The True Story of Sodom
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. His sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – is forthcoming in the next few months from Wipf and Stock (Cascades).
In The Political Mind George Lakoff asks a disturbing question: “Why are conservatives so much better at getting their ideas across?” (5).
I believe one answer is that liberals are reluctant to engage in the kind of metaphorical warfare required to refute conservative talking points.
But as a unabashed warrior in the cultural disaster that is contemporary America, as a believer in Nietzsche’s insistence that it is always about a “war of metaphors,” I believe we should tell our story more forcefully, more passionately, and more violently. With Flannery O’Connor I insist that we must shout to the hard-of-hearing and exaggerate for the unbelievers. I take this as license to dispute the arguments that the conservatives keep peddling with triple layers of certainty, piling on the toppings as if they were serving a banana split rather than reading the Bible.
As a case in point, nothing infuriates me more than the constant ranting of fundamentalist preachers going on and on till doomsday about the stories of Genesis. Take your pick from an entire array of bad readings and worse interpretations. Whether it is a literal creation, an actual flood, or the incredulous claims about how many people God slaughtered here and there, there is no end to the charade.
For example, if one more preacher or creationist theme park mogul tells me that Sodom was a city of homosexuals in rebellion against God – and hence its destruction – I will throw up. To be more specific, when conservative Christians ignore Canaanite and Israelite customs for a peculiar Western reading of the story as a condemnation of homosexuality, they have – for all their alleged commitment to inerrancy – violated both the biblical text and biblical tradition.
So it is that I offer an alternative reading of Genesis 19.
It is indeed true that when Israelites talked about depravity, “Sodom” was their “go to” example. But as Gerhard Van Rad points out in Genesis: The Old Testament Library (217-28):
- for Isaiah the sin of Sodom was the barbarity of their administration of justice (Isaiah 1:10, 3:9).
- for Jeremiah, Sodom’s sins include adultery, lying, and an unwillingness to repent (Jeremiah 23:14).
- for Ezekiel, “this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49).
In all of this there is no reference to homosexuality.
Instead, the story of Sodom may best be defined as a reliance on victimized, toxic masculinity (See “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery” by Paul Elliott Johnson, Women’s Studies in Communication, 2017). The men of Sodom believe Lot and his male guests are a threat to their personhood and existence. Men, men, manly men – that’s the story.
And the daughters of Lot are mere pawns in this display of toxic masculinity. They are objects to be used, lacking power, will, or choice. They might as well have been sticks of furniture. There are no more frightening words for women than Lot’s offer to the mob of Sodom males: “Do to them as you please.” This has been the history of women.
The Genesis 19 story revolves around the hyper-heterosexual insistence that Lot turn over his guests so that they can be violated sexually. This act of rape doesn’t involve sexual pleasure; instead, the rape would be proof of the male superiority of the men of Sodom.
Deborah Tannen says that men view the world as being individuals in hierarchal social order in which he is either one up or one down” (Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand, 24). She adds: “Life, then, is a contest, a struggle to preserve independence and avoid failure.” The proposed action of the men of Sodom would have given a gross visual representation of one up and one down. The men of Sodom have a hard on for the abuse of power. There are no homosexual acts in the story. In fact, Lot attempts to ward off the crazed crowd by offering his daughters to them. Here the sexuality is suggestive. Lot tells the toxic heterosexuals at his door: “Do to them as you please.” And that would have been rape.
And there’s more to this story. The reality is that Lot had never been accepted in Sodom. Even though he has married a woman of Sodom, is a property owner, and a man of the city, he is still an outsider, a stranger. Again, the story is not about sexuality, but about masculine, nativist, racial issues of status and place and power.
The men of Sodom call Lot “this fellow.” He remains an outsider despite all his attempts at assimilation. He has been cast as an enemy, and toxic masculinity thrives on the creation of enemies and their destruction. Toxic masculinity is the real culprit in the story of Sodom. The Sodomites are a bunch of greedy, testosterone-fueled toxic males. Anger and the desire for dominance are the driving factors here.
But generations of evangelical preachers who drank from this same well of toxic masculinity have gone to great lengths to scapegoat Sodom as a den of homosexuals. Blame it on the Queers, even when there are no Queers in the story.
Sodom continues to be replayed in our own culture. There is a toxic, paradoxically masculine style, whose incoherence is opaque to critics but meaningful to its adherents, as it helps white males – against all evidence to the contrary – to imagine themselves as persecuted, to imagine that they have been displaced from the political center by a bunch of feminist killjoys, angry blacks, and immoral gays. White males now imagine themselves as persecuted even though they are the ones pressing hard against the doors of democracy and are coming “near the door to break it down.” It is an amazing magical trick of smoke and mirrors, but its horrifying power was demonstrated in Washington, D.C. on January 6. And of course, this act of sedition has now been recast, in the conservative magical hat, as a benign tour of the capital.
The argument that white males have been marginalized in America is simply absurd. That said, a host of white males are projecting themselves as victims, and this facilitates demagoguery, a demagoguery that finds its parallel in Sodom. As Patricia Roberts-Miller has argued, Sodom was a case of “polarizing propaganda that motivated members of an ingroup (a rabid mob) to hate and scapegoat an outgroup, largely by promising to save the city from those foreign elements” (“Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 8 (2005), 462).
At the end of this very strange story, the last remaining person of Sodom heritage, Lot’s wife, is turned to a pillar of salt because she looked back at her burning home. Victimize the innocent. Make it criminal. And then pretend that the toxic male is actually the one whose existence is precarious. The well-off, privileged, and powerful white men are allowed to put on the robes of victimhood at the expense of the gays who occupy more objectively fraught positions.
And that is the true story of Sodom. Cue Ezekiel for the postlude: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”
The Christian Right and the Decline of White Evangelicalism
by William Trollinger
Update: This post is republished over at Red Letter Christians on July 30, 2021.
The headlines tell the story.
- White evangelicals are in decline and now find themselves “outnumbered” by mainline Protestants
- Survey: White mainline Protestants outnumber white evangelicals, while “nones” shrink
- The unlikely rebound of mainline Protestantism
- “Jesus was definitely a Republican”: Why some younger evangelicals are leaving the faith
- The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It
All of these articles are responses to the 2020 Census of American Religion, released by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) earlier this month. Salient findings of that report include:
- White evangelical Protestants now make up 14% of the population, down from 23% in 2006. On the other hand, white mainline Protestants have now surpassed white evangelicals, with 16% of the population (up from 13% in 2016).
- With an average age of 56, white evangelical Protestants are the oldest religious group in America. (White Catholics are next, at 54.) More than this, white evangelicals constitute only 7% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. while 12% of this age group are white mainline Protestants and 8% are white Catholics. Most striking. 36% of Americans in this age group identify as “nones,” i.e., religiously unaffiliated.
- Overall, the percentage of Americans who are “nones” has dropped from 26% in 2018 to 23% in 2020. Regarding one of the above headlines, I don’t think this qualifies as a “shrinking,” given that the religiously unaffiliated is easily the largest “religious” group in the United States (white mainline Protestants are second), and given the dramatic rise of the “nones” over the past three decades.
- 51% of white evangelicals identify as Republican, while only 22% identify as Democrat. On the other hand, white mainline Protestants and white Catholics lean toward the Democratic party as opposed to the Republican party (35% v. 33% and 38% v. 32%, respectively). Christians of color are overwhelmingly Democratic, as are the “nones.”
Earlier this year Oxford University Press published Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America (edited by James Heft and Jan Stets), which includes a host of essays by terrific scholars such as Nancy Ammerman, Joseph Baker, David Campbell, Matt Hedstrom, and Bernard Prusak. I am honored to have an essay in the volume: “Religious Non-Affiliation: Expelled by the Right.”
At the heart of my essay is a conundrum that, it turns out, is not a conundrum at all. On one side of this apparent conundrum is the triumph of political evangelicalism. Despite prediction after prediction that the Christian Right was dead or dying, white evangelicals have become the most dependable and influential constituency in the Republican Party. More than this, the takeover of the GOP by Trumpism was/is, first and foremost, a triumph of white evangelicals, who supported Trump by overwhelming numbers in both 2016 and 2020.
It is not an overstatement to say that the contemporary Republican Party is tightly tied to – and dependent upon — the evangelical Right. This has been, of course, a huge political score for white evangelicals and, especially, their leaders. But simultaneous with this development has been the dramatic reduction of white Americans who identify as evangelical, a fact further evinced by PRRI’s 2020 Census of American Religion.
So here’s the conundrum: evangelical political success, on the one hand, and the decline of white evangelicalism, on the other. But as I argue in this essay, it turns out that these two phenomena are related. That is to say, the success of the Christian Right in conflating evangelicalism/Christianity with conservative culture-war politics is a primary factor in the shrinking of white evangelicalism, in particular, and religious disaffiliation in the United States, in general.
As always (says the historian), a little historical perspective helps here. In the decades after World War I many or most white evangelicals in America were staunch and sometimes vocal political conservatives. But they had not been galvanized into an organized political movement, nor had they been attached to one political party. This began to change in the late 1970s, when political operatives connected with the Reagan presidential campaign aggressively worked to mobilize these politically conservative evangelicals into a reliable Republican voting bloc. Over time the Christian Right became politically sophisticated; over time evangelical leaders and pastors merged their religious and political identities, making it quite explicit that to be a Bible-believing Christian means that one is an ultraconservative Republican who is stridently (even viciously) opposed to LGBTQ+ rights, denies or elides climate change, aggressively opposes immigration (especially if the immigrants are people of color), and rejects the reality of historical and structural racism.
It should thus not be surprising that many political moderates and liberals have been persuaded that to identify as an evangelical or even as a Christian is to identify as an intolerant right-wing culture warrior. And many of these moderates and liberals have been so convinced that they have disaffiliated from religion altogether. In my essay, I highlight some excellent social scientific research that provides solid evidence that political backlash is pushing people away from evangelicalism in particular and religion in general. As confirmed by the 2020 Census of American Religion, this is particularly true when it comes to youth, who find – thanks to the identification of Christianity with the Christian Right – religion to be homophobic, hypocritical, and judgmental. And so they disaffiliate.
In short, as I argue in the essay, the quantitative and qualitative evidence – and, I will add, my own anecdotal evidence – strongly support the argument that the Christian Right has been a primary factor in the decline of white evangelicalism in the last decade and the dramatic rise of the nones since the 1990s. And given the past four years, and given the January 6, 2021 insurrection (with the Jesus flags and Bible T-shirts at the U.S. Capitol), it makes sense to me (as I suggest in my essay) that the Christian Right is pushing even greater numbers of Americans out of evangelicalism.
The editors of Empty Churches pressed me to conclude my essay with a personal response. I resisted this, rather strongly, but in the end I surrendered. So here’s how I conclude “Religious Non-Affiliation: Expelled by the Right”:
In the days of Jerry Falwell, Sr. and the Moral Majority, the claim was that [the Christian Right] was all about Christian values, all about rescuing America from sinking into a morass of immorality. So, for example, the Christian Right’s aggressive campaign against President Bill Clinton was explained as an attack on his egregious sexual sins and in defense of a now-bygone virtuous Christian America. But now, with the Christian Right’s enthusiastic support of Donald Trump – led in part by Jerry Falwell, Jr. – their cover is blown. We can now see (some of us had already seen) that the Christian Right is not about personal morality and Christian/religious values, but is instead about a particular right-wing politics – a politics in keeping with the history of fundamentalism – involving white nationalism, hostility to immigrants, unfettered capitalism (which includes a disinterest, at the least, in global warming), and intense homophobia.
So as a scholar, I appreciate the clarity that we now have about (much of) white evangelicalism, the clarity about what the Christian Right is all about, and the clarity about the fact that the Christian Right is but one more sign of the secularizing of America. That said, it is of course true that one could argue that it is not just (much of) white evangelicalism and the Christian Right that has been unmasked. One could argue that Christianity itself has been unmasked, that the above values – white nationalism, homophobia, and the like – are actually Christian (maybe even religious) values. Certainly many of those who abandon religion because of the Christian Right have come to something like this conclusion. And I get it. It makes sense to me. If I thought the Christian Right = Christianity, or Christian Right = religion, I would want nothing to do with it, either.
But as a person of faith, I understand Christianity to be something else. I understand it to be centered in the Gospels, in the message (stated quite clearly in Matthew 25) that in the end we are to be judged on how we treat our brothers and sisters, on how we treat “the other.” So while I appreciate the clarity with which we can now see (much of) white evangelicalism, I am also saddened by the fact that the secularizing of America occurs in part because the Christian Right has been so successful in articulating what it means to be Christian.
And if you are so inclined, here’s a link to “Religious Non-Affiliation: Expelled by the Right.”
The Making of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: An Interview with Beth Barr
by Susan Trollinger
Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is professor of history and associate dean of the Graduate School at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women’s history, and church history. She is the president of the Conference on Faith and History and is a member of Christians for Biblical Equality. Barr has written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, and Religion News Service, and is a regular contributor to The Anxious Bench, the popular Patheos website on Christian history.
Thank you so much for writing this book and agreeing to this interview! I loved reading it and am already aware of multiple ways in which it will impact both my research and my teaching. One of the big reasons that your book is so compelling, in my opinion, is the way that it weaves together brilliant historical research with memoir. As a rhetorical scholar (of, in recent years, evangelicalism/fundamentalism) and a committed Christian (whose personal experience with evangelicalism/fundamentalism has impacted my life in profound ways), I have so many questions for you. But, in the interest of a blog post that is not too long, I am going to keep my questions to just six.
- Would you please talk about how and why you made the decision to weave together your historical/theological analysis with your personal story? How did you come to that decision?
The first words I wrote for Making Biblical Womanhood were about Lynn Hybels. I still remember that moment I heard her speak so well—watching her stand small on the conference stage, confessing the script that she had tried to live until it almost destroyed her. I didn’t mean to start drafting the book at this moment, but when I thought about how I wanted to tell the story, she came to mind. I realized while historical evidence would carry my argument, it was people I needed to reach. Women like Lynn Hybels who lived and breathed the world of biblical womanhood and couldn’t find a way to escape it. I decided to meet the audience I wanted to reach through the language we share as evangelical Christians—the language of our testimony.
It wasn’t an easy decision to weave my testimony throughout the book. It required a vulnerability that I normally do not display. I was afraid of letting people know the hardest parts of my life. I was afraid of the critique I would receive from those who would dismiss my story as experiential instead of evidential. I was afraid of the critique I would receive from scholars who might dismiss me academically because I showed too much bias toward my Christian faith. I was afraid of what it would mean for my children and husband when strangers knew so much of our personal story.
Yet I knew it would be worth it. I knew that if this book was going to stand a chance of changing the conversation about women in church, I had to reach both hearts and brains. I had to share not only the historical evidence that so powerfully undermines biblical womanhood, but I also had to testify about how the message of biblical womanhood played out it my own life.
- One of the things I’m learning as a rhetorical scholar married to and co-authoring with a historian is how rhetorical history is. It’s not like I didn’t know that—intellectually. But I know it now in a much more profound way. How did you come to the realization that history has so much rhetorical power? How did you come to understand that the stories that have been told and the stories that we tell of the past make all the difference?
This is a wonderful question. Would you believe that it was medieval sermons that first convinced me of rhetorical power? It was in the midst of my early graduate school days that the dustup exploded over gender inclusive Bible translations. I remember reading Wayne Grudem and Vern Poythress’ damning critique of replacing “mankind” with “human” and “brothers” with “brothers and sisters.” The Christian sky was collapsing, according to their furor, yet I was reading texts penned by medieval clergy more than 500 years earlier that regularly incorporated gender inclusive language in both their sermons and translations of bible verses within sermons. I also realized that medieval sermons, although written in a patriarchal world too, incorporated many more stories about women—both from the Bible and church history—than I had ever heard in my Baptist Sunday School classes. It had never occurred to me that Mary Magdalene was the first preacher, bringing the news of the Gospel to the apostles on that first Easter morning, until I read about it in a fifteenth-century sermon. I find it so ironic that it took a medieval priest to open my eyes to a significant problem in American evangelicalism.
It was also my study of medieval history that made me realize the dominant male-bias of seminary history textbooks. My husband was working on his MDiv while I was working on my PhD, and I remember flipping through some of his texts. I was shocked by how quickly the church history textbooks jumped from the ancient church to the Reformation, barely glazing the 1000 years of medieval history. When I begin to dig deeper, I found that when medieval Christianity was discussed, it focused mostly on male clergy and male monastics, and when women entered the conversations, they were almost never discussed as leaders or preachers. The message sent to pastors-in-training, then, is that men have always been the preachers and leaders of the church. Is it any wonder that so many pastors believe that women preaching is a modern idea based on American culture rather than the reality of church history?
I think, though, it was my daughter who really made me understand the importance of including women in the stories we tell. She was around 6 or 7, reading a book for school (she has always been a voracious reader). She was hanging over the side of the chair looking bored. It surprised me because the book was about gladiators. Isn’t it interesting, I asked her? No, she answered. “But the page with the girl gladiators, I liked that page,” she said. And just like that my daughter taught me how critical it was for women to see ourselves in the story. Because we write women out of the Bible—using androcentric language and minimizing the stories about women—it becomes much easier to write women out of church history. And, like my daughter, evangelical woman who cannot see themselves as part of the story become less interested in being part of the story. Because women don’t realize the significant roles we have played as leaders and preachers in history, women are less likely to recognize their calling as preachers and leaders today.
- As I read your book, I got a pretty good sense of your target audience. The closing lines of your book are especially moving in that regard. How did you come to know who your target audience would to be? And how did you think about that from the perspective of your position as a historian and a scholar? In some ways, my question is about your sense of your calling or vocation. How do you understand your vocation as a historian and as a woman of faith in these times? How is your scholarship a realization of your vocation?
A friend just told me last week that I was the only one who could have written this book. I’m not sure if I am the only one who could have written it (or one like it), but I can see clearly how God made it possible for me to write this book. Indeed, that is why I decided to do it. I never intended to write a book like this, much less share my story with such a large audience. But when Katelyn Beaty suggested I should think about writing a book, I realized that I had all the pieces to do so. All my life I knew God called me to be a teacher and scholar; all my life I knew I was also called to ministry. I have never been interested in preaching, but I have always been interested in teaching and mentoring women. This book brought all my callings together, perfectly aligned. The reality is that much of the evidence I present in Making Biblical Womanhood isn’t really new (except for my own medieval sermon research). Most of it has been known by scholars for years, and explained clearly in numerous articles and books. But evangelical Christians are not reading this scholarship. I realized that God had situated me perfectly to reach this evangelical audience by speaking the evangelical language of testimony. I could tell my testimony, the impact of Christian patriarchy on my life, and combine it with the historical evidence that the evangelical world simply did not know. I cannot tell you how amazing it is to think how God brought all the threads of my life together to write this book. It is humbling and awe-inspiring. It also reminds me how complex a vocation can be—I’m not just called to be a historian or Sunday School teacher; I’m called to use my gifts as a historian and teacher in numerous outlets: in my college classroom, with my graduate students, in my Sunday School class, and in my writing.
Was I called to write this book? Yes, I am certain I was.
- The world of evangelicalism/fundamentalism is, so far as I can tell, in a really bad place right now. It seems like the right phrase is something like “a scandal a day.” Of course, all that has everything to do with the powerful history that you tell about how biblical womanhood came to be and how the patriarchy attendant to it is strenuously being maintained. Your book introduces a powerful fissure into the otherwise hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense—dominating but not fixed) discourse of evangelicalism/fundamentalism. How are you reading the efforts today to keep the patriarchal discourses of evangelicalism/fundamentalism afloat? What story do you imagine historians will tell 20 years from now about this seemingly pregnant (if I may) moment?
Well, historians really don’t like to predict the future. We are much more comfortable arguing about the past. But I think you are right. We are at a pregnant moment. Expectation is thick in the air as evangelicals grapple with the sobering reality of what we have been and the determined reality that we cannot be that anymore. We must be better. I hope that the story historians tell 20 years from now is one of freedom for evangelical women. That Christian scholars working from the inside out challenged the church to revisit long-held ideas about women and race, and that the church listened. This is the story I hope we can watch unfold. As a historian, however, I know that change comes slowly. I’m playing the long game with The Making of Biblical Womanhood. If I can help people begin to consider that they might be wrong and perhaps begin to make some small changes within their churches and seminaries, then—over many years—we will see women begin to move back into serving alongside men rather than underneath them. I think, I hope, that this change has already begun.
- What responses have you received from evangelical/fundamentalist women to your book? Do they contact you directly? Are you hearing things indirectly? And, more generally, what are you sensing of the impact of your book? And what do you think it means?
Releasing this book is the hardest thing I have ever done; harder even than writing it. But the response has made everything worth it. Not a day goes by that I do not receive messages from women all over the world telling me how much this book has changed their lives. Some of the messages are heartbreaking—women with stories very similar to mine who are still broken. So many of them have told me that my book has brought them hope again; that it has restored their faith knowing that God has always been for them. Some of the messages are just encouraging—women and men reaching out to cheer me on; to tell me how important my book has been to them and how they are sending it to all their friends. Some of the messages have been very interesting—from complementarian men who are in leadership positions telling me that my book has challenged them. While I may not have convinced them, they are thinking hard. Some of the messages have been funny—women and men reaching out with their own stories about purity culture or taking pastors’ wives classes. One woman told me a story that made me laugh and laugh for like 20 minutes. It was about the day her pastors’ wives class taught them how to get out of a car “like a lady.” They had diagrams and had to practice in their classroom seats. I still laugh thinking about that story!
I cannot count how many messages I have received so far through email, Twitter, and Instagram. But the overwhelming response shows me that not only are people reading The Making of Biblical Womanhood, but they are listening to it. And it is impacting their hearts and minds. The response gives me hope, as I told one of my readers, that this might actually work. I wrote a call to action in the final chapter, reminding women that complementarianism only works because women continue to support it. So, what if we stopped supporting it? When I wrote that, it was a pipe dream. But now I am beginning to think it might work.
- Finally, what is next for you? What are you thinking about? Writing about?
I honestly intended this book to be my only foray into the broader publishing world. My academic heart is in the medieval archives, and I want to finish my monograph on Women in Late Medieval English Sermons. But I also feel God working on my heart. There might still be more work to do, so I recently signed with a literary agent and we will see what might be next.
Again, many thanks to Beth for allowing me to interview her! What a joy! We here at rightingamerica hope to hear a lot more from her, both in this blog and through books not yet written but, perhaps, already in the works in one way or another.
Ken Ham and the Government Subsidy that Makes Ark Encounter Possible
by William Trollinger
In an article celebrating the five-year anniversary of Ark Encounter’s opening, Ken Ham continued to issue misleading (now there’s an understatement!) comments regarding how the Ark has been funded:
Another challenge since opening in 2016 has been countering myths about the Ark Encounter, like the rumor that state money was used to build and open the Ark Encounter. Also, it has had to counter the myth that the city of Williamstown is at risk on $62 million in Ark bonds. The bonds are “private activity bonds” are not a debt of the issuer (Williamstown) but only the borrower (Ark Encounter). AiG supporters funded the bond offering, and all bond payments have been paid on schedule.
Four sentences of deception.
The little town of Williamstown issued $62m of junk bonds in 2013, and then promptly loaned the proceeds to help get the Ark Encounter project started. This nifty deal – at least, for Ark Encounter — was made even niftier by the stipulation that (and here is the point that Ham never acknowledges) 75% of what Ark Encounter would have owed in property taxes over the course of the next three decades would instead be used to pay off the loan.
What a deal. If this is not a government subsidy, I don’t know what is.
Williamstown is anything but a wealthy town. Its median income is (as of 2019) 23.5% less than the median annual income in Kentucky, and its poverty level is 19.8% higher than the poverty level across the state. And to put this into perspective, Kentucky is the fourth poorest state in the Union.
So why did this economically struggling town agree to make such a sizable monetary gift to Ark Encounter?
Of course, you know the answer.
Ham and company sold town officials on the idea that the Ark would bring great economic benefits to Williamstown. But to put it mildly, that has not happened. Ark Encounter has not sparked an economic revival in Williamstown. It remains a poor town.
Ham blames the town itself for this economic failure, explaining that it is too far on the other side of interstate to get Ark visitors. Ham’s chutzpah is breathtaking, given that he and his colleagues failed to mention this geographical liability as they were charming Williamstown officials out of 75% of property taxes over three decades.
So why can’t Ham acknowledge the government subsidy that makes Ark Encounter possible?
Again, you know the answer.
Ham is a Christian Right crusader, and a central feature of the Christian Right mantra is that the secular government is engaged in an ever-increasing persecution of true Bible-believing Christians. In the article celebrating Ark Encounter’s five-year anniversary, Ham alluded to this persecution by noting that the greatest challenge that the Ark has faced in its history “was the government-mandated COVID-19 closure of the Ark last year that lasted almost three months.”
(Just a side note: Ham never says a word about the 606,218 COVID deaths in the United States. But of course, if you create a tourist site that commemorates/celebrates the drowning of, according to Ark Encounter, up to twenty billion people, how could you have concern about 606,218 dead human beings?)
So Ham hates it when folks point out that Ark Encounter is subsidized by the government. In response to my July 2019 post on this point, “Ken Ham Misleads Again,” Ham angrily responded with “University of Dayton Professor Attacks Ark and Ken Ham in Unscholarly Article,” an article which concluded with “concern” for my students. I responded with “Ken Ham Attacks rightingamerica,” which concluded as follows:
I stand by my research and my post (and Ham need not worry about my students). If Ham’s post were a paper written by a University of Dayton student in one of my first-year classes, I would have written this at the bottom of the paper: Failure to provide substantive evidence to back your claims, and a dismaying tendency to resort to ad hominem attacks. This is not acceptable for a university-level paper. Revise and resubmit. [Thanks to Sue Trollinger for the italicized text.]
Six months after all of this, in February 2020, Ham attacked the wonderful film about Ark Encounter, “We Believe in Dinosaurs,” once again focusing on the fact that the film points out that the Ark has received huge tax breaks. In response, David McMillan – a former young Earth creationist who is featured in the film – responded with a brilliant Cincinnati Enquirer article, “Ham fleeced a town that gave him his Ark Encounter.”
This headline says it all. And Ham is never going to own it.
Follow Your Conscience: An Interview with Peter Cajka
by William Trollinger
Peter Cajka is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He earned his Ph.D. from Boston College, and before that he was an undergraduate student here at the University of Dayton, where I had the great fortune of having Pete in four of my classes (Ken Ham would say this was Pete’s great misfortune). He is the author of a marvelous new book from the University of Chicago Press: Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties This work is very much worth reading, and we here at rightingamerica are delighted that Pete was willing to be interviewed about his book.
- Could you say a little about what led you into this fascinating topic?
In secondary reading for graduate classes and exams I noticed that Catholics mentioned conscience frequently. I often encountered phrases like “I must follow my conscience” or “I have sacred rights of conscience” or “conscience can never be handed to any authority figure” or “I must form and follow my conscience.” I began to wonder if this language could also be found in archival documents and other primary sources. I thought that perhaps other writings could shine light on why Catholics used this language so frequently. This project began when I started asking why Catholic conscience claims spiked in the 1960s and 1970s. I became totally hooked on the fascinating mechanics of the theology: notions like “the erroneous conscience,” for example, really captured my imagination. It seemed to me that if I could analyze the idea itself and explain why it became prominent in the late twentieth century I might be able to say something interesting about modern US history.
- One of the great virtues of this book is that it successfully challenges – overturns, actually – how the story of Catholics in America has been told. As you note in your introduction, “far from breeding the automatons that haunted the imaginations of Protestants from the colonial period to first wave of Irish immigration up to the rise of fascist and communist powers, the institutional Catholic Church taught each of its journeyman pupils about the inviolability of their moral sense” (11)? Could you elaborate on this point, in the process noting the strikingly significant role played by Thomas Aquinas and his “radical take on self-rule” (190)?
I think that the deep commitment Catholics have to conscience rights and conscience formation challenges some of the key categories and narratives of American history. Normally we associate individualism and rights with Protestant dissidents like Anne Hutchinson and modern secular freethinkers like Allen Ginsburg. American freedom as we often understand it depends upon projecting an image of Catholics as hierarchical, communal, and obedient. But at the center of Catholic thought – from moral theology to political ideas – can be found an intense focus on the conscience and the relationship between the subjective self and the objectivity of the law. This idea motivated Catholics to demand freedom in matters of sexuality and citizenship during the twentieth century. I contend that we must acknowledge the ways Catholics drew upon this set of church teachings on conscience to expand American freedom during the 1960s and 1970s. We might be tempted to say that Catholics are “acting Protestant” or even “embracing modernity” when we study their conscience language. But what I found is that the original architect of these ideas was thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas. His notions and frameworks – studied by Catholics in modern seminaries – shaped the terms of the twentieth century conscience rights movement. I hope my book shows that we can think of modern autonomy as having Catholic and medieval sources.
- You highlight the ways in which the conscience rights movement emerged in the 1960s, particularly regarding matters of war and sex. In your fascinating chapter, “The State’s Paperwork and the Catholic Peace Fellowship,” you discuss the forms filed by Catholic young men seeking to claim Conscientious Objector (CO) status. What was particularly striking about what you found in perusing these forms, and how successful were these applicants in securing CO status?
Finding these conscientious objector applications in the papers of the Catholic Peace Fellowship was a great archival moment for me! Each of these bureaucratic sheets (called Form 150) contained lengthy essays on why the applicant should not have to fight in the Vietnam War. Conscience featured prominently throughout. But more than this, the essays show that laypeople were fluent in the theology of conscience. Catholics explained to the state that no Catholic could place conscience into the hands of any authority figure, especially military commanders fighting an unjust war. That would entail a Catholic allowing an external authority to command an internal sacred space, which was an unacceptable development according to Catholic thought. Moreover, this might result in immoral actions for which the individual would be held culpable. Catholic laymen also explained how conscience had a “primacy.” Primacy means that all moral decisions must go through conscience and never around it. To follow a law, conscience must be satisfied. The application packets contain several rich layers of the theology and I hope readers enjoy unpeeling the concept. As regards the legal fates of these objectors, it was very difficult to trace what happened to them. But I am pessimistic that any, or more than a few, received free and clear conscientious objector status. Many of them likely performed community service, or the state put permanent marks on their records. The case that did make it to the Supreme Court in 1971 lost by a vote of 8 to 1. But while conscience failed in the formal legal system, this chapter and a later one on what I call the “conscience lobby” show that conscience language circulated widely at the grassroots of American Catholicism.
- Now on to sex. As someone who teaches twentieth-century U.S. history and U.S. religious history, I am embarrassed to say that I knew nothing of the 1968 rebellion of the Association of Washington [DC] Priests v. the Church hierarchy, particularly, the Archbishop of Washington. It is such a great story – could you briefly describe what happened, and how this was resolved (or not)?
The Archbishop of Washington DC, Patrick O’Boyle, suspended approximately three dozen priests from ministry for publicly defending a Catholic’s rights to follow conscience on the matter of artificial birth control. The priests then organized a Civil Rights-style campaign – replete with marches, demonstrations, speeches, and public rallies – to assert the right to follow conscience in the arena of reproduction. O’Boyle claimed that the clear teaching of Humanae vitae bound Catholics to obey in conscience the law. But the priests argued that while that teaching was part of the tradition, the other aspect of the teaching, that conscience must be formed and followed by the individual, also held in the debate about sex and its ends. The nation’s capital played host to a big debate about the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in Catholic teaching. O’Boyle refused to back down and the priests kept up the pressure on him by continually making the case for conscience in the media and at public appearances. The case could not be easily settled, and eventually went to Rome where a mediating body affirmed the teaching on conscience (calling conscience “inviolable”) while also upholding O’Boyle’s prerogatives to punish the priests as he saw fit. The chapter shows, I hope, that conscience and law set the categories for the debate on sex.
I did not have enough room in the book to tell the entire story! So this summer I published an article on this event in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. This article shows how the priests pushed their case from local ecclesiastical courts to regional church courts and finally to the Vatican. It was only settled in 1971, nearly three years after the original suspensions.
I don’t think you should feel bad for not knowing about this story! The archival papers have just become available at the Catholic University of America Special Collections, and I take pride in being the first historian to see them! I used the personal papers of Father Shane MacCarthy – a passionate priest just three years out of seminary when the dispute with O’Boyle began – to tell the story from the priests’ perspective. MacCarthy wrote sermons on conscience, and his papers include letters he wrote to O’Boyle about the idea. I hope that these priests can take their place in the narrative of global 1968 alongside Parisian rebels, the feminists who stormed the Miss America Pageant, the dissidents outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the students at Columbia who occupied various buildings. The priests imagined themselves as men of tradition, but they applied the idea of medieval conscience rights to the matter of sex. They are genuine 1968 rebels!
- The fundamental terms of this 1968 dispute revolved around the question – so central to your book – as to whether or not a Catholic can make an argument in behalf of conscience in disputes with the Church, or is it simply limited to disputes with the State. Could you talk about this debate, and why you think that – in the end – it is not resolvable?
Conscience rights, as your astute question notes, are applied to both moral and political questions. That is to say, they can be claimed in disputes in the church on the matter of sex and in issues with the state pertaining to citizenship. Catholics believed the right to follow conscience held in both arenas. The doctrine itself does not place limits on the question of where and when a Catholic can follow conscience. But this is where it gets tricky. The tension of the doctrine itself is key to understanding the history of the 1960s and 1970s. The idea has a split personality that has to be taken into account to understand why it became so important. Catholics claimed rights of conscience against the state on the matter of conscription and this spilled over into pressing claims of conscience on the issue of sex against the hierarchy. Conservatives like O’Boyle wanted conscience to be instructed by law in the church, but they also claimed conscience against the state. Catholics began to debate these questions at length in the 1960s and 1970s. How far could one follow a conscience? Does this hold in all areas of one’s life? Aquinas was clear that no superior in the church or the state could dictate a conscience. Yet he also contended that conscience must be willing to be formed by law. I do not foresee a resolution to this debate because the theology itself is ambiguous and full of tensions. In fact, it the act of putting law above conscience and then in the next breath conscience above law that gives the teaching its energy. I call conscience a double-agent. It can liberate you from obedience to a wicked authority and it can be called upon to fasten a catholic to recognize a just authority. Conscience language will continue to crop up in debates over gay rights, abortion, religious freedom, authority, divorce, contraception, and other issues precisely because the tradition left these things open-ended.
- As I was finishing Follow Your Conscience I could not help but think a lot about the threat of the American bishops to deny President Biden from receiving Communion at Mass in response to his support for the legalization of abortion. Will the question of conscience come to bear in all of this? And could you say a little bit about why you find this threatened move by the American bishops to be so problematic?
Biden would be well within Catholic tradition and his rights to assert his prerogative to follow conscience. He could make a strong case that he has formed his conscience to the best of his ability, especially given that his position on abortion is quite nuanced. He has arrived at his political position – affirming the church teaching but respecting the right to choose – after a great deal of moral formation. Conscience formation requires taking into account a wide range of secular and spiritual factors. The President can say he is trying to be a good Catholic in a complicated world.
But I would take this a step down the line. The bishops have flagrantly disregarded the Church’s own moral teachings on the formation of conscience. They are trying to align the President’s conscience with what they see as Church teaching by using coercive measures. The bishops want to pull him into obeying the law and, thus, they are violating the Catholic right to form and follow conscience, as held to be sacred for all individuals by Church teachings. Not only that, the Bishops are going against the grain of moral theology in trying to absorb the subjective side of a complex self into what they see as a clear teaching. This breaks with Catholic tradition, certainly. But it also will not work because of its brazen disregard for the self and the self’s sacred core. If you want a Catholic to agree with your argument about politics or doctrine, shepherd them towards that conclusion with debate, teaching, homilies, sacraments, and love. Catholic teaching is clear that conscience cannot be simply wrenched into agreement with an authority figure’s rules. Catholics spent a good deal of the twentieth century telling the state exactly that! What is particularly troubling (shocking or revolting or disgusting) is the use of the Eucharist to achieve these ends. The move is politically cynical and it plays into the Culture Wars. But it is also deeply tragic in the ways it actually seeks to eliminate Biden’s moral sense of self.
- Ok, Pete, I know that Follow Your Conscience has just come out, and you are rightly luxuriating in this achievement. But looking ahead, what do you envision as your next scholarly project?
I am increasingly convinced that we historians need to explain the Catholic contribution to the Culture Wars that have erupted in the wake of the transformations of the 1960s. I am teaching a new class this fall called “America’s Culture Wars” and I am going to be thinking about a potential book project that looks at how and why Catholics are such eager participants in struggles over questions of culture since 1970. We’ll see what happens!
I am also working on a scholarly article about the Clergy Abuse Crisis. I am currently the director of “Gender Sex and Power: Towards a History of Clergy Sex Abuse in the US Catholic Church.” We are a group of 12 or so commissioned researchers who are working with the records of BishopsAccountability.org to write localized and thematized studies of the crisis. I am writing a microhistory of the clergy abuse crisis by narrating the life of Reverend Louis Miller, a priest from the Archdiocese of Louisville who engaged in acts of abuse from 1960 to 1990. I plan to send this scholarly article to a journal.
The Toxic Populism of the Southern Baptist Convention
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. He is also making final edits on his sixth book – Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy – forthcoming in the next few months from Wipf and Stock (Cascades).
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) fits the populist frame suggested by Michael J. Lee. The populist narrative highlights the eternal virtue of the Founders’ vision yet distrusts its current form. The populist vision, or its “restorationism” in Richard Hofstadter’s view, locates political victory in the resurrection of a simpler idealized history. Specifically, populism begins with the constitution of a virtuous “people,” then envisions a robust “enemy,” decries the current “system,” and finally finds the promise of reform in “apocalyptic confrontation.”
Viewing the recent national convention of the SBC in Nashville through the lens of Lee’s argumentative structure may provide us with a clearer view of what is happening in the SBC. I contend that the lifeblood of the SBC is the constant creation and demonizing of enemies. But lately the old enemies have lost meaning, become matter-of-fact, even boring. All Southern Baptists agree that liberals, socialists, the ACLU, evolutionary scientists, most other Christian denominations, gays and lesbians, and the radical left make up the rotten barrel of enemies. Preaching against these enemies has become like preaching to the choir.
More than this, the enemies are now fighting back. The shamers are now shamed for their awful stances against minorities, gays, and immigrants. Always a group with extremely fragile feelings, this dis-ease among Southern Baptists has created a deep-seated resentment, a determination to lash out at enemies.
In this context, Southern Baptists qualify as a sort of demonized populists. Lee says that this sort of populism comes to life in an identifiable people:
First, a stable and definable “people” are portrayed as heroic defenders of “traditional” values. The “people” are rendered as ordinary, simple, honest, hard-working, God-fearing, and patriotic Americans. Commonality among these ordinary folks is evident in their similar ways of life. Hence, populism is a “language of inheritance” that “grows from a sense of aggrieved ‘peoplehood.'”
Southern Baptists, already possessors of a populist version of the “priesthood of the believer,” have less trust in clergy and denominational leaders than ever before. Doctrinal purity tests are no longer sufficient to distinguish between the various candidates vying for national leadership. The recently elected president of the SBC, Rev. Litton, was criticized because his wife joined him in presenting a series of sermons about family life. This didn’t seem to impact the outcome of the election, but seems more like straining at a camel to swallow a nat. In any event, the rhetorical trope, “the people,” trumps the establishment and often raises its collective voice in opposition to the establishment.
Lee’s second trope of populism defines and labels the enemy. The “people’s” collective fantasy is a narrative of unseating an enemy that has an unyielding commitment to hoarding power and to the destruction of “traditional” values. In whatever manner the “people” and their “traditional” values are defined, the enemy stands in opposition. The enemy not only provides a sharp boundary rhetorically insulating the “people’s” identity, but the enemy also is a rhetorical purifier, a scapegoat for societal ills.
Given that their traditional enemies have become so dully self-evident, Southern Baptists now need new enemies. And there was nowhere to turn except to the denominational leadership. No matter that those elected to denominational leadership have long been one of the “people.” In this fractured time, maintaining membership in the “people” can be difficult.
For example, for more than three decades, Dr. Albert Mohler, has been a strong leader and recognized theological spokesman for the SBC. In Nashville, an on-screen shot of Dr. Mohler holding one of his granddaughters was met with booing by the messengers of the convention. Mohler has been moved, through no fault of his own, from “the people” to “the enemy.” This is the way of demonized populism. There must always be more sacrificial lambs for the fires of the movement. The tragedy of this enemy-focused, enemy-dependent movement is that it finally turns on its own and becomes a form of political cannibalism. The SBC now finds itself embroiled in a self-destructive form of populism that has no viable future as long as having enemies is more important than having a positive vision for the future.
The third trope in the populist narrative is the “system.” The “system” is an amalgamation of numerous sites within the national political and economic order in which power is distributed, governed, and managed. In the case of the SBC, the system is the Executive Committee, the various boards and agencies of the denominational structure, and the seminary presidents. The “system” in this brand of dysfunctional populism cannot be trusted.
At the top of the “system” is the newly elected president of the convention. Moments after his election, Rev. Litton became a part of the “system.” This means he is only one step from being labeled “the enemy.” Again, the prospect of self-destruction looms over the entire process.
Populist rhetoric features a fourth step, i.e., apocalyptic confrontation as the vehicle for revolutionary change. The SBC response to a presidential election has apocalyptic confrontation embedded in its very existence. Thousands of “messengers” were bussed to Nashville in an effort to win the election for the far-right candidate. This strategy has attained almost god-like status among Southern Baptists, because this is exactly how the first “fundamentalist takeover” occurred. This foreboding sense that the SBC is surrounded by enemies, has enemies on the inside, and is facing a catastrophic disaster, plays into the prevailing “Left Behind” apocalyptic mindset of “the people.”
Apocalyptic confrontation rises from the archetypal metaphor, “Life is war.” Once this becomes reality, there is no choice but to engage in the use of the tropes of “destruction.” Decry the destruction that is taking place as the “system” and the “enemies” are pushing the denomination to the left. There is little hope of a change in direction because the prevailing winds are, in apocalyptic terms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
The Southern Baptists, an entity of toxic, demonized populism, have set the table for an ultimate dismantling of the entire system. Looking at the SBC through the rhetorical lens of populist tropes we are able to identify the people, the enemy, the system, and the apocalyptic conflagration that always erupts.
The Southern Baptists now resemble the strange story of I Kings 13. A prophet was sent to warn the establishment of the judgment of God. There was another prophet – “an old prophet in Bethel” – who heard what the man of God had said to the king. He found this preacher and invited him home for dinner. The preacher at first refused the invitation, but the old preacher from Bethel said, “I also am a prophet as you are.” He told the preacher that an angel of the Lord has instructed him to eat with him. The Scripture pronounces a fatal word: “But he was deceiving him.” End result: the prophet, after eating and drinking with the deceitful preacher, left for home. “A lion met him on the road and killed him.”
Strange story, no doubt — but preachers destroying preachers rings out a bell of warning to the SBC.
And for another story on the toxicity that is the Southern Baptist Convention, check out this remarkable article from Cedarville University’s underground magazine, the Cedarville Interpreter: The Paige of Enlightenment (or Not).
The Revolution at the SBC Annual Meeting
by Rev. Brian Kaylor
Rev. Brian Kaylor is editor and president of Word&Way, as well as the host of the podcast, Baptist Without an Adjective.
Today’s post appears originally at Word&Way.
After Ed Litton emerged victorious in the Southern Baptist Convention’s presidential election on Tuesday (June 15), reports and analysis quickly portrayed the news as a defeat for the denomination’s fundamentalist wing. The messengers (i.e. delegates) rejected the attempt to shift the convention further to the right. While the contest for the SBC’s top office tells that story, other votes reveal something else at play throughout the annual meeting. Rather than fundamentalism being dismissed, anti-elitism was embraced.
Consider what transpired shortly after the meeting began. Ronnie Floyd, the man who runs the denomination on a day-to-day basis as CEO of the Executive Committee, approached the microphone with other leaders to give a report. But the EC recommendations quickly sparked debate, amendments, and opposition.
An attempt from the EC to change its own mission statement brought a challenge from the floor. Instead of saying the EC “exists to minister to the churches,” the proposed revision would indicate that the EC “seeks to empower churches.” Messenger Spence Shelton of North Carolina successfully pushed to change the word “empower” to “serve.”
“We are a bottom-up not a top-down convention of churches. The local church is the headquarters,” Shelton said to applause. “The churches empower the Executive Committee to serve us. [The EC] does not empower local churches.”
This linguistic reminder of who actually runs the convention was only the beginning. 
A messenger speaks during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting on June 15, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Brian Kaylor/Word&Way)
An outcry arose to another EC recommendation granting itself the power to compel reports and actions from other SBC institutions, with the refusal to comply involving the risk of seeing funds escrowed.
“I don’t think it is wise to give our Executive Committee additional authority at this time when they are under investigation for their response to sexual abuse and other perceived overreaches,” protested Jon Canler of Kentucky.
Others expressed concerns the new language could jeopardize accreditation of SBC seminaries or create legal problems. The EC recommendation then failed in a virtually unanimous vote. The masses on the floor upstaged the leaders on the platform.
Later, a rewrite of the ministry statement for Lifeway Christian Resources failed, and the messengers refused to give another term to the EC member the EC just elected on Monday as their new vice chair — which means the EC will be forced to elect someone else to that role.
The unspoken but clearly obvious guerilla warfare continued. Something no less significant than Floyd’s vision for the entire SBC was the next target. Floyd had talked about this plan for over a year. He led those gathered in prayer before offering a passionate, nearly 40-minute sermon on “Vision 2025.” He prayed again before calling for a vote. The open microphones revealed his prayers were not answered as he had hoped. 
Ronnie Floyd speaks during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting on June 15, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Brian Kaylor/Word&Way)
First, the messengers amended Vision 2025 by adding a sixth “strategic action.” Ben Cole of Texas — perhaps one of the most vocal public critics of SBC elites — moved to include that the SBC “prayerfully endeavor to eliminate all incidents of sexual abuse and racial discrimination among our churches.” Then, a smaller edit to the wording of another one of the initiatives was proposed. The alterations passed.
The planners of the annual meeting clearly were caught off guard by the pushback. Massive banners naming Vision 2025’s original five initiatives and unaltered wording greeted messengers as they left the plenary hall. They stood as symbols of the expected submission missing in Nashville.
Still, the rebellion continued on. Just as members of Congress can maneuver around leadership to bring legislation to the floor with a discharge petition, so messengers can force consideration of resolutions on the floor by a two-thirds vote. This mechanism was used, over the objection of former SBC president and current Resolutions Committee chair James Merritt, for an anti-abortion resolution widely understood as more extreme than previous positions taken by the denomination.
The statement denounces legislation or policies that contain any exceptions in abortion prohibitions as guilty of “complicity” that helps “legitimize” the practice. It passed overwhelmingly even after a Christian ethics professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the research director for the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission spoke against the resolution during the debate. 
Resolutions Committee Chair James Merritt speaks during a press conference about the resolutions at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting on June 16, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Brian Kaylor/Word&Way)
Tom Ascol, who is perceived as either a reformer or a rebellion leader in guiding a group known as Founders Ministries, celebrated this moment by calling the resolution’s success “a clear reminder that denominational elites do not always have to get their way if grassroots church members will unite to wisely engage the process to challenge their agenda at those points that are problematic.”
Perhaps the biggest rebuke to the SBC’s leaders came in a call to investigate the EC’s mishandling of clergy sexual abuse cases. Amid growing controversies in the weeks leading up to the meeting, Floyd announced a third-party group would conduct a limited inquiry and the EC rejected a push to broaden the investigation into its own practices.
So, messenger Grant Gaines of Tennessee motioned to create a task force outside the EC to provide oversight of the review. SBC leaders then shockingly referred that motion to the EC itself, letting the proverbial foxes vote on how their guarding of the henhouse would be scrutinized.
The messengers challenged that decision, and the vast majority raised their yellow ballots into the air to establish an independent task force probing the missteps of Floyd and the EC.
ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT POLITICS
These other votes illuminate the dynamics of the presidential election. Albert Mohler, president of the SBC’s flagship seminary for almost three decades and arguably the most well known leader in the denomination, failed to advance past the first round of balloting. The candidate of the elites came in a distant third to two congregational pastors, Mike Stone and Ed Litton.
In the runoff, the second most elite candidate lost. While both Litton and Stone stressed their pastoral roles in the campaign, Stone is the immediate past chairman of the SBC Executive Committee. News reports on various EC scandals in the weeks prior to the meeting highlighted this aspect of Stone’s resume. Further reinforcement occurred from damaging letters that emerged in the wake of Russell Moore’s resignation as president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
Presidential ballots are wheeled out of the main hall to the tellers room for counting at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting on June 15, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Brian Kaylor/Word&Way)
Both Litton and Stone employed “I’m just a pastor” rhetoric in competing for the top job. There is a parallel here to the rise of outsider candidates in political campaigns, most notably the way former President Donald Trump triumphed over an array of governors and senators in the 2016 Republican primary by railing against the elites. Rather than promoting the value of experience, refrains that one is “not a career politician” are far more common today among those seeking careers in politics. Those with elite backgrounds, such as Senators Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley, even pose as insurgents fighting an establishment they claim to abhor yet desperately want to be.
For the elites, with their long histories of credentials and years of ladder-climbing, the current social atmosphere must be disorienting. Mohler, who watched from the sidelines instead of being crowned by the convention, found himself jeered during the SBC meeting while holding one of his grandchildren. The incident understandably left him “more than a little shaken.”
This is not new for Baptists to revolt against their own elites. As historian Nathan Hatch argued in The Democratization of Christianity, the Baptists in early America held “an aversion to central control and a quest for self-reliance,” so they sought leadership from outside “religious elites.”
“Increasingly assertive common people wanted their leaders unpretentious, their doctrines self-evident and down-to-earth, their music lively and singable, and their churches in local hands,” Hatch wrote. “As many of the early republic’s most visible Baptist leaders inched toward influence and respectability, a considerable network of lesser lights continued to champion local control.” 
Messengers pack the main hall during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting on June 15, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Brian Kaylor/Word&Way)
Perhaps we are witnessing another such moment today. Litton’s victory is important in the ideological sense captured by most news reports. That the more fundamentalist candidates lost will impact the life of the denomination over at least the next year or two as Litton tries to hold off additional losses of Black churches or others put off by the more extreme forces.
But reducing his victory to ideology misses something equally important. After all, Stone’s running mate won the election for 1st vice president and that far-right anti-abortion resolution passed. These are not signs of moderation or conservatism.
As the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the SBC both influences and reflects cultural shifts. The anti-establishment ideology roiling Washington, D.C. and state houses showed up at a church convention in Tennessee. This rabid rejection of elitism leads many — especially Republicans and White evangelicals like the bulk of Southern Baptists — to not trust the explanations of the media or the government officials about who won the last election or the importance of masking and vaccination during the coronavirus pandemic.
At its worst, this brand of politics leads to moments like the Jan. 6 insurrection — a potent mix of Christian Nationalism and conspiratorial thinking. (Amid contentious debate and amendments on other topics, the SBC Resolutions Committee pulled its planned resolution Tuesday that would have condemned the Jan. 6 insurrection.)
The real story here is not about who won or lost but about where power was most forcefully wielded. The populism within the SBC’s theological DNA should serve as a warning sign to Ed Litton. He is no longer an outsider, no longer just a local church pastor. Now, he is the establishment. That means the insurgents are coming for him.
What a Title IX lawsuit might mean for religious universities
By William Trollinger and Susan Trollinger
Today we share our article, which appears at The Conversation. Our thanks to the editors’ generous sharing policy, which allows us to share our article in its entirety here.
The Religious Exemption Accountability Project, or REAP, filed a class action lawsuit on March 26, 2021, charging that the U.S. Department of Education was complicit “in the abuses that thousands of LGBTQ+ students endured at taxpayer-funded religious colleges and universities.”
According to the suit, those abuses include “conversion therapy, expulsion, denial of housing and health care, sexual and physical abuse and harassment.” The abuses also include the “less visible, but no less damaging, consequences of institutionalized shame, fear, anxiety, and loneliness.”
REAP – an organization that aims for “a world where LGBTQ students on all campuses are treated equally” – holds the Department of Education culpable, arguing that, under the federal civil rights law Title IX, it is obligated “to protect sexual and gender minority students at taxpayer-funded” schools, including “private and religious educational institutions.”
The lawsuit’s 33 plaintiffs include students and alumni from 25 colleges. Most of these schools – including Liberty University and Baylor University – are evangelical, but the list also includes one Mormon and one Seventh-Day Adventist university.
Indeed, the implications of the lawsuit extend to the more than 200 religious schools that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. In 2018 these schools received US$4.2 billion in federal aid.
As scholars who write extensively on evangelicalism from historical and rhetorical perspectives, we argue that, whether or not it succeeds, this lawsuit poses a serious challenge to these religious schools.
Holding on to values
Historian Adam Laats argued in his 2008 book, Fundamentalist U that evangelical colleges are forever engaged in a balancing act.
They have had to convince accrediting bodies, faculty, and students that they are legitimate and welcoming institutions of higher education. At the same time, as Laats says, they “have had to demonstrate to a skeptical evangelical public” – alumni, pastors, parachurch leaders and donors – that they are holding fast to the “spiritual and cultural imperatives that set them apart.”
These imperatives differ from school to school, but they can include both doctrinal commitments and lifestyle restrictions. For example, faculty are often required to affirm that the Bible is inerrant, that is, without error and factually true in all that it teaches. For another example, students and staff at many of these institutions are required to agree that they will not consume alcoholic beverages.
And as Laats points out, these schools are obliged to prop up the idea that those “imperatives” are eternal and unchanging.
Racial issues and change
But it turns out that evangelical imperatives are subject to forces of change. Take, for example, the matter of race.
In the mid-20th century, administrators at many of these schools insisted that their policies of racial segregation were biblically grounded and central to the Christian faith. Not coincidentally, at mid-century segregation was part of mainstream American culture, including higher education.
But as the rhetoric of the civil rights movement became increasingly compelling, administrators at evangelical schools cautiously moved away from their racist practices. By the 1970s, things had changed to the point that racial segregation no longer rose to the status of an evangelical “imperative.”
Of course, there were a few religious schools – including Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina – that continued to practice racial discrimination and got away with it because of the religious exemption that they claimed. All that changed in 1983 when the Supreme Court ruled, in Bob Jones University v. United States, that BJU “did not get to maintain its tax-exempt status due to an interracial dating ban – a policy the university claimed was based in its sincerely held religious beliefs.”
The Court’s decision meant that BJU and similar schools had to make a choice. They could keep racist policies like the ban on interracial dating, or abandon them and retain their tax-exempt status as educational institutions. While BJU held firm for a while, by 2000 it had abandoned its interracial dating ban.
Push for and resistance to change
REAP is leaning on the Court’s decision v. Bob Jones University as a legal precedent for its lawsuit. And this lawsuit comes at a challenging moment for evangelical schools that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
As political scientist Ryan Burge has noted – drawing upon data from the General Social Survey – in 2008 just 1 in 3 white evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 35 believed that same-sex couples should have the right to be married. But by 2018, it found that “nearly 65% of evangelicals between 18 and 35 [supported] same-sex marriage,” a change in keeping with the dramatic change in opinion in the broader culture.
In response, administrators at many evangelical schools have recently adopted a conciliatory rhetoric for LGBTQ students and their sympathetic allies on and off campus. As Shane Windmeyer, co-founder of Campus Pride, a national organization devoted to working to create a safer college environment for LGBTQ students, has recently observed, most Christian colleges now “want to cloud this issue and come off as supportive [of LGBTQ students] because they know it’ll impact recruitment and admissions.”
But at most of these colleges, this conciliatory rhetoric has not translated into scrapping policies that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. And there is a reason for this. As several scholars, including us, have amply documented, opposition to homosexuality is central to the Christian right, which is dominated by evangelicals and which has framed the push for LGBTQ rights as an attack on faithful Christians.
‘The great sorting’
Evangelical colleges have had to play to two very different audiences when it comes to the matter of sexual orientation and gender identity. Folks in both audiences are paying close attention to the REAP lawsuit. Their responses indicate that “the two-audiences” strategy may no longer be tenable.
See, for example, Seattle Pacific University, an evangelical school founded in 1891 and affiliated with the Free Methodist Church. On April 19 of this year, 72% of the faculty supported a vote of no confidence in its board of trustees. This came after the trustees refused to revise a policy that forbids the hiring of LGBTQ individuals and refused to modify SPU’s statement on human sexuality which stipulates that the only allowable expression of sexuality is “in the context of the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.”
Adding to the pressure is the announcement that “the students and alumni are planning a campaign to discourage donations to the school and … decrease enrollment at the school.”
In a subsequent article in the Roys Report, a Christian media outlet that reported the development, several commentators indicated a very strong opposition to any effort to end SPU’s discriminatory policies. As one person noted: “I am sorry to hear this once Biblical school has hired so many woke Professors.” Another said: “God hates all things LGBTQ.” A third person observed: “I am a Christian and lifelong resident of the Seattle area. I say good for the SPU Board but sad they have so many faculty with debased minds.”
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As Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler has put it, “we are about to see a great sorting where we’re going to find out where every institution stands, and it’s not going to come with the filing of this lawsuit. It’s going to come when the moment that the federal government says … ‘You can have the federally supported student aid support … or you can have your convictions. Choose ye this day.’”
This comes from a hard-line fundamentalist. On the other hand, there are administrators and faculty at evangelical colleges who see discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation as being at odds with their Christian commitments. For them, the choice is whether to accept financial donations from the segment of their constituency opposed to LGBTQ rights, or go with their convictions.
There are indications that the Biden administration is seeking a compromise with these schools that claim a religious exemption that gives them the right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity. But whether or not the REAP lawsuit is successful, religious colleges and universities in the U.S. will keep getting pressed to take a stand on the status of LGBTQ students on their campuses.
William Trollinger, Professor of History, University of Dayton and Susan L Trollinger, Professor of English, University of Dayton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
“Let’s take the hill!”: Moving Past Confession and Repentance, The Main Dudes at Willow Creek Rehabilitate Bill Hybels
by Susan Trollinger
If you follow media reporting on evangelicalism, you’re undoubtedly aware that the last few years have been really tough for Willow Creek Church (or, for those in the know, “Willow”). Most people became aware of Willow’s troubles when the Chicago Tribune (March 2018) and later The New York Times (August 2018) published investigative articles in which victims told their remarkable stories of how Bill Hybels (founder and senior pastor of Willow for more than 4 decades) sexually harassed and/or abused them. The victims recounted encounters in which Hybels said inappropriate things to them, propositioned them, insisted on hugs that lasted way too long, commented on their appearance, invited them into his hotel room, fondled their breasts, and so forth.
Simply stated, these and other stories revealed that Bill Hybels was a longtime sexual predator.
Just a couple of weeks ago (on May 26), the new senior pastor (David Dummitt—he has Hybel’s former job and is in charge of all eight Willow campuses in the Chicago area) and Shawn Williams (the newly hired pastor of the South Barrington campus) hosted a Q&A for about 200 “core members” of the church. That Q&A was recorded and about eight notable minutes of it are available on YouTube.
I came upon this video by way of an excellent article that was published last week in the Roys Report and written by Laura Barringer (a longtime member of Willow and co-author of A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing). Barringer responded critically and powerfully to the video (more about that shortly). To understand Barringer’s response and to situate my own, it’s helpful to have a brief chronology of what unfolded at Willow over the last eight years or so.
- Sometime in 2013-2014: Allegations surface that for decades Bill Hybels had engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct including sexual harassment, inappropriate touching, and sexually suggestive comments. Hybels denies all of the allegations at a churchwide meeting and receives a standing ovation. Church leaders call the allegations “lies.” (Pashman, Goodstein)
- 2014: Church elders conduct an investigation and pronounce Hybels innocent. (Pashman)
- 2015: Attendance across the eight Willow campuses reaches 25,000 per weekend.
- 2017: The Church hires a law firm to conduct another investigation and, again, Hybels is found innocent. (Pashman)
- March 2018: The Chicago Tribune publishes an article based on their own investigation that includes Vonda Dyer’s story (she was the former director of the vocal ministry at Willow). Dyer talked about deeply troubling interactions with Hybels, including an evening in 1998 (they often traveled together for Willow work) when Hybels called her to his hotel room “unexpectedly kissed her and suggested they could lead Willow Creek together.” Similar stories from other women appear in the article. (Pashman)
- April 2018: Hybels resigns six months ahead of his planned retirement. (Miller Aug 8 2018)
- August 2018: Pat Baranowski (Hybel’s former executive assistant) goes public in an article published by The New York Times about the years of sexual harassment and abuse she had endured. (Goodstein)
- August 2018: The lead pastor, teaching pastor, and the entire elder board resign largely in response to the new allegations that appear in The New York Times article. (Miller Aug 8 2018)
- February 2019: The Willow Creek Independent Advisory Group (consisting of Christian leaders from around the Chicago area) release their 17-page report in which they conclude that the allegations made against Hybels are credible and, indeed, credible enough for the Church “to initiate disciplinary action.” Of course, the Church didn’t. (Miller)
- July 2019: A new elder board issues a statement saying that they believe the women who had alleged abuse, that those who verbally attacked these women should apologize to them, and that this will be their final public statement on the matter. (Jones)
- 2020: Attendance across Willow’s eight campuses drops to below 18,000—something like a 30% decline from attendance levels in 2015. (Smith)
- January 2020: A woman who was a longtime member of Willow shared on Facebook that Gilbert Bilezikian (one of the founding fathers of Willow and mentor to Hybels) sexually abused her from 1984-1988. Initially, it appeared that the leadership had turned a corner when Steve Gillen (then the acting pastor) alerted the Church to the accusation and said he believed the accuser. Soon after, however, it was revealed that other credible accusations had been levelled against Bilezikian to the leadership a decade earlier and were kept quiet. (Smith, Darnell)
- February 2020: Keri Ladouceur (former senior leader at Willow who also alleged abuse by Hybels) tells the story of a meeting she was called to in 2018 by a member of the elder board and a lawyer in which she was told that “either she was lying or misremembering” what Hybels had done and that “they could make it look like she was pursuing him.” (Roys 2 28 20)
- April 2020: David Dummitt is hired by Willow Creek to serve as Willow’s senior pastor (the position Bill Hybels occupied). (RNS)
- July 2020: Shawn Williams is hired to serve as the pastor for the South Barrington campus.
- In early October 2020, and in response to falling revenues (down 20% churchwide), Dummitt eliminates 92 positions across the eight Willow campuses in the Chicagoland area. At the North Shore Campus (Glenview) the staff serving about 2600 people went from 32 to 5. This dramatic and sudden change shocked members such that some threatened to stop tithing until they got answers. (Darnell, Roys)
- Less than a month before these cost-cutting changes, the very popular lead pastor of the North Shore Campus (Amy Mikal) resigned in response to having been told by the new leadership that in their new vision for Willow she would have a different role, one that would involve less preaching and teaching. She was replaced by Ed Ollie Jr. (Roys 10-31-20, Darnell)
In response to all of this Hybels has consistently denied all wrongdoing, claiming that, for reasons he can’t explain, members and former friends had “colluded” against him. (Pashman)
Like I said, this has been a really rough number of years for Willow. And Laura Barringer knows a lot about it. In her article, Barringer talks about the shock that she and her husband experienced when they read the Chicago Tribune article. Barringer had been baptized by Hybels and was a member for twenty years. She met her husband there. Willow was their church home. How could this be?
The pain that she and her husband experienced at the news of Hybel’s abuse was intense. Never mind the pain of the women who endured his abuse.
But the point of her article is to say that what these two Willow pastors did in their May 26 video was “wrong.” Amidst fist bumping and jokes and laughter from the audience, Dummitt and Williams respond to the question (purportedly raised by someone in the audience via an online chat or something)—”Why is Bill Hybel’s name rarely mentioned?” Barringer compellingly argues that Williams’ response – in which he talks about having encountered various “perspectives” on what transpired at Willow, shares the “profound impact” that Hybels had on his life, and refers to Hybels as “a once-in-a-generation leader” – is deeply troubling. Barringer also highlights a crucial moment in Williams’ response in which he draws on a metaphor that Rick Warren used when he gave his first sermon following his son’s suicide (caused by depression): “In the garden of God’s grace, broken trees bear a lot of fruit.”
(I leave it to the reader to speculate how Williams thought it was appropriate to mine Rick Warren’s response to his son’s suicide in behalf of Bill Hybels the sexual predator.)
In response to all this, Barringer writes:
Should Bill Hybels’ name be mentioned? This is what I think: Yes. Yes, it should be mentioned. But it should not be celebrated, as Williams and Dummitt directly stated and indirectly did with continuous praises and accolades . . . Willow Creek should tell the truth about itself, confess its complicities and sins, and receive God’s forgiveness and healing. But confession means to admit, to name, to describe, and to own what happened. It means to affirm the truth teller(s), name the abuser and his wrongdoings, and confess all complicity. It means to publicly acknowledge the harm done and express a sincere desire to change.
Finding Barringer’s analysis compelling, I decided to watch the video myself and conduct my own analysis. I went at it a bit differently than Barringer. I conducted a rhetorical/content analysis. Having watched the video a number of times, I noticed five different categories of statements that these two pastors made. And I recorded the amount of time and the percentage of time (within the video) that these two pastors spent talking within each category.
- New guy statements: As Williams opens his response to the question he talks at some length about how he is “the new guy” and so is ignorant of much of the dynamics that preceded his tenure. He jokes that while you can’t play the “new guy card” too long, he hopes that he’s still “in the window” of the new guy. He “asks” those gathered to give him “an umbrella of grace” so that he can be “candid.” He admits that he is likely to step on various “landmines” as he is being candid. And, again, he asks for that umbrella of grace.
- 147 seconds, 30% of the time
- Praise: Both pastors praise Hybels: “he was a once-in-a-generation leader” who did beautiful things, they “stand on the shoulders of 46 years of incredible things God has done here” through Hybels, they were drawn to Willow by Hybels’ work and writing, and so forth.
- 74 seconds, 15% of the time
- Blame: Williams acknowledges that there was a “shadow to Bill’s leadership.”
- 19 seconds, 4% of the time
- Excuse structure: Williams introduces the metaphor of “broken trees bearing good fruit” and Dummitt picks up on it, talking about how beautiful it is. I call this an “excuse structure” because it provides the audience with an excuse for forgetting what Hybels did to his victims (“he was just a broken tree, after all [aren’t we all broken?], and he bore great fruit!”), so they can focus instead on what a great leader he was for Willow and all the amazing things that he did.
- 113 seconds, 23% of the time
- Development of excuse structure into preparation for church-wide recoding of Hybels’ sexual abuse: After Dummitt tells Williams that the “broken tree” metaphor is “beautiful,” they have a fist bump and the audience applauds. Dummitt then encourages Williams to preach this word of Hybels as a “broken tree” “some weekend.” (Side note: Any chance they talked about this metaphor and the idea of Williams preaching this before the Q&A? Willow doesn’t leave much up to chance, and planning is everything so as to keep the audience engaged.) Dummitt goes on to talk about the importance of talking about “the history.” He says “we need to celebrate the history.” Williams talks about not being “bashful” about the great things that Willow (thanks to Hybels) has done. Dummitt instructs those gathered that “wounds got to scar over at some point. And we gotta move. Let’s go. Let’s take the hill.”
- 145 seconds, 29% of the time
A quick rundown:
- 4% of the time on blame (with no mention of the victims)
- 15% of the time on explicit praise
- 30% of the time on “the new guy” request for an “umbrella of grace” so that he can “be candid”
- And, if you put the excuse structure (broken trees) together with preparation vis-à-vis the excuse structure to recode Hybels (and the Willow brand) as having “bore great fruit”—52% of the time
Barringer is, of course, right that what Dummitt and Williams did was wrong. And there is more. This is a rhetoric of preparation. The inner circle is being prepared for a shift in the very recently repentant rhetoric of Willow. Years of coverup. Years of attacking victims who were telling the truth. Years of enabling Hybel’s abuse. And then a little window in which a new elder board said, yes, it’s true. And we’re sorry.
But enough of that! The new leaders have a vision! Enough of shame and lament and pain and confession and repentance. It’s time to get the Willow brand on the move again! All that confession and repentance is not uplifting. It does not fill the seats or the coffers. Instead: it’s time to “take the hill!”
Lord have mercy.
Jesus and 20 Billion Others Died to Save (a Few of) Us
by William Trollinger
“Off the rails” doesn’t begin to describe the state of fundamentalist apologetics.
Take, for example, young Earth creationism. Its entire “scientific” apparatus rests on the notion that a global flood four millennia ago created the geological formations that we see today. With this as the starting point, the apologetics enterprise consists of providing answers to a myriad of obvious questions, including:
- How did Noah manage to build a gigantic Ark? (Answer: it is quite possible he made use of cranes and concrete).
- How did animals coming off the Ark manage to disseminate across the planet so quickly? (Answer: they boarded log mats that took them across the oceans).
- How many people drowned in the Flood? (Answer: upwards of 20 billion).
- Where are the fossils of these billions of humans who drowned in the Flood? (Answer: human bones were destroyed by the hydraulic power and/or acidic nature of the floodwaters).
It probably goes without saying that only a person completely ensconced in the fundamentalist bubble could find answers like these persuasive or reasonable or intelligible:
- Noah may have employed cranes? (Why not computers?)
- Elephants rode logs thousands of miles across the ocean?
- The Earth’s population grew from 2 in 4004 BCE to 20 billion in 2348 BCE?
- The pre-Flood population was 12.5 billion higher than the Earth’s population today?
- Upwards of 20 billion dead, and no human remains?
Of course, all of this raises theological questions, including: What sort of God drowns upwards of twenty billion people (including children and infants and – not included in the 20 billion – the unborn)?
Of course, the folks at Answers in Genesis (AiG) have answers for this question. At Ark Encounter there is a placard entitled, “Was It Just for God to Judge the Whole World?”:
- “Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Second, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve judgment!”
This is not, well, the most theologically robust answer to the question as to the justice of divine genocide. But an AiG contributor named Mark Etter has stepped into the breach. In his May 29 AiG article, “An Act of Grace”, Etter asserts that those who “picture the flood as a vindictive action . . . fail to see the mercy that God showed humanity.” He then elaborates:
- In the time of Noah all human beings – presumably including children, infants, and the unborn – were thoroughly wicked, except for Noah and his little family.
- Noah and his family were helpless to hold back the forces of wickedness.
- If/when Noah and his family were killed by the evil forces, there would be no human beings available to bear the Messiah, as (apparently wickedness is a genetic trait) the wicked people would only produce more wicked people who would only produce more wicked people.
- In a divine act of grace, a grieving God stepped in at the last moment to drown everyone on the entire planet – except Noah and his family – to ensure that someday in the future Jesus could be born.
- “It is a comfort to know” that God will repeat this act of grace in the future, preserving the faithful remnant while sending the wicked – including those who tolerate or practice “abortion,” “unbiblical sexual behavior,” and/or “living together” (as an unmarried couple?) – to hell.
This theological “argument” is a head-scratcher. Much could be said, but I will limit myself to this: Is wickedness an overpowering genetic trait, so that wicked people only produce more wicked people who produce more wicked people, and thus none of these wicked people could bear the Messiah? This is biblical? And are there genetically wicked and genetically righteous people?
Once again, AiG loves the binary!
I have no idea who Mr. Etter is, or his qualifications – as is often the case with AiG contributors, there is no information provided about him. But I do have one suggestion for Mr. Etter: find some adult outside of the fundamentalist bubble, preferably someone with at least a high school education and some familiarity with Christianity. Read this article to them, and ask them if they find it persuasive or reasonable or intelligible. Ask them if this article convinces them that the drowning of upwards of twenty billion people was an act of mercy.
Off the rails, indeed.
