Creationists Deny Global Warming (or, Deny that Global Warming Matters); The Bible Tells Them So
by William Trollinger
It sounds as if it comes straight from the Exxon public relations machine, except for the bizarre biblical twist.
According to the young Earth creationists at Answers in Genesis (AiG), anti-Christian leftists are fueling a global warming panic, calling for expensive and un-American regulations on energy companies that will ruin our economy while also harming the poor. All this while there is little evidence for global warming, and all this while significant global warming – if actually true – would improve life on the planet.
These assertions are in keeping with the Koch brothers, and in keeping with the longstanding commitment of many or most evangelicals to unfettered capitalism.
But because the folks at AiG are young Earth creationists, they go beyond standard right-wing fare to claim that global warming denial is grounded in biblical truth. To be specific, they argue that to deny global warming is in keeping with reading the first eleven chapters of Genesis as literally true, and in keeping with the ongoing battle of true Christians v. mainstream biology and geology. As one AiG contributor put it,
Global warming is an arena where the battle between biblical truth and evolutionary truths is currently raging.
According to AiG, climate history is the story of dramatic, sometimes horrific, changes. The most dramatic example is the global Flood, which is described in Genesis 6-8, which took place 3400 years ago or so, and which may have killed 20 billion people. This particular massive climate change was – so the young Earth creationists claim – almost immediately followed by other deadly climate changes, in the form of the (one and only) Ice Age and then (when things warmed up) massive flooding.
In short, climate history is the history of catastrophes. In an article entitled “Global Warming — Normal in an Abnormal World,” Ken Ham argues that “the earth’s climate has gone through major periods of change, and a fifth change is coming [and] in every case, humans did not produce the change directly.” Echoing the language of dispensational premillennialism, in which history is divided into separate dispensations (each of which ends with God’s judgment), Ken Ham argues that we can divide climate history into the pre-Flood Earth, the Flood, the Ice Age, and the Warming Earth (our contemporary age). As regards the future, and borrowing explicitly from dispensational premillennialism:
A fifth period of major climate change is coming – the final and most dramatic change: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up” (2 Peter 3:10). After this time Christians will live in new heavens and a new earth that will remain perfect forever.
As another AiG contributor has observed,
These climate variations should not surprise us or cause undue alarm. We know that God is holding the earth together until the day of His final judgment, and nothing can destroy it until He dissolves it Himself.
No need to fret about global warming. Divine destruction is nigh. Time to chill.
And thanks to Joe Arrendale, my graduate assistant and a doctoral student at the University of Dayton, for his work of gathering and summarizing the AiG climate change articles.
Creationists Deny Global Warming (or, Deny that Global Warming Matters): Part 3
by William Trollinger
As Ken Ham proclaims again and again, the crisis facing Western civilization is the “gender revolution” :
The West has increasingly abandoned God’s Word – and the truth that we’re created male and female that is abundantly clear in Scripture (Genesis 1:27) as well as biologically obvious – and the results are more chaos and an environment where evil can flourish.
We need to be alarmed – even frightened – by the “gender revolution.”
But when it comes to global warming, Answers in Genesis (AiG) has a message for us: it’s time to chill. There is no conclusive evidence that the Earth is warming; even if it is warming it is not because of us and it is not significant; but even if the Earth is warming significantly, that may very well be a good thing (given the possible bumper crops in northern Canada and – with the melting of the ice — the increased Arctic shipping).
So, if global warming is not happening or it is not happening much or it is really happening but that’s a good thing, why all the global warming alarmism?
That’s simple. It is the product of an anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-capitalist political correctness promoted by folks (like Al Gore) who also want to make lots of money from the global warming scare.
But that is not the whole story. According to AiG, not only is global warming alarmism politically and economically driven, it also – and here’s argument #5 on behalf of denying that we should do anything about global warming – badly hurts the poor. Placing restrictions on energy corporations not only limits the freedom of corporations to do what they want to do, but it also means “increased costs of producing food, powering vehicles, and heating and cooling homes” such that “lower-income families, especially in less-developed countries, would be hit especially hard.” According to one AiG author, carbon regulation “could actually cause suffering in some nations where resources would be better spent feeding the poor.”
In making this argument that efforts to combat global warming actually hurts those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the folks at AiG draw upon Calvin Beisner. Beisner is the head of the Cornwall Alliance, an organization that spreads the message of global-warming denial among evangelicals. As quoted by AiG, Beisner (“a respected environmental expert”) has pronounced that “the policies that are being promoted to fight global warming not only will not make a difference . . . but also will have a great harmful impact on the world’s poor.”
For all of Beisner’s concern for the poor, he fails to mention that much of the funding for his Cornwall Alliance has come from the Donor’s Trust (an organization with close ties to the Koch brothers) as well as from the Exxon-Mobil corporation. Is Beisner more concerned with the poor, or his fossil fuel funders?
And what about AiG? What is its investment in denying global warming? And how does their global warming denial square with their theology? That’s the topic of the next post.
And thanks to Joe Arrendale, my graduate assistant and a doctoral student at the University of Dayton, for his work of gathering and summarizing the AiG climate change articles.
Is the Creation Museum Changing Its Story?
by Patrick Thomas
Last week I had the great fortune of visiting the Creation Museum for the third time. As I’m currently on sabbatical, I was eager to visit the museum now that I finally have the time to explore some new writing projects, one of which stems from a post I’d written a few years ago for the Righting America blog on a particular part of the Creation Museum, the Wonders Room. I’m especially interested in the role this room plays at the museum as a kind of antechamber to the Creation Museum’s pièce de résistance, the starting point for the museum’s 7 C’s – the garden of Eden.
Unfortunately, I was unable to see the Wonders Room on this visit. In fact, I’m not entirely sure the Wonders Room still exists. This is because the Creation Museum is doing some major renovations to, by my estimation, approximately 25% of the museum displays (half of the displays on the first floor).
Some of the changes are subtle and would be unremarkable for new visitors. For instance, in the Main Hall, the museum previously housed a series of six displays depicting scientific evidence for biblical creation, including live finches (used to make a creationist case for speciation), chameleons (used as evidence for intelligent design), poison dart frogs (used to show how the fall of creation introduced harm into the world), and various plants, fungi, and fossils. All of these are gone.
In a space with so much artifice – historical replicas, mannequins, animatronics, fake plants, etc., it’s sad to see the museum lose some of the more natural displays, although removing them doesn’t seem like a major change.
More remarkable is that all of the rooms leading to the Garden of Eden are no longer accessible, including the Paleontologist Dig Site display, the Starting Points room, Graffiti Alley, Culture in Crisis, the Six Days Theater, and the Wonders Room. Instead, visitors follow a narrow hallway leading directly from the Main Hall to the Garden of Eden. Along the hall, the left wall features some placards from the Starting Points room, and the right wall features small, temporary signs affirming the authority of the Bible in rendering Earth’s history.
Certainly, it’s not uncommon for a museum to change displays. Museums of all kinds have rotating or visiting exhibitions. The Creation Museum also has items on loan from the Museum of the Bible. But that’s not the kind of work the Creation Museum is doing now. And it’s more than one exhibit – the first eight rooms of the Creation Museum are under reconstruction. Talk about different starting points!
Some of the changes at the Creation Museum (for instance, the newer $5 parking charge) are negligible to the experience at the museum, the changes underway raise an important question about the legitimacy of the Creation Museum’s claim about offering a literal reading of Genesis: if the reading of the Bible that the Creation Museum offers is literally true, if the message of the Creation Museum presents a perspicuous teaching of God’s Word, why revise it? What divinely inspired purpose would such revisions fulfill? And whose agenda is served by augmenting or otherwise refashioning the museum?
Okay – that’s three questions.
But to my mind, these questions require answers. The Creation Museum is, purportedly, a museum of earthly history – the history of a young Earth. Are the revisions of the Creation Museum an indication that this history has changed? Or, perhaps, is Answers in Genesis in need of a new story to tell at the Creation Museum?
We’ll have to wait for a few more months to see the changes at the Creation Museum, but for now AiG is raising more questions than answers.
Creationists Deny Global Warming (or, Deny that Global Warming Matters): Part 2
by William Trollinger
Last week Climate Central – a group of scientists and journalists that research and publicize facts about and impacts of climate change – put out a report entitled “Climate Pile-Up: Global Warming’s Compounding Dangers.” According to this report, there are a variety of ways in which global warming produces “compounding threats”:
Greenhouse gas emissions increase atmospheric temperature, in turn boosting the capacity of the air to hold moisture. Combined with the heat, that enhances the evaporation of water from soil. In drier areas, these processes can result in drought, boost heat waves, and ripen the conditions for wildfires. In places that are commonly wet, on the other hand, heightened water evaporation results in excess rain – which can fall on saturated soil and lead to floods. In the oceans, meanwhile, warmer water evaporates faster, potentially increasing wind speeds and boosting the downpours released by hurricanes, whose surges can be aggravated by sea level rise.
And given the warming trajectory, things are going to get much worse, and soon, unless humans make “deep cuts to warming emissions.”
So comes the word from actual climate scientists. Then there’s Ken Ham and his band of young Earth creationists at Answers in Genesis (AiG), who confidently report that global warming is not a calamitous crisis, or even a significant problem worth addressing.
As I noted in part 1 of this series, “Ken Ham and AiG approach global warming . . . with a cascade of arguments that often seem to conflict with each other.” Having worked through 35 AiG articles on the topic, I have been able to identify seven basic arguments, and I have organized them from what seems less important to them (i.e., matters of science) to what seems more important (i.e., matters related to politics and the Bible).
As discussed in the last blog post, the first three arguments are as follows:
- There is no conclusive evidence that the Earth is warming.
- But if the Earth is warming, it is not significant, and it is not because of us.
- But if the Earth is warming and it is significant, that may very well be a good thing.
Evidence provided to support argument #3 includes easier shipping in the Arctic as the ice melts (what about New Orleans?), increased agricultural production in northern Canada (what about Nebraska?), and the fact that more people die of cold than heat (the hotter it is, the better for human longevity?)
And there is the argument that the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will result in “increased crop yields and enhanced forest growth.” It turns out that this argument is also a favorite of William Happer, who apparently has just been appointed to head Trump’s panel on climate change and national security (even though he has no expertise in climate science). According to Happer, “the demonization of carbon dioxide . . . [is] just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”
Trivializing the Holocaust should be beyond anyone’s moral pale. But the suggestion that folks concerned about global warming are driven by a Nazi-like political correctness is actually in keeping with one of AiG’s favorite arguments:
4. Anti-global warming activists are driven by politics and greed.
Anti-global warming activists believe Big Government “is responsible for [our] salvation,” even though their proposed governmental regulations would be very “cost[ly] to individuals and businesses,” and even though – in the end – a full-scale attack on global warming “is more likely to ruin the economies of first-world nations than make any significant impact.” But these hysterically uninformed activists are driven by a “desire to change our way of life, and in particular, the Christian worldview that has guided the Western Hemisphere,” and they are supported by liberal journalists and celebrities who promote their global warming propaganda. The anti-global warming activists want to muzzle all those who “are uncomfortable with the politically correct version of the man-made global warming crisis,” to the point of wanting to criminalize dissent. All the while “there is big money in climate change issues” for climate change scientists and businesses, and especially for climate change cheerleader Al Gore.
In the 35 AiG articles I examined there is nary a word about the “big money” made by fossil fuel corporations, and nary a word about the millions of dollars these corporations are spending to persuade us that the earth is not warming. Whether or not any of their money is going to AiG, the Koch brothers et al. certainly have to love AiG’s message. More on this in the next post.
And thanks to Joe Arrendale, my graduate assistant and a doctoral student at the University of Dayton, for his work of gathering and summarizing the AiG climate change articles.
Creationists Deny Global Warming (or that Global Warming Matters): Part 1
by William Trollinger
A few days ago, the New York Timesran an article by David Wallace-Wells, author of the forthcoming book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. In his article, “Time to Panic,” Wells points out that
The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island.
Wallace-Wells argues that while “we have probably squandered the opportunity to avert two degrees of [global] warming,” through collective action on the part of “communities, states, nations,” as well as “international agreements,” we “can avert three degrees and certainly all the terrifying suffering that lies beyond that threshold.”
Not everybody agrees that global warming is a cataclysmic crisis, or even a problem we must address. Take, for example, Ken Ham and his fellow young Earth creationists at Answers in Genesis (AiG).
When it comes to what AiG has to say about global warming, I am struck by the similarities with the infamous “Gish Gallop.” Named for creationist Duane Gish, who often employed the approach in debates with evolutionists, it is “a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments.”
This is precisely how Ken Ham and AiG approach global warming, with a cascade of arguments that often seem to conflict with each other. But what is great about print – be it blog posts or magazine articles or even museum plaques – is that you can slow it down, you can take the time to see what precisely is being argued.
In reviewing approximately 35 AiG articles on the topic of climate change, I have identified seven basic arguments that Ham and company make regarding global warming. Over the next few posts I will work through these arguments, proceeding from what seems to be less important to the young Earth creationists (i.e., science) to what is more important (i.e., politics and the Bible).
1. There is no conclusive evidence that the Earth is warming.
The science regarding global warming is still in its infancy, and the mathematical models that have been developed “are not yet useful.” Not only has the change in temperature been very modest over the past century, and “the earth really isn’t warming up as predicted,” but there is some evidence that it was “a little warmer, particularly in the northern hemisphere” in the years between 950 and 1250 than it is today. In fact, it could be that, instead of global warming, what we are seeing today are signs of global cooling.
2. But if the Earth is warming, it is not significant, and it is not because of us.
If there has been global warming, the “amount of warming has been slight, officially about 1.6 F since 1880,” and even that amount seems to be an exaggeration. Not only has this “slight global warming” had “no detectable effect on any severe weather phenomenon,” but whatever global warming has taken place, the fact is that “man’s contribution is slight, and not enough manmade warming has occurred to panic over.” Instead, as noted in an AiG article entitled “Is Man the Cause of Global Warming?,” there are “natural causes of climate change,” including volcanic eruptions, El Nino, and sunspots.
3. But if the Earth is warming and it is significant, that may very well be a good thing.
For one thing, “global warming will save the lives of many people, since many more people die of the cold than die of the heat.” More than this, the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has resulted and will result in “increased crop yields and enhanced forest growth.” More than this, “Canadian farmers could harvest bumper crops” where they can’t now, and there “would be increased shipping in the Arctic Ocean,” thanks to the melting of the ice.
There is no reference to the fact that bumper crops in northern Canada would suggest less than bumper crops in, say, Kansas. Perhaps Kansans should begin to migrate to the Yukon. But as regards coastal cities affected by the melting of Arctic ice, the suggestion is that people should “slowly move inland or build more and higher dikes.”
Encouraging words from AiG. More on young Earth creationists denying global warming (or denying that it is a problem) in my next post.
And thanks to Joe Arrendale, my graduate assistant and a doctoral student at the University of Dayton, for his work of gathering and summarizing the AiG climate change articles.
The Red Summer: 100 Years Ago, Part Two
by William Trollinger
1919 was quite the dreadful year. The Red Scare, and the Red Summer.
In the Red Scare, the federal government targeted immigrants – particularly Russians, Germans, Hungarians, and Italians – for alleged radical activities, even deporting some to the Soviet Union. But the U.S. government was not only alarmed about immigrants. In 1919, the government was also very worried about African Americans. They were worried even though African Americans played a heroic role in the war effort. Not only had black workers contributed to wartime industrial production – with perhaps 500,000 African Americans moving from the South to cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit to work in the factories – but another 367,000 black soldiers served in Europe. The Army was segregated, and 90% of these African American soldiers were relegated to support roles. But many of those who saw combat served valiantly, most particularly the 369th Infantry Regiment, which was assigned to serve under French command because so many white American soldiers refused to fight alongside black soldiers. These “Harlem Hellfighters” fought the Germans almost continuously for six months, reportedly never giving up a foot of land. The French loved them, referring to them as the “lost children” (having been abandoned by the United States) and awarding 171 members of the regiment the French Legion of Merit.
Having served their country, black soldiers came home determined to seek better treatment for themselves and their race. But they came home to a place that had not changed. The federal government actively supported racial discrimination; for example, President Wilson had segregated federal offices, and he hosted a special White House screening of “Birth of a Nation,” the film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan. This government understood calls for racial equality under the law as dangerously un-American. During the war, the government’s gigantic espionage effort had included spying on a variety of black leaders as well as organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After the war, the federal government – particularly J. Edgar Hoover and the anti-Radical Division – ratcheted up the surveillance of African Americans. African Americans who talked and wrote against racial oppression had their publications monitored, their phones tapped, their mail opened, their organizations and audiences infiltrated by spies. Racial equality was not only a frightening idea. It was Bolshevik. As Attorney General Palmer said before Congress in 1919, “’practically all of the radical organizations in this country have looked upon the Negroes as particularly fertile ground for the spreading of their doctrines . . .’ As a consequence, ‘the Negro is seeing red’” (Kornweibel, xii-xiv).
One black World War I veteran plaintively wrote: “America, will you let us fall?/After we so bravely answered your call?/Now why! Oh why! Is Freedom’s Door/Closed against us as it was before?” (McWhirter, 14). The answer was yes. In 1919, there was a renewed commitment to white dominance, a commitment that included the willingness to use the most horrific forms of violence to keep black people in their place. 84 African Americans were lynched in 1919. Black soldiers in uniform were favorite targets, the fear being that serving in the war had led them to forgetting that their place was at the bottom of American society. In one Georgia town, a uniformed soldier was dragged off a train by fifty whites, taken to the woods, shot, and then hacked into little pieces. In another Georgia town, a soldier was ordered by a white mob to take off his uniform and never wear it again; refusing the order, he was summarily executed. Often the explanation for a lynching was that a black man had made improper advances to a white woman. In Vicksburg, Mississippi 23-year-old Lloyd Clay was falsely accused of entering a white girl’s bedroom; while the sheriff stood by puffing on a cigar, Clay was covered with oil, set aflame, and raised onto a tree, where a crowd of a thousand whites took pot shots at him, and children cried for a piece of Clay’s charred finger. In Ellisville, Mississippi white citizens placed newspaper ads announcing the forthcoming burning of a black man who supposedly assaulted a white woman. The mayor and governor said they had no power to stop it, and a crowd of 3000 simultaneously burned and hanged their victim.
In the “Red Summer” of 1919, there were also 34 race riots, most involving whites attacking blacks while public officials stood by (at least, until blacks fought back). These riots took place north and south, in places such as Omaha, Charleston, Washington DC, San Francisco, Knoxville. In July, a terrible riot broke out in Chicago. Beginning as a conflict on a South Side beach, with the stoning of a black youth swimming in the lake, it quickly escalated when white gangs began pulling African Americans off streetcars and beating them; at the end there were 38 dead, 537 wounded, and 1000 people homeless. But this was not nearly as bad as what happened in Elaine Arkansas, when white landowners – fearful that their sharecroppers were about to unionize – murdered hundreds of African Americans, dumping many of the bodies in the Mississippi River in order to hide the evidence of slaughter.
100 years ago. A dreadful year.
Kornweibel, Jr., Theodore. “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
McWhirter, Cameron. Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011.
The Red Scare: 100 Years Ago, Part One
by William Trollinger
In some ways, 2019 looks like 1919. Too much so, actually.
On November 11, 1918, the Great War – with its conflicts across the globe, with its 15 to 18 million dead – officially came to an end. In America there were great celebrations. And yet, the silencing of the guns in Europe was immediately followed by a full-scale culture war in the United States. This culture war exploded on the American scene in 1919, and dominated much of the so-called roaring Twenties. And while this culture war has changed in some details over time, it is a culture war that has never gone away. Massive government surveillance, with little or no attention to constitutional rights; violence against African Americans, often tolerated by and sometimes carried out by government officials; a political groundswell for the mass deportation of immigrants.
Sound familiar?
In thinking about how the Great War produced culture war in the United States it is important to keep in mind that many (perhaps most) Americans had wanted to stay out of the European conflict. Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 thanks in good part to the fact that, as his campaign slogan bragged, “He Kept Us Out of War.”
But within weeks of having been sworn into office Wilson declared war on Germany. To get the American people (reluctant as they were) behind the war effort, the government employed a remarkable propaganda campaign, including posters, billboards, patriotic songs, millions of pamphlets, and 150,000 public speakers touring the nation giving four-minute pro-war speeches. This campaign was designed to demonize the Germans and all those Americans who were not sufficiently patriotic. But the Wilson Administration did not limit itself to a propaganda blitz. A series of laws – the Alien, Espionage, and Sedition Acts – were passed that gave the federal government sweeping powers to silence unpatriotic troublemakers, including the power to imprison for twenty years anyone who used any “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution . . . , or the military or naval forces . . . , or the flag of the United States.’”
Of course, it would take real work to locate all those Americans who were critical of the war effort. So the federal government implemented a gigantic espionage effort throughout the nation. This espionage effort targeted African Americans, German Americans, immigrants, pacifists, socialists, and union organizers as the most likely to be unpatriotic. And it was an espionage effort that made use of undercover agents from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the army’s Military Intelligence Division, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the U.S. Postal Service, and even the U.S. Food Administration. But these were just the government spies. There was an even larger network of volunteer spies, sent forth by organizations such as the Anti-Yellow Dog League, the All-Allied Anti-German League, the Boy Spies of America, the Sedition Slammers, and the American Protective League (APL). The APL alone had 300,000 agents “hidden in the folds of American society, watching, trailing, and taping their bosses, colleagues, employees, neighbors, even the local butcher or their children’s schoolteachers” (Hagedorn, 27-30).
And then, just as the Wilson Administration’s gigantic propaganda effort was really heating up, just as this enormous governmental and volunteer spy apparatus was hitting its stride, the war ended. Not surprisingly, the armistice did not end all that hatred of foreigners, all that obsession with enemies in our midst. Within a few weeks of Armistice Day the obsession with German agents and insufficiently patriotic Americans had been transformed into an obsession with radical foreign ideas – anarchism, socialism, communism – and those Americans who were duped into thinking such un-American thoughts. Thanks to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, communism was the primary obsession, an obsession that immediately made its way into popular culture. For example, there was Bolshevism on Trial, which won the Academy Award for film of the year. Bolshevism on Trial – based on the novel, Comrades, by Thomas Dixon (the same Thomas Dixon who wrote The Clansman, from which comes the movie, The Birth of a Nation) – told the story of an evil communist (the “Chief Comrade”) and his successful plan to convince a wealthy young woman (Barbara) to fund the creation of a communist utopia on an island just off Florida; when Barbara realizes that communism only brings misery and starvation she tries to leave, but the “Chief Comrade” will not let her go. Fortunately, at the last moment Barbara is rescued by the U.S. Navy. The film ends with the red flag coming down the flagpole, and the American flag going up.
Labor unions — their ranks filled by immigrants who were willing to stand up to their capitalist bosses – were viewed as communist-infested. When steelworkers and coal miners and longshoremen and others went on strike in 1919, they were described by newspapers as “red agitators,” dupes “soaked in the doctrines of Bolshevism,” “foreigners” who, “like rats infested with the plague, . . . should be exterminated or driven from the country” (Bennett, 188-189). When workers (as they had done for decades) paraded on May Day in major American cities, they were attacked by patriotic Americans: in Cleveland, Army veterans drove a tank into a peaceful parade of socialist workers. When loggers in Centralia, Washington gathered on armistice day in their International Workers of the World union hall, they were attacked by the American Legion; they fought back, and then were arrested en masse; one worker was taken from his jail cell, castrated, hung from a railroad bridge, and shot repeatedly.
Sometimes when people talk about the 1919 Red Scare they use terms like “popular hysteria,” as if the American people inexplicably endured a brief bout of mental or emotional illness. But this misses the point that this “hysteria” was in good part fomented by the government. States and governors fell all over each other hyping the communist threat, passing a host of laws designed to protect the people from Marxist tyranny (to give one example, 32 states passed laws against the display of red flags). But as in the Great War, the federal government led the way. In 1919 Congress produced a 1200-page report, Bolshevik Propaganda, which claimed that immigrants – particularly Russians, Germans, Hungarians, and Italians – had established Bolshevik “recruiting stations” in 23 American cities. In response, the gigantic espionage network created during the Great War was put to work investigating political radicals, particularly immigrants from eastern Europe. The attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer created an anti-Radical Division within the Justice Department, and placed 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover in charge. In November the Justice Department raided union halls and immigrant social clubs throughout America, arresting thousands of “radicals” (some of whom never understood why). At 4.15 AM, December 21, a former army transport ship, the Buford (which came to be known as the Soviet Ark), departed the port of New York with 249 aliens (including, most famously, the anarchist Emma Goldman) for Finland, where they were placed on trains for the Soviet Union. J. Edgar Hoover was on the dock that morning, basking in the publicity and telling the New York Tribune that “other ‘Soviet Arks’ will sail for Europe, just as often as it is necessary to rid the country of dangerous radicals’” (Hagedorn, 413-414).
So it was 100 years ago. Next time: race in 1919 America.
Bennett, David. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.
The Anti-Creationist Conspiracy?
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
As we indicated in our last post, Sue gave our second of four presentations at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio last Sunday. In the session, she talked about creation science and, in particular, the kinds of arguments young Earth creationists (like the folks at Answers in Genesis) make to “confirm” a biblical creation.
About halfway through the session, one of the men in attendance who hadn’t heard a lot about creation science before suggested that young Earth creationists should be deeply troubled by the fact that creation science never appears in mainstream science journals. He wondered aloud why that fact doesn’t raise profound questions for them as to the legitimacy of creation science.
A woman responded to him saying that she has a number of family members and friends who are young Earth creationists, and she knows exactly how they would reply to that. They would say that the reason creation science doesn’t appear in mainstream science journals is not because creation science isn’t good science. It’s because mainstream scientists are so biased on behalf of evolution and against creationism that creation science research never gets a fair shake. And she wanted to know if her friends and family were right about that. That’s a great question.
A bit of history helps out here.
In 1961, John C. Whitcomb (theologian and Old Testament professor) and Henry Morris (PhD in hydraulic engineering) argued in The Genesis Flood (1961) that a particular literal reading of Genesis (according to which the Earth was created in six twenty-four-hour days about 6,000 years ago) could be supported by an alternative to mainstream science. Dubbed “flood geology,” this science could explain how all of the appearances of an old Earth (like geological strata) were produced not by slow processes of change over millions of years but, instead, by a single and catastrophic year-long event spoken of in Genesis—Noah’s flood.
The response to The Genesis Flood was huge. Evangelicals in the 1960s were hungry for a way to legitimate their beliefs. And given the credibility that mainstream science (which was amazingly sending rocket ships into space) enjoyed at the time, grounding their literal reading in flood geology was just the ticket. Among those especially excited about that were young Earth creationists who were scientists. They were ready to get to work to produce more creation science. Organizations, like the Creation Research Society (CRS) and the Institute for Creation Science (ICR) emerged (CRS in 1963 and ICR in 1972) to take up the task.
It turns out that for all their efforts, CRS and ICR were unable to produce the scientific evidence that could pass muster in mainstream science journals. As the creationist research effort sputtered, Ken Ham (formerly of ICR) and Answers in Genesis (AiG; founded in 1994) focused their efforts on spreading a three-part apologetics message
that the teaching of evolution was evil and that it produced terrific cultural decay, that the first eleven chapters of Genesis spoke directly and literally about the origins of the universe as well as about the proper way to organize society, and that true Christians should join earnestly in an all-out culture war for the soul of America against atheistic humanism (“The Bible and Creationism,” Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, 15/223 (online/print))
It turns out that AiG has been very successful in inspiring and preparing evangelicals for the culture war. And while scientific research is not a priority at AiG – and while there is very little science (even on their own terms) at the Creation Museum – AiG does maintain an online research journal. The Answers Research Journal (ARJ) is a peer-reviewed journal, but the peers doing the reviewing are “creationist researchers, scientists, and theologians.” “creationist researchers, scientists, and theologians.” Looking at the 2018 volume, one sees articles that suggest that ARJ is not a typical research publication, including “The Hermeneutics of Adam,” “Biblical Integration in Anatomy and Physiology,” and “Syntactical Features of Hebrew Genitive Clauses and Their lmplications for Translating Genesis 1:1.” Virtually all of the articles are written by folks from fundamentalist colleges (e.g., Missouri Baptist, Cedarville, Liberty), from creationist organizations (e.g., Logos Research Associates, Biblical Creation Trust, Bible Science Institute), and from AiG itself. And a number of authors contributed more than one article, and some of the authors have contributed ten or more articles over the eleven years that the journal has been operating.
All of this to say that ARJ is further evidence that when we look at the history of young Earth creationism it seems clear that it is much less the case that the editors of science journals are in cahoots against young Earth creationism and much more the case that creation scientists themselves have found it really hard to produce anything like a “creation science.”
But as we argue in Righting America, for AiG, it is not about science. It is not even really about the Bible. It is about culture war.
Who is the God at the Center of Young Earth Creationism?
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
Last Sunday, Sue gave our second of four presentations at Westminster Presbyterian Church, in Dayton, Ohio. Her session focused on creation science and, in particular, the arguments made by young Earth creationists that mobilize the discourse of science to “confirm” a particular literal reading of the early chapters in Genesis. Sue talked about the importance of The Genesis Flood (1961) for moving creationist arguments into science—the dominant discourse of truth within modernity. And she took the class on a brief tour of the Creation Museum and the creation science arguments made there.
Along the way, one member of the class expressed confusion and some dismay at what it would mean to take seriously the idea that God sent a global flood in judgment of all land-based living creatures who did not get on the Ark.
Noah’s Flood – or, better stated, God’s Flood – is indispensable to young Earth creationism. According to young Earth creationists, the Flood was a global event that took place approximately 4500 years ago and produced the fossil record and geological strata that we see today. That is to say, the Flood gives the young Earth its “appearance” of age.
Of course, built into the idea of a global Flood is global slaughter, as all humans and animals who were not on the Ark drowned. Answers in Genesis (AiG) does not shy away from highlighting what seems to many outsiders as the genocidal, zooicidal God of young Earth creationism. In fact, at Ark Encounter they ratchet it up by claiming that upwards of 20 billion human beings (2 ½ times the current world population) died in the Flood, not to mention the billions and billions of animals who died.
But why did God find it necessary to engage in such slaughter? From an Ark Encounter plaque entitled “Man Abuses God-Given Abilities,” visitors learn that
Man eventually spread across the earth, but rather than serving their Creator they became exceedingly wicked. In a little over 1,650 years [since the Garden of Eden], they had grown so vile that God judged the world with the global flood.
Later at Ark Encounter there is a series of four plaques that justify God’s actions in the global Flood. For one thing, God “is perfectly just” and thus “must judge sin” accordingly. Moreover, as God “is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life.” Anyway, “death is a merciful punishment,” as who wants “to live forever in a fallen world?”
As morally bizarre as all this is, Ark Encounter does not address why God had to drown infants and toddlers. Were they too so vile that they had to be killed? Was death merciful for them as well?
But then there are the animals. At the Creation Museum, there is a plaque entitled “The Flood Drowns the Earth” that answers the question asked at Westminster Presbyterian last Sunday:
Animal violence was everywhere, so animals everywhere had to be destroyed.
What? What does this mean?
Putting that question aside—really? “Justice” is so important for the young Earth creationist God that He’s good with causing millions (billions, perhaps, on AiG’s count) of innocent creatures, human babies and toddlers included, to suffer at His own hands?
This is the God we are to worship?
Funding Ark Encounter: The Rest of the Story
by William Trollinger
Even while he blasts the journalists for their secular bias and their unwillingness to tell the truth about Christian ministries, Ken Ham refuses to tell the full story about how his gigantic Ark has been funded.
Ham begins his January 29 post, “The Rest of the (Media) Story,” with a Trump-like “fake news” attack on the press:
In recent times, Americans have been increasingly waking up to the extreme bias of much of the secular media, with an understanding that you just can’t necessarily trust what the media broadcasts or publishes. Of course, we at Answers in Genesis [AiG] aren’t surprised by this at all, as our ministry, especially our Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, has been misquoted and misrepresented and has seen facts distorted and information deliberately left out by many media outlets for many years [emphases Ham’s].
In keeping with this “persecuted Christians” trope, a good part of the post is devoted to the ways in which the press does not accurately describe the ways in which organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) “have misrepresented the First Amendment and threatened schools about taking field trips to the Ark (or the Creation Museum).” According to Ham:
We need to be constantly reminded that groups like the FFRF, ACLU, American Atheists, etc. have an agenda to discriminate against Christianity. And so do many reporters who write articles, magazines, and websites.
In this regard, Ham goes on at great length to defend Ark Encounter against FFRF criticisms that the Ark is receiving a “tax incentive rebate” (according to Ham, not a “tax break”) from the state of Kentucky. According to Ham, the only reason they are “outraged” is “because they want to discriminate against the Ark as it has a distinctively Christian message.” And their atheistic outrage blinds them to the fact that “the Ark has been an incredible revenue generator.”
Leaving aside the alleged persecution of Christians, it is interesting to look at what else Ham has to say about the funding of Ark Encounter:
No state funds were used in the building of the Ark contrary to many media reports . . . AiG spent over $100 million for the first stage of the Ark Encounter, of which $65 million came from bonds funded by our supporters – and those bonds plus interest will be paid off over 15 years.
It is 2019, and Ham continues to fudge the truth when it comes to the funding of Ark Encounter. As we have repeatedly pointed out,
In 2013 the little town of Williamstown, Kentucky issued $62m of junk bonds and loaned Ark Encounter the proceeds to get its project going. It is a sweet deal for the Ark, made much sweeter by the fact that, over the next thirty years, 75% of what Ark Encounter would have paid in property taxes will go to paying off the loan.
It is not clear what Ham means when he says now that the bonds will be paid off over 15 years (15 years from 2013? 15 years from 2019?). What is clear is that Ark Encounter is taking a huge chunk of what would have gone toward property taxes for Williamstown and instead is using this money to pay off its loan.
That is to say, Ark Encounter is being subsidized in a major way by the town of Williamstown. Who is omitting and distorting facts? Will Ken Ham ever come clean?
