What Pandemic? The Amish and Amish Country Tourists Dispense with Masks
by William Trollinger
Every other year my wife Sue teaches a course here at the University of Dayton (UD) entitled “The Arguments and Visual Rhetoric of Two Religious Traditions.” Not surprisingly, the two traditions she focuses on are the Amish (about which she wrote Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia) and fundamentalism (about which she co-wrote Righting America at the Creation Museum).
As part of this course Sue takes her students to the Creation Museum (Petersburg KY), and then to Holmes County, Ohio, which is home to the largest Amish settlement in the world. To prepare for next spring’s trip – in particular, to check out how things have changed since our last visit two years ago – she and I used our UD fall break to visit Holmes County.
As regards changes in Amish Country tourism, well, let’s just say that it is more evangelical and more kitschy than ever. Take, for example, the Amish Country Theater, which is located on Highway 39 in Berlin, and which is advertised by garishly hokey billboards, one of which almost led me to plow our car into the truck in front of us.
Visitors to the theater’s website learn that the theater features “side-splittin’ hilarious family variety shows,” including “Donkey Doodle Dandy” and “One Way or an Udder.” These shows feature “the famous Amish comedy trio ‘The Beachy’s [sic]’ and Fannie Mae, whose parody songs and jokes about farm living will keep you laughing the whole way home.” And as quoted on the Amish Country Theater Promotional Video – where one can view “the famous Amish comedy trio” and much, much more – one enthusiastic visitor excitedly exclaimed that the Amish Country Theater is “Better than Branson and Gatlinburg. The talent is amazing! Our church group will be back!”
In short, Amish Country is more evangelical and more kitschy than ever, which was no surprise to the author of Selling the Amish.
But what was a surprise was the lack of mask-wearing. The absolute, total lack of mask-wearing.
We visited nine different establishments – bookstores, restaurants, grocery stores, furniture galleries, and more – in the towns of Berlin, Millersburg, Mount Hope, Sugar Creek, and Walnut Creek. Not one of these enterprises had a sign informing visitors that they needed to be masked. More than this, in these establishments – where we were around hundreds of people – we did not see ONE person wearing a mask. Not one tourist. Not one Amish individual. Not one. We were the masked oddities.
So it was a relief to leave Amish Country and head to Columbus for lunch at a popular Mexican restaurant. Where, it turns out, all of the servers and virtually all of the patrons were masked. And as we ate our rice and bean bowls, we talked about what we had just experienced: two days in a popular tourist venue where – despite the fact that (as of October 09, 2021) 712,695 Americans have died of COVID-19 – we saw not one person evincing any concern about contracting or spreading this disease.
It did not take us long to conclude that it seems probable that there was a connection between the lack of mask-wearing and the evangelicalization of Amish Country. Take, for example, Answers in Genesis (AiG), the folks who run the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter (which, by the way, are popular tourist destinations not only for evangelicals, but also for the Amish, who take tour buses from Holmes County to Kentucky to visit these sites).
The message put out by AiG, again and again, is that
- the pandemic “doesn’t kill very many people at all ” and may indeed be a hoax.
- the “so-called scientific consensus” on the efficacy of vaccinations is really no consensus at all, given that it is based on “historical science” that is legitimately rejected by those who have God’s Word as their starting point.
- efforts to mandate vaccinations are oppressive and unnecessary
- it is illogical to assert that Christians should heed scientists and doctors when it comes to COVID-19.
Of course, once one rejects the scientific evidence for an old Earth and evolutionary science, it is not a huge leap to reject vaccines and masks. Janet Kellogg Ray – author of Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark?: The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making It All Fit – puts it like this:
The evangelical Christian fear of masking and vaccines is a mystery until you take that Venn diagram and see the overlap between evolution deniers and people taking Ivermectin and thinking the vaccine threatens lives or that masking is the government forcing them to do things against their will.
Right. Reject the pandemic hoax, ignore the state-sanctioned nonsense about masks and vaccines, and head out for some side-splittin’ hilarious fun.
So it is for a good part of American evangelicalism in 2021.
Owen Strachan: Rip Van Winkle and Prophet of the “Unwoke”
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).
In Catskill, New York stands a statue of Rip Van Winkle, the patron saint of the “unwoke.”
In the 38th chapter of Ezekiel, a large valley of dry bones is depicted – a white-blanched metaphor of the “unwoke.” In Revelation 3, one of the seven churches, Sardis, is the congregation of the “unwoke.” 1
Reading Owen Strachan’s Christianity and Wokeness, I felt I had met the prophet of the “unwoke.” I wanted there to be something to his effort to warn people of the danger of wokeness.
My hope for there to be something of value never came to fruition. Strachan’s vineyard is one that brings forth only sour grapes (Isaiah 5). Only the alternate universe of evangelicalism – the place where the people of a like-minded literalism gather to reassure one another that what they believe really is true – finds merit here.
Puzzled by Strachan’s attack on the voluminous scholarship on race, I wondered why he insists on returning to the scene of the crime. Strachan drags his tribe back through the “bloody heirloom” of slavery and segregation. He inadvertently calls attention once again that evangelicalism as a political force in the 1970s, as Randall Balmer reminds us, was not founded on opposition to abortion, but in defense of segregation. Still, here’s Strachan willing to be damned by the evidence while offering arguments against wokeness. Strachan’s analysis smiles back at us like those Christian folk gathered for a lynching in the 1920s, with the choir singing in the background, “Shall we gather at the river?”
Strachan’s defense of the “unwoke” leaves him as defeated as William Jennings Bryan leaving the courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee to join the ranks of the dead. For evangelicals life is déjá vu every day.
Actually, Owen Strachan has written an attack on the social gospel and liberal Christianity by disguising it as an assault on wokeness. Like Ken Ham trying to correct the “mistakes” of Williams Jennings Bryan, Strachan calls his people to stop being losers, rise, and defeat liberalism. The mood is that of, to borrow from Barbara Biesecker, a melancholia that fills the evangelical world, a deep-seated woundedness that parallels their feelings that white people are now the oppressed.
Strachan is the apostle of the “unwoke” – the living dead of American Christianity. Taking his cue from J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism (1923), Strachan has given us Christianity and Wokeness. As this book makes clear, evangelicals are still having nightmares that the social gospel will overtake their churches. The illusion that, if only liberals would give up evolution and justice, all would once again be right with the world is absurd. It is absurd that people treat matters of fact as if they were matters of opinion …. and yet they do, more than they used to. It’s absurd that we are walking into the mass suicide of an anti-science movement that has preachers railing against mask mandates and debunking the science of climate change, yet, largely, we are. And now along comes Owen Strachan railing against “wokeness” and swearing on a stack of inerrant Bibles that he and his white tribe are not racists.
Strachan attempts to be heard above the voices rising from the graveyard of the oppressed – a cemetery that goes back into the primordial mists of human history. Those millions cry out now at this pitiful attempt to offer a defense for white people, along with a list of platitudes as reparation for all the demeaning, destroying, exterminating done in the name of the evangelical God.3 Strachan speaks into the deafening roar of the oppressed, a roar the tradents of Exodus label “groaning,” but his whimpering barely registers. Defending white Christians as if they are now the oppressed is absurd.
Strachan builds a beautiful house in a gated community against wokeness. The beauty of his house masks the questionable nature of his foundation – what rhetorical scholars call the argumentative framework. I will orient his attack on the wokeness movement in the framework of rhetorical theory and demonstrate that he is a wild-eyed populist every much as the calamity howlers of the Kansas plains. I argue that Strachan attempts to rebuild the house of fundamentalism from its ruined estate. He fails to see that this is a house built on sand, a house unable to withstand the winds and the floods of a culture that Is more “woke” than he can admit.
The Foundation: Evangelical Populism
Strachan’s argumentative foundation is evangelical populism. His statements are little more than stock phrases, rhetorical topoi with little meaning or consequence. Strachan produces the evangelical version of a crowd of angry, resentful, white people denying they are racists.4 Strachan, like the proud lion of an earlier evangelical populist movement, William Jennings Bryan, represents this aggrieved tribe as champion. He even sounds the charge to battle in his introduction: “To the ramparts; to the law and the testimonies.” Armed only with an inerrant Bible and a smattering of scholarship about wokeness, his efforts are as bumbling as those of Bryan attempting to ward off the attack of Clarence Darrow.
Michael J. Lee, in “The Populist Chameleon,” suggests that populism depends upon four primary tropes that make up the populist argumentative frame: The people, the enemy, the system, and the apocalyptic.5 Utilizing Lee’s argumentative framework, we see that Strachan’s work stands on these four pillars of populism.
The People
The first trope of populism is the constitution of the people as the heroic defenders of “traditional” values. Strachan makes clear that he considers himself and his clan a virtuous people. He insists on repeating the charge that liberalism isn’t even Christian. He says that wokeness “saves it strongest firepower not for extraordinary offenders, but for ordinary men and women who live quiet, normal American lives” (11). The “people” are rendered as ordinary, simple, honest, hard-working, God-fearing, and patriotic Americans. Hence, populism is a “language of inheritance” that “grows from a sense of aggrieved ‘peoplehood.'”6
The fallacy in Strachan’s “people” trope is that the very construction of “the people” smacks of racism. “The people” that he constructs are “good, white Americans.” They are epitomized by the fictional white housewife who Strachan attempts to use to ward off all the charges of racism. Strachan speaks with awe of this woman: “The well-meaning ‘white’ housewife in my current state of Missouri who goes about her daily business, tries to be a good neighbor, and lives a quiet existence is not fundamentally considered a decent citizen by virtue of God’s common grace.” Instead, he claims, the wokeness movement smears her as a racist. Strachan ignores that the very epistemic ground upon which the House of Evangelical Denial of Racism is built has been structured by a kind of racism that is about collective commitments to the maintenance of white supremacy and the perpetuation of what Chela Sandoval calls the “apartheid of theoretical domains.” The first pillar falls and the house teeters on collapse.
The Enemy
The enemy is wokeness, but Strachan can’t resist throwing in Critical Race Theory, the social gospel, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism. Evangelicals see more enemies in our midst than first-century religious folk finding demons in every bush, tree, river, and unusual person. Here an enemy, there an enemy, everywhere an enemy, and if no enemy is to be found, evangelicals have their own enemy-producing factories. This is pure populism boosted by “Strachan’s” theological steroids.
Strachan’s opening gambit in Christianity and Wokeness names a business consultant, Ashleigh Shackleford, as the primary enemy, and accuses her of producing the entire weight of “wokeness” in a seminar at Coca Cola. She says, among other things, that all white people are racists. Strachan produces this outrageous story, blows it all out of proportion, and makes it the universal example of all people embracing wokeness. Ms. Shackleford is not a theologian, philosopher, historian, or scholar of race. Her online persona presents her as “a Black fat cultural producer, multidisciplinary artist, nonbinary shapeshifter, and data futurist based in Atlanta, Georgia.”
Yet in Strachan’s view Shackleford “laid out the core program of the system [he calls] ‘wokeness.’” Strachan denounces “wokeness” in vivid terms: “Wokeness is a major threat to the Christian faith.” “Wokeness is not Christianity at all.” Ms. Shackleford ain’t the devil, she’s a black woman trying to make a living off white folk’s guilt. If this were the World Wrestling Federation, we would have the wide-eyed innocent white housewife from Missouri facing the wild-eyed, fanatical black consultant from Atlanta in a battle to the death.
Nothing is more irritating than Strachan’s use of this annoying evangelical habit. They search endlessly, as if they were seeking the pearl of great value, for outrageous stories. They then fake an out-sized outrage at the outrageous story and spread it around the evangelical universe with amazing speed. A single example undergoes baptism to become the universal experience. In Strachan’s words, “This video went viral.” Millions of evangelicals hear television preachers breathlessly repeat the outrageous story. Soon, these millions and millions of followers are convinced that the end is near, that the enemy is at the gates, and the people must be protected. There can be no doubt of the side Strachan has chosen. His construction of the enemy is racist. Pillar number two falls and the house of Strachan barely stands.
The System
The third populist trope can be identified as the “system.” As defined by evangelicals, the “system” is an amalgamation that once represented the original conception of pure, biblical Christianity. The system contains the 14 fundamentals of the Christian faith. Strachan’s description of the system is an important transition stage in his narrative. Here he reveals what he believes wokeness and Critical Race Theory really threaten: the fundamental doctrines. In the foreword to Christianity and Wokeness, John MacArthur sounds the alarm: “Gospel doctrines like original sin, atonement, justification, and the glory of Christ are being eclipsed by lectures about social inequities and ethnic injustices that can never be atoned for.”
The system is Christian fundamentalism. In Strachan’s telling, the system has been contaminated by biblical criticism, a socialist reading of the Bible, liberal scholars, moral decay, and theological chicanery. Because the system has degenerated, other, more radical means are necessary to prevent the enemy’s impending victory. Protect the doctrines; forget the oppressed.
Strachan’s indictments of “wokeness” rely upon the recitation of an array of biblical texts that are open to a variety of meanings, but Strachan confidently places them into the straitjacket of biblical literalism – the system’s holy book. Even while claiming to only be holding a Bible in his hand, Strachan and his tribe also hold whips, chains, instruments of torture, and ropes. Strange company for the Bible, don’t you think? When the system falls as the product of systemic racism, the house of Strachan is doomed.
The Apocalyptic
The final trope of populism is the apocalyptic. Despite his denial of being apocalyptic, Strachan’s apocalyptic tropes are ever-present features of his work. He bemoans the victory of liberalism and insists that current evangelicals must be more confrontational and diligent in defeating the “powers and the principalities.” Here is the scorched earth explosion of the fearful apocalyptic trope. Strachan exemplifies the type of white man so eloquently exposed in Casey Ryan Kelly’s Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood. Strachan, Strachan views the resolution to wokeness as only possible through the destruction of a liberal Christianity and a feminized society. Strachan exhibits melancholia for better days when “fundamentalist Christians” allegedly but never actually ruled the Christian world. Strachan tries to put the world right again by disinterring the bones of the mostly discredited theology of fundamentalism. Strachan’s work is, at the end, a melancholic grieving for a lost world that never existed.
For example, Strachan’s attack on wokeness comes right out of the Ken Ham playbook of attacking evolution as the primordial enemy. Ham, of course, is prominently mentioned in Christianity and Wokeness. This is the Creation Museum salesman who thinks “evolution” is the cause of every disaster in history. Ham even claims that evolution caused racism; Strachan incredulously agrees. Some of the parallel expressions deserve attention. Evolution is a godless concept; so is wokeness. Evolution is just a theory; wokeness is a theory and it is rooted in socialism.
The apocalyptic trope reveals the primary weakness of Strachan’s argument. It’s too fearful, too dualistic, and too exaggerated. His work sounds like a five-alarm fire. The words “danger” (18 times), “threats” (14 times), and “afraid”/“fear” (18 times) pepper the book. According to Strachan and his endorsing pastors, we can forget climate change, nuclear war, poverty, and starvation, because wokeness is the greatest danger in history.
Like Strachan, evangelicals critiquing wokeness are logrollers attempting to stay upright on a log free-floating in a body of water. They slip, they slide, they elide, and they fall into the muddy water. The house built on sand falls.
Concluding Rhetorical Observations
Strachan has a simplistic explanation of how he himself is not a racist. He argues he is not racist because he has “friends of different skin colors and different backgrounds,” and “loves different cultural products from other communities.” Then there’s the ordinary, knee-jerk white response: “I’m not a racist; I have black friends.” And his claims to like “soul” food and the agility of black basketball players would be laughable if he wasn’t so serious.
Strachan dances around the racial pole but he is awkward, condescending, and would never survive the first cut on “Dancing with the Stars”. While he bends every effort to absolve his tribe of the “evangelical’s rac(e/ist) problem, he fails. For example, he attacks the high fees Coates receives for speaking engagements. This has nothing to do with the arguments of Coates. In fact, Christianity and Wokeness can be read as one long ad homimen argument.
Most damaging, Strachan attempts to appear non-racist by embracing ideas that belong to wokeness while claiming that these ideas really belong to traditional Christianity: “I’m not saying I am woke, I’m just saying that there’s some good stuff the wokeness movement has stolen from Christian teaching.” Strachan uses paralipsis to say two things at once – denying while at the same time affirming. Strachan confesses that he wants “societal harmony across backgrounds and skin colors and peace in ethnic tension.” He admits that there have been “massive failings in American and Western history, namely long and sustained patterns of racist thought and practice. He is “troubled by Christians’ complicity with racism in the past.” Strachan even enjoys global culture!
In all of this, Strachan sounds like a man whose racist rehab program went all wrong.
Only a literalist could conclude that a metaphor like wokeness is the greatest threat to human existence. Absurd may be the only word worth repeating. I am left with words from Matthew’s Gospel: “And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”
1 “I see right through your work. You have a reputation for vigor and zest, but you’re dead, stone-dead.” (The Message).
2 Barbara Biesecker, “No time for mourning: The rhetorical production of the melancholic citizen-subject in the war on terror.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 147-169.
3 There have been more people killed by oppression than the number of people Ken Ham claims died in the flood.
4 Donovan Schaefer puts it clearly: “Bodies that once felt like the unchallenged masters of their space—white bodies, male bodies, cis bodies, straight bodies, rich bodies, citizen bodies—are being confronted, more and more, with a demand to respond to the violence trailing in the wake of the comforts and pleasures they enjoy.”
5 Michael J. Lee, “The Populist Chameleon: The People’s Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame”. Quarterly Journal of Speech Volume 92, 2006: Pages 355-378.
6 Harry Boyte, “The Making of a Democratic Populist: A Profile,” in The New Populism: The Politics of Empowerment, ed. H. Boyte and F. Riessman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986, 8.
Ken Ham the Huckster
by William Trollinger
Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) are busy promoting the idea that the “Ark Encounter and Creation Museum Are Groaning” under the weight of “record crowds” flooding into these tourist sites, sites that are devoted to making the case that the universe was created in six 24-hour days 6000 years ago and to celebrating the watery slaughter of up to (according to AiG) twenty billion human beings.
Record crowds? As is often the case with Ham, the facts just don’t add up.
Regarding Ark Encounter, every month the intrepid Dan Phelps (president and founder of the Kentucky Paleontological Society) requests the “safety assessment form” – the total amount raised that month from the 50 cent “safety fee” added to each Ark Encounter ticket — from the city of Williamstown. What this means is that we don’t have to rely on the unreliable Ken Ham. We can check Ham’s claim of record crowds at the Ark against actual numbers.
And here’s what we see when it comes to Ark attendance (and note that we don’t have the numbers for 2016, which is the year the Ark opened):
- Summer 2017 248,787 (note: these numbers are for July/August)
- Summer 2018 347,929
- Summer 2019 388,704
- Summer 2020 144,628 (note: COVID impact)
- Summer 2021 328,465
- AG 2017 106,161
- AG 2018 98,106
- AG 2019 104,350
- AG 2020 46,452 (note: COVID impact)
- AG 2021 83,826
One does not have to look very hard to see that, whatever the AiG fog machine might be spewing, Ark Encounter is not experiencing record crowds. In fact, this past August saw the lowest attendance in the Ark’s history (save for the COVID year).
But I can assure you that these numbers – these facts – will not stop Ken Ham from telling untruths. This is what he does. For example, in a successful effort to convince Williamstown to issue $62m of junk bonds to get the Ark project started – a nice deal made even nicer by stipulating that 75% of what the Ark would have paid in property taxes would instead go to paying off the loan – Ham and company promised attendance numbers that Ark Encounter has never, ever come close to reaching.
With each passing year the projected numbers become even more ludicrous, given that the AiG promoters assured the town leaders that the Ark would enjoy a 7% annual attendance increase for the first decade of the big boat’s existence.
Ham and AiG apparently do not mind in the least that they have not come anywhere near the attendance they promised Williamstown. They certainly have never lamented this shortcoming. But why would they? They had their $62m worth of bonds, and they have and will have their very substantial tax forgiveness. That is, they have their money.
So they have moved on. With their stories of “record crowds” bursting the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, they are now seeking – as the attached image indicates – to secure $17 million in donations to expand both sites.
Ken Ham. Ever the huckster.
Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump: An interview with Stephanie A. Martin
by Patrick Thomas
Sam (Stephanie A. Martin) is a scholar of public address and political communication, with a particular interest in the public discourses of conservative social movements, especially evangelical voters. She has written or edited three books, most prominently Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (University of Alabama Press, 2021). Her research has also been published in top journals including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Visual Communication Quarterly. Martin frequently appears as an expert commentator and consultant for news stories, and has appeared in USA Today, NPR, NBC, the Boston Globe, the Texas Tribune, and The Dallas Morning News, among others.
We are thrilled to feature Sam’s work and to welcome another new voice to the RightingAmerica blog!
- Your book examines storytelling as it relates to evangelicals’ political support for Donald Trump. This support is well-documented, so can you say a bit about where your study comes from and what insights you’re contributing to the study of contemporary American evangelicalism?
My study reaches back a decade, to the end of the Bush Administration. In part, the questions I ask percolated in response to Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank’s book wondered why so many highly religious but not wealthy voters from his home state of Kansas had become such strong supporters of the Republican Party and their platform of low taxes and business deregulation, and had abandoned the Democrats who agitate on behalf of the middle-class, marginalized, and working poor. As Frank might have written had he wished to put it so plainly: Why is a party that seems to be against poor people supported by so many, well, poor people? And, again, why don’t those poor people care about others like themselves? Isn’t that supposed to be the Christian way?
As an answer, Frank reasoned that evangelical believers privilege social issues at election time, and so subordinate other political priorities in order to escalate values questions in the public sphere. They vote for GOP candidates who spend campaign seasons promising to pass abortion restrictions, crack down on the encroachment of Hollywood values into middle America, and defend the traditional family structure, and they cast these votes at any cost, to any constituency. The problem with this strategy, Frank wrote, is that it ultimately fails. When Republican candidates become Republican officeholders, they forget all about those values issues their evangelical base holds dear, preferring to use their actual governing time passing tax cuts, deregulating business, and eliminating the social safety net. All in all, it is a classic bait and switch.
Frank’s answer is compelling but, to me, it always felt incomplete. For one thing, I had spent time in evangelical churches and had evangelical friends, and I knew they did care about the people and the issues Frank claimed they spurned. I found his answer reductive or, at least, incomplete. My evangelical friends do care about poor people, and they care about themselves, too. But they also have other political priorities. Votes and elections are very blunt instruments—people can only vote for one side or the other. Political motivations are complicated. So, my research is trying to understand the nuance between the votes that get cast, and the stories and thinking that sits behind them.
- Your research uncovers conservative White evangelicals’ epistemic commitments through a study of rhetorical strategies employed in evangelical sermons from American megachurches. In your introduction, you mention that many of these commitments are based on a “founder’s rhetoric.” What features characterize founder’s rhetoric, and how does it play out in the sermons you study?
Founder’s rhetoric is fascinating, and is related to the idea of Christian Nationalism that scholars like John Fea and Samuel Perry, among others, write about. It refers to language that evangelicals use when they frame their American citizenship. Founder’s rhetoric positions evangelicals as the rightful heirs and so natural defenders of the values of the truest Americans: The men who founded the country and knew best what they intended for the future. This rhetoric and storytelling style—which is very popular among pastors— situates a conservative Protestant narrative and conservative Protestant truth at the center of the American story, from the beginning. This narrative claims that those men who led the Revolution and wrote the founding documents were not only Christians, but conservative evangelicals, who intended for the United States to be a nation with God at the center of the public sphere. Moreover, these are the people who decided, once and for all, the character of the nation, forever. Because of this, many evangelicals hold a worldview of the United States as a particular kind of nation, whose citizens have particular kinds of (traditional) values. Reaching back to Thomas Frank’s argument about why these believers might not vote with economics or vulnerable constituencies in mind, I argue that founder’s rhetoric offers part of the answer. For many evangelical voters, the constituent of foremost concern is always the nation itself. Defending the country and maintaining its presumed status as the most “exceptional” land always comes before any person or group, no matter how marginalized or at-risk. Thus, believers might well be worried about “poor people,” but their foremost political concern is restoring the country to the founder’s intentions, and keeping God at the center of the public sphere.
- Part of what is so compelling about your book is the digital rhetorical ethnographic methodology you develop to examine American megachurches across their local cultures. What are the features of this methodological approach, and how might other rhetorical scholars benefit from such an approach?
Digital rhetorical ethnography is a hybrid methodology that allowed me to go both wide and deep into American evangelicalism, as it exists on the Internet. Ethnography, as it is traditionally practiced, allows a researcher to join a single community and participate as much as possible as a member—to learn the rhythms of a people, including their language, their customs, their habits, and more. It is a way to “deeply hang out”—to use Clifford Geertz’s famous phrase—in a place, to study a culture systematically and respectfully. But I wanted to do more than this. I wanted to ascertain whether the rhetoric—by which I mean the stories pastors told— in California sounded much like the ones pastors told in Florida. I also wanted to know if the stories in California and Florida resembled those being told in Minnesota. To find out, I had to find a way to attend church in a lot of places, at once. Enter, the digital church. Megachurches across the country have created vibrant online spaces where individuals can find virtual community and join believers in the act of worship. By going to church online, I was able to both shift and freeze time, to attend church all across the nation, at the same “hour” (even though I might really be attending days or weeks after a pastor preached a message), and on the same “day.” So where other ethnographers of evangelicalism have had to re-order their lives to join a church or a movement, I was able to “join” the digital church across the evangelical internet while also remaining in my own home. To write Decoding the Digital Church, I compiled a collection of sermons that spanned years, and included hundreds of messages from 37 different states. This allowed me to understand how evangelicals tell a political narrative about the United States that is incredibly uniform and powerful, and that is much more nuanced than popular media tropes tend to suggest.
As far as how other researchers might use this methodology, my hope is they would. Many other such digital communities exist online for discovery, though they may not be immediately obvious. While not every experience can be replicated via digitization, the fact of digital space makes it possible to move into the quiet of one’s own home or office and then go around the loudest voices in the public sphere, to enter some of the most important sites of public engagement. This act, in turn, opens possibilities for creating new conversations or suggesting new stories across constituencies. Doing the work to discover these narratives is long and painstaking (it took me nearly ten years!), but it reaches beyond easy understanding—and misunderstanding, as well. I think it may well represent some of the most important work waiting for us to move beyond the polarization and division now happening in the public sphere.
- Your analysis focuses primarily on evangelical rhetorics surrounding the 2008 Great Recession and the 2016 presidential campaign. What narrative tropes have evangelical pastors maintained over the last 13 or so years? What aspects of these narratives have changed?
Probably the most important narrative pattern that I discovered is what I call the “rhetoric of active-passivism.” This rhetoric was especially popular during the 2016 campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, each of whom had historically poor approval ratings and were also perceived as lacking in character. So, the pastors who I listened to during my research faced the task of talking about the election, but also acknowledging how debased the whole thing seemed. To negotiate this tension, pastors framed the main characters in the election—Clinton and Trump—as unlikeable, but to the side of what was most important when it came to thinking about politics. While it was true the public sphere had become depraved, pastors still wanted their audiences to participate and to vote. Casting a ballot was their basic duty as citizens and believers. Doing so honored the American constitutional legacy, along with those soldiers who had died to protect freedom and democracy, including the voting franchise. Voting represents the “active” part of “active-passivism.”
But for those who were worried about not having a good choice in either Clinton or Trump, pastors wanted their audiences and congregations to take heart. They reminded their hearers to remember God’s providence. God is always in control, they said, even during campaign seasons, and even when the presidential candidates were dreadful. Pastors further encouraged evangelical believers to embrace the idea that they were dual citizens—residents of heaven first, and the United States second. This meant that no matter what happened in the election, true Christians were always already protected and safe as denizens of the Kingdom of God. So once a believer had voted—and this was the crucial rhetorical step—that same believer could divest their interest in the election’s ultimate outcome. Whatever the result of a vote, God had ordained that result and so God would make of it whatever He chose. Because God could be trusted, true Christians should trust Him, full stop. In any event, good or bad, the Bible-believing evangelical could be sure God maintained divine control and would protect His subject in love. By rhetorically emphasizing trust—and this is key—pastors exempted believers from any bad effects their votes might cause, either to the nation or to marginalized, at-risk constituencies. Perceived “good” outcomes, like reduced access to abortion, lower taxes, or laws defending traditional marriage were because Christians came together to vote for these things. Perceived “bad” outcomes, as were seen with children separated at the border, white supremacists finding support in the White House, or women being disparaged by the President of the United States were not for evangelicals to understand, but for God to work out. In effect, active-passivism allows those who speak it to offload their democratic responsibility and agency onto God, and so refuse responsibility for harms that could be traced back to the very votes they cast.
The rhetoric of active-passivism also marks a discursive shift in the rhetoric of non-elite American evangelicals. My research suggests that the pastors of the nation’s largest churches have begun to leave out of their political narratives those hot-button issues—the values rhetoric—that outsiders imagine takes up so much of the conversation inside of these institutions, and that is often used by elite conservative evangelicals when they talk about politics. This is surprising because popular media framing of Bible-believing Christians typically situates them as foremost concerned over the rhetoric of the so-called culture wars, as they are framed as opposition to a set of conservative values issues. However, that the discourse inside churches may less heavily emphasize opposition to abortion or gay marriage, among other issues, does not necessarily mean they have lost salience or that these voters are open to persuasion or changing their minds. Instead, I argue this conversation is now submerged under active-passivism. Thus, evangelical voters have created a storytelling logic that lets them have it both ways. They can both vote and be interested in politics and say politics don’t matter, at all. Via the rhetoric of active-passivism, pastors and other evangelical believers can both claim to be on God’s side when it comes to what happens to the American democracy and the American democratic system, and to say God isn’t worried about it, at all.
- Related to the question above, how do you think the social movements (#MeToo and #BLM) and political activities (the Mueller investigation, the Kavanaugh nomination, anti-immigration Executive Orders) that characterized Trump’s presidency have impacted evangelicals’ storytelling since 2016?
Conservative evangelicals are trying to talk about these issues, and there is no one approach that characterizes everyone. When it comes to Black Lives Matter (BLM), many pastors and believers acknowledge the problem of racism, but emphasize how unity and reconciliation among citizens are more important—or more workable solutions—than engaging in systemic change or acknowledging systemic injustice. By emphasizing reconciliation between people of different races, evangelicals frame the problem of racism as being solvable through creating understanding and building relationships. If white people and black people would only come together as friends to acknowledge and forgive the past, the nation could heal. Crucially, this reconciliation is framed as two-sided. It is about restoration and imagines a past based in equality, rather than one rife with injustice of that included disparity of access to opportunity. It also privileges conversations—talking and understanding—over taking direct action. At most, white citizens are called to repentance; never to reparation.
In terms of #MeToo and the follow-on hashtag #ChurchToo, the story is complicated. Many evangelicals and evangelical women embrace complementarian theology and resist feminism and feminist ideology. However, there is a sizeable and growing constituency of born-again women who are actively challenging the inherent patriarchy within evangelicalism. I have written a lot about Beth Moore, the popular speaker and Bible study writer, who has been especially vocal in asking evangelical leaders, particularly evangelical men, to consider how the emphasis on female submission has curated a sexist culture that is rife with abuse. For example, some might remember when, just before the 2016 election, the Washington Post leaked audio tapes of Donald Trump seeming to brag about treating women badly, maybe even criminally so. Evangelical leaders including James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. said they were disappointed, but refused to withdraw their support. In response, Moore tweeted, “Are we sickened? Yes. Surprised? NO.” Since then, Moore has continued to gain and lose followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as she has pushed back against calls for women to remain silent and subordinated to men within the church. In March 2021, she announced she no longer identified as a Southern Baptist or with the Southern Baptist Convention—as she had her whole life, and she distanced herself from complementarian theology. While she did not say why she had left the Southern Baptist Convention, many speculated it was because the Convention had become too sexist, while refusing to wholly repudiate its racist past (and present). The best example she could set for other women was to leave.
- Of course, you’re celebrating the recent release of your book (as you should!), but can you say a bit more about your upcoming work or your next book project?
Getting Decoding the Digital Church across the finish line was a big project. It has been nice to take a deep breath. I am now beginning research on a new project, which is writing a history of the case that went to the Supreme Court in 2017, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. This is a very different project than Decoding the Digital Church, because it involves telling a story and getting it right—and doing so in a way that is honest and fair to both sides—but is less interpretive than the work I’ve done before. But I’ll still be hanging out with conservative evangelicals, a community that I both love and shake my head at. I’m also enjoying extra time with my husband and twin seven-year-old boys. They are growing up too fast and it has been a joy to spend time with them over the past several months.
Many thanks to Sam for her interview! Decoding the Digital Church is now available from the University of Alabama Press! Use code DChurch30 for 30% off at checkout!
What Did Trump Know? The Presidency, Prosperity, and Pentecostals
by Dara Coleby Delgado
Dara Coleby Delgado is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Black Studies at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. Coleby Delgado is a third-generation Pentecostal, reared in the Apostolic/Oneness tradition. In 2019, she completed her doctoral work in theology under the direction of William V. Trollinger at the University of Dayton. There, Coleby Delgado examined the life and work of Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, founder of the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, using a social-historical frame that employed both feminist/womanist theology and Critical Race Theory. Currently, Coleby Delgado is working on her forthcoming book on the same topic. In addition, she is a 2018-2019 AAUW Dissertation Fellow, and she has written about Pentecostals in scholarly journals and popular news outlets alike.
Dr. Coleby Delgado’s essay originally appeared at the Political Theology Network. It is reposted here with permission from the author.
Since announcing his run in 2015, Donald J. Trump has enjoyed almost unwavering evangelical support. Included in the evangelical lot of those who believe that “God wanted Trump to be president” are Pentecostal-Charismatics.
In “President Trump’s Hidden Religious Base: Pentecostal-Charismatic Celebrities,” Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne observe, “Not everyone considers Pentecostals and Charismatics to be evangelicals, but they are to this president.” Why did Trump need to categorize Pentecostal-Charismatics as evangelical? What did he, or his team, understand about this group, and what might this preference disclose about politics, race, and religion in the United States?
Without question, the Trump campaign knew that American evangelicalism formed a spurious alliance with the Republican Party in the 1970s. Anthea Butler notes that this shift rendered evangelicals, as a group, “not just religiously or culturally white” but also, “politically white.” By aligning with the Republican Party to sustain cultural whiteness, evangelicals became a powerful voting bloc and a formidable lobbying presence on Capitol Hill.
But in their collective overt appeals to Pentecostals as evangelicals, the Trump campaign proved savvy and highly pragmatic. By taking a cue from the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), who first coupled Pentecostals with evangelicals in 1942, Trump significantly extended his political reach among conservatives—because while Baptists are fully 15.4 percent of the adult US population, for example, there are something like 10 million Pentecostals and charismatics in the US. This isn’t always obvious in ways that demographers track denominational categories. But somehow Trump’s campaign circuit targeted several non-denominational megachurches, whose memberships sometimes reach into the tens of thousands and make up a big slice of the evangelical pie.
If the world of megachurches is a challenge to trace, it might be even harder to navigate from within. Yet, Trump seemed almost drawn to Pentecostal-Charismatics and their sumptuous houses of worship. Most likely he was drawn to Pentecostals-Charismatics’ affinity for him: for their ready appreciation of his affluence and wealth. Of course, Pentecostal-Charismatics’ affinity for wealth and affluence did not begin with Trump: a whole sector of Pentecostalism runs on the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel emphasizes divine health and wealth as the reward for extraordinary faith. It provides ecclesial jargon for the neo-liberal values of American evangelicals.
In a capitalist society, the prosperity gospel perpetuates the cultural myth within the Protestant work ethic, insisting that health and wealth are the exclusive benefits of those who attend to some esoteric formula of hard work, thrift, and resourcefulness. It thereby ignores problems around access, privilege, and structural/systemic oppression. Preferring instead narratives of personal success (sans socialist ideas of collective care, communal responsibility, and shared resources), the prosperity gospel, much like the evangelical doctrine of salvation, is woefully individualistic. Trump readily became emblematic of this popular theology.
Critically, like evangelicalism as a whole, adherents of the prosperity gospel are not all white. Take, for example, Darrell Scott, the pastor and co-founder of the New Spirit Revival Center, “a Bible-based, Non-Denominational church with a Pentecostal/Charismatic persuasion” in Cleveland Heights, OH. Scott is a Black evangelical who so embraces the unholy merger of Christianity and American capitalism that he promotes a disturbing “bootstrap” philosophy—one that reduces the state of Black America to wealth-building sans a critical examination of the impact of systemic racism in this country. In 2015, Scott was introduced as part of Donald Trump’s Transition Team.
Though Scott pastors a predominantly Black church with a Black Pentecostal religio-racial aesthetics, in joining Trump’s team, he performed what Butler calls “Christian Blackness,”—the performative expectations and values of the Religious Right vis-a-vis the Christian Coalition of the late 1980s.
Noting Scott’s surrogacy for Trump, David Wiegel asked “What makes a Black Cleveland Pastor back Donald Trump?” Yet, I am more inclined to ask another question: why did Trump take an interest in Scott? In truth, at the time of their first meeting at Trump Tower in 2011, Scott was a fledgling televangelist with aspirations of being a leading megachurch pastor. Essentially, Scott lacked appreciable religio-social capital in the Pentecostal-Charismatic arena and the Black Church in particular. In other words, in the Black Pentecostal world, Darrell Scott was no T.D. Jakes.
Recalling the details of that first meeting, a flattered Scott claims to have found Trump to be “a prayerful Christian” and not the irascible business tycoon portrayed on television. Moreover, he said that he left this first meeting believing that Trump was “someone who would fight with [him] to defend his community and his faith.”
In Scott, Trump found a black ally for whom his partnership could make a material difference. By 2015, Scott’s wife Belinda was a failed reality TV star, but in exchange for his steadfast, if not recalcitrant support of a Trump presidency, Scott gained access to previously unimaginable platforms and media outlets. Eventually, he assumed an advisory role as a member of Trump’s executive transition team and, later, an opportunity to co-found the National Diversity Coalition for Trump.
Amidst the growing number of Pentecostal surrogates, the media coverage of Trump’s evangelical base, and the burgeoning scholarship around the history of evangelicalism in America and its political influence, no one seemed to inquire about what Trump knew about Pentecostals as a distinct voting bloc and how he imagined someone like Scott advancing his appeal among its Black constituency?
I submit that Trump intuited that Pentecostals, especially those with an affinity for prosperity, revered the materially “blessed.” Consequently, his purported wealth and public persona made him particularly desirable, if not enviable. He also understood—what Wiegel and others did not—that Pentecostals like Scott tout morality, but immorality itself is never really a deal-breaker. From the biblical King David to televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, practitioners of prosperity theology are trained to believe that “sin” does not preclude one from a protagonist role in the divine narrative. Being categorized as the anointed/most blessed one, divine protagonist Trump would not be disqualified but rather readily absolved.
Beyond believing that the anointing which is evinced by material blessing includes impunity, Trump-supporting Pentecostals of the prosperity sort also believe that the anointing is transferable. Because blessings are contrived as a matter of proximity, endorsing Trump meant being aligned with God’s favor. Sadly, this cast of religionists, eager to be prosperous “like Trump,” failed to consider how in doing so, they became co-conspirators of the injustices fashioned in our inequitable and capitalistic society.
Following the November election, several Pentecostal-Charismatics either have repented of their false predictions or nuanced their original claims. Still, there are those whose loyalty to Trump remains unbroken. In choosing to double down on their allegiance to Trump, Pentecostal-Charismatics have joined the fray of other supporters in normalizing false political propaganda and conspiracy thinking—with theories ranging from the precarious state of American religious freedom to the events of January 6.
Scott, in particular, took to his iHeartRadio program to assert that on January 6, Congress set up Donald Trump. According to Scott, their goal was to impeach Trump to prevent him from holding public office again. He went on to say that
“The Capitol riots were pre-planned, and they knew days in advance that it was coming. The Capitol Police were told to hold back on the response[;] they were given a stand-down order. This was no coup, it was no insurrection, it was no attempt to overturn the election. They were told to stand down. It was a setup.”
Here, Scott is acting as Trump’s protector; in doing so, he is proving to the former president that election results aside, he is an uncompromised surrogate who will attend to the Trump cause even if it means defying reason or logic. But why? I contend that Scott’s discourse reflects a larger gendered [Black] Pentecostal hermeneutic given to a radical practice of obeisance to male authority. Often summed up by paraphrasing Psalm 105:15—“touch not my anointing and do my prophets no harm”—this form of radical deference to God-ordained authority shows up as a form of Pentecostal anti-Donatism that shies away from holding leaders accountable for their actions as long as they continue to do the work of the ministry on behalf of the church.
In the classical sense, the Donatist controversy focused on the unity and holiness of the church. In opposition to Donatism, St. Augustine maintained ex opere operato: “by the work having been performed.” In short, anti-Donatists like St. Augustine felt that the sacrament’s validity does not depend on the sinlessness of the minister but the celebration of the sacrament. Moving away from the context of origin to our contemporary religio-political climate where Trump is King Cyrus, we can understand Scott’s claim that Trump was set up as an extension of his reverence for Trump as both most blessed and commander-in-chief. By saying that Trump was “set up,” Scott solidified his conviction that everything Trump did as president was above reproach—including but was not limited to inciting a riot.
Today, in the post-election and post-January 6th shadows of the Trump Era, the roll call of evangelicals who paved the way for a Trump White House very rarely, if ever, includes Scott. Generally, that honor goes to Scott’s white counterparts. For all of his work, he is now little more than a footnote in this larger story. Although he still pastors, his political impact has been reduced to 140 characters on Twitter and a poorly publicized memoir.
Is Scott’s less than subtle erasure from the annals of the Trump Era because of his ineffectiveness at getting the former president the Black Pentecostal-Charismatic vote? Or, is it because he was just one [Black] pawn among many in the political game of evangelical chess? Whatever the case, failing to include Scott in this chapter of America’s religious history is a grave mistake.
For all of his vitriol and lambasting and the shame he brought to the legacy of Black evangelicals, Scott is symbolic of a small but noteworthy voting bloc of Black evangelicals. To disregard his role during the Trump Era is to miss an opportunity to interrogate Black Pentecostal-Charismatics as a distinct group with particular political sensibilities.
Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars and Anticommunism in America: An Interview with Carl Weinberg (a.k.a., the perfect post for Labor Day)
by William Trollinger
Carl R. Weinberg is Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Indiana University Bloomington, where is also the Director of the PACE Institute for Role-Immersive Teaching and Learning. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).
He is also the author of Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America, which has just come out from Cornell University Press. We here at rightingamerica are very pleased that Carl is willing to be interviewed about this very important book.
- You have been at this project for a while. What originally prompted you, a labor historian, to head down this research road?
First, my own background in socialist activism acquainted me with the fact that Marxists liked evolutionary science. I learned that in 1983 when I walked into the Militant bookstore in Washington, D.C. and bought a copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin, which I still have. Knowing that socialists and communists were pro-evolutionary made it likely that antievolutionists might notice and point this out. Which of course they did.
Second, when I was researching my PhD dissertation on Illinois labor history in the World War I era, I came across articles about a pair of inveterate anti-socialist activists, both former Socialists and converts to the Catholic faith: David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery. Reading Goldstein’s autobiography, I learned that a pivotal moment in his conversion away from socialism was his horror upon reading Frederick Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in which Engels affirms the truth of humanity’s ape ancestry. This always stuck in my mind and suggested some possible connection between anti-socialism and anti-evolutionism.
Last but not least, in 2002, when I was teaching at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega, Georgia, the nearby Cobb County school board ordered that a creationist-inspired disclaimer sticker be attached to all district high school biology textbooks. It read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” Pro-evolution parents, led by Jeffrey Selman, sued Cobb County, while other parents defended the school board’s decision. All of this prompted me to offer a course on the history of the controversy—which I’ve now taught at four different institutions—and set me on the road to writing this book. So, thank you Cobb County?
- Why the title, Red Dynamite? How does this title connect with your book’s central argument, that – as you assert – “Christian conservatives have succeeded in demonizing Darwin” by “convinc[ing] their followers that evolutionary thought promotes immoral social, sexual, and political behavior, undermining existing God-given standards and hierarchies of power”?
I stole, ahem, borrowed the title from George McCready Price, the godfather of young-earth creationism. He used it as a title of a chapter of a book he wrote in 1925 called The Predicament of Evolution. Price saw evolution and communism as twin evils. “Marxian Socialism and the radical criticism of the Bible,” Price wrote, “are now proceeding hand in hand with the doctrine of organic evolution to break down all those ideas of morality, all those concepts of the sacredness of marriage and of private property, upon which Occidental civilization has been built during the past thousand years.” For Price, and those who followed him, the main problem with evolution was NOT that its claims lacked scientific evidence or even that it contradicted the Book of Genesis. Rather, evolution was bad because it made people who believed in it do bad things. It made us behave in an immoral, “beastly” or “animalistic” way. In the 1920s, perhaps the height of Red Dynamite rhetoric, Price, William Bell Riley, Gerald Winrod, J. Frank Norris and others explicitly connected that bad behavior—centered around sex and violence—with evolutionary science and communism. What really concerned them was not biological evolution, but social evolution—particularly the notion that morality can evolve as society changes.
- To what degree were/are fundamentalists correct to connect Darwinism with Marxism/communism?
They were more correct than we commonly think. To be sure, the vast majority of evolutionary biologists were and are not communists or socialists. But left-wing “social Darwinism” was real. As I show in my first chapter, Marx and Engels, the founders of the modern communist movement, were fervent evolutionists. So were the leaders of the American socialist movement in the early twentieth century. As were the central Russian Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky. In an interview with Max Eastman, Trotsky explained that when he was thrown in prison by the Tsarist regime for labor organizing, he was attracted to Marxism but still resisted its lure. Reading Darwin in prison, Trotsky recalled, “destroyed the last of my ideological prejudices” against a fully materialistic outlook. Darwin, Trotsky told Eastman, “stood for me like a mighty doorkeeper at the entrance to the temple of the universe.” I love that quote. In any event, the fundamentalists weren’t totally imagining things.
- Most readers will be unfamiliar with the story you tell about the Scopes Trial in your introduction, particularly regarding John Scopes and the town of Dayton, Tennessee. Could you share a little about this, and explain why this story of the Scopes Trial is so germane to Red Dynamite?
As many people have learned, high school science teacher John Scopes went on trial in 1925 for violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee law that made teaching human evolution illegal. The usual story of the trial focuses on the legal titans clashing in (and outside) the courtroom—Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution. John Scopes, who never testified, seems a hapless victim of circumstances, almost a footnote to the story. As is Dayton, the sleepy, Southern town that sought to use the trial as a publicity stunt to revive its economic fortunes.
The real story is much more interesting and relates directly to my anticommunist theme. It was no accident that Scopes agreed to serve as a test case of the Butler Act. His father, Thomas Scopes, was a British-born Socialist labor organizer who arrived in America with a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species under his arm. Thomas Scopes raised his son to question everything including organized religion and the capitalist war machine. And the elder Scopes was well acquainted with Socialist activists who proudly flouted norms of capitalist morality. Not shockingly, on the first day of the trial in Dayton, a front-page story in the Chattanooga Daily News, outed the elder Scopes as a dangerous socialist, Red-baiting the younger Scopes by association.
The real Dayton, Tennessee was not isolated and sleepy, but rather a bustling center of coal production and labor unrest. English investors sunk millions into the area’s mines and blast furnaces to produce coke for the steel industry. Their paternalistic labor policies aimed at labor peace. But in the early 1890s, East Tennessee union coal miners revolted against the hated convict lease system, which aimed to undermine wages and labor solidarity by pitting imprisoned (mostly) African American workers against free white workers. Dayton miners signed a petition in sympathy, even though the rebels were accused of being “anarchists” and “communists.” Soon after, repeated mine explosions in Dayton that killed dozens, along with repeated wage cuts, produced a series of strikes (some involving dynamite attacks on company facilities) and the formation of a local branch of the United Mine Workers of America.
The real historical context of the Scopes Trial, that is, points to the real stakes in the controversy over evolution—what kind of society do we want to live in, and whose morality will prevail?
- One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the way in which you connect a century of creationist anticommunists, from George McCready Price and William Bell Riley to Henry Morris and Ken Ham. Could you say a little about this lineage, in the process noting both the continuities and the changes in the message?
The creationist anticommunism that Price launched in the World War I era runs through “creation-science pioneer Henry Morris’s work from the 1940s through the 1980s. In his first book, That You Might Believe (1946), Morris warned readers about the “deadly philosophies” of Marx and Nietzsche who were “profoundly influenced” by Darwin. Thought it’s rarely noticed, Morris and Whitcomb’s young-earth creationist blockbuster, The Genesis Flood (1961) also featured anticommunist arguments. In a section tellingly titled, “The Importance of the Question” (of whether evolution or creation was valid)—almost certainly authored by Morris—the authors explain that evolutionary science was the “backbone” of communist philosophy. Communism, they write, “is the most dangerous and widespread philosophy opposing Christianity today.” Morris’s magnum opus, The Long War Against God (1989) expands his anticommunist focus to charge that the pro-evolution Karl Marx was a practicing Satanist, linked to an international conspiratorial cabal.
But creationist anticommunism has evolved. By the time that Morris-protégé Ken Ham founded Answers in Genesis (AiG) in 1994, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and “secular humanism” had replaced communism as the bugbear of the right. Whereas the creation museum run by the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, California, showcased Karl Marx as a (possibly) Satanic evolution supporter (and under new ownership, it still does to this day!), the AiG Creation Museum avoids explicit anticommunism. Still, the link between evolution and communism rears its head in AiG publications. The Pocket Guide to Atheism (2014) includes an article by Bodie Hodge that attributes tens of millions of deaths to wars and revolutions led by various communist leaders. And Ken Ham has continued to link Marxism, evolution, and Satan. (See here.)
Creationist conspiracy theory has also morphed. When William Bell Riley wrote about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the 1930s, he cited Protocol No. 2 which claims that Darwinism and Marxism were part of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to demoralize the Christian masses and pave the way for the rule of the Antichrist. But after World War II, it became politically problematic to make the argument with the explicit Jew-hating language. Thus, when Henry Morris and Tim LaHaye wrote about evolution, communism, and conspiracy in the 1970s and 80s, they were more circumspect. In The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to Our Children (1983), LaHaye defended what his critics called “bizarre” allegations of an international plot, writing that “many people” believe in a real conspiracy fomented by the Illuminati, Bilderbergers, and the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations. Similarly, D. James Kennedy Ministries, with a long history of linking evolution and communism, says nothing today about Jews as such, but points to billionaire investor George Soros as the “master puppeteer.”
- In your epilogue you say the following: “From Trump’s reference to the Eucharist wafer as the ‘little cracker,’ to his rendering of 2 Corinthians as ‘two Corinthians,’ to his admission that he never asks forgiveness of God for his sins, he has difficulty convincing anyone that he is part of any Christian faith community. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that conservative evangelicals’ embrace of Trump is a radical departure from the norm.” Why do you say this?
A superficial analysis of Christian political commitments would suggest that evangelicals respond to “faith-based” appeals, and so it seems puzzling that so many (white) evangelicals would gravitate to such an obviously profane, un-religious character. And yet, if we take a look at the central characters in my book going back to the early twentieth century, we find that even if they expressed their ideas in a Christian, Bible-based idiom, their worldviews were deeply political in the broadest sense. They were ultimately concerned with the questions of power—who should wield it over whom and on what moral basis?
The clearest explanation of all this comes from Rev. Robert Jeffress, a vocal Trump supporter, an ally of the Institute for Creation Research, and pastor of the Dallas First Baptist Church. Asked how he could support Trump, Jeffress answered that if the American president were at war with ISIS, “I couldn’t care less about that leader’s temperament or his tone or his vocabulary. I want the meanest, toughest, son of a gun I can find.” It’s no accident that Jeffress grew up at First Baptist hearing Rev. W. A. Criswell preach, a fundamentalist and fierce segregationist, who inherited his role from prominent antievolutionist and anticommunist J. Frank Norris. As I note in the book, Norris retained the fanatical loyalties of his congregation at First Baptist in Fort Worth despite the fact that he stood trial for shooting a unarmed man to death in his church office (Norris claimed self-defense). It’s hard not to recall candidate Donald Trump’s boast that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
- Do you have any new projects in the works, or are you simply relaxing after having completed this terrific book?
The main project I’m working on is an author’s website where I can share a sample of the voluminous amount of material that didn’t make it into the book but is still relevant and compelling. How did twenty-first century Christian conservatives employ Red Dynamite rhetoric to demonize President Barack Obama? How does pioneering sex researcher Alfred J. Kinsey fit into my story? And why did I voluntarily get into an armored car and drive into Mexico with Tom Cantor, the owner of the Earth and Creation History Museum in Santee, California? Stay tuned.
Thanks Carl . . . and I can’t wait to read about the armored car excursion into Mexico!
Ken Ham and Tucker Carlson Agree: Leftists (i.e., Liberals and Democrats) are Satanic
by William Trollinger
Every time I think that Ken Ham cannot go any lower, he does. And he takes his followers with him.
On his Facebook page, Ham posted this image of a Daily Wire article entitled “’Satanic’: [Tucker] Carlson, [Jason] Whitlock Agree Left Driven by Ideas ‘In Direct Objection to God.’”
In this article Carlson claims that the idea that “some races are morally superior to other races” is one of “the core ideas of the Democratic Party.” This is nonsensically dreadful on so many levels, including the fact that white supremacists absolutely love Tucker Carlson – he speaks their language.
And in the end, so does Ken Ham, never mind all his assertions that he is against racism. If Ham were truly anti-racist, then one would expect him to speak out against white supremacist groups, to speak out against Carlson’s racist tropes, to have spoken out against the white nationalism and horrifying racism at the heart of the Insurrection, on and on and on. But Ham maintains a very convenient silence about all this, just as he maintains a very convenient silence about QAnon.
As regards Whitlock, it is not surprising that white conservatives love having an African American speak their language. But Whitlock’s grasp of American history is appallingly flawed. From the article:
I think a lot of what the Left supports is satanic. I’m just sorry. It’s in direct objection to God, in direct objection to the Judeo-Christian values that were at the foundation of this country . . . Yes, it was hard, but our Christian values compelled us to sacrifice our lives for the freedoms of other Americans, of slaves. And through the civil rights movement, our Christian values compelled us to take risks and fight for equality.
What? “Our”? “Us”? Does Whitlock not realize that millions of Bible-believing white evangelicals fought to preserve slavery? From Righting America:
In antebellum America millions of white Christians (in both the North and the South) held tight to a “plain-sense” reading of the Bible, one which, as Mark Noll has pointed out [in his brilliant The Civil War as a Theological Crisis], emphasized “the natural, commonsensical, ordinary meaning of the words” in order to construct a powerful argument justifying the enslavement of African Americans. These white Christians stood on their literal reading of the Word of God to issue forth a raft of proslavery polemics and to deliver an almost-infinite number of proslavery sermons; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese observed that, in the South, “evangelicals, having cited chapter and verse, successfully enlisted the Bible to unify the overwhelming majority of slaveholders and nonslaveholders in defense of slavery as ordained of God.” These white Christians argued that opponents of slavery, who struggled mightily to combat the straightforward biblical arguments of the proslavery advocates, were undermining the authority of the Bible with their unbiblical antislavery arguments that depended more on Christian experience, humanitarianism, and morality than on the “literal” meaning of the text (186).
And then, after the Civil War, millions of white Christians (in both the North and the South) used this literal reading of the Bible to make the case for segregation and a rigid racial hierarchy. And they did it again in the 1950s and 1960s against the civil rights movement. As Carolyn Renee Dupont points out in Mississippi Praying, Mississippi’s white evangelicals
fought mightily against black equality, proclaiming that God himself ordained segregation, blessing the forces of resistance, silencing the advocates of racial equality within their own faith tradition, and protecting segregation in their churches (231).
But the bad history advanced by Whitlock is precisely the bad history advanced by Ken Ham. As part of his “color-blind” project, Ham suggests that – as of 1963, or so – we achieved racial equality in America, that whatever racism remains is the product of Darwinism, and that the real problem in America is that Christians are being persecuted by satanic secularists and leftists.
In introducing the “’Satanic’” article on Facebook, Ham – in true fundamentalist fashion – deposits Bible verses and parts of Bible verses that establish that true Christians in America are at war
- “against the spiritual forces of evil”
- against “the devil [who] prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour””
- against Satan who “was a murderer from the beginning” and who “is a liar and the father of lies.”
Ham’s acolytes definitely get the Great Leader’s message. A sample of the responses to his Facebook post:
- “I absolutely agree that the left is Satanic.”
- “The left is satanic.”
- Obama and Biden “are traitors.”
- “The Marxist, communist Dems are following Satan and they all lie like their father Satan.”
Once you convince people that folks who disagree with you are satanic, then no response is too extreme.
Including violence.
Of course Ham has had nothing to say about the Insurrection. It would seem that he is too busy doing his part to foment another one.
The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump: An Interview with Rodney Kennedy
by William Trollinger
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.
Most important here, his sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – is forthcoming in the next few days from Wipf and Stock (Cascades). The Immaculate Mistake is a book very much worth reading, and we here at rightingamerica are delighted that Rod was willing to be interviewed about his book.
- In my preface to your book – a preface I was honored to write – I noted that “the Rev. Dr. Rodney Kennedy is the quintessential example of a Protestant preacher who cannot be shoehorned into either the conservative or the liberal ‘party.’ Instead, Kennedy is (to quote from his introduction) the ex-fundamentalist ‘misfit who believes Jesus, who he was and is, what he taught and preached.’” Could you elaborate on this point, in the process explaining how you became the Jesus-believing ex-fundamentalist misfit?
My original impulse was my dissatisfaction with “biblical inerrancy,” which seemed to be more about the Bible than Jesus. The longer I actually read and dealt with biblical texts, the more I realized that our faith has no foundation other than Jesus. This put me in a distinct minority in my Southern Baptist tribe. Louisiana Baptist College, of all places, provided me with the intellectual framework to escape the strictures of my fundamentalism. My religious studies professors opened my mind to new possibilities. As laughable as it may sound, I changed sides forever when I realized that Cain found a wife, given that I had always been taught there was Adam and Eve and two sons and no other humans. This started me on a pilgrimage that led me to the far left bank of liberalism. After a few less than helpful years, I didn’t exactly move back to the middle. Instead, I reclaimed some of the icons of my youthful Christian experience. By that I mean that I reclaimed the Bible as the primary text for my faith, but not the Bible as read by fundamentalists. I was disenchanted by a liberal faith that basically dismissed the Bible as too patriarchal, classist, xenophobic, and bloodthirsty. Accepting that the Bible reflected all those cultural factors, I still knew the Bible was the book for me. The critical study of the Bible gave me the tools I needed to investigate this history of abuse and take the Bible seriously. This made me a “misfit” among liberals, and thus I was now suspect in both tribes. I applied Flannery O’Connor’s term, “misfit,” to my ministry without pressing her analogy too far. Later I also, after reading Cornel West, saw myself as an “outcast.” An outcast is someone not considered to be part of the normal world. I embrace this stance in my preaching and in my writing.
- One of the fascinating things about your book is that you argue that “evangelicals have been misunderstood, mischaracterized, and maligned as a bunch of dummies, a multitude of misguided Christians easily conned.” Why do you make this point, and why does it matter?
I make this point because all Christians are “evangelicals” in the biblical sense and the historical sense, but not in the contemporary political sense. The media didn’t seem to have the theological/historical perception necessary to explain evangelicals, and this bothered me a great deal. In 2016 nothing came as a greater shock than the wholesale commitment by evangelicals to Donald Trump. At the same time, I found myself, as an evangelical (ABC USA). disgruntled by the media coverage of evangelicals. The template of evangelicals, forged in the steel-trap mind of M. L. Mencken, remained the go-to description now. Mencken had written, his tongue dipped in vitriol, that the South (a synonym for evangelical) consisted of a “cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodists, snake charmers, phony real estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists.” A liberal media piled on the stereotypes, and added that evangelicals were mostly poor, uneducated, angry white working-class folk.
As a Southerner and an evangelical, I found myself insulted as the indictment of my kinfolk unfolded in the media. The condescension was almost unbearable. The sneering, mocking, insulting barbs were made more painful by the undisguised glee that pundits displayed in attacking evangelicals. The result bordered on a sense of ressentiment – a group of like-minded persons (the media) enjoying one another enjoying being cruel to evangelicals. “We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, told The New Yorker, “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.” Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain minced no words in his gumbo of contempt: “red-state, gun-country, working-class Americans as ridiculous and morons and rubes.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind Garth Brooks was wailing, “I got friends in low places.” I confess being injured by these attacks. In this moment of pathos, I decided to challenge the conclusions of the liberal media. The Immaculate Mistake’s originating idea was born in the heat of this hot-blooded moment. Not to mistake me as an evangelical defender, I attempt to make the case that evangelicals have been in the business of bringing to life, of giving birth, to Donald Trump for more than a century of resentment, mistrust, and anger. My defense of the stereotypes gives way to my own assessment of what I believe is the evangelical sellout.
- What do you mean by the title of your book, and on what basis do you claim that “evangelicals are the organ grinders” and “Trump is the monkey”?
I believe that the appearance of Donald Trump was the culmination of almost a century of fundamentalist/evangelical attempts to be in charge, to force the rest of the nation into their template of faith. In my view, the moment the evangelicals walked out of the courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, they returned to the woods and hammered out an alternate universe. They nurtured a deep resentment that I trace from the Scopes Trial to the election of Donald Trump. My thought was that evangelicals were the grandparents and parents of Donald Trump. I investigated numerous evangelical leaders and finally selected three representatives of this version of faith: Billy Sunday, J. Frank Norris, and Jerry Falwell. In my mind, the conservative evangelicals had been looking for a “strong man” to enable them to exact revenge for the loss they perceived happened to them in evolution. In fact, I believe that every anti-science stance the evangelicals take, including the refusal to wear a mask, is rooted in the originating anti-evolution stance. Ken Ham and Robert Jeffress frequently assail evolution as the root cause of every evil that has come down the pike in our culture. Evangelical dissatisfaction with President Jimmy Carter (they sold him out for Ronald Reagan), with Bush I and Bush II, with the conservative appointees to the Supreme Court who refused to do evangelical bidding, led them to seek a candidate who was, in the words of Robert Jeffress, “the meanest s. o. b.” in the country. What comes out here is the evangelical lust for winning at any costs and with any ally. They betray their own faith by using the weapons of the devil for what they deem good ends. In other words, faced with the temptation like those faced by Jesus in the wilderness, they accepted the devil’s deal. The devil didn’t just come down to Georgia; the devil came to the entire South and the entire evangelical nation formed by southern religion and offered them control and they said “yes, yes, yes!”
My title is thus a bit of satire or sarcasm aimed at the self-righteousness of evangelicals who believe they possess a holiness that all other religious groups lack. The word “immaculate” seemed a perfect fit for a bunch of “inerrantists.” The idea that Trump was their baby led me to the trope that evangelicals were the organ grinder and Trump was their monkey. The liberal media was wrong, in my view, to think that the evangelicals were duped, deceived, and made fools of by Trump. Instead, the two were a perfect match of perfidy – each using the other for dubious means. Trump and the evangelicals engage in what rhetorical scholars dubbed “ressentiment” and “jouissance.” Trump and the evangelicals nurture and cultivate resentment and deep anger. Trump took out this resentment on the media, the liberals, and all other groups despised by evangelicals. At a Trump rally, you can witness the speaker and his audience enjoying Trump’s cruelty and doing it together – “jouissance.”
- Given your knowledge and love of the Bible, I know it infuriates you that evangelicals have mangled the Bible in their defense of Trump. Could you give a couple of examples?
When Pentecostal journalist/preacher/evangelist Lance Wallnau suggested that Trump was the new Cyrus, I knew that the attempt to make Trump “God’s anointed” would be a full-blown campaign. Wallnau said that when he realized that Trump would be the 45th president of the United States, he was led by the Holy Spirit to read Isaiah 45. I have no idea why he didn’t read Psalm 45, Jeremiah 45, or Ezekiel 45. He read Isaiah 45 because it fit his notion that Trump, like Cyrus, was God’s anointed. No one seemed to notice that Trump was nothing like Cyrus. All that mattered was the sound bite: “Trump Is God’s Anointed.” From here, the full-orbed defense of Trump bellowed forth from the pulpit of First Baptist Church Dallas and the Rev. Dr. Robert Jeffress. Every mistake, every slip, every awful word, and every dreadful deed of Trump was defended and glossed over by Jeffress. In defending Trump’s payoff to a porn star, Jeffress even invented an 11th commandment “Thou shalt not have sex with a porn star,” and said that even if Trump had violated that commandment, what evangelicals supported were his wonderful policies. At the same time, evangelical preachers unleashed a veritable army of biblical tropes for Trump. Trump was lauded as King David. This shows a shallow reading of the story of David because David repented of his sexual abuse of “the wife of Uriah,” while Trump swore he didn’t need to repent. Trump was heralded as Samson and again the reading is shallow. Samson was deceived by a beautiful woman and then pulled down the temple of the Philistines on all of his enemies. This may, in light of January 6, be exactly the Trump trope that we should utilize.
- In your conclusion you suggest possible rhetorics that could be used against white evangelicals and their “secular preacher,” Donald Trump. Could you say a little about this?
An important rhetorical strategy is “naming” the negative and destructive tropes of Trump. As a debater I am aware that an argument stands in the course of a debate until it is refuted. The false assertions and outright lies of Trump need to be refuted over and over again. A second strategy is to align Trump supporters with his racist, xenophobic rhetoric. Trump supporters are endorsing and celebrating a legacy of white supremacy, homophobia, and misogyny that we thought had passed from the scene. In the face of evangelical denials of these behaviors, the pedagogy of shame from civic virtue and progressive thought has to continue with full-orbed zeal. We must recognize the danger that Trump branding, braggadocio, and demolition rhetoric creates for democracy. This means that the most positive strategy is the rhetoric of real democracy. When Trump scapegoats, we name and shame. We offer fierce resistance to his hateful, hurtful rhetoric. By showing our nation the vitality and energy of real democracy, by engaging in empathy and compassion, we not only contrast with Trump’s rhetoric of hatred, we offer a viable alternative. Frank and honest speech is an important part of our democracy. By realizing this, perhaps more rhetors will be willing to engage in American democracy as truth tellers.
- Could you talk about your next book project?
When I finished The Immaculate Mistake, I realized that I had not gone far enough in my critique of evangelicals. What was even more pressing was a move beyond insisting – as rhetorical scholars had done — that Trump was a perverted populist, a demagogue, a serial liar, and a danger to democracy. In my newest project, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, I develop the argument that Trump is the personification of evil: Theologically, philosophically, politically, and rhetorically. He is the essence of what Sheldon Wolin labels, “inverted totalitarianism.” Trump is the Evil One incarnate.
Thanks Rod for this interview, and for your new book!
To Be Secular is To Be a Pedophile: Ken Ham and the Courting of QAnon
by William Trollinger
Referring to the image displayed here, which Ken Ham has circulated via Twitter and Facebook, a friend asked if, by adding the “pedophilia” flag to the “secular worldview” fortress, Ham “is trying to appeal to QAnon” devotees?
It seems obvious that the answer is yes.
For those of you who have remained blessedly ignorant of this particular form of right-wing lunacy, the QAnon conspiracy theory holds that (quoting from Wikipedia)
a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against former President Donald Trump during his term in office . . . One shared belief among QAnon members is that Trump was planning a massive sting operation on the cabal, with mass arrests of thousands of cabal members to take place on a day known as the Storm. QAnon supporters have accused many Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking government officials of being members of the cabal, with [this is not a shocker] little or no evidence.
More than any other group of Americans, white evangelicals – 27% – believe that “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers led by prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” So, in linking “pedophilia” to the “secular worldview,” Ham is playing to his base.
Now, to be fair, I have not seen articles or blog posts or Facebook comments in which Ham specifically affirms the QAnon conspiracy theory. On the other hand, Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) have not critiqued QAnon, unlike evangelical pastors who are asserting that QAnon in particular and Christian nationalism in general (of which QAnon is a part) are at odds with the Gospel.
In fact, and on the contrary, just a few weeks before the 2020 election Ham turned over Ark Encounter to QAnon enthusiast Trey Smith. Smith, whose previous video “credits” include The Day of Reckoning: the Q, entitled his Ark Encounter film, The Coming Storm: A Donald J. Trump documentary inside Noah’s Ark. In this almost unwatchable video Smith – who expends a great deal of energy praising Ham and his boat – asserts that:
- The spirit of the Antichrist has been with us throughout history, as evinced by Hollywood actors and their “witchy people” lurking behind them.
- Facing soon-to-be-revealed scandalous revelations, two Supreme Court justices will step down.
- God will take a simple stone (perhaps Roger Stone), and folks will mock him, and then we will hear the sounds of victory as Trump emerges triumphant.
- God has dictated that Donald Trump will have two terms.
All of this would suggest – more than suggest, actually – that in adding the pedophilia flag to the secular worldview fortress, Ken Ham is making a pitch to white evangelical QAnon devotees. Besides everything else, he can’t afford to alienate them, just like he can’t afford to alienate white nationalists.
One other thing about Ham’s fortress image. In Righting America at the Creation Museum Susan Trollinger and I argue that Ham and AiG and the Christian Right hold to a radical binary (149). In this binary the world is divided into two groups, Christian and Secular. Each group is identified with a set of linked terms that necessarily are the opposite of the other group’s set of linked terms.
So, according to this image, to be secular is to be a racist pedophile who supports the killing of babies and the disabled, and who suffers from gender confusion. To be Christian is to be “color-blind,” anti-pedophiliac, life-affirming, and very clear on the gender binary and one’s place within it.
So much to be said here. Especially about race. More later.
Using the Law to Protect Fragile White People from Seeing the Past and Present
by William Trollinger
One thing is for certain. White Americans need lots of tender loving care.
The latest campaign to prop up white folks has its origins in the furious response to the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine production that won the Pulitzer Prize, and that sought “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The notion that the long shadow of slavery is a central feature of U.S. history seems as commonsensical as it can get. But apparently this is too much for the tender psyches of white conservatives. For example, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) – who, as one blogger observed, is “on a mission to turn himself into an actual cartoon character” – whined that the 1619 Project completely fails to take into account that, as our glorious Founders understood, “slavery was a ‘necessary evil’” that made it possible for America to become the extraordinary nation that it is today.
Cotton was soon followed by then-President Trump, who cried that the 1619 Project was – in words he clearly did not write – “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that if not removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.”
(The fomenter of the January 06 Insurrection cares about “civic bonds that tie us together”?)
In an effort to re-establish patriotic education in U.S. schools, Trump created the 1776 Commission, which pronounced that its goal was to tell America’s “true history.” Oddly (or, not oddly), the Commission included no historians who work in U.S. history. On the other hand, the Commission did include two presidents of very conservative colleges who apparently had no problem with the fact that 26% of the report was plagiarized (without citations).
(Are Hillsdale and College of the Ozarks ok with their students submitting papers that are ¼ plagiarized?)
Not surprisingly, the report is dreadful. Here are two lowlights from the 1776 Report that directly relate to the white fragility laws I discuss below, along with my responses:
- “The most common charge levelled against the founders. . . is that they were hypocrites who [in their protection of slavery in the Constitution] didn’t believe in their stated principles . . . This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.” (10)
- Let me get this right. What has damaged America is not its 250 year tradition of enslaving human beings, and not the “long shadow of slavery” that resulted in a pervasive individual and institutional racism that continues to this day (e.g., the January 06 insurrection). Instead, what has really damaged America is noticing and commenting on the huge gap between the founders’ ideals and the institution of slavery. Check.
- “The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding.” (15)
- The second sentence is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous. Whole swaths of the American public (including my family and my church) hated the movement and hated Martin Luther King, Jr. And there were not just angry words, as the segregationist resistance to the movement involved vicious and violent attacks. Finally, and as Kevin Kruse has pointed out, these furious opponents to civil rights claimed “that it was their resistance that reflected the ‘principles of the founding.’ When Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for instance, he pointedly recited the entire Declaration of Independence to link his act of defiance to the colonists’ acts.
Upon taking office President Biden disbanded the 1776 Commission. But the conservative obsession with ensuring that fragile white people feel good about themselves has now taken a legal turn.
In the past few months 28 states have passed or are debating laws that “restrict education on racism, bias, [and] the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history.” And given that these laws come from the white Right echo chamber – where Tucker Carlson is a godlike personage – it is not surprising that many of them are nearly identical.
For example, in May Oklahoma passed a law prohibiting teachers “from using lessons that make an individual ‘feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” The next month Tennessee banned any discussion of race that might cause a student ‘discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress.’” And according to guidelines proposed by the Tennessee Department of Education, teachers who violate this law “may have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked,” and districts that “knowingly” violate this law may lose up to $5 million in state funding.
Make a white person feel uncomfortable, and you are going to pay.
Of course, none of these laws specifically reference “white” individuals or “white” students. They can’t.
But here is a thought experiment. Imagine an African American student who complains to a local school board or state department of education that she feels “discomfort,” “anguish,” and other forms of “psychological distress” because her teachers and her textbooks:
- elide the horrors of slavery (i.e., the “necessary evil” that really was not so bad)
- assert that the Civil War was not about slavery but, instead, “state’s rights”
- claim that Reconstruction was awful (all those uneducated ex-slaves running amuck) and Redemption was necessary and good
- declare that white Americans happily supported the civil rights movement (see: the 1776 Commission report) until the moment in 1963 or 1964 when African American leaders became “divisive”
- pronounced that racism has been banished from the land, and that there is certainly no “systemic racism” (and to claim this is to reveal that you are an anti-American Marxist)
How would a school board or state department of education respond? Would they revoke the teacher’s license? Would the school district be forced to surrender millions of dollars in state funding?
Of course not.
(That said, I would love to see these laws challenged on these grounds, if only to have the chance to marvel at the convoluted responses from school boards and state departments of education).
In a brilliant New York Times Magazine essay, historian Timothy Snyder has it exactly right:
Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws’ portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings, and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so. We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.
At their very core these white fragility laws are anti-democratic, authoritarian at their core, very much in keeping with – as Snyder pointed out – laws established in Putin’s Russia. That said, the game is not over. As Nashville’s Margaret Renkl pointed out in a New York Times article earlier this week:
People here are already standing in defense of history against the attempts of our Republican leaders to prevent the teaching of truth, and I have faith that more and more Southerners will work to overturn these laws that bar the teaching of truth, just as they worked last summer to bring down those Confederate statues.
The anti-truth forces have not yet triumphed.
But the threat is real.
