When the Juice is Not Worth the Squeeze: Distinguishing between Productive and Unproductive Conversations
by Emma Frances Bloomfield
Today’s post comes from our colleague Emma Frances Bloomfield, an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the intersection of science, religion, and politics from a rhetorical perspective. She received her PhD from USC Annenberg and wrote her dissertation on the similarities between science denial in the human origins and climate change controversies. She has written and presented on topics of the environment, digital rhetoric, narratives, political communication, and health. Her new book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, is available now through Routledge’s series on Advances in Climate Change Research.
In this third post about my forthcoming book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, I want to address the issue of how we can judge when climate conversations are likely to be productive and when they are over before they’ve even begun. My book primarily focuses on the rhetorical features of religious communities in relation to climate change and communication strategies for engaging them in conversation. While the vast majority of people I interacted with during the course of my data collection were open and willing to having conversations, some were less welcoming. In Chapter 2 of the book, I dedicate a short section to “A cautionary tale,” where I detail an interaction with a committed skeptic.
Because my research aimed to engage all types of people in climate conversations, I continued my conversation with this person far longer than I suggest others should engage people who exhibit similar characteristics. Based on that conversation, I outline in this post three primary markers of unproductive conversations. These features indicate that continuing to engage might not be worth the effort and may even backfire by providing the dialogue partner more ammunition for their skepticism towards environmentalism.
The first characteristic of unproductive conversations is the deployment of gatekeeping techniques. In my conversation with the hostile separator, they first asked me to solve a riddle about a tea party where people stated one thing about themselves. The separator continued that they would not engage with me about their views on the environment until I could determine “who is the Christian, who is the Environmentalist, and who is the Mad Hatter?” Even after I attempted to answer their riddle, they criticized me for not locating the correct answer, which was that there was no Christian or Environmentalist present. I could not follow the point of the riddle that the separator intended, but the riddle did function to derail us from the topic of the environment. Using gatekeeping strategies is also a feature of the Cornwall Alliance, an exemplar separator that I analyze in my book. In an interview with The Guardian CA President Calvin Beisner asked journalist Leo Hickman to read book Resisting the Green Dragon in its entirety before agreeing to the interview. When gatekeeping techniques are used, it likely means that the dialogue partner is not interested in a true, genuine conversation at all. Instead, those strategies may be used to unfairly test their dialogue partner and put up roadblocks to the topic at hand.
The second characteristic of unproductive conversations is the use of insults and ad hominem attacks. Even if people hold strong opinions about an issue, using insults, ridiculing others, and attacking people’s characters are rhetorical choices that should be avoided in productive conversations. In talking to the hostile separator, they used frequent insults such as calling my questions “ill-defined” and “leading,” and they accused me of being biased against Christians. Furthermore, they argued that my requests for conversations were part of “a trap” to “shame” and “force” people into “government regulated environmental compliance.” In starting a conversation with someone who holds these aggressive and overt views, I opened myself up to having to defend my integrity and intentions, again derailing the conversation away from environmental topics. If our dialogue partners react in this way, it is a likely sign that the conversation may quickly “devolve into elitist rants” or into “dueling ad hominem attacks and counterattacks” as Leah Ceccarelli warns. Instead of taking the bait and responding in kind, it would be more productive to find a different dialogue partner.
The third characteristic of unproductive conversations is engaging with someone who has a closed mindset. People often disagree on topics but can still engage in conversation. The key is that both parties must agree to rules of engagement (whether stated explicitly or not) to have a healthy back and forth, be respectful, and listen to one another’s perspectives. If people enter the conversation with a closed mindset, they may dominate the conversation, lecture the other person, and hear instead of listen. Former Vice President Al Gore recently visited UNLV’s campus and described some climate skeptics as reading from a “teleprompter.” This characterization is similar to Riley Dunlap’s assertion that some climate skeptics have their “minds made up” and cannot be reached through any means. Communicating with committed skeptics may look and feel like a “real” conversation, but instead, it more closely resembles someone reading from a pre-programmed script, which will not to lead productive engagement.
Similar to other scholars of climate change communication, I advocate that some dialogue partners, such as committed skeptics, need not be engaged or take up our rhetorical attention. For example, Karin Kirk argues that some people, whom she calls trolls, will never change their minds on climate change, and so we should focus on those who are more open and willing to engage. Of the nearly 50 people I had conversations with during the course of my book project, I only had one negative interaction with a committed skeptic. While there were certainly other committed skeptics who came across my calls for dialogue partners who chose not to engage with me, this lone interaction gives me hope that there are far more people that are willing to engage in conversation than “trolls” who are closed-minded. While we should keep dialogue and rhetorical listening at the forefront, we should also selectively attend to those who are truly open-minded and offer the most opportunity for productive discussion.
Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment is available now through Routledge’s series on Advances in Climate Change Research.
Talking with Climate Skeptics: How to Engage Separators, Bargainers, and Harmonizers (Part 2)
by Emma Frances Bloomfield
Today’s post comes from our colleague Emma Frances Bloomfield, an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the intersection of science, religion, and politics from a rhetorical perspective. She received her PhD from USC Annenberg and wrote her dissertation on the similarities between science denial in the human origins and climate change controversies. She has written and presented on topics of the environment, digital rhetoric, narratives, political communication, and health. Her new book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, is available now through Routledge’s series on Advances in Climate Change Research.
My previous post explained my typology of the separators, bargainers, and harmonizers and their rhetorical features as analyzed in official organizational discourse and interviews. In this post, I provide brief overviews of my proposed strategies for responding to the disparate motivations and frameworks of each category. It is beyond the scope of this post to explain these strategies in detail, but I offer brief overviews and examples of dialogue in hopes of piquing readers’ interests to explore further.
I propose three strategies for engaging separators in conversation. The first is asking questions, where we seek to learn more about the root of our dialogue partners’ skepticism. The second is accepting premises, where we do not alter but instead embrace our dialogue partners’ driving values. The third is making it personal, where we redirect existing values to align with pro-environmental policies. In a conversation with a separator, I accepted their premise that Christians should primarily be concerned about evangelization but asked if Christians could also be environmentalists. During the conversation, the separator noted it was acceptable for “us [C]hristians to care for our common household” as long as we prioritize “faith and moral issue[s]” over environmental protection. For this separator, caring for the environment was not a negative behavior; it only became so when care for the environment displaced other concerns. In accepting the value they placed on evangelization, I was able to modify and expand the separator’s perspective to include environmentalism as compatible with evangelization.
I propose three strategies for engaging bargainers in conversation. The first is working within frames, where we do not seek to shift the conversation back to climate science, but instead remain within religious and economic frames. The second is joining the revolution, where we embrace the uncertainties inherent in scientific knowledge and measure current climate skepticism against scientific criteria. The third is employing examples, where we find concrete information and statistics from within bargainers’ frames that disrupt stereotypes and generalizations that bargainers may hold. In a conversation with a bargainer, I sought to disrupt their assumption that environmental policies would make life less comfortable. After discussing research I had done on renewable energy, the bargainer responded, “if sustainable and renewable power is the solution, I really don’t care where the electricity comes from as [long as] my computers and phones and tablets … work.” This bargainer assumed environmental policies would interfere with their everyday life, but during our conversation, my openness to listen to their concerns enabled me to speak from a position of trust and correct this perception.
I propose three strategies for encouraging environmental behaviors in harmonizers. The first is shifting frames from private to public, where we emphasize the importance of community and public behaviors. The second is communicating urgency, where we infuse the reality of climate change with immediacy. The third is thinking globally, where we build on the harmonizers’ ecological worldview, so that they may see that actively protecting a variety of different forms of life is implicated in Christian stewardship. These strategies largely build on harmonizers’ existing environmental values in order to encourage them to view their environmental behaviors as globally important. Many harmonizers I spoke with were already committed to personal changes, but they did not feel comfortable sharing them with others. One harmonizer I spoke to argued, “Even though God will instantly transform nature when Christ returns, that does not mean Christians should just wait for God to do the work when Christ returns.” This quotation reveals an interesting tension between environmental restoration and the apocalypse that repeated itself in my interviews.
The most prominent contributions of the book are the interviews that are examples of how people think about, talk about, and express themselves on these important topics. I greatly enjoyed my conversations and found that all my dialogue partners (save one or two) were respectful, open, and willing to talk; they showed me that we have far more in common than we might assume. Even separators and bargainers were concerned about the environment, wanted to invest in more eco-friendly technology (largely for economic benefit), and cared about long-term impacts. What was different were the labels people were using, and their perceptions of what it meant to adopt the term “environmentalist.” Willing to listen and be open to new information, my conversations and dialogues fostered mutual respect and understanding.
Talking with Climate Skeptics: How to Engage Separators, Bargainers, and Harmonizers (Part 1)
by Emma Frances Bloomfield
Today’s post comes from our colleague Emma Frances Bloomfield, an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the intersection of science, religion, and politics from a rhetorical perspective. She received her PhD from USC Annenberg and wrote her dissertation on the similarities between science denial in the human origins and climate change controversies. She has written and presented on topics of the environment, digital rhetoric, narratives, political communication, and health. Her new book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, is available now through Routledge’s series on Advances in Climate Change Research.
In our ongoing conversations and controversies about the environment and climate change, it becomes ever more pressing to uncover and explore obstacles to progress and policy enactment. In my forthcoming book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, I specifically address the sometimes productive and sometimes detrimental role that religion and Christianity play in public attitudes on the environment. While some may view religion as an impediment to climate change beliefs, I wish to tease out these relationships in order to disrupt monolithic assumptions about both climate skeptics and religious adherents. The primary goal of the book is to create strategies for engagement – to start and continue conversations – by better understanding various audiences and stakeholders in controversies over climate change.
In my theoretical justification for the project, I propose that environmental communicators should be audience-focused. Drawing primarily from work by Kenneth Burke on identification, Richard Johannesen on dialogue, and Krista Ratcliffe on rhetorical listening, I argue that our environmental conversations must focus on engagement and understanding, instead of coercion and persuasion. A key contribution of the book is my focus on seeking to understand skeptics instead of dismissing them out of hand. This approach opens up opportunities for genuine exchange and trust-building, in order to uncover underlying motivations and perspectives. I explore the potential harms of entering conversations with pre-conceived biases (on the part of both environmental communicators and climate skeptics), in the process making use of rhetorical theories that may help us achieve commonality.
In the book, I propose a typology for categorizing how Christians make sense of their relationship to the environment and their attitudes toward climate change. Instead of categorizing people based on the strength of their denial, my typology of separators, bargainers, and harmonizers is based on public discourse about climate change and my interviews and interactions with climate skeptics and members of the Creation Care community (Christians who support environmental advocacy based on their faith). The typology emerged from the worldviews, frameworks, and guiding metaphors that were shared amongst them. The typology is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive but a new conceptualization of skepticism to tease out the interrelationships of Christianity and climate change.
The first category in the typology is the “separator.” Separators see a distinct, oppositional relationship between their interpretation and performance of their faith, and mainstream conclusions from climate science. Separators operate from within a “war” framework, which drives their discourse to be aggressive and highly polarized. For example, separators may accuse climate scientists of corrupting society’s morality or seeking to destroy religion’s influence. To outline the rhetorical features of the separators, I analyzed the public discourse of the Cornwall Alliance. The Cornwall Alliance draws a clear divide between their interpretation of Christianity and environmentalism, viewing them as incompatible. For example, Cornwall Alliance President Calvin Beisner argued that environmentalism is a “radical religion” and that Christians “must never conflate Biblical earth stewardship with environmentalism. The two are mutually exposed from – pardon the pun – the ground up.”
The second category in the typology is the “bargainer.” Bargainers negotiate their understanding of mainstream climate science with competing authorities, mainly religious and economic ones. Unlike the separators, bargainers are more likely to bring up scientific data and research as valid decision-making resources. However, they oftentimes undergo a bargaining process where that information is interpreted differently in order to refute mainstream interpretations. For example, bargainers may look at the statistic that 97% of scientists ascribe to anthropogenic climate change and interpret this to mean that there are still credible experts and scientists that are unconvinced. In substituting other authorities for scientific ones, bargainers operate under the framework of a revolution, where current understandings will be disrupted and replaced by further research. For example, the Acton Institute has argued that “an environmental ethic … rests firmly upon the foundation of both sound reasoning and divine revelation,” thereby framing reasoning and science as relying on Christian ideals.
The third category in the typology is the “harmonizer.” Harmonizers are not climate skeptics but are Christians who actively incorporate environmental protection into the performance of their faith. They are included in the typology to show the variety of ways, both negatively and productively, that religion influences environmental attitudes. Harmonizers are likely to see themselves as personally implicated in making environmental decisions, and they believe that Christians should be stewards of the environment. While there is little need to engage in conversations about the scientific reality of climate change with harmonizers, it is important to engage them on practical ways to enact their religious identity and make meaningful environmental changes. The Evangelical Environmental Network exemplifies the harmonizers’ ecological attitudes by noting the connectedness of all life. The organization’s goals include creating “renewed harmony and justice between people” and “between people and the rest of the created world.”
It is my hope that by book will appeal to different audiences at the intersection of the environment, communication, dispute resolution, collaboration, climate science, and faith. By pairing communication and rhetorical theories with practical solutions, the book aims to not only produce knowledge but contribute to progress in environmental conversations. Future projects should build on these ideas by further testing and refining the typology, exploring how other ideological identities intersect with the environment, and proposing additional strategies for engaging in environmental conversations.
Cheap Grace: White Evangelicals and the Matter of Race
by William Trollinger
There’s no getting around it. White evangelicalism has a race problem. And some white evangelicals are getting the message.
So it is that some Westmont College students are agitating for the removal of the “white Jesus” in the campus prayer chapel. So it is that some Taylor University students and faculty are protesting their administration’s decision to have Vice President (and evangelical) Mike Pence as their commencement speaker, in part because of the Trump Administration’s racist policies and language.
And so it is that, as Molly Worthen discusses in a recent New York Times opinion piece, “a vanguard of Christian consultants and community activists focused on racial justice is gaining a wider hearing in white evangelical institutions than ever before.” As Worthen suggests, some of this is directly related to the fact that white evangelicalism is shrinking: without people of color, the hemorrhaging of church members may just continue apace. But whatever the reason, more white evangelicals are dealing with questions of race. And Worthen’s conversations with the activists who are bringing this message into white churches
almost persuaded her that the steady accumulation of personal encounters, multiethnic Bible studies, and new seminary programs might amount to more than flashes of good will. Maybe they really are paving the way for the slow political transformation of white evangelicalism.
“Maybe” is right. It is one thing to decry individual racial prejudice. It is quite another to take into account the ways in which structures upholding white supremacy are at the very heart of American life and in many ways embedded in the very fabric of white evangelicalism. This is what critical race theory seeks to explain, i.e., “that race, as a socially constructed concept, functions as a means to maintain the interests of the white population that constructed it.”
As a historian of 20th-century America and American evangelicalism, the necessity of such structural analysis seems pretty obvious. But this notion is threatening to many white evangelicals. So it is that, as Worthen points out, evangelical leader John MacArthur has issued “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel,” in which the 11,041 (as of now) signatories “deny that the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical teaching.” So it is that the four white guys at Taylor University who published Excalibur– in which they decried the “leftist trends” on campus – attacked what they saw as the “uncritical endorsement of liberal-progressive ideals (e.g., in the form of Marxist-inspired critical race theory).”
Revealing their ideological commitments, the Excalibur authors (at least two of whom signed MacArthur’s “Statement”) suggested that instead of taking an approach which takes structural racism seriously, “a conservative-libertarian approach to race relations is most respectful of racial minorities and holds out the most promise for long term racial justice in this country.” Not only is there no historical evidence to support this claim. There is also no evidence that conservatives and libertarians were at the forefront of efforts to overturn Jim Crow America. As Milligan College historian Tim Dillon has noted, “the only silver lining [in this story] is that none of the instigators of Excalibur were historians.”
I share with Worthen both the wish that white evangelicalism’s increased interest in racism would translate into something like a political metamorphosis, and the grave doubts that significant change is coming. White evangelicalism has a serious race problem. And this problem cannot be overcome on the cheap.
Mike Pence, Taylor University, and the Political Realities of White Evangelicalism
by William Trollinger
Conservatives at Taylor University can breathe a sigh of relief. Mike Pence is on his way. The leftist assault has been thwarted.
Just 14 months ago the alarm was sounded at the evangelical school of 1900 undergraduates in Upland, Indiana. A newsletter — portentously entitled Excalibur — suddenly appeared throughout campus, in which the authors (who did not reveal themselves, fearful of the “current cultural climate” as well as “leftist trends” on campus) charged that Taylor was awash in
permissivist views of human sexuality, hostility toward creationist perspectives, . . . and uncritical endorsement of liberal-progressive ideals (e.g., in the form of Marxist-inspired critical race theory).
Adjunct professor Amy Peterson reports that, disturbingly but tellingly, “in some dorms, [Excalibur] was only distributed to the rooms of students of color and sexual minorities.”
Controversy erupted immediately, as many in the Taylor community resented and rejected the anonymous attacks. Within 48 hours, college president Paul Howell Haines had issued a “community letter,” in which he regretted that “the unsanctioned, anonymous, and suspect distribution of the publication sewed discord and distrust, hurting members of our community.”
The four white male Excalibur authors – two professors (biblical studies, and philosophy/religion), a soccer coach, and the university marketing director – felt compelled to reveal their identities. But they were not finished, as they renamed Excalibur as (the slightly less pretentious) ResPublica, while continuing to press the trope of white male victimhood (the newsletter’s subtitle now reading, “The Conservative Voice You Are Free to Ignore”). More significant, just two weeks after sending his letter expressing concern for those who were hurt by Excalibur, President Haines backtracked, issuing a second statement in which he said that “those who believe he stood against the content of Excalibur misread his statement”; instead, what he had really wanted to communicate was that “Taylor is a place where we wrestle with ideas of all kinds.”
So much for standing with those who were hurt by “the unsanctioned, anonymous, and suspect distribution” of Excalibur. But then again, Haines may well have been – as is common among evangelical college administrators – looking over his “right shoulder” to the conservatives in Taylor’s constituency who were alarmed by the claims made by the Excalibur quartet.
And now, one year later, Haines has found a way to reassure conservatives that Taylor is the Right kind of school. As Haines announced last Thursday:
Taylor University is pleased and honored to welcome to our campus and its 2019 Commencement exercises, Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Pence has been a good friend to the University over many years, and is a Christian brother whose life and values have exemplified what we strive to instill in our graduates. We welcome the Vice President and his wife, Karen Pence . . . and thank them for their love and service for our nation, our state, and our institution.
Once again, controversy has erupted at Taylor. The faculty voted 61-49 to register their dissent. One of the dissenters noted that, upon hearing the news, he “immediately became angry and cynical, thinking . . . that the administration was [betting] they could turn graduation into a political statement, and, furthermore, a revenue stream . . . pleas[ing] people with deep pockets with whom the administration would like to partner.” Many students – particularly students of color and LGBTQ students (the sorts of students targeted by Excalibur) – are quite upset; as one Puerto Rican student observed, “I was excited for graduation, since neither of my parents have a degree, [but now they have] to sit and listen to a man who is part of an administration that doesn’t care for our people.” Alumni responded with a petition calling on the university to rescind its invitation, a petition that, as I write, has approximately 5,000 signatures.
The administration has responded by asserting, in the words of the school’s provost, that “there is always something to be gained from listening” and “working through our opinions.” Last year students “worked through their opinions” by listening to the CEO of Interstate Batteries; two years ago, it was Butler University’s head basketball coach.
Some students and faculty are quite supportive of bringing Pence to campus. Pro-Pence alumni have themselves drafted a petition that has secured more than 2,000 signatures. Oddly written – e.g., “Taylor is by no means aligning themselves with the alleged controversial views of the Trump administration, they are simply giving a voice to all opinions and planes of thought” – the petition concludes with Romans 13:1-2 as the clinching argument:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.
It is not clear how these verses apply to Mike Pence delivering a commencement address, but among evangelicals it is a commonplace to trot out these verses in behalf of – and only in behalf of – conservative politicians and conservative policies.
Taylor alumnus C. Christopher Smith has responded to the controversy by calling for his alma mater and other evangelical institutions to abandon its allegiance to the Trump administration, and instead embrace “a new brand of evangelical politics” marked by “transparency, hospitality, and empathy.” As Smith sees it, not only is this alternative evangelicalism possible, but it “is quietly being cultivated by the Spirit outside the reach of the limelight.” Amy Peterson shares Smith’s hopefulness:
Since the 2016 presidential election, young evangelicals have had to rethink everything we’d been taught about what it means to be faithful Christians engaged in politics. If the uproar at Taylor this week is any indication, white evangelicals may not be such a monolithic voting bloc the next time around.
I wish I could share their optimism that the Taylor controversy is evidence that white evangelicals are rejecting the racist misogyny of the Trump administration and embracing an alternative, empathetic, hospitable politics. But polling data indicates otherwise: after two years, white evangelicals support Trump at approximately the same levels that they did in the 2016 election.
As Adam Laats has rightly noted, “faculty lounge” evangelicals simply do not represent evangelicalism as a whole. While many Taylor faculty and some Taylor students “might reel in dismay at the university’s decision to honor Mike Pence,” some faculty and many students are thrilled that Pence will be on campus. As Laats continues, the administration, “as always desperate to reassure students and families [and donors] that they represent ‘real’ evangelical values, decided that Pence embodied these values.”
Nevertheless, Smith and Peterson are right that something is happening. That something is the shrinking of white evangelicalism. Between 2007 and 2017, the percentage of American adults who are white evangelicals dropped from 23% to 17%. The median age of white evangelicals is 55; only 11% of white evangelicals are between the ages of 18 and 29. More than this, only 8% of white American adults under the age of 30 identify as evangelical. And a good deal of evidence suggests that much of the disaffection with evangelicalism has to do with the fact that it is so tightly identified with the Christian Right.
Despite these demographic realities, and to quote from an earlier post,
Evangelical schools [like Taylor] hold the course, in the process competing with each other for a rapidly shrinking demographic. And all the while their “evangelical” brand becomes increasingly tarnished as “judgmental and hypocritical and hateful.”
Tucker Carlson and Ken Ham: Culture War Comrades
by William Trollinger
Over the past four months Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight has lost at least 34 advertisers thanks to Carlson’s history of offensive comments. Companies that have ceased to purchase advertising time include Farmers Insurance, Lexus, Red Lobster, and TD Ameritrade.
Some of Carlson’s comments are very recent, and some go back a decade. For those of you who have had the good fortune to miss out on what Carlson had to say, here are a few of the remarks that prompted the boycott:
- Immigrants make the US “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
- Iraq is a country of “semi-illiterate monkeys.”
- When women earn more than men, the result is a decline in marriage and thus “more drug and alcohol abuse, [and] higher incarceration rates.” “more drug and alcohol abuse, [and] higher incarceration rates.”
- Regarding a teacher facing charges for performing a full-contact lap dance for a 15-year-old student, “There’s no victim here . . . a 15-year-old boy looks at this as, like, the greatest thing that ever happened.”
- In defending arranged marriages with underage girls, Carlson opined that “the rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different.”
- “I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.”
- “I feel sorry for unattractive women.”
- Martha Stewart’s daughter is a “c—” who desperately needs to be spanked.
Carlson not only has refused to apologize in any fashion for his remarks, but – as is the wont of conservative white guys under fire – he presents himself as the victim of a liberal/feminist witch hunt.
But not everyone is abandoning the “persecuted” multimillionaire. As Newsweek reports, “commercial breaks on Tucker Carlson Tonight over the past month have been filled with lesser known brands.” Companies currently advertising on Carlson’s show include My Pillow USA, Nutrisystem, Sandals Resorts, American Petroleum Institute, and . . . Ark Encounter.
What? The theme park devoted to making the case that God had to drown up to 20 billion people because of their wickedness is also financially supporting someone who traffics in misogynistic and racist remarks, and who finds it humorous to joke about underage sex?
Yes.
To be fair, it is possible that Answers in Genesis (AiG) CEO Ken Ham simply does not find Carlson’s remarks to be offensive. For example, he has (as far as I can tell) had nothing to say about the plight of refugees at our southern border. Moreover, while Ham expends enormous energy blasting homosexuality he has (again, as far as I can tell) been silent about sexual harassment in the Southern Baptist Convention and elsewhere in fundamentalism.
More than this, AiG is all in for patriarchy, repeatedly making the case that wives should happily “accept their role as submissive helpers,” in this way emulating Jesus’ submission to the Father and the Spirit’s submission to both (Righting 174). While the latter claim seems to violate orthodox Christian theology, it does powerful work on behalf of cementing female subordination. And when it comes to violating sexual taboos, the Creation Museum (in explaining that Adam and Eve’s son Cain married his sister) explicitly asserts that heterosexual incest was not a problem for millennia:
While “sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage, whether between close relatives or not, has been wrong from the beginning,” marriage “between close relatives was not a problem in early biblical history,” as long as “it was one man for one woman (the biblical doctrine of marriage)” (Righting 177).
All this to say that it may be the case that Ham and his AiG colleagues are not bothered by Carlson’s racist misogyny and underage sex jokes.
Or perhaps all this is beside the point. As we argue in Righting America, AiG, the Creation Museum, and (now) Ark Encounter are Christian Right enterprises that are about “preparing and arming crusaders for the ongoing culture war” (15). And Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Donald Trump would seem to be on the same team, no matter how offensive and how at odds with the Gospel their statements may be.
In the end, maybe we should not be at all surprised that Ark Encounter is purchasing ads on Carlson’s program, regardless of what dreadful things he says.
Well, maybe not regardless. If he were to joke about gay sex, that might be the bridge too far.
White Supremacists, Fundamentalists, and the Ideology of Separation
by William Trollinger
Once you “other” someone, then you can do anything to them.
Rebecca Solnit is a wonderful writer, not just because she is masterful with words (and here I confess some envy), but also because she has a compelling moral sensibility that invites us to remember that – despite how bleak the current political moment might seem – there are lots of loving folks on this planet. For example, in an article arrestingly entitled, “The American Civil War didn’t end. And Trump is a Confederate president,” Solnit argues that those who (in contrast with the president and his minions) hold to equality and justice for all are on the side of history, but we (if I may) must reject culture war logic and instead reach out to those with whom we disagree.
Recently Solnit published a brilliant article in The Guardian entitled “Why You’ll Never Meet a White Supremacist Who Cares About Climate Change.” The article was prompted by the eerie reality that the slaughter of 50 Muslims in the Christchurch mosque coincided with the nearby climate strike on the part of the city’s youth. As Solnit put it, “it was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one, a clash of opposing ideologies.” On the one hand, climate activists are driven by a “recognition of the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems . . . on which that life depends.” Climate action is about protecting life, all life, “because human beings are not separate from the fate of insects, of birds, of the life in the sea, of the forests that sequester carbon, of the diseases that will thrive on a warmer planet.” In short, climate activists are driven by love, a love for the entire planet.
In contrast, the Right is adamantly, apocalyptically opposed to climate action, in good part because that would require recognizing that we are all connected on this planet, and that we must all cooperate. As Solnit puts it,
So much of rightwing ideology now is about a libertarian machismo in the “I can do anything I want” vein. It’s the pro-gun myth that we can each protect ourselves with a weapon when in reality we’re all safer with them out of our societies. It’s the idea that we can deregulate the hell out of everything and everyone can just look out for themselves whether it’s food safety or infrastructure safety or air and weather quality. To kill someone you have to feel separate from them, and some violence – lynching, rape – ritualizes this separateness. Violence too comes out of a sort of entitlement: I have the right to hurt you, to determine your fate, to end your life.
This same ideology of separation animates much of Protestant fundamentalism, even those parts of the fundamentalist movement which would recoil from the notion of “white supremacy.” For example, take Ken Ham’s young Earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG). It is not just that the creationists at AiG absolutely do not care about climate change (see here, here, here, and here). It is that they evince no concern for those – humans and animals alike – who will pay the price for global warming.
But all of this tightly connects with their notion that the saved (i.e., themselves and those who believe as they do) are completely separate from all other human beings. They imagine themselves so separate from all other human beings that they are very matter-of-fact about the notion that God is entitled to impose the worst sorts of violence on “the other.” How else to explain the creation of a theme park (Ark Encounter) that has its central theme that God rightly drowned up to 20 billion people (including children and infants) – not to mention billions of animals – in a global Flood? How else to explain AiG’s resolute affirmation of the justice of divine genocide?
I have struggled to understand the moral callousness at the heart of Ark Encounter, the Creation Museum, and AiG. But I think Solnit has it right. As far as these young Earth creationists are concerned, those species going extinct, those billions who (so they claim) drowned in the Flood, those billions (so they claim) who will suffer eternal torment in Hell: they are oher. We are separate from them. They are not our concern. So be it.
White Jesus at Westmont College: The Controversy
by William Trollinger
Last weekend Sue and I were at Westmont College (Montecito CA) for the 18th annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts. The theme of this year’s conference was “High Anxiety: Liberal Arts and the Race to Success,” for which we contributed a paper on the ways in which academic rigor and an interdisciplinary first-year curriculum can actually work against undergraduate anxieties regarding future careers.
Interestingly, we were invited by a small group of Westmont administrators and staff to show up early for an informal conversation regarding the “white Jesus controversy” which has roiled Westmont’s campus community this academic year.
First, some background. In December 1959, Westmont student Nancy Voskuyl died in an automobile accident. She was the daughter of Westmont president Roger Voskuyl, and, as a memorial to her, the Nancy Voskuyl Prayer Chapel was erected on campus. In this chapel there is a stained glass window featuring a Jesus who is light-skinned with Anglo-Saxon facial features, and who is standing on what appears to be North America.
This year “white Jesus” has become a point of contention. In the fall, various notes were taped to the window, pointing out that – to quote one of these notes – “Jesus wasn’t white.” But the controversy picked up steam in early February, when three Westmont students sent a letter to Westmont administrators – which was then posted online with an accompanying petition – in which they expressed concern about the “symbolic and theological impact” of the white Jesus and called for dialogue with the administration and board.
Since then there has been an evening presentation on white privilege at Christian colleges, a faculty forum on both the white Jesus window and the racial climate on campus, and a round-table discussion on “how should we depict Christ on campus?” And the student newspaper, The Horizon, has been filled with articles and responses, starting with a February 14 op-ed piece written by the three students who drafted the letter to administrators. Entitled “Westmont needs to face its White Jesus,” the authors asserted that “this image (and other representations of Jesus as White) comes out of a troubled chapter in the evangelical church’s history,” in which “evangelical Christianity aligned becoming Christian with becoming like White Europeans.” They conclude the article by asserting that
We believe it would be healthy and healing for Westmont to repent of colonialist imagery and embrace its commitment to “diversity in a biblical vision of God’s Kingdom.” In our view, removing a White-appearing Jesus from the spiritual heart of Westmont would be a manifestation of Westmont’s commitment to witnessing to the entirety of the kingdom of God, and would therefore be an “act of restorative justice.”
A few weeks later The Horizon devoted an entire issue to the topic. In a thoughtful article entitled, “A Westmont to belong to,” historian Alister Chapman – author of Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement – and sociologist Felicia Song praised the students for having “expressed [their] concerns with grace and self-restraint, thanked them for “raising these knotty matters,” and called on the campus community to “see this as an opportunity to live into God’s reconciling work.”
At the other end of the spectrum was an article by Professor Emeritus and Scholar-in-Residence Robert Gundry, entitled “Why objections to a white Jesus are only skin deep.” In this piece Gundry asserted that Jesus “may well have been fair-skinned,” asked if the authors of the petition and op-ed would really have us “conclude that all non-whites suffer oppression at the hands of whites?,” and complained that “to darken the skin of Jesus . . . would spoil the symbolism of his identifying himself with Nancy Voskuyl.” He even invoked a very familiar trope:
My first friends and playmates were exclusively black as black can be. My later friends and colleagues were often Hispanic. Knowing them as I have, I can’t take seriously – or as accurate – the OpEd’s implication that for them as people of color “salvation became about being or becoming White.”
So, what did we have to say to the administrators and staff persons with whom we met? In keeping with Chapman and Song, we noted that we were impressed with how articulate and thoughtful the student complainants were, especially as regards calling on Westmont College to live up to its stated commitments. More than this, these students were simply and rightly pointing out the ways in which “whiteness” remains the default position not only at Westmont, but within white evangelicalism (and not only white evangelicalism!) in the United States.
But what to do about the stained glass window? We acknowledged the fact that it is the job of college administrators to keep the institution afloat; given that many of the parents and donors supporting Westmont (and supporting other evangelical colleges) are conservative evangelicals/fundamentalists, it would be financially risky (without the savviest of rhetorical campaigns) to replace or alter the chapel window. That said, what about adding – in the chapel and/or other central locations on campus – a variety of ethnically diverse portrayals of Jesus? Why not add a black or brown Jesus in the chapel?
But that leads to a final point that I don’t think we made in our meeting. Evangelical colleges are forever trying to thread the needle, moving to become more progressive (or, better put, more Gospel-oriented) while at the same time not alienating their fundamentalist constituency. Will there be an evangelical college that simply decides to quit “looking over the right shoulder” and instead remake itself in the hopes of creating a new constituency?
Given the rapidly changing demographics of white evangelicalism in the US, this seems to us to be a crucial 21st-century question for evangelical colleges and universities.
Deciphering Glacial Change on the Tibetan Plateau during the Holocene
by Shuang-Ye Wu
And now, some actual science on global warming.
Dr. Shuang-Ye Wu is a climatologist working in the Department of Geology at University of Dayton. Her research focuses on how climate change alters the hydrologic cycle and the consequent precipitation patterns. In particular, she is interested in changes in extreme events such as extreme storms, floods and droughts. Dr. Wu has published 36 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and obtained grants from NSF, EPA and other funding agencies. Dr. Wu obtained her Master and PhD degrees from Cambridge University in UK, majoring in environmental geography. She is currently teaching courses in the Earth system science, climate change, and geographic information systems at UD.
This post summarizes work she and colleagues at Nanjing University (where she is affiliated as a visiting professor) will be doing over the next four years thanks to a $552,620 grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The Tibetan Plateau (Figure 1) is often referred to as the “water tower of Asia,” because of the large number of high mountain glaciers that form the headwaters of major river systems (e.g., Yangtze, the Yellow River, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Ganga, Indus, and Tarim) which supply water for irrigation, power and drinking water for over 1.4 billion people. These glaciers act as an important reservoir and buffer against drought in the world’s most populated region. During the past few decades, most of the Tibetan glaciers have experienced reduction in length, surface area and volume due to increasing temperature in this region. Recession of the Tibetan glaciers varies spatially, with the most significant retreat in the Himalayas, while there is a slight mass gain in the Karakoramglaciers in the northwest.
The state of a glacier is controlled by its mass balance, i.e., the difference in ice input from snowfall and ice output from melt. If the input is consistently greater than the output over a period of time, a glacier will get bigger (i.e. advance); otherwise, it will get smaller (retreat). Mass balance of a glacier is largely controlled by climate factors, in particular temperature (which affects the output) and precipitation (which affects the input). Although climatic change could affect the glacial mass balance instantly, the glacier extent (i.e. size) responds to changes in mass balance with a delay of decades to centuries depending on such factors as glacier size, surface slope, direction and debris cover. This delayed response makes it difficult to attribute an observed glacier change to any specific change in the climate, particularly when long-term glacial change data are lacking. Most of the observation data for glacial change are based on satellite images and in-situ measurements obtained during the past several decades, and little is known for glacial change on the Tibetan Plateau on the long time scales (e.g., millennial or longer).
Past glacial advances can often be reconstructed from mapping and dating sediments deposited by past glaciers (moraines) and from proglacial lakes. However, past glacial retreats are more difficult to detect because traces of minimum extents are now buried underneath modern glaciers. Recently, a new approach was developed to assess minimal glacier extent by determining the glacier basal ice age, which is interpreted as indicative of ice-free conditions at the time. In a recent project funded by the Natural Science Foundation of China, we propose to apply this approach to establish past glacial retreats on the Tibetan Plateau. Combined with previous data of glacial advances, this new information will allow us to examine how glaciers respond to climate change during the Holocene (~ 11000 calendar years ago to the present).
In this study, we propose to drill ice cores to bedrock and collect sediment samples at various locations on four glaciers over the Tibetan Plateau, in order to explore changes of glacial extent during the Holocene. They include: Cho Oyu in the Himalayas, Zangser Kangri in the central Tibetan Plateau, Shule Nanshan in the Qilian Mountains, and Chongce in the western Kunlun Mountains (Figure 2). After field samples are collected, we will determine accurately the ages of the sub-glacial sediment samples, terminal and periglacial sediment samples, as well as the bottom age of the ice cores drilled from the glaciers. These bottom ages suggest previous smaller than present glacial extents at various times during the Holocene because of the absence of older ice at the studied sites. Based on this assumption, we will estimate the glacier reduction by applying GIS and spatial statistics methods during the bottom ages (which are estimated to be around 6000-9000 years ago based on previous studies). Together with the time series of the quaternary glacial advance events, we will re-examine the previously suggested asynchronous glaciation on Milankovitch timescales over the Tibetan Plateau. We will also update the Holocene climate reconstruction over the study region, and decipher the glacial responses to the past climatic conditions on the long time scale that extends far beyond the instrumental period. Our results will have important implications for the prediction of the glacier fluctuations over the Tibetan Plateau in the near future with anthropogenic global warming.
The Past is the Present: Henry Ford’s Campaign Against the Jews
by William Trollinger
Near the end of Black Reconstruction, that brilliant 1935 historical study that was decades ahead of books written by white historians, W. E. B. DuBois eloquently observed that
nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things . . . And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable? (714)
But the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan would beg to differ with DuBois.
100 years ago, in January 1919, automobile mogul and world-famous celebrity Henry Ford purchased the Dearborn Independent. Within a few months, and as heralded with the headline, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” Ford turned this little paper over to the most vicious sort of anti-Semitism. Over the next few years, articles in the Independent blamed the “Jewish menace” for any and all problems in American life (even problems in major league baseball), and again and again attacked an alleged Jewish cabal for its manipulation of the world’s finances and culture for its own nefarious purposes. In this vein Ford also publicized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery which purported to provide the details of how, since the time of Christ, a covert Jewish conspiracy was at work in an effort to control the globe.
It turns out that there was an audience for anti-Semitic hate speech, as the Dearborn Independent soon had nearly one million subscribers. More than this, Ford’s publishing company took many of these articles, reprinted them in four books (collectively known as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem), and sold them across the globe.
None of this is news to historians. But it is also true that dark stories from America’s past are all-too-conveniently forgotten, and so they must be retold. So on the 100th anniversary of Henry Ford purchasing the Dearborn Independent, esteemed Michigan journalist Bill McGraw told the above story in The Dearborn Historian, a tiny quarterly magazine published by the city’s historical commission and co-edited by McGraw.
Or, I should say, McGraw was going to tell the story in The Dearborn Historian, of which he was the co-editor. The mayor squelched the issue and had McGraw removed from his post, explaining that
We want Dearborn to be understood as it is today – a community that works hard at fostering positive relationships . . . This edition of The Historian could become a distraction from our continuing messages of inclusion and respect.
Fostering inclusion and respect requires pretending that exclusion and hate never happened? It seems likely that Dearborn’s mayor was much more concerned about protecting the image of Dearborn’s favorite son. (Of course, the mayor failed to take into account that squelching the article meant it would come out elsewhere).
As suggested by the Dearborn Independent’s circulation numbers, Henry Ford’s campaign of anti-Semitism had a significant impact here in the United States. For one thing, it is thanks to Ford’s newspaper and books that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion became very popular in certain corners of American culture. To give just one example, in the early 1930s William Bell Riley – the organizing genius behind American fundamentalism – turned to the Protocols for his guide to world affairs. As I noted in God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism, Riley (who was not alone among American fundamentalists in his vicious anti-Semitism) found in the Protocols the evidence that Jews were determined to establish a “king despot of Zion” who
would have absolute control of the world’s finances, education, press, and courts, and would establish a uniform atheistic religion to which all people would be required to adhere. (72)
But Ford’s campaign of anti-Semitism also had a horrific global impact. The International Jew – which was first published in German in 1922 – was very popular in Germany, and proved to be an ideological inspiration for the Nazi Party. In 1931 Adolf Hitler gave an interview to a Detroit News reporter from his office, which had on the wall a huge portrait of Henry Ford. Asked about the portrait, Hitler replied that “I owe my inspiration to Henry Ford.” Ford was rewarded in 1938 – just after the German Army invaded Austria – with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, the highest award given to foreigners by the Third Reich.
And Ford’s legacy continues to this day, as Bill McGraw discovered in his research on The Dearborn Independent. As journalist Anna Clark noted in her Columbia Journalism Review article on the squelching of McGraw’s article,
McGraw ties Ford’s legacy to the present-day hate that has been exposed in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and beyond. “I was totally blown away by how active Ford is” in online white supremacist forums, Mc Graw says. The industrialist is mentioned “hundreds of thousands of times.” McGraw noticed that people who appeared to be “new to the movement” were encouraged by Ford’s status, which they saw as giving legitimacy to their views. “Hey, look at this incredible American, this global celebrity: he thinks like us,” is how McGraw summarizes the posts.
Pretending that “hideous mistakes” and “frightful wrongs” did not happen does not eliminate the hideous and frightful from our past. Especially when it turns out that the past is not even past.
(Thanks to my colleague and friend John Inglis for pointing me to the Dearborn story.)
