The Making of a Creationist Theme Park: Part Two
Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU, 2018) is the latest work from James Bielo. Below is the second half of the rightingamerica interview with James regarding this fascinating book.
James S. Bielo is Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Anthropology at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). He is the author of four books and more than 50 scholarly articles, chapters, & essays. He is the project director for Materializing the Bible, a digital scholarship project that explores the social, material, and political dimensions of biblically-themed attractions. And, he is co-editor of a book series with the U of Nebraska Press, Anthropology of Contemporary North America.
Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU, 2018)
1. At the end of your chapter on “The Past is Not History” you ask this provocative question:
“In contrast to the hotly contested field of public school curricula, where symbolic capital derives from scientific legitimacy, can creationism score a victory in the court of public entertainment, where creative capital speaks in an artistic and affective register? When it comes to history-making, is creationism more fun than evolution?”
Can you explain what you mean here, and how would you answer your own questions?
Ark Encounter, and the Creation Museum, use the power of entertainment to advance their ambitions of religious publicity. In posing this question, I’m trying to reveal the wager that the creative team is making. Their wager is that through entertainment they can win visitors to their cause, and intensify the commitments of those already won. In this wager, they don’t have to compel non-creationists within the playing field of science; they just have to grab their attention within the playing field of entertainment. In their calculus, if visitors are wowed then they will walk away changed: if not converted, then at least re-oriented to the potential legitimacy of creationism.
So, how would I answer? You’re not supposed to ask me that 😉
Of course, it’s meant to be a rhetorical question. That being said, it’s worth adventuring an answer. To begin, we should clarify the kind of visitor we’re talking about. Creationist visitors, I suspect, do experience the creationist past — as performed by Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum — as fun and, indeed, more fun than an evolutionary past. But, what about non-creationist visitors? Of course, the category “non-creationist visitor” entails tons of variation. But, if you don’t live in the creationist lifeworld, then no matter your orientation you are being asked to do the same thing: to play in this frame of reality. You are asked to consider creationism as viable and, in turn, to work with their terms and exist in their lifeworld. For visitors who engage in this play, part of their experience upon leaving is reflecting on what kind of experience they had onsite. How did they feel? How did they respond: bodily, emotionally, and cognitively? Irrespective of whether they are confused, disturbed, amused, or whatever, they will confront what it was like to play in this world. Did they have fun? Ultimately, I think we just need more ethnography with different kinds of visitors to meaningfully address that.
2. Related to the previous question, a recent online article argues that Ark Encounter is “a boring homophobic mess.” Leaving aside the question of homophobia (unless you want to say something in that regard!), does it make sense to you that folks find Ark Encounter boring? Put another way, could Ark Encounter actually lose in the court of public entertainment?
I read this article as well, published by Vice. It certainly makes sense that some visitors will find Ark Encounter boring. Again, not everyone will get caught up in the experience of play. For some visitors, the kind of entertainment strategies the attraction uses will not work. For others there will be ideological and/or theological conflicts. For some, both.
What I find more interesting, though, is how winning and losing in the court of public entertainment is figured (especially, beyond the level of the individual visitor). In part, it is about making a lasting impression, creating a memorable experience. Over time, it is about perceived innovation. The Creation Museum opened in 2007. Almost without exception, each year they have expanded or changed the visitor experience in some way (often, this has been timed with Memorial Day weekend, which in the seasonal ritual cycle of U.S. mass tourism marks the beginning of summertime travel, especially for families). I suspect Ark Encounter will aim for much the same. While many people will never visit because of ideological opposition, and many visitors who are ideologically opposed to creationism will find the place boring and disturbing in equal parts, its eventual success or failure will be determined otherwise. In part, it will be determined in how well they innovate to entice visitors to return, to invite others, and, for non-creationists, to play a bit in this lifeworld.
3. You conclude Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park with this statement: “For the fundamentalist gaze to work at Ark Encounter, it must absorb the commercial gaze of an entertainment-savvy public that is poised for accusations of religious idiocy.” Can you explain what you mean here, and do you think Ark Encounter will succeed in this regard?
What I mean is that even creationist visitors, because of their broader cultural repertoire, will demand that Ark Encounter be a good/memorable/fun experience. For long term success, it must meet a threshold of quality that is not defined within the world of fundamentalism, but within the broader world of entertainment. The creative team was quite attuned to this, and they talked constantly about the need to “surprise” visitors by measuring themselves and their work against the highest possible industry standards. The need to innovate over time is part of this, as is the need to mobilize strategies and techniques that read, for visitors, as up-to-date (i.e., fun/engaging/interesting) and not outmoded (i.e., boring/lame/tired).
Perhaps not surprisingly, most visitor accounts that I’ve seen are polarized. Creationist visitors largely praise the experience, critics largely ridicule the experience. Apart from some good ethnography with other visitors (which I encourage scholars to pursue), there are some hints in circulating media about the Ark’s perceived quality. For example, an anthropologist named Scott Lukas has been studying themed environments (mostly not faith-based attractions) for several decades. Writing for Attractions Management, a leading trade magazine in the themed entertainment business, Lukas reviews Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum. He writes, “look beyond the controversies surrounding the monumental Ark attraction and its sister museum and you’ll find some of the best examples of immersive theming in the US.” Throughout, he takes the self-identified stance of an expert on themed environments who is assessing the attractions on how well they perform within this genre of place (not, for example, how well they meet the imperatives of fundamentalism or how much they clash with non-fundamentalist sensibilities). He observes various features, from architecture to the choreography of the senses, and continually returns to one point: he was deeply impressed.
So, will Ark Encounter be successful? If success means impressing a non-creationist public, it may already be. If success means remaining open for years/decades to come, and perhaps expanding to include additional exhibits (e.g., a proposed Tower of Babel replica), then a major variable will be their capacity to innovate: to keep the experience entertaining for new and returning visitors. Innovation includes multiple things. On one hand, it includes changes/expansions in exhibit designs, uses of technology, and multi-media experiences. On the other, innovation will likely include responding to socio-political life as it unfolds in a fundamentalist vein (e.g., connecting the visitor experience at Ark Encounter to the wider ideological concerns of fundamentalism).
4. Ok, your book just came out, so it probably is not fair to ask. But could you say a little about your next project?
I appreciate you asking. My fieldwork with the Ark Encounter creative team inspired me to examine other attractions that “materialize the Bible.” This began with a digital scholarship project, Materializing the Bible https://www.materializingthebible.com/}, which I curate with undergraduate research assistants. This project is an interactive, curated catalogue of biblically-themed attractions throughout the world. Working on this project has helped me to think comparatively and historically about this phenomenon, inspiring analyses of biblical gardens and Protestant mobilizations of biblical landscape items. Materializing the Bible has also prompted more ethnographic work with different attractions. For example, I have done participant observation work at the Garden of Hope in northern Kentucky, which features a replica of Jerusalem’s Garden Tomb. And, I have done some observation and interviewing on the newly opened Museum of the Bible (MOTB) in Washington, D.C. The article I’m working on right now focuses on MOTB and, like Ark Encounter, is interested in questions of immersive entertainment. MOTB is especially fascinating because, unlike Ark Encounter, most of the creative talent were not part of faith-based design firms. What will we learn about this place – and, more broadly, about religious publicity and the entangled relationship between religion and entertainment – when we foreground the voices of these designers?
The Making of a Creationist Theme Park: Part One
Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU, 2018) is the latest work from James Bielo. Below is the first half of the rightingamerica interview with James regarding this fascinating book.
Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU, 2018)
James S. Bielo is Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Anthropology at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). He is the author of four books and more than 50 scholarly articles, chapters, & essays. He is the project director for Materializing the Bible, a digital scholarship project that explores the social, material, and political dimensions of biblically-themed attractions. And, he is co-editor of a book series with the U Nebraska Press, Anthropology of Contemporary North America.
Before we get started, I’d just like to say thanks for this opportunity. These are really thoughtful questions and it’s helpful for me to reflect on them.
1. We have been asked again and again how we ended up writing a book on the Creation Museum. So we ask the same question of you: How did you end up committing years of your life to researching and writing on Ark Encounter?
It was a mix of good timing and proximity, an openness from the Answers in Genesis (AiG) staff and gracious reception from the Ark design team, and my interest in speaking from an unexpected ethnographic vantage point. I first heard about Ark Encounter in December 2010. After considering it for a few months, and knowing AiG was based only 1 hour from my home, I reached out to the ministry. Surprisingly, I only encountered two gatekeepers before I was standing in the Ark design studio in October 2011.
Such pragmatic issues are always important to consider in fieldwork, but there was also a methodological and theoretical interest that drew me in. From the get go, and still today, the idea of conducting fieldwork with creationists and writing about creationists only to ask questions about creationism per se was not all that compelling to me. Going back to anthropological scholarship in the 1990s, folks like Susan Harding and Chris Toumey, we have a pretty good handle on who creationists are in cultural terms. For me, the really fascinating questions were always about the process of cultural production, the possibility of tracing the making of a creationist theme park from a backstage vantage point. I was always more interested in the creative team, who so often are unknown (even within creationist networks), than I was in public figures like Ken Ham. I wanted to know how a project of religious publicity like Ark Encounter develops and changes as it forms, not merely the finished product that visitors experience. I wanted to learn how fundamentalist Protestant commitments structured the process and the decisions being made on a daily basis, but I also wanted to ask if the process was shaped by other cultural logics, tensions, and contingencies. As it turns out, it absolutely was.
2. How did you secure “backstage” access to Ark Encounter, what was that experience like, and how and why did this access come to an end?
I invite readers to consult the book’s Appendix, which charts the methodological journey of the project. But, I can offer an abbreviated version here. The first AiG staff member I spoke with was an administrative assistant, who had very few questions for me. Fairly quickly, she put me in touch with one of the ministry’s co-founders who was also working as the organizational lead for Ark Encounter. We had a 1-hour phone conversation in August 2011. I asked some basic questions about the Ark, but really this conversation was about him interviewing me. He wanted to know what kind of research I had in mind and what kind of writing I was hoping to produce. I explained that my goal was to analyze the process of production as an anthropologist interested in how cultural systems work, not as someone looking to write any kind of expose. At the end of the call, he invited me to the design studio for a tour, which we set up for October 2011. I spent several hours there and later learned that, at the time, this kind of tour of the studio was primarily given to potential (and, potentially, deep-pocketed) donors. I returned a few weeks later for the first day of full fieldwork, at which point I met the team’s creative director, whose thumbs up or down would really decide my access. He too seemed to appreciate the fact that I wanted to focus on the creative process, and that I wanted to stick around as long as they would let me.
My fieldwork ended in June 2014. In late February 2014, AiG announced that the Ark project had raised the necessary funds to begin construction. At this time, the creative director and I spoke about how my fieldwork could continue, if in an adjusted form. Up to this point, I would spend a full day at the studio once every couple of weeks or so. I sat in on team meetings, talked with the artists in their cubicles while they worked, and (with a few exceptions) was provided generally open access to the team’s process. For example, they would share work-in-progress with me, materials that would not be seen by anyone else outside the studio. The creative director explained that with the green light to begin construction, their design work would increase considerably and my presence sitting in cubicles would soon not be possible. We agreed that I would focus only on team meetings and their more public-facing work. For whatever reason, he changed his mind and my access ended. I never learned the full reason for this decision, but ultimately, I am quite grateful that they were as open as they were over the course of those 43 months.
3. In the introduction to Ark Encounter you note that you want to move analysis of creationism beyond questions of “religion-science” to questions of “religion-entertainment.” What do you mean by this, and why is this important?
Yes, I hope this will be an enduring contribution of the book. As I said above, the creationist movement is well understood in the anthropological record and in the critical, interdisciplinary study of religion. The lion’s share of this scholarship analyzes, interprets, and explains creationism within the framework of religion-science. In other words, the questions posed and arguments advanced engage creationism in terms of how this movement appropriates the symbolic and material infrastructures of mainstream science. This is both good and necessary. Really, there is no understanding of creationism without an understanding of how creationists and creationist institutions continually re-create an antagonistic relationship with science (in particular, of course, evolutionary science). It’s important work and should continue.
My intervention in the book is to say that the frame of religion-science, while productive, does not exhaust the questions we can and should ask about the social life of creationism. What is illumined when we shine the light elsewhere? Through my fieldwork with the Ark Encounter design team, I learned quickly that a different analytical frame would be necessary to understand their creative process and labor. While they did participate in standard creationist discourses about science as part of their design work, this was far less significant than their engagement with other cultural assemblages, namely the world of entertainment. Moreover, it was a particular form of entertainment defined by immersive experience, world-making, and play. As I ask in the book, what do we learn from the ‘creationist imagineer’ that we don’t/can’t from the ‘creation scientist’? So, by shifting the focus to religion-entertainment, I hope to make legible key elements of how Ark Encounter, as a project of religious publicity, was produced and how it works as a visitor attraction. By highlighting the relationship between religion and entertainment I am also setting the stage for the book’s central argument: with Ark Encounter, creationists seek to mobilize the legitimacy and authority of entertainment to advance fundamentalist Protestant claims to cultural legitimacy and authority.
Life in the Bible Nation
by William Trollinger
Tuesday was Hobby Lobby day here at the University of Dayton. And no, that does not mean the campus turned into a gigantic craft show.
Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby by Candida R. Moss & Joel S. Baden. (c) 2017, Princeton University Press.
Candida Moss (Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham) and Joel Baden (Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School) were on campus to discuss – at an informal coffee talk, to a crowd of 200+ students and faculty, and at an intimate post-talk dinner – their 2017 book, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby.
Candida Moss and Joel Baden discuss their book, Bible Nation, at the University of Dayton. October, 2018. Photo credit: Meghan Henning.
In this fascinating and important book, Moss and Baden tell the story of the Green family (billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby) and their aggressive and wide-reaching campaign to increase the Bible’s influence in American life. This has included purchasing approximately 40,000 biblical artifacts, or so-called biblical artifacts, as it turns out that many of these are forgeries and many more lack provenance (that is, a history of ownership), which could suggest illegality of one sort or another. That the Greens have not done due diligence is an understatement.
As Moss and Baden detail, the Greens’ campaign has also included purchasing a scholarly patina for their holdings. The “Green Scholars Initiative” involves a tightly-controlled group of scholars – many of whom who work at small evangelical schools – who receive compensation (generally not much) for studying and promoting the collection. In a departure from normal academic procedures, access to the Greens’ collection is limited to those scholars willing to sign a nondisclosure statement that includes the following:
Scholar shall safeguard and keep confidential the Information; and shall not disclose the Information to any party, without the prior written consent of The Green Collection, in any manner whatsoever, in whole or in part . . . Upon written request by The Green Collection, all Information and copies thereof, including that portion of the Information which consists of any and all documents or anything else internally prepared or obtained by Scholar, shall be returned to The Green Collection immediately . . . All Information shall remain the exclusive property of The Green Collection. (73)
The crown jewel of the Green family/Hobby Lobby campaign is the Museum of the Bible (MOTB), which opened in Washington DC in 2017 (weeks after Bible Nation appeared), and which has as one of its purposes “to educate legislators about the biblical foundations of American government” (138).
Importantly, the authors of Bible Nation find there to be a good deal of overlap between the MOTB and the Creation Museum. Both the Greens and Ken Ham share an inerrantist understanding of the Bible (i.e., the Bible is without error, and factually accurate in all it teaches). The president of MOTB, Cary Summers, also served as a consultant for Ark Encounter. Artifacts from the MOTB appear in both the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. As Moss and Baden observe, the “impact floor” at MOTB is simply “a more upbeat reflection” of the “Culture of Crisis” section of the Creation Museum, which highlights – through newspaper clippings about euthanasia and same-sex marriage – that “society would crumble [or, has crumbled] without the Bible” (153). And Ken Ham and his wife Mally were at the MOTB’s opening gala.
In short, MOTB and the Creation Museum are ideological and theological twins. The difference is that, as Moss and Baden emphasized in the book and here at UD, the MOTB is seeking to reach a broader audience than is the Creation Museum. While for all practical purposes the latter directs its message to the evangelical subculture, the MOTB – situated in Washington and not in Petersburg, KY – is aiming to reach the nation and especially the nation’s political leaders. Toward this end, it claims to be a nonsectarian institution, all the while promoting an evangelical understanding of the Bible, and “classic evangelical tropes such as American exceptionalism, Lockean property rights, a Victorian vision of the family” as the timeless ‘biblical worldview’” (193).
As explained in Bible Nation, the Greens hide their evangelicalism and their evangelization under the cover of religious nonsectarianism and scholarly neutrality. And for the authors, this may be the most troubling aspect of the MOTB, especially given it may very well deceive its visitors into thinking that it is something that it is not.
This is not the case at the Creation Museum or the Ark Encounter. In contrast with the MOTB, both Answers in Genesis institutions are quite open about their Christian fundamentalist commitments. But insofar as their apologetics ministry transform earnest Christians into culture warriors, they likely produce their own ill effects on American culture and politics.
Redemption and the Blessing of White Supremacy
by William Trollinger
“The Monument to Florida Confederate Units at Chickamauga” by AirBeagle (2009).
“Redemption.” In Christian theology, it is a powerful and hopeful term referring to the deliverance from sin and its consequences. But in the context of U.S. history, “Redemption” is a word that has much less positive connotations.
Thursday night I gave a Ohio Humanities lecture in Peninsula, Ohio, a lovely village nestled in the woods between Cleveland and Akron. Hosted by the Peninsula Foundation, I spoke in the historically preserved G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) Hall, which features, among other things, a very large photograph of Abraham Lincoln.
The setting was quite appropriate, given that my lecture was entitled “Statues, Flags, and the Ongoing Battle over the Meaning of the Civil War.” This is a topic which has become very hot in the last few years, thanks in good part to two horrific events:
- June 17 2015. Charleston SC. Dylan Roof entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat with a small Bible study group for 40 minutes. And then, during prayer, he pulled out a handgun and killed nine people, explaining “You blacks are killing white people and raping white women every day.” An examination of the website Roof created found a racist manifesto plus photos of Roof with Confederate flags.
- August 12 2017. Charlottesville VA. In response to the city council’s resolution to remove Charlotteville’s Robert E. Lee statue, angry white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klan members marched into town for a Unite the Right rally. Opponents gathered, and a Nazi sympathizer drove his car into the counter-protestors, killing one and wounding nineteen others.
As I noted in Peninsula, there are over 1500 Confederate monuments and memorials in the United States. They are all over the place in the South, particularly (but not only) in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Interestingly, most of these statues were not erected immediately after the Civil War, but, instead, were put up in the years between 1880 and 1920. These were the years after Reconstruction, when Southern whites reasserted their complete political and economic supremacy over African-Americans, creating a system in which segregation was the law of the land, black people were kept from voting, and black labor had been reduced to near-slave status. And when blacks gave even a hint that they were not fully subservient in body and in mind, lynching often followed.
Confederate monuments were a central feature of this system. As the American Historical Association pointed out in its powerful 2017 “Statement on Confederate Monuments,” these monuments
to the Confederacy were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life.
Explicitly borrowing from Christian theology, the leaders who engineered the reassertion of white dominance in the South referred to their policy as “Redemption.” The sins of Reconstruction – particularly, the sins of black political participation and economic freedom – were now purged. Paraphrasing Isaiah 1:18, the South – purged of its Reconstruction sins – was once again “white as snow.”
The South had been fully redeemed by 1915, when D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation appeared. This appalling cinematic masterpiece tells the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction: happy slaves, unnecessary war, northern repression after the war, thoroughly corrupt and incompetent blacks in Southern state legislatures, and rapacious blacks roaming the land looking for white women. But then comes Redemption, thanks in good part to the Ku Klux Klan. The Klansmen restore sexual order (capturing and lynching the prospective black rapist) while also using military force to re-establish political order in the form of Southern white dominance.
Religious order was also restored. In one of the strangest scenes in American film history, Birth of a Nation ends with a image of Jesus superimposed over a group of celebratory white people. He appears to be placing his blessing on the re-establishment of white racial dominance in the South. Redemption, indeed.
100 years later, are we still here? Is the Christian Right Jesus giving his blessing to voter suppression and racist tweets and white supremacy?
Stretching the Frames of Acceptance in an Evangelical Church
by Camille Kaminski Lewis
Camille Kaminski Lewis is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Rhetorical Studies with a minor in American Studies. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism, was a scholarly attempt to stretch the boundaries of both Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory on tragedy and comedy as well as stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. The story of that publication is available at The KB Journal. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled, Klandamentalism: Dysfunction and Violence in America’s Most Romantic Religious Movements, and an anthology called One-Hundred-Percenters: Statements and Counter-Statements.
“Choir Practice” by Stewart Black.
In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication possible, thus, providing the first condition necessary for their interchange of blows. Put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives (25)
The Sunday before the 2016 Presidential Election I wore suffragette white. I am one of the remaining few Protestants who (strategically) identify as an “Evangelical.” I attend a PCA church in Greenville, South Carolina after all. It’s an Evangelical denomination. So naturally, I’m an Evangelical, right?
Underneath my buttonless white jacket, I wore several Hillary Clinton campaign buttons. Only I and my little family of four knew about them. But my choir robe was covering it all.
We sopranos were milling around before we would file in to the loft. A first soprano—“Jan,” I’ll call her—and I were chatting. I like talking to Jan because she’s a fellow Michigander, and I can understand her. To my ears, she has no accent. I, in the Burkean sense, identify with her. She brought up the election.
Now I love to talk about the two things polite society avoids—religion and politics. I love to find out how people think, why they vote the way they do, and how they see the world. It’s all research. And it’s irresistible. But so many South Carolinians are too genteel to engage this Detroiter.
But I can don the middle-aged lady cheerfulness to get more data. Jan was frustrated with the current political climate. I agreed. She didn’t know what this world was coming to. I agreed.
“It really feels to me like this election is a contest between good and evil,” Jan concluded.
Uh oh. Well, that’s a little too Manichaen for me. I’m a Burkean, after all. People are not evil, just mistaken, right? But I did feel that way. Even though Jan was clearly on the other side of the political aisle, I did feel like Trump was probably evil.
So I said it. “Yeah, I agree with that.” I didn’t tell her that I put her guy in the evil column. I didn’t let on that the words were ambiguous.
But then she went too far. I honestly don’t remember what she said. The coming flurry of words made me forget her exact statement. It was something like, “And Obama was not a legitimate president. He wasn’t even born in this country!”
There it was. The dog whistle. A loud voice in my head started screaming, “You can’t just happily go along with this, Camille. That’s racist. You have to say something. Don’t just go along to get along.”
So I said something. I separated from that sentiment. “I’m going to have to disagree with you there.”
Jan’s spine straightened. Her shoulders went back. Her jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. Her brows were up. “What?”
I explained. “I think Obama was a good president. I voted for him twice.”
Horror passed across her face.
I continued, “And in fact, I’m voting for Clinton on Tuesday. I’m doing phone-banking for her this afternoon.”
“You’re . . . a DEMOCRAT?”
She spat the word from her lips. Like she was saying “atheist” or “terrorist.”
Was I a Democrat? I don’t think of myself as one. Evangelical, yes. But Democrat? But it would be disingenuous, I figured, to back-peddle.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
Aghast, Jan turned on her heels and left our conversation. She took her place in the choir line-up. . . . Right next to the tenors, where my husband Grant sings.
Jan huffed to him, “Your wife is a really pretty lady, but I can’t believe she’s a Democrat!”
Grant chuckled, “Well, I guess then we’re both Democrats.”
After church when my husband and I were hanging up our robes and filing away our music, Jan sought me out and apologized. She was just so stunned, she explained.
The next Sunday, again in our robes, Jan and I talked about the election. “Could you believe it?” I asked her.
“No!” Jan admitted.
“Did you stay up?” I continued.
“Oh yeah. My husband went to bed, but I stayed up.”
“Me too. Same. Michigan surprised me.”
“It didn’t surprise me.”
She was right. I had to give her that.
In his October 17 post, Pastor Kennedy drew Kenneth Burke’s identification into our “righting” conversation claiming that the Evangelical script is after identification alone. “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language,” Burke explained. However, Burke foregrounds more agon than we may give him credit. In pure identification, as Kennedy ascribes to Evangelicals, no rhetorical work is necessary since there is no strife. When Jan blew the dog whistle of white supremacy in a polite be-robed conversation, she assumed there would be pure identification. We were wearing the same clothing, we occupy the same space, and we even speak in the same dialect. The shock and the work and the hope came when there was ambiguity, when the “really pretty lady” in the second row of the Sopranos was not blowing the same dog whistle. Because we couldn’t know for certain just where identification ended and the division began, and we had the characteristic invitation to rhetoric.
We’ve all had the terrible comments on posts such as Kennedy’s interlocutor’s “No Demokrat is a Christian.” The frames of acceptance, to continue with Burke, have calcified. Perhaps the social media algorithms are thwarting the possibilities of ambiguity. Things are too clear and too separated and too recalcitrant. Perhaps the solution is to bring back ambiguous conversations in the church lobbies and choir lofts.
Will that work? Can we stretch the frames of acceptance?
The Creation Museum as Megachurch
by Margaret M. Grubiak
Margaret Grubiak is an associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Humanities at Villanova University. Margaret’s scholarship, including her first book on the history of university chapels, focuses on twentieth-century American religious architecture. Her next book, The 900-Foot Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America (forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press), considers how people react with doubt to the religious images they see in the everyday landscape. This book includes a chapter on the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, as well as chapters on “Touchdown Jesus” at the University of Notre Dame; the Mormon Temple along Washington, D.C.’s Beltway cast in terms of The Wizard of Oz; the evangelical theme park, including Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA; and the giant Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, nicknamed “Gumby Jesus.”
Entrance to the Creation Museum, including metal Stegosaurus. Photo Credit: Susan L. Trollinger, 2015
At the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, the metal Stegosaurus entrance sign and the giant dinosaur statue plodding on the entrance plaza are the inescapable objects of your attention as you begin your museum adventure. To be sure, these elements are part of the spectacle intended to signal the museum’s very nature as natural history museum, theme park, and religious polemic. But what do we make of the Creation Museum’s architecture itself, if we think about it at all? It is, in truth, a big blank of a building: its cream colored, concave colonnade encased in dark glass is topped by a visually heavy, unadorned cornice, as landscaping and a battered stone sidewall seemingly sliding into the ground mask the museum’s massive 75,000 square foot volume. Completed in 2007 and designed by the Cincinnati-based firm A.M. Kinney Associates, the Creation Museum shares in the kind of anonymous, Postmodernist architecture of the Smithsonian Museums you see on the National Mall (think here, for example, not of the Beaux-Arts style National Museum of Natural History (1910) but rather the severity of the Hirshhorn Museum (1969–1974), the Air and Space Museum (1972–1976), and the National Museum of American History (1964)). But I’d like to posit another point of comparison for the Creation Museum’s architecture: the Creation Museum as American megachurch.
As scholars of American material religion and religious architecture have explored, the American Protestant megachurch—Willow Creek Community Church in the suburbs of Chicago is the quintessential example, and televangelist Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston is another famous realization of this building type—differs from traditional ecclesiastical architecture in its rejection of Gothic and classical historicism and frank embrace of a corporate image. Gone from the megachurch are the steeple and stained glass (though not always), and in their place are sprawling complexes in a sea of asphalt parking that feel more like shopping mall, hotel, and convention center than sacred space. This is purposefully so, to reach precisely those people for whom the pomp and circumstance of traditional liturgical spaces are off-putting. The megachurch’s massive foyers, wide hallways, escalators, coffee shop, and bookstore are meant to put people at ease within the familiar language of commercial and leisure spaces. The megachurch’s sanctuary space—if you can call it that—comes alive only with the activation of the worship services themselves, as massive screens project close ups of the preacher and the choir and scroll lyrics to hymns. These screens are the new stained glass, as religious historian Jeanne Halgren Kilde tells us. The megachurch remakes how Protestants worship and in what environment, even as it draws on longstanding traditions of Protestant auditorium and performance space since the nineteenth century.
For me, understanding the Creation Museum as a megachurch was a light bulb moment that offers a way to understand the function and purpose of the museum and its identity within the parachurch organization of Answers in Genesis. The Creation Museum is a proxy church: its exhibits become the text of its theology; the “Last Adam” theater, a performance of salvation; its Legacy Hall, a space for the witness of faith, as the 2014 debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye showcased to great public effect. But also like a megachurch, the Creation Museum fuses its witness to faith with an environment that caters to the many needs of its visitors. Noah’s Café, the Screaming Raptor zip lines, the petting zoo, and the annual ChristmasTown spectacular offer opportunities for respite and entertainment. This fusion of religion, entertainment, and the everyday found in the Creation Museum are the same hallmarks of the American megachurch.
In a 2010 Vanity Fair article titled “Roll Over, Charles Darwin!”—an article dripping with sarcasm and entirely inimical to the Answers in Genesis project—British writer JJ Gill made plain his expectation of understanding the Creation Museum as a house of worship and his great disappointment at finding such expectations unfulfilled. Gill observed,
Oddly, [the Creation Museum] is a conspicuously and emphatically secular construction. There is no religious symbolism. No crosses. No stained glass. No spiral campanile. It has borrowed the empirical vernacular of the enemy to wrap the literal interpretation of Genesis in the façade of a liberal art gallery or library. It is the Lamb dressed in wolf’s clothing.
Further judging the museum as “the biggest collection of kitsch in God’s entire world,” Gill lamented that Creation Museum “is the profound represented by the banal” that actually “defies belief, beggars faith.” For Gill, the very architecture and environment of the Creation Museum could not possibly embody a religious point of view for the very reason that God did not seem to be immanent there. The Creation Museum, in short, was too ordinary to convey its extraordinary claims with conviction.
What a critic like JJ Gill wanted was an encounter with a physical space that gave place to the transcendent and the religious imagination. But what Gill didn’t understand was that the Creation Museum traffics in the banal in precisely the same ways as the American megachurch—to meet people where they are, in a language of the everyday. In taking care of the body in the restaurants, in giving respite in the gardens, in attending to the energies of children young and old in the zip line and the petting zoo, all the while offering a testament to faith in its exhibits, its theaters, its lecture halls, the Creation Museum takes the form of the American megachurch.
The Creation Museum is many things at once: a natural history museum, a religious and political polemic, a theme park. And we can understand it in the context of the American megachurch too.
Not Bound by the Evangelical Script
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is now the interim senior pastor at the Upper Merion Baptist Church in King of Prussia, PA (which is also an American Baptist church) while also teaching homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary. He is currently putting the finishing touches on his sixth book: The Immaculate Mistake: How Southern Baptists and Other Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump.
There are abundant reasons to applaud the attempts to engage in rational discussion with evangelical Christians. After all, we are all members of the same family and have been grafted onto the same tree of life with our brothers and sisters of Judaism. We all worship Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God; believe in eternal life, amazing grace, and the Word of God. For years I have made attempts to have ongoing conversations with persons who are variously categorized as evangelicals, conservatives, or fundamentalists. These attempts have not, in my estimation, accomplished much if anything. I find myself at the end of arguments, or what Richard Lischner calls “the end of words.”
Some of these conversations have been of the social media variety. For example, I frequently write opinion pieces on Facebook. In a quick survey of some of these posts I realized that certain buzz words or topics provoke emotional outbursts.
For example, I recently wrote a piece encouraging people to vote because the majority of Americans support the policies that Democrats are promoting. The responses were less than helpful:
This Effeminate > (Rod Kennedy) claims to be a Baptist Preacher > and a Demokrat! PREACHER that Promotes Torture and Murder of Unborn Children? DEMONIC POSSESSION > SATANISM! SODOMITE MARRIAGE PROMOTER? HELL AWAITS YOU > And Your Sick Church! Read his rant for yourself. Special Rights for Sodomites? Abortion > Torture and Murder of Unborn Children?
And No Marvel: For Satan Himself transforms into an Angel of Light.’ Corinthians/AKJB.
No Demokrat is a Christian.
The subject of my writing doesn’t matter because the “buzz words” have energized an emotional response from my conservative “friends,” what Richard Weaver dubs as “devil” terms (which in this case is literally true).
One of the problems here is the insistence on certainty and uniformity that prevails among conservative evangelicals. In fact, the rhetorical goal of conservative evangelicals is uniformity in the most critical sense, what Kenneth Burke calls “identification.” Burke says, “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.” Burke notes that there are aspects of persuasion such as “mystification,” “courtship,” and the “magic” of class relationships. Members of a group promote social cohesion by acting rhetorically upon themselves and one another. As Aristotle put it, “It is not hard to praise Athenians among Athenians.”
For example, a conservative Christian congregation may be willing to listen to Francis Collins, one of America’s foremost scientists, give a talk because they know he is an evangelical Christian. But the moment he starts to make the case for evolution, the congregation turns him off and turns against him. Rhetorically, he cannot “identify” with the audience because they are already predisposed to mistrust anyone who believes in evolution. The audience in this case refuses to identify with Dr. Collins as a fellow believer and stamps him as a disciple of Satan.
Dr. Collins is perceived as a threat to the “substance” of the congregation. Burke reminds us that “substance” in the old philosophies, was an act; and “a way of life is an acting-together; and in acting together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial.” Breaking through these tribal scripts may very well be impossible.
But perhaps we need to consider the difference between persuasion and communication. I would agree that we may not be able to communicate with supporters of President Trump, even with religious, biblical, and theological arguments. On the other hand, we are still capable of continuing to use all the available means of persuasion. As Aristotle insists, this is the essence of rhetoric.
My conclusion is that I am not bound by the strictures of the conservative evangelical “script.” I am free to persuade with as much logic, emotion, and credibility as possible, and I will continue to make all the possible persuasive attempts to articulate an alternative vision to that of conservative evangelical Christians. I will do so through a rigorous study and proclamation of the gospel of Jesus through the interpretative grid that is my mind and heart. In this way I avoid unnecessary confrontation and I am not responsible for whether or not I am communicating with my opponents. I will leave those results to the Spirit of God and to the word of God which is sharper than a two-edged sword and cuts both ways. I will do so as I continue to work out my salvation with fear and trembling.
Studying Religious Rhetorics in the Time of Trump and Kavanaugh: Part Two
by William Trollinger
“Everyone got woke in the 2016 election.”
So said Andre Johnson – Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Public Address at the University of Memphis – at the final keynote panel at last weekend’s Rhetoric and Religion in the 21st-Century Conference in Knoxville. And while this does not apply to Americas en masse – after all, 42% of Americans still support Donald Trump — it did seem the case at the conference. Almost every session and every conversation that we participated in was energized by the deep-felt conviction that there is no more important task for scholars of rhetoric than to explain Trump’s election and Trump’s ongoing support (particularly among white evangelicals). As one conferee said to us:
With the 2016 election I realized that my previous scholarly interests were not only irrelevant, but even narcissistic. I have changed my entire research trajectory, all in an effort to understand and critique how we got to this place.
Certain questions came up again and again at the conference: What happens when persuasion doesn’t work? How do we think about the fact that our reasoned arguments seem to go nowhere? How do we respond when we find that we have crashed into the limits of our ability to connect with the other? What do we do when, as one scholar plaintively observed, words seem to have no impact?
All of this can be reduced to the question of whether those of us on the outside are able to have a productive dialogue with politicized white evangelicals and – as came up regarding our conference paper on Ark Encounter – young Earth creationists. In response to our previous post on the Rhetoric and Religion Conference, Mark Masthay – University of Dayton chemistry professor and rightingamerica contributor – sent me this email:
This was an especially nice and interesting essay, Bill. I find the topic of having civil discussions with fundamentalists interesting. I got an email from one – and one who was very influential on me as a teenager – yesterday. He said in the email that the upcoming midterm election is extremely important, and that we should “vote values not party.” The attached letter, which provided more details, touted a straight, highly Tea Partyish Republican line. I think I could have a (moderately) friendly conversation with this guy, but he would treat me as being somewhat nonChristian or delusional. I guess that’s fair, because I regard him as being not very thoughtful about his positions.
At the conference we had the great good fortune of participating in the “Religious Rhetoric and Public Leadership” seminar, presided over by the ever-gracious Martin Medhurst, Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Communication and Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. In the seminar – which met over all three days of the conference — our conversation returned again and again to the matter of white evangelical support for Donald Trump. As a number of participants noted in one way or another, the rhetoric of contemporary white evangelicals is not aligned either with the Bible or with traditional evangelical beliefs.
But if this is the case, then how are folks like the Red Letter Christians – whose appeals are explicitly based on taking seriously Jesus’ words in the Gospels – ever going to have productive dialogue with their evangelical brothers and sisters?
Near the end of the final keynote panel Andre Johnson made the point that we need to recognize the limits of rhetoric, and accept the fact that there are times we have to walk away from the conversation. In response another panelist, T. J. Geiger II, Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University, agreed that there are rhetorical limits – sometimes efforts at persuasion or even conversation seem to go nowhere – but he also pointed out (and Johnson agreed) that in the future (maybe years out) one’s argument may bear fruit. One never knows.
Contingency. All of us who have taught for any length of time in the humanities or social sciences have had the experience of students who adamantly resist this or that point in the lecture or readings, and who then, years later, let us know that they had changed their minds. (Here’s one example.)
As regards white evangelicals, it seems that – at least in the long run – the rhetorical strategies of Jim Wallis and the Red Letter Christians are the best strategies. While white evangelicals may seem to be so tied to Christian Right politics that the words of Jesus in the Gospels are not able to break in, there is no getting around the fact that, to be evangelical, one has to reckon with the Bible.
Who knows what the future holds.
Studying Religious Rhetorics in the Time of Trump and Kavanaugh: Part One
by William Trollinger
On the Saturday that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate as the newest justice on the Supreme Court, it was energizing and therapeutic to be in the company of smart and gracious scholars devoted to studying and explaining religious rhetorics.
The conference on “Rhetoric and Religion in the 21st Century” was sponsored in part by Baylor University’s Institute for Faith and Learning, and was hosted by the Department of English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. We had never been to Knoxville – even while we had heard LOTS about it from friends and colleagues who are UT alumni – and we loved it, including the sunrises over the Appalachians, the restaurants on Market Square, and this historical marker (we had no idea of the dramatic story behind Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment, which was the last ratification needed for the amendment to be added to the Constitution).
Burn Memorial commemorating the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Photo courtesy of Susan Trollinger, 2018
In our paper session we were paired with Brent and Tyler Kibbey (Princeton and Kentucky, respectively), who gave an interesting paper on “A Case Study in the Religious Rhetoric of Gender in Tennessee Politics.” In this paper they devoted much attention to Tennessee’s 2017 “Natural and Ordinary” Amendment, which seeks to restrict LGBTQ rights by limiting how words like “husband” and “wife” are defined.
Given Ken Ham’s conviction that legal rights for gays and lesbians rights are – as discussed in Righting America at the Creation Museum – the best evidence that America’s Judgment Day is nigh, it makes sense that we were paired with the Kibbeys. Our paper was on “Artistic License and the Impossibility of Inerrancy: The Fundamentalist Rhetoric of Young Earth Creationism at Ark Encounter.” As suggested by the title, we look at how the folks at Ark Encounter give themselves permission to use “artistic license” to dramatically expand upon the biblical story of the Flood, even to the point of creating nicely-furnished living quarters for Noah and his family. As we noted in the paper, biblical inerrancy may be impossible, given that there are no inerrant readers, but “this is not to say that [inerrancy] is not productive – in fact, quite the contrary.”
The discussion was quite lively (we went past our allotted time). Here are a few examples of questions we received:
- Q: Does the Creation Museum also make use of artistic license?
A: Oh yes. Actually, Ark Encounter is simply an expanded version of the Voyage Room in the museum, where much of the artistic license found in the Ark is found in miniature dioramas that depict the living spaces in the Ark, and that include people not specifically mentioned in Genesis. Genesis 6-8 just does not have enough for the story that Answers in Genesis (AiG) wants to tell.
- Q: Does the Ark Encounter include the Genesis 9 story of Noah getting drunk and lying naked, his son Ham telling his two brothers of Noah’s plight, and Noah cursing Ham’s son Canaan into slavery?
A: No, and this is a good observation. Artistic license at the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter also includes the license to omit stories that do not fit the narrative. There is also no discussion of the first few verses of Genesis 6, which tells of godlike beings who came to Earth and impregnated human women. In fact, when one includes those first few verses one can easily read the god-human sex as the reason God flooded the Earth.
- Q: Given that at both the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter the claim is that the global slaughter of Noah’s Flood prefigures the global slaughter of millions or billions at the end of history, how else does apocalypticism play out in fundamentalism?
A: Yes. The response to climate change is a great example. The argument goes something like this: There is no significant climate change taking place; OR, There is significant climate change taking place, but humans are not responsible; OR, There is significant climate change taking place and humans are responsible, but it is not bad; OR, There is significant climate change taking place and it is bad, but it is not something we need to be concerned with, given that the end of history is probably imminent. The apocalyptic argument is the clincher. [For the latest on what all of this costs us, see this from the New York Times: “Ignoring Climate Science, FEMA is Mired in Cycle of Repairs” (this is the title from the print version).
- Is there a way to have meaningful and civil dialogue with fundamentalists?
Variations of this question came up again and again during our three days in Knoxville – evangelical support for Trump and the fight over Kavanaugh’s confirmation loomed large – and in fact gave “Rhetoric and Religion in the 21st Century” an energy unusual for an academic conference. I will talk about this in my next post.
After our session one of the conferees said to us that “I really like what you are doing in your scholarship. You do not mock and dismiss the young Earth creationists, but at the same time you maintain a critical edge in your assessments.”
It is hard to imagine a better compliment.
Papal Inerrancy For All but Francis
by Sean Martin
Sean Martin is a fifth-year theology doctoral student at the University of Dayton writing on Catholic fundamentalism and Scott Hahn. Sean and his wife, Beth, currently live in Cincinnati with their infant daughter, Gwen. Sean has an MA in philosophy from Georgia State University and an MA in theology from the University of Dayton. Currently, Sean writes, reads, teaches, and parents.
One of the more interesting aspects of transitioning (over the course of 20 years) from a fundamentalist Protestant to a somewhat liberal Catholic has been recognizing the different ways in which my fundamentalist past has begun showing up in my Catholic present. I recently was given an article that begun to articulate a particular hunch that I have been having concerning this very phenomenon in the form of what the author termed “Papal Fundamentalism.”
General Audience with Pope Francis by Catholic Church (England and Wales)
I cannot even begin to count the number of times in my youth and early adulthood that I referred to the Bible as the “inerrant” word of God. I was taught, and so I believed, that in this world of postmodern, relativistic thought, there was a singular source of objective truth that could be accessed by anyone willing to look. The Bible was more than just without any mistakes, a statement concerning the collection of every independent claim from scripture separately. It was inerrant, a claim concerning the status of scripture as a whole. Such a position raised the status of scripture nearing something like an equivalency with God. In fact, my sister-in-law (Jennifer Martin of Notre Dame) talks about a hymn she used to sing in her fundamentalist church growing up, the first line of which was, “Holy Bible, book divine.” It was comforting in a world that always seemed to cast every moral issue in shades of grey to have the complete, unblemished truth that I could carry around with me.
Like all of you, the past several months have been a tumultuous and difficult time for me in the wake of a wave of new accusations of sexual abuse by religious leaders. Along with the horrific accounts of systematic sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, we also had the stories of Paige Patterson, President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Bill Hybels, lead pastor of mega-Church Willow Creek. While there have been countless fantastic responses to the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and within Christianity at large, an overlooked consequence (granted, much less important than the suffering of abuse victims and the break of trust) is that the local church and the pastor, that which functioned as the moral and spiritual ground for the faithful, have been ripped away from them. As the Catholic Church has become more and more deeply mired in scandal and abuse, the Catholic laity have begun to find themselves adrift.
For many among the faithful, there was a phenomenon taking place within the Church that could provide direction in response to precisely such a problem. Adam Laats, of I Love You but You’re Going to Hell, in his post “Papal Fundamentalism,” briefly discusses the fairly recent trend of young, highly educated evangelicals converting to Catholicism. What these Catholic converts bring with them from Evangelicalism, as Jason Hentschel noted in his post “Might Makes Right,” seems to have been a predisposition for certainty, simplicity, and accessibility. Part of entering the Catholic communion, however, is a certain subordinating of scripture to the Tradition. That is, if one is looking for the firm foundation inerrancy is supposed to provide, they would need to look outside of the Bible.
For Catholics, the canon of scripture was set (and eventually closed) by the authority of the Apostles safeguarded in the tradition by the hierarchy in the form of Apostolic Succession. Instead of appealing to “book, chapter, and verse” from the Bible to settle moral, social, or political debate and confusion, it is the Tradition, specifically that which has been officially promulgated, that can provide for the Catholic what the Bible cannot. And, once we begin looking, we find that the discussions and argumentation of many conservative Catholics oftentimes treat the encyclical tradition (and a few documents from outside of that tradition like “Theology of the Body”) in a similar manner as that of Protestant Fundamentalists regarding the Bible.
A word from Humana Vitae is seen just as final in a debate concerning homosexuality in conservative Catholic circles as a reference from Leviticus is among evangelicals. Theology of the Body, incidentally not an officially promulgated document of the Church, is regarded just as complete and accessible among certain Catholics as the (alleged) straightforwardness of the Genesis creation account is assumed by Protestant fundamentalists. The Catholic Tradition, represented most definitively in papal documents, functions as the unassailable bulwark that an inerrant Bible is for conservative Protestantism.
There are, of course, some glaring exceptions. Somehow Rerum Novarum’s caution against the abuses of capitalism, for instance, rarely makes an appearance in the discussions of the moral stance of the Church among Catholics of this particular stripe. While there are a host of inconvenient aspects of this inerrant encyclical tradition, what is more striking is that papal fundamentalism seems to refer to the entirety of the papal tradition with the exception of Francis. Conservative American Catholics responded to Laudato Si with rejection and derision. He has been described as a liberal pope advancing a liberal agenda and, therefore, unworthy of Catholic trust. This rejection of Francis has become increasingly clear in the wake of the McCarrick scandal and the Vigano letter. John Paul II and Benedict XVI are protected at all costs (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of priest abuse and cover-up took place during their tenures), yet Francis is further cast as a power-hungry despot.
Fundamentalism plays the same game no matter where it appears. You take what you want and shield it behind inerrancy and simplicity, rejecting anything and everything that is inconvenient. Francis, by all reasonable accounts, a man who cares about the poor and marginalized, in offering “…who am I to judge?” and an argument for the proper care and nurture of Creation, is just a bridge too far.
The Church and the Bible are quite simply too complex to be regarded as simple, too dynamic to be seen as entirely consistent, and too controversial for any Catholic to rest with comfortably. That is, the Tradition is complicated, constantly evolving, oftentimes troubling, and yet good. It is the home of both Francis and Benedict. Of Dei Verbum and Laudato Si. Of conservatives and liberals alike. And, in that very nature, Tradition rebuffs fundamentalism at every turn.
