The Righting America Blog

Between the Progressives and the Fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists: How to Understand the Story of Noah and the Flood

Feb 1, 2024 | 4 Comments

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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April.

Leon Francois Comerre’s *Le Deluge*. In public domain.

The story of Noah and the ark makes for great sermons, movies, even stand-up comedy performances. Everyone loves a good story. From Bill Cosby, when he was actually funny, Noah asks God, “What are we going to do with all these rabbits,” to the most recent peer-reviewed scientific article in geology, interest in the flood remains of lasting interest.

Noah’s story is a rhetorical construction of an inspired, imaginative Hebrew storyteller recounting the saga, legend, myth, and tales of a time before history known as primeval time. The creator of Noah’s story is separated by centuries from the events the raconteur recounts.

Progressive Christians tend to talk about the flood in scholarly and scientific language that fails to achieve the primary objective: Persuasion. I also read several creationist defenses of the flood in the last month. These papers were filled with what was alleged to be scientific information.

Both sides seem intent on filling the great void with science of one kind or another. Write an article on creation and the flood and the ensuing flood of words will overwhelm even the most diligent researcher. Everyone has opinions about the flood. Why is it such a powerful magnet for such fierce debate? What makes one story more attractive than other stories?

External debates about history, science, biblical interpretation, and literalism cloud the meaning of the flood story. No one gets around to reading the story as biblical material intended to inspire faithful living.

A “Stand Up for Science” mug appeared on Facebook. The following claims appear on the side of the mug:

Earth is not flat.
Vaccines work.
We’ve been to the moon.
Chemtrails aren’t a thing.
Climate change is real.
STAND UP FOR SCIENCE.

Using that same approach, I will approach the story of Noah and the flood as a rhetorical act of persuasion designed to extol the mercy of God and the precarity of human existence

As biblical scholar Robert R. Cargill has observed,

It is time for Christians to admit that some of the stories in Israel’s primordial history are not historical. Christians and Jews must concede that the Bible can still be “inspired” without being historically or scientifically “inerrant.” Simply because a factual error exists in the text of the Bible does not mean that an ethical truth or principal cannot still be conveyed. It is time for Christians to concede that “inspiration” does not equal “inerrancy,” and that “biblical” does not equal “historical” or even “factual.” Some claims like the flood and the six-day creation are neither historical nor factual; they were written to communicate in a pre-scientific literary form that God is responsible for the earth.

Here’s a good rhetorical move to make: Do not accept the framework or language or definitions of fundamentalist/evangelical Christians. There is nothing in faith that requires your signature on a list of doctrines rooted in the human notion of inerrancy or literalism.

Preachers who preach the flood literally and preachers who preach that the flood was not literal are wasting pulpit time by not taking seriously the biblical text. I am acutely aware of the difficulties in my claims. I will not be scientific enough for my liberal allies; I will not seem biblical enough for my evangelical enemies.

Primeval Time

Noah’s flood, as the real estate agents say, comes down to three things: Local, local, local. It was a local flood that seemed like a universal experience. Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann says, “The flood narrative is widespread throughout the world. The flood narrative like the creation narrative is part of the common property of humanity. It is humankind’s basic expression of its being-in-the-world, of the threat to human existence and at the same time of its permanence.”

All flood stories are stories of primeval time. The definition of primeval: the earliest ages. The person writing about primeval time is a historical person millions of years removed from the ongoing origins of creation, but writing about stories that are a mixture of symbols, metaphors, analogies, myths, fables, and archetypal narratives.

The motifs in primeval stories are few, but the little that is narrated about the primeval event is the same the world over. As Westermann notes,

The experience common to all humankind is more impressive than the experience of isolated groups. This is the explanation of the astounding similarity of the individual motifs of the flood stories throughout the world. We are dealing here with a particular sort of tradition. It is not the result of an individual event, but of a series of identical or similar events which have been fashioned into a type. The flood is the archetype of human catastrophe, and as such has been formed into narrative. What the flood narrative aims at expressing is derivation as a result of the preservation of the one amidst the demise of all others. It is precisely this that is the goal of the flood narrative.

In summary, all cultures have flood stories. They have been shared across centuries of development and have become a single archetypal metaphor depicting universal human experiences.

Everybody’s got a flood story. If there were an international gathering of representatives from all peoples, cultures, and nations, conversations around the bars and coffee shops would include, “You think you have a flood story; I have the flood story of the ages.”

Westermann helpfully summarizes:

We are dealing with a narrative of primeval time that is in the context of the story of the creation of humans. Side-by-side with the creation of humanity there is now the possibility of its destruction; this leads to the preservation of humankind by saving the one. The creation of humans and their preservation involve a catastrophe; but the saving action does not take place in the realm of the history of humanity. It is an event that precedes history.

As Wilhelm Wundt has put it, “Flood narrative and creation narrative . . . complement each other.” Creation and flood exist outside of time as a single event. The literalist obsession with the destruction of humanity suggests a blood-thirsty desire for punishment. But the text refuses to submit to this horror motif because, to quote Westermann, “the extinction of humanity cannot really be the subject of narrative because with it all tradition would be at an end.”

Abraham and Moses Argue with God against Destruction

As Rowan Williams reminds us in Tokens of Trust,

Genesis may not tell us how the world began in the way a modern cosmologist would; but it tells us what God wants us to know, that we are made by his love and freedom alone. What the Bible puts before us is not a record of a God who is always triumphantly getting his way, but a God who gets his way by patiently struggling to make himself clear to human beings, to make his love real to them, especially when they seem not to want to know, or to want to avoid him and retreat into their own fantasies about him.

After the flood, God will again be tempted to destroy humankind. Abraham and Moses intervene in these two instances. Why doesn’t Noah plead with God not to destroy the earth? Even in God’s anger the story still presents a way of salvation. God is merciful. But Noah says nothing. He leaves the people to their destruction. Not once does Noah ask God if the sentence would be commuted if 50 righteous people were found. An accurate movie about Noah would have to be a silent movie.

Why is he the passive builder of an ark designed to save only him and his family? Perhaps in the primeval history, man has not yet developed theologically enough to express the arguments against destruction. In any event, the rhetorical acts of Abraham and Moses are helpful in showing us what the biblical writers are doing – the drama they are constructing.

There is another awful silence in the story. The coming of the flood is told with no comment or dialogue. There are no humans in sight to be destroyed. There is no reaction from those who threatened with extinction. There’s no lament, cry, death agony. There’s no questioning of God. There’s only absolute silence. Only an extreme Calvinist could be pleased with this announcement:

And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. (Genesis 7:21-23)

As Westermann points out, “Humankind as God’s creation cannot take for granted its own existence in the world; its existence is problematic and remains such in the presence of its creator.” More stridently, he says, “The creation decision can be revoked.”

The Bible sometimes does this by a very bold method – by telling a certain kind of story from the human point of view, as if God has human characteristics rooted in revenge, anger, and destruction. Since Noah remains silent, we turn to Abraham and Moses – two persons of faith who had good reason to know something about what God is really like. When they are faced with a crisis and things are going badly, and when it looks like the end of the line for humanity, Abraham and Moses argue with God until they persuade God to be merciful.

The mistake that a religious populist like Ken Ham makes is depicting God as if God acts as we act, as if God is the genocidal killer of the human race. Ham is more nonchalant in his belief that God destroyed up to 20 billion human beings in the flood than a neo-Nazi is of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust or an American patriot of the almost 200,000 Japanese killed in the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hitler saw the Jews as the “devil” – the universal enemy. President Truman and the American government saw the nuclear bomb as saving American lives.

What rationale or excuse does God have for the flood? Fortunately, only people like Ham have to worry over that question.

The writers of these biblical stories knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t believe in a bad-tempered, capricious, destructive God who needed to be calmed down by sensible human beings. They knew that the most vivid way of expressing what they understood about God was to show Abraham and Moses appealing to the deepest and most true thing about God as they pray to him. The message: Even if there were a universal disaster, God can be trusted to find a way to provide salvation for creation.

Precarity

At this point, an opening appears for the homiletical imagination – a possible application of the flood story to a current crisis. In our time, when humanity faces even more precarity than ever, there are millions of Christians who are not only not saying anything, but who are also (like Ken Ham) pretending that global warming is false. They are actively opposing the measures that would save the planet. They are opposed to life. This makes Noah’s silence seem almost righteous, the evangelical preachers negligent.

Westermann has previously pointed out that one of the primary motifs of the flood story is the threat to human existence that it imposes. Decades of climate and geological research have coalesced in consensus that global warming signifies precarity at the biological or species scale. It indexes the fact that we (and our various publics) “have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing [the] parametric conditions needed for our own existence.” In other words, all humanity is rendered precarious. Humans are now on the endangered species list even though we continue to build and expand as did the ancient humans at the Tower of Babel.

It’s absurd that so many evangelical preachers are climate-deniers and literal flood believers. But what if we are also implicated in that we claim to accept the reality of global warming but live in “soft denial.” We refuse to face reality, not changing our lives as global warming reality demands. As usual, nothing is harder for even Christians to practice than repentance – the changing of our minds and practices.

Humbuggery

The hobbyists at the Ark Encounter in Kentucky are pulling a religious P. T. Barnum on the evangelical culture.

Barnum drew huge crowds to see his alleged 161-year-old former slave of George Washington named Joice Heth. When a local journalist attacked the credibility of Barnum’s claim, his business didn’t suffer. The crowds became larger. Barnum claimed that the controversy led to even greater ticket sales. When Joice Heth died in 1836, Barnum arranged another show where Dr. David L. Rogers conducted an autopsy on her body. He concluded that Heth’s “wonderful old age was a wonderful humbug.” She was approximately 80 and not 160.

Rhetorical scholar Jennifer Mercieca writes, “But Barnum had the last word. He planted a story with The Sun’s competitor, The New York Herald on February 27, 1836, which claimed that the Heth humbug story was itself humbug. In fact, reported The Herald on “good authority,” Heth was “not dead” at all, but alive and well in Connecticut.

Mercieca wonders why Americans are so attracted to hyperbole and humbug. She concludes: “We love to be amused and we love excess, and so we reward showmen with our attention. Some have said that we’re “amusing ourselves to death” and that we live in the “society of the spectacle.” A people who enjoy being “humbugged” are easy victims for certain kinds of religious and political demagogues.

The story about the flood is not historically true. Literal interpretations of the flood story have always been religious humbug in spite of their obvious sincerity. The attempts to prove that the flood actually happened are humbug as well. For example, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris provide the most lasting piece of humbuggery with The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter – supposedly a replica of Noah’s Ark – adds the final layer of humbuggery. It is as much like Barnum’s Joice Heth as any known humbuggery in history.

This entire episode is at least three layers of humbug deep.

Progressive Christians are too generous in allowing Ken Ham’s fantasies of the flood to parade through our culture as if they are legitimate parts of Christian history and faith. It’s all humbug.

The biblical account of the flood was written to praise God for being the “almighty” God of creation and the final arbiter of human existence. That is not humbug; that is eternal truth.

For evangelicals to persist in the fake war against science – from opposition to evolution to refusals to have vaccinations – adds additional layers of humbug to the ongoing saga.

We are much better served in helping humanity respond with courage and effort to the precarity of our existence and to demonstrate this in our lives together.

Ken Ham’s Creation Story Meets Biblical Scholarship

Jan 12, 2024 | 7 Comments

by Rodney Kennedy

Image from Ken Ham’s *The Lie: Evolution*.

(Disclaimer: The story of Kevin is a fictional story. No actual child was harmed in the writing of this essay. The churches mentioned are representatives of two different approaches to faith.)

This is the story of Kevin, a 10-year-old boy whose mother and father divorced. His mother was the organist at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas while his father was a biology professor at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

Kevin’s parents had joint custody which included being at his dad’s every other weekend. The first Sunday of each month, Kevin attended Sunday School at FBC Dallas. His Sunday school teacher used materials from Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis. The second Sunday of each month, Kevin attended St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas. And this is how his life unfolded Sunday after Sunday with clashing world views.

At FBC Dallas, he imbibed a biblical literalism filled with the unusual interpretations of Ken Ham. At St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church he was introduced to biblical scholarship that applied a more nuanced approach to the often symbolic language of the Bible.

In his senior year of high school, he was studying Ken Ham’s book, The Lie: Evolution. Filled with cartoons, caricatures, and simplistic generalizations, the book offered an easy, accessible, and entertaining presentation of the evils of evolution. Cute characters standing on the Bible showed the importance of a biblical foundation for life. For instance, Ham illustrated the opening of chapter 8 of The Lie: Evolution with a drawing of bricks labeled “Abortion,” “Pornography,” “Homosexuals,” and “Lawlessness,” all resting on a foundation labeled “Evolution.” The chapter was titled, simply, “The Evils of Evolution.”

Ham’s creation account doesn’t attract followers by claiming literal truth. Nor does he intrigue people by saying evolution is not Christian. What attracts people is the populist message of evolution as an attack on the faith. The foundation of the belief is not faith but fear. Historians Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson point out in The Anointed:

Ham’s simple message resonates with fundamentalist Christians in America and around the world. Their faith is under attack by evolution. By undermining faith in God’s word, particularly Genesis, modern science is destroying the foundations of civil—meaning “Christian”—society. The result is widespread anarchy, immorality, and nihilism.

Meanwhile, at St. Martin’s Kevin was studying Claus Westermann’s classic commentary, Genesis 1-11.

The contrast between Ham and Westermann may be represented analogically as the great gulf that exists between the abode of Lazarus and the place of the rich man’s residence. In Luke’s words, “Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”

Imagine our fictional Kevin making the trek every weekend across the “great chasm” from the Land of Ham to the Kingdom of Westermann.

Claus Westermann’s commentary on Genesis can’t be easily reduced to a populist pulpit message. This remains a challenge for all academic publications. Theologians are academics at home in the university. They write primarily for other theologians.

Despite the almost insurmountable odds, I am determined to do the work of presenting the results of biblical and theological scholarship in the pulpit to lay persons attending churches.

The work of the preacher is to exposit Scripture and that is also the work of theologians. My initial task I have set for my own satisfaction is the comparison of the populist work of America’s most famous creationist, Ken Ham and the best Old Testament scholar of the 20^th century, Claus Westermann. In an academic setting, Ham couldn’t be Westermann’s “hewer of wood” or “carrier of water.” In a local church Sunday school class or pulpit, Westermann’s 636-page commentary, Genesis 1 – 11 may not sustain enough interest to have people return for a second lecture or sermon.

Think of me as an assistant docent to the world of Genesis – coming alongside the primary guide, Claus Westermann, whose commentary on Genesis 1 – 11 is just the resource you didn’t know you needed. Until now.

Ham has created an imaginary world that has successfully convinced millions of Americans that his world is the real world. Yet Ham’s world tells us that the only part of science that we cannot trust is the fact of evolution. In all other areas, we have trusted science with our lives. Science has provided so many marvelous benefits. It has improved the quality of our lives and led to increased longevity. How is it even possible to maintain a complete dismissal of the science of evolution while embracing science is so many other areas?

While Ham attacks biology, geology, and physics, he always ends up at the beginning: a reliance on a literal Bible. The theory of literal truth dismantles Ham’s world because there has never been a literal Bible. This means there have never been a literal creation story.

The Story of Primeval Events in the Pentateuch and Its Prehistory

Westermann says, “The biblical story of the primeval events hands down what has been said about the beginnings of the world and of humanity in an unbroken line from antiquity to modern times.” Westermann argues that that the creation accounts have had an uninterrupted audience “from the time when the Yahwist planned his work in the 10^th – 9^th century B.C.”

Here is our first point of contrast. Biblical scholarship dates the Genesis accounts in the 10^th – 9^th century B.C. In other words, the narrative doesn’t originate with an eyewitness to the creation. Ham’s clumsy literalism falls into disarray when we consider that the story of creation was written long after the events of creation happened. The writer/editors of Genesis 1 – 2 are looking back at the beginning and imagining what it was like. Genesis 1 is no more a story of a literal creation than James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “The Creation.”

Judaism and Christianity have always celebrated creation. Westermann testifies,

There has been no break in that line of tradition which stretches back to the early stages of the Old Testament. The Christian Churches continue in their formal worship to acknowledge their belief in God, the creator of heaven and earth, and every attempt to detach faith in the creator from faith in Christ has miscarried.

A Christian rising in Sunday worship to affirm faith in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth doesn’t require Ham’s literalism.

The Poem of Creation

A creation poem imagining the beginning is not the same age as creation. The two events – creation and the story of creation – are separated by millions of years. Westermann says, “The Christian faith does not take its stand on an event at the beginning, but on an event in the ‘middle of time’; but because it looks to the whole, it must speak of the beginning.”

Ham’s literalism also struggles to deal with creation sources. The Yahwistic and Priestly syntheses of the Old Testament both begin with an account of creation. There’s no reason for faith to be thrown for a loop by the awareness that there are multiple creation stories with the main two identified by the name used by the writer for God. One uses Yahweh, the other Elohim. Faith doesn’t fall apart at the seams at the acceptance of this scholarly discovery.

A pre-Christian tradition lies behind the Christian confession of faith in God the creator; traditions which preceded Israel and from outside Israel also impact what Israel has to say about God the creator, Yahweh, the God of Israel.

The Hymn of Creation

The creation story of Genesis 1 – 2 is a hymn not a science theory. Westermann calls attention to hymns of praise which lift up God’s activity in creation. Hymns are not interested in chronological sequence or historical succession or even the age of the earth.

Even though Genesis 1 begins “In the beginning,” it is not the beginning of creation, time or even the book of Genesis itself. Genesis 1 – 11 is a distinct unity, a separate element from the Pentateuch. Westermann says, “It is …. A relatively self-contained unity, and not primarily a part of Genesis. It is a relatively late component.”

Genesis 1 – 11 looks to the universal; it includes all humanity; and primeval time, in which all takes place, cannot be fixed on the calendar. The attempt to fix an exact date for the first day of creation is an exercise in fiction. Such a date is as meaningless as all the dates Hal Lindsay has selected as the day of the Rapture.

As Westermann suggests,

The real question is this: Why has Israel’s confession of the god who rescued Israel from Egypt been extended back into the primeval events? And why did Israel speak of its rescuer as the creator of heaven and earth in a way which has so many points of contact with what the surrounding world said of its gods in the same context?

The writer of Israel goes back to the story of beginning to show that the God who called Abram and delivered Israel from Egyptian slavery is precisely the one true God of the universe. In short, God is God and we are not.

Genesis 1 – 11 answers a basic theological question which arises from Israel’s confession of Yahweh as the rescuer. This requires Genesis 1 – 11 to be exegeted around the relationship of the biblical story of primeval events to the tradition of the primeval happening in the history of humankind. I don’t see the point of attempting the impossible task of dating the first day of creation as a fundament of faith.

Ken Ham’s work is superfluous except for the money that he raises selling tickets to the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.

A Cautionary Tale: Dwell/Xenos Christian Fellowship, Evangelical Assumptions, and the Jesus People Movement

Jan 2, 2024 | 0 Comments

by Ben Williamson

Benjamin Williamson is Associate Professor of Theology at Ohio Christian University in Circleville, OH. Additionally, he serves as executive pastor at Riversong Church in Springfield, OH, and planted a church outside of Indianapolis early in his career. He has degrees from Asbury University (BS, Secondary Education), Wesley Biblical Seminary (M.Div.), and the University of Dayton (Ph.D. theology). He is currently working on a book for Fortress Press based upon his doctoral dissertation, out of which comes much of the material in this post.

June 21, 1971 cover of *Time* magazine featuring an image of The Jesus Revolution. Image via Time.

In a 2022 article published by The Daily Beast, Emily Shugerman interviewed 25 former members of the Columbus, OH megachurch about alleged excessive use of controlling authority into the lives of its members. Sadly, this is not a new accusation to be leveled at this church. It has been publicly accused of cult-like behavior since a few years after its founding in the early 1980s.

“Dwell” (formerly Xenos Christian Fellowship) has been wildly successful since establishing itself as Xenos Christian Fellowship in 1980 and currently boasts a membership of 5000. Its origins coincide with the rise of what has become known as the Jesus People Movement (JPM). They began as a group of students who published an underground paper and rented a house near Ohio State University in 1969.

The JPM was the result of a brief confluence between the sixties counterculture and conservative evangelicalism. (Note: I use “conservative evangelicalism,” “mainstream evangelicalism,” “fundamentalism,” and “neo-evangelicalism” interchangeably, as in my estimation they are all fruit from the same tree.) It began sometime around 1967 and reached its peak from 1971 to 1972 before merging with mainstream conservative evangelicalism in the late middle and later seventies as hippiedom faded into the past. To be sure, one can see the marks of the JPM in current evangelical Protestant churches through rock-inspired worship choruses and a casual atmosphere both in dress and general informality.

However, the sixties counterculture’s emphasis on inner enlightenment was diminished within the JPM as it was absorbed into mainstream evangelicalism. The emphasis on a personal encounter with the Divine remained because that was always an element of conservative evangelicalism. While this attracted countercultural youths, the JPM was largely swept up in the rise of the Religious Right that grew into power in the late seventies.

The truth is that Dwell/Xenos was never as countercultural as it would like to claim. The founders, brothers Dennis and Bruce McCallum and Gary DeLashmutt, were highly influenced by the former’s mother Martha (who had strong ties to mainstream evangelicalism, and was a member of the John Birch Society), and by castoffs from the evangelical organization, Campus Crusade for Christ.

In fact, Dwell/Xenos is a cautionary example of what can happen within mainstream evangelicalism. As I see it, here are three assumptions common to conservative evangelicalism, and how they relate to what happened at Dwell/Xenos.

First, conservative evangelicalism takes for granted its ability to interpret and apply the Bible, considered absolute in its authority, to the lives of its members in a manner that is also absolute in authority. This confers a high degree of power to the pastor and/or small group leader. In the case of Xenos/Dwell, the church consists of a large and varying number of small groups. Small group leaders, trained by the church, lead these groups. These leaders naturally hold a high degree of authority in their interpretation of the Bible, a dynamic that is amplified by the age of the congregants (median age = 25).

Kathleen Boone’s book, The Bible Tells Them So, suggests that there exists within fundamentalism an invisible authority that operates under the guise of a proper, approved interpretation. Such interpretation has the effect of finalizing the text and denies the interpretive authority of the community. The interpreters themselves impose their authority on their hearers “by effacing the distinction between text and interpretation, an effacement especially apparent in literalistic reading when it is claimed that the interpreter does nothing more than expound the ‘plain sense’ of the text.”

Jim Smith, a psychology professor at Ohio Christian University, recalled visiting one of these early Bible studies as a student in 1970. They were packed into the living room of the Fish House and listened as Gary DeLashmutt shared a teaching from the Bible. There was some conversation invited, but the teaching was “more didactic.” Smith kept in touch with the church over the years and described their style of teaching as a “hardcore cognitive process. They teach what the Word says, and if [you don’t] match up, you’re the problem. They don’t want to hear anything you have to say. Also, if it’s emotional, they don’t want anything to do with it. It’s like if it’s emotional, it’s evil or something.”

Second, conservative evangelicals, particularly those in non-denominational churches, tend to assume that the Bible provides a blueprint for church polity that is absolute. As they formulate their church authority structure, they believe that they are doing so in a way that restores the model found in the first-century Church. Dennis McCallum and Gary DeLashmutt made ecclesiology the subject of their master’s theses at the J.C. Light and Powerhouse Seminary in Los Angeles, CA. This was a seminary run by former Campus Crusade leaders, and thus was a product of evangelical assumptions. The product of this specific assumption results in a structure of church government that is perceived to be absolute, deriving its authority from the Bible itself.

Third, there is a belief in the necessity of every Christian to have a personal encounter with the Divine. The individual Christian can receive a personal message from the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures. They can also receive personal direction through prayer. Finally, conversion happens through a “personal encounter with Jesus Christ.”

This third assumption of conservative evangelicalism could protect members of such churches from potential authoritarian overreach in the first two assumptions. Xenos/Dwell is an example of what can happen when the individual’s ability to hear God for themselves is marginalized. For example, important personal decisions such as where to send one’s children to college have been subject to vetting by the leadership of the church. In my dissertation, I referenced an article from 2001 co-written by Dennis McCallum argued,

“Since God has sovereignly placed these students in Xenos, shouldn’t the burden of proof be on why should go away to school? If someone had a perfectly good job and decided they would leave their church and established relationships to move. To another city to take a slightly better job, wouldn’t we critique that decision? Why wouldn’t the same critique apply if we’re talking about colleges?”

This said, in their book, Spiritual Relationships that Last: What the Bible Says About Dating and Marriage, DeLashmutt and Dennis McCallum affirm the sovereignty of the individual Christian to hear God in the process of making important life decisions such as deciding when and whom to marry. More than this, they speak out against churches who “have tried to minimize the significance of the individual decision making by dominating every area of their members’ lives,” and they mention that these churches use terminology such as “shepherding” to dominate the lives of their members.

However, and as I establish in my dissertation, this is likely a reference to former evangelical mentors with whom they had a subsequent falling out. Put another way, DeLashmutt and the McCallums recognize the issue as a problem in other evangelical churches, but cannot or will not see it in their own church.

Dwell’s model, built upon a network of smaller cell groups that meet in homes, provides community and the possibility for deep friendships. It fends off isolation. This is also true of their Dwell-sponsored student housing. No one at Dwell must face isolation . . . unless, and this is significant, they disobey the leadership.

If one reads Shugerman’s article in its proper context, and listens to the stories of these former members with the proper gravity, one realizes that these are often impressionable young adults in their mid-twenties. They are taught the three assumptions of evangelicalism, with an emphasis on the first two. They receive love and community from Dwell and their small groups. But in story after story, they also talk about being isolated from friends and family. And once isolated, the church gains a very powerful and authoritative presence in their lives. Leaving Dwell means loss of the identity and community one has earned through great personal sacrifice.

Post-Covid evangelicalism has begun to promote the viability of house church models reminiscent of Dwell/Xenos. Evangelical leader and former megachurch pastor Francis Chan is a significant proponent. Chan’s “We Are Church” movement is committed to the evangelical approach to the Bible with an acknowledgment that individual members can and should hear God for themselves. However, their statement that “The body of believers is supposed to be closer to us than our own families (Matthew 12:46-50, Luke 14:26)” carries the potential of a future authoritarian and isolating tendency. (And notice that they reinforce their assertion with the Bible).

Dwell’s story is important for evangelicals to consider in such a historical moment. As a person who affirms the inerrancy of the Bible and the possibility of a personal encounter with the Divine, I think it’s crucial to recognize that the assumptions undergirding evangelicalism have the potential to be interpreted in ways that allow for a destructive authoritarianism.

Like father, like son: Jeffrey Dahmer’s claims about evolution in light of Lionel Dahmer’s creationism

Dec 26, 2023 | 3 Comments

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.

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and his victims. Image via jagotutorial.com.

Lionel Dahmer, the father of the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer – the “Milwaukee Monster” who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys (mostly African Americans) – died on December 5, 2023. Lionel was the author of A Father’s Story, a memoir of his son’s youth first published in 1994. According to the obituary in The New York Times, “Mr. Dahmer described himself in his book as ‘almost totally analytical’—a chemist, comforted by the scientific predictability of his work, whose emotional life resembled a ‘broad, flat plain.’” But in fact, Lionel underwent a conversion experience in 1989 that affected not only his conception of the relation between religion and science, but also how his son is remembered.

Interviewed by Dateline NBC’s Stone Phillips in 1994, Jeffrey characterized evolution as the idea that “we all just came from the slime,” described it as “a complete lie … [with] no basis in science to uphold it,” and contended that “the whole theory cheapens life.” Implicit in his rambling remarks is the following argument: evolution entails that there is no God to whom we are morally accountable; only if there is a God to whom we are morally accountable is there reason for us to behave morally; therefore, accepting evolution robs us of any reason to behave morally.

For the benefit of any reader inclined to take their scientific or philosophical pointers from a college drop-out like Jeffrey, it should be noted that the scientific consensus on evolution is overwhelming, with over 98 percent of American scientists accepting human evolution in a 2014 survey; that evolution, like science in general, is typically regarded as intrinsically silent on the existence of God; and that there are a plethora of philosophical accounts of morality in which God is not central. It’s also not clear why slime is supposed to be a worse origin than the Biblical alternative, the dust of the ground.

Yet creationists are disturbingly fond of invoking Jeffrey Dahmer. To take a few examples at random: the creationist ministries Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International discuss Jeffrey in virtually identical terms, reflecting their common ancestry; a professor of philosophy at a fundamentalist university paraphrased the Dateline NBC remarks while participating in a three-way internecine creationist debate; and Jeffrey is credited by IMDB as appearing in “Kent Hovind: An Atheist’s Worst Nightmare,” a 2006 self-promoting film from a flamboyant creationist and convicted felon.

Sometimes these invocations reach a broader audience. In 2009, for example, as the Texas state board of education was conducting a revision of the state science standards, members of the radical Christian right were hoping for the retention of “strengths and weaknesses” language that was invoked as a pretext to undermine the teaching of evolution. The Texas Freedom Network reported at the time on a lobbying email with the unsubtle all-caps subject line “JEFFREY DAHMER, SERIAL KILLER, BELIEVED IN EVOLUTION—WHY ‘WEAKNESSES’ NEEDS TO STAY IN TEXAS SCIENCE STANDARDS.”

But is Jeffrey’s claim that he formerly believed that evolution licensed his ghastly crimes actually evidence of anything? Even if he was sincere and accurate, it would be unwarranted to generalize from his single case, as Lionel conceded in the appendix to the 2021 edition of A Father’s Story. And while he may have been sincere—Roy Ratliff, who ministered to him in prison, reported similar remarks from him in his book Dark Journey Deep Grace: Jeffrey Dahmer’s Story of Faith —there is no reason to regard him as insightful about his own twisted psyche, and no evidence that he was interested in evolution before his imprisonment.

Moreover, there is a plausible source for Jeffrey’s claim independent of his own murderous career: creationism itself. In the appendix to the 2021 edition of A Father’s Story, Lionel revealed that from 1989 onward he was sending “tapes and articles” espousing creationism to his son, who (according to Lionel) ignored them until after his imprisonment. Roy Ratliff reported that while in prison Jeffrey continued to receive material from his father discussing “the creation of the world and how evolution is untrue,” which Jeffrey credited with bringing him to God.

It is inevitable that the creationist materials that Lionel plied Jeffrey with, before and after his imprisonment, contained a hefty dose of the claim that acceptance of evolution causes moral bankruptcy. Indeed, the idea that accepting evolution is connected to religious apostasy, moral turpitude, and social decay is among the so-called pillars of creationism, the main rhetorical themes used by creationists hoping to influence the public. Subsisting on such a doctrinaire diet, it is hardly surprising that Jeffrey was primed to repeat the claim during his Dateline NBC interview.

But why was Lionel sending creationist materials to Jeffrey? In the initial edition of A Father’s Story, Lionel was circumspect about his own attitude toward evolution. He wrote that while in prison in 1992, his son used $130, anonymously donated, to purchase thirteen creationist books, neutrally adding,

It amazed him that a scientific theory that had been received as an unarguable scientific fact during all the years of his education might rest on questionable assumptions. It seemed to delight him that so thoroughly accepted an idea could be questioned, that nothing stood on truly solid ground.

In the appendix to the 2021 edition of his book, however, Lionel disclosed, “In 1989, I myself ‘returned’ fully to God, being influenced by the urging of my son, Dave, and profoundly affected by a seminar presented by a scientist from Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Bert Thompson.” Thompson was indeed a scientist, earning a Ph.D. in microbiology from Texas A&M University in 1975, but he spent the bulk of his career “spread[ing] young-earth creationism throughout the Churches of Christ,” as the historian Ronald L. Numbers wrote, including through a ministry called Apologetics Press.

Inspired by Thompson, Lionel was briefly active in organized creationism himself, presenting a poster at the 1990 International Conference on Creationism and publishing a 1991 paper in the conference’s proceedings. The research purported to challenge the scientifically ascertained dates of dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous:

Our radiocarbon dates of dinosaur bones and the other information in this report should be alarming to the evolutionary community and should be given serious study considering our preliminary results.

Spoiler: the “evolutionary community” was unmoved (PDF, pp. 72-79).

Ironically, in light of the proclivity of creationists to quote Jeffrey’s Dateline NBC interview to illustrate the claim that accepting evolution causes moral bankruptcy, the career of the second author of Lionel’s paper—Dmitri A. Kouznetsov, then a superstar of Russian creationism—imploded in the mid-1990s owing to accusations of scholarly dishonesty. According to the historian Ronald L. Numbers, Kouznetsov then reinvented himself as a supposed expert on the Shroud of Turin, “using fake samples from nonexistent museums,” and subsequently served time for passing bad checks in Connecticut.

It is similarly ironic that Bert Thompson, whom Lionel credited with his return to God, was fired from Apologetics Press in 2005, amid accusations of sexual misconduct. According to a story in The Christian Chronicle, which serves the Churches of Christ, a member of the church alleged that “Thompson started sending him cards and letters when he was 13, then pressed him to go out to dinner after he turned 16, the legal age of consent in Alabama.” After dinner, Thompson took the youth to his home and “lured him to a bedroom, disrobed and touched him inappropriately.” It was not the only such accusation.

Whether or not Lionel was aware of or troubled by the alleged moral failings of his collaborator and his inspiration is unclear. In any case, he seems not to have been active in organized creationism after 1991, which is not surprising given the disruption of his life by his son’s arrest, trial, conviction, imprisonment, and murder. But he continued to harbor doubts about the scientific bona fides of evolution, judging from the appendix to the 2021 edition of his memoir, and he still appears in propagandistic lists of scientists who accept creationism, including the list put out by Creation Ministries International.

100 years ago, the KKK planted bombs at a U.S. university – part of the terror group’s crusade against American Catholics

Dec 15, 2023 | 0 Comments

by William Trollinger

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation.

This image shows an early twentieth century photograph of a Ku Klux Klan rally. At the top of the image is written "Demonstration, Klonclave, Dayton Klan, Knights of the Ku-Klux-Klan, Dayton O, September twenty one nineteen twenty three, class of seven thousand." In the foreground at the bottom of the picture are a picture of about two or three dozen Klan members dressed in traditional Klan outfits, complete with hoods. Behind them are a large crowd of plainclothes people facing a stage in the distance that appears to have a couple dozen more people dressed in Klan outfits on it. Those on the stage appear to be on a choir seating arrangement. At the top of the seating arrangement is a large cross. About fifty feet to the right and to the left of the stage are two burning crosses with two American flags farther out to the right and left. Closer to the left of the stage is a large lit sign that spells KKK. The photo was taken at night, and there appears to be another light source out of frame to the right of the picture. — KKK Demonstration in Dayton, OH on September 21, 1923. Photo courtesy of Dayton Metro Library.

It was Dec. 19, 1923 – 100 years ago. The first day of Christmas break at the University of Dayton, with fewer than 40 students still on campus.

At 10:30 p.m., the quiet was shattered by a series of explosions, as 12 bombs went off throughout campus. Frightened students discovered that, while damage was minimal, there was an eight-foot burning cross on the edge of campus. Running to tear it down, they were confronted by several hundred Klansmen screaming threats from 40 to 50 cars.

It wasn’t the first time Dayton’s residents had endured terror from the Ku Klux Klan. Hundreds of neighbors poured out of their houses and charged at the hooded invaders. The Klansmen sped away, and the students and others extinguished the fire and tore down the cross.

The KKK is most infamous for violently terrorizing African Americans. But in the 1920s its hatred also had other targets, especially outside the South. This version of the KKK, known as the Second Ku Klux Klan, harassed Catholics, Jews and immigrants – including students and staff at Catholic universities like Dayton, where I am a historian of American religion. All of this is the focus of my 2013 article, “Hearing the Silence.”

The Second Ku Klux Klan

The KKK emerged in the South in the years immediately after the Civil War. Its goal was to use whatever means necessary – including a great deal of murderous violence – to force newly freed African Americans into conditions close to slavery.

Having succeeded, the original Klan all but disappeared by the end of the 19th century. But in the wake of the blockbuster film “Birth of a Nation” – which celebrated the original KKK as having “redeemed” the defeated South – the organization was reborn in Georgia in 1915.

This second KKK only attracted a few hundred members over the next few years. But it exploded upon the national scene in the early 1920s, thanks to anxieties about immigration, race and communism. In fact, the white-robed Klansmen with their fiery crosses – a symbol borrowed from “Birth of a Nation” – very soon attracted between 1 million and 5 million members.

The second KKK was truly national, with more members in the Midwest and West than in the South. As the reporter Timothy Egan powerfully chronicles in his book, “A Fever in the Heartland,” “the Klan owned the state” of Indiana. In 1925, “most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.”

It is possible that Ohio had nearly as many members in the 1920s. Historian David Chalmers – who counted 400,000 Ohioans in the KKK at the organization’s peak – commented that “there was a time when it seemed the mask and hood had become the official symbol of the Buckeye State.”

A black and white photograph shows a large crowd of people, many of them in white robes, crouched on the ground outside in front of a small stage with crosses on either side of it. — A Klan event near Dayton in July 1923, a few months before the bombing on campus. Dayton Metro Library

The second KKK presented itself as a supremely patriotic organization: “100% American.” And to be 100% American, in their eyes, you had to be white and determined to keep African Americans in their place. Emulating the first KKK, the second Klan used horrific violence, including lynchings, to try to terrify African Americans into submission.

To be “100% American” also meant that you were Christian. The second KKK was the quintessential white Christian nationalist organization, and it defined ideal citizens by their race, creed and birth. When Klansmen were initiated into the organization, members sang “Just as I am Without One Plea,” a hymn that adores Jesus as the “Lamb of God.” Yet the group portrayed Jesus as one of them: the First Klansman.

A black and white photograph of two women with a baby between them, all dressed in white robes and white hoods, with their faces showing. — Anna Doss and Mrs. Theodore Heck, wife of the Ohio Commander of the Klan, with a baby at a Klan event in Ohio around 1925. Bettmann via Getty News

Anti-Catholic campaigns

Actually, being Christian wasn’t enough. To be 100% American, in the Klan’s view, meant that you were a white Protestant Christian.

In the years between 1890 and 1920, a flood of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe came to America, a large percentage of whom were Catholic or Jewish.

While the Klan was – and still is – strongly antisemitic, in the 1920s its members were particularly worried about Catholics, as there were many more of them. This was certainly the case in Dayton, where 35% of churchgoers were Catholic, thanks to an influx of immigrants who worked in the city’s factories.

In response to the Catholic “threat,” at least 10% of Daytonians – some 15,000 people – joined the KKK in the early 1920s, with some estimates placing the number as high as 40,000.

As was the case elsewhere in the Midwest, the Klan’s presence in Dayton was visible in rallies and parades that attracted thousands of Klansmen, Klanswomen and supporters – not to mention the burning crosses intimidating Catholics and Jews in working-class neighborhoods. As one Dayton resident of those years later recalled, the “threat of Klan violence was always there.”

The Klan directed much of its anti-Catholic hostility against the University of Dayton, which was founded by the Society of Mary, also known as the Marianists. As part of their intimidation campaign, KKK members repeatedly slipped onto campus to set crosses on fire. Rumor had it that the police force was filled with Klansmen; whether or not that was true, city authorities made little effort to intervene.

But as historian Linda Gordon has noted, “targets of Klan aggression were not always passive or nonviolent themselves.” Students at the University of Notre Dame, for example, stopped a KKK parade and rally, then damaged the headquarters of the local Klan.

University of Dayton students fought back, too. They repeatedly chased Klansmen off campus, calling on them to “show their faces.” At one point, football coach Harry Baujan, hearing that another cross burning was about to commence, exhorted his players to “take off after them” and “tear their shirts off” or “whatever you want to do.”

Lingering legacy

The second KKK peaked in influence and membership around 1925. Over the next few years, however, the Klan was afflicted by a series of scandals, the most famous of which involved the leader of the Indiana KKK – in effect, the most powerful Klansman in America – who raped and murdered his secretary. The KKK had faded from view by 1930, but not without achieving many of its aims.

A man in a white robe and cap that says '69 Ohio' sits on a low stool outside pouring a drink from a pitcher. — N.W. Cleverly, a member of the Klan from Ashtabula, Ohio, before a Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C., in 1925. FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images

For one thing, its extraordinary violence, including lynchings, helped ensure that white supremacy would remain the order of the day in the South – as it did for the next few decades.

In addition, the Klan and its sympathizers won the fight on immigration. In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which remained on the books until the 1960s. This law drastically reduced the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S. from Southern and Eastern Europe – that is, reducing the number of Catholic and Jewish immigrants – and essentially cut off all immigration from Asia.

One of the tragic effects came in the 1930s and 1940s, as the act made it very difficult for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust to get into the U.S..

While the second KKK faded from view in the late 1920s, a third emerged in the 1950s and 1960s to lead the charge against the Civil Rights Movement. Today, Klan membership is miniscule, as the KKK has been supplanted by more tech-savvy hate groups.

The Second Ku Klux Klan argued that to be truly and fully American one must be the right race, the right ethnicity, the right religion. One century after the Dayton bombing, such sentiments persist in the United States.

Before he was House speaker, Mike Johnson represented a creationist museum in court. Here’s what that episode reveals about his politics.

Dec 12, 2023 | 2 Comments

by William Trollinger

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson takes questions from reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Nov. 14, 2023. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been the subject of considerable media attention following his elevation to the post on Oct. 25, 2023. Since his appointment, news reports have highlighted the fact that he was one of the House leaders against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden to the presidency, and that he is known to be stridently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+.

Comparing himself to Moses, in a speech at a gala on Dec. 5, 2023, Johnson suggested that God cleared the way for him to be speaker of the House.

In the words of Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones, Johnson is “a near-textbook example of white Christian nationalism – the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

As historian John Fea has noted, Johnson is “a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right.”

While it might not seem obvious, one of those connections includes his legal work on behalf of Ark Encounter, the massive tourist site in Kentucky run by Answers in Genesis, or AiG, and its CEO, Ken Ham. Ark Encounter and its companion site, the Creation Museum, propagate Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, which is the notion that the Earth is but 6,000 years old and that the geological formations seen today were formed by a global flood that took place around 4,000 years ago.

The state of Kentucky offers tax incentives for large tourist sites. In 2014, two years before Ark Encounter opened, the state determined that the tourist site was ineligible for these tax rebates. A primary reason for rejection was that all Ark Encounter employees are required to affirm a lengthy faith statement, which, according to Tourism Secretary Bob Stewart, “violates the separation of church and state provisions of the Constitution.”

As an attorney for Freedom Guard, a conservative religious legal advocacy law group, Johnson sued on behalf of Ark Encounter, arguing that in denying the tax rebates, the state was discriminating on the basis of religion. Johnson and the Ark prevailed, and Ark Encounter received the state’s tax incentives.

As a scholar of American evangelicalism, I argue that Johnson’s association with Ark Encounter makes much sense, given the very strong connection between Young Earth Creationism and Christian Right politics. And this connection is old.

Answers in Genesis and the Christian Right

In his 2021 book, “Red Dynamite,” historian Carl Weinberg established that for the past century, Young Earth creationists have made the case that evolutionary science makes people behave in “an immoral, ‘beastly’ or ‘animalistic’ way,” especially when it comes to sex and violence.

More than this, Weinberg argues that, for Young Earth creationists, evolution has been understood as the “backbone” of a communist philosophy, a “socialist, Marxist philosophy” that promotes a “spirit of rebellion” in America today.

Ken Ham, founder of the nonprofit ministry Answers in Genesis, poses with animatronic dinosaurs during a tour of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., on May 24, 2007. AP Photo/Ed Reinke

As rhetorical scholar Susan L. Trollinger and I document in our 2016 book, “Righting America at the Creation Museum,” AiG continues this Christian Right tradition through its extensive online presence, its museum and now Ark Encounter.

According to Ham and AiG, “public schools are churches of secular humanism and … most of the teachers are … imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students.” Sexual immorality, LGBTQ+ activism and the rejection of patriarchy are, according to AiG, signs of the resultant cultural corruption. Ham claims that a once-Christian America – with Bible-believing founders who had no intention of separating church and state – has, since the 1960s, been dragged downward. In his 2012 book, “The Lie,” Ham asserts that this will eventually “result in the outlawing of Christianity.”

In the past few years, AiG has doubled down on its culture war commitments. For example, in March 2021 the AiG Statement of Faith – signed by all employees and volunteers – was expanded from 29 provisions to 46 provisions. This includes article 29, which requires signers to affirm that “‘social justice’ … as defined in modern terminology” is “anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing.” Then there is article 32, which says that “gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated.”

Rejecting the dangers of global warming and the notion that governments should intervene to reverse this trend, AiG’s Ham has asserted that “zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets.” According to him, climate activists are misled because they begin with human reason and not the Bible, and because they hold to evolution and an ancient Earth.

In a similar vein, an AiG spokesperson blasted mainstream scientists and others who focused on the dangers of COVID-19, arguing that they were simply generating hysteria “about a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.” AiG’s CEO lamented on his social media post that “the COVID-19 situation has been weaponized in many places to use against Christians.”

Mike Johnson and AiG beliefs

Johnson has effusively praised Ark Encounter as “a strategic and really creative … way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”

Johnson also shares with AiG’s Ham that government should not intervene when it comes to global warming, particularly given that, like Ham, he does not believe “that the climate is changing because we drive SUVs.”

He also shares with the folks at AiG the conviction that belief in evolution results in immoral behavior. For example, Johnson has blamed school shootings on the fact that “we have taught a whole generation … of Americans that there is no right and wrong. It’s all about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from primordial slime,” and so “why is that life of any sacred value?”

In this, Johnson is echoing AiG authors and speakers. For example, in response to the 2007 shooting in a high school in Jokela, Finland, which left nine dead, including the shooter, Bodie Hodge, an AiG researcher and author, asserted: “So long as evolutionism is forced onto children (no God, people are animals, no right and wrong, etc.) and so long as they believe it and reject accountability to their Creator, then we can expect more of these types of gross and inappropriate actions.”

In short, Johnson’s political commitments fit neatly into the politics of AiG and the Young Earth Creationism ecosystem. This matters politically, particularly given that a significant subset of American evangelicals adheres to Young Earth Creationism.

Agency, Authority, and the Bible: What Has Happened to Evangelicals?

Dec 5, 2023 | 0 Comments

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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April.

Donald Trump stands outside of St. John’s Church in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020. Image via CNN.

A group of PhD students at the University of Dayton are wrestling this semester with the question of whether evangelicals have surrendered their agency – their reading of the Bible – to pastoral authorities. Since I’ve never known a PhD seminar that I didn’t want to join, I am going to barge into this class and offer a single argument: Loss of agency means the rise of authoritarianism in church and in democracy.

My contention that people are reading the world’s best-selling book less deserves some warrant. Paul Combs, in an article on the Bible, says, “90% of people don’t read the Bible, and the other 10% lie about it.” Articles on American “biblical illiteracy” are too numerous to list. The point is that agency among evangelicals is pulling a disappearing act.

Hebrew scholar Richard Elliott Friedman has written a book called The Disappearance of God, in which he chronicles divine recession in the Hebrew Bible. Analogically, I am convinced that a book waits to be written titled The Disappearance of the Bible.

An Autobiographical Prelude

On an autobiographical note, in the 1950’s and 1960’s Southern Baptists had not surrendered agency. Not only was Bible reading a primary act of faith, but it was also encouraged in multiple ways. We were expected to read our Bibles daily. As youth we participated in Bible Memory Drill and Sword Drill. Baptist deacons were often biblically astute and informed. There was an expectation that reading the Bible gave us the right to disagree with one another and with the pastor. And this dissent was an honored trope in Baptist life.

By the 1980’s this agency was disappearing. The Word of God went into the age of declension.

First, Baptist laity put the interpretation of the Bible into the hands of the pastor. Then dissent was disallowed at the local church level, and at the denominational level. After two decades of Southern Baptist control by fundamentalists, like agency, had disappeared. Once the Pattersons and the Mohler’s took control, the period of a priesthood of the believer and the agency of church members began to come to an end. As the 21^st century enters its third decade, dissent continues to retreat.

The Bible has virtually retired, leaving only clergy as the keepers of knowledge. The acts of dissent are over. The authority of the preacher prevails. The evangelical church is no longer a place where a gathered people discerned the will of God, but a place where the preacher telss people what to think and do.

When Agency Became Authority

I would argue that the evangelical opposition to science has damaged evangelicals by taking away the necessary elements of agency, dissent, and a free search for truth.

There’s something about the evangelical disdain for science that irritates me. The blatant disregard for new truths, new discoveries, and new theories turns me cold. But the most irritating of all is the refusal of evangelicals to apply the hard work of science to our study and preaching of the Bible.

What we lose sight of is how much science and faith have in common – the pursuit of truth. The two are not identical twins, but they share a God-given desire for truth. If faith would allow science into the church, and if science would be more open to alternative explanations that are not physical, we could have an alliance in search of truth.

For example, with the aid of science, we could stop debating about the age of the earth. The “age of the earth” is not a question Christians even need to ask. The argument is as harebrained as the debates about how many angels would fit on the head of a needle. Arguing about the age of the earth resembles the comedic question, “How many clowns can you put in a Volkswagen ‘Bug’”? There’s not really any biblical evidence and certainly no scientific evidence for a young earth, but the debate still attracts many Christians. It’s a cottage industry gone mega at the Creation Museum and The Ark Encounter.

The Baptist churches prior to the fundamentalist takeover produced a wealth of godly, righteous, and faithful Christians. The healthy mixture of agency, dissent, disagreement without anger, discernment, and prayer helped maintain the “unity” of brothers and sisters. As the psalmist puts it, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1). And this unity didn’t require allegiance to an inerrant Bible, a double-edged predestination, or a substitutionary atonement theory. Nor did it involve the intrusion of the denomination on the freedom and autonomy of the local church.

What, in other words, has been gained in the move from agency to authority? In a word, “Nothing.” Even more telling, much has been lost. The loss of agency has resulted in an array of toxic tropes that undermine the traditional politics of Baptist life. The fundamentalists among us have managed to construct their usual cathedrals to certainty and infected the baptist spirit with political alienation, demagoguery, and advancing authoritarianism. These “godly” men have turned the evangelical movement into a “total war” rather than the deliberation and mediation of differences.

The evangelicals haven’t advanced Christian faith or American politics. Instead, they now define an oppositional movement dismissive of democratic norms. Their promises of “saving the faith from liberals” has turned out to be a sort of salvation by demolition. They have created mistrust and animosity that “ravages democratic norms and values, undermines civic culture, and inhibits deliberation,” say rhetorical theorist, Robert L. Ivie.

I want to make a radical suggestion that I believe would have a chance to save evangelicalism and our nation from authoritarianism. Agency needs to be recovered among evangelicals. These closed-to-the truth institutions would benefit from a few deacons dispersed here and there who are stubborn, dissenting, argumentative, disagreeing, and godly men and women. Their preachers would be blessed by church members who quietly, reverently, and truthfully say, “Pastor, I don’t think that is what the Bible says.” Or saying, “I’m tired of all this secular politics in the church. I think it is poisoning the church.”

The evangelical demagogues need exposing. They have not been advancing the gospel; they have been shutting it down by scapegoating and oversimplifying complex issues. Demagoguery has aligned with authoritarianism as a propaganda that takes advantage of congregations already predisposed to such “fear” messages because of the fear and hatred that exists in their midst.

An Anabaptist Guide

A return to “agency” requires a guide. In this case, we have the best guide possible in the Anabaptist theologian James McClendon.

McClendon calls our reading strategy the “baptist vision,” or the prophetic vision. Two traditional elements of this reading strategy are the centrality of Jesus Christ and the “this is that” of the baptist vision. The role of Scripture is the clue to the baptist vision. Scripture forges a link between the church of the apostles and our own. McClendon expresses the baptist vision in this way: “Shared awareness of the present Christian community as the primitive community and the eschatological community.” In a motto, “the church now is the primitive church and the church on judgment day.”

McClendon asserts that

the baptist vision sees that the narrative the Bible reflects, the story of Israel, of Jesus, and of the church, is intimately related to the narrative we ourselves live. Thus that vision functions as an interpretative grid. Construing our experience by way of Scripture, it shows how the two are properly joined. Scripture + Experience. For Baptists this is the way of Christian existence. A reading of the Bible as interpreting the present situation is characteristic of the baptist vision.

Consider the following as baptist distinctives:

The biblical story as our story.
Liberty as the duty to obey God without state help or hindrance.
Discipleship as life transformed into obedience to Jesus’ lordship
Community as the daily sharing in the vision.
Mission as responsibility for costly witness.

A Scientific Guide

The second guide that I offer may seem an odd match for an anabaptist, but I am convinced that the scientific community has a methodology of truth-searching that offers a way back to agency. The study and preaching of the Bible need the benefit of the scientific method of research and theory.

There is humility in the heart of scientists. Kenneth Miller says,

Scientific explanations are always, to some extent, incomplete. For all of their apparent precision, even gravitational theory and atomic theory are incomplete in their descriptions of the mechanics of nature.”

When a scientist refuses to take a stance of certainty toward something as elemental as “gravity,” the certainty claims about the inerrancy of the Bible or the authority of the pastor stands on sinking sands.

Good science has a streak of disrespect for authority that evangelicals have evaporated into authoritarianism. Young scientists are expected to challenge the theories of their teachers. They are required to be innovative, creative, rebellious, outside the box. An embracing of the scientific paradigm of research and the search for truth holds the key to a recovery of agency.

This work has been ongoing in our universities and seminaries, as our brightest biblical scholars have used the research techniques of science to provide alternative readings and challenge us with radical ideas. Yet there seems to exist a wide gulf between the academy and the congregation.

Biblical scholars have been bringing us “gifts from God” for centuries. But even among progressives, there’s been a tendency to leave behind all that scholarship at the seminary. In our churches we are reluctant to disturb our people with new ideas, with innovative readings of the Bible. We are afraid we may disrupt their faith.

Jesus commands us to ask, seek, and knock. Where are the young preachers ready to slay the dragons of close-minded intolerance? The young preachers have been bold on social issues and ethical issues, but where is our boldness with it comes to the Bible and theology?

I am suggesting that preachers learn the lessons of scientific research and experience the freedom of scientists seeking to improve or overturn existing paradigms of science. In the crucible of searching, asking, and questioning, we will discover the “newness” of God’s Word.

A Rhetorical Guide

Historically, there’s a dispute over whether Jews, Anabaptists, or Baptists are the most argumentative. I grew up with the truism, “Where two or three Baptists are gathered, there’s bound to be at least four opinions.”

Perhaps no one loves to argue as much as the Jews. Even more important, the Jews have maintained a detailed written account of all their arguments. Ellen Davis reminds us that Christians have no material even remotely related to the written history of the “sayings of the rabbis.” Davis has argued eloquently for these “arguments” as already embedded in the transmission of the Scripture. She names this process “critical traditioning.”

For instance, Davis helps readers interpret Leviticus 19. In the chapter there is a definition of “neighbor” as fellow Jew. Also, there is a command that the “alien” is the neighbor of the Jews. The two seem to contradict one another, but both remain in the book of Leviticus. The reason, according to Davis, is so that each new generation can keep arguing about what it means to be “the neighbor.”

The introduction of argument to this discussion opens the door for an appearance of the tropes of my own academic discipline: Rhetoric. Argument and persuasion are essential elements in theology and politics. The Greek word, for faith, in ancient Greek, means “probability.” Aristotle defined rhetoric and persuasion as the use of all the available possibilities.

Theological work has always been premised on deliberation, pluralism, multiple meanings, and reciprocity. Now we face advocates who insist on, as James Kloppenberg puts it, as “framing disagreements as all-or-nothing struggles between good and evil, between freedom and oppression,” instead of seeing that theology involves endless arguments and openness to competing values and worldviews.

The closed fist approach of evangelicals to truth harms evangelicals as it harms the rest of us. I challenge the “zero-sum” story of evangelicals that “a voice for liberals and progressives” is a loss for evangelicals and the truth. It would be better for faith and democracy if we were not exploited by the cult of certainty sowing the seeds of division and mistrust. We need to invest in a larger perspective and in more diverse voices.

I am fully aware that the multidimensional work of providing multiple readings of the Bible and faith cannot be undertaken without the rowdiness of democratic give and take. But it is the price we must pay to embrace diversity as a benefit and not a curse.

In summary: There isn’t a reason in the world to be distrustful of new knowledge. Some new knowledge turns out to be a dead end and is discarded. The process of knowing what to keep and what to discard is the very heart of biblical work.

I have argued for dissent as an affirming gesture for faith that will allow the potential for new truth to emerge. This, in my view, provides a constructive starting point for restoring agency and resisting the demagogic regression from mating with authoritarianism. The bridge from pastoral authority to political authoritarianism is a walking bridge – a very short one. An authoritarian government will destroy democracy and impose control that Americans would need to resist with all our minds, hearts, and bodies.

The Debate over Biblical Cosmology: A Case Study in Gracious Forbearance

Nov 28, 2023 | 0 Comments

by Terry Defoe

Pastor Terry Defoe is an emeritus member of the clergy who served congregations in Western Canada from 1982 to 2016, and who ministered to students on the campuses of the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Evolving Certainties: Resolving Conflict at the Intersection of Faith and Science, a book which, among other things, chronicles his transition from Young Earth Creationism to evolutionary creation. Evolving Certainties is endorsed by scientists in biology, geology and physics, with a foreword written by Darrel Falk, former president of BioLogos, an organization that has as its goal the facilitating of respectful discussion of science / faith issues. Defoe has been educated at: Simon Fraser University (BA Soc); Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (M.Div.); and, Open Learning University, Burnaby, British Columbia (BA Psyc).

A Representation of Early Cosmology. Illustration via DustoftheBible.com.

Biblical cosmology is phenomenological — reflections of earth-bound observers seeking to explain various aspects of the natural realm. The ancients were without the benefit of modern science and its associated technologies. Their understanding was limited to what the eye could see. In the Old Testament book of Job, (42:3), Job admits his lack of knowledge of both material and spiritual realities when he says, “I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” The issue of phenomenology is at the root of much of the current conflict between science and faith. Old Testament professor John Walton of Wheaton College says, “There is not a single instance in the Old Testament of God giving scientific information that transcended the understanding of the ancient Israelite audience” (106).

The author of Genesis is not aware of the limitations of his own knowledge. In the Hebrew Scriptures, important theological truths are often embedded in prescientific contexts. Modern-day believers do not base their faith on scripture’s statements about the natural world. Denis Lamoureux asserts that

The earth “looks” flat, “seems” to be surrounded by water, and “feels” stationary; the sky gives the “impression” of being a blue body of water overhead, and the sun “appears” to cross the dome of the sky, rising and setting every day.… to ancient peoples like the biblical authors and their readers, these are descriptions of the actual structure and operation of the universe.

The Firmament

The Hebrew word translated “firmament” or “expanse” is “raqia,” or metal pounded flat. The ancient authors of scripture believed that the firmament supported God’s footsteps. Job 22:14 in the New English Bible says, “He walks to and fro on the dome of heaven.” The ESV translation says, similarly, “He walks on the vault of heaven.” Job 37:18 has a question for God’s servant: “Can you join God in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?” And Isaiah 40:22 says, “God sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and his people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” The builders of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) were convinced they could build a tower that would reach the firmament.

The Israelites believed that the stars were quite small and fixed to the firmament. The stars sometimes dislodged, falling to the earth. This idea was carried forward into the New Testament (Revelation 6:13), where the apostle John says “… the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.” In the fifteenth century, some scholars (called “philosophers” in those days) began to question the idea of a firmament. Luther (1483-1546) insisted on a literal interpretation of the relevant texts:

Scripture says that the moon, the sun, and the stars were placed in the firmament of the heaven, below and above which heaven are the waters… It is likely that the stars are fastened to the firmament like globes of fire, to shed light at night… We Christians must be different from the philosophers in the way we think about the causes of things. And if so far beyond our comprehension like those before as concerning the waters above the heavens, we must believe that rather than wickedly deny them or presumptuously interpret them in conformity with our understanding (30).

Israel’s cosmology was similar to that of surrounding near eastern nations, especially Egypt and Babylon. There were differences, however. And those differences were theologically significant. For example, the author of Genesis carefully pointed out that astronomical bodies were not autonomous divinities able to control human behavior, as was believed in neighboring nations, but were inanimate entities under God’s control.

Paradigm Shift

A typical sixteenth-century scientist, Polish priest Nicholaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a man of faith. Somewhere around 1514 (the date is uncertain) he proposed a radical new theory, subsequently called heliocentrism, arguing that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa. Physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out that the theory was first circulated anonymously, perhaps fearing that Copernicus would be labeled a heretic (3). Heliocentrism caused consternation among theologians because of verses like 1 Chronicles 16:30: “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.”

Galileo (1564-1642) was asked to write an account which would lay out the arguments pro and con. He was instructed not to take sides. But that’s exactly what he did. Galileo displayed what Stephen Jay Gould called “… a fatal impetuosity,” the behavior of “…a frightfully undiplomatic hothead who brought unnecessary trouble on his own head” (88). Incidentally, in 1992, 350 years after Galileo’s death, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) admitted, on behalf of the Catholic church, that errors had been made by the theological advisors in their persecution of Galileo.

Accommodation

Martin Luther was a contemporary of Copernicus. He shared the geocentric cosmology of the learned people of his day. Luther refused to budge from the standard scriptural interpretation which claimed that the earth did not move. This, however, is not the end of the story. The Lutheran Church never took an official position against the Copernican theory. As Russell Moulds has established, Luther and his colleagues at Wittenberg University included the Copernican heliocentric model in their curriculum, despite the radical, counterintuitive, and exegetical problems status of that theory (40). Paradoxically, the Lutheran University of Wittenberg actually played a central role in promoting heliocentrism.

Despite Luther’s biblically grounded skepticism, Lutherans openly considered and embraced heliocentrism without fear of reprisal. According to Moulds, “this approach fostered the study of what was current and emerging in the arts, letters, and sciences without necessarily endorsing the content as conclusive” (40). Lutherans granted early scientists the autonomy to understand nature on its own terms, and for this they played a key role in shaping the modern scientific enterprise.

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a devout Lutheran, best known for his laws of planetary motion. As A. J. Swamidass explains:

Kepler’s introduction to Astronomia Nova included a careful exegetical study, analysis of Psalm 104 and Joshua, showing these passages did not put science at odds with the Bible. . . . As a scientist, I admire Kepler’s obvious and diligent brilliance. I identify with his worshipful devotion to the Creator in his study of creation. I also aspire to Luther’s graceful forbearance of those who disagreed with him (84)

Kepler pointed out that science could assist investigators in learning about God’s creative will. (Gribbin, 2003, p. 52) Faithful individuals the likes of Augustine, Kepler and Galileo encouraged the church to acknowledge scientific advances and let those insights inform church teachings. As Ted Davis says:

Kepler used the Augustinian principle of accommodation to justify the figurative interpretation of biblical references to the motion of the sun. The Bible, he noted, speaks in a very human way about ordinary matters in a manner that can be understood, using ordinary speech to convey loftier theological truths. Thus, the literal sense of texts making reference to nature should not be mistaken for accurate scientific statements (36).

Conclusion

Many Christians are unaware of the fact that the Big Bang theory was initially proposed by Father George LeMaitre, (1894-1966) a Jesuit priest, friend of Albert Einstein and leading scientist in Belgium. According to the theory, the universe expanded from a high density state approximately 13.8 billion years ago. In 1951, LeMaitre’s theory was officially pronounced to be in accordance with Roman Catholic teaching.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. In order to assist viewers in grasping the magnitude of that number, producers of a Nova TV Special used the analogy of a vehicle traveling at the rate of one million years per minute. This vehicle would have to travel nonstop just over three days (74 hours) to reach the equivalent of 4.5 billion years. As explained in PBS’ “Australia: First Four Billion Years” that’s at the rate of 1 million years per minute.

A growing number of Christians today believe that God has continuously supervised an evolutionary process, a point of view called evolutionary creation. The New Testament book of Hebrews, chapter 1, verse 3, says that God “… sustains all things by his powerful word.” The Apostle Paul adds “… All things were created through him, and for him: and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:16-17) In Romans 1:20, we read: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…”

You Can’t Be a Literalist in a Metaphorical World, or, Conservatives Like Mike Johnson Have a “Daddy” Issue

Nov 21, 2023 | 0 Comments

by Rodney Kennedy

“Welfare Queens” by Darrin Bell. Image via Candorville.com

George Lakoff asks penetrating questions in his work, The Political Mind: “Why do certain people, most of them self-identified as conservatives, find certain acts of love—premarital, extramarital, or homosexual—more sinful than war or torture? Why should a conservative living in the Midwest find it personally threatening when gays get married in San Francisco or Massachusetts?”

I add: Why do conservatives have such an emotional need to reduce SNAP benefits?

Why indeed? Conservatives seem to have a single mind that informs their approach to every social issue. Lakoff, in another work, one that inspired my doctoral dissertation, argues that we live by a series of metaphors that constitute our reality.

Conservative modes of thought are sweeping across the nation, creating a kind of soft authoritarianism. Egged on by a deep emotional fear of losing, evangelicals are comfortable with the idea of minority rule. Any form of authoritarianism – even fascism – entices those who are determined to be in charge. No conservative I know is bothered by the fact that 72% of Americans accept gay marriage. They are not deterred by the reality that more than 65% of Americans believe that there should be some access to abortion. They are not the least bit intimidated by a secular culture and progressive Christian majority that embraces diversity.

They no longer have any qualms about reducing direct democracy, empowering the minority, or eliminating the primary guarantees of democracy.

Building on my 1993 book, The Creative Power of Metaphor, I suggest that conservatives live by a single, dominant metaphor.

In the 1990s I thought that dominant metaphor was LIFE IS WAR.

Now, I believe that I only discovered one of the tertiary metaphors of the conservative movement. Borrowing again from Lakoff, I think the primal metaphor is the strict father metaphor.

Definition of The Strict Father Metaphor

Lakoff defines the strict father as the moral leader of the family, and he is to be obeyed. The family needs a strict father because there is evil in the world from which he must protect them—and Mommy can’t do it. The family needs a strict father because there is competition in the world, and he has to win those competitions to support the family—and Mommy can’t do it.

You need a strict father because kids are born bad, in the sense that they just do what they want to do, and don’t know right from wrong. They need to be punished strictly and painfully when they do wrong, so they will have an incentive to do right to avoid punishment.

The Strict Father metaphor depends upon a deeper metaphorical structure: God is the Strict Father. For instance, evangelicals operating out of the strict father frame struggle with the story of the prodigal son. The younger son did what all strict father adherents abhor – he wasted everything. He was lazy, promiscuous, careless with money, had evil friends, and refused to work.

The only way evangelicals can “stomach” the prodigal son story is to turn it into a revival testimonial. In this framework, the prodigal son is a sinner in need of grace. There’s no economic reality involved in this reading. It is sloppy spiritualization attempting to hide from messy reality.

In the strict father metaphor, we would have a different prodigal son story.

When his father saw him he was filled with indignation. He waited at the front door with his arms folded and his face showing a bit of a scowl and an ocean of indifference. Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

But the father, feeling no sympathy said to his slaves, “Quickly, get the chains and lock the boy in the cellar and leave him there with no food and water.”

The father then called the elder son and said to him, “Order the fatted calf to be killed, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine has to learn how to be an adult in this home.” And they began to celebrate.

And the father said to the Older Brother: “You are my son, my Beloved. You have worked hard, obeyed my every word, and you have always respected my authority. To you I leave my entire estate as your reward.”

In the Strict Father version, the prodigal doesn’t get a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet; he gets chains on his body and the sting of a whip on his back. Disobedience must be punished. The son must once again learn the total authority of the Father; he must be obedient, and most of all, he must return to work in the field every day.

A softer version of the Strict Father prodigal story would have left out the chains and whip, but the issues remain the same: Authority, discipline, obedience, and punishment. This is the Strict Father template.

Strict Father (Mike Johnson) v. the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

During Thanksgiving week, there is another defining example of the strict father metaphor. This one has to do with food supply. Instead of a table loaded with turkey and dressing with all the goodies, there is the reality that 30,000,000 Americans suffer from food deficiency.

Why would an affluent member of Congress be concerned about the amount of food assistance received by a poor person? The irony of affluent members of Congress debating food assistance for poor people without consulting a single poor person is thick.

When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson claims that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program,” he conveniently ignores the facts that 41 million Americans receive SNAP benefits, and that the alleged fraud in the program doesn’t exceed 2% of the budget. As for the emotional argument that SNAP is “bloated,” the reality is that SNAP comprises a very small portion of the federal budget and it is not a key driver of our federal debt. In 2022, spending for SNAP made up 2.4 percent of total federal spending.

Johnson’s miserly politics looks suspiciously like Pharoah cutting the rations of Hebrew slaves and nothing like the amazing generosity of God. Walter Brueggemann says,

From the outset, Pharaoh, blessed by God’s Nile, was the leader of the breadbasket of the world (see Gen. 12:10). By his own actions and those of his food czar, Joseph, Pharaoh advanced the claims of the state against his own subjects, achieving a monopoly on land and on the food supply. That land and food supply became a tax base whereby wealth was systematically transferred from the peasant-slaves to the central monopoly.

The strict father operates on merit, competition, hard work. In a strict father family, hierarchies of power and wealth are justified on “merit.” If a person is “given” food benefits, the desire to compete, to win, to provide disappears. Conservatives really believe that cutting welfare benefits will build discipline, improve lives, and make America great again.

President Reagan Gave Conservatives a Permanent Metaphor for Opposing Welfare Benefits

Conservatives are not void of metaphorical construction. Ronald Reagan, for instance, invented the metaphor of the “Welfare Queen,” and it served as the defining principle of conservatives for decades.

Whether or not the Welfare Queen was a total fabrication, or a real woman, is not relevant. The power of the metaphor is that the Welfare Queen came to stand for all African Americans on welfare. She was a lazy, uppity, sexually immoral black woman who was a cheater living off of the taxpayers, driving a Cadillac paid for by taxpayers, having children just to get money for them.

Despite the fact that most welfare recipients are white, and few own vehicles of any kind, conservatives eagerly accepted Reagan’s metaphor. Match “Welfare Queen” with “Strict Father” and you have a shotgun wedding made in conservative heaven.

Reagan’s description of the Welfare Queen driving a Cadillac enabled him to reach southern poor whites. The Cadillac symbolized something valuable and upper-class that was not earned. He also deftly employed the racist and sexist tropes that whites were above nonwhites, and men were above women.

The rhetorical trope for this was metonymy. The definition of metonymy: the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant. For example, “suit” for business executive, or “track” for horse racing.

Here’s how metonymy works: In Reagan’s created frame the welfare recipient is a lazy uppity immoral black, and that fits a social stereotype of blacks. Eliminating welfare is giving those unworthy blacks what they deserve—nothing!

Reagan’s prodigious powers of persuasion convinced poor, white, worthy welfare recipients to vote against their own self-interest. They supported Reagan’s stand against welfare because they already lived out of a more powerful metaphor: the Strict Father. They knew that Reagan didn’t include them in the Welfare Queen trope. They were on welfare, but they didn’t drive Cadillacs.

The Welfare Queen and Strict Father metaphors explain how Speaker Johnson can ignore facts and reality to insist on cutting SNAP benefits. The “Welfare Queen” haunts the dreams of all hardline, strict father legislators.

“And I Will Show You a More Excellent Metaphor”

In the rich language of the Bible there are better metaphors to live by than the strict father. There’s a phrase that appears frequently in the Bible: “Made a feast.” From Abraham making a feast for his guests with unleavened bread to Jesus feasting with his disciples at the table with bread and wine, there is a sense of joy and generosity in the air.

Instead of the clutching greed of the Strict Father guarding all the benefits, we get God’s inexhaustible creation, limitless grace, relentless mercy, enduring purpose, and fathomless love. No wonder the Strict Father metaphor struggles to find its footing in the kingdom of grace.

The feast that God provides gives us a vision of God “cutting a rug” with all peoples of all backgrounds – rich and poor. When you think about it, an appeal to rhythm makes perfect sense: without the satisfaction of certain appetites, nothing gets born – neither songs nor babies.

Imagine feasting, singing, dancing, the sense of rhythm in the nurturing God’s kingdom as the ingredients for a stronger metaphor.

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah imagined the reality:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 25:6-8)

The shroud in this passage is the Strict Father metaphor – the illusion of white male superiority – that separates the rich from the poor, and from God. Strict father types believe that extravagance is waste, that generosity is a sign of weakness, and that feasting is somehow not acceptable.

Evangelicals have “daddy issues;” more seriously, evangelicals need better metaphors for framing reality. Evangelicals need a new primal metaphor.

Roger Miller sang, “You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd.” Well, you can’t literalize in an ocean of metaphors and symbolic language.

« Older Entries

Next Entries »

Righting America Blog Categories

Subscribe via Email

Find Us on Facebook!

Find Us on Facebook!

Righting America

Between the Progressives and the Fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists: How to Understand the Story of Noah and the Flood

Primeval Time

Abraham and Moses Argue with God against Destruction

Precarity

Humbuggery

Top 10 Posts of 2023 on rightingamerica

Ken Ham’s Creation Story Meets Biblical Scholarship

The Story of Primeval Events in the Pentateuch and Its Prehistory

The Poem of Creation

The Hymn of Creation

A Cautionary Tale: Dwell/Xenos Christian Fellowship, Evangelical Assumptions, and the Jesus People Movement

Like father, like son: Jeffrey Dahmer’s claims about evolution in light of Lionel Dahmer’s creationism

100 years ago, the KKK planted bombs at a U.S. university – part of the terror group’s crusade against American Catholics

The Second Ku Klux Klan

Anti-Catholic campaigns

Lingering legacy

Agency, Authority, and the Bible: What Has Happened to Evangelicals?

An Autobiographical Prelude

When Agency Became Authority

An Anabaptist Guide

A Scientific Guide

A Rhetorical Guide

The Debate over Biblical Cosmology: A Case Study in Gracious Forbearance

The Firmament

Paradigm Shift

Accommodation

Conclusion

You Can’t Be a Literalist in a Metaphorical World, or, Conservatives Like Mike Johnson Have a “Daddy” Issue

Definition of The Strict Father Metaphor

Strict Father (Mike Johnson) v. the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

President Reagan Gave Conservatives a Permanent Metaphor for Opposing Welfare Benefits

“And I Will Show You a More Excellent Metaphor”

Righting America Blog Categories

Subscribe via Email

Find Us on Facebook!

Archives