Trump Isn’t Jesus: A Message from Answers in Genesis
by William Trollinger
Over the past three decades, I have had the great privilege of teaching M.A./Ph.D. seminars on American evangelicalism/fundamentalism in the Religious Studies Department here at the University of Dayton. The students have been terrific, and it has not been difficult to convince them that this topic matters in contemporary America, given the ascendancy of the Religious Right, and given (much of) white evangelicalism’s obsequious devotion to Donald Trump. In light of all this, the question keeps coming up in seminar: Does the Bible and theology still matter to evangelicals and fundamentalists, or is it all simply right-wing politics?
Well, it turns out that there is evidence that there are indeed fundamentalists whose commitment to the Bible places limits on their allegiance to the Trump regime. And some of this evidence comes from an unlikely quarter: Answers in Genesis (AiG).
Roger Patterson – who has his B.S. Ed. in Biology from Montana State University – is AiG’s Education Specialist. In his AiG video, “Trump Isn’t Jesus,” he responds to the now infamous meme put out by the President. Rejecting Trump’s ridiculous after-the-fact claim that the image actually depicts him as a Red Cross doctor, Patterson observes that he “wasn’t really surprised” by the meme: “Why? Because it matches the character of President Trump and the people he has surrounded himself with.”
Patterson’s particular target is White House “faith advisor” Paula White, who has compared Trump’s political travails to what Jesus went through on the way to the Cross, and who assured the President that “’Because of his resurrection, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious. And I believe that the Lord said to tell you [that] because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hands to.’”
Patterson responds:
This is nothing but prosperity gospel garbage, and blasphemy that should make any Christian cringe. . . . Despite Paula White’s claims, God is not interested in promoting the proud and making all they do to prosper. How do I know that? God’s Word makes this very clear. In James 4 we read . . . “God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.” That’s the message President Trump needs to hear from Paula White. No one has paid the price Jesus has paid, and no one gets to claim the glory that he alone deserves.
This is a striking rebuke from AiG. Of course, none of this is coming from the mouth of Ken Ham. More importantly, AiG has ignored and continues to ignore what has been a decade of Trump blaspheny; see, for example, the fact that – after years promoting the QAnon notion that liberal secularists promoted and engaged in pedophilia – Ham and company have been absolutely silent about the Epstein files and Trump’s connection to this predatory pedophile.
Obviously, much more could be said about Ham’s and AiG’s fealty to the Trump regime. Still, Roger Patterson’s video is a heartening sign that there remain fundamentalists who, in the end, are more identified with the Gospel of Jesus Christ than to the reign of Donald Trump.
The Flat-Earth Flank of Young-Earth Creationism
by Glenn Branch
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
William Trollinger’s recent post “Answers in Genesis: The Bible Is to Be Read Literally, Except When It’s Not” mentioned how young-earth creationists, such as the folks at Answers in Genesis, are outflanked by biblical geocentrists like Gerardus Bouw. “[I]n fundamentalism,” Trollinger explained, “the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that ‘I am more literal than thou.’” In a comment, I noted, “The Institute for Creation Research’s Duane Gish once complained that a scientist with whom he debated had hit below the belt by comparing the Creation Research Society with the Flat Earth Society. ‘Not a single member’ of the former was a member of the latter, he protested.” I added, “A letter subsequently published in Flat Earth News set him straight.”
Having alluded to the episode, I may as well tell the whole story. Duane Gish (1921–2013) was the most avid debater associated with the Institute for Creation Research. His tendency to try to overwhelm his opponent with a flood of arguments was so famous it won the enduring sobriquet from Eugenie C. Scott of the Gish Gallop. But he wasn’t invulnerable as a debater. And when the paleontologist Michael Voorhies, in a debate with Gish, charged that the Creation Research Society resembled the Flat Earth Society, the accusation apparently stung. Gish took umbrage. Writing in the May 1979 issue of the ICR’s periodical Acts & Facts (no longer on-line), he protested, “Not a single member” of the Creation Research Society was a member of the Flat Earth Society.
Subsequently, a letter was published in the September 9, 1979, issue of Flat Earth News, the periodical of the International Flat Earth Research Society of America, operated by Charles K. Johnson (1924–2001) in Lancaster, California. The author, identified only by his initials “G. J. D.,” complained of Gish that “[h]e doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as I belong to both [the Creation Research Society and the Flat Earth Society], and I am writing to him to let him know that he is wrong.” A few years later, Robert Schadewald — a science writer with a strong interest in flat-earthery — explained in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer that “Gish may have created a fact. To protest this attack on the flat-earthers, ‘G. J. D.’ dropped his membership in the Creation Research Society.”
I was reminded of the episode in 2019, when I was preparing a talk on the flat-earth movement. Robert Schadewald died in 2000, but I knew that his sister Lois Schadewald prepared his book on flat-earthery, The Plane Truth (2015), for publication, so I asked her to look through his notes for G. J. D.’s identity. Lo and behold: G. J. D. was Gerald J. Dodelin (1905–1988) of Philadelphia. Amusingly, Dodelin, according to Schadewald’s notes, “was thrown out of the Flat Earth Society in about 1981 for the crime of talking to me!” Schadewald too had been expelled from the society, although not before Johnson asked him to take over running it, “an offer he declined” — as Christine Garwood nicely puts it in her Flat Earth (2007) — “due to his globular convictions.”
Schadewald’s notes revealed little further about Dodelin, except that his involvement with flat-earthery was of long standing. In 1969, he wrote to Samuel Shenton (1903–1971), the sign-writer who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in Dover, England, in 1956, expressing interest in joining. (Johnson’s society was in effect the continuation of Shenton’s.) I wasn’t able to add significantly, although I found a 1956 letter from Dodelin in a Catholic magazine called the Liguorian in which he complained about a previous article that described certain chapters of the Bible (e.g., Esther) as largely fictional. (The editors replied that the fact that those chapters are fictional doesn’t mean that they’re not inspired.) Dodelin’s complaint tends to confirm that he accepted Biblical inerrantism.
When Johnson died in 2001, his society boasted about 100 members, down from (what Johnson claimed was) its mid-1990s peak of 3500 members, according to the obituary for Johnson in The New York Times. The young-earth creationists at the Institute of Creation Research and Answers in Genesis might have assumed that their flank would be generally safe from the flat-earthers. But flat-earthery came roaring back, evidently enabled by the internet. In a 2025 on-line survey conducted by Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire among a nationally representative sample, 10 percent of respondents agreed with “The Earth is flat, not shaped like a globe.” It was not a fluke: Hamilton reported the same result from a 2021 survey conducted by telephone.
Apparently Answers in Genesis is especially perturbed by the threat to its flank. Danny R. Faulkner, who is listed on its website as a researcher, author, and speaker from 2013 to 2025, not only regularly inveighed against flat-earthery online but also published a book — Falling Flat: A Refutation of Flat-Earth Claims (2019) — devoted to doing so. As I noted in my review for Skeptical Inquirer, about half of his book offers a competent discussion of the science. But Faulkner’s historical treatment is tendentious. In particular, I wrote, “he neglects the fact that for a century and a half, the leading figures of flat-earthery not only identified themselves as Bible-believing Christians but also cited verses from the Bible in the service of their flat-earth belief.”
Concluding my review, I acknowledged that today’s flat-earthers, though still invoking the arguments of their precursors, are not so visibly committed to the inerrancy of the Bible. But, I added, “the diminished emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible among flat-earthers ought to be of no comfort to Faulkner, because biblical inerrantism is on the decline anyway.” As evidence of the decline, I cited a 2017 poll from Gallup that found that 24 percent of respondents — fewer than one in four — agreed that “the Bible is the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word” comes closest to describing their views about the Bible. The decline continues: according to a 2022 poll from Gallup, only 20 percent of respondents — one in five — favored the inerrantist option.
Answers in Genesis: The Bible Is to Be Read Literally, Except When It’s Not
by William Trollinger
At the height of the pandemic, Georgia Purdom of Answers in Genesis (AiG) instructed Christians to ignore the medical experts and evolutionist academics (some of whom teach at supposedly Christian colleges!) who were recommending that people get COVID vaccines, given that this is “a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.”
Now Purdom has turned her attention to making the fundamentalist case that there are no contradictions in the Bible, her example being the death of Judas. The ever-attentive Paul Braterman looks at Purdom’s argument in a recent blog post at Primate’s Progress:
Biblical exegesis; how did Judas die? Answers in Genesis has the answer.
Matthew 27:5 And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.
But Acts 1:18 Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.
How can these both be true?
No problem, says Answers in Genesis. Since the Bible contains nothing inaccurate, both of these must be the case, and therefore they must represent two perspectives on the same event. But bear in mind that the bowels are held firmly in place by the abdominal muscles and skin. So what must have happened is this; first of all he went and hanged himself, but after a while the rope snapped, flesh goes off quickly in the hot Mediterranean sun, and his rotten corpse exploded.
That’s exactly what they say. I am not making any of this up.
So what’s my point? My point is that the Answers in Genesis style of literalism is absurd, offensive, and in its own way deeply irreverent.
Absurd, offensive, irreverent. Yes. Ludicrous. Yes.
And yet it turns out that, as is the case for all those who hold to a strict inerrantist view of the Bible, Purdom and her AiG compatriots are also, to understate the case, extraordinarily selective when it comes to their biblical literalism.
Let’s take the example of geocentrism. As Susan Trollinger and I discuss in Righting America at the Creation Museum, “one could easily assume,” from the multiplicity of biblical texts to this effect, that AiG would “proclaim and defend the idea that the sun revolves around a stationary Earth.” See, for example, Joshua 10:12-13:
On the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the LORD; and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in mid-heaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.
Seems pretty clear that the biblical author is describing a geocentric universe!
The folks at AiG, however, beg to differ. They reject such a reading as “hyper-literal” (as opposed, I suppose, to what Purdom does with the death of Judas).
But they have a problem. As Susan Harding makes clear in her wonderful study, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, in fundamentalism the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that “I am more literal than thou.” Enter the late Gerardus Bouw, who – as director of the Association for Biblical Astronomy – went after the AiG young Earth creationists with great enthusiasm:
So, if Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is a clear statement that God created, then Ecclesiastes 1:5, “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose,” is just as clear a statement of geocentricity. And with that, we come to the real issue: Is the Scripture to be the final authority on all matters which it touches . . . The issue is final authority, is it to be the words of God, or the words of men.
So the folks at AiG are absurd, offensive, irreverent, AND quite inconsistent in their biblical literalism.
But in their defense, there are and can be no consistent biblical literalists. Read this verse literally, do not read that verse literally. No matter how often inerrantists argue for a plain, common sense reading of the text, interpretation is always required – and for these Protestant fundamentalists, there is no interpretive magisterium.
So it goes with biblical inerrancy.
“The Testament of Ann Lee”: A Review
by Vincent Miller
Vincent Miller is the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton and a Sustainability Scholar at its Hanley Sustainability Institute. He is the editor of The Theological and Ecological Vision of Laudato Si’: Everything is Connected (T&T Clark). He is writing a book about hope in the Anthropocene. This review was originally published in Commonweal (see the link at the end).
I have sat tearfully through the final credits of many films in the comforting dark of The Neon—Dayton’s arthouse cinema. But never before have I openly wept with everyone else in the theater. Others who have seen The Testament of Ann Lee report the same experience.
A biopic of Mother Ann Lee, the leader of the “United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” commonly known as the “Shakers,” is an unlikely project. The film’s writers have spoken about the difficulty of crafting an elevator pitch for a musical based on songs and dialogue from the writings of an eighteenth-century religious sect. The Shakers strived for millenarian perfection: creating a celibate, pacifist, socialist community that practiced gender and racial equality. Today they are remembered for graceful furniture design, “naïve” celibacy, and a dubious legend about Ann’s invention of the circular saw. Aaron Copeland and Martha Graham played the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” as a motif of American innocence in Appalachian Spring. The Shakers’ theologically rich images, such as Hannah Cohoon’s Tree of Life, adorn scarves in the kind of catalogues sent to public-radio subscribers.
The Testament of Ann Lee opens in far less domesticated territory: dancing figures emerge from the mist, their movements inscrutable and discomfiting, their breathing rhythmic and sharp. It is not clear where the scene is going. The film’s director, Mona Fastvold, describes the choice to make Testament a musical (although she isn’t sure it qualifies as one) as an attempt to honor the Shakers’ form of life. Daniel Blumberg’s soundtrack and Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography are as central to the film as its plot or dialogue. The musical form lends a liturgical frame to a biopic that might otherwise collapse into voyeuristic sensationalism. Early Shaker worship is portrayed as a disorienting blend of Georgian propriety and religious frenzy: the characters pray and confess sin with breaths and moans that verge on the orgasmic. Their individual movements and vocalizations coalesce into and emerge from communal rhythms.
The pre-released songs from the film’s soundtrack are tellingly safe. “Hunger and Thirst” reworks a Shaker hymn in the mode of contemporary praise-and-worship music. “Woman Clothed by the Sun” sounds like Christian alt-folk. Both are beautiful and compelling, but conventional. The rest of the soundtrack is strange, disturbing, and far more powerful. Blumberg’s setting of “I Never Did Believe” conveys the disorienting power of Shaker worship in a way utterly unlike contemporary praise music. The scene takes place in a British manor, where members of the Wardley Society—the group from whom the Shakers emerged—have gathered. The music begins with eerie string saws, cries, and rhythmic moaning, out of which emerges a quavering Georgian tenor singing “I never did believe / that I ever could be saved / without giving all to God.” Rowlson-Hall’s choreography captures the interplay of freedom and order in this raucous worship in which the “Shaking Quakers” (as they were mockingly called) move in individual ecstasy and flow together into swells, surrounding and lifting up those who cry out the refrain. After three days of this, constables arrive to break up the gathering and drag Ann away. The sequence ends with Ann (played by Amanda Seyfried) bloodied, in prison, singing the final verse: “So I freely give the whole / My body and my soul / To the Lord God, Amen.”
I watched Testament a few days after ICE agents had killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti. That week, Bruce Springsteen released the “Streets of Minneapolis” and Tom Morello performed “Killing in the Name” in Minneapolis, shouting with the crowd “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Grief and outrage were in the air. But it was Seyfried’s voice singing the Shaker verse of total commitment that echoed in my head that week, more powerfully illuminating the demands of our dark moment than those protest songs.
Ann’s body—violated and ill, in labor and in ecstasy—is at the center of the film. Her revulsion against “fleshly cohabitation” is portrayed from early childhood. Ann marries Abraham Standerin, a Quaker blacksmith who brings a libertine novel with pornographic woodcuts into their bedroom for use as a marital manual, lauding the book for its “unrelenting attack on the traditional clergy.” There follows a series of four awful conceptions, labors, and infant deaths. If Ann is portrayed as barely consenting to Abraham’s sexual impositions, she is active in motherhood: laboring through exhaustion and hemorrhage, expressing milk in a desperate attempt to nourish an infant too ill to nurse, clinging passionately to her stillborn child. Seyfried (with the aid of a dizzying array of prosthetics) appears naked throughout these excruciating scenes.
Some have criticized this portrayal of overwhelming trauma for reducing Lee’s faith to a compensation for suffering and loss. But something far more interesting is going on here. Blumberg’s setting of the Shaker hymn “Beautiful Treasures” combines a nursery tune, which we first hear hummed by Ann’s mother, with what sounds like a horror soundtrack. Love and grief are mixed with tension and dread. Ann’s sexual subordination and heroic yet futile struggle to give life to her dying children are interspersed with scenes of ecstatic freedom and sisterly support as she dances in worship with the Shakers. The bridge of the song—and climax of the sequence—is a grief-stricken wail, not of madness but of Ann in labor. The film is founded on this interplay of motherly love and death, bodily vulnerability and fierce resolve.
Fastvold has said that she does not share Ann Lee’s faith but found herself “moved deeply” by her “implausible” prophecies. Her statement that Ann took “horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world” reads, at first glance, like artist-statement speak. But her film—by means of drama, music, and dance—conveys this connection with the utmost seriousness and power. Ann’s cry of labor returns later in the film, this time ecstatic, ferocious, and unbound: opening the sequence “Building and Growing,” where the Shakers dance in the sunlit warmth of a beautiful Shaker barn. Seyfried’s wailing visage in this scene provides the cover image for the soundtrack album.
The connection between natural and spiritual motherhood, between childbirth and spiritual labor, is true to the historical Ann Lee. While it is unclear whether she considered herself to be the second incarnation of Christ, she definitely did consider herself to be “Mother.” If her experience of reproductive loss was behind her condemnation of lustful “natural generation,” it’s also true that she repeatedly used words such as “labor” and “travail” to describe her spiritual struggle and her ministry to “birth” children into “regeneration” in Christ. As her later followers wrote:
Ordained of God…to be the first Mother of all souls in the regeneration, she had, not only to labor and travail for her own redemption, through scenes of tribulation, and to set the example of righteousness, and mark out the line of self-denial and the cross for her followers, but also to see and feel the full depth of man’s loss, and the pain and judgment which every description of lost souls were under. Hence she was destined to pass through inexpressible sufferings for their redemption.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Seyfried’s powerful performance in Fastvold’s film gives voice to Ann now amid the rise of an exclusionary Christian nationalism, when pious politicians attempt to justify violent deportations with platitudes about the limits of love, while ordinary people risk their lives in the streets to care for those who are not their kin but are nonetheless their neighbors.
(For the complete review in Commonweal, see here.)
MAGA Evangelicals Attack James Talarico, or, the Never-Ending War on the Social Gospel Continues
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
The fierce MAGA evangelicals’ attack on Texas Representative and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico belongs to an ancient blood feud between fundamentalist/evangelical Christians and moderate/liberal Christians.
Evangelicals remain known by the enemies they selected in the late 19th century: Evolution, biblical criticism and the social gospel. All three enemies still unsettle the evangelical mind.
Now, deep in the heart of Texas, we are in the early stages of an all-out war against the social gospel. That is, an all-out war against James Talarico. And let’s be clear. It’s not that Talarico is preaching a new gospel. His message has been preached for generations. And it’s not that Talarico is preaching an anti-biblical gospel. His message is grounded in the Scriptures.
But it’s a gospel message that evangelicals simply cannot abide and have not been able to abide for 150 years.
The term social gospel refers to a Protestant movement that came to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Promoters of the social gospel sought to apply Christian principles to social problems.
In the social gospel, heaven and hell can wait. Meeting human need in material, fleshly, bodily ways has to happen now. Practices and politics meeting human need constitute salvation. The radical community called “Church” is more important than individual salvation.
Originally both liberals and evangelicals supported the social gospel. That is to say, evangelicals were for the social gospel before they were against it. Randall Balmer reminds us that evangelicals used to support women’s rights, labor unions, care for the poor, and voting rights.
But those days are gone, and have been gone since the 1920s. Today evangelical preachers are preaching a gospel with none of the politics of Jesus (that is, nothing from Matthew 25 and nothing from most of Luke’s gospel), nothing about economics, nothing about health care, nothing about care of the stranger, nothing about support of LGBTQ+ individuals.
Theirs is an empty gospel, “all hat and no cattle.”
Evangelicals attacking Talarico today are just carrying on an old family tradition. Their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers and great, great grandfathers hated and berated the social gospel.
Two prominent critics of the social gospel in the early 20th century were William Bell Riley and J. Frank Norris. Compare the arguments of Riley and Norris with the attacks on Talarico, and one finds that they are the same boring, contrarian arguments.
Riley’s idea of the government’s role was to “restrain evil. Today Robert Jeffress says, “Governments have one responsibility …. to avenge evil-doers.” He then rephrased, “The goal of government is to protect us and leave us alone to practice our faith.”
William V. Trollinger, Jr., in God’s Empire, refers to an article Riley wrote in School and Church: “In this piece Riley asserted that a modernist confederacy had recently emerged which sought to unify Protestantism around the banner of the social gospel. This confederacy was such a threat that ‘the life of the true Church is at stake, and the interests of the Kingdom are in the balance.’” With a nice touch of historical sarcasm, Trollinger goes on to say: “Fortunately for Christendom, the Holy Spirit had inspired Christian leaders like Riley to create a countermovement to fight the modernists.”
For J. Frank Norris, the social gospel was of one piece with the higher criticism of Scripture, evolution and liberalism. His sermons attacked modernism as an attack on America. As Barry Hankins notes in God’s Rascal, Norris believed “the whole American way of life was threatened.”
And now, a likable, cherub-faced neophyte politician pops up in Texas proclaiming a gospel of compassion, a social gospel of care for the body, for all bodies. Evangelicals can’t stand to be told that there is a social gospel rooted in the teachings of Jesus.
Texas seems an odd choice for a revival of the social gospel, but I think the Holy Spirit, from time to time, calls certain ones to make clear the meaning of the Gospel. The Spirit often calls these holy ones into action in the most unexpected places. So while the Holy Spirit could have called someone to run for Senate as a social gospel preacher in Vermont, Washington, or Wisconsin, I think it is poetic justice to call James Talarico to raise the banner of the social gospel in Texas. Maybe God made Texas in order to give the social gospel a vast land to conquer.
I think one reason that Talarico spooks MAGA evangelicals is because he looks, talks and smiles like another Texas deeply involved in politics as a professing Christian, David Barton. The difference: Talarico speaks truth, while Barton has made a career of concocting an untrue revisionist history of America and selling it to conservatives as truth.
The arguments swirling around Talarico are as old as Western civilization. Socrates knew this practice well. He named it dialectic, meaning argument as the process of sorting through a host of ideas about justice in search of what is the most true, most good.
Of course, there is good argument and bad argument. And the hyperbolic ad homimen outrage of MAGA evangelicals is uncivilized argument. Calling Talarico names doesn’t make the social gospel less true or less just.
But these ad hominem attacks grow out of the reality that evangelicals are more obsessed with rooting out the social gospel than Senator Joe McCarthy was with exposing all communists. McCarthy is a good model for MAGA evangelicals because they consider the social gospel as socialism. The MAGA attack on the social gospel is leftover anti-communism.
Two towering Americans paved the way for Talarico. Walter Rauschenbusch and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rauschenbusch basically wrote the social gospel; Roosevelt implemented it.
The social gospel is in its second century of existence. Walter Rauschenbush, the intellectual and theological father of the social gospel, has been dead for 108 years. His book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, was published in 1907.
Rauschenbusch identified the economic exploitation of the poor as nothing less than a national sin. He argued, “The essential purpose of Christianity is to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God. , , , , The Christian Church has never undertaken to carry out this fundamental purpose of its existence.”
As long as evangelicals are counting the souls saved and the number baptized, as long as they are asking preachers, “How many you run?” (that is, “What is your church attendance?”) - instead of asking how many hungry have you fed, how many homeless have you housed, how many sick have you healed, and how many prisoners have you restored – the evangelical church will fail the gospel.
Evangelicals attacked Rauschenbusch for being soft on sin, badly mistaken on the nature and purpose of the church, and wrong about the second coming of Jesus and Scripture. In other words, he was not a Fundamentalist. But such attacks did not (and does not) make Rauschenbusch’s theology and the social gospel less true.
And then there’s Franklin Roosevelt. Talarico is not the first politician to embrace the social gospel. In the 1930’s Franklin Roosevelt promoted the values of community, cooperation, prudence, and sacrifice. With his Good Neighbor Policy and with his overhaul of the government, and as limited and flawed the New Deal was, Roosevelt has been the only president to ever attempt to legislate the Social Gospel into the soul of America.
But the values promoted by Roosevelt have been almost completely submerged by an evangelical leadership suspicious of – even opposed to – empathy.
Attacking the social gospel as if it were a form of secular politics – i.e., socialism – caused evangelicals to become the champions of capitalism, despite the fact that Jesus clearly says “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24), and despite the fact that Paul clearly connects the love of money (greed) with idolatry (Colossians 3:5).
In contrast, evangelicals have embraced wealth as a form of godliness, baptizing greed as virtue and empathy as vice, in the process blatantly contradicting the message of Jesus. With the inclusion of independent pentecostals into the evangelical circle, the prosperity gospel has found a church home.
Evangelicals are reaping the whirlwind because decisions made politically have consequences. To put it bluntly, wealth made war a necessity. Evangelicals would never admit we go to war to protect American wealth. But President Trump has said the quiet part out loud: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”
In contrast, Talarico represents the spirit of Rauschenbusch, Gladden, Fosdick and Roosevelt. He gives renewed hope to Christian churches taking the lead in radical social change.
Perhaps the opportunity of the church to liberate America from evangelical reduction of faith to the individual has arrived once more in Texas. Maybe the 19th century passion of evangelicals for the poor can bring about revival.
Think of the possibilities when an evangelical community adds the social gospel as part of its theological commitments. When an evangelical community returns to its historic roots. This is not an either/or, but, instead, a both/and possibility.
When this happens, we can all then sing the social gospel hymn of Katherine Lee Bates while we work together to reduce, even eliminate, the grinding inequalities in our nation:
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw
. . . . . .
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
In the Room Where Death Row Prisoners Say Final Goodbyes, He Learned He Would Live
By Liliana Segura
Last week we published an article on the planned execution of Sonny Burton, an horrifying commonplace in Alabama and America. But then, Burton’s death sentence was commuted, as wonderfully celebrated in this article by Liliana Segura in The Intercept. Check out The Intercept, and consider contributing to this beacon of independent journalism.
On the day after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey commuted his death sentence, halting his execution two days before he was supposed to die, Charles “Sonny” Burton sat in his wheelchair in a visiting room at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., drinking a Coke and eating a Reese’s peanut butter cup.
He could not stop smiling.
“I’m feeling wonderful,” Burton told me.
Burton, 75, wore white sneakers and a brace on his right hand, his tan quilted jacket and slacks fitting loosely over his thin frame. A tan helmet, given to him by the prison to protect from his occasional falls, sat on the table next to an array of photos taken with family earlier that day, along with a bag of quarters for the vending machines.
Burton identified the people in one of the photos for me. Several were still in the visiting room: his sister Eddie Mae Ellison, his son Charles Burton III, and his grandson Charles Burton IV. No sooner had one group of relatives left the visiting room than another showed up — a rolling family reunion.
Burton had been sitting in that same visiting room with his lawyers 24 hours earlier, on Tuesday, March 10, when his longtime paralegal Nancy Palombi got a phone call in Montgomery, 120 miles away. While the rest of the legal team was at the prison without access to their cellphones, Palombi had stayed behind to field any communications from the U.S. Supreme Court, which had just received their final filings aimed at stopping Burton’s execution.
Instead, she got a call from a reporter she knew. The reporter was screaming, “Have you heard?” The governor’s office had just sent out a press release with the subject line, “Update from Governor Kay Ivey: Charles L. Burton.” And that’s how Palombi learned that her client of 20 years would not be executed.
“I was the first member of the team to find out,” Palombi told me that morning, her voice still trembling with a mix of shock, joy, and relief.
Palombi called the prison and spoke to the warden’s secretary, who entered the visitation room with a smile on her face. She told Burton’s lead attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Matt Schulz, that he should call his paralegal right away. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, it happened,’” Schulz said. “But I still didn’t want to let myself believe it, because I didn’t know yet.”
Schulz rushed to his car, drove out of range from Holman’s cellphone blockers, and called Palombi. He then sped back.
Describing the scene the next day, Burton turned and pointed toward the hallway that runs along the perimeter of the visiting room. That’s where prison staff celebrated as the news spread on death row. Nurses and officers waved and gave him thumbs ups through the horizontal window slats. “Guards were saying, ‘Sonny got clemency! Sonny got clemency!’” Burton said.
A day later, everyone was still a bit shellshocked. Burton’s son, who had flown in from New York, got the news while loading up his rental car for the drive to Atmore. Burton’s sister was at the doctor’s office in Montgomery, where she saw a local news alert. She ran outside and dropped to her knees. “And then the tears just flowed,” she said.
For decades, the visiting room had been the site of agonizing goodbyes between the condemned and their loved ones in the hours before an execution. Now it was home to warm hugs and tranquil smiles, no one’s bigger than Burton’s. He invoked the famed blues harmonica player Snooky Pryor: “I’m too cool to move.”
Burton's commutation was historic: the third time in the modern history of Alabama’s death penalty that a person facing execution received clemency by the governor. Ivey, a staunch Republican, has presided over 25 executions since she took office in 2017. Although she commuted the sentence of Burton’s neighbor, Rocky Myers, last year due to serious doubts over his guilt, few were optimistic that she would exercise such mercy again.
Burton would have been the ninth person executed using nitrogen gas in Alabama in just over two years. The method was adopted following complications carrying out lethal injection, a wider trend that has reshaped the landscape of executions across the country. The state’s last execution prompted a forceful dissent from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who described the psychological torture in visceral detail. “You want to breathe; you have to breathe,” she wrote. “But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.”
Burton’s commutation also came as a searing documentary about the state prison system, “The Alabama Solution,” was in the race to win an Oscar. The film, which was produced using footage from contraband cellphones, forced politicians to acknowledge the deadly conditions and inhumane punishments inflicted on people incarcerated in their state. On the day I visited Burton, lawmakers met in Montgomery to discuss legislation to impose oversight on Alabama’s prisons. It was this kind of public pressure that undoubtedly saved Burton’s life. “I would have 100 percent died without it,” Burton told me. In Montgomery, activists held vigils every Monday for weeks in front of the governor’s mansion, while downtown businesses posted flyers about Burton’s case in their front windows. On the eve of Ivey’s decision, two of Burton’s daughters led a march to the state Capitol to deliver petitions to her office.
The campaign for clemency was launched by Burton’s legal team, who believed they had nothing to lose. They highlighted Burton’s remorse, his advanced age and poor health, and, above all, his lack of culpability for the murder that sent him to death row. “This is one of those cases that shocks people,” Schulz said in a clemency film produced last year. “And it shocks people in a totally different way than most death penalty cases.”
Burton was 40 years old when he led a group of younger men in an armed robbery at an AutoZone in Talladega, Alabama. A 34-year-old father and military veteran named Doug Battle walked in as the crime was underway — and one of the young men fatally shot him in the back.
At first, Burton denied any role in either the robbery or the shooting. His apparent lack of remorse helped convince jurors at his 1992 trial that he should be punished as severely as the man who actually shot Battle, a 20-year-old named Derrick DeBruce, who had already been sent to death row. After a four-day trial, Burton, too, was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to die.
But a federal court eventually threw out DeBruce’s death sentence, finding that his lawyer failed to effectively represent him during the punishment phase of his trial. The Alabama attorney general’s office initially appealed the decision, contending that it would be “arguably unjust” to allow Burton to be executed for his co-defendant’s actions. But in 2015, the state agreed to reduce DeBruce’s punishment to life without parole. He died five years later.
The notion that Burton should now pay with his life for another man’s crime spurred outrage among people in Alabama and beyond. The campaign to save Burton was bolstered by six of the eight living jurors who voted to send him to death row, as well as by Battle’s daughter, Tori Battle, who was outspoken in her opposition to the execution. “What is the execution of Mr. Burton supposed to accomplish or solve?” she asked Ivey in a letter that was submitted as part of Burton’s 88-page clemency petition. “Is it for my father? For me? To deter crime? I honestly do not understand.”
The petition argued, first and foremost, that Burton never killed anyone. “He did not pull the trigger that killed Douglas Battle,” his lawyers wrote. In fact, he didn’t even witness the murder. “Mr. Burton was already outside of the AutoZone building where the shooting took place.” Although Alabama’s felony murder statute allows defendants to be held responsible for the actions of others, Burton was only supposed to be eligible for capital murder if he intended to take somebody’s life — and there was nothing to prove that this was the case.
The state’s star witness against Burton was a teenager named LuJuan McCants who agreed to testify in order to avoid the death penalty. He said that Burton had gathered the group with the intention of committing a robbery — and if something went wrong, “he said let him take care of it.” According to prosecutors, this directive proved that Burton intended to kill anyone who might stand in the way of the robbery. But even this weak evidence was undermined by McCants’s own testimony, as well as by an interrogation video discovered by Burton’s lawyers years after the trial. It showed McCants repeatedly telling investigators that Burton had not wanted anyone to get hurt — and that he’d been upset upon learning that DeBruce shot Battle.
Some of the jurors who spoke out against the execution said they were haunted by their decision. “I have questioned whether death is an appropriate punishment,” one woman wrote in a letter submitted with the clemency petition. “I have often thought about Mr. Burton’s mother, who was no doubt devastated by the sentence.”
But for most, it came down to the obvious unfairness of executing Burton for DeBruce’s crime. “Had I known the shooter would later be taken off death row,” one juror wrote, “I would not have voted for the death sentence.” Another juror wrote that Burton may have been the ringleader, “but if Charles Manson can get a life sentence for leading his group to kill many people, it is fair for Mr. Burton to serve life without parole.”
Like most people living on death row, Burton bears no resemblance to Charles Manson — or to the people Americans picture when they hear the term “worst of the worst.” His early life had many of the familiar hallmarks of those who are put to death in the United States: poverty, racism, childhood abuse, and trauma. By the time Alabama came close to executing him, he’d long since apologized for his actions and was in frequent pain from rheumatoid arthritis, unable to walk on his own.
But he was also lucky, he told me. If there was anything that sustained him during his years at Holman, it was a strong family structure, which many of his neighbors lack. Indeed, Burton’s clemency petition was filled with letters from relatives, pen pals, and advocates who described Burton as a positive and nurturing presence in their lives.
I was supposed to attend Burton’s execution — not as a media witness, but as one of the people placed on his personal list. Burton did not wish for his family to be subjected to his death, and his legal team decided that, should the killing move forward, they wanted the world to know what Alabama had done. They invited me and two other journalists to join them in the witness room.
One of them, Lee Hedgepeth, had already witnessed seven executions in Alabama, including three by nitrogen gas. The last one had been the longest to date, lasting 40 minutes. Schulz had seen two of his clients killed with nitrogen. Their accounts were harrowing: Terror and panic was visible on the faces of the condemned, who gasped and thrashed on the gurney. As Burton’s execution date neared, Schulz wondered how it would compare. Would his elderly client suffer more or less due to his age and poor health? Could his more shallow breathing cause the execution to last longer? Or would the fact that he does not have as much oxygen in his lungs to begin with mean it would be shorter?
What was certain was that executing Burton would have been a horrifying spectacle. Guards would have had to lift him onto the gurney, adjusting the thick black straps to fit more tightly over his withered body, and putting a mask over his face. Witnesses would then have watched as Alabama suffocated an elderly man, who killed no one, in the name of justice.
Instead, Burton is now poised to live out the rest of his days behind bars. On the day after our visit, he was moved out of the prison where he spent more than three decades and driven up to Kilby Correctional Facility outside Montgomery, where newly incarcerated people are housed before being transferred to their designated prisons. The move is sure to be a shock to the system for a man who has hardly begun to process the trauma of his near-execution and who has spent much of the past 10 years between his cell and the prison infirmary. After age 65, Burton told me, he slowed down. “I haven’t been outside in eight years,” he said.
In a less punitive system, it would be obvious that Burton should go home to spend the rest of his life with his family. As he said, “I ain’t got much longer to live.” His relatives harbor some hope that he may some day be eligible for medical release. But for now, according to Schulz, Burton was in good spirits when they spoke on the phone from his new location. “He said he knew many of the nurses there, and that they all were greeting, and treating, him warmly,” he said.
“And he’s alive,” Schulz added. On Thursday at 6 p.m., the hour he had been scheduled to die, Burton planned to eat ice cream at the same time as his attorneys and savor the feeling of gratitude. “God has given me a second chance,” Burton told me. This, he believed, was God’s work. “He put the right people in my path.”
America, Alabama, and the Case of Sonny Burton
by William Trollinger
Maybe, just maybe, by the time you read this, Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey will have done the right thing.
Maybe.
Let’s start with one basic and very important fact: Sonny Burton did not kill anyone.
On August 16, 1991 Burton and five other men robbed a Talladega, Alabama AutoZone store. After Burton had left the store, one of his accomplices – Derrick DeBruce – shot a customer, Doug Battle, who died from the wound.
Upon appeal DeBruce’s death sentence was reduced to life without parole. The other four men involved in the robbery were not placed on Death Row. Only Sonny Burton.
The daughter of the victim, Tori Battle, has written Gov. Ivey to ask that Burton be given clemency:
It disturbs me to think of a man who is now elderly, being executed, who if he had a better lawyer, probably never would have ended up on death row . . . I hope you will consider extending grace to Mr. Burton and granting him clemency.
Six of the jurors who found Burton guilty have also written to say that they do not oppose the death sentence being commuted, and religious leaders from Islam (Burton is Muslim), Judaism, and Christianity (including the Archbishop of Mobile) have asked that Burton be granted clemency.
But as I write this on Monday morning, March 09, Alabama’s Governor has ignored all of this, and is ready to have Sonny Burton executed on Thursday, March 12.
On the face of it this story is outrageous. But then again, this is America. And the United States is an outlier: while almost all of the nations in North and South America have either abolished or instituted a moratorium on the death penalty, the USA is – since 2008 – the only nation in the Americas to carry out executions. Add to this the fact that the abolition of capital punishment is a pre-condition for membership in the European Union, and that in Europe only Belarus continues to use the death penalty.
But Sonny Burton’s story is not just an American story. It is also a Southern story. Since 1977, the top seven states to carry out executions are all located in the South:
- Texas: 593
- Oklahoma: 127
- Virginia: 113
- Florida: 107
- Missouri: 101
- Alabama: 79
- Georgia: 77
Race is crucial to understanding the Southern propensity for legal executions. As Rod Kennedy explains, perhaps the South’s
deepest connection to violence remains the quasi-legal executions of the Lynching Era. . . . Nearly 5,000 people were lynched during the lynching era of America (1880-1940). The prevailing public attitude about lynching allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting. Daily newspapers publicized hangings and lynchings. Preachers, church choirs, good Christians, and the curious gathered to witness a lynching against the backdrop of “Shall We Gather at the River?”
While Alabama is sixth in the nation in executions since 1977, it condemns more people to death per capita (.956 per 100,000) than any other nation. Moreover, and as Sonny Burton experienced, the state (to quote the Equal Justice Initiative) suffers from “a serious crisis in the quality of counsel because the state does not pay appointed attorneys enough and has no statewide public defender system.” More than this, Alabama has the “worst record of any state for botched executions,” and is the only state that “has used nitrogen suffocation to execute a person,” despite the fact that the American Veterinary Medical Association has determined that it is “inappropriate for euthanizing animals because it causes distressing side effects.”
Inappropriate for animals, but not for humans. And this is how Alabama plans to kill Sonny Burton.
But perhaps, in the case of Sonny Burton, region and race will prove not to be determinative. Perhaps sometime in the next three days Gov. Ivey will commute Sonny his sentence.
And perhaps, some day, the United States of America will join much of the rest of western world, and put an end to the barbaric and capricious practice of capital punishment.
Perhaps.
Saint Duncan Gray: Four Times into the Fiery Furnace of Racism
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this rightingamerica interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see: www.theprogressivepreacher.com.
I am a preacher. As a preacher, I have a biblical text: (Daniel 3:19 – 26). According to the story, Nebuchadnezzar threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a blazing fiery furnace. But they were not consumed by the fire (Daniel 3:19 – 26).
Daniel may seem an odd book to choose for a reading about the life of Duncan Gray, Jr. There is a bit of historical irony here. Episcopalians are not usually apocalyptic dispensationalists, but the dispensational scheme came from a former Anglican priest named John Nelson Darby. He left the Anglican Church and founded the Plymouth Brethren. Episcopalians are not likely to check the daily Rapture Index to see if they should prepare for the return of Christ. We are more likely to read the New York Times and the stock market reports.
But since we live in apocalyptic times, I want to hold up that Christian faith is maintained by faithful women and men who know how to face the beast-kings without fear. Duncan Gray was an exemplar of this kind of Christian. In our tradition, we name such people “saints.” Gray, in word and deed, demonstrated to his fellow Episcopalians the Christian response to the beast-king of racism.
The anabaptist theologian from Shreveport, James McClendron taught me to do theology biographically. In Biography as Theology, McClendon says,
In or near the community there appear from time to time singular or striking lives, the lives of persons who embody the convictions of the community, but in a new way; who share the vision of the community, but with new scope or power, who exhibit the style of the community, but with significant differences. When such a person or persons appear, they shine a light in the darkness. They correct or reshape or enlarge the community’s moral vision. They arouse the impotent wills within the community to make it a faithful communion of the saints.
This defines Gray’s life. A person close to Gray said, “Duncan is what the Episcopal Church would be if everyone in it believed (lived by) the words they repeat every Sunday.”
Rhetorically, Gray was a dissenter. Gray remained a faithful churchman; he dissented within the bounds of the Word, the liturgy and the Episcopal Church. “To speak against the dominant ideology,” observes John Lucaites and Celeste Condit, “requires advocates of social change to speak “within [the dominant ideology’s] own vocabulary.”
Gray did not start out as a dissenter. Vaclav Havel, an expert in dissent, says that people
Do not usually discover they are 'dissidents' until long after they have actually become one. “Dissent” springs from motivations far different from the desire for titles or fame. In short, they do not decide to become “dissidents” and even if they were to devote twenty-four hours a day to it, it would still not be a profession, but primarily an existential attitude.
Gray is the best example I have found of the dissent needed in our current political disorder. Ours is a time calling forth the best dissent from faithful pastors.
Saint Duncan Gray: Four Times into the Fiery Furnace
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego endured the fiery furnace one time. Gray was tossed four times into the abyss.
Gray was one of those rare Christians who knew the church needed protecting from the powers and the principalities. The church needs some saints – people who seem powerless by the world’s standards. Only God produces saints. Those who try to be saints end up like priests always campaigning to be bishop, without enough votes to get out of committee.
Gray was no Luke Skywalker. He was a faithful priest of the church. He was not a social activist; he was a man possessed by the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. The words spoke like thunder from Sinai to Gray.
Gray didn’t choose for his life to be overshadowed by the fiery furnaces of America’s racism. The winds in Mississippi blew the flames in that direction. Some of Gray’s friends called him Joe Btfsk, the little man of Lil’ Abner fame who always had a dark cloud of adversity hovering over him., following him wherever he went.
Fiery Furnace #1
Seminary days usually fill with systematic theology and selecting a theory of the atonement, rather than battling the institution over whether African American students can enroll.
In seminary on “The Mountain” – University of the South School of Theology, Sewanee, Tennessee – Gray faced the crisis of whether Black students would be admitted. He was president of the Student council his senior year and had to face his beloved Uncle, the president of the school, with his dissent. His uncle opposed the admission of Black students. The school’s board of trustees refused to admit an African American student. The battle on the mountain led all but one member of the faculty to resign.
Very few seminarians receive the baptism of fire preparing them for a ministry of fires constantly breaking out, but Gray did.
Fiery Furnace #2
After graduation, Gray’s first parish was in the Delta in Cleveland and Rosedale, MS. He arrived on the eve of the Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education. Gray was a member of the Department of Christian Social Relations of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, a little known department not known for troubling the waters.
Gray was drawn back into the fiery furnace of race for a second time. Gray wrote the document, “The Church Considers the Supreme Court Decision,” 3,000 words that would rock the diocese. Gray basically added to the words, “Thus saith the Law,” the affirmation, “Thus saith the Lord.”
Many considered the document blasphemy and heresy. The document was reprinted in the diocesan paper, The Church News, published as a pamphlet, but the publisher wouldn’t put his stamp on it out of fear of reprisals. Gray mailed a copy to members of the Mississippi legislature. A spunky priest!
Fiery Furnace #4
I will return shortly to the third and most significant fiery furnace.
When he came to St. Paul’s Church in Meridian, he faced the fierce resistance of the White Citizen’s Council and the presence of the KKK. It seemed there were charred houses of worship, dynamited dwellings, and dead bodies littered everywhere.
A year before Gray arrived in Meridian one of the most heinous crimes of the civil rights era was committed nearby. Three young men, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered. The FBI came. The bodies were found in the levee of a pond, and Neshoba County deputies were involved in the killings. Perhaps you have seen the movie Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman and William Dahoe.
At a vestry meeting, Gray had an item on the agenda to present an African American couple as members of the church. The vestry was also considering a request by union organizers asking the church to host a meeting. Gray put the union request first. The arguments lasted for over an hour. The last item was admitting the African Americans. It passed without a single “No” vote. Shrewd priest!
Fiery Furnace #3
September 30, 1962, James Meredith was brought to the campus of Ole Miss on this Sunday night. He would be the first African American ever admitted to the University of Mississippi. The night erupted into a battlefield.
This one Sunday night encapsulates Duncan’s career. He was 36 and was clinging precariously to the side of the Confederate monument at the entrance to Ole Miss. He was trying to address the mob gathered there but was drowned out by cries of “Kill him, kill him, kill him!”
Gray’s life hung in the balance. He came as close to being murdered for his faith as is possible.
I love the conversation Will Campbell reports between Gray and General Walker, the retired general from Texas who had come to aid those protesting James Meredith’s entrance to the University of Mississippi. Gray is pleading with the general to use his influence to stop the riot, but instead Will reports that Walker turned on the priest and demanded, “Just who the hell are you anyway? And what are you doing here?” “My name is Duncan Gray. I am the rector of the local Episcopal Church,” the priest replied. “This is my home and I am deeply hurt to see what is happening to the university and the state. I am here to do anything I can to stop the rioting and keep any more people from getting hurt or killed.” The general became even more angry, moving toward Mr. Gray and exclaiming, “You’re the kind of minister that makes me ashamed to be an Episcopalian!” Mr. Gray, realizing that he was on the verge of losing his temper, tried to remain calm, explaining that he was on home ground. “I have a proper concern and interest in keeping law and order. You, sir, are a Texan and have no business here. Your very presence here is making matters far worse. You should have stayed in Texas. We have enough problems of our own.”
As the mob grew more violent, Gray was grabbed from the monument and thrown to the ground. Two large men had Gray pinned to the ground.
“No, no, no,” one kept saying. “Let’s not hurt the preacher.” “You heard what he said on TV. Let’s kill the s.o.b.” “I know, I know, I know. But he’s a preacher. He really believes that stuff.”
Evans Harrington, an English professor, and a few others came to Gray’s defense. One believes again in miracles when English and rhetoric professors brave a howling mob like King Arthur’s knights of the Round Table. Somehow they got Gray away from the mob.
Federal troops finally arrived. The local National Guard unit, Troop E was commanded by one of Gray’s parishioners, Captain Murry Falkner, nephew of William Faulkner. Captain Falkner was an ardent segregationist and vocal critic of his rector’s sermonizing. But this night he did his duty. He and his troops roared over the bridge into a hail of bricks, planks, bottles and bullets. They stopped the mob from lynching James Meredith.
The registration of James Meredith at eight o’clock the morning after the riot was not the end of the crisis for the university, James Meredisth, or Duncan Gray, Jr. It was only the beginning.
May the Lord be with y’all. And also with you.
QAnon, the Epstein files, and Ken Ham
by William Trollinger
Ken Ham’s silence is deafening. And so revealing.
For those who don’t know, QAnon (quoting from Britannica) is a
conspiracy theory originating in forum posts on the website 4chan in October 2017. Conspiracy adherents believed [believe?] that U.S. Pres. Donald Trump was waging a secret war against a cabal of satanic cannibalistic pedophiles within Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the so-called “deep state” within the United States government.
It is not in the least surprising that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) did their part to encourage their followers in QAnon adherence. For one thing, 29% of white evangelicals – the core supporters of the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter – are QAnon believers. More than this, and as Susan Trollinger and I documented in a June 2025 Isis article, Ham and AiG are all about promoting conspiracy theories, including that evolution, global warming, and the COVID pandemic are hoaxes manufactured by scientific elites and anti-Christian leftists.
So it is that Ham repeatedly claimed that secularists are in favor of abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and pedophilia. (And racism, in the process conveniently – as is always the case with Ham and AiG -- eliding the past and present of white evangelical racism.) Moreover, AiG put out a YouTube video claiming that “social emotional learning” – an educational approach which they assert is prevalent in the secular public school system – is actually a “form of grooming children for sexual predation.” And in 2020 Ham opened Ark Encounter so that QAnon devotee and MAGA enthusiast Trey Smith could film his The Coming Storm: A Donald J. Trump Documentary Inside Noah’s Ark. (a title which draws upon QAnon’s motto, “A Storm is Coming,” which refers to the notion that Trump is the storm that will clear the “swamp” of liberals and pedophiles). In this unbearably bad video – made worse by the narrator’s obsession with sticking his face as close to the camera as possible – Smith asserts that the Antichrist has been present throughout history, and is with us today, particularly in the Hollywood culture and the omnipresent “witchy people” lurking behind them.
After four years of attacking Joe Biden as “the enemy” of the American people, in 2024 AiG and the rest of the Christian Right could celebrate Donald Trump’s election. Now, finally, the swamp could be cleared! Now, finally, it was time to go after the secularist, liberal pedophiles! And opening the Epstein files – which they alleged had been kept under lock and key by Biden and company– would be the first step!!
Oops. It turns out that the Epstein files have revealed that Donald Trump (and other Republican operatives, including Steve Bannon) was much closer to Jeffrey Epstein and other sexual predators than even his critics had imagined. And in the files that have been opened so far there is at least one specific (and not exactly shocking) accusation that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl.
One could imagine that QAnon devotees would be thrilled that their notion of an“elite conspiracy of pedophiles” has been proven to be true. And while there are a few who are indeed happy to be proven right, it turns out that
for most QAnon believers the priority is protecting Mr. Trump at all costs. Even if it means no longer asking questions. Even if it means letting the moment they finally got something right pass them by. Even if it means continuing to thirst for a storm that will never come.
As Kali Holloway puts it in a Nation article entitled, “MAGA’s Reaction to the Epstein Files Reveals Total Moral Collapse,” the Right has revealed that – in its determination to “move on” from the Epstein issue – “the notion of sincere moral outrage grounded in right and wrong . . . is genuinely lost on them.” For the Right,
“Morality” isn’t about principles or lines you refuse to cross; it’s just a cost-benefit analysis between options that maintain power. That’s how authoritarian movements work – they put hierarchy, dominance, and power above all else . . . [And] where nothing is disqualifying, everything is permissible.
Despite all their emphasis on the notion that secularism = pedophilia, and despite all the ways that they have catered to the QAnon enthusiasts, Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis have been publicly silent on the recent Epstein revelations. They have been publicly silent about the fact that Mr. Trump sits “uncomfortably close to the center of them.” (Imagine all the articles, posts, videos, and rants AiG would have produced if it were Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump!) All evidence points to the fact that AiG’s commitment to Christian morality, to protecting vulnerable children from pedophiles, has been “trumped” by its attachment to a thoroughly corrupt and immoral president who cynically caters to the Christian Right.
Moral collapse, indeed.
The 1837 Debate on Roman Catholicism between Bishop John Purcell and Alexander Campbell: The World Is Large Enough for Us All
An Interview with Herbie Miller
by William Trollinger
Herbie Miller is Senior Pastor of the Palmetto Presbyterian Church in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Dayton. This book on the 1837 debate between Bishop John Purcell and Alexander Campbell is an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation.
- You begin your book, in your “Acknowledgments,” with this arresting statement: “The ideas in this book have been in my head . . . for twenty years. From first hearing about the Purcell-Campbell debate in seminary, to writing a paper on it in my first semester of graduate school, to eventually centering my dissertation on its most inspiring aspects, I have been captivated by this event.” What has captivated you about this event? Why does it matter to you?
Two aspects of the debate have always interested me.
First, I was drawn to the idea that two men could sustain a civil dialogue in a very uncivil time. Purcell and Campbell were not longing for some imagined golden age of religious harmony. They were living in the 1830s, with its complexity around social norms, class, race, religion, and more. There were plenty of incentives for both men to rile up their respective bases with inflammatory rhetoric, and they chose to restrain themselves from that “low-hanging fruit.” That civility, and what I would later discover to be a real friendship, pulled me into the story.
Second, I think there’s something noble about public debate with agreed-upon rules. In that day, as in ours, public disagreement was not in short supply. But Purcell and Campbell showed a kind of courage. They were willing to state their beliefs publicly, in the presence of someone who absolutely disagreed with them, and allow those beliefs to be interrogated. To be sure, some of that was strategic. They hoped to win converts and bolster their reputations. But beneath that was a shared conviction that public discourse done well could strengthen society. That inspired me twenty years ago, and it has stayed with me.
- Throughout this book you make great use of a concept developed by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, the “third space,” to the point that you devote the second third of the book to “The Debate as a Third Space.” Can you explain this concept, and how you make use of it in your book, and how it helps us understand the debate and its significance?
The funny thing is, the first time I encountered the idea of the “third space” wasn’t in a doctoral seminar, but while working at Starbucks during seminary. The Starbucks training manuals described the “third space” in a way that was essentially faithful to Ray Oldenburg’s idea: a social space that is neither home (first space) nor work (second space), but somewhere you enjoy being. Starbucks leveraged that idea to train employees to create enjoyable environments so customers would want to linger.
The “third space” has its roots in the Greek agora, and Oldenburg traces the concept through American history—in spaces like coffee shops, pubs, public parks, and so on. Third spaces are essential for healthy democracies because they expose people to different ideas and people they may not otherwise meet—sometimes from different races, classes, religions.
In the book I argue that the Purcell–Campbell debate was a third space in two senses.
First, in the literal Oldenburg sense: for a week, the church in Cincinnati became a space where Catholics and Protestants gathered to engage a live debate on Roman Catholicism. One side defended it; the other attacked it. That alone made it a rare kind of public space.
Second, I argue that the printed transcript of the debate, which was later published, created a kind of literary third space. Purcell and Campbell wanted their words preserved so that later readers could “enter” the debate imaginatively—almost as if they were present in 1837.
Seeing the debate as a third space shifts our attention from ideas alone to the debate as an event—as a speech act situated in a particular context. And when we see it that way, we begin to understand how significant this debate was for American religious history, even though it has not received sustained attention from historians of American religion.
- In your conclusion you talk about how you have “described the debate as a site of boundary crossing and productive friction the conditions for a new experience of the religious Other.” What do you mean by this, and how does this help us understand the debate?
One of the things that still strikes me is that this oral debate happened at all. Think about it: in the dead of winter, Purcell and Campbell devoted an entire week to a public oral debate in Cincinnati. Campbell traveled from Bethany, (West) Virginia. They easily could have debated in print through their journals and avoided the trouble and exposure of a public event. The fact that they chose to meet in person is significant.
The debate took place in a Baptist meeting house, a short distance from the Catholic Cathedral. Purcell, as a bishop, was crossing cultural and religious boundaries simply by spending time in a Protestant church. Campbell was crossing geographical and cultural boundaries as well. He represented a nascent restorationist movement within Protestantism—the Disciples of Christ—which was already creating tension with established denominations. Yet in the debate he positioned himself as a defender of Protestantism as a whole, not merely his own movement.
During the debate, their ideas clashed, and according to news reports, the audience engaged in lively discussion as well. The room became a space where Catholics and Protestants could hear the “other side” from reputable sources and argue about it afterward. In that sense, the debate became a site of boundary crossing—religious, cultural, and social—and the productive friction was the challenge of hearing and being confronted by another’s convictions.
- Related, why the subtitle: “The World is Large Enough for Us All” (a terrific subtitle which also happens to be the title of your conclusion)?
I actually wanted The World is Large Enough for Us All to be the main title, but my publisher rightly noted that the book needed the key terms in the title for searchability. So the subtitle was our compromise, and I’m glad it’s there.
The line comes from Purcell’s final speech on the last day of the debate. It reflects his conviction that he and Campbell, and their respective communities, could flourish together in the United States. Purcell and Campbell remained friends for the rest of their lives, and I think this statement captures his irenic spirit at a time when Catholicism was viewed with deep suspicion by many Protestants.
While Campbell didn’t share Purcell’s poetic style, I believe he shared the sentiment. Both men were “Americanists” in the sense that they believed their communities could fully inhabit the American experiment. Purcell was essentially endorsing a voluntary religious framework in which different traditions could coexist and serve the common good.
Fittingly, the men had met a year before the debate at a conference on education in the Ohio Valley. Both cared deeply about forming citizens in the new nation. That shared concern reminds us that the subtitle was not a flourish, but reflected a genuine hope.
- Given that you are senior pastor at Palmetto Presbyterian Church in Mount Pleasant (SC) it is obvious that this book is not just an “academic exercise” (whatever that means). Are you able to apply what you have learned from the Purcell-Campbell debate to your work as a pastor? And are you hopeful about the possibilities for civil interreligious dialogue in 2025 America?
Absolutely. And I would actually say the applications extend beyond pastoral work into any domain where you engage with people who see the world differently.
The two key takeaways for me are boundary crossing and productive friction. Boundary crossing sounds like something you’d be told not to do in an ethics workshop, but it simply means becoming aware of your own assumptions and then attempting, even temporarily, to inhabit someone else’s. When you’re discerning a major policy change in a church or organization, that discipline can be the difference between stalemate and compromise.
Productive friction has been a learned practice for me. By disposition, I dislike conflict. But over time I’ve come to see disagreement as an opportunity for growth rather than something to avoid. In teams I lead, I work to help people see friction as constructive rather than threatening.
As for the future of civil interreligious engagement, yes, I'm hopeful. I participate in a clergy council in my area, and I work with the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership to promote constructive Jewish–Christian relations. I don’t have a formula beyond getting to know people, finding common interests, and sharing meals. Sometimes the common interest is a social concern; sometimes it’s simply friendship.
Purcell and Campbell still have something to teach us: own your convictions, share them openly with those who disagree, allow your views to be critiqued, model dignity and respect, and do your best to live at peace—and occasionally make new friends in the process.
