials – that they are holding a firm “biblical line,” which translates into maintaining discriminatory policies on the basis of sexual orientation.
Two audiences. Reassuring words for the one, hardline guarantees for the other.
Of course, this strategy – which is very much about trying to hold on until the older generation dies off – has obvious weaknesses. As an anonymous correspondent (anonymous because this person teaches at an evangelical school) wrote in response to an earlier blog post:
You are spot on with the “two audiences strategy,” which a moderate can moderate in moderate times and even feel that s/he is offering a mediating service and “holding the center.” But when the choice becomes stark, and the center is not on offer by either constituent group, then the true colors must be flown. Well, we are here now.
The REAP lawsuit is definitely forcing this issue, but this apocalyptic moment for evangelical colleges is much bigger than the lawsuit; that is to say, however the lawsuit turns out, this issue will remain.
Below are two current examples. It is important to note that both of these schools have historically been understood as being on the “moderate” end of the evangelical spectrum. It makes sense that it is at such schools where the LGBTQ+ controversy will hit with the most force, given that it is at such schools where the “two audiences” are most apparent.
Seattle Pacific University
- Last spring 72% of the faculty voted to declare no confidence in the school’s Board of Trustees, in response to the trustees’ refusal to modify the school’s policy forbidding the hiring of LGBTQ+ individuals. Students joined in, with one senior announcing that “the students and alumni are planning a campaign to discourage donations to the school, cut its ties to community organizations, and work to decrease enrollment at the school.”
- That was one year ago. This May the Board reaffirmed its policy that employees who engage in “same-sex sexual activity . . . may face disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment with the University.” In response, SPU students began a sit-in outside of the interim president’s office, in which “they have coordinated meals and sit-in shifts through Google sign-up sheets, making sure there are at least three students there at any given time.” The students have announced that the sit-in will continue until July 01. If the policy remains in place on that date, the students plan to sue the Board. Most dramatically, at SPU’s June 12 commencement ceremony dozens of graduating seniors gave the interim president rainbow flags instead of shaking his hand.
Calvin College
- Calvin has been known as an evangelical school which – by evangelical standards – has been unusually supportive of LGBTQ+ students, even permitting a student group (the Sexuality and Gender Alliance) to operate on campus. That said, there are donors, alumni, and parents who have pressured the school to crack down on suggestions that LGBTQ+ relationships are acceptable, a position that was reinforced by a 2009 Board of Trustees statement that “advocacy of homosexual practice and same-sex marriage is not permitted.”
- The current controversy began in 2018, when the Trustees intervened to reject the faculty recommendation for tenure of a popular Social Work professor; in their “letter outlining its rationale” the Board “cited a number of instances . . . when he’d made public or private statements about LGBTQ issues.” This professor was, however, allowed to stay at Calvin on a renewable two-year contract. But this spring the administration and Board did not renew his contract because he officiated at a same-sex wedding.
- And then, just last week, the lines hardened, as the school’s governing denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, voted to make “opposition to same-sex relationships a matter of confessional status – in other words, something that congregations can’t violate.” As Calvin professor Kristen Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, observed, “I can say that whereas before I’ve always felt like I belonged at Calvin . . . that’s now an open question. And I think it is for many of us.” And it’s clear that the ”us” applies to Calvin students as well as Calvin faculty.
By the way, this Thursday, June 23, REAP is holding an online webinar celebrating the 50th anniversary of Title IX. To quote from REAP, this webinar will include “a panel of leading experts . . . sharing the inspirational history of the Title IX movement for equality in education and the critical challenges Title IX faces today.”
The webinar is from 3-4 pm EDT (noon-1pm PDT). Use this form to sign up!
The Bible Told Them So: An Interview with J. Russell Hawkins
by William Trollinger
J. Russell (“Rusty”) Hawkins is Professor of Humanities and History in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. He is also author of The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, which came out from Oxford University Press just last year. We here at rightingamerica are very pleased that Rusty is willing to be interviewed about this very important work.
- The Bible Told Them So began as a Rice University Ph.D. dissertation. What prompted you – as a scholar and as a person of faith – to head down this research road, and why the focus on South Carolina?
Like many historians, I wrote this book, in part, to answer questions about my own history. I grew up very much a part of the white evangelical subculture in the 1980s and 90s. For those who know this culture, my experiences might sound familiar. I was in church twice on Sundays and every Wednesday night. I sang along with Psalty and listened to the Music Machine on vinyl. I wore Witness Wear, subscribed to Focus on the Family’s Breakaway magazine, and saw my fellow Christian high school students at the pole each September.
But, this evangelical world was only part of my formation. I also grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas, attended racially diverse public schools from K-12, and grew up playing on racially diverse sports teams. The racial diversity of a good part of the rest of my daily life stood in stark contrast to the racial homogeneity of my church on Sundays and Wednesdays. And, as I grew older, I was struck by how attitudes and conversations about race in my church were so different than in other areas of my upbringing. Conversations about race with white Christians were often met with defensiveness, or hostility, or hushed tones. The discussions were usually short, with the implied message that it was better not to talk about such things. Occasionally, I even heard explicitly racist comments or jokes at church.
Now, to clarify, these things didn’t register with me as they were happening. It wasn’t until later, while I was in the midst of my graduate studies and started wrestling more seriously with questions about race and religion in American history, that I found myself wanting to make sense of why so many white evangelicals seemed to respond differently to race compared to people I knew who weren’t part of that evangelical world. I decided that if I was going to make sense of this, I would need to find a period of history when white evangelicals were talking about race, and I suspected that the civil rights era was promising in this regard. And it turns out that I was right. So while I’m not a direct descendent of the southern white evangelicals I cover in my book, I do believe much of what I have experienced (and continue to experience) in evangelicalism around race has its roots in the civil rights period.
How I landed on South Carolina is a long story that I’ll keep brief. Initially, I intended to study all of the South. I took my first research trip to South Carolina because I knew the state had high percentages of private schools and a high percentage of black Methodists, and I was very interested in these two areas of research. (They became chapters four and five.) After I returned from an initial week of research, my dissertation advisor wisely counseled me to limit the scope of my study to South Carolina alone, rather than trying incorporate all of the South. (Wiser advice, I’ve seldom been given!)
- In your introduction you note that, in both scholarly and popular accounts of the civil rights movement, much is made of the fact that many black activists were motivated and sustained by their “deep and abiding Christian faith.” But as you point out, there’s “another version of Christianity [that] is seldom portrayed,” a version that prompted a large percentage of southern white evangelicals “to move seamlessly from studying their Bibles to denouncing civil rights legislation on the same Wednesday evening” (5). I know that you devote the first two chapters of The Bible Told Them So to this topic, but could you give us a glimpse into how these Christians understood segregation as divinely mandated?
As you note, I cover this thoroughly in the book, so I’ll just offer some broad strokes of this segregationist theology here. First, southern white Christians appealed to what theologians refer to as “general revelation,” a principle that says you can know something about the nature of God by looking at the created world. It made sense to some white southern Christians that God was a segregationist because, from their perspective, the world God created seemed to have segregation built into it. Blue jays and cardinals didn’t mate. Neither did red ants or black ants. In the minds of Christian segregationists, this was because God created them not to mix. And if bluebirds and redbirds weren’t intended to mate, neither were black people and white people. (And it’s important to note that, in the minds of many white southern Christians, widespread interracial sex was a taken-for-granted assumption if Jim Crow was outlawed.)
While the natural world was the starting point for many white Christians’ understanding of God-ordained segregation, their read of the Bible was really what established their segregationist theology. From the perspective of many conservative white Christians, all a person had to do was open the pages of scripture to see how in passage after passage God was the “original segregationist.” Southern white Christians pointed to the Levitical prohibition on weaving unlike fabrics together as evidence of God’s disfavor of integration. Southern white ministers preached on how the separation of people groups at the Tower of Babel was a blueprint of God’s segregationist intent. Denominational journals ran articles highlighting Ezra chapters 9 and 10, which spoke of how Israelite men had to repent for marrying non-Israelite women as a sign of God’s desire for racial purity. Exegesis of Acts 17:26, in which the apostle Paul declares that God “created all men and set the bounds of their habitation,” circulated in pamphlet form throughout the South as a divine endorsement of Jim Crow segregation. These biblically grounded arguments and many others like them (again, see chapter 2) were ubiquitous in the South, flowing from southern white pulpits and coursing through southern white pews at the same time black Christians were in the streets demanding racial change.
If I could elaborate on this response just a little further, I don’t think the hermeneutical purity or logical consistency of this segregationist theology is important from a historical standpoint. Certainly these were not theological ideas that many formally trained seminarians could or did promote. And frankly, perhaps from our perspective today, following some of the arguments laid out in this segregationist theology surely must have required a suspension of logic or at least a good amount of mental gymnastics in order to adhere to such scriptural interpretations. So, if readers think these arguments sound like questionable theology, I understand that. But again, from a historical perspective, the theological soundness of these interpretations does not matter. Rather, from the historian’s point of view, what was important about this segregationist theology was the extent to which white southerners believed it to be true. And the historical record indicates that a majority of white southerners sitting in the pews each Sunday were willing to go along with this segregationist theology. In fact, these southern white Christians didn’t just believe this segregationist theology to be true, they actually ordered their lives around its veracity and kept living as if it were true even after the triumph of the civil rights movement. That’s the story told in the final three chapters of my book.
- Maybe it’s somewhere in the book, but I could not find it. How and where did you (or your editor) find the incredible cover photo?
I know the adage says not to judge a book by its cover, but in this case I really wouldn’t mind if people do! I fortuitously came across the cover photo in an online archive of Getty images. It was snapped by photographer Paul Slade, who took it while covering a school desegregation protest in New Orleans in the late 1950s. The photo itself perfectly captures one of the primary arguments I make in the book–that many southern white Christians resisted racial integration on religious grounds derived from their read of scripture. Perhaps even more significantly, the cover photo also communicates a central theme I hope readers will wrestle with as they make their way through the book: we inherit our history from those who have gone before us, and that same history shapes us in ways we seldom recognize. The smiles of the mother (perhaps grandmother?) and sister placing a placard supporting bigotry into a toddler’s hands immediately captures the eye and is a haunting reminder of the way beliefs are handed down across generations. The photo is a testament to the inherited nature of faith– with all its goods and ills. I was beyond pleased with how the book cover came out.
- I love how you start each of your five chapters with a story from the latter decades of the 19th century, be it the 1860 South Carolina Secession Convention at the First Baptist Church in Columbia, the 1893 erection of a Confederate monument in Orangeburg, and so forth. How did you come up with this idea, and what is the purpose of these stories?
This is a great follow up to the question about the book cover. I spent a lot of time in archives across South Carolina doing research for this book. One of my favorite parts of my research trips is getting out of the archives and actually visiting the sites I was reading about. I remember one afternoon driving through Orangeburg, seeing the First Baptist Church, and remembering that I had a cache of letters from the pastor of that church from back in the late 1950s expressing the pastor’s concern that he’d need to resign his pulpit because he favored school desegregation. I pulled over and started walking around the church, wondering what it would have been like to have been that pastor, wrestling with those issues at that time. I actually sat down on the steps of the church, looked across the street, and spotted the Confederate monument. I started thinking about how everyone in that church would have looked (and still look!) at that Confederate marker coming and going from church each week. And, if you live in a world where you regularly see monuments celebrating the Lost Cause, you’re going to be shaped by that celebration in significant ways.
It’s sometimes easy for us to look at people in the past and cast judgement on them without asking what made them believe the things they did. I decided to start each chapter with a short vignette from the previous century (e.g., telling the story of how that Confederate monument in Orangeburg was constructed) that might help explain some of the influences that caused white Christians in the mid-twentieth century to react the way they did to racial change. One of the hopes I have for this book is that it might reach white Christians who have inherited certain beliefs and practices about race and whiteness that they aren’t even aware of. As white Christians in the 1960s were shaped by the politics and beliefs of the 1890s, so too are white Christians today shaped by the politics and beliefs of the 1960s. That’s what I was trying to communicate by starting each chapter in the 1800s.
- As you know from my recent post, I am particularly taken with your compelling argument – articulated most clearly in chapter 4 – that when the biblical and theological case for segregation proved “ineffective against the moral force of the civil rights movement” (116), segregationist white evangelicals turned to colorblindness. Could you elaborate on this a bit, in the process explaining why white evangelicals continue to find this so compelling? Do white evangelicals genuinely believe that – with colorblindness – they have gotten past racism?
Again, I think this question is a great follow up to the previous one. One of the big arguments of my book is that “colorblindness” emerged as an effective way to maintain segregation when explicitly religious arguments failed white Christians who resisted the civil rights movement. Usually we think of colorblindness as emerging after Jim Crow’s defeat, that is, colorblindness is the response to integration as white folks are trying to make sense of their new post-segregation reality. But what I found in my research were Christians who adopted the language and tools of colorblindness as a strategy of maintaining segregation rather than a response to integration. Colorblindness for these white Christians wasn’t so much about making sense of a new reality. Instead, it was using a particular kind of rhetorical device to maintain the segregation they had been practicing in their institutions all along (or since emancipation in the case of churches).
So as some Christian institutions and denominations started to make halting moves toward integration in the mid to late 1960s, there were white Christians who started saying that all this attention to race was problematic and the church and religious institutions would be better off if they just ignored the issue of race altogether. But, these were the same people who had said a decade earlier that God made the races distinct and declared in Scripture that they should be segregated. So, it was almost as if these folks could see the writing on the wall, and colorblindness for them became the final defense of a segregated system they believed God desired.
The reason I think it’s so important to emphasize the linkage between early uses of colorblindness and the defense of segregation in the church is because of how ubiquitous the language of colorblindness would become among evangelicals within a generation after 1970. As my experience growing up evangelical attests, white evangelicals are especially fond of the language of colorblindness when it comes to matters of race.
I have no doubt that there are some Christians who genuinely believe “colorblindness” is the best approach to matters of racial division. But this is where a better understanding of the history I’m providing in this book would be helpful. There are ample critiques of colorblindness, but I think one of the most powerful indictments we can make against colorblind rhetoric is to show that in its earliest iteration it was wielded by white Christians who wished to maintain Jim Crow-style segregation in their churches and religious institutions. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that a white evangelical subculture that embraced the language of colorblindness remains hyper-segregated along racial lines. Colorblindness has helped in part maintain the very segregation its early adopters had hoped and prayed for. I’m not sure that this segregation is the desire of latter-day espousers of colorblind rhetoric. But by espousing colorblindness, white evangelical Christians today are reinforcing racial divisions all the same.
- You conclude The Bible Told Them So with this powerful sentence: “White evangelicals desiring a solution to the problem of race would do well to begin their search for answers by acknowledging and addressing the ‘brutality and the injustice’ of the segregationist theology that has so deeply shaped their past even as it continues to influence their present?” (167). Are you hopeful that a good number of white evangelicals will see, acknowledge, and repent? Or, as seems to be the case with the folks we write about, is facing squarely the enduring effects of slavery and segregation just a bridge too far for most white evangelicals?
This is a hard question for me to answer. As a historian, I don’t see a lot of cause for hope. But, as a Christian myself, hope is something I cling to like a life preserver. So yes, I have hope that acknowledgment and repentance of our past is still possible for a good number of my fellow white Christians. But I’ll also confess that I have less hope for such acknowledgement and repentance than I did when I wrote those words back in the summer of 2020.
- In your preface you assure your wife (Kristi) that writing the next book will not take so long. So, what will that next book be about?
I’m currently working on a religious biography of the infamous Alabama governor George Wallace. In some respects, this biography will be a continuation on a theme as I explore how religious belief and racial segregation fit seamlessly together in Wallace’s life. But the second half of Wallace’s life has an interesting turn. Wallace claimed to have a “Damascus Road” experience after the bullet of a would-be assassin left him paralyzed from the waist down in 1968. He spent a good deal of his life after his “born-again” experience trying to make amends, visiting black churches to apologize for his previous views, and giving interviews where he emphasized the close relationships he had with black friends. By the end of life, Wallace was exchanging Christmas cards with people like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, and writing to the man who shot him to urge him to seek forgiveness from God just as Wallace had himself. I’m too early into the research to know how it’s going to turn out, but I think Wallace’s life holds a lot of promise to explore the intersections of race and religion and to understand the potential for and limits of forgiveness and redemption.
Learning About Abortion at VBS
by Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood
Editor’s Note: Rev. Brian Kaylor is editor and president of Word&Way – which we strongly urge you to support – as well as the host of the podcast, Baptist Without an Adjective.
Today’s post appeared originally at Word&Way.
Learning About Abortion at VBS
It’s Vacation Bible School time in a lot of churches. Kids will be learning biblical stories, memorizing verses, playing games with friends, acting out motions to songs, and enjoying delicious snacks — all in a safe space while parents get a bit of a break. And some kids this year will also learn about why abortion, euthanasia, and evolution are bad.
That’s right. The Zoomerang VBS from Answers in Genesis isn’t your parents’ VBS. This popular curriculum being used in hundreds of churches across the country sounds like a fun trip “down under” with cute Australian animals but actually packs a political punch.
“During this pro-life VBS, kids will discover that life is valuable … from the lives of preborn babies to eternal life,” the promotional materials promise about this “sanctity of life VBS.”
Ken Ham, founder of AiG, explained in a promotional video that this is “a very unique VBS.” And he’s not lying about that. He added, “This is really an important time to be able to train young people with the right foundation because of what’s happening in our culture with this issue” of abortion.
That AiG would create a VBS for the culture wars shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, the fundamentalist organization Ham leads has sought for decades to teach that God created the Earth in six literal days about 6,000 years ago. For Ham and AiG, these doctrines are non-negotiable for Christian faithfulness.
The group’s statement of faith required for employees also declares that “the Triune God” should be viewed “in the male gender with masculine pronouns,” that the Bible is “inerrant” in all areas like “its assertions in such fields as history and science,” that Noah’s flood explains “most fossiliferous sediments,” that “there is only one race of mankind — the human race or Adam’s race,” and that “the concepts of ‘social justice,’ ‘intersectionality,’ and ‘critical race theory’ as defined in modern terminology are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing.”
In 2016, AiG opened the Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky that features a full-scale 510-foot-long replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s a controversial retelling of biblical accounts and is often criticized by scientists and theologians. And it cost over $100 million to construct, millions of which came from government bonds and tax incentives. Susan and William Trollinger, authors of Righting America at the Creation Museum, have visited the Ark Encounter and AiG’s Creation Museum multiple times to analyze the religious messages. They’ve written about how AiG offers fantastical explanations to justify its young Earth belief and preaches a wrathful God who killed, by AiG’s wild estimates, billions of people (and makes unsubstantiated claims about attendance at the Ark).
“It’s hard to imagine how children — or adults — can square AiG’s pro-life VBS with their notion of an extraordinarily angry God who drowned up to 20 billion people in Noah’s Flood (including millions of pregnant women),” William Trollinger (a Word&Way board member) told us.
Now, AiG is building a Tower of Babel replica (since the first tower went so well) to teach about “the racism issue.” But rather than just waiting for people to pair up and flock to the Ark, AiG creates curriculum for homeschool families and VBS. They recognize the importance of spreading their ideology to the next generation. As their leader guides for Zoomerang explain: “Researchers generally agree most people become Christians when they’re children, so it’s apparent this age group is a huge mission field!”
But for AiG, becoming a Christian means adopting specific fundamentalist doctrines on topics like creation, abortion, and racism. Do churches buying this curriculum realize what agenda they are facilitating? Do parents know this when they send their children to VBS at their church or the one down the street?
In this issue of A Public Witness, we sign up for a quick history of VBS before heading to Zoomerang to experience a unique VBS for today’s culture wars. Finally, we pack up for the day by reflecting on what this means for churches.
History of VBS
Exactly how VBS got started remains a bit of a mystery. Chris Gehrz, a historian at Bethel University, traced two different U.S. origin stories. One starts in Hopedale, Illinois, in 1894. That’s when D.G. Miles, the wife of a Methodist pastor, gathered children from various churches for summer sessions devoted to learning scripture. The second begins in New York City in 1898 when Eliza Hawes of the Baptist Church of the Epiphany launched an “Everyday Bible School” in a rented beer hall.
As Gehrz explained, it was another Baptist named Robert Boville who developed the idea into a movement. After running five New York-based summer schools in 1901, Boville became an evangelist for the concept and spurred churches in other cities to provide similar offerings. He went on to organize national and global campaigns promoting VBS.
In 1910, the Presbyterians became the first denomination to formally adopt the approach, and others soon followed suit. By the early 1920s, more than 5,000 programs existed in the United States. Lasting a significant portion of the summer, these schools mixed Bible lessons with activities, the development of practical skills, and even patriotic content. By mid-century, more than 5 million children in the U.S. attended VBS.
However, Gehrz cited a lament in The Christian Century among church leaders from that era about the typical program length shrinking from seven weeks to just two. Today, polling shows fewer churches offering programs, while curriculum is increasingly produced by parachurch organizations that cross traditional sectarian boundaries and downplay theological differences.
With lots of churches relying on only a few curriculum providers, this outsourcing of content development can create problems. In 2004, LifeWay Christian Resources (a ministry of the Southern Baptist Convention that serves many congregations both within and beyond the SBC) came under fire for its “Rickshaw Rally” curriculum whose theme and materials drew on offensive Asian caricatures. A decade later, LifeWay’s CEO acknowledged that “stereotypes were used in our materials, and I apologize for the pain they caused.”
A similar controversy engulfed Group Publishing in 2019. The provider of interdenominational resources released its “Roar!” VBS that garnered criticism for racial insensitivities in taking participants on an “epic” adventure to Africa. In addition to asking children to roleplay being Egyptian slaves (and teachers to act as angry guards), one activity involved mimicking African languages by making “clicking noises.”
Group Publishing apologized and revised the product following the blowback, but many churches had already purchased and promoted the theme. That left them scrambling to adapt the materials. For instance, leaders at New Covenant Church of God in North Charleston, South Carolina, rewrote the lessons and replaced the activity imitating slavery with a talk about “the cruelty of forced labor.” As Laura Elsey, the church’s preschool pastor, said, “At church, nobody should feel ashamed.”
Ham-Handed VBS
Much of Zoomerang is typical VBS flair with corny caricatures of the chosen exotic land where the week is set. In this case, Australia. So, kids get to enjoy “aus-some songs,” “koala-ty treats,” “hoppin’ good games,” and “turtle-y terrific science and crafts.” And the videos feature rough Australian accents as cartoons say “g’day, mate” and “grab your sunnies” (sunglasses). There are also decorating suggestions to make a eucalyptus forest or Great Barrier Reef.
While Australia offers plenty of material for bad puns, it doesn’t have an obvious connection to the “sanctity of life” theme any more than other places with abundant wildlife. But, like a clumsy kangaroo, the curriculum goes there anyways.
“Like a boomerang, we are returning kids to what the Bible says about the value of life!” a cartoon declares in one video just before a sonogram appears on screen.
Summaries of Bible verses provided in lessons inject conservative beliefs about life in the womb that don’t actually appear in the verses. Psalm 127:3 says that “children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.” But Zoomerang puts it: “Each child, from the moment of fertilization, is a blessing from God. God is the author of life. The lesson plans also go into detail, depending on the age group, about abortion and euthanasia numbers and laws in the U.S. and other countries.
One reason AiG argues churches should switch to their VBS is that their material “teaches apologetics so kids know what they believe and why.” That is, the emphasis is on learning and repeating talking points on contemporary issues, instead of a more expository focus on unpacking biblical stories. The VBS curriculum includes advice on sharing the gospel to those who have had abortions.
Day one looks at the “Creation of Man,” with the “apologetics focus” of “They can’t make a monkey out of me! (Ape-Man Frauds).” The next day, on the topic of “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made,” has the focus of “God thought of everything! (Design features of Our Bodies).” Day 3 recounts the story of King Herod killing baby boys after Jesus’s birth, with the focus “Be a defender of the defenseless! (Protecting and Respecting Life).” The memory verse that day doesn’t come from the passage but is instead the “golden rule.” As is common with VBS materials, day four is a salvation focus, with John 11:25 chosen since Jesus talks about being “the life.” The week wraps up with Jesus ascending and leaving his followers to keep doing the work: “Life Has Meaning and Purpose.”
Since AiG teaches a literal interpretation of creation week occurring just 6,000 years ago, that ideology shows up in the lessons. For instance, a teacher guide includes this “teaching tip” to share: “The ancestors of the Aboriginal people had migrated to Australia from the tower of Babel at some point during the past 4,300 years. The people at Babel had heard the truth about creation and the flood from Noah and his family. Over time, the true account changed into what is now part fact (man was created and didn’t evolve), and part fiction.” Scholars instead believe various groups of people included in the Aboriginal Australian category migrated there at various times between 11,500 and 50,000 years ago.
“As we explore the Genesis account that describes the creation of man and woman, we will find that people didn’t evolve from ape-men,” AiG added.
Elsewhere in the materials, AiG claims “Christianity is the oldest ‘religion’ dating back 6,000 years to the creation event described in the book of Genesis.” That inaccurate timing creates Christianity before Christ and ignores the Jewish faith of Jesus, the disciples, the prophets, and others.
As with many VBS programs, AiG’s guides offer suggested snacks, games, and crafts to connect with the stories. So, a treat for day one is a “Funky Monkey” face made of crackers, cheese, pretzels, cheerios, and chocolate chips to remind children: “Today, we’re talking about how we don’t share an ancestor with apes. … There’s no missing link between apes and man. People are people, and apes are apes.”
On day 3 — the day when they learn about Herod slaughtering babies — a game suggested for toddlers is to set up two baby pools with three Duplo figures per child floating individually on foam plates. The kids are then to “carefully carry a miniature person from one baby pool to another on their plate” and put it in the other pool. While it’s a race, they also have to be careful not to drop (and apparently kill) “the person.”
A suggested treat for that day is “Gingerbread Girls and Boys” to remind children that “God is the one who makes boys and girls like you! And you are very loved and valued by him” (so, now let’s eat these cute kids?). Another suggested treat for that day is even more likely to arise in therapy sessions years from now: “Baby in a Blanket,” which is a renamed “pigs in a blanket” that adds dots for eyes and a nose drawn on the little hot dog end sticking out. As one AiG video explained about the value of eating pretend babies: “This is a really great one for the kids to learn more about the value of life.”
Of course, no VBS is complete without decorations. In addition to various cheap trinkets and prizes to use during the week, churches can also buy posters to help set the mood. For Zoomerang, the posters include one that features a platypus, another with the Great Coral Reef, and a large one nearly 20-feet long and 6.5-feet tall showing the developmental stages of a baby in a womb.
The lessons also get into sexual anatomy, especially for youth. After watching a 55-minute video on day two about human “development from embryo to birth,” teachers are suggested to ask a few questions to students, including, “How does a female ovary testify to our intelligent creator?”
Rise of Political VBS?
Having trusted a local church to teach their child about the Bible, how many parents or grandparents will end up surprised (outraged?) when their children come home talking about abortion and evolution? As former church pastors, those are phone calls and emails we’re happy to not receive.
To be clear, we’re not saying churches shouldn’t talk about controversial topics. We’d actually prefer more conversations about political and ethical issues in our churches, as Christians need to consider such subjects through the lens of their faith rather than the partisan spin of cable news. But kids’ VBS is not the appropriate forum for such weighty discussions about the relationship between faith and science or the moral complexity of abortion. Nor do we regard Answers in Genesis as a trusted teacher.
Indeed, from our review of the Zoomerang materials, we see a different agenda at play. Instead of helping children understand the Bible, the Zoomerang curriculum is designed to indoctrinate participants in support of ideological causes. Rather than fostering an appreciation of scripture and what it reveals about God, Zoomerang is designed to cultivate and nurture the next generation of culture warriors. Standing on the cusp of a watershed victory on abortion, reaching the captive audience of children in churches during summers helps ensure the sustainability of present and future gains.
Whatever success this creates in the political realm, it is almost certain to inflict harm on Christ’s Church. Polling last year revealed that Christians perceived overt partisanship in congregations as damaging to the church’s witness and reducing their desire to participate in church life. Conforming to the political polarizations of society ends up poisoning Christian communities, with a congregation’s witness idolatrously reduced to a partisan agenda. Many inside the sanctuary choose to leave and many on the outside decide never to enter. Gains in the world come at a cost to the soul.
From political sermons to campaign rallies in worship services to sanctuaries used for partisan revivals, American Christianity faces constant pressure to sacrifice its religious convictions on partisan altars. Ideologically-driven VBS curriculum is only the latest evidence that politics is our nation’s true religion. This year kids face inculcation about abortion and evolution. Next year they may be inundated with lessons against CRT or helping refugees. What they’re not learning about in Vacation Bible School, ironically, is the Bible.
At Zoomerang VBS this summer, children will hear various claims that contradict what scientists, historians, and theologians teach. More than mere disinformation, it risks preventing them from learning how to follow Jesus more faithfully. For instance, AiG’s lessons for Zoomerang blame Charles Darwin and evolution for the “mistreatment of the Aboriginal people” in Australia. To teach this, the material suggests to teachers, “You may want to show a picture of Aboriginal people in chains.”
But the mistreatment actually predated Darwin and instead often came from Christians. That’s why the Catholic Church in Australia publicly apologized in 1996 for its role in the forced removal of Aboriginal children that “will remain forever a blight on our nation.”
“There was an underlying view that conversion to Christianity required the weakening of the spiritual influence of Aboriginal elders and culture on the younger generation,” the Church’s statement explained. “This led almost inevitably to accepting the idea that the physical separation of Aboriginal children from those families who were not in reserves or missions was necessary for their ultimate spiritual and material well-being.”
If we don’t learn the lessons of history right, we’re more likely to repeat them with the self-righteous arrogance of fundamentalism. It’s another example of why churches and parents should not trust Ken Ham or Answers in Genesis to teach their children.
And when it comes to thinking about the spiritual well-being of children, perhaps we shouldn’t tell them about Herod killing the babies right before serving them a “Baby in a Blanket.”
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor & Beau Underwood
EricTales: The Story behind the Metaxas Word Salad
by Camille Kaminski Lewis
Camille Kaminski Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Rhetorical Studies with a minor in American Studies. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism, was a scholarly attempt to stretch the boundaries of both Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory on tragedy and comedy as well as stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. (The story of that publication is available at The KB Journal.) Last year she published an edited volume, White Nationalism and Faith: Statements and Counter-Statements on American Identity (Peter Lang); see here for our interview with Lewis about this book. Finally, her latest manuscript – tentatively entitiled Klandamentalism: America’s Most Dysfunctional Romance – is under consideration for publication.
You’d think that a $30,000 speaking fee would get you more than a word salad in doctoral robes.
But as the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church’s Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina was planning their Inaugural Garnet & Gold Forum for commencement week, enough Eric Metaxas fanboys got the ear of the president that he couldn’t resist. Metaxas would be their much-celebrated speaker at their much-touted event.
They were expecting 1000 attendees. Mercifully, they got about 150. The price was too high or the draw wasn’t strong enough.
We all know Eric Metaxas by now, right? He’s the boy from Queens who graduated with a B.A. in English from Yale in 1984 whose writing skills peaked with his stint on VeggieTales. Oh sure, there’s a Wilberforce biography and a Bonhoeffer biography in there. And his latest riff on a 1966 Time cover story, Is Atheism Dead?
He really doesn’t want us to forget that.
Salem is his publisher (whose CEO is Bob Jones University Class of 1957 Stu Epperson), and it looks like they are giving him free rein. I mean, some of these titles are cringy.
But Eric “turned” in 2019, according to his old friend, Phil Vischer. He started sidling up to Ann Coulter and getting book blurbs from Tucker Carlson.
Then he’s calling the 2020 election “stolen” and insists that Joe Biden is “DELIBERATELY trying to destroy the USA” [emphasis in original]. He says Jesus was “white,” and the COVID vaccine is evil.
And to top it all off, he’s boldly aligned with the 21st-century iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, the Oath Keepers.
Apparently not everyone among my South Carolina neighbors knows about Eric Metaxas’ alignment with the worst Americans because my own church peddled this Garnet and Gold Forum.
This isn’t okay. This is not the voice we want to amplify. This is not encouraging courageous living or resting in grace. This is not hope-filled discipleship. And it’s the furthest it could be from loving community.
Now, Metaxas’ speech at the expensive ticketed event has never been published, but his commencement address the next morning was. I’ve transcribed the whole thing. You can read it here.
So, join me, please, in putting on your rhetorical critic’s hat for a few minutes to get at Metaxas’s “drama,” as we call it in the biz. By that we rhetoricians mean that every speech tells a story. There’s a protagonist, or agent, who is motivated to do an action with some agency or means within some scene to accomplish some purpose. Who? what? how? where? and why? – these questions hang together within any discourse. The rhetoric is like a play or a novel. And, according to Kenneth Burke, it gives us clues into a rhetor’s (or speaker’s) motivations.
Usually, for instance, a President talks about the American people as the primary agent in a State of the Union rhetorical drama. It’s important for that Rhetor-in-Chief to communicate the idea of “we, the People” to get things done. A Reformed pastor would likely talk about God as the primary agent. A Holiness pastor would likely talk about believers as the primary agents. You get the idea.
On first pass, Metaxas’ commencement speech is an incomprehensible word salad. Metaxas has few cogent sentences in those 51 minutes.
But I’ve spent the last 15 years studying the rhetoric of Bob Jones, Sr., so I am familiar with narcissistic word salads. And I think it’s productive to unravel them so that we can detect the consequences of their words. In my analysis of 50 years of Bob Jones, Sr.’s public life, I’ve identified his rhetoric as “Klandamentalism.” I created that neologism since I’ve discovered that it’s not that the Klan took advantage of naive Evangelicals in the 1920s. No, the Klansman and the fundamentalist evangelist were one. They touted the same ideology, preached in the same pulpits, and funded the same schools. I have discovered that Klandamentalism starts with a forceful, egocentric singular personality and a small but secret cadre of young, white males who alone act upon their neighbors, employees, families, and nation to “bring them to God” in order to earn their own entry into Heaven. Their actions are immaterial and vague. Their counteragents, on the other hand, are perpetually relegated to the second person persona, “you.” Those counteragents flamboyantly lure the protagonists’ attention away from their heavenly destination.
You can see the Burkean drama I have just identified there:
- Agent = Bob Jones and his cohort of white young men
- Action & Agency = Not well defined
- Scene = Neighbors, employees, families, nation which are the receivers of the agents’ action
- Purpose = To get to Heaven
The key with Bob Jones’ Klandamentalism is that the antagonist is always lurking, always present, always acting in lurid, provocative ways. In the protagonist’s dystopic fantasy, the antagonist is always trying to tempt him away from his goal of Heaven.
But honestly, I did not expect a Yale-trained cartoon writer to sound so much like my own “Dr. Bob.” It could be a script—a Klandamentalist script.
Agent vs. Counteragent
First, the agent or protagonist is plainly Metaxas; he uses “I” frequently in his text just like Bob Jones. Aligned with Metaxas are, of course, his “heroes”—William Wilberforce, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Chuck Colson. This is unsurprising. White, Protestant, lettered, and male—these are Eric’s imagined allies. That these people are all dead makes them easily cast as Eric’s wingmen.
Like Bob, Eric sets up a plain rivalry between himself and his enemies. He says early on that
“there’s [sic] basically two narratives: one is that we, that life was generated spontaneously about 4 billion years ago. Some of the sloshing in the primordial soup, 4 billion years ago created single-celled life.”
Bear with him here. He gets to it eventually:
“That’s the secular narrative…. the secular narrative, that life emerged from non-life through natural random processes.”
Ten times he mentions this counter drama, this “secular narrative,” crafting an anticipation that he’ll mention an alternative “narrative,” maybe even a “sacred narrative.” But he never explicitly names the “sacred narrative.” Never.
Instead of a “narrative,” he calls the alternative to the secular—his narrative—“logic.” It’s “truth.” It’s God. It’s stable—static even—and obvious.
But the antagonists’ “secular narrative” defies credulity and “is shifting.” He frames it like a conspiracy that his counter-agents—people like Albert Einstein and Christopher Hitchens—are too weak-minded to resist. “You wanna get tenure,” and “you wanna keep your job,” and “are just longing for the applause of undergraduates.” Additionally, “you don’t want people looking at you funny.” “You”—there’s that second-person persona popping up as if the brand-new Erskine Class of 2022 is among his antagonists.
Act
One of the things that shocked me in my research into Bob Jones, Sr.’s rhetoric is that while he is the most frequent actor in his narrative, his actions are negligeable. Some rhetoricians would call them “motion” not “action.” He simply “stands” for the “eternal verities,” as Richard Weaver calls them. And in simply standing, he looks all the more moral (to himself) than his busy and alluring antagonists.
Metaxas’ “stand” is similar to Jones’. You’re either with him and his small cadre of Christian thinkers or you’re against him. Everything for Metaxas is either-or.
- “Either that is garbage or it’s true…. It’s either true or it’s garbage.”
- “Either it’s true or it’s not true.”
- “Either God created it or he didn’t.”
- “We know it or we don’t.”
- “Is this true or is this just some religious claptrap that some people talk about?”
In fact, the most frequent verb Metaxas uses is “is”! I have a marked-up version of the transcript, highlighting the verbs in yellow, if you’d like to see it.
Jesus who?
The biggest clue that you’re listening to a Klandamentalist, I’ve discovered over the last 15 years, is to look for Jesus in their rhetoric. For an evangelical talking to evangelicals with evangelical trappings all around him, you’d think Jesus would be the primary focus. That’s what they are supposed to do. So, I ask myself when I’m listening to evangelical rhetoric, “is Jesus an actor? What’s Jesus doing?”
With Bob Jones, Jesus rarely does anything at all. In all forty-two sermons I have unearthed in Marshall, Texas in 1924, Bob Jones mentions Jesus twice. Twice! And even then, Jesus is nothing more than an object of Jones’ preposition—a thing he carries around like a badge of honor.
Metaxas does the same thing. For him “faith in Jesus” is necessary, and the natural world is “pointing to Jesus.” Even Chuck Colson “suddenly encountered Jesus”—the Son of God as a direct object to the bland verb “encountered.” When Jesus is the subject of the sentence—and this is where Eric is not like Bob—Jesus doesn’t act in Metaxas’ rhetoric. He is: “Jesus is Lord,” and “Jesus is truth.”
Jesus and Eric and Chuck and William and Dietrich—these actors are not doing anything for good or for God. They simply exist. Period.
Purpose
Now, God does act in Metaxas’ story: “God created.” That is an active albeit past-tense action. Here’s Metaxas at his most coherent and when he reveals the purpose in his drama:
“God created us for war. We are in a war in this world between good and evil. It expresses itself in an infinity [sic] of ways. There’s [sic] all kinds of evil in the world.”
The Manichean story of good-vs-evil is alluring. Ignore the fact that the Apostle Paul calls Christians “more than conquerors.” In the imagined fantasy between good-and-evil, we can make ourselves our own heroes. Like little kids playing cops-and-robbers, of course, we’re on the side of “good”! And everybody who’s not-us is evil!
But where’s Jesus, his purported Savior, in Eric’s demagogic war narrative?
As if he’s throwing a bone to his hero, Metaxas nonsensically repeats Chuck Colson’s favorite Abraham Kuyper’s quotation from Kuyper’s own inaugural address in 1880:
“And Chuck, when he would give speeches almost in every single speech, he would quote the Dutch theologian and statesman, Abraham Kuyper. I know you’re familiar with a lot of Dutch theologians and statesmen, so I wanna be really clear. This was Kuyper I’m talking about. He would quote Kuyper, and he would do this in almost every speech. Abraham Kuyper, around, I don’t know, the late 1880s, said, ‘There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ who is Sovereign does not say, ‘Mine!’”
I say this is “nonsensical” because it disagrees with everything else Eric is saying. If Jesus actually rules over all the earth like Kuyper claims and Colson and Metaxas repeat, there is no war against evil. The war is over. It is finished. That’s the Point.
And within this romanticized war, Metaxas and his cohort fight by “bringing” Jesus into the battle (emphasis mine):
- “If it’s true, you’re gonna have to bring it out into the whole world.”
- “So as you go into the secular world, it is your job to bring the truth of God into every sphere in which you travel.”
- “Does who he is—-do we allow that to enter us in such a way that we bring it wherever we go? That we bring his truth and his love and his goodness and his justice, everywhere we go, no matter what we’re doing? Being an activist or in a lab—whatever you’re doing—he wants us to bring him into that, to be forces of redemption and life in a world of brokenness and death.”
And this is where a rhetorical analysis reveals a rhetor’s inner logic. For Metaxas, Jesus is sovereign but only if “we allow” him to be. Only if we “bring” Jesus-as-fact “into the secular world.” That’s plain—we “go into the secular world” from our logic-ruling world. There are two worlds for Metaxas: “Logic” and “truth” where Jesus reigns and the “secular world” in which we have to “bring” Jesus. They are hermetically sealed off from the other so that Jesus cannot reign without Eric and Company.
So the rhetorical drama here is this:
- Agent = Eric Metaxas and his cohort
- Action & Agency = Being and bringing and allowing Jesus
- Scene = Secular world of brokenness and death
- Purpose = Redeem
Thus we—not Jesus, but we human beings joining Metaxas’ cohort—can redeem. We have sovereignty over the Lord of all creation. We hold the power. It’s all in our hands. Who wouldn’t love that kind of supremacy?:
“If you give your life over to him, you only then begin to know what joy feels like, what meaning feels like, what purpose feels like. He created you literally for that. But because he created you in his image, he cannot and will not force you to acknowledge it. You have total freedom because you’re made in his image. You’re so a glorious creation that you have freedom to reject him or to accept him.”
Jesus sits quietly in our formal (logical) dining room waiting to be invited into the secular rumpus room where we live our lives…if we let him. It’s all up to us.
No wonder Metaxas likes this story.
I suppose he clues us in right at the beginning with his opening metaphor:
“The charge to anyone who says, ‘I’m a Christian’” is to live out our Christian life in a secular world. But it is not defensive. It’s not like, ‘OK we’re gonna put an ice cube in and we’re just gonna pray that it melts slowly.’ No, we’re gonna pray that the ice turns all the other water to ice. We’re going on offense. When you bring your Christian faith, if you have real Christian faith, into a world that is unaware of the Christian faith, the demons tremble. Now if you have some fussy religious faith, the demons are fine. But if you bring Jesus into the world, I just want to tell you, folks, the world is hungry for that…”
“Hungry for that,” he says. Not Jesus, but for a “real Christian faith” offensively “brought” into the world.
The strange ice cube metaphor proves Metaxas’ complete Klandamentalist drama. What kind of action does an ice cube do? It chills, of course, but only temporarily. It can’t do much alone either. Somehow, curiously, Metaxas imagines a simple, singular ice cube freezing everything around it “offensively” rather than melting defensively and slowly. It’s such an insipid and capricious alternative to Jesus’ metaphors of salt and light.
Is it any wonder then that Eric Metaxas has aligned himself with the white nationalist war-peddlers like Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, and the Oath Keepers? All of them imagine a conflict between themselves and a pernicious and secret evil which tempts them to destruction. All of them cast aspersions on education and science. All of them imagine themselves as the singular heroes of their own stories.
All of them are another variation of Klandamentalism—white nationalism cloaked in religious rhetoric and patriotism.
The problem is that these people don’t remain simply being and bringing and allowing. This was Kenneth Burke’s warning to us in 1938. Sometimes they take up arms for insurrection. Sometimes they inspire others to do the same. Klandamentalism’s appeal in the 1920s warns us about its appeal to us in the 2020s. Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. Kenneth Burke explained it as “the corrupters of religion … are a major menace to the world today, in giving the profound patterns of religious thought a crude and sinister distortion.” We have to “find all the available ways of making the” Klandamentalist “distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of [t]his kind in America be unable to” continue their “swindle.”
We have to take their rhetoric seriously because it’s never merely an incoherent word salad. We have to transcribe it, mark it, and analyze it so that we can understand how their drama fits together. 100 years ago, Klandamentalism created my alma mater. We need to do better this time.
This is our anti-Metaxas battle.
A Colorblind Racism
by William Trollinger
In his terrific 2021 book, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins – focusing on white Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina – makes two primary arguments:
- “many white South Carolinians who resisted the civil rights movement were animated by a Christian faith influenced by biblical exegesis that deemed racial segregation as divinely ordered” (7).
- “in the years after 1965, segregationist Christianity evolved and persisted in new forms that would become mainstays of southern white evangelicalism by the 1970s: colorblind individualism and a heightened focus on the family” (8).
While the first argument is in keeping with much recent historical work, the second argument marks an important intervention in our understanding of post-Jim Crow white evangelicalism. In Chapter 4, “Embracing Colorblindness,” the author makes a powerful case for the continuities between segregationist and colorblind Christianity. Focusing on the struggle to desegregate the Methodist Church in South Carolina in the 1960s and 1970s, Hawkins notes that Christian segregationists continued to oppose integration, but their arguments “had grown threadbare in broader society, proving ineffective against the moral force of the civil rights movement” (116).
But these segregationists found their answer in “colorblindness,” in which the race problem would disappear as individuals no longer attended to race. Not seeing race would, ipso facto, eliminate racism. As Hawkins convincingly argues,
the shift to colorblindness for these Christians was more a defensive repositioning than a confession of past sins. With colorblindness segregationists were able to curtail the conversation. They were the ones who supposedly wanted to move on from race, the ones who wished to put the past behind them and march into a future where race no longer mattered (125).
Focusing on race was the problem; not seeing race was the answer. Of course, not seeing race meant not seeing ongoing racial inequities in society. But in colorblindness, racism was simply an individual matter. Quit seeing race, and problem solved.
Answers in Genesis CEO Ken Ham is a perfect exemplar of this sort of colorblindness. According to Ham, when individuals believe the Genesis account of creation, when they build their faith on the Bible, they will recognize that there are no races. They will recognize that we are one race, one blood. True Bible-believing Christians are colorblind.
In keeping with the South Carolina segregationists, Ham suggests that the less we talk about race and racism, the better: “In many ways I believe certain public figures are actually fueling racism by using wrong terminology such as ‘races,’ ‘black race,’ ‘white race,’ and so on.” If you don’t see race, if you don’t talk about race, then presto, racism is gone.
In keeping with Hawkins’ description of “colorblindness,” for Ham it is all about individuals and their feelings and their ideas. He is silent about structural and systemic racial inequities in America; as we note in Righting America, “there is a palpable lack of concern with institutional racism in contemporary America” (189). Just to give two examples, Ham has nothing to say about the racial wealth gap in this country, and he has nothing to say about the fact that 1 in 3 black males are in prison, in jail, on probation, and on parole (in contrast with 1 in 17 white males). (Thanks much to my colleague Leslie Picca, Roesch Chair in the Social Sciences, for this information).
But it’s worse. As far as I can tell – I have seen no evidence to the contrary – Ham can’t bring himself to criticize white supremacist groups, can’t bring himself to say a word about Christian nationalism. His blog post on the January 06 Insurrection was exceptionally weird: while he said nothing about the destruction, violence, racism, and all the crosses, Bibles, and Jesus T-shirts, he did manage to attack Darwinism and the public schools.
While he eventually had a brief comment about the horrific murder of George Floyd, he had almost nothing to say about the Charleston nine, the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, on and on and on.
And then there is the recent slaughter in Buffalo. As you can see in the screenshot below, Ham is determined to reject any suggestion that America is enduring a tide of racist hate; instead, it is “an epidemic of [individual] depravity because of sin.” And in what is a classic move for Ham and others in the Christian Right, Ham avoids saying anything about racism by asserting that what really matters is maintaining the gender binary (how in the world did he manage to get this into a post on the Buffalo killings?) and opposing abortion.
Don’t talk about racism, and it disappears. Poof.
And it is not just about eliding racism in the present. While Ham and AiG occasionally acknowledge that some Christians in the past misused the Bible in behalf of racial discrimination, they will absolutely not acknowledge the degree to which “Bible-believing Christians” used the Bible as a foundation for racial oppression. From Righting America:
In antebellum America millions of white Christians . . . stood on their literal reading of the Word of God to issue forth a raft of proslavery polemics and to deliver an almost-infinite number of proslavery sermons . . . Prior to the Civil War, “Biblical Christians,” those holding to plenary verbal inspiration and a commonsense reading to the Bible, led the fight for slavery. Not surprisingly, almost a century after the Civil War – when the civil rights movement challenged the Jim Crow system of white supremacy in the South – supporters of segregation used biblical literalism to bolster their campaign against integration and racial equality . . . In her book, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, historian Carolyn Renee Dupont puts it bluntly: Mississippi’s white “evangelicals fought mightily against black equality, proclaiming that God himself ordained segregation, blessing the forces of resistance . . . and protecting segregation in their churches” (186-87).
Of course, eliding this past, eliding the degree to which white Christians have used the Bible to bolster the case for racial oppression, means that white evangelicals like Ham and his comrades at Answers in Genesis do not need to reckon with history. As Daniel Rodgers observed in his masterful Age of Fracture, “in the ‘color-blind’ society project, amnesia [is] a conscious strategy, undertaken in conviction that the present’s dues to the past had already been fully paid” (143).
There is no need to confess, no need to repent, no need to work to overcome the structures cemented in place by 350 years of slavery and segregation.
In fact, there is no need to see.
White privilege at its finest.
