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.
The Flat-Earth Flank of Young-Earth Creationism
by Glenn Branch
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
William Trollinger’s recent post “Answers in Genesis: The Bible Is to Be Read Literally, Except When It’s Not” mentioned how young-earth creationists, such as the folks at Answers in Genesis, are outflanked by biblical geocentrists like Gerardus Bouw. “[I]n fundamentalism,” Trollinger explained, “the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that ‘I am more literal than thou.’” In a comment, I noted, “The Institute for Creation Research’s Duane Gish once complained that a scientist with whom he debated had hit below the belt by comparing the Creation Research Society with the Flat Earth Society. ‘Not a single member’ of the former was a member of the latter, he protested.” I added, “A letter subsequently published in Flat Earth News set him straight.”
Having alluded to the episode, I may as well tell the whole story. Duane Gish (1921–2013) was the most avid debater associated with the Institute for Creation Research. His tendency to try to overwhelm his opponent with a flood of arguments was so famous it won the enduring sobriquet from Eugenie C. Scott of the Gish Gallop. But he wasn’t invulnerable as a debater. And when the paleontologist Michael Voorhies, in a debate with Gish, charged that the Creation Research Society resembled the Flat Earth Society, the accusation apparently stung. Gish took umbrage. Writing in the May 1979 issue of the ICR’s periodical Acts & Facts (no longer on-line), he protested, “Not a single member” of the Creation Research Society was a member of the Flat Earth Society.
Subsequently, a letter was published in the September 9, 1979, issue of Flat Earth News, the periodical of the International Flat Earth Research Society of America, operated by Charles K. Johnson (1924–2001) in Lancaster, California. The author, identified only by his initials “G. J. D.,” complained of Gish that “[h]e doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as I belong to both [the Creation Research Society and the Flat Earth Society], and I am writing to him to let him know that he is wrong.” A few years later, Robert Schadewald — a science writer with a strong interest in flat-earthery — explained in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer that “Gish may have created a fact. To protest this attack on the flat-earthers, ‘G. J. D.’ dropped his membership in the Creation Research Society.”
I was reminded of the episode in 2019, when I was preparing a talk on the flat-earth movement. Robert Schadewald died in 2000, but I knew that his sister Lois Schadewald prepared his book on flat-earthery, The Plane Truth (2015), for publication, so I asked her to look through his notes for G. J. D.’s identity. Lo and behold: G. J. D. was Gerald J. Dodelin (1905–1988) of Philadelphia. Amusingly, Dodelin, according to Schadewald’s notes, “was thrown out of the Flat Earth Society in about 1981 for the crime of talking to me!” Schadewald too had been expelled from the society, although not before Johnson asked him to take over running it, “an offer he declined” — as Christine Garwood nicely puts it in her Flat Earth (2007) — “due to his globular convictions.”
Schadewald’s notes revealed little further about Dodelin, except that his involvement with flat-earthery was of long standing. In 1969, he wrote to Samuel Shenton (1903–1971), the sign-writer who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in Dover, England, in 1956, expressing interest in joining. (Johnson’s society was in effect the continuation of Shenton’s.) I wasn’t able to add significantly, although I found a 1956 letter from Dodelin in a Catholic magazine called the Liguorian in which he complained about a previous article that described certain chapters of the Bible (e.g., Esther) as largely fictional. (The editors replied that the fact that those chapters are fictional doesn’t mean that they’re not inspired.) Dodelin’s complaint tends to confirm that he accepted Biblical inerrantism.
When Johnson died in 2001, his society boasted about 100 members, down from (what Johnson claimed was) its mid-1990s peak of 3500 members, according to the obituary for Johnson in The New York Times. The young-earth creationists at the Institute of Creation Research and Answers in Genesis might have assumed that their flank would be generally safe from the flat-earthers. But flat-earthery came roaring back, evidently enabled by the internet. In a 2025 on-line survey conducted by Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire among a nationally representative sample, 10 percent of respondents agreed with “The Earth is flat, not shaped like a globe.” It was not a fluke: Hamilton reported the same result from a 2021 survey conducted by telephone.
Apparently Answers in Genesis is especially perturbed by the threat to its flank. Danny R. Faulkner, who is listed on its website as a researcher, author, and speaker from 2013 to 2025, not only regularly inveighed against flat-earthery online but also published a book — Falling Flat: A Refutation of Flat-Earth Claims (2019) — devoted to doing so. As I noted in my review for Skeptical Inquirer, about half of his book offers a competent discussion of the science. But Faulkner’s historical treatment is tendentious. In particular, I wrote, “he neglects the fact that for a century and a half, the leading figures of flat-earthery not only identified themselves as Bible-believing Christians but also cited verses from the Bible in the service of their flat-earth belief.”
Concluding my review, I acknowledged that today’s flat-earthers, though still invoking the arguments of their precursors, are not so visibly committed to the inerrancy of the Bible. But, I added, “the diminished emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible among flat-earthers ought to be of no comfort to Faulkner, because biblical inerrantism is on the decline anyway.” As evidence of the decline, I cited a 2017 poll from Gallup that found that 24 percent of respondents — fewer than one in four — agreed that “the Bible is the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word” comes closest to describing their views about the Bible. The decline continues: according to a 2022 poll from Gallup, only 20 percent of respondents — one in five — favored the inerrantist option.
Answers in Genesis: The Bible Is to Be Read Literally, Except When It’s Not
by William Trollinger
At the height of the pandemic, Georgia Purdom of Answers in Genesis (AiG) instructed Christians to ignore the medical experts and evolutionist academics (some of whom teach at supposedly Christian colleges!) who were recommending that people get COVID vaccines, given that this is “a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.”
Now Purdom has turned her attention to making the fundamentalist case that there are no contradictions in the Bible, her example being the death of Judas. The ever-attentive Paul Braterman looks at Purdom’s argument in a recent blog post at Primate’s Progress:
Biblical exegesis; how did Judas die? Answers in Genesis has the answer.
Matthew 27:5 And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.
But Acts 1:18 Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.
How can these both be true?
No problem, says Answers in Genesis. Since the Bible contains nothing inaccurate, both of these must be the case, and therefore they must represent two perspectives on the same event. But bear in mind that the bowels are held firmly in place by the abdominal muscles and skin. So what must have happened is this; first of all he went and hanged himself, but after a while the rope snapped, flesh goes off quickly in the hot Mediterranean sun, and his rotten corpse exploded.
That’s exactly what they say. I am not making any of this up.
So what’s my point? My point is that the Answers in Genesis style of literalism is absurd, offensive, and in its own way deeply irreverent.
Absurd, offensive, irreverent. Yes. Ludicrous. Yes.
And yet it turns out that, as is the case for all those who hold to a strict inerrantist view of the Bible, Purdom and her AiG compatriots are also, to understate the case, extraordinarily selective when it comes to their biblical literalism.
Let’s take the example of geocentrism. As Susan Trollinger and I discuss in Righting America at the Creation Museum, “one could easily assume,” from the multiplicity of biblical texts to this effect, that AiG would “proclaim and defend the idea that the sun revolves around a stationary Earth.” See, for example, Joshua 10:12-13:
On the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the LORD; and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in mid-heaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.
Seems pretty clear that the biblical author is describing a geocentric universe!
The folks at AiG, however, beg to differ. They reject such a reading as “hyper-literal” (as opposed, I suppose, to what Purdom does with the death of Judas).
But they have a problem. As Susan Harding makes clear in her wonderful study, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, in fundamentalism the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that “I am more literal than thou.” Enter the late Gerardus Bouw, who – as director of the Association for Biblical Astronomy – went after the AiG young Earth creationists with great enthusiasm:
So, if Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is a clear statement that God created, then Ecclesiastes 1:5, “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose,” is just as clear a statement of geocentricity. And with that, we come to the real issue: Is the Scripture to be the final authority on all matters which it touches . . . The issue is final authority, is it to be the words of God, or the words of men.
So the folks at AiG are absurd, offensive, irreverent, AND quite inconsistent in their biblical literalism.
But in their defense, there are and can be no consistent biblical literalists. Read this verse literally, do not read that verse literally. No matter how often inerrantists argue for a plain, common sense reading of the text, interpretation is always required – and for these Protestant fundamentalists, there is no interpretive magisterium.
So it goes with biblical inerrancy.
“The Testament of Ann Lee”: A Review
by Vincent Miller
Vincent Miller is the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton and a Sustainability Scholar at its Hanley Sustainability Institute. He is the editor of The Theological and Ecological Vision of Laudato Si’: Everything is Connected (T&T Clark). He is writing a book about hope in the Anthropocene. This review was originally published in Commonweal (see the link at the end).
I have sat tearfully through the final credits of many films in the comforting dark of The Neon—Dayton’s arthouse cinema. But never before have I openly wept with everyone else in the theater. Others who have seen The Testament of Ann Lee report the same experience.
A biopic of Mother Ann Lee, the leader of the “United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” commonly known as the “Shakers,” is an unlikely project. The film’s writers have spoken about the difficulty of crafting an elevator pitch for a musical based on songs and dialogue from the writings of an eighteenth-century religious sect. The Shakers strived for millenarian perfection: creating a celibate, pacifist, socialist community that practiced gender and racial equality. Today they are remembered for graceful furniture design, “naïve” celibacy, and a dubious legend about Ann’s invention of the circular saw. Aaron Copeland and Martha Graham played the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” as a motif of American innocence in Appalachian Spring. The Shakers’ theologically rich images, such as Hannah Cohoon’s Tree of Life, adorn scarves in the kind of catalogues sent to public-radio subscribers.
The Testament of Ann Lee opens in far less domesticated territory: dancing figures emerge from the mist, their movements inscrutable and discomfiting, their breathing rhythmic and sharp. It is not clear where the scene is going. The film’s director, Mona Fastvold, describes the choice to make Testament a musical (although she isn’t sure it qualifies as one) as an attempt to honor the Shakers’ form of life. Daniel Blumberg’s soundtrack and Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography are as central to the film as its plot or dialogue. The musical form lends a liturgical frame to a biopic that might otherwise collapse into voyeuristic sensationalism. Early Shaker worship is portrayed as a disorienting blend of Georgian propriety and religious frenzy: the characters pray and confess sin with breaths and moans that verge on the orgasmic. Their individual movements and vocalizations coalesce into and emerge from communal rhythms.
The pre-released songs from the film’s soundtrack are tellingly safe. “Hunger and Thirst” reworks a Shaker hymn in the mode of contemporary praise-and-worship music. “Woman Clothed by the Sun” sounds like Christian alt-folk. Both are beautiful and compelling, but conventional. The rest of the soundtrack is strange, disturbing, and far more powerful. Blumberg’s setting of “I Never Did Believe” conveys the disorienting power of Shaker worship in a way utterly unlike contemporary praise music. The scene takes place in a British manor, where members of the Wardley Society—the group from whom the Shakers emerged—have gathered. The music begins with eerie string saws, cries, and rhythmic moaning, out of which emerges a quavering Georgian tenor singing “I never did believe / that I ever could be saved / without giving all to God.” Rowlson-Hall’s choreography captures the interplay of freedom and order in this raucous worship in which the “Shaking Quakers” (as they were mockingly called) move in individual ecstasy and flow together into swells, surrounding and lifting up those who cry out the refrain. After three days of this, constables arrive to break up the gathering and drag Ann away. The sequence ends with Ann (played by Amanda Seyfried) bloodied, in prison, singing the final verse: “So I freely give the whole / My body and my soul / To the Lord God, Amen.”
I watched Testament a few days after ICE agents had killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti. That week, Bruce Springsteen released the “Streets of Minneapolis” and Tom Morello performed “Killing in the Name” in Minneapolis, shouting with the crowd “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Grief and outrage were in the air. But it was Seyfried’s voice singing the Shaker verse of total commitment that echoed in my head that week, more powerfully illuminating the demands of our dark moment than those protest songs.
Ann’s body—violated and ill, in labor and in ecstasy—is at the center of the film. Her revulsion against “fleshly cohabitation” is portrayed from early childhood. Ann marries Abraham Standerin, a Quaker blacksmith who brings a libertine novel with pornographic woodcuts into their bedroom for use as a marital manual, lauding the book for its “unrelenting attack on the traditional clergy.” There follows a series of four awful conceptions, labors, and infant deaths. If Ann is portrayed as barely consenting to Abraham’s sexual impositions, she is active in motherhood: laboring through exhaustion and hemorrhage, expressing milk in a desperate attempt to nourish an infant too ill to nurse, clinging passionately to her stillborn child. Seyfried (with the aid of a dizzying array of prosthetics) appears naked throughout these excruciating scenes.
Some have criticized this portrayal of overwhelming trauma for reducing Lee’s faith to a compensation for suffering and loss. But something far more interesting is going on here. Blumberg’s setting of the Shaker hymn “Beautiful Treasures” combines a nursery tune, which we first hear hummed by Ann’s mother, with what sounds like a horror soundtrack. Love and grief are mixed with tension and dread. Ann’s sexual subordination and heroic yet futile struggle to give life to her dying children are interspersed with scenes of ecstatic freedom and sisterly support as she dances in worship with the Shakers. The bridge of the song—and climax of the sequence—is a grief-stricken wail, not of madness but of Ann in labor. The film is founded on this interplay of motherly love and death, bodily vulnerability and fierce resolve.
Fastvold has said that she does not share Ann Lee’s faith but found herself “moved deeply” by her “implausible” prophecies. Her statement that Ann took “horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world” reads, at first glance, like artist-statement speak. But her film—by means of drama, music, and dance—conveys this connection with the utmost seriousness and power. Ann’s cry of labor returns later in the film, this time ecstatic, ferocious, and unbound: opening the sequence “Building and Growing,” where the Shakers dance in the sunlit warmth of a beautiful Shaker barn. Seyfried’s wailing visage in this scene provides the cover image for the soundtrack album.
The connection between natural and spiritual motherhood, between childbirth and spiritual labor, is true to the historical Ann Lee. While it is unclear whether she considered herself to be the second incarnation of Christ, she definitely did consider herself to be “Mother.” If her experience of reproductive loss was behind her condemnation of lustful “natural generation,” it’s also true that she repeatedly used words such as “labor” and “travail” to describe her spiritual struggle and her ministry to “birth” children into “regeneration” in Christ. As her later followers wrote:
Ordained of God…to be the first Mother of all souls in the regeneration, she had, not only to labor and travail for her own redemption, through scenes of tribulation, and to set the example of righteousness, and mark out the line of self-denial and the cross for her followers, but also to see and feel the full depth of man’s loss, and the pain and judgment which every description of lost souls were under. Hence she was destined to pass through inexpressible sufferings for their redemption.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Seyfried’s powerful performance in Fastvold’s film gives voice to Ann now amid the rise of an exclusionary Christian nationalism, when pious politicians attempt to justify violent deportations with platitudes about the limits of love, while ordinary people risk their lives in the streets to care for those who are not their kin but are nonetheless their neighbors.
(For the complete review in Commonweal, see here.)
