The Rocks, and Not the Creation Museum, Are Biblical and Truthful
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary and interim senior minister at First Baptist Ottawa, Kansas. He is also putting the finishing touches on his sixth book: The Immaculate Mistake: How Southern Baptists and Other Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump.
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Back in 1985, a band called Jefferson Starship, belted out a song, “We built this city on rock and roll.” I have always liked the song. It reminds me of another song in the Bible that claims God built this planet on rock. And that rock has quite an ancient story to tell. In fact, the rocks have been here for more than four billion years.
But about 80 million evangelicals, with their lips pressed flat against Judgment Day, swear on a stack of King James Bibles that the Earth is only about 8,000 years old. This is known as young Earth creationism. So it is that there are ongoing attempts to teach scientific creationism or its cousin, intelligent design, in high school biology classes. The courts, even in Southern “Bible Belt” states, have always unmasked these attempts as a sneaky way to teach a particular kind of evangelical theology in science classes.
When the dominant dualism of our time insists that we must choose between a young Earth embraced theologically, or an old Earth embraced without belief in God, many of us are left out. Thank God we don’t have to choose between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists. I believe that we and the world are God’s good creation, and I believe she took her own sweet time creating the world. Creationists are right to question the atheistic, materialistic views of some scientists. Those views are not scientific; they are theological. Creationists are right to insist that viewing the world “scientifically” is only one point of view.
That said, it is not necessary to dispute the findings of science on the basis of some scientists’ theology. Rather than fight the scientists over science, why can’t Christians maintain the prophetic, poetic rhetoric (analogy, symbols, metaphor) that has long been our preferred method of truth claiming? For example, St. Paul tells us that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God,” that “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption.” All creation longs for the revealing of the children of God – rocks, plains, mountains, trees, cats, dogs, armadillos, weeds, and even us – who are longing for God’s redemption.
Yes, I would rather praise the Lord among the rocks along the road than in places where creation is bundled and hawked as a freak show of the impossible. The psalmist seems to agree: Praise the Lord, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars! Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! In Luke 19, Jesus says that if his people stopped praising God, the rocks would cry out! Let the rocks cry! Let the rocks praise!
I find it mildly amusing that in Boone County Kentucky there are rock formations that are part of a famous formation called the “Cincinnatian” that contains some of the richest fossil beds in the world. These fossils date from a half-billion-year-old geological epoch called the Ordovician. Tens of millions of years of geological history lie exposed in these layers – chapters in the four-and-one-half-billion-year story of life on this planet.
Here’s what makes this amusing: Many people driving along Highway 20 in Kentucky are oblivious to the rock formations because they are on their way to a tourist site known as the Creation Museum. At the museum they will be told that the Earth is only about 8,000 years old. The rocks on the side of the road to the Creation Museum cry out to the glory of God’s creation. If the tourists stopped and dug among the layers of earth, they would discover fossils of trilobites, shellfish, and other ancient and extinct life forms – all continuing to give praise to God’s creative power.
But who has time for testimony from God’s ancient creation when there’s a fundamentalist tourist site just around the next curve promising to regale you with tales of an Earth that just showed up a few thousand years ago?
The rocks tell a more biblical, more truthful, more accurate story. The story at the Creation Museum is unfaithful to Scripture, misleading, and unscientific. If evangelical Christians can be this wrong on creation, perhaps we should ask if they are insisting on other questionable ideas that are just as far-fetched as young Earth creationism.
Jerry Falwell Jr.: The Latest in a Century of Fundamentalist Autocrats
by William Trollinger
Over the past few months, the lid on the inner workings at Liberty University has been lifted a little. And these glimpses have revealed some seamy doings, including the fact that in 2014 and 2015 Michael Cohen hired a Liberty official to rig polls in Donald Trump’s favor, followed by (according to Cohen) the former Trump aide’s successful effort to suppress racy personal photos that would have embarrassed Falwell.
But now, the lid is coming off.
In a remarkable Politico article that appeared yesterday, “‘Someone’s Gotta Tell the Freakin’ Truth’: Jerry Falwell’s Aides Break Their Silence,” Brandon Ambrosino draws upon interviews and documents provided to him by more than two dozen past and present Liberty University officials to reveal “how Falwell presides over a culture of self-dealing, directing university resources into projects and real estate deals in which his friends and family have stood to make personal financial gains.” As one university official observed, “we’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund.”
These insiders are deeply distressed by the fact that “there’s no accountability, [as] Jerry’s got pretty free reign to wheel and deal” as he wishes. More than this, Falwell punishes anyone who dares question or criticize his decisions or statements. Here are three quotes from three different university officials:
- “It’s a dictatorship. Nobody craps at the university without Jerry’s approval.”
- “Everybody is scared for their life. Everybody walks around in fear.”
- Liberty is “a totally dysfunctional organization. Very similar to Trump’s White House.”
All of this is remarkable. And yet, it is important to keep in mind that Falwell is not an anomaly. In fact, for the past century it has been a feature of fundamentalist institutions – colleges, churches (particularly megachurches), apologetics organizations, and the like – to be run by a male autocrat who holds almost total sway over his fiefdom.
In fact, and as I discuss in God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism, the founder of the fundamentalist movement was the original fundamentalist despot. In 1919, William Bell Riley created the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, which he dominated for a decade while leading national crusades to eliminate liberal ideas and pastors from mainline Protestant denominations, ban Darwinian evolution from the public schools, and Make America Christian Again.
Not only did these national crusades fail, but Riley struggled to maintain control over the movement, given all of the other equally ambitious dictatorial wannabes who were determined to run their own piece of the fundamentalist movement. (Note: this sort of competition between autocrats remains a feature of fundamentalism.)
But while Riley failed to establish total control over the fundamentalist movement, he succeeded fabulously at the regional level (Chapter 5, “The Empire”). Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, in 1902 he founded Northwestern Bible School, which had 1700 full- and part-time students in 1946. Riley’s primary goal was to train men to serve as fundamentalist ministers or missionaries. By 1940 he had placed 220 “Riley’s boys” in churches throughout the upper Midwest, churches that were tightly linked to Riley and his school, as Northwestern provided these churches with speakers, Vacation Bible School workers, and various forms of religious literature, and as Riley routinely made the circuit to check on his preachers and their churches. Strongest in Minnesota, in 1936 (with Riley pulling the strings) Northwestern graduates grabbed control of the Minnesota Baptist Convention; one decade later he led the state convention right on out of the Northern Baptist Convention.
In short, Riley created the prototypical personality-driven fundamentalist empire. And of course, there are great advantages to such organizations, including the fact that – as with all autocratic structures – they can be extremely efficient. So, for example, when a local church needed to fill a pastoral vacancy, all it had to do was contact Riley, and the position would be immediately filled with a “Riley’s boy.”
But as is the case in these organizations, as is the case at Liberty today, there were no checks on the Great Fundamentalist Leader. He said what he wanted, did what he wanted, and there was no one there who could stop him, no one who would dare challenge him. There was, for example, no one to suggest that his behind-the-scenes scheming to take control of the Minnesota Baptist Convention was unseemly and unethical.
Worse, there was no one to put the brakes on Riley’s anti-Semitism. As I detail in God’s Empire (chapter 3, “The Conspiracy”), throughout the 1930s Riley wrote and preached about the international Jewish-Communist conspiracy that sought to enslave Gentiles and establish complete control over the world’s finances and governments. In fact, according to Riley, Jews had successfully taken over most of American corporations, arts, and colleges – and, with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, they had placed in the presidency a puppet they could easily control. In contrast with his attacks on Roosevelt, Riley was effusive in his praise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, seeing them as divinely-ordained instruments to save Germany from the Jews who had corrupted the German “race.” Riley’s anti-Semitism became increasingly vicious as the decade progressed – not surprisingly, his First Baptist Church was frequented by members of the Silver Shirts, perhaps the most virulently anti-Semitic organization in the U.S. in the 1930s – and it was not until America’s 1941 entry into World War II that Riley ceased his praise of Hitler.
In my work on Riley I was struck by the apparent failure of folks within his church and school and regional empire to speak up against his vicious anti-Semitism. Surely there was some opposition from within, but it is easy to imagine that – as at Liberty – the fear of provoking the wrath of the Great Fundamentalist Leader made it very difficult to suggest that Riley had gone too far. In the epilogue to God’s Empire I suggested that
It is quite possible that Riley’s position as czar of midwestern fundamentalism contributed to the vicious anti-Semitism of his later years. Alone at the top of his personal religious empire, the unquestioned hero for truth with an army of devoted followers, Riley was without peer or restraint. Perhaps the decades of unchecked power and the unrestrained adulation of his followers corrupted his thinking, thus contributing to the elderly Riley’s tendency to view farfetched and horrible ideas as reasonable. But whether or not Riley’s role as fundamentalist autocrat contributed to the vicious anti-Semitism of his later years, the fact that he perpetrated and promoted such notions is prime evidence that Riley . . . should not have been trusted with an inordinate amount of religious authority (157).
It’s not only Riley who should not have been trusted with inordinate authority. Today, the same point applies to Jerry Falwell, Jr., James Dobson, Ken Ham, and hundreds of other fundamentalist autocrats running big or small institutions.
But as Falwell is now learning, once in a while there are people within a fundamentalist organization who finally have had enough, who finally screw up their courage and tell the truth about the Great Leader. Of course, that is the day the dictator fears. Uneasy is the head who wears the crown.
Jews and the Perils of Christian Zionism
by William Trollinger
In his recent Tikkun article, “Today’s Christian-Jewish Zionist Alliance Imperils American Jewry,” Jim Sleeper (author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York) makes the fascinating argument that America at its best bears the marks of something like a “Judeo-Puritan” consensus. As Sleeper sees it,
[while] early Protestant Christianity in America gave to conscientious dissent a legitimacy and strength that Hebraism had not, . . . Hebraism offset Christian tendencies toward monkish or airy otherworldliness with a moral order grounded concretely in law.
For Sleeper, this “civic-republican balance of public obligation and inner integrity” was perhaps best seen in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Sleeper argues that these movements cannot “be understood without reference to the Puritan and Hebraic wellsprings from which King [who quite explicitly drew upon the Hebrew Scriptures] and others drew the strength to face dogs, fire hoses, and even murder.”
The contemporary Christian-Jewish Zionist alliance is a far, far cry from the civil rights and antiwar movements. Much more important, it is an alliance of convenience that places American Jews in great peril. Sleeper – who “is deeply supportive . . . of Israel’s flourishing” – points out that the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has eagerly embraced folks like Steve Bannon – who has tight connections with white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups – as well as right-wing fundamentalist firebrands such as John Hagee. All of this is quite problematic:
ZOA members who indulge an [extremely apocalyptic] Christian Zionist theology . . . are hollowing out American Jewry’s and the American republic’s fragile foundations. They’re enlarging the frightening civic vacuum into which have swept Glenn Beck, the torch-bearing, anti-Semitic Charlottesville rioters, and the perpetrator [of the] Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.
Many American evangelicals are Christian Zionists; that is to say, they are big supporters of the state of Israel. Much of this has to do with their belief in some version of dispensational premillennialism, the apocalyptic system developed by John Nelson Darby in the middle of the nineteenth century. According to this system, reading the Bible (in particular, the books of Daniel and Revelation) provides a sure guide to the past, present, and future of history. As regards the present, we are living in a time of increasing apostasy and decadence. But near the end of our current historical moment the Jews will return to Palestine, which will be followed soon by Christ’s return in the air to retrieve the faithful. After this “rapture” there will be seven years of “tribulation,” followed by the return of Jesus and his army of saints to annihilate the enemy and establish God’s millennial kingdom.
All this to say that, in the contemporary version of dispensational premillennialism, the State of Israel is a biblically foretold sign of the second coming of Jesus. Hence the Zionism of the Christian Right. And organizations such as the ZOA are quite willing to work with the Christian Right, as they are all in for Israel.
But it is very important to note that according to dispensational premillennialism, in the end Jews must either accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, or they will be consigned to hell. And while Jewish Zionists can shrug this off as nonsense, it should give them pause that, for folks in the Christian Right, Jews as Jews don’t matter. As Robert Smith cogently observes in his excellent book, More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism, “Darby [the architect of dispensational premillennialism] viewed Jews not as real persons, but as literary tropes in his world of prophecy interpretation” (158). Thus, and as I note in my review of Smith’s book (which Sleeper quotes), it “might make sense in the political short-term” for Jewish Zionists to welcome support from the Christian Right, but “enabling such typecasting carries with it significant dangers, given that the prophetic script can change (particularly if Jews do not play their Christian-assigned roles).”
Jews are but bit players in the evangelical apocalyptic drama. Not a reassuring word for Jews, notwithstanding Christian Right support for Israel.
Child Soldiers in the Creation/Evolution War
by Adam Laats
Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History (by courtesy) at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His books include: Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard UP, 2015); with co-author Harvey Siegel, Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2016); and, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2018). Coming up next is Jesus and the Dinosaurs, to be published by Oxford. Adam blogs at the wonderfully named I Love You But You Are Going to Hell.
There’s a lot to be horrified about. Ken Ham recently offered schoolchildren a jumble of noxious advice, mixing equal parts plagiarism and high anxiety. Yet buried in Ham’s unfortunate essay is a nugget of hope: even Ham now agrees on the fundamental principle that will allow us to end our long struggle over the teaching of evolutionary theory in our public schools.
As Ham explains, he hopes to give young Earth creationist children in public schools a guide to handling tests and essays in their hostile secular environment. Instead of encouraging children to look hopefully to their teachers for a positive relationship, Ham warns them that their teachers will be relentlessly out to get them. In the dangerous confines of your local public school, Ham explains, the best you can hope for is an escape from teachers’ implacable and misdirected persecution.
That sort of high-anxiety preaching about public schools has long been the heart of Ham’s message. Back in 2015, for example, his Answers In Genesis organization published a cartoon of the terrible fate of kids who got on the public-school bus. Yes, children would learn the dangerous ideas of “Darwin,” but they would also be indoctrinated with other doctrines that Ken Ham considers pernicious: secular environmentalism, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and hatred of prayer and the Bible.
For children heeding Ham’s advice, the result is predictable. Instead of entering school hoping to build friendships and prepare for life, anxious creationist kids will be waiting to be attacked and belittled. Even worse, if they follow Ham’s next bit of coaching, they certainly will be. In his advice about writing school reports about evolutionary theory, Ham suggests that students should plagiarize their way out of the evolutionary lion’s den.
As Ham preaches,
…if you say, “There are no beneficial mutations,” your teacher may suggest, however inappropriately, sickle-cell anemia or wingless beetles as examples of mutations that can be beneficial to the organism. It would be better if you say, “Mutations have been observed to destroy, delete or corrupt genetic information or to be neutral, but have not been observed to add information. This is true even of so-called-beneficial mutations like shriveled-eyed cave fish or flightless beetles on windswept islands, where the changes still involve loss of sight or flight. However, particles-to-people evolution requires so many information-increasing mutations that it should be easy to find such mutations happening today, but we have yet to observe even one.”
It doesn’t take years of experience as a classroom teacher to guess what will happen next. Looking for help, any creationist kid could follow Ham’s advice and copy Ham’s science-y sounding answer.
No teacher, no matter what, would be able to be able to accept that kind of plagiarized essay. Instead of only warning students about teacher hostility and anger, Ham’s ready-made essay advice actually makes it more likely that creationist kids will be punished for copying and pasting their answers.
Nevertheless, buried in Ham’s mistaken advice to his young followers is a kernel of good news for us all. How does Ham think creationist children should answer their public-school test questions? Not by insisting on radical creation science, but rather by explaining evolutionary science. As Ham advises,
Please be aware that these [tests] are not appropriate times to “preach.” For example, if you are asked “how old is the Earth?” then the (correct!) answer of ~6000 years will almost certainly be marked wrong because the course most likely would have stated ~4.5 billion years. To avoid lying, we recommend prefixing your answer by saying, “Most scientists believe that. . . ” or “The general consensus among geochronologists is. . . ” Remember, an exam is not a test of your personal beliefs. Instead, it is a test of how well you have learned and understood the material of the course as taught.
And here we have our ray of hope. Nobody—not Ken Ham, not even Richard Dawkins—wants public schools to “cure” children of their religious beliefs. As I am arguing in my upcoming book about creationism, public schools need to take a strict line against any kind of missionary work. Not just the misguided traditional religious type, but also the misguided secular atheist type. Public schools should never preach a religion to their students, but they should also avoid belittling or mocking their students’ religious ideas.
That doesn’t mean public schools can politely ignore the subject of evolutionary theory. Indeed, public schools have more than a right to teach evolutionary science to students, they have a firm duty to do so. As our present best understanding of the ways different species came about, evolutionary theory is something that every student has a right to know about.
But that’s a different story from insisting that every student accept or endorse any particular religious idea about evolutionary theory. If a creationist student wants to believe that our species came about in one divine moment about 6,000 years ago, that is absolutely her right. But she has no right to expect her religious idea to be taught as our best scientific idea, because it’s not. And she has no right to expect to be able to skip parts of the curriculum that she finds religiously problematic, because those ideas are part and parcel of what every American has a right to know about.
Instead, to give credit where it is due, Ken Ham has stumbled across the key to solving our long dispute over teaching evolution in public schools. The only thing public schools can insist upon is exactly what Ham suggests. Public schools have a right and duty to help students understand the best modern science. If religious dissenters choose not to believe those ideas, fine. At the very least, however, students need to be able to explain, as Ham suggests, what those ideas mean.
The answer is just what Ham says: Students can preface their explanations by saying things such as “Most scientists believe that…” or “The general consensus among geochronologists is…”
You might cringe when you hear Ham preaching anxiety and plagiarism among his flock. But we can all clutch at a straw of hope when we hear him tell children that they can know and understand evolution without ever being asked to change their religious beliefs. That is exactly the correct advice, and a solution we can all agree upon.
Saints, Scholars, and Charlatans: Christian Nationalism and the War for America’s Historical Soul
by Earl Crown
Earl Crown is a doctoral student and graduate assistant in American Studies at Penn State Harrisburg, where he also teaches American history and works at the Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies. His scholarly interests include 20th century American social and intellectual history. He is currently researching progressive student activism on university campuses in the Jim Crow South. He blogs with Shaun Stiemsma on issues of American society and culture at room201athirdplace.com. He lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania with his wife Sarah and two children.
Several years ago, my family and I were guests for Fourth of July services at a New Hampshire church. As I am sure was the case at many other services elsewhere that Sunday, the fusion of American democratic, patriotic, and religious values was alive and well. The front of the sanctuary was a sea of red, white, and blue bunting and banners. As the service began, congregants proudly bellowed “God Bless America” as the Bible was paraded forward behind the Christian and United States flags. Following behind them was the guest speaker Garrett Lear, who refers to himself as “The Patriot Pastor.” Dressed in a colonial era costume and carrying what I assume was a functioning flintlock musket, the pastor walked to the front to lead worshipers in pledging allegiance to the American and Christian flags, as well as the Bible. My son, ten at the time, whispered to me, “Dad, they sure pledge a lot of things at this church.”
Lear’s message is typical of what might be called Christian nationalism. These people generally embrace a narrative of American moral and cultural decline, from which we can only be saved by a return to our original Christian founding. Lear’s website proudly proclaims his “expertise and extensive knowledge of the founding of America,” as well as “the original intent of the Founding Fathers.” So, what does Lear see as America’s founding? Apparently, it was the writing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620. In what Lear has named “The New Mayflower Compact,” he calls for “our countrymen and our leaders everywhere . . . to renew the original intent of this [the original Compact], our founding, in all spheres.” Lear would have us believe, therefore, that in order to find America’s original purpose and values, we need to look to the seventeenth century, and particularly to the settlers of what became Plymouth Colony.
Yet Lear, despite his apparent expertise, runs into problems with this preposterously simplistic approach to America’s founding. A quick look at the original Mayflower Compact demonstrates this. On various websites run by Lear, he claims “We will have no other king but Jesus.” This certainly was not the view of the Plymouth settlers. In the second sentence of the original document, the signers identify themselves as “Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God.” If we were to return to the “original intent” of those at Plymouth, while at the same time presuming—as does Lear—that the words of the Compact can be taken at face value, we would need to restore our allegiance to the British crown.
Lear is far from alone in this. Texas author David Barton publishes prolifically on the subject, and according to an article in Texas Monthly, is booked for 250 speaking engagements per year. Yet his extraordinary popularity comes despite having been both criticized and discredited by the academic history community. A 2012 readers’ poll by the History News Network named his Jefferson Lies book “the least credible history book in print.” Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter of Grove City College published a book directly challenging and discrediting many of Barton’s claims, leading his publisher to pull it from distribution. And yet his popularity continues.
So, how is it that people whose facts are so patently false can have so much popularity, and what can be done to reverse this? In a recent column for the Washington Post, former George W. Bush White House staffer Michael Gerson, in his ongoing assault on the Trump presidency, called our current chief executive “the most ambitious fabulist in presidential history” who is “determin[ed] to inhabit his self-blown truth bubble.” In this column, Gerson asks a very timely question. “How,” he asks, “is any political conversation or policy discussion possible when citizens inhabit separate universes of truth and meaning?” This is a perfect synopsis of what I experienced as I listened to Lear’s sermon. To the people surrounding me that Independence Day, it was not ultimately facts that mattered. Lear and Barton give their audiences a historical melodrama that is both accessible and satisfying. Facts are often neither. Enveloped as I was that Sunday in a cloud of rage at this charlatan’s myriad of factual blunders, I felt profoundly alienated from my fellow congregants, most of whom seemed to enthusiastically welcome his message. I suspect that Gerson is right, and that there are indeed “separate universes of truth” in this case, one where truth is defined by evidence, the other convenience.
And yet it is not enough for historians to sit on an epistemological judgment seat as we watch the integrity of what we hold to be sound scholarship disintegrate before our eyes. We must do more than wallow in frustration that someone with no credible authority to inform Americans about the past, like Lear, does precisely that with an exponentially louder voice than the scholarly community. Yes, he and others like him are empirically wrong. Yes, the consequences of their fraudulent message are destructive. But it accomplishes little simply to reiterate that.
This is not to say that nothing is being done by academic historians. Princeton’s Kevin Kruse and Yale’s Joanne Freeman, for example, have effectively used Twitter to help bridge the gap between sound history and popular understanding of the past. Yale has made entire courses by Freeman and recent Pulitzer-winner David Blight available for free on YouTube. Their efforts, unfortunately, are not enough at this point to lessen the hegemonic control over the past by Lear and his ilk. If the mind is truly something to be celebrated, then its potential can and must be harnessed to reach the masses with better history. Surely every teacher of history has been asked at some point in their career why their chosen field matters. If we believe that it does, we must do a better job reaching a larger audience.
Much to Their Chagrin, Locals Have Learned that Ark Encounter is Not the Best of Neighbors
by William Trollinger
One might think that, given their self-proclaimed Christian commitments, the folks at Ark Encounter would be the most accommodating of neighbors, particularly when one considers all the gifts showered upon them by locals. These gifts include (as we have said many times) the fact that the nearby town of Williamstown floated $62m in junk bonds (or, high-risk municipal bonds) to allow for the building of the Ark, with 75% of what would have been paid by the Ark in property taxes going to pay off the bonds. But there’s more. As P. Z. Myers points out, there was also a gift of $175,000 from the Industrial Authority of Grant County (where the Ark is located), plus the sale by local officials of 100 acres to Ken Ham and company for a mere $1.
Taking all this largesse into account, it would make sense to assume that Ark Encounter would be a good neighbor. But that assumption is challenged by the following.
The Grant County Board of Education (GCBE) is making the case that the local property valuation of Ark Encounter is far below what it should be, and thus the Ark is not paying its rightful share of taxes for Grant County schools. In 2017 the county’s Property Value Administration estimated the Ark’s value at $46m. But the GCBE – taking into account the Ark’s land value, ticket sales, and capital investments – is arguing that the creationist theme park is worth $130m, which means that instead of the $275,912 Ark Encounter actually paid in taxes, it really should have paid $746,200. That is to say, the GCBE is asserting that the Ark stiffed county schools almost half a million dollars. And this represents just one annual tax bill.
The GCBE appealed the valuation of Ark Encounter. When the Property Value Administration rejected their claim, the GCBE then appealed to the Kentucky Claims Commission; the Commission rejected their claim, asserting that the GCBE could not appeal because it receives taxes and does not pay taxes – that is to say, the GCBE does not have legal standing as an aggrieved entity to appeal the property valuation. But the GCBE has filed another lawsuit, in the process asking how “a school district, suffering [the loss of] hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, not be any ‘persons aggrieved?’”
Interestingly, Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) have not, as far as I can ascertain, made any public statements about the question as to what the Ark is worth. It would be fascinating to read how Ham would construct an argument that Ark Encounter is worth only $46m. That argument may indeed be forthcoming. But Ham’s silence makes sense, given that the GCBE is using the Ark’s own numbers to come up with the value of $130m.
The earliest example of Ark Encounter’s unneighborliness is the fact that the Ark sold Williamstown on the notion that underwriting $62m of Ark bonds would bring great development to Williamstown, something that definitely has not panned out. Adding insult to injury, Ham now blames Williamstown for this failure, claiming that it is too far away from the interstate to attract visitors (something Ham and company did not make clear when it was selling Williamstown on underwriting the bonds).
Another example of ungrateful behavior came after Williamstown, frustrated by the Ark’s failure to bring in revenue to the town, imposed a .50 cent “safety tax” on every Ark Encounter visitor. Ham and AiG responded by moving the Ark from its for-profit status to non-profit status, in the process obviating Williamstown’s ability to impose its tax. It seems this would have remained the case, except for the fact that the state of Kentucky made clear that moving the Ark to non-profit status would end the state’s sales tax rebate, which has proven to be quite the boon to Ark Encounter. So it is that, less than a month after moving the Ark to non-profit status, the folks at AiG returned it to for-profit status. Williamstown got its safety tax, but it also got the message: Ark Encounter cares about Ark Encounter, and its neighbors will have to look out for themselves.
And that apparently includes the children. The Board of Education could not be clearer: Ark Encounter is paying much less than its fair share of taxes, which hurts local schools, which means – in the end – it is the students who attend these schools who are hurt.
But of course, this is in keeping with the message of the Ark. A few get on board. The rest drown.
Playing Nice with Fundamentalists is a Recipe for Disaster, or, See the Southern Baptist Convention
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary. He is also putting the finishing touches on his sixth book: The Immaculate Mistake: How Southern Baptists and Other Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump. This post is drawn from the introduction to this book.
Ignoring fundamentalists is like doing nothing about a small fire ant bed that suddenly appears in your back yard. Untreated, the fire ants, working furiously from below, out of sight of the rest of the world, will eventually build a mound that seems to stretch to the heavens, a kind of insect version of the biblical Tower of Babel. Once the fire ants are at full strength, if you poke a stick in the mound, they will send out waves of soldiers intent on afflicting as much pain on your body as possible. They spread out in formations, covering the ground in circular attacks within ten seconds of the alarm. Left untreated, your back yard will soon resemble something out of the apocalyptic mind of Tim LaHaye – mound after mound of these invasive creatures are everywhere.
It is not a pretty sight. And fundamentalists are the fire ants of our culture and our churches. But from the 1920s to the 1970s most scholars and journalists, not to mention the world of mainline Christianity, simply ignored them. While the mainline was sleeping, blissfully safe and secure, a thriving evangelical world was evolving in the woods, a world in which credentials were a negative and being “anointed by God” was a necessity. While the intellectual elite was sleeping, comfortable in their knowledge that fundamentalism was dead, the “fire ants” were preparing their cultural and political invasion.
See, for example, the story of moderate Southern Baptists in the 1970s. Fundamentalist students, armed with tape recorders, came to seminary classes, secretly taped the lectures of the professors, and made sure those lectures made their way to Paige Patterson and his allies. Seminary leaders thought all this was just a nuisance, not really paying that much attention because they had been lulled to sleep by the status quo of power and control which they enjoyed. Moderates controlled the convention, the institutions, the boards, and the major churches, and so they simply were not that concerned about the fundamentalist uprising. And then, when the moderates finally took notice, they insisted on responding to the attack by “playing nice.” It was not until after the fundamentalist “takeover” of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) did it dawn on the moderates that, by ignoring and misjudging and placating the fundamentalists, they had lost the denomination.
Of course, in response to the recent sexual abuse scandal in the SBC, a “moderate” (J. D. Greear) was elected president of the convention. But then this “moderate” dared to speak up about the legacy of slavery, dared to suggest that “if the church is to change our nation’s story for the future, we must begin by knowing and owning the story of our” 246 years of slavery. In response, white Southern Baptist knights on white horses (surprisingly, no white robes) rose like ragged Confederate soldiers from the gray swamp mist to defend white people with white-knuckled rage. It’s as if someone had restarted the Civil War. Southern Baptists have an unfettered gift for attacking their perceived enemies with unrelenting harshness, even if that happens to be one of their own elected leaders. Such an attack has now been turned loose on the SBC President, Rev. J. D. Greear. His fellow Southern Baptists, mincing no words, leaving no ill-mannered rock unturned, gathered on anti-social media to treat him as if he were as worthy of stoning as the woman in the gospels who was allegedly “caught in the throes of adultery.” One responder accused Rev. Greear of not being a “Bible-believing conservative.” Others implied that he was under the influence of something called “Neo-Marxism.” Still others doubted his basic intelligence, calling him “bone-headed,” while others charged him with being “one sick, disgruntled, disruptive, instigating, race-baiting, discouraging man.”
These nasty messages came from fellow Southern Baptists, infuriated that their president, who claims to be a godly and faithful Christian, could say these things about slavery and the need for repentance. If Baptists practiced excommunication, I think there would be a movement to excommunicate the president. There’s no limit to the over-stoked, hyper-emotional religious bullying that is now a constant in Southern Baptist life when someone dares to trespass the fundamentalist party line. Obviously, the SBC president has discovered that he should be using a paintbrush to “whiteout” all due historical diligence about slavery.
This is but one of many examples that led me to the unfortunate conclusion that there are only two ways to deal with a fundamentalist: Agree with him or hit him in the mouth (rhetorically speaking, of course). I am of the latter persuasion. I was raised a fundamentalist and imbibed not only the theology but the method. Even though I rejected fundamentalism by the time I was a student at Louisiana Baptist College, I never really took off the armor or surrendered my sword. My combative nature is a direct product of my upbringing, and it still shows in my writing and, at times, in my preaching. And I know from my experience in the SBC that “playing nice” with fundamentalists is simply tantamount to surrender.
“A Spirit of Rebellion”: The Real Politics of Young-Earth Creationism
by Carl R. Weinberg
Today’s post comes from Carl R. Weinberg, Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). He has completed a book manuscript entitled Red Dynamite: Creationism and Anticommunism in Modern America.
For secular-minded defenders of evolutionary science, it’s easy to make fun of Ken Ham and his young-earth creationist group Answers in Genesis (AiG): The life-size dioramas with animatronic vegetarian dinosaurs frolicking with humans in the Garden of Eden at the Creation Museum. The dragon exhibit—AiG claims that belief in these mythical creatures is rooted in the time when humans and dinosaurs together walked the earth. The gigantic wooden boat at Ark Encounter.
At first glance, the blog post that Ham published recently on the AiG website fits the same seemingly “crazy” pattern. In “Teachers Union Endorses Killing Unborn Children,” Ham expresses alarm that delegates at the annual meeting of the National Education Association (NEA) in Houston, TX approved a resolution supporting a woman’s “fundamental” right to choose abortion. It’s no surprise that AiG opposes abortion rights. But Ham goes further, describing the labor union meeting as a “dark place” that was “permeated” by a sinister socialist, Marxist philosophy. Has Ham lost his mind? What does the politics of the NEA have to do with creationism?
I don’t share Ham’s views about abortion, but I don’t think he’s crazy. His blog piece can help us understand what really lies behind the dinosaurs, dragons, and dioramas. Ham may sincerely believe he is running a “ministry” working to save souls for Christ. But he is not waging a war pitting “religion” against “science.” Ham and his allies are carrying out a culture war that is fundamentally about politics—who has the power to decide how we will live in this world.
Most of Ham’s blog post is dedicated to answering the NEA’s pro-choice arguments with anti-choice talking points: we’re not misogynistic, we love women and their unborn children; abortion is the ultimate violation of human rights; a fertilized egg is not part of a woman’s body. For any supporter of a woman’s right to choose, perhaps the strangest argument is this one: “It’s tragically ironic that an organization that is supposed to support those who will teach the next generation of students endorses killing off the next generation of babies before they are born!” In other words, not only are the NEA pro-choicers immoral, but they are depriving teachers of job security.
But the key to AiG’s broader political agenda can be found in Ham’s citation of what he takes to be disturbing comments on the NEA meeting by AiG speaker Bryan Osborne, a former public school teacher who attended the Houston confab. As Ham summarizes Osborne:
It’s a dark place . . . [Bryan Osborne] said a spirit of rebellion and the idea of “we won’t take this anymore” was everywhere in the expo hall, in the imagery (such as the closed, raised fist) that was on display, and in many of the presentations given. Bryan also shared that socialist, Marxist philosophy—stemming from a secular, evolutionary worldview—permeated the convention.
Speaking of imagery, the photo following these lines features a large banner that in the foreground depicts a teacher, an African American woman speaking into a megaphone, as a large crowd of people in the background hold aloft their closed fists. The banner text says, “Educators. We Work for the People.”
Frankly, this is the kind of convention I might enjoy attending. What makes it so scary for Ken Ham and AiG? Let me translate: a “dark place” and “rebellion” refer to the ultimate rebel, Satan. According to Ham’s writings, Satan was also the ultimate evolutionist. Ham learned this from his former boss at the Institute for Creation Research, Henry Morris, who spelled the argument out most fully in The Long War Against God (1989).
And what does evolutionary science have to do with Marxism? Here Ham is on stronger historical ground. Despite a popular notion that evolutionary ideas have been deployed only for conservative purposes through something called “social Darwinism,” left-wing support for evolutionary science was just as real, starting with Marx and Engels. In my research, I have uncovered a consistent theme in creationist rhetoric that links the alleged dangers of evolution, communism, and immorality, a potent combination that creationist geologist George McCready Price labeled “Red Dynamite” in 1925. Conversely, Price and his successors have also argued that the Bible endorses capitalism. At base, they believe that evolutionary thought promotes immoral social, sexual, and political behavior, undermining existing God-given standards and hierarchies of power.
To fully grasp the politics behind Ham’s concerns about “rebellion,” we should recall that over the past three years, the US has been rocked by a series of strikes and protests carried out by public school teachers in primarily “red” states like West Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Sporting red t-shirts, teachers proudly proclaimed that they were “Red for Ed,” drawing on labor movement traditions and calling attention to the sad state of state education budgets. This activism embodies the “spirit of rebellion,” including the raised fists, animating the 2019 NEA gathering. For good reason, teachers have been saying, precisely, “we won’t take this anymore.” So, when Ken Ham and AiG raise alarms about “rebellion” in this context, they are not only making an obscure theological point about Satan, they are saying, in effect, that going on strike is evil. Rebellious workers, that is, act against the wishes of God.
Which makes me wonder what Ham would say to the Blackjewel coal miners and their families in Cumberland, Kentucky, a four-hour drive from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, who have been blocking the railroad tracks from the Harlan County mine where they work to protest non-payment of wages. They are putting their lives on the line to say, “we won’t take this anymore.” Their slogan is, “No pay, we stay.” Are they Satanic, too?
In fairness to Ham, it should be acknowledged that while the NEA delegates voted to affirm abortion rights, teachers are divided on this issue. When Ham put his blog post on Facebook (which has been shared more than 2200 users), many people identifying themselves as public school teachers “liked” his post. One of them was a pre-K teacher from Kanawha County, West Virginia who took part in the 2018 strike but who was not happy to see a Planned Parenthood table at a strike rally. So working people need to talk this issue through, ideally as they engage in common struggle to better their lives and the lives of all working people. As they take part in that discussion, it may become clearer what is at stake in the real politics of the debate over evolutionary science.
Is Science News Trustworthy?
by Sarah Olson
Sarah Olson is an undergraduate student majoring in microbiology at Oregon State University, and a member of the National Association of Science Writers. She works at a bookstore curating their science and math sections and reviews popular science books on her blog readmorescience.com. In addition to pursuing a career in science writing, Sarah frequently writes about the intersection of religion, feminism, and science. She currently lives in Corvallis, Oregon with her fiance. You can connect with her at saraholson.net and on Twitter and Instagram at @ReadMoreScience.
In an age of fake news and online misinformation, can we trust trust science media? Writing for Answers in Genesis (AiG), Henry F. Sanders III attempts to establish why readers cannot trust science journalists. But Sanders’ misguided argument succeeds only in showing how necessary it is that well-trained journalists report science, and why readers should be wary of popular media’s reporting on scientific research. Citing a Pew Research poll from earlier this year that indicates the American public has stable confidence in scientists, Sanders spins this in a bad light by suggesting that “Americans are not actually trusting scientists: they are ultimately trusting what the media tells them scientists are saying— in spite of having a general distrust for the media.”
It’s a science journalist’s job to make technical subjects into more digestible news articles for the general public. Proper science writing and reporting is a skill that takes years of training, which is obviously why untrained members of the media incorrectly report scientific findings – and why graduate degrees for science journalism and communication exist. Today, even some scientists are participating in science communication and writing news-style articles for the public. Graduate programs for science journalists often require an undergraduate degree in a science, and more prestigious programs such as the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Master’s program require research experience as well. Science journalists have an organization, the National Association of Science Writers, which strives to help its members attain journalistic excellence. The field itself is self-correcting, with journalists ready to call out each other’s mistakes at a moment’s notice.
But members of the popular media who sometimes write about science news are not specially trained. Those unfamiliar with scientific processes and concepts are more likely to make mistakes, exaggerate findings and conclusions, or simply misinterpret data. Worse, there are certainly fake news sites that set out to spread misinformation and rile up the general public, to rally them against scientists and experts or simply cause mass confusion or hysteria.
Interestingly enough, the story Sanders uses for evidence is from The Daily Mail, a tabloid. If that’s where Sanders gets his science news, it’s no wonder he’s confused and alarmed. Perhaps he needs to play the Fake News Game and equip himself with the skills necessary to detect online fact from fiction. Jerry A. Coyne notes the difference between popular media and trained science journalists, as his blog post suggests: “New paper on flightless birds is grossly misreported and distorted by the popular media.”
Sanders also cites a clickbait article distributed by Fox News, and another article Fox News misreported about Ice Age insects. Instead of recognizing that Fox News and tabloids are not trustworthy news sources, Sanders instead blames science journalists and science media. He also mentions mistakes made by Science Daily, but neglects to mention Science Daily is a press release aggregator and only lightly edited. When I was an intern for a university newsroom, some of my own science press releases were picked up by the aggregator.
Despite that Sanders has written many articles for AiG on scientific topics, he seems to have very little understanding of what a science journalist actually does. He suggests misinformation happens because science journalists simply may not have access to original papers published in scientific journals (right, try pitching an article you haven’t read to a credible science news outlet) or they may not understand that press releases may be biased (press releases are put out by universities in order to get their research featured in the media, so yes, they’re obviously advocating for themselves). But science journalists are taught to have discerning eyes, to interview their sources, and to check the facts. Their writing must make it through the initial pitch, the editing process, and publication. Despite the best intentions of editors, mistakes still happen, and sometimes papers are retracted. It’s up to journalists to investigate the facts during their reporting.
Science journalists want their headlines to be catchy, but they aren’t “paid per click” as Sanders implies. In fact, I can’t think of an outlet which pays journalists that way. Some websites may rely on clicks to earn money through advertisements, which incentivizes them to write clickbait headlines. In my opinion, New Scientist can be guilty of writing clickbait headlines – but because they have a paywall, the more enticing their headlines sound, the more likely a reader is to buy a subscription.
Still, Sanders’ points don’t hold up to scrutiny. For his bold claim that “much of what is published in the scientific media is just as skewed and misrepresented as what is presented in the rest of the media,” Sanders fails to provide adequate or convincing evidence to support this. Had he suggested the popular mass media frequently misrepresents science, and that journalists untrained in reporting science news are more prone to errors, he would have been correct.
Ironically, Sanders also notes that AiG’s own news outlet, Answers News, is guilty of covering misinformation and clickbait; that is, even as AiG criticizes and blames science journalists for fake news, the organization publishes and perpetuates it. Sanders tries to spin Answers News as blameless, suggesting that the popular science articles they covered were misrepresentations and AiG is the victim. Readers are left with the impression Answers News isn’t fact-checking or researching for themselves, and is instead relying on other outlets to do the work for them.
But the most outrageous claim Sanders makes is that, since only 8% of journalists attend religious services, this corrupts their journalistic integrity. He writes, “because of this [nonreligious] worldview, many journalists are more than willing to manipulate the facts to fit with their bias.” Yes, Sanders is accusing non-religious journalists of manipulating the facts to fit their worldview. According to his logic, because Answers News makes their biases known, they are the more trustworthy journalists.
If anything, Sanders’ piece ultimately casts great doubt on his own credibility as a writer of science articles. Then again, you need not read any further than this piece to know that Sanders isn’t writing anything that is scientifically sound. Despite my research, I’m unable to find information about Sanders or his credentials and experience. Perhaps he simply hasn’t any?
Let’s return to our original question: in an age of online misinformation, should we stop trusting science news? I think it would be a mistake to condemn science journalists. There are many straightforward strategies that exist to combat online misinformation and fake news. Even the most gullible reader can take a moment to research a source and verify whether the information is true or not. On Twitter, I encourage my followers to research an incredible news claim before resharing (#ResearchThenReshare). Combating misinformation involves recognizing tactics the fake news gurus employ to trick readers, such as playing to emotions and biases or pretending to be a legitimate news source.
I’ve been a member of the National Association of Science Writers for several years now. Last year I was one of their undergraduate science journalism fellows, a program in which promising young science journalists get to try their hand at reporting with the guidance of an accomplished mentor. What I learned during that fellowship, and during my subsequent internship in a science newsroom, is that science communicators and journalists are working hard to gain the public’s trust. We are in the fight against fake news too. Sanders, however, doesn’t seem to know which side he’s on.
Ken Ham Attacks rightingamerica
by William Trollinger
“University of Dayton professor attacks Ark and Ken Ham in unscholarly article”
That professor is me. If you would like to read what he wrote, click above. If you would like to read what I wrote, here’s a link to “Ken Ham Misleads Again.” And here are a few comments in response to Ham’s vitriolic and misleading post:
1. Ham asserts that I “repeated the misinformation and outright untruths about the Ark’s funding that permeates other atheist blogs,” and then he continues in the next sentence by lumping me in with “secular reporters and bloggers.” All of this would be very surprising to our friends and family and students, given that Sue and I are devout Catholics – a point we made very clear when we spoke at the American Atheists Convention. Of course, it is quite possible that the fact that we are Catholic does not reassure Ham that we are actually Christian, given the anti-Catholicism found in Answers in Genesis (AiG) publications, including volume 1 of World Religions and Cults: Counterfeits of Christianity.
2. As regards the funding of Ark Encounter, I noted that “in 2013 Williamstown issued $62m worth of junk bonds” in order to help “get the Ark project underway.” Ham is very upset that I used the term “junk bonds,” which is odd, given that it is a commonly used descriptor that refers to bonds that can be valuable investments for informed investors, but their potential high returns come with the potential for high risk.” But I have no problem referring to the Ark Encounter bonds as high-risk municipal bonds, which is how they were defined – as we reported here in March 2017 – by Gurtin Municipal Bond Management in their August 2016 newsletter. Interestingly, and as befits their readership, Gurtin’s article — “Williamstown, KY’s Ark Encounter May End Up Sinking Investors” – focuses not on Williamstown and its taxpayers (which has been my focus), but on the dangers the Williamstown bonds pose to those who bought them. As noted by the folks at Gurtin:
On July 7, 2016 the doors of Ark Encounter opened to the public in Williamstown, Kentucky with the help of municipal investors who contributed $62 million in bond proceeds toward the amusement park in hopes that future revenues generated from admissions would be sufficient to pay them back. The potentially optimistic projections may end up sinking investors, as we have seen in the past, with other similar endeavors whose “if you build it, they will come” mentality never materialized when people did not show up.
3. A major reason the Gurtin newsletter highlighted the risks to Ark Encounter investors is that their researchers had serious doubts about the feasibility report put together by the Ark group to convince Williamstown and investors to sign on. As the newsletter stated, this feasibility report asserted that in its first year of operation the Ark was expected to attract 1.2 million to 2.0 million visitors; what the newsletter does not mention is that the feasibility report projected even significantly higher attendance figures into the future, with an average annual attendance increase of 7% for the first decade (a claim about which I suspect the Gurtin researchers were even more skeptical). So how is Ark Encounter doing with attendance? I have been following this since the park opened in the summer of 2016, and I can say that Ham and Ark Encounter are loathe to provide hard and verifiable attendance figures. But the town of Williamstown, which collects a “safety tax” from each visitor, can provide firm numbers. And according to Williamstown, paid Ark attendance in year two (2017-18) was 862,471. Interestingly, Ham has claimed that attendance in the second year was one million, which he asserted marked a 20% jump from year one. If Ham’s claim of a 20% increase is true, and if we make use of the firm attendance numbers provided by Williamstown, then approximately 720,000 showed up at the Ark in its first year. If we make use of Ham’s unverified 1 million visitors (and are these paid visitors?) in year two, then approximately 830,000 showed up at the Ark in 2016-2017. Either way, this is 370,000-480,000 short of the 1.2 million Ham and company sold to Williamstown and investors as the lowest possible attendance number in the first year.
4. Contrary to Ham’s claim, I did not say nor did I “imply that the city [of Williamstown] has some obligation to repay the bonds.” Moreover, I understand how Tax Increment Financing (TIF) works, an understanding enhanced by conversations with an attorney who is familiar with the Williamstown issue. That means that I also understand how they can fail. And they can fail if the proposed project does not succeed in the fashion that was promised, if the project does not generate the revenue (tax and otherwise) that was projected, if the project simply folds. Now it is clear, based on the numbers from Williamstown cited above, that Ark Encounter is not meeting even the lowest attendance projections it offered in its feasibility report (a point that Ham has never acknowledged publicly). I have no idea what this means for the future of Ark Encounter. Perhaps it does not need to meet these projections. Perhaps those attendance numbers were inflated in an effort to further encourage investors to put their money down. Perhaps the Ark never needs to reach an annual attendance of 1.2 million visitors for the project to survive. But there is a reason that Gurtin Municipal Bond Management used Ark Encounter as an example of a very risky municipal bond that could end up sinking investors. In this regard I will simply repeat what I said in July 2018:
Will Ark Encounter be around in, say, ten years? Five years? I have no idea. But if I were a bondholder or a Williamstown official, I would find it very worrisome that the reported attendance numbers are ever-changing, and apparently never as promised.
5. While Williamstown is not on the hook for the bonds (I did not claim that they were), it underwrote the bonds, in the process agreeing that a good chunk of what would have been property taxes paid by the Ark to Williamstown will be used to pay off Ark bondholders. It is indeed a sweet deal for Ark Encounter, and of course the folks in Williamstown signed on because they were persuaded that the Ark would bring an economic boon to Williamstown. Of course. This is the promise of TIFs. And Ham’s response, repeated in his post, is that other towns (north of Williamstown) have benefited from the Ark. But as regards Williamstown, Ham blithely asserts that
the actual town is a half a mile off the interstate (and on the other side of the interstate) and is not visible to our guests, so the town understandably sees very few Ark visitors. And the town has not been successful so far in getting major hotels or restaurant chains to come there.
As I noted in the last post, in selling Williamstown on underwriting the $62m worth of bonds, Ham and company apparently failed to share their wisdom (articulated now by Ham, but not back in 2013) that Williamstown was located too far from the interstate to see many Ark visitors.
6. In the conclusion to his post Ham says the following:
We do hope Prof. Trollinger is providing real academic rigor to the students in his university classes as opposed to what we have exposed here: unfounded rhetoric and poor research, as he continues to disseminate false information about the Ark Encounter.
I stand by my research and my post (and Ham need not worry about my students). If Ham’s post were a paper written by a University of Dayton student in one of my first-year classes, I would have written this at the bottom of the paper:
Failure to provide substantive evidence to back your claims, and a dismaying tendency to resort to ad hominem attacks. This is not acceptable for a university-level paper. Revise and resubmit.
