Jesus, Putin, and Trump: Guess Who’s the Odd Man Out in this Evangelical Trinity
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 professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and 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).
Evangelicals claim they have a commitment to imitating Jesus, but they remain enthralled with Donald Trump, the Donald Trump who loves and seeks to emulate Vladimir Putin – a former KGB agent, dictator, human rights violator, and long-time enemy of the USA. What an odd trinity: Jesus, Putin, and Trump.
Putin has been an appealing figure for many on the American Right – Tucker Carlson is just one example – thanks to the “masculinity he radiated in such sharp contrast to his U.S. counterpart” (Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Line of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump). As far back as September 2013 commentators were noting the cult following Putin was amassing on the American right with his macho exploits: tranquilizing a tiger, hunting a gray whale with a crossbow, riding war horses, catching gigantic fish. He was always shirtless and never afraid, “Rooseveltian testosterone oozing out of every pore.” Even though Putin has admitted that the macho exploits were mostly staged events, his macho image has been sealed in the media.
And in the evangelical mind. Nothing impresses evangelicals like the image of the “strong man.”
Of course, evangelicals routinely ignore that the “strong man” theology/ideology never fares well in the Bible. Perhaps the strongest of the strong men in the Hebrew Scripture was Samson. He was seduced and deceived by a woman, captured by the Philistines, and had his eyes put out. When his hair grew back out (the secret to his strength), the Philistines failed to notice. During a celebration in the Temple of Dagon, the Philistines brought Samson out for the people to see and mock. Samson asked of his captors: “Let me feel the pillars on which the house rests, so that I may lean against them.” In one act of revenge Samson pulled down the temple and died along with three thousand Philistines. The strong man ended his life in an act of suicide, terrorism, and mass murder.
But never mind. Evangelicals love the “strong man.”
As the world stands on the precipice of another war that could envelop all nations, Trump has said that Putin’s move into Ukraine is “genius” and “savvy.” Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner, remarking on the unusual support of Putin by Trump and his allies: “There is something else this time around, something new that I have never seen before on the scale we are witnessing. There are many in this nation, cheered on by powerful media voices, who seem more aligned with a dangerous foe to America and a peaceful world order than they are with our own leadership.” Having already damaged democracy by attacking our anchor institutions – press, court, Congress, and military leadership – Trump now sides shamelessly with Putin, and his acolytes in Congress and his adoring evangelical fans are mouthing Putin love. Democracy now inhabits the arena of precarity.
But evangelical love of Putin is not simply a matter of idolizing the “strong man.” It is also about the evangelical obsession with the “end times.”
The doomsday preachers have always salivated at the apocalyptic scenarios that include Russia – the “bear from the North” (Daniel 7). They locate Russia in the esoteric prophecies of Ezekiel as Gog and Magog. The preachers breathlessly quote Ezekiel 38 and Daniel 7. According to self-proclaimed prophet Craig C. White:
The new Russian Union is here! Kazakhstan and Belarus have joined Russia in a new Eurasian economic Union. Ukraine was supposed to join but backed out at the last moment. I think this is a big step. Daniel Chapter 7 tells us about the Russian bear during the end times. Three ribs may be nations along its western border in the teeth of Russia. Two of those nations may be represented here. This is a new Russian Union! Christians should be alerted that Daniel 7 is moving forward. This is an economic Union. I expect that three nations will one day soon say to Russia, you must create a Political Union including other nations! [Ukraine?] Devour much flesh!
Russia figures prominently in the final war that occurs in what essentially is the genocide of the earth’s remaining population. Putin now embodies this apocalyptic scenario in frightening reality. But contra the rapture preachers, there will be no “superman” Jesus flying in from outer space to rescue God’s special evangelical children.
Putin now has the power to put all humanity in the crosshairs of his delusional lust for power with all of Russia’s nuclear capacity at his fingertips. This is a different kind of precarity that threatens humanity as a species: the Anthropocene. “In the Anthropocene,” note G. Mitchell Reyes and Kundai Chirindo, “the precarity that had been the nearly exclusive preserve of people occupying the bottommost rungs of human society is becoming generalized to most if not all humans.” We are all an endangered species, and yet evangelicals are playing with rapture charts and giving support to Russia’s madman.
In Precarious Rhetorics, Wendy Hesford, Adela Licona, and Christa Teston suggest that one cause of the growing sense of precarity felt around the world is the growth of right-wing nationalist populism. The rise of “hard-right populism,” they note, “is cultivated through the sowing of fear and suspicion.” “One’s life,” Judith Butler observes, “is always in some sense, in the hands of the other.” This cultural or socialized precarity, in other words, is an inescapable fact of the publics that humans constitute. And now, all our lives seem to be in the hands of a sixty-nine-year-old Russian dreaming of world dominion. Precarity to the max!
Putin moves to put into effect his long-sought goals of restoring Russia to the position of world power. Betul Eksi and Elizabeth A. Wood argue that his right-wing populism is a gendered performance, a Janus-faced masculinity. His political masculinity allows him to position himself as an outsider yet insider, bad boy yet good father to Mother Russia. His performed political masculinity supports conservative social and political gender norms as well as nationalistic ones. His machismo combines a bullying masculine set of performances with a paternalistic dominance that claims to protect his own people. He is the good father saving Russia by rejecting others whose masculinity he impugns. Putin falls into the category of a “populist authoritarianism.”
While Putin dreams of restoring the old borders of the Soviet era, he embodies a tradition of paranoia, a mistrust of institutions, an inferiority complex that sees himself as both the savior of the nation and a victim of great conspiracies, and a deep sense of resentment and desire for revenge against enemies.
Putin expresses resentment over Russia’s losses. He uses aggressive, even angry language to show his authenticity. He exhibits tough talk to signal the tough stance of an aggrieved, underdog nation toward outside powers. Putin is all about being strong, about winning no matter the cost to the world. There’s no moral imperative.
As Eksi and Wood have pointed out, “No politician has ever been so fantastically vulgar [as Vladimir Putin]. Ordinary people love it because it’s the way they speak themselves.” Putin has said that his defense of the Motherland is “a man’s affair,” and he did not need to engage in public debates on which was better, “Tampax or Snickers.” Proclaiming that “we showed weakness and the weak get beaten,” Putin positioned himself as the strong man who would not show weakness. In response to those foreign powers who want “to tear off a fatty piece” of the nation, Putin insisted that “We won’t allow anybody to interfere in our internal affairs because we have our own will, which has helped us to be victorious at all times.” And Putin has threatened any nation that interferes in his invasion of Ukraine with “consequences you have never experienced in your history.”
Putin had more than twenty years to prepare his most recent speech. After promising to start with just “a few words about the history of this issue,” he gave a lengthy revisionist account in which he claimed that Ukraine was merely a region of the old Russian empire. In a belligerent tone (“the strong man”) he offered an argument on why Ukraine had no right to exist. Putin called Ukraine “historically Russian land” that was stolen from the Russian empire and has since fallen into the hands of neo-Nazis and corrupt “puppets” controlled by the West. He offered the bizarre claim that he was “denazifying Ukraine” by invading it.
Here, his words sound more like QAnon conspiracy talk than world leader rhetoric. According to Timothy Snyder, Yale history professor, there is a great irony that Putin appears to be behaving just as the Nazis did, invading neighbors on the pretext that their borders are irrelevant: “It’s very strange when you’re surrounded by the reality of Ukrainian history, to hear a distant tyrant declare that the thing doesn’t exist — obviously he’s wrong.” As Snyder observes, “This kind of language, that another nation doesn’t exist, is something we need to pay attention to because it usually precedes atrocious actions.”
Putin is the personification of the kind of leader that Americans need to reject. We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by the lies of Putin. In the last two weeks Putin vehemently insisted that he was not invading Ukraine. That lie is now publicly known, and Ukraine’s people hang in the balance.
Putin is forced to perform like a long-running American crime drama: more and more violence must be inserted into the plot, or the audience will turn away. Quoting Eksi and Wood, “Janus-faced masculinity must be performed in larger and more outrageous ways to prove itself.” Putin’s model of rule must seek enemies, internal and external, and he must dominate them all. “When those external enemies are also in the grip of a masculinist set of ideologies used to justify their very existence, the danger of conflict and war increases exponentially.”
Despite all of this, it is striking how many evangelicals seem at home in the apocalyptic scenario now laid out by Putin. They have affixed their future on the “strong man” trope, the toxic male, the bully. In the trinity of Jesus, Trump, and Putin, Jesus is odd man out.
This is dangerous on so many levels.
The Disturbing Fantasies at the Heart of Evangelical Climate Denial
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 professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and 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).
From the early campaigns to overturn the science of evolution, to the contemporary insistence on a literal six-day creation, fundamentalists have desperately attempted to “control the handles of nature.” But what I detect among contemporary fundamentalists is a growing dissatisfaction with their profound inability, in fact, to control nature. In response, fundamentalists have made the turn from attempting to control nature with what they consider the absolute Truth, to attempting to control nature with an onslaught of conspiracy and denial theories.
Very helpful in understanding this bizarre shift is Rupert Read’s penetrating article, “What Is New in Our time, The Truth in ‘Post-Truth'” “What Is New in our Time, The Truth in ‘Post-Truth.’” As Read puts it so clearly:
The most crucial of all attractions of climate-denial is that it involves the denier in a kind of fantasied power over reality itself: namely, over the nature of our planetary system, and thus of life itself. Climate-denial pretends to give the denier a power greater than that of nature, including in nature’s “rebellion” against humanity, what James Lovelock calls Gaia’s incipient and coming “fever” (i.e. global over-heat). Climate-denial seems to give the denier freedom from truth itself, in the case of the most consequential truth at present bearing down upon humanity …. They reject the reality of human-triggered climate-change, in the end, because they are unwilling to be “bound” by anything, not even truth itself.
Note that Read puts his finger on the attempt “to give the denier a power greater than that of nature.” In short, evangelicals have unconsciously abandoned the “absolute truth” for the ultimate freedom of not being bound by anything. And they have no one to blame but themselves. With the advent of evangelical televangelism and the prosperity gospel, along with the rise of the megachurch, evangelicals have spent the last fifty years embracing an attitude of individualism or consumerism concerning truth itself. I think that our current fights over climate-change and COVID can be traced back to the evangelical commitment to an individual and consumer ethos. The truth has been replaced by “feeling good and feeling free.”
There’s a cultural avatar that visualizes this evangelical zeal: Pepe the Frog. Pepe is a human-bodied frog character created by the cartoonist Matt Furie in 2005. Pepe is a sort of sad-clown figure who finds himself in embarrassing situations, like being caught urinating with his trousers around his ankles. Unflappable when confronted, he waves off all embarrassment with a stoner smile and his breezy catchphrase, “Feels good, man.” The evangelical emotion machine churns out “feeling good, acting free.” No group, religious or political puts more stock in the demand for individual freedom than evangelical preachers. Some of these preachers have gone to jail by refusing to stop holding live worship services during the pandemic. Others have bellowed, “How dare you interfere with my right to worship God as I please/ how dare you interfere with my right to warn people of the lies of climate-change/how dare you interfere with our corporations rights to profits and pollution?
These pronouncements of freedom coupled with laments about persecution by the government are being expressed most vehemently by evangelical leaders. Robert Jeffress, Dallas megachurch pastor, has warned his congregation of increased persecution during Biden’s term. Citing the gospel of Matthew’s apocalyptic passages Jeffress warns “savage times will come as people cast off all moral restraint and society begins to disintegrate. Doesn’t that describe the time we’re living in right now when people have cast off the restraints that God has put into place?” He then adds, “You see that all around you – whether it’s regarding gender fluidity, same-sex marriage, unrestricted abortion. All of these things are the result of a society that has thrown off God’s restraints,” he added. He lamented “unspeakable things” being “celebrated” by a secular society and he claims, “If you’ve got the culture celebrating while the Church is condemning, you know what that produces? It produces friction,” he explained. “There is going to be pressure whenever the Church condemns what society is celebrating. And I believe that’s what we’re going to see happen very, very quickly over these next four years.” Jeffress represents a segment of the evangelical community who are boringly hyper-individualistic, attached to a fixed set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion. Truth is thus sacrificed on the altar of freedom.
Above all, evangelicals are still determined to exercise control over nature; to borrow from Read, they “can’t stand to be told that they don’t have as much epistemic right as anyone else on any topic that they like to think they understand or have some ‘rights’ in relation to: ‘Who are you to tell me that I have to defer to some scientist?’” This reaches the heart of the issue, and explains the tragic spectacle of evangelicals becoming COVID conspiratorialists and climate change deniers. There’s a straight line from fundamentalist denial of evolution to evangelical denial of climate change.
Truth has clashed with individual liberty and it is crowding out the value of truth. As Read says, “They end up believing simply what they WANT to believe.” Just as they don’t want to accept the solid science that lies behind evolution, they don’t want to accept the truths of ecology, environmental well-being, climate science, and pandemic science. As a result, they deny them. Hidden in this denial is the old evangelical desire to be in charge, to control even nature herself.
Many evangelicals have embraced climate denial as surely as they have swallowed Trump’s “big lie” about the election. It seems to give them freedom from truth even though climate change has the devastating potential of being an even greater apocalypse than the one evangelicals dream of in their weird interpretations of Revelation. Having to go along with the truth of experts they have long despised feels like too much for them to endure.
With all the evangelical preaching about the end of the world, it is at least somewhat ironic that they are now willing pawns in the coming destruction of our planet, not by God or armies of angels, or nuclear destruction, but by rising tides and severe weather outbreaks and the overheating of the planet that threatens to turn it to a secular version of hell. How evangelicals find this attractive is worthy of future investigation, worthy of a Religious Studies Ph.D. dissertation. That study should start with Read’s original hypothesis and final conclusion: “Climate denial involves the denier in a kind of fantasized power over reality itself in the form of the ultimate reality: the nature of our planetary system, and thus of life itself.”
My personal contribution to this unfolding tragedy is to add my voice in opposition to those who now hold a rank contempt for truth. Instead, I insist that truth doesn’t reside in the narrow enclave of small-minded evangelicals, but in the wide, gloriously equipped universe that now requires our help to be restored to her previous splendor when God, gazing at creation, couldn’t stop saying, “It is good. It is good. It is very good.”
A Flood of Angry (and Grateful) Responses to American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism
by Sean Swain Martin
Sean Swain Martin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. His American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism (October 2021) published by Pickwick Publications explores the centrality of epistemological certainty in the work of Scott Hahn, attributing to Hahn a specific Protestant fundamentalist approach in his very popular Catholic theological contributions. Sean specializes in American Catholicism, Christian Fundamentalism, John Henry Newman, and early modern philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in theology from the University of Dayton as well as an M.A. in philosophy from Georgia State University. When not teaching or endlessly grading, Sean and his wife, Beth, are raising two insanely adorable children, Gwen and Milo, and a wildly destructive dog, Luna, in Onalaska, WI.
Editor’s Note: This post is the second in a two-part series Sean shared about his book, American Pope. You can read part one here.
In the course of trying to make it through yet another season of this seemingly endless pandemic, I binged watched the first season of the new, hit show Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso is the ridiculous story of an American football coach who embarks on a new career coaching an English football team, despite knowing almost literally nothing about the sport of soccer. Lasso, along with his constant coaching companion, Coach Beard, are met in their new roles with ridicule and derision from the rightly outraged Richmond Football Club fans who see Lasso’s hiring as a commitment by the team owner to self-sabotage. While clever in a variety of ways, what is truly compelling about the show is Ted Lasso’s perennial optimism. In the face of a stadium of angry fans chanting their displeasure with him personally, Lasso cheerfully wades through a dismal ninety minutes of football without ever succumbing to the taunts and jeers of the fans. As the season continues, Lasso is challenged, betrayed, heartbroken, and rejected. Yet, through it all, Ted carries with him the constant conviction that he is doing what he truly believes is best.
While compelling, however, this is not what makes Ted Lasso so attractive to me. Ted also carries with him throughout all his adventures (and misadventures) his brokenness, a recognition of his shortcomings, and a commitment to allow himself to be bettered by those around him, friend and foe alike.
In October 2021, I published my first book, American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism with Pickwick Publications, an imprint of Wipf & Stock. While the more academic reviews of the book are still forthcoming, notification of its publication took off on the more Catholic corners of Twitter and I was soon inundated with a host of opinions on the work. Before American Pope even became available for purchase, my tweet announcing the book had been viewed over 120,000 times and interacted with (retweeted, liked, or commented on) more than 35,000 times.
Given Hahn’s popularity, I expected strong reactions to my announcement but as I had never experienced anything like this before, I had no idea what this kind of response might look like. Among the many comments, however, was one that I found quite unsettling. Surprisingly, it was not the private message that I received informing me that the writer was praying for my death so that I may soon experience the judgment of God. It was also not the comment that suggested that I was possessed, nor the one that raised the possibility that I was funded by certain liberal powers to take down faithful Catholics, nor even the host of retweets that assumed that I hated both God and the Catholic Church.
Instead, it was the comment to a supportive retweet, “I hope this author knows what he’s in for. This is going to get bad for him.”
In the weeks that followed and the book began to reach readers, my institution, Viterbo University, received complaints concerning my employment there. Discussions of the book began appearing on Catholic radio stations, blogs, and social media. My book was ridiculed as embarrassing and I dismissed as a jealous, liberal academic who should have never made it through a doctoral program.
Along with all of this, however, I also began receiving emails and private messages from people I had never met thanking me for writing the book.
Such a bizarre experience. On the one hand, my book is riddled with errors, falsehoods, and the most uncharitable of critiques on one of Catholicism’s most faithful scholars. On the other hand, it successfully demonstrates a thoroughgoing fundamentalism in the theology of one of the American Catholic Church’s most prolific writers. I am a failure who should be ashamed of my work, or I have written a good discussion on a topic that needed to be brought to the fore.
So, which is it?
A constant theme in the negative reactions to the book’s publication (not necessarily to the content of the book) is that I must have written the book because I am either jealous of Scott Hahn’s success or because of a hatred for the Church. I am sure that what I say here will not satisfy American Pope’s critics, however, I feel the need to address the question.
There are many reasons that I did not have in mind in publishing my book. First and foremost, I did not write American Pope out of a hatred of Catholicism. It is quite the opposite, in fact. The Catholic Church is my home. It is where I am allowed in my fallenness to be brought together with my family and community to become united with Christ’s goodness in the perfection of the sacraments. It is within the Body of Christ that I have tried, and will continue to try, to offer the little that I can for the good of God’s Church.
The second charge often leveled against me is that I wrote American Pope out of a jealousy for Scott Hahn’s success. All I can offer in response is that I have been fortunate enough to have been given a the most wonderful of spouses, two beautiful children, family and friends, the privilege to teach theology at a good and courageous Catholic University. In short, I have more than I ever even knew to dream was possible. This is all that I could want.
Third, I actually did not write American Pope because I believed that Hahn was wrong in his theological positions. To be clear, I do believe that Hahn is wrong about certain of his beliefs, but the entire community of Catholic theologians is predicated on the notion that we find our theological beliefs in conflict. And those of us who work in the academy work within the context of that conflict in the hopes that in so doing we can together come closer to the truth. American Pope, then, is not about which of Hahn’s beliefs I happen to regard as incorrect.
Rather, I wrote American Pope because when I engage Hahn’s theological contributions I find a conviction in his own thought that allows for no other. In Hahn’s Catholic world, there is but one approach, one set of truths, one way to read the scriptures, and one way to live in the world – Hahn’s. The reason that I decided to write the book is because what I found in the works of Scott Hahn was the same fundamentalist certainty of my past. The church of my childhood was one that divided the world between those who thought like them on the one hand and evil on the other. In that world, there was no place for the radical grace, hospitality, and humility that I saw in the person of Jesus Christ and the Church he established. I wrote American Pope because I saw in Hahn’s claims of exegetical simplicity, epistemological certainty, and moral clarity the same fundamentalist hubris that poisoned my past.
My faith is not certain. I am insufficient. But I am better, made whole, perennially optimistic from within my brokenness because of the goodness of the people I love. And, miraculously, ridiculously, in the story of Catholicism throughout human history I find a place for me. I wrote American Pope because I am a sinner who walks with a community of sinners always in the work of being saved by a grace we neither deserve nor will ever fully understand. I wrote it because the working out of Catholic faith in fear and trembling will always be our present and never a forgotten part of our distant past.
Why I Wrote American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism
by Sean Swain Martin
Sean Swain Martin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. His American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism (October 2021) published by Pickwick Publications explores the centrality of epistemological certainty in the work of Scott Hahn, attributing to Hahn a specific Protestant fundamentalist approach in his very popular Catholic theological contributions. Sean specializes in American Catholicism, Christian Fundamentalism, John Henry Newman, and early modern philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in theology from the University of Dayton as well as an M.A. in philosophy from Georgia State University. When not teaching or endlessly grading, Sean and his wife, Beth, are raising two insanely adorable children, Gwen and Milo, and a wildly destructive dog, Luna, in Onalaska, WI.
In many ways, I was wrestling with this subject of American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism well before I had ever heard of Scott Hahn. I was raised in southern Georgia in a conservative, evangelical household. We were members of the local Catholic Church, St. Anne’s, until when I was around eight years old and my parents came to believe that the Catholic reading of the Bible was insufficient. They had started attending a neighborhood Bible study led by a Southern Baptist family and became convinced that for the good of their family, they needed to find a church that took the Scriptures more seriously than it seemed our priest did. Within a few short years, we had found a small, nondenominational church to call our spiritual home for the remainder of my childhood.
It was not until I reached college that I experienced my crisis of faith. My home church had taught me that the Bible was the perfect Word of God and that in reading it faithfully, the world was completely laid bare. That is, in reading the Scriptures, again, faithfully, I would see clearly right from wrong, friend from enemy, and good from evil. In leaving my hometown and attending school in Atlanta, my world became exponentially larger very, very quickly. The assurance that the Bible had given me that I was, in a sense, finished with the work of understanding the world and had firmly moved into the mode of saving it, entirely vanished.
Such a development was not just a hiccup in my plan to “seek and save” the world of the lost, it was devastating. In losing my confidence in the absolute perfection of the Scriptures, I saw myself as losing my faith. I stopped attending church services with any sort or regularity. I turned to the Scriptures less and less. I distanced myself from other Christians who still demonstrated vibrant lives of faith. Moreover, I was plagued with the fear that I had damned myself, stepped outside of the perfect love of God, and exposed myself to that side of God that looked a lot like vengeful hatred, but I had always been taught could not be.
In desperation, I turned to a professor who had become something of a trusted mentor. “I don’t understand.” “I don’t know how to fix this.” “I don’t know what to do.” And then, finally, “What would you do?” The answer that this kind and patient mentor offered me will stay with me throughout my life.
My professor told me that he understood what I was going through, that there was value in my current suffering, and that the faith out of which I had forced myself may not have been the faith that I thought it was. And then he told me that he would become Catholic.
In my religious world, there was no group more confused and tragic than Catholics. Their stained-glass churches, Latin hymns, and bejeweled chalices might have a certain aesthetic appeal, but it certainly was not Christian. My affection for this professor was great enough, however, that I began occasionally to visit a local parish. Over the next several months, I began to discover a faith that, to my mind, looked more like the God I still believed in. My questions, doubts, confusion, and even anger were welcomed.
Thus, during my senior year of college, I asked to begin, along with my older brother and sister-in-law who had been directed to Catholicism by the same professor (even if for different reasons), the process of returning to the Catholic faith. And at the Easter Vigil in 2005, I was confirmed in the faith. To my delight, in the old, beautiful parish I had joined, I became confident in my faith, again. Not only did I become more confident in my faith, but I enjoyed my life of faith, particularly going to Mass. Here, finally, I had found a faith in which both my belief and unbelief could rest.
In the years that followed, however, I noticed that there were parts of my newly found Catholicism that began to remind me of the faith of my past. There were those (and sometimes myself) who claimed to have a corner on authentic Catholicism. There were those (and again, sometimes myself) who at times imagined their Catholic faith rendered the world utterly knowable, understandable, and straightforward. While I found in the saints numerous moving depictions of long dark nights of the soul, I continued to long for simplicity in the face of so much confusion and certainty in the face of doubt. The more certain and simple the Catholic faith was depicted, however, the less it resembled the complicated and often fractured faith of the ages that I had joined.
Meanwhile, my parents, who had struggled at the time with my conversion, had been given a copy of a book by a Catholic theologian “who actually explained Catholicism in a way that made sense.” His name was Scott Hahn. This book, Rome Sweet Home, was the recounting of Hahn’s own journey to Catholicism, and, as such, my parents found it helpful in understanding their children’s decision to convert, and eventually led to their own return to Catholicism. While I had never read the book, drowning as I was with the demands of philosophy and then theology graduate work, Scott Hahn became a name that I heard more than almost any other in my different parish communities over the years as someone uniquely gifted at explaining the faith in an accessible and compelling way.
I wrote a philosophy graduate thesis in which I employed Gottlob Frege’s philosophy of language as a response to contemporary defenses of G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument. It was and is by no means perfect, but I was happy with it and, most importantly, I successfully defended it. Several years later, I successfully defended a theology graduate thesis that argued that Bl. John Henry Newman relied on David Hume’s theory of knowledge to construct his account of the illative sense. There is a lot I would change about it if I could, but I am still proud of the effort and convinced by the argument.
But when friends and family asked me about them as I was writing them, however, they did their best to act interested, but the conversation would quickly turn to other matters. And when my wife, Beth, and I began dating in 2014, she asked if she could read what I had written; while she made a couple of valiant efforts, she never made it all the way through either. She was interested in my ideas and why I felt like they were important, but it was difficult for her to follow all the academic nuances of my theses, given that she did not have the background that I did. I saw value in the work that I had done, but my ideas were not connecting with the people in my life I cared about most. In talking with my friends and family, the conversation would often turn to American life and faith.
Despite how much I had come to love the many different theologians whose works now line my bookshelves, they were not the voices that my friends and family were hearing in the Catholic world outside the academy. That voice was Scott Hahn’s. My parents had his books, and before I met my wife, she and her parents both had his books. Hahn’s books were passed out for free at church during Christmas and Easter. He held large youth, adult, and priest conventions, sometimes multiple times a year. Hahn offered marriage retreats and adult education seminars. And despite the fact that Scott Hahn was the loudest voice in shaping the minds of the faithful, as a doctoral student in Catholic theology, I had no idea what he taught. I had never read a single one of his books. I could not tell you how he envisioned Catholic life and faithfulness. Moreover, when I turned to the theological world, I found that no one else had engaged with Hahn either.
And so the central concern for me in writing American Pope was that, as arguably the most influential voice in American Catholicism, we should understand the vision that Scott Hahn offers in his works read by millions of Catholics throughout the world. Hahn is shaping the American Catholic Church in a uniquely powerful manner and yet, until now, I have been unable to find a single systematic engagement with his thought and work. Thus, American Pope was an attempt to provide just such an engagement, as well as to bring my own philosophical and theological contributions into the wider world of my loved one’s lives of Catholic faithfulness. What I actually argue in the book is that the Catholic vision that Hahn claims to be providing his audience is, in fact, quite different than the one he actually presents. What he coins as Catholic faithfulness is instead a straight-forward and damning Catholic fundamentalism. As this vision is delivered to millions of the faithful who look to Hahn as a trustworthy guide to an authentic life of Catholic faith, it is crucial that we understand, not just the content of his work, but also the perspective with which he approaches theological truth. And while I believe that American Pope succeeds in its critique of Hahn, what I am more interested in is in the book acting as a reminder to those of us in the academy that our Catholic friends and loved ones desire accessible theological insight. Moreover, at present, this largely resides in the work of Scott Hahn and his compatriots, whose audience is massive and whose commitments are not often the best representative of the Catholic tradition.
The Best of RightingAmerica, 2016-2021
by William Trollinger
The rightingamerica website first appeared in April of 2016. In the 5 ¾ years since then, we have published 465 blog posts (many or most are more accurately described as short essays). Our brilliant website guru, Patrick Thomas, reports that the following ten articles – listed below in reverse order – have been the most popular pieces we have published. As you can see, the scandal that is Cedarville University has been a favorite topic. Also popular are pieces on the moral and intellectual failings of evangelical leaders, which includes, to quote one contributor, the “half-baked” ideas promoted by the folks at Answers in Genesis (AiG). And coming in at #1 is everyone’s favorite, divine genocide!
Happy reading (or, re-reading!)
10. The Christian Right and the Decline of White Evangelicalism, by William Trollinger (July 23, 2021)
“So here’s the conundrum: evangelical political success, on the one hand, and the decline of white evangelicalism, on the other. But . . . it turns out that these two phenomena are related. That is to say, the success of the Christian Right in conflating evangelicalism/Christianity with conservative culture-war politics is a primary factor in the shrinking of white evangelicalism, in particular, and religious disaffiliation in the United States, in general.”
9. A Pastor’s Resignation and a Former Student’s Story: More on the Wreckage Wrought by the Fundamentalist Takeover of Cedarville, by William Trollinger (June 16, 2020)
As a former student observed, “’The same school that had once welcomed diverse viewpoints now wears conservative blinders. The same school that once celebrated nuance treats ambiguity like treason. The same school that once confronted narrow mindedness now nurtures it. Mission accomplished.’”
8. No Safeguard, No Whole: Why I Left Cedarville University, by Julie Moore (May 12, 2020)
“I had to leave the culture engineered on fear, an environment so in love with its own homogenous ideology that anyone who appears even slightly different is likewise assumed to be out of line, liberal (gasp!), and worst of all, unChristian. Indeed, the climate was and is poisonous. Even a CU alumna like me – Christian to my core! – no longer felt welcome there.”
7. Wayne Grudem on Divorce: The Right Conclusion for the Wrong Reason, by Emily Hunter McGowin (December 03, 2019)
“I am glad [Grudem] is no longer teaching that women (or men) in abusive marriages must remain married to their abusers. But the fact that he couldn’t see the problem with his position before now testifies to serious weaknesses in his theological method: a lack of attention to the social and cultural context of biblical teaching on divorce, a lack of engagement with canonical interpretation on the subject, a lack of attention to the detrimental effects of his teaching, and a lack of interaction with women’s experience.”
6. The Scandal Deepens at Cedarville University, by William Trollinger (May 05, 2020)
“The Cedarville Board places Thomas White on administrative leave while the school investigates the hiring of Anthony Moore. In White’s place the Board inserts White’s special advisor Loren Reno . . . into the role of acting president. And given how closely Reno worked with both White and Moore, it is inconceivable that Acting President Reno did not know the full story of Moore’s sexual predation, and was not fully complicit in Moore’s hiring. In this climate, the investigation looks much more like a cover-up.”
5. “Let’s Take the Hill!”: Moving Past Confession and Repentance, The Main Dudes at Willow Creek Rehabilitate Bill Hybels, by Susan Trollinger (June 08, 2021)
“Years of coverup. Years of attacking victims who were telling the truth. Years of enabling Hybel’s abuse. And then a little window in which a new elder board said, yes, it’s true. And we’re sorry. But enough of that! The new leaders have a vision! Enough of shame and lament and pain and confession and repentance. It’s time to get the Willow brand on the move again! All that confession and repentance is not uplifting. It does not fill the seats or the coffers. Instead: it’s time to ‘take the hill!’ Lord have mercy.”
4. Another Ken Ham Attack Goes Awry, or, The Evangelical Con Job that is Creationism, by Rodney Kennedy (December 27, 2021)
“There were no eyewitnesses to creation other than the Holy Trinity, so Mr. Ham is speculating and his speculations are ‘just a theory – a theory with ‘no there there.’ In my view, Ham & company might as well be peddling honey-baked hams for Christmas, because young Earth creationism is a half-baked loaf of bread that refuses to rise to the level of epistemic confidence and truthfulness.”
3. Anti-Vaxxers and Answers in Genesis, by William Trollinger (with Susan Trollinger) (September 15, 2020)
“AiG’s token female, Georgia Purdom . . . attacks BioLogos for engaging in a stealth campaign [to encourage evangelicals to be vaccinated], using the pandemic to get their evolutionary ideas into Christian churches and Christian schools and Christian homeschooling organizations. They ‘are very, very sly,’ they ‘are sheep in wolves’ clothing.’ More than this, the folks at BioLogos are hypocrites: ‘they are concerned about a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all,’ but they say nothing about abortion.”
2. The Cedarville Interpreter, or, Thomas White Can’t Silence (all) the Students, by William Trollinger (March 22, 2021)
“The Cedarville University administration has done everything in its power to eliminate discussion of any ideas mildly at variance with the patriarchal Christian Right ideology propagated by the administration as the Truth. Indoctrination, not education, is Cedarville’s goal. Dissent of any sort is simply not permitted. And yet, it turns out that – even at Cedarville – there are students who are not willing to turn over their brains to the fundamentalist thought police. And this has to be driving President Thomas White crazy.”
1. Noah’s Flood: The Drowning of Billions, by William Trollinger (June 30, 2016)
“For AiG the future Judgment is as important as the past Judgment . . . According to AiG, if the end of history came this year at least 4.8 billion individuals would be cast into a hell where they would consciously endure eternal torment. Here, then, is the message of Ark Encounter. The righteous drowning of millions/billions of human beings prefigures the righteous burning of billions of human beings. Quite the tourist site.”
Ken Ham the Huckster and Inventor of a New Arithmetic, or, The Trials and Travails of Trying to Have a Letter Critical of Ark Encounter Published in the Local Newspaper
by Daniel Phelps
Daniel Phelps is a retired environmental geologist for the commonwealth of Kentucky. He has also taught part-time in Kentucky’s Community College system. His work to expose the pseudoscience behind Ham’s Ark Encounter was featured in the award-winning 2019 documentary, “We Believe in Dinosaurs.” In 2021 the Paleontological Society – the world’s leading scientific organization devoted to studying invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology, micropaleontology, and paleobotany – awarded Phelps the prestigious Strimple Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in paleontology by someone who does not make a full-time living from paleontology. Phelps is founder and president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society.
For some time, I have been aware that The Grant County News (GCN), a paper headquartered in Williamstown, KY, is an ardent supporter of the Ark Encounter. Anything the least bit critical of the Ark Park is unlikely to appear in the paper. When the documentary “We Believe in Dinosaurs,” aired nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens in February, 2020, an article about the show was buried in the later pages of the paper. This was odd, because Williamstown and Grant County were prominently showcased in the documentary. Thus, it was not surprising that I was given a runaround in having a letter to the editor published in the local newspaper.
On December 16, 2021, GCN printed a remarkable front page story: “Changes Ahead for Ark Encounter Parking”. In the story, Ken Ham is reported as saying that Ark attendance has increased by 42%, compared to pre-COVID numbers. I found this incredible claim to be counter to the data that I have been collecting about Ark attendance. Thus, I dashed off a letter to the Editor pointing out the facts.
The next week, I naively thought my letter would be in the latest issue of GCN. Alas, the December 23 issue lacked my letter, but it did have one by Mark Looy, Chief Communications Officer (CCO) of the Ark Encounter (their version of Baghdad Bob). His letter-to-the-editor is not available online (GCN only rarely puts their editorial content online). Looy complained that the original article made them look bad, because it stated the Ark was reneging on allowing locals to park there for free so they could go to the Ark’s buffet restaurant, and that the reporter had referred to AiG as “Fundamentalist.” Apparently, locals will now have to pay $10 to park; Looy, and presumably AiG’s leaders, didn’t like the paper saying they were “reneging.” I’m not sure why AiG objects to being referred to as “fundamentalist.” Perhaps this objection is a branding issue. Notably, Looy didn’t say anything about the reported claim of attendance increasing 42% over pre-COVID numbers being incorrect.
Over the next few weeks, I emailed the editor, reporter, and the general email address of GCN at least twice, asking if my letter would be published. No one replied. On January 19, 2022 I called the paper. I was unable to reach anyone, or even leave a message. I found another contact phone number on the paper’s website, which connected me to another newspaper owned by the same company: The Cynthiana Democrat. The Editor of that paper, Ms. Becky Barnes, indicated that only Bryan Marshall (the GCN Editor) is routinely in the office, and she promised to contact Mr. Marshall with my inquiry.
By January 21, no one had contacted me, so I called the original GCN phone number. I was informed by a young woman at the office that the Editor, Bryan Marshall, had quit some time ago (thus contradicting what Ms. Barnes had told me less than two days earlier). I called Ms. Barnes and she told me that, after discussing the letter with a regional manager, they were not running it because it was a personal attack on the owners of the Ark and did not represent an actual editorial viewpoint. She also emailed me almost immediately afterwards and said, “We will not be publishing the letter. The reporter’s article did not differentiate between season passes, etc. Your letter appears to be more of a personal attack (huckster) than expressing a point of view.” Obviously, this ignored that the paper published factually incorrect material directly from Ken Ham.
In any case, here is the December 17, 2021 “Letter to the Editor” that the GCN would not publish:
Dear Editor,
I read with great interest the December 16, 2021 story “Changes ahead for Ark Encounter parking.” The article quotes Answers in Genesis and Ark Encounter founder Ken Ham as stating that Ark attendance numbers have increased 42% compared to pre-COVID 2019 numbers. This is an amazing claim.
Every month, since Williamstown imposed a Safety Fee of 50 cents per ticket on Ark Encounter in July 2017, I have done an open records request to determine ticket sales numbers (provided below). Attendance in 2019 was 896,465 (based on the “safety fee” totals). In 2021, the projected total ticket sales (because I don’t have the data for December 2021 yet, but based on the average sales for December in 2018 and 2019) will be slightly above 700,000 tickets. Based on elementary school mathematics, that is a decrease of approximately 190,000, or a little over 20% decrease of the 2019 (pre-COVID) attendance. Obviously this significant decrease is NOT an increase of 42% or any other amount.
The Ark Encounter will claim these yearly numbers are higher due to free admission of children and lifetime pass holders. But that is not evidence of a 42% increase. The Grant County News should be more careful in taking for granted the claims of hucksters who have used Williamstown and Grant County while simultaneously dismissing Williamstown as a small community “that has no major hotels or restaurants and whose struggling downtown is not convenient to interstate drivers” (see https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article240622332.html). Do not forget that Grant County and Williamstown gave Answers in Genesis/Ark Encounter 98 acres of land for $1, $175,000 in cash, a huge decrease in property tax rates, and $62 million in unsecured bonds to pay for the Ark. Simultaneously, Mr. Ham’s organizations claimed that 1.4 to 2.4 million people would visit the Ark annually.
Creationists such as Mr. Ham have claimed that they have created an alternative to modern science. Apparently, Mr. Ham has also created an alternative arithmetic!
Sincerely,
Daniel Phelps
Lexington KY
The Lives of Amish Women: An Interview with Karen M. Johnson-Weiner
by Susan L. Trollinger
Karen M. Johnson-Weiner is a Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emerita at SUNY Potsdam in Potsdam, NY, where she taught courses in linguistic anthropology. She received a B.A. in 1975 from Hope College (Holland, MI) and an M.A. from Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI) in 1976. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) in 1984 and has been studying patterns of language use and cultural maintenance in Amish and Mennonite communities for over 30 years.
She is also the author of The Lives of Amish Women published by Johns Hopkins University Press. We here at rightingamerica are very pleased that Karen is willing to be interviewed about this very important book.
- You have been doing this kind of participant observation research of the Amish for more than 35 years now. Can you talk about why you chose this approach and what brought you to the kinds of research questions you have pursued?
A complicated question. I began my research of the Amish, not by exploring Amish life, but by looking at Pennsylvania German. My Ph.D. is in linguistics (my dissertation was neurolinguistic), and I was looking at language structure. Accordingly, I sought out informants and found two: an older woman (widowed, I thought) who taught school and was a midwife and a woman about my own age with 6 children. Both became close friends. Sitting in their homes, asking questions about language soon became sitting in their homes and exploring their culture. I was so naïve in the beginning that I didn’t know the difference between the first woman’s Swiss Amish community and the second one’s Swartzentruber settlement. (“How can you tell the difference,” I asked, oblivious to the obvious differences in dress.) In time, I stopped looking at the language itself and began asking why they were still speaking it in the first place. So began my interest in Old Order schools, which took me to lots of different kinds of Amish communities, and things evolved from there.
Participant observation was the approach that enabled me to explore the questions I had in the context of the culture. As I said above, my training was in linguistics, specifically neurolinguistics. When I realized where my interests were heading, I went back to McGill and began taking graduate courses in Anthropology and talking to anthropologists, which taught me much about the approach that it seemed I’d adopted. But my earlier training led me to do archival work and interviewing as well. Still, sitting in someone’s kitchen, helping them to peel peaches or holding one baby while another gets diapered is a great way to find out so much more than an article can tell you.
- In your book, you draw on countless encounters and so many relationships with Amish individuals from a wide variety of affiliations. That’s really incredible. Can you talk about how you built those relationships and earned the trust of the folks you have spent time with and talked with for purposes of your research?
Time. I mentioned the two women above, who welcomed me into their homes. The first, Sue, supported herself as a teacher and hers was the first school I visited. With her I was able to visit schools in Michigan and Indiana, and through her I was able to sit in peoples’ homes and get to know them. The second woman, Fannie, introduced me to her siblings (all 10), who introduced me to others. I got to know school teachers and their families by asking if I could visit schools the children I knew were attending. It was a snowballing of connections that I tried to maintain as long as possible by writing letters. Building this kind of research base is building friendships. And the experiences are well worth it! Driving 4 Old Order Amish teachers around to visit schools in Ohio was eye-opening in so many ways!
- You are very familiar with a wide range of Amish affiliations. A few years ago, when I was taking a class to the Holmes and Wayne counties settlement, I heard of what was then a new affiliation—the New New Order. Are you familiar with that affiliation? If so, what is distinctive about them? And how would you characterize the lives of women among that affiliation compared to, say, the New Order?
I haven’t gotten to know any New Order women [or New New Order women], so what I know of their lives I’ve learned largely from talking to their Old Order friends and relatives and reading their publications. My suspicion is that their lives are more individual, based on scriptural authority more than church-community practice.
- Can you talk about the whole rather elaborate business of secrets surrounding courtship practices among the Amish? What are the origins of that and what purpose do you think that practice of secrets serves or, put another way, why is it so important (there seems to be a lot of investment in it among young Amish adults)?
That depends on the church-community. Young Swartzentrubers are highly secretive about whom they’re dating, and an unmarried Swartzentruber couple wouldn’t go out in public together except as part of a group. Among Swartzentrubers, speculation and guessing about who will be published and when is practically a pastime of married women. Interestingly, as an outsider with access to many homes, I was often asked questions that other Amish women wouldn’t be asked. (“Did so-and-so say anything? Are they painting their house?”) Among other groups of Amish, dating couples are quite public, though when they expect to be “published” (have their engagement announced) may be kept a secret. In other communities (e.g. Lancaster County), couples are published long before the wedding.
There’s no religious reason for any of this. I think Amish young folk find it fun to keep people guessing.
- You write about the very different approaches that Amish mothers take with their daughters regarding sex and reproduction. Some are quite candid with their daughters and others leave them entirely in the dark. To what do you attribute that difference? And what would you say is the history and motivation behind the latter approach?
Since one can find this variation even in the same or very similar church-communities, I hesitate to put it down to any religious cause. It’s not “Amish” as much as it is a tradition handed down within families. It’s probably much like it was in mainstream society before television rendered the mysterious public. Sex education has become a sign of the worldliness of public schools with everyone talking about things that should be private. That likely reinforces the notion that sex and reproduction are something private to be kept between married couples and those about to be married.
- Have you detected any differences between the way Amish men and Amish women have responded to COVID? Do women have any special responsibilities in the pandemic?
I’m not traveling very much myself anymore, so my response is largely shaped by the Swartzentruber women I’m still in close contact with. Basically, COVID has released them to stay home and send their husbands to do any chores outside the church-community. Women (and their husbands) are still carrying on all usual interactions within the church-community, and women will go out and shop when they need/want to. Explaining why they send their husbands to the store or elsewhere, women say they don’t like the masks, but they have no hesitancy to use them if they need to. For example, the closing of a local fabric store saw many women out and masked to take advantage of sales. Otherwise, women seem to have decided to just stay put, letting men deal with the public. Where people are required by law to mask up, they’re wearing masks.
- I am curious about your thoughts on the proliferation of Amish affiliations over the last few decades. What do you attribute that to? Are we seeing something akin to the proliferation among Protestants following the Reformation?
I think it has a lot to do with economic change within communities, the founding of new settlements, and the freedom afforded by Wisconsin v. Yoder to establish their own schools. To answer your second question, I think yes, in a way. Pre-Wisconsin v. Yoder (a very different economic time), diverse Amish children went to school together and identified as Amish v. their English counterparts. As the Amish started their own schools, particularly in large settlements, diverse children still went to school together, but schools now had to play to the dominance of one kind of Amish and others were motivated to start their own schools. In Holmes County, for example, a diverse group had attended a one-room school. When that school burned down, the majority approved and built a new school house that a minority, a conservative Swartzentruber group, thought “too worldly”. They, too, built a school house, about 100 yards away from the other school house, that recognized conservative Swartzentruber ideals, not just in construction but also in curriculum. Wisconsin v. Yoder enabled this diversity.
- Finally, I understand that you are recently retired. Will your retirement include continued research on the Amish? If so, what questions are you hoping to pursue? If not, what are you looking forward to doing instead?
I maintained an active research life for about 6 years after retirement. In fact, The Lives of Amish Women is partly a product of that period when I actually had time to read, write, and revise. But now I am retired, and I have given up active research on the Amish.
That said, I still visit Amish friends regularly and just went to the wedding of the first granddaughter of my friend, Fannie. I enjoy visiting my Amish friends and hope I can continue to do so for many years to come.
Occasionally, I regret that I have given up the scholarly life, but not so much that I would wish to keep on with it. Still, one never knows. I’ve said “I’m done” before, and then things came up (e.g. All About The Amish).
I’m currently putting together what I hope will be my last presentation, a paper for the June conference at the Young Center that will focus on letter-writing as a research tool. I plan to donate all of my correspondence with Amish friends and others to the Young Center and hope that it will prove as useful to other researchers as it has to me.
Now, were I to go on with research, I would write a book about the Swartzentruber Amish and all the different versions of Swartzentruber. One can find Swartzentrubers from Minnesota to Maine, from Kentucky to New York and Canada. There have been at least five schisms since I met my first Swartzentruber friend, Fannie, back in 1984. The Swartzentrubers remain committed to farming, their homes show the least modernization, and they are the most likely to end up in court for zoning law violations. When I visit higher Amish groups, I get asked about them. Folks in Lancaster can’t quite figure them out. (I have an Old Order Mennonite friend whose address I gave to a couple of Swartzentruber Amish men headed for the New Holland sales. The Swartzentrubers ended up staying with the Shirks, and I had a lot of making up to do for it!) I no longer have the stamina for the extensive traveling and fieldwork a book about the Swartzentrubers would involve, but I hope very much that someone will focus their research on the Swartzentruber Amish and would offer any help I could.
On Martin Luther King Day, A Patriot’s Lament: Donald Trump and the Insurrections to Come
By Raymond Screws
Raymond D. Screws earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska in 2003. He also has an MA from Pittsburg State University and a B.A. from School (now College) of the Ozarks, where his advisor was William Trollinger. Throughout his career, he has been a history professor, museum director, and humanities professional. He has published articles on immigration and ethnicity as well as a chapter in a book on World War I and Arkansas. He has also co-written a chapter on leadership in America. Dr. Screws lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, and is currently the director of a military museum.
When President Trump refused to concede the 2020 presidential election to the winner, Democrat Joe Biden, and then perpetuated the Big Lie, he ripped the final threads of the cloth that has held the country so tenuously together. In doing so, Trump produced the largest divide the United State has witnessed since the Civil War (and to some degree has never recovered). It can be said that Trump’s divide is related to the divide caused by slavery, and, as with the Civil War, it will take decades or even a century for America to recover.
Will true Republicans ever wake up and realize that Trump is not a true conservative? While I do not believe that most Republicans are racists, the Trump camp sure makes it look as if they are. More than this, many Republican/Conservative pundits have clearly demonstrated their racism, have clearly demonstrated their hatred of America. What they want and love is their fictional image of America. They either don’t understand, don’t believe, or purposely distort the basis of the founding of this country, in particular the racist history of European America.
I love this country, and because I understand our historical and contemporary issues, because I refuse to hide behind the Stars and Stripes (or, better yet, the Confederate flag), I find that I am much more of a patriot than many conservatives. I stand for the National Anthem, respect our American flag, and honor our men and women in the Armed Forces, especially those who have served in times of war and sacrificed their health our lives. That said, I absolutely refuse to sweep our history under the rug – under our sacred flag – to hide the truth of our history.
Unquestionably, this country has had this cultural, political, and racial divide for a long time, but Trump took advantage of this division for his own personal and political and financial gain. Trump does not give a damn about the Republican Party other than using it as a mechanism to advance his agenda. Then he’ll chew it up and spit it out, just like he has done with the few prominent Republicans who have attempted to take the Party back from him.
I am not a Republican, but I would like to see the Party return to its roots. Most Republicans, it seems, do not comprehend or even know how and why the Party was founded more than 160 years ago. I can say this with certainty – my grandfather, born and raised in Georgia as a Primitive Baptist, would be embarrassed to be from the same state as Marjorie Taylor Greene!
But there it is: Greene and her fellow like-minded racist Trumpers have chewed up the threads holding this country together, disposing of them into their imagined all-white American sewer.
America needs a two-party system in which the sides still disagree, but operate in undivided chambers of ideas and cooperation to further the values of the United States and its future. The Democratic Party is somewhat fractured, but it would appear that most Democrats continue to hold to particular American values. Then there is the other side. Did Trump simply give millions of conservatives permission to openly display their racist filth? Just look at Greene’s recent rant about Kwanzaa. It says it all about the racist mindset permeating the Republican Party.
When Trump commandeered the Republican Party for his own gain, the Party lost what remained of its historical identity. And it might never get it back. In the end, America is sacrificed. Another January 6-like insurrection seems inevitable.
The Same Old Evangelical Enemies
by Rodney Kennedy
Editor’s Note: this piece appeared earlier this week at Word&Way. We are happy to share it here for our readers!
Historians have long grappled with the dynamics of evangelical faith. For example, why does resentment seem more important than repentance? Why are evangelicals so angry? Anti-intellectualism, in-and-out group dynamics (being left out of the majority culture and church), a sense of being anointed by God with the truth, and a sense of being constantly assailed by the Devil have always been part of the evangelical gumbo.
The overall umbrella for these characteristics is populism. Armed with the Bible and common sense, evangelical populists rally people to a cause rooted in the creation of enemies to demonize. A people who are, as Christians, supposed to be known by their love and hospitality, are instead known by their age-old resentments. Evangelicals have produced their own multi-generation version of the Hatfields and McCoys.
Evangelicals are haunted by Charles Darwin, Clarence Darrow, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. The essence of faith is attacking the enemy with victimization, resentment, and revenge the required liturgies. Creating enemies – real or imagined – and maintaining a deep sense of resentment matters more than evangelism. Instead of loving enemies, there’s resenting them. Instead of praying for enemies, there’s attacking them. Evangelicals, in a zeal that challenges the Pharisees, scour the nation for a single enemy and then make that enemy the child of the devil or the devil himself.
Enemies serve as scapegoats for societal ills. Like most wanted posters in U. S. Post Office lobbies, the enemies of evangelicals are pictured always – visible, personal, with names and faces. At the Creation Museum, for example, enemies are placarded, named, and shamed, especially Darwin. In a section of the museum below the heading, “Scripture Abandoned,” C. I. Scofield and the Scofield Reference Bible appear. William V. and Susan Trollinger say, “This mural signals a remarkable and dramatic fall from grace for C. I. Scofield.” Even fellow Christians end up named, shamed, and turned into enemies.
The Original Enemies
Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859. His key concept, evolution, would become the focus of a prolonged contest among American Christians. Darwin became the favorite demon of fundamentalist preachers. Growing up in a rural area listening to uneducated preachers thunder forth the condemnations of God, you would think that Darwin was a devil living in the woods behind your house.
Clarence Darrow defended Scopes in the famous Dayton, Tennessee trial known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. He was designated enemy number one by fundamentalists after he made William Jennings Bryan look like a misguided juvenile. Darwin and Darrow filled many sermons across the nation in the years following the trial.
In a 1922 sermon, J. Frank Norris brought several monkeys into the pulpit at FBC Fort Worth and pretended to carry on a conversation with them. The showmanship of Norris rivaled that of P. T. Barnum. His circus act with the monkeys left the crowd laughing out loud as Norris worked his rhetorical brilliance into a full-orbed denunciation of evolution.
In 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” This marked the beginning of the end for the fundamentalists in the mainline churches. The modernists soon controlled the churches, the schools, the denominational structures, and the mission bodies. The fundamentalists retreated into a simmering resentment that resulted in the building of an alternate world filled with their own churches, schools, and institutions. They would not come back in force until the advent of the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell, Sr.
A New Charles Darwin: Anthony Fauci
There’s a modern-day Charles Darwin in the minds of evangelicals: Dr. Anthony Fauci. Right-wing commentator Dave Daubenmire claims Fauci is an “emissary of the devil.” “Friends, as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be at the coming of the Son of Man,” Daubenmire insisted, implying that the vaccine shot was screwing up our DNA just like what happened before Noah when there were giants in the land. He continued, “Dr. Fauci is an emissary of the devil, folks… He is an emissary of Beelzebub himself, sent to deceive and destroy the seed of Christ!”
In a recent Face the Nation interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he represents science. The anger from conservatives was predictable and explosive. Senator Ted Cruz claimed Fauci was “the most dangerous bureaucrat in the history of the country.” Senator Rand Paul was incensed that Fauci claimed to represent science. “The absolute hubris of someone claiming THEY represent science,” Paul said. “It’s astounding and alarming that a bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity.” Senator Tom Cotton repeated the same critical refrain that Fauci was nothing but a bureaucrat.
Not to be topped by his fellow hyperbolic fellows, Tucker Carlson compared Fauci to Benito Mussolini. “Tony Fauci has morphed into an even shorter version of Benito Mussolini,” Carlson intoned breathlessly. Lara Logan, host of a Fox News’ streaming platform went completely nuclear by insisting that Fauci was like Josef Mengele, Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. Logan said, “What you see on Dr. Fauci, this is what people say to me, that he represents Josef Mengele. Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps.”
When conservatives see a scientist, they see the ghost of Charles Darwin. They are crying for Fauci to retire or die.
A New Clarence Darrow: The ACLU and Liberal Judges
No one lawyer has attracted as much evangelical spite as Clarence Darrow, but an entire spectrum of liberal lawyers and judges are under constant attack. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell, Sr. and Pat Robertson did a tag team wrestling match move on a plethora of alleged groups that caused 9/11: “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’” To which Mr. Robertson said: “I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”
Robert Jeffress, complaining about mistreatment, says, “I have been threatened with physical violence and with the loss of our church’s tax-exempt status by the ACLU.” The ACLU haunts Jeffress with a paranoia that they are out to get him and to destroy his church.
Evangelicals have followed former President Trump in attacking the “liberal judges.” When a judge of Hispanic descent was put in charge of the Trump University fraud case, Trump said the judge could not be objective because he was “Mexican.” The judge was born in Indiana. Trump went on to claim that a Muslim judge could not be objective if ruling on his case. The lawyers, the judges, and the liberal court system are the cumulative representative of the ghost of Clarence Darrow. Like Darrow, these lawyers and judges are diabolical and they stand in the way of evangelical victories, at least in the eyes of evangelicals.
A New Harry Emerson Fosdick: Liberal Preachers
No one preacher in our day has the fame and reputation of Harry Emerson Fosdick. Perhaps two preachers who also served Riverside Church as senior pastor are worthy of mention: William Sloane Coffin, Jr. and James Forbes. Perhaps the fiery Jeremiah Wright should receive honorable mention, but it would be hard to identify one preacher whose fame and influence approaches that of Fosdick. Instead, there are many powerful progressive voices and all of them are lumped together by the evangelicals as enemies of God. After almost 100 years, the resentment lingers in the air for evangelicals.
For example, when the Democratic Party hired Rev. Derrick Harkins, a senior vice president at New York’s Union Seminary, as its new religious outreach director, the evangelicals attacked him as if he was Fosdick come back to life. Robert Jeffress claimed Harkins was a “Trump-hating pastor” and that Union Seminary was a “liberal seminary that is filled with liberal professors who couldn’t find God if their life depended on it.” Jeffress represents the blanket attack that evangelicals make on all preachers who are not in lockstep with evangelical notions of truth.
Concluding Thoughts
After a century of resentment, evangelicals continue to draw from the same tired old playbook. The faces and the names change but the primal enemies are the same: Darwin, Darrow, and Fosdick. The same anti-science views inhibit evangelicals from taking responsibility for our planet and its flourishing. Opposing evolution has morphed into opposing COVID-19 vaccinations and any attempt to ward off climate change.
A lawyer, a preacher, and a scientist created a stir that has not subsided to this day. Whenever there’s an evangelical/conservative flare-up against science or liberal preachers and lawyers, the ghosts of Darwin, Darrow, and Fosdick are still haunting evangelical dreams.
A House Divided: Evangelicals, An Insurrection, and Donald Trump
by Terry Defoe
Pastor Terry Defoe is an emeritus member of the clergy who served congregations in Western Canada from 1982 to 2016, and who ministered to students on the campuses of the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Evolving Certainties: Resolving Conflict at the Intersection of Faith and Science, a book which, among other things, chronicles his transition from Young Earth Creationism to evolutionary creation. Evolving Certainties is endorsed by scientists in biology, geology and physics, with a foreword written by Darrel Falk, former president of BioLogos, an organization that has as its goal the facilitating of respectful discussion of science / faith issues. Defoe has been educated at: Simon Fraser University (BA Soc); Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (M.Div.); and, Open Learning University, Burnaby, British Columbia (BA Psyc).
January 6th 2021. Images from that day have been incorporated into the collective consciousness of the American people, and have caught the attention of many others around the world as well. Hardly a day goes by, even now, without a reminder, often in the form of a graphic video, of the crowds, the banners, the red MAGA caps: all part of an assault on US democracy. As an evangelical pastor for almost 40 years, it was the banners with a religious theme that caught my eye, especially banners displaying the name of Jesus.
After security was breached, and as individuals sifted through private documents, a group assembled near the speaker’s chair. One of them prayed:
Thank you Heavenly Father for gracing us with this opportunity to stand up for our God-given unalienable rights. Thank you Heavenly Father for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into the building, to allow us to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation not theirs, that we will not allow the America — the American way, of the United States of America — to go down.
Thank you divine, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ… Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you and we thank you, in Christ’s holy name we pray! Amen!
The Great Leader
Evangelicalism is a big tent. Under that one roof is everything from progressives to strict fundamentalists. But in our day, the focus has turned to the political radicalization of many in the movement. How could it be that people who want to be known as serious Christians – people advocating a strict biblical morality – would decide to associate with an individual – Donald Trump – who, how should I say this, never walked that road?
For years, evangelicals had been hoping for a leader who would champion their cause. They didn’t particularly like the rhetoric or bravado of the GOP candidate for president in 2016. They weren’t thrilled with his morality or his abrasiveness. But they were willing to overlook all that when he came bearing gifts and making promises – the most significant of which was overturning Roe v. Wade. He was a self-advertised straight shooter who openly boasted about his political incorrectness. He was suspicious of immigrants, a strong supporter of the NRA, an advocate of no-nonsense law and order. He would stand up to the so-called experts who were making a lot of noise about climate change. And, perhaps most importantly, he would appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court. In return for prioritizing their concerns, the majority of US evangelicals supported Donald Trump during his presidency, and continue that support even now. Nearly a year after he reluctantly left office, claiming all the while that his re-election had been stolen away from him by those treacherous Democrats, Trump’s shadow continues to loom large over evangelicalism and, by extension, over the GOP as well.
Historical Background
As Peter Enns discusses in The Sin of Certainty, US evangelicalism has an interesting history which provides a framework that helps make sense of recent events. In the mid-19th century, evangelicalism was buffeted by four separate storms which arrived in quick succession.
Dark clouds appeared in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This theory challenged the traditional interpretation of the Bible’s creation accounts. It proposed that creation took place, not in six literal 24-hour days, but over millions – perhaps billions – of years. It claimed that all of this could have taken place without divine intervention. Darwin’s theory knocked humanity off the pedestal of special creation and instead made the point that humanity is just another species that arrived on the scene by the process of natural selection.
A second major challenge to evangelicalism, which also occurred in the mid-19th century, was the higher critical method of biblical interpretation. Originating in Germany, theologians began to challenge basic beliefs like the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the veracity of the Bible’s creation story, as well as its depiction of other miraculous events.
A third challenge to evangelical orthodoxy came from in-depth study of Israel’s neighbors in the ancient near east. Scholars discovered striking parallels between the Bible’s creation accounts and those of Israel’s ancient near eastern neighbors. Those accounts were much older, implying that Israel had borrowed from them rather than the other way around.
A fourth serious problem for antebellum evangelicals was the institution of slavery, and the Bible’s confusing, even contradictory, commentary and advice regarding the practice of slavery in the ancient world.
Faced with these multiple serious challenges, conservative evangelicalism dug in. Given this background, it’s not difficult to see why the contemporary secularization of the wider society has been a grave concern. In response, and to a large degree, evangelicalism has withdrawn into a hermetically sealed, ideologically safe, subculture.
The Perpetually Aggrieved and Persecuted
Trump’s evangelical supporters have been described as perpetually aggrieved. They lament a perceived breakdown of morality, and a younger generation that has increasingly abandoned the church. More than this, they consider themselves persecuted by a liberal elite who have co-opted the media and the secular educational system. Evangelicals understand themselves as under siege.
This defensive posture has manifested itself, according to many observers, in a pervasive anti-intellectualism. In particular, the present pandemic has clearly revealed a deep distrust of science. That distrust is nothing new. For many years evangelicals have been taught that the theory of evolution is essentially atheistic, and aims to destroy traditional Christian faith. Many evangelicals believe that science is a Trojan horse, which, once it gets into the churches, destroys them from within, eroding biblical authority. This caricature of science is, in and of itself, a classic conspiracy theory which, in this time of the pandemic, manifests itself as criticism of medical experts, the rejection of masks, social distancing, and life-saving vaccines.
And then there’s the media. Following Trump’s lead, many evangelicals understand mainstream journalists – who have been belittled, threatened, and even spied upon – as purveying “fake news.” If a story originates with the New York Times, MSNBC, or CNN, it is likely to be ignored. Their world is informed by Fox News or other right wing media. Living in a media ghetto means that their world becomes smaller and smaller – more and more radical – as they are determined to believe what they want to believe, and are self-righteously convinced that they alone are correct.
The internet has done for the modern era what Gutenberg’s printing press did in the Middle Ages. It added a much more effective communication tool to those that previously existed. For its part, the internet has made the world’s largest library of information available to a good portion of the global population. Unfortunately, it has also been a godsend to purveyors of misinformation and outright propaganda. The internet has the ability to disseminate information globally at minimal cost. The veracity of that information is another matter, however.
A highly influential component of the internet is social media – particularly Facebook. When it comes to social media, individual consumers are the product and their information is the currency. Social media profile likes and dislikes and point individuals in the direction of their ideological comfort zone. It provides a platform from which unscrupulous individuals or actors take advantage of by stoking fears, playing on emotions, and caricaturing opponents. Social media also provides fertile soil for a multitude of conspiracy theories, characterized by Jonathan Gottschall as a malicious form of storytelling.
The Road Ahead
Suffice it to say that democracy is experiencing an unprecedented challenge. The threat to democracy increased by several orders of magnitude with the events of January 6, 2021. A major crisis was averted. Or was it just forestalled?
Something critically important is missing in US politics and, by extension, US society in general. That missing element is civility. It has been smothered – deprived of oxygen – by an intolerant tribalism. The other person – the other group – the other political party – is not just different. It’s dangerous and deceptive. More and more, it’s us versus them, patriot versus traitor, friend versus foe. Everything is black and white, no nuance, no ambiguity. Respectful conversation is drowned out by verbal attacks and threats, thoughtless criticism, shaming, and downright nastiness. If it pleases the base it’s worth giving it a try. Political discourse has been needlessly cheapened. Loyalty to country has been replaced by loyalty to political party. The entire system has become dysfunctional, often paralyzed by rancor, locking horns over minor issues. It seems that, for many, truth has become whatever supports the party line. All of this is, as Jason Stanley observes, how fascism works.
What a healthy democracy needs most is an informed electorate. It needs independent, clear thinking, not credulity. Democracy works best in the context of civility and respectful discussion, when politicians value irenics over polemics, dialog over debate. Democracy works best when the focus is on superordinate goals – shared goals that can only be accomplished when groups work together. An informed electorate thinks critically – assesses evidence rationally – and recognizes efforts at manipulation. Accountability is important. Words do matter. Ideas do indeed have consequences.
The U.S. Constitution wisely mandates the separation of church and state. Unlike the Second Amendment, which most evangelicals quote often in the context of firearms, that required separation has been set aside by Donald Trump’s evangelical base. But democracy is a good idea. Theocracy is not. The majority of Americans do not want a situation in which a minority group – or an authoritarian leader for that matter – steer the ship of state, stifle dissent, and call the shots. It’s time for evangelicals to stop looking in the rearview mirror and focus on the road ahead. If there ever was a time for cooler heads to prevail, that time would be now. That way, the crisis averted will not turn out to be simply a temporary reprieve.
