Another Ken Ham Attack Goes Awry, or, The Evangelical Con Job that is Creationism
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).
A favorite tactic of demagogues, political and religious, is reification. These dishonest rhetoricians objectify actual people and treat them as objects. As far back as Genesis, not naming a person was a way of claiming power over that person. No name has always meant powerlessness and voicelessness.
Ken Ham does exactly that in attacking me for this article. By refusing to even use my name, he shows his total lack of respect. Refusing to be erased, I want to say here that my name is Rodney Kennedy. I am a Baptist pastor and professor of homiletics. .
First of all, Mr. Ham makes the false assertion that I “can’t stand” that his organization exists. This is an absurd emotional argument. I am not bothered by the existence of Answers in Genesis or the Creation Museum. I do believe, however, that Ham & Company genuflects to a naïve misreading of the Scripture (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age), but I’m not emotionally invested in anything like the destruction of either the Creation Museum or Ark Encounter.
In the second place, I am not intolerant. I disagree with young-Earth creationists, but disagreement is not intolerance. I am convinced that a literal interpretation of the stories of creation in Genesis is unbiblical, unchristian, and dangerous, but that’s not intolerance. If Mr. Ham didn’t have such a thin skin, he could make his arguments without resorting to a blanket condemnation of “progressives.” Instead of being intolerant, I am passionate about offering readings that differ from those of young-Earth creationists. I have nothing against Ken Ham personally.
Look how quickly he insists that I want to control everyone and force everyone to accept my views. That sounds suspiciously like fundamentalism to me. Harry Emerson Fosdick asked a hundred years ago:
There is nothing new about the situation. It has happened again and again in history, as, for example, when the stationary earth suddenly began to move, and the universe that had been centered in this planet was centered in the sun around which the planets whirled. Whenever such a situation has arisen, there has been only one way out: the new knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination. Now the people in this generation who are trying to do this are the liberals, and the Fundamentalists are out on a campaign to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship. Shall they be allowed to succeed?
I am invested in not allowing the world view of Ham & company to be the dominant truth claim. Ham’s insistence that the world will never be right until the scientific community returns to a naïve age of supernaturalism simply suggests a fierce arrogance embedded in his certainty. Unfortunately, for Mr. Ham, “the cat is out of the bag,” and there’s no putting it back.
I practice the art of persuasion. I am not interested in controlling or forcing. Coercion is not my game. Persuasion is my purpose, and I am not responsible for how my readers respond to my argumentative claims. I am glad that Mr. Ham is reading my articles. Perhaps he can be persuaded to drop his absurd charges.
At no point have I said that Mr. Ham and his followers can’t think for themselves. He sits at the head of a multi-million dollar empire that speaks, prints, televises, and blogs across the world every thought that enters their minds. I have never said they didn’t think. As Raney says in the novel by the same name, “everybody thinks.”
Instead, I claim that Ham & company are in an epistemic crisis because they can’t accept that others have read the same Bible and reached different conclusions.
More broadly, evangelicals 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: “Who are you to tell me that I have to defer to some scientist?” Borrowing from the writing of philosopher Rupert Read, this then reaches the nub of the issue, and explains the truly-tragic spectacle of someone like Ken Ham – a garden-variety theologian, a non-scientist, thinking entrepreneur – who made his name and fortune as a hardline advocate of young-Earth creationism. He seems not to notice that he’s more of a libertarian than an evangelical, insofar as libertarianism is consumeristic, individualistic, and relativistic/subjectivistic.
No one has an automatic right to their own opinion. You have to earn that right, through knowledge or evidence or good reasoning or the like. I argue that Ham has not earned his right through scientific knowledge, evidence, or good reasoning. Instead, he has earned his fortune through sleight of hand that would impress Barnum and Bailey. His libertarianism has careened – crashed – right into and up against actual science, as he is driven to deny the most crucial truth about science today: “Evolution has never been on stronger scientific ground than it is today” (Kenneth Miller). Ham’s subjectivising of everything important leads him finally to destroy his love for truth itself.
Ham is truly a tragic spectacle. Or, perhaps we should say, farcical.
The remarkable irony here is that young-Earth creationism – allegedly congenitally against “liberals,” “biblical criticism,” and “political correctness,” allegedly warring against the forces of unreason – has itself become the most ‘Post-Modern’ of doctrines. A new, extreme form of individualized relativism, young-Earth creationism is one more con job among a plethora of prosperity gospel preachers, rapture believers, America-was-born-Christian adherents, and all those privileged white people who deny racism and even blame racism on – wait for it – evolution.
“Taking God at his Word” may be the most subjective statement in Ham’s criticism. In what way can this be reality when millions of other believers make the same truth claim but come to different conclusions? There’s no ambiguity in Ham. He’s certain that he and his followers take God at his word. He never says, “I believe that the Word of God teaches this or that.” He insists that the Word of God is the same as the Word of Ham in spite of his denials.
I do agree with Ham that we should all examine the Scriptures daily to see what is true. There is a sense of shock when someone accuses me of not taking Scripture seriously. I believe the Scripture truthfully tells the story of God’s action of creating, judging, and saving the world. Texts of Scripture do not have a single, literal meaning, but have complex, diverse possible readings across the centuries. Scripture calls us to ongoing discernment, to fresh re-readings of the text in the light of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in the world.
Each Sunday morning, before the Scripture lessons of the week are read and the Word is proclaimed, I lead my congregation in the Prayer for Illumination:
This is the Church’s Bible. The Bible tells the truth about God. The four Gospels tell the truth about Jesus. We read the Bible together as God’s people to hear God’s Word to us. We will engage in the faithful interpretation of the Bible under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We gladly hear the Word with open minds and full hearts. Together we will hear and do the Word from God as a faithful and obedient people. Amen.
Ken Ham mistakenly claims that, if I would only come to my senses and read the Bible as he reads it, I will conclude that he is right and that God did create the world in six literal days.
I hate to disappoint, but I am not persuaded by his creationism – it’s just another man-made “ism” and perhaps the worst of all the “-isms.”
Maybe the questions of God in Job need to be answered by Ham and Company, since all the answers are not in Genesis.:
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
There were no eye-witnesses 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.
A Message of Hope in a Dark Time
by William Trollinger
In this time of wretched culture war – with its hateful rhetoric and threats of violence fueled by an increasingly unhinged Christian Right – it really is quite striking to encounter someone who relentlessly and joyfully shares a message of hope and love, a message that insists it is possible (and necessary) to have meaningful dialogue with the “other,” even if that “other” resides on the opposite side of the cultural divide.
I have written about Harold Heie before. My first dean at Messiah College – he and I were both hired in 1988 – Heie was a model of collegiality who refused to impose a top-down “command and control” structure, and who trusted faculty to follow their pedagogical instincts. Not surprisingly, he was beloved by a great many faculty members. But also not surprisingly, given that Messiah is an evangelical school, in the process of treating faculty members as colleagues Heie ran afoul of the president’s determination that faculty hew to a conservative line (thus reassuring the college’s constituency that Messiah was an ideologically and theologically “safe” school). So in the summer of 1993 he was summarily fired, to the great chagrin of many of us . . . and a year of faculty resistance did not bring Heie back as dean.
One could imagine a lesser and less-hopeful person taking from this experience the message that collegiality and cooperation are simply not possible in contemporary evangelicalism. But that’s not Harold Heie. As I wrote last year:
After his firing he moved on to a role as Founding Director of the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College. And since his “retirement” in 2003, Harold has been busy in the project of “Respectful Conversations,” in which he has sought – working against the Christian Right takeover of white evangelicalism – real conversations among evangelicals on political discourse, human sexuality, and the like. And in the past year he has published Reforming American Politics: A Christian Perspective on Moving Past Conflict to Conversation.
And now, from Cascade Books, comes Heie’s newest publication: Let’s Talk: Bridging Divisive Lines through Inclusive and Respectful Conversations, a book warmly blurbed by Randall Balmer, Brian McLaren, and Mark Noll. This is how Harold describes the book:
The premise that is foundational for my book is that to listen carefully to those who disagree with you and to then talk respectfully about your disagreements is a deep expression of the love of others to which Jesus calls all those who claim to be his followers.
Aspiring to model this premise is starkly counter-cultural in America today because of the tribalistic tendency to demonize those who disagree with you, even within our Christian churches and denominations. Therefore, my book concludes with concrete, practical recommendations for how churches should, and should not, navigate disagreements among their members on such contentious issues as same-sex marriage. These recommendations flow from two primary convictions: (1) Churches need to embrace a strong sense of “belonging” wherein a member who disagrees with you is “embraced as one who is beloved by God”; and (2) Churches need to embrace a strong sense of ‘peace” that goes beyond “absence of conflict” (by not talking about our disagreements) to “shalom,” where all members flourish together in the midst of their disagreements by respectfully talking to and learning from one another about those disagreements.
It is because of these concrete recommendations and my honesty (“personal candor”) in reporting what has worked, and has not worked, in my own efforts to orchestrate respectful conversations that Richard Mouw, in his Foreword to this book, suggests that it will treat the reader to “the practical character that is often missing in studies of civil discourse.”
A message of hope indeed. Let’s Talk might be just what you need as 2021—which began with an attempted coup — comes to its fitful and uneasy end.
Mark Meadows: Before the Attempted Coup, the Tawdry World of Young Earth Creationism
by William Trollinger
An evangelical young Earth creationist played a central role in Donald Trump’s coup attempt? Not a shock.
Late last night the House of Representatives voted to hold Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress for “his refusal to comply with the subpoena issued by the committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.”
As reported by the New York Times,, it turns out that “Meadows played a far more substantial role in plotting to overturn the 2020 election and fueling Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power,” serving “as Mr. Trump’s right-hand man throughout various steps of the effort to undermine the 2020 election.” Among other things, Meadows:
- encouraged and guided members of Congress as to how they could overturn the election.
- discussed means by which to encourage state legislators to replace duly-elected Biden electors with Trump electors.
- pressed the Justice Department to investigate alleged and unfounded assertions of voter fraud, and personally engaged in on-the-ground efforts to undermine the Arizona and Georgia election results.
- met numerous times with Phil Waldron, the infamous conspiratorialist who created a “38-page Power-Point document containing extreme plans to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory.”
- coordinated with those who brought Trump supporters to Washington on January 06 to participate in the rally protesting Trump’s defeat.
- promised that the National Guard would be at the Capitol to “protect pro Trump people.”
Pretty sleazy stuff. But Meadows is quite practiced at participating in sleazy activities. And these sleazy activities go beyond politics, to the tawdry world of young Earth creationism. To Ebenezer the Allosaurus, who is a star at the Creation Museum. The story of Ebenezer is a window into the corruption, fraudulence, and right-wing politics at the heart of young Earth creationism. And Meadows is smack dab in the middle of it.
As we reported here last December, this story begins . . .
Dinosaur Bones, Mark Meadows, Neo-Confederates, and the Tawdry World of
Young Earth Creationism
by William Trollinger
originally published on December 30, 2020
Ebenezer the Allosaurus is a star at the Creation Museum. But the story of Ebenezer is a window into the corruption, fraudulence, and right-wing politics at the heart of young Earth creationist culture. But maybe weirder and more important than all this, Ebenezer the Allosaurus reveals that, when it comes to creation science, there is no there, there.
This story begins in 2002, near the appropriately named town of Dinosaur, Colorado. (Personal note: Growing up in Denver as the son of a geologist, I knew all about Dinosaur). There a creationist named Dana Forbes had purchased a 100-acre lot, which he opened to young Earth creationist groups to look for dinosaur fossils that would ostensibly prove (more on this later) that the Earth is but 6,000 years old. Two creation science groups participated in this expedition: Pete DeRosa’s Creation Expeditions, and Doug Phillips’ Vision Forum.
The enterprising Phillips used this fossil hunting expedition to produce a documentary: Raising the Allosaur: The True Story of a Rare Dinosaur and the Home Schoolers Who Found It. Appearing in the film is Mark Meadows (yes indeed, that Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff) and his wife, mother, and two children – all of whom were along for the “dinosaur dig.”
And it turns out that Meadows’ daughter was the movie’s star. With her father nearby, and as reported in a Vision Forum press release,
Nine-year-old home schooler Haley Meadows was dusting away dirt with her brush when she found the claws to a 100-foot Sauropod, presently believed to be of the rare Ultrasaurus variety.
According to the documentary, the creationist fossil hunters implored Jesus to help bring the dinosaur skull out of the Earth. Jesus answered immediately. With claws and skull, there was – according to the film – dramatic and conclusive evidence that the dinosaur had been buried just over 4,000 years ago in a global Flood.
But shortly after Raising the Allosaur came out, news emerged that the story told by Phillips, Meadows, et al. was, well, a fabrication. Nine-year-old Haley Meadows did not discover the dinosaur claws, and she and the other homeschoolers did not uncover the skull. The landowner (Dana Forbes) had found it in 2000, and paleontologist (and creationist) Joe Taylor had unearthed most of the bones a year before the “Dinosaur Dig,” in 2001.
It remains unclear how the Raising the Allosaur scam was set up. It is certainly plausible (likely?) that both Phillips and Meadows were in on it, particularly given that both men have a history of significant ethical lapses. As regards Phillips, this hard-core patriarchal fundamentalist was forced to abandon Vision Forum when it turned out that he was having sexual relations with a young woman not his wife, a woman who attested that Phillips began “grooming” her when she was but 15, and who sued him for sexual abuse.
As regards Meadows’ own ethical shortcomings, it turns out that, once he entered Congress in 2013, he had a difficult time abiding by congressional disclosure requirements. Remarkably enough, one of his failures to disclose directly relates to the 2002 “Dinosaur Dig.”
In 2003 Meadows purchased the 100 acre lot in Colorado from Forbes, the original idea being that he would lease it to Pete DeRosa for additional creationist fossil digs, a lease Meadows soon disallowed when he discovered that DeRosa was not the paleontologist he claimed to be. Then, in 2016, he sold this land to Answers in Genesis (AiG) for them to use for their own creationist purposes. He sold it for $200,000, to be paid in monthly installments. Meadows never included this income on his congressional financial disclosure forms, an act of ethical negligence that, of course, made him a perfect candidate to serve as chief-of-staff in the Trump Administration.
But let’s get back to Ebenezer the Allosaur, and additional sordid details. It turns out that there was a nasty legal fight over who owned the dinosaur skeleton, between Pete DeRosa (Creation Expeditions) and Joe Taylor (the paleontologist who identified and excavated the skeleton), both of whom claimed that they had rights to the bones. In the middle of this dispute Michael Peroutka of the Peroutka Foundation offered to pay Taylor for his part of the allosaur – and the financially strapped Taylor said yes. And in 2013 the Peroutka Foundation gave the dinosaur fossil to the Creation Museum, who put it on display in 2014.
But who is Michael Peroutka? The AiG press release announcing the “Ebenezer the Allosaurus” display failed to mention that Peroutka, who was the 2004 Constitution Party candidate for president, is a neo-Confederate who obsessively sought to have Barack Obama impeached, who claimed that the Maryland General Assembly was “no longer a valid legislative body because . . . it has tried to restrict the right of the people to keep and bear arms . . . [and] declared that little girls must share bathrooms with older men who are ‘gender confused,” and who attacked “government schools” for their relentless efforts to “enslave a Christian people” (Righting America 190).
What a sordid story. An elaborate scam. Corruption and abuse and creationist legal wranglings. And a neo-Confederate donor to the Creation Museum.
But for all of this, the weirdest part of the story may be that – for all the desperate efforts on the part of creationists to secure this dinosaur skeleton, for all the brouhaha and AiG-hype surrounding “Ebenezer the Allosaurus” – the Creation Museum makes absolutely no use of the skeleton itself to advance the case for a young Earth and a global Flood. Referring to arguably the most relevant placard that accompanies the dinosaur fossil, we note in Righting America that
Given that this placard appears in the room wherein a truly impressive skeleton of a real dinosaur is on display, and given that this placard tells a story that seeks to link that skeleton to the Flood, it is surprising that the placard makes no mention of the skeleton itself. Not one piece of physical evidence from the skeleton is mobilized in any way by this placard. No inferences whatsoever are drawn from the skeleton about Ebenezer on this placard . . . In the end, Ebenezer-the-skeleton appears to make no contribution to an understanding either of his demise or any other creature’s (Righting America 93).
The only evidence provided by the Creation Museum in behalf of the claim that Ebenezer died in a global Flood is the story recounted in Genesis 7:21-23. That’s it.
When it comes to creation science, there is no there, there.
Evangelical Ziggurats, and The State of Babel after the Fall
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.
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. (Genesis 11:1)
The story of Babel is largely mythological—an origin story to explain linguistic diversity. Like the story of Jonah, the empirical facts are not the point. The point is that we were one, and then we’re confusingly not.
Well, we thought we were one. Our hubris made us think we were one. We thought we all agreed. We didn’t need to listen to our neighbors. They were already with us! Who could be against us? This Tower is so impressive!
And in our unity we thought we could reach perfection. We could transcend the earth. Like Icarus, we could fly to the sun.
But we never could.
Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. (Genesis 11:7)
The goal to be not-human goaded us to make us even more human. We were confounded.
In a moment completely free of self-reflection, Ken Ham is building his own Tower of Babel to “take aim at Critical Race Theory.” His spokesperson argues that “a large part of CRT is the ungodly idea that we must instruct people to see and judge people based on the melanin level in their skin, which is the opposite of what Scripture teaches.”
With the Ham ziggurat, Critical Race Theory—that academic study intended to foreground the infinite variety of the human experience—gets conflated under a singular and simple “ungodly idea.” For Ham, Babel is not about language at all. It’s about a specific amino acid called “melanin.” It’s not metaphysical. It’s physical. It’s not words. It’s skin.
In this use, Genesis 11 is not a Biblical story that can be applied to our own hubris, including Ham’s. It’s a factual account that only applies to those outside. Genesis 11, then, is not about a unified pride. It’s about diversity. It’s not us. It’s them.
Ironically, Ham the fundamentalist is taking the most liberty with the Text. He’s mangling it for his own specific purpose, building a ziggurat to political oneness, even to whiteness.
Ham doesn’t need to listen to a Critical Race scholar. He doesn’t need to listen to a Biblical scholar. He doesn’t need to listen to anyone outside of his own self. Listening is too vulnerable after all. It leaves you open to change. And change is bad. Oneness is good. Oneness gets you to God.
Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall. (Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 23)
In a strange way, we are all facing our own Towers of Babel in the weeks ahead. We may never go to Ham’s ziggurat, but we’re standing at the foot of the man-made tower intended to touch the face of God. We’re wondering what to do. Do we join in or scatter? Do we build our own tower or walk away? Or maybe something else entirely?
Do we give thanks with our recalcitrantly anti-vaxxed family? The New York Times naively suggests that we can just call them up and ask for their suggestions about how to dine safely:
Start by calling your unvaccinated family members and soliciting their ideas on how to gather safely.
If we trust their unvaxxed and unmasked idea of safety, we’re walking a few steps up their ziggurat. We’re standing on the same ground that they have paved with counter-factual conspiracies.
The ziggurats to presumed unity are everywhere. John Hagee’s Texas church hosts a rally with South Carolina pastor Mark Burns leading a “Let’s go Brandon” chant. QAnon doctors tout they are “doing God’s work” by lying about VAERS data. Anti-vaxxers yell around a KN95 mask that your three Moderna shots prove you are a cruel, anti-life advocate. An assault-rifle-waving teenager claims he is the victim while a judge shrugs behind his cookie catalog.
We’re all wringing our hands over the “polarization” in our culture, as if we are nostalgic for never-existed unity. But perhaps like those Babel-builders, that unity just cloaked infinite diversity.
Maybe unity isn’t the goal at all. With unity as our purpose, polarization and “tribalism” are inevitable. Polarization just builds multiple ziggurats—one in Kentucky, one in Colorado Springs, one in Lynchburg, one at Mar-a-lago, one in Greenville, South Carolina too—but a neighborly ambiguity does something else. Is this what Kenneth Burke calls “the characteristic invitation to rhetoric”? When you put “unity” and “division” ambiguously together, so that you don’t know for sure where any one person resides, rhetoric steps in to strategically manage the potential difference.
This week my student was wrestling with Francis Bacon’s metaphor for rhetoric. Bacon said that dialectic—or the philosophical pursuit of truth—is a fist, and rhetoric is an open hand. The way she talked about it stopped me cold. She said that rhetoric’s open hand presumes that you’re listening to the person on the other end of your hand. It’s adaptive. It’s empathetic. It’s other-focused, but still connected to you. In a sense, rhetoric is anti-ziggurat. It’s even neighborly.
I’ve chosen the metaphor of a neighborhood here, as a kind of anti-ziggurat system. Towers make terrible communities. They demand adherence and an upward march. There’s little rest or even play.
But within a neighborhood, good fences—or what psychologists call boundaries—still make good neighbors. Sometimes the property lines need to be scoped out precisely. Sometimes the lines need only be porous. A neighborhood feral cat will still prance through or a puppy will still race over. Their Bermuda grass will still make its way into our Fescue. But when real harm exists—a fire, a fast car, an unpredictable virus—the boundaries between the neighbors are not as important as safety. And we need to sound an alarm for the sake of each other, even if that neighbor doesn’t admit there’s a looming threat.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote here that conservative evangelicals were managing the pandemic by talking like Billy Sunday. That is, we were ignoring the material reality of a virus. We were ignoring the multiplicities of bodies and the irrationality of viruses and their variants in order to protect our singular and metaphysical unity of “love.”
It’s another ziggurat we evangelicals have built. It’s our monument to our own hubris, another attempt to be god-like, another way to caulk over difference for the sake of an illusion. Carl Sandburg dismantled Billy Sunday’s pride. He does it for us too.
When are you going to quit making the carpenters
build emergency hospitals for women and girls
driven crazy with wrecked nerves
from your goddam gibberish about Jesus –I put it to you again:
What the hell do you know about Jesus?
Advent, Apocalyptic, and the Blind Teachers of the Blind
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).
“For it is God who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of times.”
(Wisdom of Solomon 7:17 – 18)
Self-delusion creates a form of blindness. Tennessee Williams puts the consequences of self-delusion on the lips of Tom Wingfield, narrator in “The Glass Menagerie”:
That quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. (Quoted by Robert McElvaine in The Great Depression).
The issue of failing eyes, blind eyes, or not seeing what is in front of the face was part of the curriculum of Jesus. “Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit” (Matthew 15:14).
In our day, there are blind preachers/teachers “guiding” the blind. These preachers/teachers, engrossed in how the world began and how the world will end, have confused beginnings with endings. For example, Ken Ham has built a Creation Museum and an Ark in Kentucky, two metaphorical monstrosities dedicated to “pressing fingers down on the fiery Braille alphabet” of a false apocalyptic vision.
Tim LaHaye claims that Jesus is coming soon to rapture the believers and destroy the earth. Beginning and ending.
David Barton and Robert Jeffress insist that America was born as a Christian nation. This is another of the “in the beginning” stories that is not based on actual history.
A soprano from the choir burst out, “What does Advent have to do with Apocalypse? Why do you have to frighten us with these awful texts in this season of joy?” She’s a fantastic singer, but she had been impacted by people who read their Bibles wrongly and mixed beginnings and endings. She had never read the Left Behind fictional books. She had never taken a course in the rapture. But the teaching was in the air of American religion, and she had breathed in some of its noxious particles. I tried to help her: “Apocalyptic readings are used in Advent because they are about the beginning not the ending. Advent is the beginning, not the ending. Advent is about the new that’s always just around the bend.”
The most dangerous readings are those that insist that Jesus teaches that he is coming back to end the world. Passages that use complex symbolic, metaphorical language are twisted into literal meanings that distort the truth and make Jesus look bad. For example, William V. Trollinger, Jr. points out:
Well, when it comes to Matthew 25: 31-46, they say that Jesus’ words do not apply to us today. Instead, these words apply to the seven-year Tribulation at the end of history. Instead of a text that holds nations accountable for how they treat fellow human beings, the words are twisted to saying that we are to care for the people who have converted after the Rapture. Those who turn away the refugees will be cast into everlasting judgment.
The blind preachers who insist on a apocalyptic trope of demolition and destruction do a disservice to the reality of God’s gentle, persuading work. Far removed from this fearful raging, the Wisdom of Solomon offers us a different vision of God’s creating power through wisdom:
There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits
that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. (7:22 – 23).
N. T. Wright says that the New Testament has a vision that the creator God, the God who makes all things new, will remake heaven and earth entirely, affirming the goodness of the old Creation but overcoming its mortality and corruptibility.
In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas said that creation should not be conceived as an event with a before and after, but, rather, creation is ongoing (Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, 36). In keeping with Aquinas, Rowan Williams offers what he deems “the real Christian doctrine of creation that is going on in this moment.” This vision of creation goes far beyond the first three chapters of Genesis and offers us splendid views that far surpass the dull literalism of Ken Ham’s account. These visions are most prominent in the “Wisdom Books” of the Bible: Job, Proverbs, Psalms, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach. In the seventh chapter of the Wisdom of Solomon, God’s wisdom is a gentle, peaceful, intelligent, persuading presence, always permeating the universe and looking for co-creators in human beings. This is the beginning that Advent envisions with the use of apocalyptic symbols.
The vision of Advent is a here and now vision unsettling the status quo and putting the political system on notice for its death-dealing ways. Mary, eyes wide open to God’s coming kingdom, centered Advent in human need and human reality:
God’s mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. The Lord has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud (that’s a big crowd) in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. That’s economics. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.
No political leader can sleep easy at night knowing that “Jesus will bring down the powerful from their thrones.” No rich person can be at peace having heard that God sends the rich away empty. Mary’s vision in Luke 1 is the same vision that Jesus offers in Luke 21: “the son of man coming on the clouds.” Rapture lovers protest here by quoting Paul: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1Thessalonians 4:16-17). But as N. T. Wright says,
Paul’s mixed metaphors of trumpets blowing, and the living being snatched into heaven to meet the Lord are not to be understood as literal truth, as the Left Behind series suggests, but as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.
The clearest eyes that ever existed, the eyes of Jesus, give us a view that counteracts the blind preachers/teachers confused about beginnings and endings. The view of Jesus is found in his first sermon, his vision in Luke 4. I have always been partial to Dr. Otis Moss III’s interpretation of this sermon:
“Good news to the poor.” I believe that’s economics. “Release to the captives”– that must be political. “To recover the sight of the blind” – that’s educational. “To let the oppressed go free” – that’s liberation theology.
So at the top of the text is theology. In between is economics, politics, and education. In between it’s all about social public policy. And then at the bottom, it’s theology – Jubilee. All that human need frames the here and now season of Advent.
Matthew 25, read in the context of Advent, holds the nations accountable for how they treat the “least of these.” “All the nations will be gathered before him.” Jesus brings the vision of the Hebrew prophets to the table and preaches that nations will be responsible for how the poor are treated, how the hungry are fed, how the thirsty are given drink, how the prisoners are treated, how the homeless and naked are treated, how the sick were treated.
In Democracy Matters Cornel West claims, “The Jewish invention of the prophetic commitment to justice for all peoples” is written large in all of Jesus’ teachings. This prophetic message “is one of the great moral moments in human history.” Then West adds,
Prophetic witness consists of human acts of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. Prophetic witness calls attention to the causes of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery. The prophetic message calls out to us to take part in transforming communities into flourishing places of well-being. It speaks to all peoples and nations to be just and righteous. (16-17)
Advent and its apocalyptic rhetoric walk hand in hand to announce the beginning of the “birth pangs” rather than the end. This is here and now, not some illusory apocalyptic future, but the hard work of creating a new earth. Advent and apocalyptic are one and the same.
Respectful Discussion
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).
Disturbing the Peace
In the sixteenth century, the Christian church experienced serious conflict over issues of Biblical interpretation. Martin Luther rejected a system of doctrine that, in his opinion, allowed unscriptural teachings to contradict and obscure the gospel. Luther’s desire was that these issues be discussed without fear of retribution.
That did not happen. Since then, contentious issues have multiplied. This post deals with scientific discoveries that continue to challenge traditional interpretations of the Bible’s creation accounts.
A little historical context may be helpful. Around 1514, a Catholic priest by the name of Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the radically counter-intuitive idea that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa. After considering an idea which seemed to contradict the plain reading of scripture, which said that the earth does not move (in keeping with the sun’s passage across the sky each day), the Church came to acknowledge this cosmological reality.
For the last 150 years, the theory of evolution has been an even greater challenge to orthodoxy. The findings of evolutionary biology do not align well with a traditional interpretation of the Genesis creation accounts. To many, scientific concordism, the argument that the Bible’s statements about the natural realm are always accurate, fails as a defense against those who argue that the “science” in the Bible is, in fact, that of Iron Age Semites, and bears little resemblance to a modern understanding of the natural realm.
A growing number of evangelicals seek re-engagement with mainstream science, convinced that Christians can take mainstream science seriously while upholding historic Christian doctrines such as the incarnation, the substitutionary death of Christ, and his resurrection from the dead. These individuals assert, for example, that mainstream science can make a positive contribution to the Church’s understanding of scripture’s creation accounts. A great deal was at stake 500 years ago as the church grappled with heliocentrism. Issues related to the biological sciences and the theory of evolution, with even more serious implications for evangelicalism, are generating a great deal of less-than-respectful discussion today.
The Power of the Paradigm
All of us have mental filters – paradigms – that organize and interpret the constant stream of data that comes our way. To a surprising extent, these mental filters determine what we can or cannot perceive. In his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn defines a paradigm as
universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners. Paradigms define or suggest problems to investigate; they rule out others, they light the way, simultaneously restricting and enhancing the view.
A paradigm shift can be compared to installing a new operating system on a computer. An individual’s understanding shifts from “It can’t be so,” to “That’s the way it is!” Physicist Tom McLeish compares the process to a light being switched on. Things suddenly makes sense. A paradigm shift is often preceded by what Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance — mental discomfort caused by holding two or more contradictory beliefs simultaneously, or encountering new information that conflicts with existing beliefs. In order to reduce that dissonance, individuals seek mental consistency, which may lead them to reject valid information.
Many evangelicals are surprised to discover that, for the majority of Christians worldwide, including mainline Protestants as well as the Roman Catholic Church, mainstream science and faith are compatible. Ambrose of Milan (337-397 A.D.) once said that all truth, regardless of its source, comes from the Holy Spirit. Benjamin Warfield, evangelical champion of biblical inerrancy, once said:
We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us then cultivate an attitude of courage over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them then we. None should be more quick to discern the truth in every field, or hospitable to receive it, or loyal to follow it, whithersoever it leads. (In Fugle, Laying Down Arms to Heal the Creation-Evolution Divide, 62),
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Theologian John Schneider claims that evangelical Protestantism is on “the brink of crisis” with regard to evolutionary theory. What Schneider portrays as a serious problem, paradoxically, could also be seen as an opportunity. Evangelicals are called upon to clarify which aspects of their faith are non-negotiable and which may be appropriately updated. When seen in the context of the broad sweep of church history, the theological enterprise has always been a work in progress. As Nathan Hale observes:
I’m not attempting to cast doubt on the authority of scripture; it is simply a plea to better understand the complexity and richness of the text. The Bible is a complex library of history, law, poetry, wisdom, Gospels, epistles, and apocalyptic literature. But it was written in a time, place, culture, and language that is not ours.
A key evangelical doctrine is inerrancy, the view that the Bible, in its original manuscripts, is without error of any kind. That foundational doctrine is being revisited. Christian biologist Gary Fugle says in Laying Down Arms to Heal the Creation-Evolution Divide,
For most evangelicals, the concept of inerrancy is supported by a modern scientific understanding of the world applied to the scriptures. But in light of modern science, some assertions in the scriptures are inaccurate (233).
David Dockery offers these preliminary thoughts as to the kinds of concerns being raised —
The Bible, properly interpreted in the light of the culture and communication developed by the time of its composition, will be shown to be completely true… in all that it affirms, to the degree of precision intended by the author, in all matters pertaining to God and his creation. (As quoted in Walton and Sandy, The Lost World of Scripture, 275).
Just before paradigms are abandoned, new facts no longer fit old frameworks. Pesky anomalies accumulate and refuse to be dismissed. A major paradigm shift has been compared to rebuilding a ship while it is still floating on the water. The notion of a paradigm shift is at the heart of the scientific enterprise. It is what scientists win Nobel prizes for. Major paradigm shifts have occurred with regularity since the sixteenth century advent of the scientific revolution — Copernicus and heliocentrism, Darwin and evolution, Wegener and plate tectonics, Einstein and relativity.
A requirement to modify one’s views when presented with better data is one of the hallmarks of the scientific method. Scientific methodology has a built-in accountability system that strongly discourages scientists from clinging to a discredited theory. A paradigm shift has been compared to snow melting on a metal roof. All of a sudden, without warning, the snow slides off and hits the ground with a thud.
Splendid Isolation
In self-referential cultures, everything makes sense as long as individuals remain within their cultural boundaries. Out-of-the-box thinking makes group members nervous. Psychologist John Jost of New York University describes partisans (religious or political), those whose primary motivation is defending the status quo, as system justifiers. In the scientific world, challenges to a conventional view are to be expected, but in evangelicalism, challenges to theological norms are typically viewed with suspicion. Many evangelical denominations practice what is known as confessional subscription, a public affirmation of confessional statements typically formulated during the Reformation in the sixteenth century.
In practice, confessional subscription means that denominational leaders, educational facilities, and clergy affirm and teach a fixed body of doctrines and articles of faith. Those confessions were designed to protect a theological heritage, an admirable goal. Paradoxically, the same confessional safeguards which guarded evangelical faith in years past may hinder the enrichment of that same faith today. John H. Walton and D. Brent Sandy put it this way in The Lost World of Scripture: “… the foundations of our fortresses are nearly immovable. But we need to make our best efforts to reconsider the evidence and the possibilities.”
It’s not surprising that administrators and board members of evangelical denominations, as well as educators in evangelical colleges and seminaries, are suspicious of change; it is, as it were, in their theological DNA. They look askance at what they perceive as unnecessary changes to long-standing doctrines and teachings. It’s not difficult to understand why Christian leaders would resist changes that, in their opinion, would adversely affect basic doctrines and, in addition, cause confusion among the people in the pews.
Confessional subscription may lead church administrators and educators to believe there is no need for any revisiting – let alone revision – of their creation-related doctrines. Scientists, on the other hand, are trained to follow the truth wherever it leads. When the evidence piles up and becomes overwhelming, they know that they must adjust (or replace!) their old model and move on.
In this regard evangelicals need safe places where contentious issues can be discussed respectfully. They too often lack an open and collegial atmosphere where dialogue replaces debate. Without these things, genuine rapprochement is unlikely. Groups of all kinds are vulnerable to a psychological phenomenon called groupthink, where the desire for group harmony overrides good decision-making. Groupthink encourages individuals to suppress their own views on the subject at hand so as to support each other and minimize conflict. An artificial consensus is achieved. Alternative viewpoints are not critically evaluated. An all-too-human failing is to allow ourselves to be lulled to sleep under the comfortable quilt of group conformity rather than courageously facing uncomfortable truths.
I distinctly remember the metal ring-puzzles I used to play with as a child. It didn’t take long to realize there was only one way to correctly align the rings. But experience also taught, as I experimented a little, that I could cheat. I could force the rings to fit. But my conscience stepped in to remind me that I hadn’t found the correct solution should I do that. Christians who steadfastly refuse to allow mainstream science to speak to their faith find themselves forcing scripture’s statements about the natural realm to fit with its spiritual truths. In so doing, they are missing an important opportunity to improve the accuracy of their Bible interpretation.
So what does mainstream science want? A rethinking of the early chapters of Genesis would be helpful – a willingness to view the text figuratively rather than literalistically. That’s it.
Christians who avoid mainstream science, or unfairly criticize it, are missing a great opportunity to build a bridge of understanding to the wider secular society, especially its younger cohort. The majority of Christians who have adopted an evolutionary viewpoint indicate that the change resulted in a significant enrichment of their faith. Protecting and defending the authority of scripture need not be accomplished by rejecting mainstream science.
One Sunday, on the advice of friends, a geology student attended worship in a church he had never visited before. The pastor’s sermon strongly criticized the theory of evolution, not on the basis of the scientific evidence, but under the presupposition that should science and faith disagree, science must be in the wrong.
An opportunity for dialogue was missed that day. Nothing really changed. And nothing will, unless respectful conversations are encouraged and individuals are willing to let down their guard and enter an ongoing process of dialogue. Christian leaders are duty-bound to speak the truth and to do that in love (Ephesians 4:15). They are required to deal with others with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15). Respectful conversation is a critically important factor in resolving conflict at the intersection of faith and science.
Debunking the Original Birther Story
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).
The “original birther conspiracy” is fueled by Christians intent on writing the history of America being born as a Christian nation. This original birtherism involves a recasting of the founding of America in an evangelical straitjacket of misinformation and lies. Here is the naked defense of colonization, nationalism, and nativism by a people who should know better. A pure America, an America chosen and founded by God, an America that has earned all her blessings, an America that is a “city on a hill,” a (white) American people who have inherited the Promised Land and have created a new Eden: this fantasy dominates the evangelical landscape.
The stifling innocence and naivete of evangelicals can be stunning to observe. As Rowan Williams has observed, here is a clinging to this mythological America “that shows itself in the longing to be utterly sure of our rightness.” A cursory look at the “original birther conspiracy” demonstrates the depth and width of this evangelical attempt to rewrite the history of our nation.
The Beginnings of the Birther Story
Steven Keith Green outlines the early beginnings of the “original birther conspiracy” in Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding. In an email, I asked Green if there was one founding father of the birther conspiracy. He responded:
The best that I could tell from my research is that there was no one, leading nineteenth-century proponent for the idea of America’s Christian nationhood. Rather, there were a bunch of ministers, commentators, and jurists who all built on each other.
To give but one example, Lyman Beecher made a host of Christian America claims in sermons and pamphlets. As he proclaimed in A Plea for the West (1835):
There is not a nation upon earth which, in fifty years, can by all possible reformation place itself in circumstances so favorable as our own for the free, unembarrassed applications of physical effort and pecuniary and moral power to evangelize the world.
The African American prophetic tradition tells a very different story. As Jeremiah Wright satirically preached in his 2003 sermon, “God and Governments”:
Let me tell you something; we believe in this country, and we teach our children that God sent us to this Promised Land. He sent us to take this country from the Arrowak, the Susquehanna, the Apache, the Comanche, the Cherokee, the Seminole, the Choctaw, the Hopi and the Arapaho. We confuse Government and God. We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. We believe God ordained African slavery. We believe God makes Europeans superior to Africans and superior to everybody else too.
Then Wright brings down the hammer on evangelical birtherism: “God does not change! God was against slavery yesterday, and God who does not change is still against slavery today.”
The 1970’s: Peter Marshall and D. James Kennedy
Peter Marshall and David Manuel are the authors of The Light and the Glory, a book that sold almost a million copies, and that became the primary source for evangelical homeschooling history curriculum. Among the more blatant fictions in this book:
- America is in a covenant with God.
- Columbus was directed by God.
- God made the Massachusetts Bay Colony a “city on a hill.”
- God led George Washington’s army to victory over the British in the American Revolution.
In writing this work of historical fiction Marshall ignored mountains of historical evidence, and yet he had the temerity to accuse “liberal” historians of not doing any research. According to Marshall, he prayed about writing this book, and God told him to proceed. Marshall would go on to claim that Obama’s 2008 victory was a disaster that would bring God’s wrath upon America.
Then there was James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Presbyterian pastor and early television preacher who was determined to reclaim America for God. As Kennedy saw it, the hand of God was everywhere in American history. Evangelical willingness to jump to false cause arguments may be one of their most misleading rhetorical tropes. Kennedy’s defense of the “birther conspiracy” appears most prominently in his book, What If America Were a Christian Nation Again?
2000 – Present: Robert Jeffress and David Barton
Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, stands as the primary contemporary promoter of the fantasy that America was born as a Christian nation. All the previous attempts at the original birther theory are brought to full bloom in the hyperbole and misinformation and distorted facts of Robert Jeffress.
A primary artifact of the “birther” movement is Jeffress’ Fourth of July sermon, “America Is a Christian Nation.” Most of the material in this sermon comes from David Barton, as the two Texans morph into a single creature.
The dominant rhetorical trope in the sermon is “American exceptionalism.” In Demagogue for President Jennifer Mercieca identifies “American exceptionalism” as a major trope in the political speeches of conservatives. As Mercieca says, “Appeals to American exceptionalism rely on American’s pride and their desire to believe that their nation is the best among others, that it is chosen by God (News to the Jews?), and that it has a heroic destiny to spread democracy and enlightenment around the world.”
With blustering certainty and overweening confidence Jeffress promotes the idea that America really is God’s nation, and (mostly white) evangelicals really are God’s new chosen people. This is a sermon wrapped in red, white, and blue. The danger in the sermon is that its patriotism is, to borrow from Barbara Biesecker’s “The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” a species of melancholy. It allows evangelicals to ignore the nation’s violent, racist past. Rather than working through melancholia as a step toward “inventing a society that remembers, rather than unconsciously repeats, a murderous and authoritarian past,” evangelicals wave the flag, recite the creed, and give God’s blessing to the feast of idolatry. It may go without saying that a flag-waving, Bible-thumping tribe pouring out feelings from the evangelical-emotion machine is a menace to democracy.
Jeffress the patriarchal patriot dangles a dramatic vision of a godly and patriotic nation before his congregation’s adoring eyes. For Jeffress, the American way of life is under siege – its memories, origins, common territory, deep beliefs, ways of life, even God. While this epideictic celebration of American exceptionalism does not have the ring of truth, belief and obedience are almost automatic for Jeffress’ congregation. As Ann Willner put it in The Spellbinders,
Followers accept and believe that the past was as the leader portrays it [America was founded as a Christian nation], the present is as he depicts it [America is a Christian nation], and the future will be as he predicts it [Jesus will rapture the holy people of America]. And they follow without hesitation his prescriptions for action.
Cue the fireworks (in the sanctuary no less!)
Jeffress’ sermon comes from the low-hanging poisonous fruit that has fallen from David Barton’s “tree of lies and fabrications.” Jeffress uses David Barton’s material and Barton uses James Kennedy’s material, but they are all attempting to drink from “cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
Two stories about America have collided. The originating story of America has a true story depicting the violence, the deception, the wickedness, the naked abuse of power against Others. The evangelical story tells a sanitized, innocent, misleading, and ultimately false story of American righteousness. In an age where democracy seems endangered by lies so huge that millions feel they must believe them, the Thanksgiving season seems a good time to face the truth. While giving thanks, we can also repent of our violent past.
Put another way, truth may yet lay waste to the antidemocratic historical fantasies and unscrupulous political machinations of evangelicals.
Mirror Images: The Jefferson Bible and The Fundamentalist Bible
by William Trollinger
I taught for eight years at Messiah University (PA), which is – as the name might indicate – an evangelical school.
(Side note: At my campus interview I suggested – in what I thought was a brilliant moment of levity – that the athletic teams should have as their nickname “Messiah Complex.” Except for me, no one laughed.)
While Messiah is a moderate evangelical school (e.g., biblical inerrancy is not part of the faith statement), it attracted (and, I presume, attracts) a good number of fundamentalist students, many of whom had been homeschooled or had attended fundamentalist high schools.
One day in my U.S. history survey class, when I was talking about the American Revolution, I said in passing that the author of the Declaration of Independence was something akin to a deist. After class three distressed young women confronted me, letting me know that I was completely wrong about Thomas Jefferson’s religious beliefs, as they had learned in high school that he was an evangelical.
I happened to know that the library had a copy of the The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (more commonly known as The Jefferson Bible). Jefferson created this work by literally taking a razor to a KJV Bible, cutting out certain Gospel passages and gluing them together as a summary of Jesus’ teachings, in the process removing all supernatural references (including the Resurrection and other miracles).
So I suggested to these students that they go to the library and take a look at what Jefferson had produced. And so they did. And at the next class the same three young women approached me. And again they were quite agitated, but not for the same reason; as one of them blurted: “I was lied to: Jefferson was no evangelical – I don’t think he was even a Christian!”
But then, there’s the Fundamentalist Bible. And one way to think of the Fundamentalist Bible is to understand it as the mirror image of The Jefferson Bible. The supernatural is all there, but many or most or all biblical references to social justice have been cut out by way of a virtual razor.
Take, for example, what one finds in the Jesus exhibit at the Creation Museum. As we noted in Righting America (48), when the Museum opened in 2007 there was almost no Jesus in the place. Not only was there just one Jesus statue tucked away in a corner (which was moved to the main foyer for the holidays), and almost no quotes from Jesus on the ubiquitous placards.
Then, ten years later, the museum opened a three-room Jesus exhibit. The Jesus here is, to quote Susan Trollinger, a “powerful, authoritative, God-approved, superhero Jesus” who performed miracles, rose from the dead, and will be returning to Earth soon to annihilate his enemies.
The Creation Museum’s vindictive-superhero Jesus is definitely not the Jesus of The Jefferson Bible. This becomes even clearer when one realizes that there is only half of one placard devoted to Jesus’ “Instructions” (the other half of the placard is devoted to “Rebukes,” which is telling in itself.) Not only is there so little on Jesus’ teachings, but what is included on this placard has been so severely edited that museum visitors will not come away from the exhibit with any notion that Jesus had anything to say about social justice.
Take, for example, the snippet from Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters.” What exactly does that mean? Well, here is the full verse:
No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
This is not a subtle editing job. Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) have taken the razor blade to Matthew 6:24, and the result is that Creation Museum visitors do not have to wonder if there’s anything about capitalism and the accumulation of riches that might be at odds with the Gospel.
But then look at “Rebukes” on the right side of the placard. One of these rebukes comes from Matthew 25:41: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
There is no question that this verse is supposed to be an example of, as noted at the top of the placard, “the consequences of rejecting Him.” Conveniently enough, the folks at AiG have failed to include the following five verses:
“For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Talk about an unsubtle editing job! In truth, “editing job” is quite the euphemism for what the folks at the Creation Museum have done to the Bible. A few judicious slashes with the virtual razor blade, and voila, we have a superhero Jesus who is poised to condemn sinners and neglect those who, like him, suffer.
But what about fundamentalist study Bibles, where editors cannot – unlike Jefferson and unlike AiG – simply excise passages that they do not like?
Well, when it comes to Matthew 25: 31-46, these Bibles have done the next best thing. That is, they say that Jesus’ words do not apply to us today. Instead, as one learns from The King James Study Bible: Reference Edition (p. 1036), The MacArthur New Testament Commentary: Matthew 24-28 (pp. 122, 124-125), and The Henry Morris Study Bible (p. 1445), these words apply to the seven-year Tribulation at the end of history. The test will be whether or not one helps the refugees – apparently those who convert after Jesus has taken up the “true Christians” in the Rapture – fleeing the forces of the Antichrist. According to Morris, those who turn “the refugees away, and perhaps even reporting them to the authorities, will be sent away into everlasting judgment.”
In other words, what these study Bibles proffer is an interpretive razor blade, an extraordinarily esoteric explanation of a passage whose meaning is (unlike so many passages in the Bible that are a challenge to interpret) pretty plain and obvious. What’s not to get? If you want to call yourself a Christian, Jesus says, then get busy about easing the suffering of the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned. This reading, by contrast, is not rooted at all in the biblical text. Instead, it successfully excises unwelcome suggestions that Jesus and the Bible have anything to say to us today about working for social justice.
The Jefferson Bible and the Fundamentalist Bible. Mirror images.
More Fun in Fundamentalism: Halloween is now National Evangelism Day!
by William Trollinger
This semester here at the University of Dayton I am teaching my Ph.D. seminar on American Evangelicalism, with a particular focus on the late 19th and 20th/21st centuries. The greatest challenge I have faced in this seminar is not the students – this is a smart group, with some of them planning to write dissertations on some aspect of fundamentalism – but, instead, choosing which books to assign. The past decade, in particular, has seen a surfeit of good monographs on evangelicalism and fundamentalism . . . and more keep appearing, to the point that it is hard to keep up. Here is the course reading list; please know that there are another fifty (or more) books I could have assigned (some of which I have required in earlier iterations of this course).
One of the books I assigned this year was the 2014 edition of Randall Balmer’s wonderful Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. One of the nineteen stops in Balmer’s evangelical travelogue was a October 1990 visit to the Multnomah School of the Bible (keeping up with the university-craze in higher education, it is now Multnomah University) in Portland, Oregon.
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is a gentle and generous book, but notwithstanding Balmer’s graciousness, his description of Multnomah suggests an extraordinarily dreary place. (Maybe things have livened up now that it is a university!) He ends his “Bible School” chapter by narrating the story of wandering the campus on a Saturday night, the goal being to see what Multnomah students do for fun, given the “strict injunctions against drinking, gambling, R-rated movies, dancing, and kissing.” (143)
While the Solid Rock Café in the Student Commons was empty, Balmer managed to find two individuals in a nearby meeting room who were busy carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns. When he asked, “What do Multnomah students do for fun on Saturday night?,” he was told that
“We play Rook in the café,” he said. I started to protest that I had just come from the empty café, but not wanting to be contrary, I pulled up short. The man read my mind, however. “That usually doesn’t get started until ten o’clock,” he said. . . A lot of students go to malls or to parks, he added, or to the local nickel arcade to play video games. On Friday nights one of the professors opens his home to students, who “drop by to discuss life and how it relates to the Bible.” The woman nodded vigorously in agreement. “I don’t know if you’d call this fun,” the man said, “but a lot of students go and witness downtown on Friday and Saturday nights – talk to drunkards and stuff. . . . [And we] play board games!” the man said suddenly, looking hopefully in my direction. . . . I elected to pass on the Rook game. I couldn’t bear the thought of more excitement and levity that evening. I jumped into my rental car and headed back to an empty hotel room. (144-145)
All of this came back to me as I read that Ray Comfort – yes, that Ray Comfort, of the infamous banana video — and his Living Waters organization have designated October 31 as National Evangelism Day. Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) have jumped on board, offering to sell eager fundamentalists “the resources you need to share the gospel message with trick-or-treaters and their families.”
Here are some of the Halloween resources available at the Answers in Genesis online store:
- The “Halloween Learn & Share Kit,” which includes 1 “Halloween, Paganism, and the Bible” DVD, 5 “Biblical & Historical Look at Halloween” booklets, 100 “Dino-Bucks Gospel Tracts,” and 100 “Noah’s Ark Gospel Tracts.”
- The “Halloween Outreach Pack,” which includes 1 “Halloween, Paganism, and the Bible” DVD, 50
Biblical & Historical Look at Halloween” booklets, the “Fall of Satan” book, and the “Satan & the Serpent Pocket Guide.” - The “Ten Commandments Scroll Pen”
- The “Noah’s Ark Gospel” tract
- The “Atheist Test” tract
- The “7 Reasons WHY we should NOT accept MILLIONS of years” booklet
- and much, much, much more!
I am trying to wrap my head around your average nine-year-old trick-or-treater getting back home and pulling out of her bag candies of various sorts – we are going for glow-in-the-dark KitKats this year – along with, say, the “Biblical & Historical Look at Halloween” booklet and the “Atheist Test” tract. Really? She is not immediately throwing them into the trash? This is an evangelism plan?
The fun in fundamentalism just never ends.
Media Hypes Anti-Vaxx Pastor from Waveland, Mississippi
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).
For those of you in the Dayton area, Kennedy will be discussing The Immaculate Mistake at Temple Israel (130 Riverside Drive) at noon on Monday, November 01. Taking from his book, he will be focusing on anti-Semitism and its threat to American democracy. All are welcome to attend what should be a fascinating and provocative presentation.
According to Reuters, “U.S. Pastors, advocacy groups mobilize against COVID-19 vaccine mandates”.
Whether the misleading headline or the absurd stance of a Mississippi pastor offends more is a toss-up.
Let’s start with this. Only one pastor is mentioned as “mobilized” against mandates: Shane Vaughn, pastor of First Harvest Ministries in Waveland, Mississippi. His strategy is to post form letters for workers seeking religious exemptions.
Waveland, Mississippi is not the center of world Christianity. It’s not the Vatican where the Pope speaks for Catholics. It’s not Nashville, the beating heart of the Southern Baptist Convention. This one Pentecostal preacher is not the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, is not the president of the SBC, is not the president of the council of bishops in the United Methodist Church. This article focuses on just this one young man from Waveland, Mississippi who is taking a stand against mandates.
Luther doesn’t exactly spring to mind. Nor John Wesley or John Calvin.
Of course preachers often engage in satire-rich behavior and rhetoric. But what is at least as disturbing is that the Reuters reporter (Tom Hals) has universalized this story as if the one little preacher from Waveland has started, yes, a wave of protests by pastors from sea to shining sea. Sometimes members of the media display a level of religious illiteracy that would be mind-numbing if more people had even the most rudimentary understanding of the more than 2,000-year-old history of Christianity. It is hard not to suspect a callous motivation on the part of the reporter who feels the necessity of sending a subliminal message: Preachers are simply crazy.
I confess that I am impatient with news articles that glorify and amplify and exaggerate absurd and nonsensical actions of preachers. It seems a most curious delusion to believe that people would be persuaded by the example of one Waveland, Mississippi preacher to believe that an entire armada of pastors are out there fighting “tooth and nail” against COVID mandates.
As Brian Beutler puts it, “The press is not a pro-democracy trade, it is a pro-media trade …. It doesn’t act as a guardian of civic norms” (The New Republic, September 13, 2016). Some reporters chase what they “deem” a good story like a hound dog chasing a biscuit, even if the truth has to be stretched, fabricated, or disregarded. That is to say, the media has a tendency to universalize single examples, and this kind of exaggeration spreads misinformation, and a significant portion of the public gullibly swallows it whole.
Television and the internet use a destructive rhetorical trope called ad populum – “appeal to the crowd” – in making a single example a universal experience. But the single example would never stand up in a debate, in court of law, or in a article by a historian. The Jewish law insisted that “every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses” (Matthew 18:16). A media whose only value is “profit” will not be bothered with the common good or the spread of dangerous ideas. As Cornel West argues, “While an essential mission of the news organizations …. should be to expose the lies and manipulations of our …. leaders …. Too much of what passes for news today is really a form of entertainment” (Democracy Matters, 36). He then adds, “Our mass media are dominated by the ambulance chasers and the blatantly partisan hacks” (West, 37).
Just as disturbing is that a preacher picked a fight with mandates designed to reduce the COVID infection rate. Why would a preacher who follows Jesus, the Great Physician, not wholeheartedly support every method, practice, and preventive treatment that will lead to the defeat of COVID? The call not to be vaccinated seems as silly as asking the police not to wear bullet-proof vests in a shootout with drug dealers. And this is a Pentecostal preacher – a Christian movement centered in healing practices and belief in the healing power of the Holy Spirit? There is no “balm in Gilead” when preachers fight against good health practices.
If we made a list of the 100 most crucial issues facing people in our nation, fighting a mask mandate wouldn’t even make the list. Yet here is a modern-day Don Quixote, flailing at windmills he thinks are giants, and taking up his Bible to defend the helpless. Why wouldn’t this preacher take on the rising tides of secularism and the increasing worship of Mammon in a greed-infected nation? Why wouldn’t this preacher mobilize against the “new racism,” which is the old racism with a denial amendment attached?
Casey Ryan Kelly, in his book, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood argues that white men feel wounded but proud and they lash out at what seems to be attacks on their freedom and masculine pride. Kelly says that white men, cast as virtuous and long-suffering, engage in a melodramatic portrayal of themselves not as weaklings or simpletons, but as unjustly persecuted and unsung heroes of the modern world. This investment, Kelly suggests, animates a melancholia where men grieve the loss of their status and “wholeness.”
In this worldview, the anti-mandate preacher thinks he is defending the righteous, the people persecuted by the government. But if people follow his admonitions, the result will be an increase in the death rate from COVID. Like a Confederate general attempting to urge his men into the center of the battle with no defenses, this preacher yells, “Be a man. Don’t wear a mask. Defy the mandate. Forward! Onward Christian soldiers!” The Pentecostal preacher from Waveland insists on battling COVID without putting on the whole armor of medical science and God. Such an apocalyptic vision sees no future beyond violence toward the Other and its own self-destruction. The anti-mandate preacher is not a freedom warrior; he has a death wish for all of us.
Maybe this preacher lost all hope of mobilizing against the old cardinal sins of pride, greed, lust, sloth, anger, envy, and gluttony. These old sins are mopping the floor of American culture, and they are aided and abetted by an array of even more dangerous sins, like racism, homophobia, nativism, militarism, hatred, division, and violence. Sending out form letters against COVID mandates seems innocent enough, easy enough, and it garners publicity for a Pentecostal preacher in Waveland, Mississippi.
Misleading headlines and mobilizing against good health procedures are both absurd. But we live in absurd times when a lie passes for truth and opinions for facts. Look, I understand that a headline that reads, “Pastor From Waveland, Mississippi Speaks Out against COVID Mandates” has no sizzle. But that’s no excuse for an educated reporter who knows better.
