Right Makes Might
by Jason A. Hentschel
Jason A. Hentschel has a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Dayton, and is currently senior pastor at Wyoming Baptist Church (Wyoming, OH). His research focuses on the intersection of evangelicalism and modern American culture. He has contributed chapters to The Bible in American Life and The Handbook of the Bible in America, both of which were published by Oxford University Press in 2017. He is currently revising his book manuscript, “Inerrancy and the Evangelical Quest for Certainty,” for publication.
White evangelicals converting to Catholicism is a thing. Scott Hahn once called it, rather endearingly, Rome Sweet Home. Christian Smith, on the other hand, went with a bit more snark: How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-five Difficult Steps. Whatever their differences, both Hahn and Smith found it important that they offer explanations for their conversions. Come to find out, there’s an awful lot at stake, and it’s something much different than anything that resembles trusting Jesus or becoming part of a community of faith. It’s much more about their desire for certainty and where they can find it.
I graduated college after the landmark ecumenical statement, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” had just entered its second decade. Even in those years, quite a few of my classmates had already begun to walk through the doors that statement opened. While I never took the plunge myself – though I did graduate work at an unapologetically Catholic university – I largely shared the same spirit. To be sure, most of us weren’t your typical disaffected evangelicals. The left never really attracted us. Instead, what did was a more traditional, indeed, a more hierarchically authoritative right. Call it a strange twist on the liturgical movement, we yearned for more theological regulation in the midst of what we were taught to be believe was a wildly escalating cultural relativism. We harbored a deep desire for a more stable authority, a desire born out of frustration with the democratization of American Christianity and the pervasive interpretive pluralism intrinsic to the standard evangelical approaches to the Bible upon which we cut our teeth. In the end, this desire for certainty led many of my friends to trade a singular dependence upon the Bible for what, to all appearances, was a more stable and certain authority in the Roman Magisterium.
Though of a different generation entirely, Hahn’s story is typical of many (not all) converts I know. By and large, it’s an account of one evangelical who thought himself into the Roman Church. Once a staunch anti-Catholic polemicist, Hahn did not so much convert as conclude, after years of earnest reading and intellectual debate, that it was the Catholics who got the Bible right after all. As a case in point, Hahn tells us that he became increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional Protestant position that what we have in the Bible is, as he puts it, “a fallible collection of infallible documents.” What he needed was to be “certain,” certain that it really was God’s infallible Word that he was reading. That desire for certainty is key. By his own admission, Hahn was after what he believed to be the sole objective truth – that one correct interpretation of the Bible upon which he could hang his hat in the midst of the cacophony of voices that was then late twentieth-century America.
In some ways, Christian Smith’s story stands in stark contrast to Hahn’s. He comes right out and rejects the desire for certainty that had earlier set Hahn and others on the road to Rome, and he rails against exchanging the evangelical doctrine of biblical inerrancy for a similarly misguided view of a supposedly equally infallible Magisterium. And yet, while the Catholic Church might not offer the certainty that some evangelicals want, Smith admits that it provides “well-warranted claims about the truth of things,” so that we “can believe with great confidence that what the Church teaches as true really is true.” Exactly how different is this “great confidence” of Smith’s from the “certainty” discovered by Hahn? In practice, it would seem, not very much at all.
And that’s the revelatory thing about this particular wave of conservative evangelical conversions to Catholicism – what is sought and gained is a renewed sense that what we know to be true is really true. When casting votes or in other ways grappling with Western pluralism, Smith’s confidence and Hahn’s certainty come to look very much the same. Where else are we seeing this better played out than on the battlefield of American politics today? In a world of hyper-partisanship and watertight binaries where all that really matters is overturning Roe v. Wade and where the President can rally his supporters with the threat that the very survival of their religion is on the line, there is simply no room left for any genuine discussion and debate, much less the recognition of legitimate differences of opinion or – God forbid – doubt. In a world where right makes might, we had better figure out what is right.
Institutional Religion: A Protestant Story
by Margaret Bendroth
Supreme Court on a cloudy day with a security guard on the stairs blocking the entrance as the doors are being renovated. ” width=”5952″ height=”3968″> “US Supreme Court” by Roman Boed
One thing that the #MeToo movement and the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings have made blindingly clear is that sexual harassment/abuse is not simply or even primarily a matter of abusive individuals. Instead, it is very much about institutions – be they elite prep schools, the Catholic church, evangelical megachurches, or the U.S. Congress – that coddle abusers while refusing to hear or even acknowledge those who have endured abuse. But as Peggy Bendroth reminds us, the problem is not with institutions, per se – in fact, we need institutions. Healthy institutions.
Margaret Bendroth is executive director of the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston, and a historian of American religion. Her books include Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (Yale 1993); Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism (Illinois 2003), co-edited with Virginia Brereton; and, The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past (UNC 2015).
Nobody really likes institutional religion. In fact it’s hard to think of anything drearier than the juxtaposition of those two words, “institution” and “religion.” They bring to mind cinder-block office buildings full of boring bureaucrats sidling up and down rows of cubicles, urgent memos in hand. If Martin Luther, John Wesley, or even Jesus Christ himself walked through the door, they’d die of boredom.
Not only that, we’re used to thinking of institutional religion as the enemy, small-minded pencil-pushers out to quash anything that looks rebellious or fun or perhaps led by the Holy Spirit, unless it comes with a budget request and an invoice number.
And it’s particularly disheartening when, in the Southern Baptist case Emily McGowin and Elesha Coffman and I (among others) have detailed here at rightingamerica, the wagons of denominational machinery are circled against change, drowning out legitimate grievances of women who have been abused, and protecting the abuser.
I don’t think institutions themselves are the problem, though, weird as this may sound. I was on the faculty at Calvin College when the first buildings went up named after big donors (Elsa Prince and the DeVos family, of Amway fame and, well, you probably recognize the name so I need not digress). Before that, every dorm and classroom building bore the consonant-rich name of a Dutch domine or a denominational hero of some kind—Noordewier, Beets, Broene, VanderWerp, Eldersveld. As odd and parochial as those names appear (and who even remembers why they were famous in the first place?) they were a buffer from big money. Behind them was a solid constituency of Christian Reformed churches, all giving regularly to “our school” (onze school), as well as generations of parents who wrote “Calvin College” on their children’s birth certificates—and if all went according to plan, on marriage licenses too. Those churches and parents depended in turn on an army of people who ran Calvin College like a hardware store (as I once heard George Marsden describe it)—money in, money out, budgets and class schedules all proceeding decently and in order.
It’s a story that other denominational colleges could also tell. Old loyalties to Christian Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian schools have declined, probably in proportion to the rising numbers of non-denominational megachurches named after suburban landscape features, and all those startups without any fixed address, just urls designed to evoke religiously nonspecific yet positive associations.
The unpleasant truth, especially for anti-institutional baby boomers like me, is that institutions matter and it’s important to know how to take care of them. All those byzantine bylaws and org-charts, the budget spreadsheets and committee minutes—they protect people. We’ve come to see them as the enemy (thanks, George Orwell?), but it’s not the institutions themselves, the daily hum of paper shuffled and stamped—it’s the institution weakened enough to allow outsize influence to big money, Big Brother.
One of the reasons I’m saying things that, to be honest, surprise me to no end is my experience, lo these past fifteen years, trying to bring an old and creaky Yankee institution back to life. My job at the Congregational Library has been rewarding in the long run, but a lot of the time it’s fairly dull and frustrating work, sometimes frustrating beyond belief. I do not come to administrative work naturally—I hate meetings and my desk is a mess—but I have learned how to do it, and to understand why it’s necessary. I’ve had to hold responsibility for all kinds of things I’d prefer to ignore, and at some cost. I no longer take any institution for granted—I know how much time and guts and skill it takes, not just to care for them but to slowly and patiently induce them to change.
These are skills most of us, especially academics, I think, aren’t taught, or taught to value. But one of the many takeaways from the Southern Baptist case is that we ignore them at our peril.
If It Sounds Unbelievable, It Probably Is
by Mark Wastler
Mark Wastler is a sheep farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and an Episcopal priest serving a village church in Maryland. Mark’s spirituality, politics, and way of life have been deeply shaped by agrarian thought and American Pragmatism. He studied American intellectual history in graduate school at the University of Maryland, then went to seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied Pragmatism with Richard Niebuhr at Harvard Divinity School. He became a radical empiricist the day he encountered William James, “The Will to Believe” in Bill Trollinger’s “History of American Thought” class at Messiah College in 1990. The following is adapted from his March 4 2018 sermon to the St. Paul’s Church, Sharpsburg, Maryland.
It was 1979 or 1980, I can’t quite remember the year or what grade I was in at school. I think I was in eighth grade. But I do remember the girl. I was in love. She went to a fundamentalist Baptist church in town, and so I decided to go. I would have gone just about anywhere that she went, and so church seemed like a reasonable place. I could show her and her parents what a fine, upstanding young man I was. It didn’t work. I got my heart broken.
One Sunday morning I was snapped out of my daydreams of Lori, as she sat two pews in front of me and to the right. I was brought back to the moment when Pastor Jack Power, a hell-fire and brimstone preacher whose booming voice could wake the dead and scare the hell out of teenage boys, proclaimed with great authority, “I would believe the bible if it said that Jonah swallowed the whale.” (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, the ancient prophet, Jonah, spent three days in the belly of a big fish that then vomited him out on shore.)
“I would believe it if it said that Jonah swallowed the whale,” he said. Thirty-eight years later and I can still hear him say it. He laid down the gauntlet for everyone there. He set the standard for what it means to believe the Christian message. What he was saying is that the more unbelievable things are, the bigger your faith is. To be a Christian, in his mind, was to believe outrageous things in spite of what anybody else might think.
I remember that I admired his audacity and simplicity. But I also quickly realized that this was going to lead to my exit from the church. There was no way I was going to live up to his standard for belief. His faith lacked intellectual curiosity, and he really believed that there was no truth to be found outside of a literal reading of the bible.
That preacher could easily have been preaching on St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians that we heard this morning. In 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 20, Paul wrote, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world.” That verse and plenty of others like it make it very easy to set up a dichotomy between Christianity and the world. You don’t have to be a very smart preacher to set up an “us versus them” scenario. Those kinds of binaries preach pretty well, especially if your audience already feels under siege.
Throughout the history of Christianity, but especially in modern times, we have asked people to believe some pretty extraordinary things—things that have little, if anything, to do with the core message of Christianity.
In 1859 Charles Darwin published his book titled, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In that work Darwin argued that species change and evolve over time—over millions of years species change and adapt to their environment, and that process eventually brings about new forms of life.
Some people thought this was a radical new idea, and to many it was. Most farmers just kind of yawned at the idea because they had known this for years. You can easily change an animal through selective breeding. That is why there is such diversity among domestic animals, from cattle to dogs.
Christians divided over Darwin’s ideas. It is called the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. Some Christians, like Episcopalians, found ways to rethink their theology in light of these new ideas about biology and evolution. Others, however, said that Darwin was evil, that his ideas were demonic. The bible said that God created the world in six days, and if you did not believe that, then you were not a Christian. The litmus test for where you stood was whether or not you believed that Adam and Eve were real people, not part of a mythic story that conveyed spiritual truth.
I went to a small, Christian liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. As part of our general education requirements we had to take “Introduction to Bible Study.” It was a college level bible class, not your average Sunday School sort of thing. We studied textual and historical criticism, and looked at the bible from a variety of angles.
I went into that class with Pastor Jack Power’s assertion that true believers believed it all, just the way it was written on the page, still echoing in my head. His assertion dominated my definition of what it meant to be a Christian. I could never live up to his literalism and I always felt guilty about it.
We got to the part in the class on Genesis, about Adam and Eve and evolution and all of that. We learned that there were other ways of looking at it. We learned that the writers of the bible were not addressing modern, scientific questions. We learned about ancient ideas of the universe. We learned that the early writers probably thought that Adam and Eve were metaphors for humanity at large.
I was talking with the associate pastor at the church I went to in college. He and I were good friends. I told him the ridiculous thing my professor had said that week, that Adam and Eve were not real people. I fully expected him to say how stupid that was. Instead he said, “I don’t believe that Adam and Eve were real people. I think they are ways the biblical writers used to talk about deeper truths.”
I was a bit shocked, relieved, and excited. I was excited to find out that one could believe in the message of Christianity without buying into all the fundamentalist stuff. I could follow Jesus and not buy all the alternative truths. My friend and pastor saved my faith that day by showing me it was possible to be a Christian and still have intellectual integrity in the modern world.
I am sharing all of this with you for two reasons. The first is because I want you to know that being a Christian is about living the radical message of God’s love. It is not about believing in unbelievable things. You can believe those if you want, but they are not essential to the Christian project. Jesus calls us to love, plain and simple. Do that and you are a Christian.
The other reason I share all of this is because I have become deeply concerned with the long-term impact of Christians and their so-called alternative forms of knowledge. Every time we say that science is a bunch of lies, we undermine the public good. Every time we assert some conspiracy theory about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, we are teaching people to be suspicious and not trust one another. Every time we say that the bible is to be taken literally, we call into question all other pursuits of knowledge.
Sowing such doubt and mistrust is not an act of love. It is deception. The long-term impact of asserting wild claims and undermining the bonds of trust will not take us good places. We bear a large responsibility for all of this talk of fake news these days and for the general mistrust that permeates society. For almost a hundred years now, we have said that it is a Christian thing to do to deny science, promote conspiracy theories, and believe in fairy tales.
Love, Jesus tells us, is about embracing the truth wherever it may lead us. And he was deeply convinced that the truth, no matter how we discover it and no matter how uncomfortable it makes us, will set us free.
William James and a Journey into the Land of the Faithfully Unafraid
by Earl Crown
Earl Crown teaches high school United States and Modern European history at Chapelgate Christian Academy in suburban Maryland. He has a bachelor’s in history from Messiah College and a master’s in liberal arts from McDaniel College. His scholarly interests include the history of dissent and marginalized groups in the United States. He is currently working on a project on his uncle’s involvement in the struggle to integrate the University of Florida as an undergrad in the 1940s. He lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania with his wife Sarah and two children.
In a recent piece on this blog, Bill Trollinger wrote of a course called “History of Thought in America” which he taught at Messiah College in the early 1990s and in which I was a student. As Bill rightly points out, of particular interest to my fellow students and I was the work of William James. Our discussions of James, quite heated at times, centered on James’s distinction between religious belief that claims a foundation of certainty, and that which doubts that certainty can exist without empirical evidence.
William James, courtesy of Houghton Library [public domain]
Almost eighteen years later, I found myself a student in Bryn Upton’s American intellectual history grad seminar at McDaniel College. This cathartic experience made me aware that I was no longer as certain as I once had been. Like Bill, Bryn is a great appreciator of James, and once again I confronted the challenge of James’s pragmatism. While researching for a paper in that course, I came across the following gem from James: “True ideas,” James argues, “are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify…Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.” Looking back at myself from the perspective of grad school, I realized the foolishness of having claimed certainty for a set of ideas that at least for me were at that point untested. My past certainty had been made false by events. Marriage, parenthood, travelling and living outside of the country for a time, and two decades of teaching high school history had combined to open my mind. This for me was not a rejection of faith. It was simply recognizing the preposterous arrogance of claiming that I had cornered the market on religious—or any other—truth.
My takeaway from my experience with James is twofold. First, in an age when we take our certainty, isolate ourselves in echo chambers, and allow our car bumpers to shout truth at each other, James is more important than ever. His call for subjecting our ideas to evidential verification is antithetical to our fearful and anti-intellectual culture. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to teaching. I can channel my frustration at ignorance, including my own, into my students. Young minds are so wonderfully teachable.
On a more personal level, I still consider myself a person of faith, and I still expect that there is truth out there. I have simply been wrong too many times to assume that I have ever arrived at it. I think I feared that embracing the uncertainty that was lying dormant inside me all the time would reduce me to something resembling Camus’ Meursault, unable to conjure up even the slightest hint of sympathy for my fellow man, or to find meaning in anything. Quite the opposite is in fact the case. The journey towards a deeper understanding of reality has made life more meaningful than ever before. If, as Bill says in his piece, my old self was “a fearful place to be,” then my 45 year-self is in a wonderful place, unafraid, if not eager, to find out my errors.
Revisiting Evangelicalism and the Desperate Need for Certainty
William Trollinger
This post originally appeared on July 30 of this year. We republish it now because we have received a few very interesting posts in response, which we will be publishing here over the next week or so.
At the heart of much of evangelical apologetics is the promise that you can know that you know the truth. Not think or hope or have faith that you know the truth, but know that you know the truth.
In particular, you can know with certainty – it has been proven – that Jesus rose from the dead. The classic work is Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, which was first published in 1972, and which has been updated again and again. Also popular in this genre is Gary Habermas’ The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, as well as Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus, which – as of 2017 – is also now a movie. There are also CDs, including “Top Ten Proofs for the Physical Resurrection of Jesus Christ.” And the internet is awash with ironclad arguments, including Jack Zavada’s “7 Proofs of the Resurrection: Evidence the Resurrection of Jesus Christ Happened,” as well as, from Answers in Genesis, Tim Chaffey’s “Infallible Proofs.”
Note the language: Evidence, Verdict, Proof, Infallible.
I taught for eight years at Messiah College, an evangelical school in south-central Pennsylvania. In my time there, my favorite class to teach – hands down – was HIS 321: History of Thought in America. Half of the class periods were devoted to lecture, half to discussion. The only textbook we used was David Hollinger’s and Charles Capper’s two-volume collection of primary documents, The American Intellectual Tradition. Each week, students would write a two-page paper in response to a prompt regarding one or more of the sources, which included – to give a few examples – Jonathan Edwards’ “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Jane Addams’ “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements,” and Michael Walzer’s “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘American’?”
William James, courtesy of Houghton Library [public domain]
This command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait – acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true – till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough – this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. . . If we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell (87; emphases James’).
The first time I taught the course, I assumed that my evangelical students would focus on (and perhaps find encouraging) James’ argument in behalf of the legitimacy of religious belief (the essay really should be entitled “The Right to Believe”) in an age of science. I was mistaken. Instead, and this was the case every time I taught “The Will to Believe,” they gravitated toward – what really animated the conversation – James’ distinction between two kinds of belief:
The faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another (79: emphases James’).
On its own the class would divide between – to use James’ terminology – the empiricists (where of course James stood) and the absolutists. But the absolutists in this case were not scientific absolutists. They were religious absolutists. And the arguments that ensued had to do with whether or not we can be certain in our religious beliefs. At some point in the debate, those in the absolutist camp would assert that if you don’t know that you don’t the truth, you don’t really have faith. No Kierkegaardian or Jamesian leap of faith here, as these young evangelical absolutists equated faith with certainty.
The first time I taught this class I was stunned by the number of students who declared themselves religious absolutists. But I should not have been. In fact, what I should have been surprised by was the number of religious empiricists, given that the evangelical subculture in which many or most Messiah students were/are raised was/is awash with claims that there is overwhelming evidence proving the truth of Christianity and the resurrection of Jesus, and given that evangelical apologetics again and again equates faith with certainty.
Over time, I moved from being stunned by the number of religious absolutists in my classes to being saddened. Again and again, these students would talk about how they would not be able to believe if they did not know that they knew the truth. They “needed” certainty. But this requirement for certainty is really a requirement that one’s reasoning can transcend human limits, can transcend human flaws and delusions, can be untainted by – to use theological language – sin. One must be perfect. Godlike. That’s the requirement.
What pressure. What a fearful place to be.
Relaunch of Righting America!
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
In spring 2016, we launched the RACM (Righting America at the Creation Museum) website. One of the primary purposes of the site was to get word out about the publication of Righting America at the Creation Museum (by Susan and William Trollinger, Johns Hopkins UP, 2016). We also hoped to create an online community interested in a scholarly conversation about topics discussed in Righting America at the Creation Museum, including creationism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, the culture wars, the Christian Right, and so forth.
In the course of the last couple of years, we have been astonished and thrilled to see that our second purpose easily eclipsed the first! In the first year, six University of Dayton faculty and three alumni contributed articles to the RACM blog. In the second year, 18 authors wrote 45 posts out of the total 104 posts. Nearly half of our blog posts in our second year were written by guest bloggers. And that has continued such that by now they come from an array of disciplines including history, rhetoric, communication, English, art history, sociology, history of education, geography, chemistry, physics, biblical studies, and theology. Importantly, while all of our guest bloggers write from a scholarly perspective, not all would identify (strictly speaking) as academics. Some are pastors. Others are independent scholars. And still others are graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Dayton.
As we reflected on how our second purpose wonderfully took over our first, we became convicted that it was time to bring the site into better alignment with what it really is—something on an informal online journal that makes available many scholarly voices on topics of growing interest in the US. Instead of featuring Sue and Bill’s book, our newly renovated site showcases the blog and its contributors. As you have likely already surmised, Bill serves as the primary blogger for the site. He will continue in that role and his role as recruiter of contributors. He seems to have a great knack for that! Patrick will continue as site manager and contributor. Sue, who loves thinking about visual rhetoric, will serve as something of a visual editor of the site and contributor.
Finally, with this renovation of the site, we are also changing its name from Righting America at the Creation Museum to “Righting America.” That change simply reflects the fact that the blog seeks to offer insights about topics that go well beyond the confines of the Creation Museum.
We hope you will enjoy the newly renovated site. As always, we certainly welcome your feedback. Most of all, we look forward to learning more from all of our contributors and to keeping the conversation going.
Evangelicalism and the Desperate Need for Certainty
William Trollinger
At the heart of much of evangelical apologetics is the promise that you can know that you know the truth. Not think or hope or have faith that you know the truth, but know that you know the truth.
In particular, you can know with certainty – it has been proven – that Jesus rose from the dead. The classic work is Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, which was first published in 1972, and which has been updated again and again. Also popular in this genre is Gary Habermas’ The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, as well as Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus, which – as of 2017 – is also now a movie. There are also CDs, including “Top Ten Proofs for the Physical Resurrection of Jesus Christ.” And the internet is awash with ironclad arguments, including Jack Zavada’s “7 Proofs of the Resurrection: Evidence the Resurrection of Jesus Christ Happened,” as well as, from Answers in Genesis, Tim Chaffey’s “Infallible Proofs.”
Note the language: Evidence, Verdict, Proof, Infallible.
I taught for eight years at Messiah College, an evangelical school in south-central Pennsylvania. In my time there, my favorite class to teach – hands down – was HIS 321: History of Thought in America. Half of the class periods were devoted to lecture, half to discussion. The only textbook we used was David Hollinger’s and Charles Capper’s two-volume collection of primary documents, The American Intellectual Tradition. Each week, students would write a two-page paper in response to a prompt regarding one or more of the sources, which included – to give a few examples – Jonathan Edwards’ “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Jane Addams’ “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements,” and Michael Walzer’s “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘American’?”
William James, courtesy of Houghton Library [public domain]
This command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait – acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true – till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough – this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. . . If we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell (87; emphases James’).
The first time I taught the course, I assumed that my evangelical students would focus on (and perhaps find encouraging) James’ argument in behalf of the legitimacy of religious belief (the essay really should be entitled “The Right to Believe”) in an age of science. I was mistaken. Instead, and this was the case every time I taught “The Will to Believe,” they gravitated toward – what really animated the conversation – James’ distinction between two kinds of belief:
The faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another (79: emphases James’).
On its own the class would divide between – to use James’ terminology – the empiricists (where of course James stood) and the absolutists. But the absolutists in this case were not scientific absolutists. They were religious absolutists. And the arguments that ensued had to do with whether or not we can be certain in our religious beliefs. At some point in the debate, those in the absolutist camp would assert that if you don’t know that you don’t the truth, you don’t really have faith. No Kierkegaardian or Jamesian leap of faith here, as these young evangelical absolutists equated faith with certainty.
The first time I taught this class I was stunned by the number of students who declared themselves religious absolutists. But I should not have been. In fact, what I should have been surprised by was the number of religious empiricists, given that the evangelical subculture in which many or most Messiah students were/are raised was/is awash with claims that there is overwhelming evidence proving the truth of Christianity and the resurrection of Jesus, and given that evangelical apologetics again and again equates faith with certainty.
Over time, I moved from being stunned by the number of religious absolutists in my classes to being saddened. Again and again, these students would talk about how they would not be able to believe if they did not know that they knew the truth. They “needed” certainty. But this requirement for certainty is really a requirement that one’s reasoning can transcend human limits, can transcend human flaws and delusions, can be untainted by – to use theological language – sin. One must be perfect. Godlike. That’s the requirement.
What pressure. What a fearful place to be.
Good Stuff to Read about White Evangelicals, Race, and Donald Trump
William Trollinger
Thanks to the fact that an overwhelming percentage of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump and continue to enthusiastically support him – hush money to porn actresses and obeisance to Vladimir Putin notwithstanding – many smart journalists and scholars have turned their attention to American evangelicalism. But while there are various explanations of evangelicals’ attachment to Trump, it is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that one of the most – if not the most – important contributing factors has to do with race. That is to say, white evangelicals feel besieged, and much of this sense of threat has to do with the fact that America’s racial landscape is changing such that white dominance may no longer be a given.
The following two articles shine a light on this phenomenon.
Seth Dowland, “American Evangelicalism and the Politics of Whiteness,” Christian Century.
In this insightful article Dowland, author of Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right, points out that historians have traditionally relied on a theological characterization of evangelicals, i.e., as Christians who emphasize conversion, salvation, evangelism, and biblical authority. But as the author argues, this definition really does not really get at what it means to be a white evangelical in 21st century America. Instead, as Dowland astutely observes, “what most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups, and nonbelievers is not theology but politics.” As some of the best recent scholarship on evangelicalism has made clear, racism (along with patriarchy) has been central to much of white evangelicalism for the past 150 years. In the wake of the conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s over civil rights and feminism, evangelicals became even more tied to white racial identity and right-wing politics, to the point that now “they have rallied around Trump to defend a white Protestant nation,” serving as “loyal foot soldiers in the battle against undocumented immigrants and Muslims.”
Stephanie McCrummen, “Judgment Days,” Washington Post.
To be sure, over the past eighteen months national news organizations have sent out countless reporters to interview rural and small-town Trump supporters. Despite all of the attention paid to this topic, McCrummen’s article from Luverne, Alabama is very much worth the read. She focuses on the congregants of the First Baptist Church, who explained their willingness to overlook Trump’s blatant immorality because he is anti-abortion and because they are convinced that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had been sent by Satan to destroy white Christian America. Trump will protect them, from the onslaught of undocumented immigrants and from blacks who seem determined to foment a race war with protests against police brutality, with the opening of a memorial to lynching victims in nearby Montgomery (which is “promoting violence”), and with – as one church member emphasized – the never-ending obsession with the exaggerated negative effects of slavery. As one interviewee put it, “’Slaves were valued. They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.’” Perhaps most interesting here is McCrummen’s focus on the church’s pastor, who has qualms about Trump’s character, but who – in the face of so much passionate support for the president – just can’t bring himself to say a negative word.
Presuppositionalism, the Fundamentalist Bubble, and Donald Trump
William Trollinger
The fundamentalist bubble is not simply a matter of separate schools, institutions, and media. It is also a matter of separate ideas that cannot be challenged or disputed or proven untrue. It is a matter of impregnable presuppositions.
At the Creation Museum much is made of presuppositions, or “starting points.” At the very beginning of the museum’s Bible Walkthrough a question posed on a wall: “Same Facts, but Different Views . . . Why?” The answer is given on a placard entitled “Different Views because of Different Starting Points,” in which it is asserted that “individuals must choose God’s Word as the starting point for all their reasoning, or start with their own arbitrary philosophy as the starting point for evaluating everything.”
As we observe in Righting America, at the Creation Museum
There are only two possible starting points. Start with the inerrant young Earth creationist Bible, and you will have a true understanding of the origins of the world and of humans, a well-ordered life in line with God’s law and eternal salvation. Start with human reason . . . and you will have a compromised Word of God with “millions of years” and evolution, a thoroughly corrupted church, the collapse of Western civilization, and eternal damnation (148-149).
What is so curious about this is that so much of the museum is devoted to “evidence” for a young Earth, including a planetarium, fossils, and four rooms devoted to making the point that a global flood explains what appears to be an old Earth.
In her book, Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen brilliantly describes what is going on here. She notes that central to young Earth creationist apologetics is the conviction that presuppositionalism gives “creationists the language they needed to roll back Darwin’s dominance,” as they claim that evolution and creationism are simply “conflicting ‘hypotheses’ with different presuppositions,” i.e., starting points. And yet, while creationists – and evangelicals in general – “demand that presuppositions trump evidence,” they also assert that “the right kind of evidence as universal fact.” They “insist that modern reason must buttress faith, that scripture . . . align with scientific reality” (224-225, 258).
Creationists are too modern to give up on the importance of evidence. But when the weight of contrary scientific evidence becomes too much to bear, they can always retreat into presuppositionalism. In effect, “we have the right starting point, so we can see the evidence as we wish to see the evidence.”
In his powerful little book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder observes that
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom . . . You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case (65-66).
Is there a connection between creationist presuppositionalism and white evangelical support for Donald Trump?
The Comforts of a Fundamentalist Bubble
William Trollinger
Who is the audience for fundamentalist apologetics?
One place to start in answering this question is Answers in Genesis (AiG). This creationist juggernaut – with its books, videos, podcasts, speakers, school and church curricula, museum, and theme park – advertises itself as an “apologetics (i.e., Christianity-defending) ministry, dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively.”
Probably no one at AiG has produced more apologetics material than Ken Ham’s son-in-law, Bodie Hodge. Among other books and videos, he has written or edited Confound the Critics: Answers for Attacks on Biblical Truths, How Do We Know the Bible is True?, Quick Answers to Tough Questions, and Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions.
Again and again, Hodge underscores the point that, contrary to what one might imagine, it is very easy for fundamentalists to logically demolish the views of those with whom they disagree. For example, in a recent article on the AiG website entitled “Micro-Refutations,” Hodge asserts that “with just a little knowledge, [fundamentalists] can usually easily refute false religions and beliefs . . . It’s that simple.” To make his point, he helpfully provides some examples of “some quick, easy refutations”:
- Regarding materialism: This belief “is itself not material or energy, but a nonmaterial concept [emphases Hodge’s]. This means materialism cannot exist within materialism. Thus, materialism is self-defeating and refuted.”
- Regarding Taoism and Hinduism: While these religions “have an impersonal ‘god’ . . . how then can anyone know that this ‘god’ is impersonal? After all, this ‘god’ cannot communicate anything about itself to man since communication is personal. This is arbitrary, to say the least, and self-refuting.”
- Regarding atheism: “The atheist must be an omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscience [sic] ‘god’ to say there is no omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God. They must have the attributes of God to claim God doesn’t exist. Thus, the atheistic position is self-refuting.”
- Regarding public education: When “state schools” – which “generally teach children the evolutionary position that they are animals” and that there is “no God” – chastise these same students for “not ‘behaving’ (acting with Christian morality)” when they “do drugs, vandalize, rape, get drunk, shoot their classmates, and live like animals,” they are being illogical.
- Regarding transgender individuals: They are “offended that I don’t accept them for who they are, when they don’t accept themselves for who they are (hence, the attempted transition from the gender they were); furthermore, they do not accept me for who I am (a double standard). Are they repentant over offending me by their actions? No. This is inconsistent and thus false.”
One probably does not need a college philosophy course to see that these arguments are ludicrous. Just to take one for example—of course, you don’t have to be God to be of the opinion that there is no God. So, we have to ask: who could be persuaded by Hodge’s “micro-refutations”?
That question, however, presumes that Hodge is seeking to persuade individuals outside fundamentalism. But given the quality of Hodge’s arguments, it makes more sense to see his primary audience as folks who are already fundamentalist creationists. Understanding this allows us to see that Hodge is in the business of delivering pep talks to true believers, comforting them with the knowledge that it takes little or no mental energy for them to demolish arguments made by their religious, political, and cultural opponents.
So, staying in the AiG bubble – with its schools, publications, speakers, and more – makes sense. Those inside the bubble have the Truth. Those outside the bubble do not.
