Kingdom or Nation: Why the Divide between Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism Is Primarily Theological, Not Political
by Sudabée Lotfian-Mena
Sudabée Lotfian-Mena will begin her fourth year as a doctoral Theology student at the University of Dayton in Fall 2026, where she is working on theology arising in the wake of economic realities and the project of colonization in the Age of Discovery. She is also ABD at the University of Valladolid in philosophy of aesthetics. She has lately co-authored a book on philosophy of religion, to be published later this year, as well as recently co-authored a chapter on Latin American Marian devotions. She is dedicated to teaching theology, her latest courses being Faith and Justice in the context of Catholic Social Teaching and East Asian Religions.
“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” — Matthew 7: 20 (KJV)
Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism are usually situated on opposite ends of the political spectrum, one on the Left, the other on the Right. This shorthand obscures more than it reveals. Though it is true that both currents are political, and that both trade in public expressions of Christianity, “Left vs. Right” categorization/labelling ignores the more fitting scenario of “Kingdom vs. Nation.”
Liberation Theology is theocentric, oriented toward God, born from the reading and interpretation of Scripture by the poor and their pastors. Christian Nationalism, however sincerely felt by many of its adherents, is better described as an anthropocentric ideology that borrows Christian symbolism to sacralize a nation-state. Liberation looks up toward God, seeking the source of the love and justice necessary to heal and mend society; Christian Nationalism, following Feuerbach, projects an idealized idea of nation upward and calls this projection God.
Authentic Liberation Theology
Anglophone accounts of Liberation Theology often begin the story with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s 1971 treatise, A Theology of Liberation. Perhaps in a bid for academic legitimization, these accounts often provide Gutiérrez with European predecessors, most often Jürgen Moltmann and Johann Baptist Metz. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, writes that Latin American theologians “have acknowledged their indebtedness to the European development of political theology,” even as he concedes that “the Latin American situation cannot be characterized by secularization and privatization but rather by dependency and exploitation.”
But Liberation resists this global-North treatment because it is, by its very Latin American nature, different. It is, therefore, better understood as the cry of a people first colonized and then neocolonialized into oppression (by that same global-North). It is what Leonardo and Clodovis Boff call “a cultural and ecclesial phenomenon by no means restricted to a few professional theologians.” Gutiérrez, for his part, describes his landmark text as “an attempt at reflection, based on the Gospel and the experiences of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America.”
Accordingly, the Boff brothers introduce Liberation Theology with a scene very descriptive of one of the theological loci of Liberation:
A woman of forty, but who looked as old as seventy, went up to the priest after Mass and said sorrowfully: “Father, I went to communion without going to confession first.” “How come, my daughter?” asked the priest. “Father,” she replied, “I arrived rather late, after you had begun the offertory. For three days I have had only water and nothing to eat; I’m dying of hunger. When I saw you handing out the hosts, those little pieces of white bread, I went to communion just out of hunger for that little bit of bread.” The priest’s eyes filled with tears. He recalled the words of Jesus: “For My flesh [bread] is real food indeed . . . whoever feeds on me will draw life from me” (Jn 6: 55, 57).
The plight of this woman is a “starting point” for Liberation Theology. She does not replace God; instead her hunger forces the theologian to ask “more basic questions about the nature of actual oppression and its causes.”
Is Liberation Theology Communism?
Almost inevitably, the accusatory question of Marxism dressed up as Catholicism is leveled at Liberation Theology. And so, it becomes necessary to reassure those less familiar with Liberation Theology that it is neither synonymous with Communism nor a product of Marxism. Is it socialist? One could describe it as such, but on those terms the first Christian community was socialist too: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common... Neither was there any among them that lacked” (Acts 4: 32, 34, KJV).
Gutiérrez is candid about why socialism was acceptable for the Latin America of the 1960s and 1970s: the “untenable circumstances of poverty, alienation and exploitation” in which most people lived, and the fact that socialism was widely seen as “the most fruitful and far-reaching approach” available after centuries of mercantilist extraction and dehumanizing capitalism. But Liberation Theologians have always been explicit that they treat “Marxism purely as an instrument.” The Boffs borrow terms like “dialectical” and “historico-structural” from Marx, yet Marxism itself is transformed in relation to the poor. As they put it, “It does not venerate it as it venerates the gospel.” Because Liberation remains oriented toward God, there is no mechanism within it for idolatry. Neither Marxism nor even the poor themselves can be made into gods.
The Base Ecclesial Communities and the CIA
That theocentric orientation has not reassured the powers that be. In a declassified 1986 study titled, “Liberation Theology: Religion, Reform and Revolution,” the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Liberation Theology “can pose a serious threat to US interests when its critique of capitalism and US development policy finds a receptive audience.” The “base ecclesial communities” (comunidades eclesiales de base) are singled out as the place where that audience is found.
However, base ecclesial communities are not revolutionary cells. They are parishioners who gather outside of Mass to read Scripture together, finding both similarity in it with the oppression they suffer, and the permission to long for liberation in their own lives. In that light the Exodus is a story about being led out from under the bootheels of the pharaohs of the present age. And parishioners can find sense in Amos thundering: ”Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream (Amos 5: 24, KJV). For Marcello de C. Azevedo these communities are “a new way of experiencing the Church, of being Church and of acting as a Church.” Pilar María Aquino adds that women, “doubly oppressed and marginalized,” become “active subjects” of the Church for the first time in these spaces.
The CIA report misreads these communities, defining them as “parallel institutions to the government” set up “to create local civic responsibility and to provide services.” That an intelligence agency could look at Acts 4 and see some sort of parallel bureaucracy is telling. What Langley cannot recognize, the base community sees clearly: government cannot and will not bring salvation, and dependency on the state, dressed up as “development” or “progress,” is a counterfeit of the dependency we owe to God alone. In a moment of cynicism, the same report allows that Liberation might “promote US interests by assisting popular efforts to bring democratic rule to authoritarian states”—a line one must be forgiven for reading as the enduring temptation of empire to subvert communities like these into instruments of Washington’s preferred regimes. However, liberation has proven mostly resistant to this treatment. What keeps it focused on the poor is what also keeps Marxists from co-opting it and capitalists from purchasing it: “Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ” (Mt 23: 10, KJV).
Inauthentic Christian Nationalism
The starting point for Christian Nationalism is very different. Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry define it as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.” What they mean by “Christian” does not primarily involve faith or religious expression. As they note, “Christian nationalists can be quite secular.” The term instead refers to beliefs about “historical identity, cultural preeminence, and political influence.” Paul A. Djupe and his co-authors add that the nation is imagined as “of, by and for Christians,” and Michael W. Austin notes that the culture in question is specifically Anglo-Protestant, its adherents fusing their American and Christian identities and pursuing political power to exert control over the country.
I would qualify the latter, observing that Catholicism in the United States has been very influenced by Protestantism. This might explain the allure Christian Nationalism has for many Catholics as well. Nevertheless, this is why Chrisitan Nationalism is better described as an ideology rather than a theology. Its focus is the nation. God, when He appears, appears as a warrant, a genie in a bottle.
Kingdom versus Nation, Biblically
The biblical term “nation” deserves a closer look. In Genesis 12: 2 Israel is promised to Abraham as a great nation, and “the nations” in later texts denote other peoples, most of them idolatrous (Dt 7: 1–6; Ps 2: 1–12). The New Testament interprets these texts in the light of Christ. Jesus tells the chief priests that “the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Mt 21: 43, KJV); at the end of Matthew He commands us to make disciples of “all nations”—peoples, not modern geopolitical states. Revelation completes the redemption of the term: “for Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Rev 5: 9, KJV).
If Christian Nationalism were truly Christian, it would not treat the nation as an objectifiable state. Biblically, the nation is a people, and we come under judgment when we fail to build the Kingdom. Catholic Social Teaching, from Lumen Gentium onward, insists that Christian kingship is service: serving Christ in their fellow men they might by humility and patience lead their brethren to that King for whom to serve is to reign (36).
The deep theological problem with Christian Nationalism is that it inverts this order. It is itself a manifestation of chaos: it decentralizes God and His Word, dispenses with the doctrine of His Son, and quietly ignores the gifts of His Spirit. Ignacio Ellacuría’s distinction applies precisely: structures of sin objectify the power of sin and turn it against the life of men, while structures of grace objectify grace and convey life. Christian Nationalism, however piously advertised, functions as a structure of sin in its service of empire. Liberation Theology, however imperfectly, labors against empire to build structures of grace.
The Cintas Largas and the Fruit of the Nation
If this sounds abstract, an episode from 1963 might help to make it concrete. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett open Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon with a story about a man named Ataide Pereira confessing to Fr. Edgar Smith that he had taken part in a genocide. The victims were the Cintas Largas, a small indigenous tribe that lived along the Aripuana River. Because Brazil’s Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI) legally protected them, foreign companies who wanted their land resorted to subterfuge. Approximately four hundred Cintas Largas were attacked by Pereira and others under the command of a man known as “Champion Indian Killer,” who was also the general manager of a local rubber company. The aggressors used both bullets and machetes to kill the unarmed tribe members until only a little boy and a little girl were left. Pereira described their deaths to the priest in lamentable detail.
The subsequent investigation implicated 134 SPI officials, none of whom ever stood trial, and revealed that the agency had been corrupted by “starvation of government resources and ‘the disastrous impact of missionary activity.’” The mission in question was the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), known in the United States as Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL denied the genocide; a year later The Sunday Times of London reported that mining was under way on Cintas Largas land, with American and European companies flying planeloads of rare metals out. Colby and Dennett describe the arrangement bluntly: “The missionaries came in on the cultural, social and political side of the conquest,” as part of “a counterinsurgency network shaped by Nelson Rockefeller’s development goals,” teaching the Indigenous through Bible translation that they must obey the government because “all authority comes from God.”
In light of what happened to the Cintas Largas and countless other tribes, a letter from Baptist minister Frederick Gates to John D. Rockefeller Sr. celebrating the “peaceful conquest of the world” that Christian missions would enable can only be described as lamentable. But it better serves as an invitation to contemplation. Marveling at the word “peaceful,” one recalls that Saint Paul tells us the law is written on the hearts even of those who do not know God, their conscience also bearing witness (Rm 2:15).
What erases that law? Part of the answer is the idol of nation. But nations are made of people—some of them numbed by the red-and-blue squabble that passes for spiritual discernment, others so divorced from the human condition that they simply personify the will to power. The genocide of the Cintas Largas and countless other Amazonian peoples is the fruit Christian Nationalism yields when the empire it sacralizes turns outward.
Liberation Theology answers with granular fruit: base communities, Scripture read from the margins, women becoming subjects in their own churches, structures of grace built one parish at a time. It is an unsatisfactory solution for most because it does not bring the swift justice and accountability of the Hollywood happy ending. Instead, it is the justice of the Bible, slow, steady, individual but collective; a justice that involves trust in God and solidarity with one’s neighbor. It is an ancient prescription for an ancient ill.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them
Again, the core difference between Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism is not Left versus Right, but theological. Liberation is oriented toward God and intent on building His Kingdom, manifesting as base ecclesial communities that peacefully dismantle structures of sin. Christian Nationalism is anthropocentric and oriented toward the nation, mistaking its agenda for the Will of God. However dominant its Anglo-Protestant inheritance, that is only the sheep’s clothing. Inwardly, as Matthew 7: 15 warns, it remains a ravening wolf.
The disciple Liberation forms reads Scripture from the margins and sees the crucified Christ in oppressed brothers and sisters. The Church that emerges is a true “church of the poor,” a true nation in the biblical sense, drawn from every tongue and people by the Blood of Christ. The disciple Christian Nationalism forms reads Scripture through mythopoetic jingoism that dispenses with the Sermon on the Mount in favor of the most violent Old Testament episodes, as though the New Covenant had not been sealed in the Blood of Christ. Its churches serve the nation, and the regalia of empire furtively displace the Cross.
Setting the CIA report beside Colby and Dennett’s account of the Cintas Largas, the conventional worry about Liberation being Marxist becomes hard to sustain. It is not Liberation Theology that has proved a threat to human life in the Americas; it is the Christian Nationalist project of empire that has done so. Liberation evangelizes from within the communities that survived 1492 and the ravages it brought in its wake; Christian Nationalism arrives from without, in disguise, intent on the same sort of “peaceful conquest.” Only one of these currents remain standing. Liberation has the force of God behind it as the blessed poor come together to build His Kingdom. Nationalism, Christian or otherwise, like every empire it has ever animated, will fall by the Will of God—whether now or in a thousand years.
The Dominoes Fell, and Next Thing You Know, I Had Exited 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. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
In Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America, Stanley Hauerwas suggests that the Bible should be taken from North American Christians. Not a point that Southern Baptists would take well.
Neither would they appreciate what the Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard had to say about the Bible in his Journal (p. 150):
Fundamentally a reformation which did away with the Bible would now be just as valid as Luther’s doing away with the Pope. All that about the Bible has developed a religion of learning and law, a mere distraction. A little of that knowledge has percolated down to the simplest classes so that no one any longer reads the Bible humanly. As a result it does immeasurable harm where life is concerned. Its existence is a fortification of excuses and escapes; for there is always something one has to look into first of all to have the doctrine in perfect form before one can begin to live – that is to say, one never begins. . . . Christendom has long been in need of a hero who, in fear and trembling, had the courage to forbid people to read the Bible. That is something quite as necessary as preaching against Christianity.
I was born in the deepest recesses of what is now known as the “Right Wing.” There’s no doubting how deep in my mind Southern Baptist preachers planted the notion of being afraid. My mother awakened me one night. I was standing up in my bed, running in place. When I gained consciousness, I pleaded, “Mama, don’t let the devil get me.”
My journey away from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) started early. I didn’t so much leave as almost unconsciously move further and further away. My moving away from the SBC could be compared to a long row of dominoes. I nudged one of the dominoes and it fell onto the next one. Frightened, I stopped the line of dominoes from falling and put the first two back in place.
But from the moment I questioned why the Bible contains more than one creation story, more dominoes started crashing, and I didn’t stop them. Cain’s wife, the death of Abel, the flood, the sons of God and the daughters of men, the Tower of Babel, the young age of the earth and on and on the dominoes tumbled until they were a runaway train. At age 8, I told my mama, “The Sunday school story of the flood gives me nightmares. How could God be so cruel?” I couldn’t imagine our family ever being one of the eight saved by the Ark.
That is to say, Genesis, on a literal level, was of no comfort. Enough terrible things happen in life without adding God to the list of predators. The death of Abel still affects me personally.
Biblical literalists think in abstract terms about God’s mysterious ways. On the other hand, I see every broken, torn and mangled human body in history and ask, “Why?.” I need a gentler God than the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards and his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Their concern for a “pure, literal” Bible exceeds their empathy for fellow humans. They pray over sins too small for a man like Adam or me to notice.
The first time I heard someone say of the death of a three-year old to the ravages of spinal meningitis, “God needed another angel,” at least a dozen more dominoes hit the ground.
When I listened to our preachers teach our relationship with God was transactional, I felt I was breathing the toxic air of bad religion. And I knew I had to get away from bad religion. God doesn’t need more angels. God doesn’t need anything. I could hear the click-clack of all the falling dominoes and not only did I let them all fall, I exulted in it.
I knew I was home when I realized Genesis tells us we were made by God’s love and freedom alone and the age of the earth is of no consequence. I put my trust in God’s almightiness, not the exegetical expertise of Al Mohler, David Barton, Ken Ham or other dull lights of Christian fundamentalism.
As I have reviewed the twisted, tortured Southern Baptist reading of Scripture about the role of women, I realized they are guilty of selective literalism. It’s not the Bible, but the preacher-leaders who determine what is literal truth. It was a sneaky but effective move for the preachers to claim authority over the Bible while continuing to hide behind the “authority” of the Bible. All my dominoes fell here with a loud crash like God speaking from Sinai.
In any event, I am glad to still be a pilgrim progressing. My ongoing journey led me in a wilderness period away from the left edge – it seemed an abyss – back in the direction of an ambiguous center. I’m not sure there is a center, but I have learned how zealous the disciples on each side can be. I am also not persuaded the “Left-Right” metaphor is an honest take on our situation.
What I’ve noticed is how easy it is to move more and more to the left or the right. We are already a fractured, divided nation filled with people unwilling to respect different perspectives. I am puzzled when Facebook friends accuse me of “not knowing the Bible,” of “twisting the Scripture,” and of “biblical ignorance.” Having spent 70 years reading, studying, pondering, researching and preaching the Bible, I can’t imagine how people reach these conclusions. I have decided not to take them literally but hyperbolically. They are actually saying, “Yuck” to my views. They are saying I’m wrong and they don’t like my views.
As regards the Southern Baptists, they have set sail for an excursion deeper into the dark seas of the right wing. I haven’t seen any SBC “ships on the horizon” moving to the center. The SBC seems guided by ancient maps plotting the world as flat. Written on those maps were words scrawled across the expanse of the oceans, “Beyond this point, monsters.”
I have no explanation for Albert Mohler embracing Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who is not a Southern Baptist and believes women should not have the right to vote. Earlier, the SBC welcomed all sorts of independent network Pentecostals such as the Seven Mountain Dominionists. These groups don’t possess a single page of historic Southern Baptist theology, but the SBC sailed gladly into these camps.
Mohler seems to have contracted an old Jerry Falwell, Sr., flaw. Falwell famously said, “If you see someone further to the right than me, let me know, and I will move over.” My movement to the left center seems simple compared to the SBC ships falling off the edge of the right rim of a “flat earth.”
Ironically, the SBC may not have noticed the absence of their fellow right-wing cohorts on the issue of women in ministry. Pentecostal groups of all kinds have women prophets, apostles, and preachers. The SBC has moved more to the right than Paula White. There are no more dominoes.
I don’t inhabit a universe with edges. Our planet is not flat and one-dimensional. It is sort of round. I possess the spirit of the explorers who first dreamed of sailing around the world. There is much to yet to learn. In that regard, the epistemological certainty of the SBC feels like a millstone around the neck.
Ecclesiastically homeless – I am a catholic baptist communing in the Episcopal Church – I look forward to the new lessons of each new day. Literalism is boring except when it is scary, as in the teachings of Jesus. That’s the journey I’m on now – attempting to take Jesus’ words as words he intends us to actually obey.
Maybe the literalist SBC will take a literal view of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ sermon at the synagogue at Nazareth. But I am not hopeful because the SBC suffers from selective literalism. They have a gift for turning a literal statement into a metaphor. “Jesus didn’t really mean that” is a standard SBC statement.
What a fascinating world we inhabit.
Somewhere in my subconscious mind, the dominoes keep falling, but I barely notice these days. God has given us a fully equipped, flourishing universe of diversity, inclusion and grace. I’m at peace.
The Freedom Trucks are the Creation Museum of American History
by Karen Elizabeth Park
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared at Ex Voto, Karen's Substack. We are grateful for her permission to re-post the article here.
Karen Elizabeth Park is a writer and historian who examines religion as a lived and public force. She writes about sacred space, authority, gender, and belief in American life. For any inquiries please contact karenparkwriting@gmail.com.
At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, the underlying question is: Do you trust God’s Word in the Bible or the flawed scientific theories of fallen humanity?
At Freedom250 the underlying question is strikingly similar: Do you trust patriotic institutions like PragerU, Hillsdale College, and Freedom250—or the historians, teachers, and scholars who have spent decades complicating America's founding story?
For nearly twenty years, I taught religious studies, American religious history, and historical theology to college students. On the first day of class, I often told them that my goal was not for them to finish the semester with a set of answers. My goal was for them to leave my classroom able to ask more questions and better ones about history, the church, and even the nature of God, than they could have asked before taking the course. Good books, good art, good science, good theology, and good history ought to raise questions—not insist on settled answers.
Earlier this month, I toured one of the PragerU Freedom Trucks. It was parked outside of a Catholic Freedom 250 rally in LaCrosse, WI that I wrote about for both Religion News Service and National Catholic Reporter. The trucks are billed as “mobile museums” and include lots of screens where, for example, an AI George Washington talks about how this country was founded on Christian principles. PragerU’s website describes its trucks this way:
History Brought to Life
The Freedom Trucks celebrate America’s 250th birthday by bringing key Founding events and figures to life with state-of-the-art storytelling, artifacts from the American Revolution, and awe-inspiring audiovisual experiences.
The whole family can engage and learn through:
- First-of-their-kind AI portraits bringing the Founders to life
- Interactive touchscreen activities and games
- Artifacts from Glenn Beck’s American Journey Experience
The New York Times recently did its own in-depth examination of the Freedom Truck exhibit, focusing carefully on the “Wall of Heroes” section in order to notice who is included (lots of white male Christians and baby boomer entertainers) and who is left out (anyone whose achievements might challenge the conservative political imagination). Throughout the Freedom Truck exhibit and the history section of the Freedom 250 website, visitors, both in-person and virtual, are presented with a providential narrative consisting of “answers” about this country without inviting a single question that might encourage authentic historical curiosity.
After touring the Freedom Truck, and exploring the AI online “Founders Museum”, I realized that they were familiar and that I had seen this type of “museum” before—a place which used the trappings of high tech exhibits and the imprimatur of a small cadre of “experts” in the service of the reinforcing pre-determined conclusions, not forming new questions. What the Freedom250 history exhibits reminded me of are the Kentucky Creation Museum and its sister site the Ark Encounter—expensive pseudo-museums designed to reinforce the “truths” held by those who designed and created them.
I have visited these religious attractions multiple times over the years as part of my research into lived American religion. Like PragerU and Hillsdale College, they are less interested in investigating questions than in affirming answers that are already known. At the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter the subject is evolution; at Freedom250 it is the American founding.
James’ Bielo’s 2018 book Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park describes the goals of the creative team who designed this extraordinarily ambitious destination hoping to “create an immersive experience so successfully that visitors say to themselves: ‘Wow! Maybe that was possible. Maybe that did happen.’”1 Bielo describes the Ark Encounter design teams imagining the various audiences who would visit Ark Encounter, then voic(ing) the ideological stances they imagined these audiences would take when experiencing particular exhibits.”2 In a similar way, the PragerU Freedom Trucks have created an immersive experience shaped for imagined audiences of Americans who are there to hear a particular providential version of America’s founding. George Washington’s actual words are readily available in countless archives—but in the Freedom Truck, his AI avatar and script are wholly imagined.
The Creation Museum’s slogan is “Prepare to Believe,” and while the Ark Encounter is more of an imaginative “Disney-esque" experience (although one where the literal truth of Noah’s Flood is the organizing principle), the Creation Museum, opened in 2007, takes the form of a traditional natural history museum, while simultaneously inverting the purpose of such spaces. There is only one goal at the Creation Museum, to believe the creation story of Genesis as a literal description—and as the slogan makes clear, all the exhibits prepare visitors to believe this.
At the Creation Museum dioramas and displays about the natural world, from insects to dinosaurs to the formation of the Grand Canyon, are presented as superficially interactive museum exhibits. Questions are often posed, but never as open-ended prompts for discovery. For example, here is the question. “Did humans live with dinosaurs?” and the answer provided is: “Yes.” Why? Because “God made Adam and Eve on the same day as land animals (Day 6.) so that means dinosaurs and people lived at the same time.”
It looks like a museum, but the answers to every prompt have already been answered by a literal reading of Genesis.3
Creation museum question and answer.
In an exhibit about insects, visitors to the Creation Museum are exhorted to “Think Critically!” in this case about how it could be possible that male crickets and female crickets evolved to both make musical sounds and respond to them as part of their mating communication. But here, “thinking critically” turns out to mean its opposite—rejecting the possibility of these traits evolving or trying to understand how, and turning instead to the book of Leviticus 11:22 where God “gave the Hebrews grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids as food.”
The pseudo-history presented at the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, like that of the Freedom Trucks, is interactive entertainment with an agenda. In one case the story is that God created the world in six days, then flooded it, killing everyone except one family and two of every kind of animal. In the other case, the story is that God specially chose the United States as the greatest nation on earth and then we proceeded to live up to it—always. In both cases, challenges to these narratives are unwelcome and the work of either the ungodly who are not true Christians or “woke leftists” who are not true Patriots.
In the end, the Freedom Trucks and Freedom250 online Founders museum are no more “historical” than the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. They all present a predetermined understanding of truth under the guise of authentic learning.
Like the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, the Freedom Trucks are designed to attract families. Many of the visitors I encountered in La Crosse were parents and children experiencing the exhibit together. Outside the truck, I spoke with one such family—a father, mother, and teenage daughter. I asked them each what they thought of the exhibit and then asked the girl if she had learned anything new inside that she hadn’t learned in school. She told me that she hadn’t learned any “real” American history in her public school, but since she and her family watched PragerU history documentaries regularly, she had already learned these truths there.
Yes, their family “knew the answers already” her mother told me, but it was “good to see them being reinforced.”
Children "learning" at the Creation Museum (left) and PragerU Freedom Truck (right)
Footnotes
1 James S. Bielo, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 26.
2 Bielo, Ark Encounter, 81
3 For a compelling scholarly treatment of the Creation Museum as a form of religious and political storytelling, see Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
The Religious Immaturity of Ark Encounter and American Evangelicalism
by William Trollinger
In his wonderful book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr talks about how we should read the Hebrew prophets as starting in a place of righteous anger, and then moving from there to sadness and then to compassion. This growth process – “from order into what seems to be disorder, and finally reaching some sort of reorder” – is one we should follow as human beings. As Rohr puts it,
Without this growth process, most of us believe our first presented order is all there is. This is why we have so much immature religion. What we learn early in life, with the mind of a four-to-six-year-old, is just to get us started. We first need the ark and the horrible flood to be literal, but when we act as is this is the main point of such stories, it puts us in an untenable and even absurd position. Where did Cain and Abel’s wives come from, for example? Did the whole earth really speak the same language before the Tower of Babel? . . . “Now that I have become a man,” Paul says, “all childish ways must be put behind me” (I Corinthians 13:11). Such passages are a shout-out and a demand for an adult Christianity, rather than the version that sentimentalizes faith at the childish level.
In Rohr’s terms, it would seem that young Earth creationism is the epitome of religious immaturity. And Ark Encounter (the Answers in Genesis (AiG) tourist site near Williamstown, Kentucky) takes this childish faith to a whole new level.
According to a plaque inside the Ark, God drowned up to 20 billion people in the “horrible” (Rohr’s word) global flood – just for context, the current world population is 8.3 billion – while sparing only eight individuals: Noah and his wife, plus three sons and their wives. 8 people lived, while up to 20 billion people, including infants, toddlers, and children, were drowned. Assuming that 40% of the ten billion women were of reproductive age, and assuming that 4% of these women were pregnant at the time of the flood, then 160 million unborn were also killed.
As Ark Encounter would have it, God determined that these up to 20 billion infants, toddlers, children, and adults – plus the 160 million unborn – deserved to be slaughtered. The only explanation offered for why these billions of human beings had to be drowned is that, according to a placard, since God “gave life, He has the right to take life,” and anyway, all humans “deserve death and judgment.”
To refer to AiG’s God as genocidal seems the ultimate understatement.
But there’s more to the religious immaturity of Ark Encounter. The eight people whom God saved from the flood are presented as residing in plush quarters – library and large kitchen included – and having a great time, eating great food, making music, and creating artwork. (Just to be clear, all of this is AiG’s addition to the biblical account). They are living large, all while a horrific slaughter is occurring just outside the walls of their big boat.
Maybe their music is supposed to have drowned out the screams? Or maybe the screams are just music to their ears?
It is obvious that visitors to Ark Encounter are expected to identify with the lucky eight who are comfortably, smugly basking in their luxurious rooms. Inside the walls of the Ark, tourists can contentedly enjoy the fact that they too are safe. This is brought home by the fact that AiG has prominently placed a “keepsake photo” site near the door that God supposedly shut and locked as the waters were rising, thus ensuring that not one of the billions of human beings trapped in the Flood would escape their watery execution.
Every time we have visited Ark Encounter, we have witnessed a happy smiling family posing for the camera at the Ark door.
This is religious immaturity on steroids. Besides everything else, what does this tell us about the state of evangelicalism in 21st-century America?
Blood in the Water: Ken Ham v. Evangelical Colleges
by William Trollinger
As I noted in my last blog post, Ken Ham has launched a full-scale attack on evangelical colleges, claiming that “biblical compromise” has infected the majority of these schools, including (as he specifically lists) Abilene Christian, Baylor, Biola, Covenant Seminary, Messiah, Westmont, and Wheaton. He exhorts parents who want their child to attend a “safe Christian school” to be very careful, as many of these supposed Bible-believing institutions have professors who brainwash students with “ideas that undermine God’s Word.”
Ham clearly understands himself to be on a roll. Six days after he posted his video, “This is Truly Awful: Seriously?!: This is What ‘Christian’ Schools are Teaching,” he put up a video specifically attacking Biola’s William Lane Craig: “Are You Kidding Me: I’m in Disbelief over What This ‘Christian Apologist’ Just Said.” (Note how in both instances Ham uses scare quotes to suggest that evangelical colleges and William Lane Craig aren’t really Christian). In this video Ham rips Craig for holding to an old Earth and rejecting the Genesis account of creation, thus compromising the idea that the Bible is God’s Word.
In response to my blog post I received the following note from a friend who has spent their entire career serving as a professor and administrator at evangelical schools. Here is the gist:
Ham’s instincts are absolutely right in raising questions about the handful of those still existing, once called “progressive evangelical,” institutions of higher education. The heyday of these schools (remember all those InterVarsity Press books) has been well over for a long time, and such institutions will continue to watch their waterhole of students shrinking into oblivion as “progressive evangelicalism” itself shrinks into oblivion.
These schools continue to use language that suggests that their students will learn what they never knew, and that this education will be transformative. But as fundamentalism of various hues has overtaken the evangelical world, these institutions have been increasingly hard pressed to balance a branding message of “safe for your kids” with “intellectually rigorous and growth-inducing.” And of course, the marketing offices of these schools are as terrified of relying on their own faculty to explain this creative tension as they are with fundamentalists raining on their parade. With the likes of Ham naming names and showing receipts, the fundamentalist “wing” of these schools’ constituency base will continue to collapse right at the time when these institutions need them in order to stay open. All in all, I don’t see a rosy solution for these schools.
To be theologically “safe” in the land of evangelical colleges begins with an unwavering commitment to biblical inerrancy. And for young Earth creationists, to hold firmly to biblical inerrancy necessitates a belief in a literal reading of Genesis 1, a young Earth (actually, a young universe), and a global Flood (Noah’s Flood). Given the spread of young Earth creationism in conservative Protestantism over the past six decades, one of the easiest ways for an evangelical school to establish its theological bonafides as a “safe school” is to affirm – or, at very least, to discourage public challenges to – young Earth creationism. And not to do so is risky -- maybe not for a place like Baylor, given its size, but for many or most evangelical schools.
Ken Ham knows all this. And he clearly smells blood in the water.
Ken Ham: The Majority of Evangelical Colleges are Unsafe for Christian Students
by William Trollinger
Ken Ham has launched a full-scale, no holds barred attack on evangelical colleges.
In his video, “This is Truly Awful: Seriously?!: This is What ‘Christian’ Schools are Teaching,” the Answers in Genesis (AiG) CEO repeatedly and dramatically proclaims that “Compromise is Rife in ‘Christian’ Colleges.” And while the video begins with 15 seconds on “drag” classes and pride celebrations at Texas Christian University, the bulk of Ham’s diatribe is aimed at evangelical professors who instruct their students that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, who claim that there is very little evidence that the Flood was global, and who suggest that one can incorporate evolution into a Christian worldview. Incorporating an image of Bibles being burned, he asserts that “biblical compromise” is widespread throughout evangelical higher education (actually, at a majority of so-called Christian colleges). To make his point, he specifically calls out Abilene Christian, Baylor, Biola, Covenant Seminary, Messiah, Westmont, and Wheaton.
Ham asserts that what these schools are teaching is leading these young people to leave the church. (For evidence that supports a very different explanation as to the rise of religious “nones,” see my chapter on this topic.) So he exhorts parents to investigate evangelical colleges before sending their children there. But as Ham sees it, the challenge for parents is that these schools are often quite deceptive in how they present themselves:
You have to be very careful about how you ask questions concerning what the colleges are going to be teaching, because a lot of times you will ask these questions in a particular way, and [you will] think that they’re going to teach my children to stand on God’s Word and to be bold about God’s Word. And then you are shocked to find out that those kids end up getting brainwashed with ideas that undermine God’s Word.
To counter this, at AiG’s annual Creation College Expo parents and their children are introduced to Christian Colleges that “won’t plant seeds of doubt in your child or teach them to compromise.” These very “safe” schools include Appalachian Bible College, Bob Jones University, Cedarville University, Emmaus University, and Maranatha Baptist University.
As Adam Laats makes clear in his excellent Fundamentalist U, both fundamentalist colleges (see the Creation Colleges listed above) and evangelical colleges (see the colleges attacked by Ken Ham) have over the years sold themselves – to donors and to parents – as “safe” schools for their students, safe intellectually, culturally, and of course religiously. And when an evangelical or fundamentalist school’s “safe” label has been challenged, the result has often been a purging of “unsafe” faculty members.
So now Ken Ham has labeled the majority of evangelical colleges – with certain schools specifically mentioned -- as unsafe places for Christian parents to send their children. How will these schools respond? Will they simply ignore Ham? Will they reason that they are not competing with Bob Jones and Cedarville and Maranatha Baptist, and so they don’t have to worry about what the young Earth creationist gatekeeper (Ken Ham) has to say? Or, on the other hand, will they see a threat to their enrollment and donations? Given that so many of their students come from fundamentalist backgrounds (having taught at one of the schools Ham attacked, I know whereof I speak), will they now work overtime to re-establish their credentials as “safe” schools, in the process removing “unsafe” faculty members?
I don’t know. What I can say is that how evangelical colleges respond to this attack will be a very telling indicator of the reach of Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, and young Earth creationism in mainstream evangelicalism. Stay tuned.
Spouting Venom from their Fire Ant Mounds: Evangelical Preachers v. James Talarico
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
In Texas, the plagues tend to be fire ants, armadillos and coyotes. A new plague has invaded with Ken Paxton’s primary win in the US Senate race. The Texas-size showdown between state Representative James Talarico and attorney general Ken Paxton in their Senate race is bringing out a plague of evangelical preachers comparable to one of the plagues of Moses.
The alleged biblical faith of evangelicals will demand center stage in this shootout. And it will not be nice, meek or mild.
The Democratic nominee, Talarico, is a Presbyterian seminarian, with deep commitment to the teachings of Jesus and the social gospel. Paxton is a MAGA darling, a Trump actor with an ethical rap sheet almost as long as the president.
Paxton has already issued his first ad: “Talarico threatens everything we hold dear.” I think he’s telling an accidental truth. The problem is what MAGA holds dear. They have been retreating from empathy. There are rumblings about Jesus being too meek and mild, too weak and woke.
When an evangelical makes an argument against a progressive Christian, for example, you will not hear him say, “I disagree with his interpretation.” Instead, you will hear that “He’s a heretic, a false teacher, a blasphemous prophet.”
After her sermon at the presidential inauguration worship at the National Cathedral, Bishop Budde was called a “demonic princess.” Rev. Franklin Graham claimed the cathedral was “taken over by gay activists,” Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, published a post on X suggesting Budde, a U.S. citizen, should be deported.
Rev. Jack Graham, Southern Baptist pastor, was beside himself: “See the face and hear the voice of a woke ideologue who represents the reason apostate churches are dead and dying. This is religion at its worst. No Jesus. No Bible. No future.”
Seems hell has no fury like an evangelical confronted with the clear teaching of Jesus.
In 2016, when I wrote The Immaculate Mistake, I thought the best metaphor describing MAGA evangelicals was fire ants:
Writing off evangelicals as a bunch of dummies is like ignoring a small fire ant bed that suddenly appears in your back yard. Once the fire ants are at full strength, if you poke a stick in the mound, they will send out waves of warrior ants intent only in afflicting as much pain on your body as possible. They spread out in formations, covering the ground around the next in circular attacks within ten seconds of the alarm.
The outrage of MAGA evangelicals over the Senate campaign of James Talarico has brought the “fire ant” metaphor back into clear focus. It’s hard to determine if there are more fire ants or more Baptists in Texas, but either way the “warriors” of the Right are circling Talarico as if he has stuck a stick in the middle of their mound.
Paxton has already called Talarico a “vegan,” as if such an appellation equals membership in a satanic cult. A bemused Tallarico responded, “I’m an 8th-generation Texan and I have been eating bar-b-que my entire life.”
Inexplicably Paxton then labeled him a transgender candidate.
Speaking with a conservative podcast host earlier this month, Paxton complained that everything Talarico says “is as far from the gospel of Jesus Christ as could possibly be imagined,” and darkly alluded to Jesus’s remark that it would be better to tie a millstone around one’s neck and dive into the sea than to mislead God’s children.
Paxton sounds like President Trump claiming Talarico is “insulting to Jesus.” I wonder if Trump was wearing his Jesus costume when he made this ludicrous remark.
According to Allie Beth Stuckey, a Plano, Texas, native who is a popular evangelical writer and podcaster, “Talarico is a leftist atheist’s idea of a good Christian.” Stuckey, whose lack of theological understanding is only topped by her bad rhetoric, went on to proclaim that Talarico was “a progressive culture warrior in lockstep with the secular world,” completely “uninterested in foundational Christian principles like sin, repentance, or salvation.” Piling on, a spokesperson for the conservative group Turning Point USA accused Talarico of speaking “the language of an evangelical while completely undermining the central truth claims of the Scripture.”
Where are these off-the-wall accusations originating? Have they not heard Talarico insist on loving neighbors and enemies, not seeking revenge, and following the teachings of Jesus? These arguments are as disgusting as Paxton’s lack of character.
And it’s not even hot weather in Texas yet. The venom will increase exponentially between June and November – prime hot weather for fire ants in Texas.
Why such an outpouring of disdain for Talarico? To understand means returning to the scene of the Scopes Trial a century ago in Dayton, Tennessee. Clarence Darrow embarrassed fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan and Baltimore Sun news reporter H. L. Mencken made such fun of these Christians they disappeared from the public eye for decades. Since Scopes, evangelical resentment has grown deeper. In attacking Talarico, they are attacking a century of modernist, liberal and progressive Christians.
In this sense, I believe that the angst and anger of conservative evangelicals is more akin to that of young Saul, the zealous Pharisee, than it is to any kind of righteousness that derives from God. In Acts 9:1, Luke describes the pathos of Saul: “Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and asked for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any that belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” This biblical description fits evangelical attitudes like a fine leather glove – an amalgamation of perceived persecution, bitterness, anger, revenge, and a need to strike out at the enemy.
Ellen Davis, Duke Divinity School, observes that “It is a sad fact of history that authoritative texts held in common but read differently are less likely to create mutual sympathy than bitter division between religious communities.” This is exactly what we see taking place in the attacks on Talarico.
Evangelical insistence on character and moral behavior has crashed right into a limit: their love for power. Lovers of the Ten Commandments, the holiness code of Leviticus, the moral strictures of some passages in Paul, have been driven to deny the necessity of integrity, truth-telling, moral conduct and ethical practices. Once you elect a president who committed adultery with a porn star and then paid to cover up the moment, the barn door has swung open and all the cattle in Texas are free on the range.
Paxton is small potatoes compared to Trump, but he’s riding Trump’s willingness to work his way through disobeying all the Ten Commandments. This means that evangelicals – who claim to be lovers of Jesus and followers of the Son of God – are scrambling to offer justifications and rationalizations for supporting candidates without a shred of moral character.
For instance, evangelical preacher Josh Howerton, attempts to push the camel through the eye of the needle: “Ken Paxton has personal baggage. I don’t deny that . . . [But] Here’s the truth: I would rather vote for almost anyone else who is going to at least advocate for conservative ‘policies’ over a literal heretic who wears my faith like a skin suit, advocates for policies that harm children, [and] endorses immorality.”
The problem, of course, is Howerton defines “faith” only from his Southern Baptist perspective, and his view departs significantly from the faith of the Christian Church across the centuries.
Talarico faces an army of evangelical apologists in the Texas senate race. Every MAGA preacher in Texas will stand on his fire ant hill believing he is on top of Mount Sinai delivering the thundering judgments of God to an ungodly people.
The angels in heaven will be laughing so hard they will be crying at these little would-be gods pontificating from their small mound of a Texas pest.
Sinking Further and Further Below Their Projections: The Facts of Ark Encounter Attendance
by William Trollinger
In 2013 Ark Encounter sold the little town of Williamstown on the idea of issuing $62 million worth of junk bonds to get the Ark up and running, a sweet deal sweetened even more by the agreement that 75% of what Ark Encounter would pay in property taxes over the next three decades would instead go to paying off the loan.
Central to the sales pitch made by Ken Ham and colleagues was the “Ark Encounter, LLC Feasibility Report,” which was presented to Williamstown officials, and which included “Visitation Projections.” On the first page of this section there is the confident claim that “the Ark Encounter is expected to attract between 1.2 million and 2.0 million visitors (or an estimated average of 1.6 million visitors) during the first year of operation.” And this would be just the beginning. Later in the report, in the “Financial Projections” section, there is the prediction that there would be “Annual Attendance Growth” in the first ten years of the Ark’s existence. 4% annual increase would be the norm, but there would be a few years (thanks to new exhibits) in which there would be a 10% growth in attendance.
Using the “estimated average of 1.6 million visitors” in the first year, here are the projected attendance numbers contained in the feasibility study:
- Year 1: 1,600,000
- Year 2: 1,664,000 (4% increase)
- Year 3: 1,730,560 (4% increase)
- Year 4: 1,903,616 (10% increase)
- Year 5: 1,979,761 (4% increase)
- Year 6: 2,177,737 (10% increase)
- Year 7: 2,264,846 (4% increase)
- Year 8: 2,491,331 (10% increase)
- Year 9: 2,590,984 (4% increase)
Not to put too fine a point on it, Ark Encounter has not come close to meeting these projected attendance numbers. Each month the indefatigable Daniel Phelps – founder and president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society – asks Williamstown officials for the total amount collected that month from the safety fee, a number which gives us a clear picture of Ark attendance.
And here are the actual attendance numbers:
- Year 1(JY 2016-JE 2017): est. 800,000 (50% of projected attendance)
- Year 2 (JY 2017-JE 2018): 865,761 (52% of projected attendance)
- Year 3 (JY 2018-JE 2019): 875,882 (51% of projected attendance)
- Year 4 (JY 2019-JE 2021): 841,772 (44% of projected attendance)
- Given the impact of COVID on Ark attendance, I left out March 2020-February 2021
- Year 5 (JY 2021-JE 2022): 775,731 (39% of projected attendance)
- Year 6 (JY 2022-JE 2023): 782,660 (36% of projected attendance)
- Year 7 (JY 2023-JE 2024): 764,258 (34% of projected attendance)
- Year 8 (JY 2024-JE 2025): 682,101 (27% of projected attendance)
- Year 9 (JY 2025-JE 2026): 664, 813 (26% of projected attendance)
- For May-June 2026 I used the attendance numbers from May-June 2025. If history is any guide, this may serve to overestimate Year 9 attendance.
Note that Ark Encounter has never gotten close to the 1.2 million attendance mark that was projected to be the lowest possible attendance in the first year. And as each year passes the Ark sinks further and further behind the numbers contained in the feasibility report, numbers that helped convince Williamstown to issue $62m of junk bonds, and to forego 75% of the Ark’s property taxes.
What a government subsidy . . . and this does not include the $1.825 million/year sales tax rebate from the state of Kentucky. And as one can see by driving through Williamstown, and as is made clear in the wonderful documentary, We Believe In Dinosaurs, this little town has not enjoyed the economic benefits that it hoped would come from subsidizing the Ark.
These are facts. And it would be lovely if Ken Ham would acknowledge all or even some of these facts.
But that’s not happening. Ark Encounter is doing God’s work, and critics who point out inconvenient facts about the Ark are at war with God. End of story.
When it comes to the Bible, the Vicar of Christ trumps the Apostle of Trump
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
Robert Jeffress, pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church and Fox News contributor, is never at a loss for words. He invents sound bites in his head for public consumption. The more outrageous, divisive, and hate-suggestive, the better. Jeffress is a Texas-sized “red meat” kind of guy.
And he has been a gusher of misleading claims on behalf of President Trump for more than a decade. Historian John Fea has dubbed Jeffress one of Trump’s “court preachers.” Texas Monthly headlined him as “Trump’s Apostle.”
His latest bit of rhetorical “rare steak”: “It looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the pope has.”
Since I inhabit a world where credentials still matter, I have to point out that Pope Leo XIV has a Master of Divinity degree and a Ph.D. in canon law. To state the obvious, he is a man very well acquainted with the Bible.
On the other hand, Trump is not.
Trump knows less about the Bible than an Amish second grader in Ohio. The man “knows neither the scriptures nor the power of God" (Matthew 22:29).
Yes, Trump has been a Bible salesman. He held aloft a copy of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, upside down, in a photo op outside an Episcopal Church in Washington to claim that God supported his attack on peaceful protestors. But he is not a man of the Bible.
When Mr. Trump was asked what his favorite Bible verse is, he managed to say, “an eye for an eye.” This puts Mr. Trump in league with a host of biblically illiterate Baptists who when asked by the pastor at Wednesday night supper, “What’s your favorite Bible verse,” blurt out “Jesus wept.”
Trump seems more like the character in the movie “Metropolitan” who confesses that he has never read the Bible, “but I have opinions about it.” While Trump has denied keeping a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by his bed, the idea is more plausible than him having a Bible by his bed.
More than this, Trump doesn’t speak the language of the Bible. Trump’s vocabulary has no biblical footprint. He fills his rambling speeches with hyperbole, untruthful, often incoherent claims. He mixes in threats, profanity, outrage and constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery unrelated to the Bible.
Then there’s Rev. Robert Jeffress, and his very unproblematic and politically convenient reading of Romans 13:1-7:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there Is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval, for it is God’s agent for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s agents, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them: taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.
Here’s the case Jeffress makes for the meaning of Romans 13: “Look, the godly principle here is that governments have one responsibility, and that is Romans 13 …. avenge evil-doers. God gives government the power of the sword, of capital punishment, of executing wrong-doers.”
Jeffress views the Bible as self-interpreting. For Jeffress Romans 13 settles all arguments about Trump’s border wall, the deportation of all immigrants, the DACA program, the war with Iran, the desire to imprison leading Democrats and remove all Muslims from the US.
Romans 13 serves as Trump’s template for doing whatever he wants to do. Blow up fishing boats in the Caribbean? Romans 13. Invade Venezuela, take the president of the country hostage and return him to the US for trial? Romans 13. Bomb Iran and kill Muslim school children? Romans 13.
And here’s the irony. Interpreting the Bible for himself, Jeffress misreads a biblical passage while attempting to prove Trump knows his Bible.
On the other hand, Pope Leo reads the Bible in the context of the Church. He assumes Scripture can be interpreted only in the context of an “interpretative community” – the Roman Catholic Church. The Church is prior to Scripture. The meaning of Scripture is not left to common sense, not left to individual, private interpretation. Scripture is interpreted in light of the Church.
The Eastern Orthodox Church also insist Scripture and tradition reflect all readings. Georges Florosky, in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, argues that “Only within the Church is it revealed as a whole and not broken up into separate texts, commandments, and aphorisms.”
The Episcopal Church centers interpretation in Scripture, Tradition and Reason. United Methodists add Experience to the three-legged stool of Anglican belief.
Anabaptist theologian James McClendon adds, “The church, as the apostolic community, necessarily reads (in community) the apostolic writings, the Old Testament, and the New Testament.”
Scripture has no original, fixed meaning. Scripture. Texts of Scripture do not have a single meaning limited to the biblical era. Scripture has multiple possible meanings. Faithful interpretation of Scripture involves participation in a Church where the Bible is read in community.
Jeffress and his fellow MAGA preachers waving their verses of Scripture in the air look like the prophet of Baal, I Kings 18 tells the story: “They limped about the altar that they had made. “At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, ‘Cry aloud!’ As midday passed, they raved on until the time of the offering of the oblation, but there was no voice, no answer, and no response” (I Kings 18:27, 29).
Jeffress has a narrow, restrictive reading of Romans 13. He rips it from his larger context of Romans 12 – 13 to construct his own personal view of evil and the government’s role in stamping out evil. Jeffress strays far from the opening of Romans 12 – “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:1 – 2).
I find Jeffress utilizing an interpretative framework exposed to subjectivity and arbitrary methods. Historian John Fea says, “The problem is that Jeffress defines the evil from which the government should protect us according to his own reading of the Bible.” His reading of Romans 13 sounds more like the MAGA evangelical playbook than an honest understanding of Scripture.
Jeffress’ reading of Romans 13 has nothing of Paul’s insistence the present era is passing away, Paul’s proclamation that “Jesus is Lord” not Caesar, Paul’s assertion that our true citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) and that every ruler and authority and power as being done away with in preparation for Christ’s reign (I Corinthians 15:24).
Ironically, Jeffress reads Romans 13 through a Constantinian lens, marrying church to state in an authoritarian, cruel and coercive system. Nothing could be less Pauline. Paul and the Church had no desire to take the state or replace the Emperor or want a Christian to be the Emperor. That would be a far too conservative politics.
Instead, Paul preaches the ceaseless, exuberant good news. There’s been a break between God and the pagan world, the power of Christ and the Pax Romana, the lordship of Christ and the lordship of Caesar. As Stanley Hauerwas puts it, Paul “does not see in Christ one religious option among others. He sees in Christ nothing less than the whole of creation and all of humanity under God’s final judgment and grace. . . . Paul is uncompromisingly focused on a single, incomparable, final, and exclusive theological reality which constitutes, includes, and determines all other reality: Jesus Christ.”
A new reality formed in the resurrection of Jesus. A new mode of being was created even though Caesar was still on the throne. The new order is one of peace, persuasion and working out the perfect will of God.
Jeffress turns a blind eye to how often government is unjust and cruel. Jeffress’ argument crashes against the politics of our modern democratic nation where authority derives immediately and ultimately from the people. What Romans 13 does so admirably is point out that no government, including Trump’s one-man rule, is a law entirely unto itself. Ultimately, Romans 13 tells us, “God is God and we are not.”
I conclude Jeffress is wrong at every turn. He asks Romans 13:1 – 7 to carry a weight it can’t lift. The New Testament never approves of Caesar in any form.
Pope Leo not only knows far more about the Bible than President Trump (it was not a fair contest), but he also knows far more about the Bible than Rev. Jeffress. The Vicar of Christ trumps the Apostle of Trump.
Trump Isn’t Jesus: A Message from Answers in Genesis
by William Trollinger
Over the past three decades, I have had the great privilege of teaching M.A./Ph.D. seminars on American evangelicalism/fundamentalism in the Religious Studies Department here at the University of Dayton. The students have been terrific, and it has not been difficult to convince them that this topic matters in contemporary America, given the ascendancy of the Religious Right, and given (much of) white evangelicalism’s obsequious devotion to Donald Trump. In light of all this, the question keeps coming up in seminar: Does the Bible and theology still matter to evangelicals and fundamentalists, or is it all simply right-wing politics?
Well, it turns out that there is evidence that there are indeed fundamentalists whose commitment to the Bible places limits on their allegiance to the Trump regime. And some of this evidence comes from an unlikely quarter: Answers in Genesis (AiG).
Roger Patterson – who has his B.S. Ed. in Biology from Montana State University – is AiG’s Education Specialist. In his AiG video, “Trump Isn’t Jesus,” he responds to the now infamous meme put out by the President. Rejecting Trump’s ridiculous after-the-fact claim that the image actually depicts him as a Red Cross doctor, Patterson observes that he “wasn’t really surprised” by the meme: “Why? Because it matches the character of President Trump and the people he has surrounded himself with.”
Patterson’s particular target is White House “faith advisor” Paula White, who has compared Trump’s political travails to what Jesus went through on the way to the Cross, and who assured the President that “’Because of his resurrection, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious. And I believe that the Lord said to tell you [that] because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hands to.’”
Patterson responds:
This is nothing but prosperity gospel garbage, and blasphemy that should make any Christian cringe. . . . Despite Paula White’s claims, God is not interested in promoting the proud and making all they do to prosper. How do I know that? God’s Word makes this very clear. In James 4 we read . . . “God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.” That’s the message President Trump needs to hear from Paula White. No one has paid the price Jesus has paid, and no one gets to claim the glory that he alone deserves.
This is a striking rebuke from AiG. Of course, none of this is coming from the mouth of Ken Ham. More importantly, AiG has ignored and continues to ignore what has been a decade of Trump blaspheny; see, for example, the fact that – after years promoting the QAnon notion that liberal secularists promoted and engaged in pedophilia – Ham and company have been absolutely silent about the Epstein files and Trump’s connection to this predatory pedophile.
Obviously, much more could be said about Ham’s and AiG’s fealty to the Trump regime. Still, Roger Patterson’s video is a heartening sign that there remain fundamentalists who, in the end, are more identified with the Gospel of Jesus Christ than to the reign of Donald Trump.
