The Righting America Blog

With the Texas Voucher Bill, taxpayer money will go to private schools that teach anti-science and Young-Earth Creationism

Feb 17, 2025 | 0 Comments

by Mara Richards Bim

Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with Baptist News Global (BNG) and as program director at Faith Commons. She is a spiritual director and a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023. This is an abbreviated version of her February 03, 2025 BNG article, which can be found here.

Texas Governor Abbott has made “school choice” his mission over the last few years, going so far as to spend 2024 actively campaigning against rural Republicans who opposed to ensure that he would have enough votes in this legislative session to pass it.

There are many reasons for Texans to oppose school vouchers including that they are tools used to enforce racial segregation and to harm students with disabilities whom private schools are not legally obligated to accept. But, as I listened to the recent testimony at the Texas Senate Education Committee hearing, new red flags were raised for me. The Committee—in order to stack the deck in its favor—began the hearing with 2.5 hours of conversation between the Senators and invited guests who spoke glowingly of the bill. A little too glowingly, actually.

Some Highlights from the Invited Testimony

In the invited testimony before the Senate Committee on Education, something kept coming up over and over that raised alarm bells for me. The guests repeatedly expressed gratitude to the Senate committee for the “freedom” afforded to them in SB2 and dismissed any legal concerns around church and state separation.

Nathan Cunneen, Texas State Director at the American Federation for Children (an advocacy organization)

This proposal maximizes freedom for families and students while placing common sense guardrails for providers, vendors, and the EAOs that would help administrate the program. Guardrails are not the same thing as strings attached. Numerous school choice programs around the country have had similar accountability measures as these for decades and not in one instance has that led to the government takeover of private schools or the further regulation of homeschoolers. I would encourage this committee to be incredibly clear with their language in making it clear that this program will not attempt to infringe on the protections placed on private schools and students.

Arif Panju, Managing Attorney of the Texas Office of Institute for Justice (a national legal advocacy organization pushing for school choice in states across the country)

It is our opinion at [Institute for Justice] that SB2 fully complies with the U.S. Constitution and with the Texas Constitution—referring to the education clause, which is what you hear about often…What’s left with opponents is education clauses. And they like to weaponize a state constitution’s education clause, which requires a very simple thing: creating and maintaining a public education system. It’s just a mandate. These things per the text in Article 7 section 1 of our state constitution, are not prohibitions on the legislature’s power to create additional educational options. The Texas Supreme Court has held that decades ago—and the plain language of the provision says as much—as long as there’s a public school system before and after the program, we’re fine. There’s nothing stopping the legislature from enacting SB2.

Matt Ticzkus, Regional Director of the Mid-South American Association of Christian Schools which is affiliated with American Association of Christian Schools (a school credentialing organization):

The autonomy and religious liberty language contained in the bill is exceptionally strong as it conveys to participating schools that they’re free to carry out the mission of their school with no impact to curriculum admissions or hiring, and that a participating school is not a recipient of federal financial funds or a state actor.

Taxpayer Funds, School Choice and Accreditation

What Arif Panju failed to mention in his testimony before the Texas Senate Committee was that a bill identical to Texas’s was just ruled unconstitutional in South Carolina by that state’s Supreme Court. Perhaps he failed to mention it because his organization has is now involved in and has a financial stake in seeing this issue make it to the Supreme Court.

What Matt Ticzkus failed to mention in his testimony is more interesting. He introduced himself as follows:

I’m a volunteer board member for the Texas Private Schools Association representing the 941 accredited nonprofit Texas schools who serve more than 300,000 students. I’m here today in support of SB2. At the outset of my testimony, I want to affirm on behalf of our members that we appreciate the work that public schools do, and we consider them to be partners in educating the next generation. For nine years, I served as head of school at a small private school in North Texas, and today I serve as a regional director for a nonprofit. I’m not a highly paid lobbyist or some big donor, nor do I represent one.

To quote Shakespeare, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

It turns out that Tisczus is the Regional Director of the Mid-South American Association of Christian Schools which is a subsidiary of American Association of Christian Schools, a credentialing organization for Christian private schools focused on delivering curriculum that embraces a “Biblical worldview.”

As SB2 currently stands, there is no requirement that private schools be accredited to receive taxpayer funds.

It is here we land at the crux of just why people like Tisczus are especially pleased with the current iteration of the bill and the “religious freedom” it affords private schools.

Last year, Huffington Post conducted an audit of 7,200 private schools across the country receiving taxpayer funding through school choice programs. They found that 75 percent of participating schools are religious, specifically: 42% are non-Catholic Christian, 31% are Catholic, 23% are non-sectarian/secular, 2% are Jewish and 1% are Muslim.

They did a deep-dive into the curriculum being taught by the 42% non-Catholic Christian and found that 33% were using textbooks from the leading publishers selling curriculum emphasizing a “biblical worldview” marked by creationism and a rejection of science.

By comparison, I did a deep dive into Texas Private Schools Association (TPSA) and the 941 schools currently credentialed by one of its member credentialing organizations. I found that roughly two-thirds of them advertise that they teach “a biblical worldview.” Many utilize curriculum produced by Abeka, Purposeful Design Publications, Accelerated Christian Education (ACE School of Tomorrow) and Bob Jones University Press (BJU Press).

To be clear: Modern-day Catholics and Mainline Protestants do not see a conflict between science and faith. It is only certain kinds of extremist Christian sects that do.

Taxpayer Funds, School Choice, Anti-Science and Young-Earth Creationism

I was curious about these schools that advertise using “comprehensive, biblically-based curriculum” from these providers and what, exactly, is in the curriculum. So I purchased some to review for myself from Abeka, the largest of the “biblical worldview” curriculum provider including: 7^th Grade Science Textbook Science: Order and Design, 8^th Grade Science Textbook Science: Earth and Space and 10^th Grade Science Textbook Biology: God’s Living Creation.

Each of the three textbooks devotes a chapter to dismissing the theory of evolution as “superstition” and “bad science” in favor of young-earth creationism. The ramifications of this belief touch every aspect of each of the three textbooks.

The 7^th grade section on mammals claims that “Although man has the physical characteristics of a mammal and was created on the same day as the land animals (Gen. 1:24–26), he is unique and separate from animals, including mammals.” The review section at the end of the chapter includes the question: “What are some reasons that man should not be considered a mammal? Use scripture to back your reasoning.”

The 7^th grade textbook also states that the wide variety of felines today (from tigers to the domestic cat) “probably came from the two ‘cats’ that got off Noah’s ark.” The 8^th grade textbook goes even farther with this notion by including a section analyzing the dimensions of Noah’s ark to make the case that all of life today could easily have come from the inhabitants of the ark.

Excerpt from the 7th Grade Textbook, *Order and Design* from Abeka Press.

All three textbooks attribute the biblical flood to every known phenomenon in our world from the extinction of the dinosaurs (who, the textbooks claim roamed the earth with humans) to the erosion of rocks.

The textbooks also warn students to distrust science. The 8^th grade section on geology states:

Geology also covers such topics as the features of the earth’s surface, the formation of the earth’s features, earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion, and fossils. Unfortunately, some areas of geology, especially the study of fossils, have become dominated by evolutionary philosophy. Therefore, we must be careful not to assume that the hypotheses and theories of modern evolutionary geologists are the best explanations for the existing features of the earth. God, the only eyewitness to the formation and geologic history of the earth, sheds light on these areas in His Word; and His statements are irreconcilable with evolutionary philosophy. For example, the great Flood in Genesis 7 and 8 is undoubtedly responsible for most of the earth’s present features and fossils, although evolutionists reject the Flood as a myth.

All three textbooks then go on to claim that the universe, solar system and earth are all less than 10,000 years old. The 7^th grade textbook includes a special section that states, in part:

Evolutionists do not reject the biblical age of the earth because scientific evidence indicates that the earth is billions of years old; rather, they reject it because their faith in the unproven and unprovable ideas of uniformitarianism and evolution requires an old Earth. In fact, when the scientific evidence for the age of the earth is examined without evolutionary assumptions, the evidence agrees with the biblical teaching that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Like the choice whether to believe in evolution or Creation, the choice whether to believe in an old Earth (billions of years old) or a young Earth (only thousands of years old) depends entirely on where one chooses to put his faith: in matter, energy, and error-prone hu-man reason, or in God and His perfect and true Word.

The 8^th grade textbook reinforces this belief with thought-provoking review questions like: “If the earth is less than 10,000 years old, as a straightforward reading of the Bible indicates, why must the continents have moved much faster in the past if they were ever together?”

Excerpt from 8th Grade Textbook, *Science: Earth and Space*, from Abeka Press.

Reinforcing young-earth creationism, the 10^th grade textbook, when introducing the fossil record states:

Fossils are the remains or impressions of plants, animals, and humans preserved in sedimentary rock. Countless billions of fossils are found in the earth’s crust, most of which were probably buried during the worldwide Flood of Noah.

Especially troubling in each of the three textbooks are the chapters on ecology.

Each textbook emphasizes Genesis 1:28 which states that humankind is to have “dominion” over the earth. Before exploring the subject of renewable resources, the 7^th grade textbook warns:

As Christians, we need to be careful to follow scriptural commands and avoid getting caught up in the world’s preservationist attitude. The following are some things we should remember: 1) Human life is sacred; animals and nature are not (Gen. 9:2–6); 2) God has given man dominion over nature (Gen. 1:28); 3) Man is charged with taking care of nature (Lev. 25:1–5).

Later, on the issue of climate science and climate change (the textbook does acknowledge that humans are at least partially responsible for the latter), the text warns:

Knowledge of science is essential to being a well-informed Christian who follows God’s commands to subdue and have dominion. Environmental hysteria comes from misinformation. To avoid misinformation, you should wisely use the scientific method to experiment and to interpret facts without bias, just as scientists should do. Collect the facts. Learn about advancements. Practicing conservation as part of good stewardship (managing nature for God as caretakers) brings glory to God.

The 8^th grade textbook includes the same warning as above with this added text preceding it:

Many people hold unbiblical perspectives about the environment. One unbiblical perspective that people take is placing the earth’s needs above the needs of mankind. Some environmentalists disapprove of the harvesting of trees or the use of fossil fuels for any reason. Often, environmentalists treat humans as unimportant or as nature’s enemy and, in their attempt to protect nature, are a detriment to man. The most dangerous aspect of modern environmentalism is that it promotes a reverence for creation that should be reserved for God alone. The idea that nature is god is pantheism.

The 10^th grade textbook modifies the above warnings of getting involved in the fight against climate change:

Unfortunately, some people take conservation to such an extreme that they stress the welfare of nature above that of man. In their zeal to protect the environment, they dismiss man’s needs as unimportant. For example, some environmental extremists object to the harvesting of trees for any reason. Yet God created trees to provide people with lumber for homes, furniture, paper, household heating, and cooking. Forestry not only benefits mankind but also benefits the ecosystem by thinning a forest of diseased and dying trees to make room for new growth. Of course, if too many trees are cut down in an area the results can be detrimental, but cutting down a few trees where a high way or building is planned is reasonable. Logging companies can replant in forests where they harvest, and trees will reproduce on their own unless too many are harvested.

This curriculum teaches young people to reject all kinds of science from geology to biology. What are the implications for this kind of education for the fields of medicine, ecology, meteorology and more?

If you’d like to read some of the curriculum for yourself, click here.

A New Frontier in the Fight Against School Vouchers?

Multiple courts have ruled that using taxpayer funds to teach young-earth creationism and, more recently, “intelligent design, violates the both state and First Amendment establishment clauses.

The major U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this matter was decided in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard in which the Court declared Louisiana’s “Creationism Act” unconstitutional. More recently, U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III issued a judgement in 2005 in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover striking down the school board’s policy of teaching “intelligent design” alongside evolution.

In his 139-page ruling, Judge Jones issued a scathing rebuke of creationism which had been renamed “intelligent design” stating, for the record that this “is not science and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community.”

Parents have a right to educate their children as they wish—even if that means teaching them junk science. But that right must be balanced by the rights of taxpayers who do not wish to see their taxes diverted to religious teachings they disagree with.

The President and the Paleontologist: Jimmy Carter’s Dalliance with Creationism and Stephen Jay Gould’s Stumble in Rebutting It

Feb 7, 2025 | 4 Comments

by Glenn Branch

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

President Jimmy Carter (Image via *People*)

When Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, the nation lost not only its 39th president but also a prominent born-again Christian who accepted evolution. In chapter 5 of his 2005 book Our Endangered Values, entitled “No Conflict Between Science and Religion,” Carter insisted, “The existence of millions of distant galaxies, the evolution of species, and the big bang theory cannot be rejected because they are not described in the Bible, and neither does confidence in them cast doubt on the Creator of it all.” Yet in the late 1980s, he proposed a creationist argument to no less a figure than the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould — whose rebuttal, surprisingly, was inadequate.

As Gould related in a postscript to his 1988 essay “In a Jumbled Drawer” (reprinted in his 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus), Carter called him out of the blue one day in the late 1980s, “simply to express his good wishes and his hopes for my continued good health” (Gould was in remission from cancer). In gratitude, he then sent Carter a copy of Wonderful Life (1989), his new book about the Cambrian fauna of the Burgess Shale. As was typical with Gould, the paleontology served as a springboard to explore a larger theme: “the ‘pageant’ of evolution as a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable.”

Having read Wonderful Life with pleasure while attempting to defuse armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa, Carter nevertheless offered a counterargument:

You seem to be straining mightily to prove that everything that has happened prior to an evolutionary screening period was just an accident, and that if the tape of life was replayed in countless different ways it is unlikely that cognitive creatures [such as humans] would have been created or evolved. It may be that when you raise “one chance in a million” to the 4th or 5th power there comes a time when pure “chance” can be questioned. I presume that you feel more at ease with the luck of 1 out of 10 to the 30th power than with the concept of a creator who/that has done some orchestrating.

Gould described Carter’s argument, a bit fulsomely, as “a brilliant riposte … a brilliant twentieth-century version of natural theology … fascinating.”

But he insisted that Carter’s argument was nevertheless wrong, and wrong for the same reason that a similar argument he discussed in “In a Jumbled Drawer,” due to the 19th-century Harvard paleontologist Nathaniel Shaler, was wrong: “because a probability cannot even be calculated for a singular occurrence known only after the fact.” (It’s because of the similarity of Shaler’s and Carter’s arguments that Gould added the postscript to “In a Jumbled Drawer.”) Gould approvingly quoted the 19th-century Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James, as writing, in a letter to Shaler, “Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of ‘probability’ at all.”

Gould’s answer to Carter thus presupposed that attributions to probability to individual events are not legitimate: it’s wrong to say that the chance that the next toss of a coin will be heads is 1 in 2, or that there’s a 30 percent chance of rain in Chicago tomorrow, or that the probability that a given atom of cobalt-60 will decay in about 5.27 years is 0.5. Such a view is indeed accepted by a few (such as the mathematician Richard von Mises, who famously declared, “The phrase ‘probability of death,’ when it refers to a single person, has no meaning at all for us”), but it is hard to square with the abundance in ordinary life and scientific practice of attributions to probability to individual events.

And Wonderful Life itself abounds in such attributions. Early in the book, Gould explained, “This book is about the nature of history and the overwhelming improbability of human evolution under themes of contingency and the metaphor of replaying life’s tape”; toward the end, he mused, with reference to Homo sapiens, “we are an improbable and fragile entity,” and interpolated a new adjective in a familiar Shakespearean line: “O brave — and improbable — new world, that has such people in it!” In light of these and similar passages, it is hardly fair for Gould to have faulted Carter for wanting to discuss the improbability of human existence.

What should Gould have said to Carter instead? Carter in effect was arguing that because the probability of human existence is very low on the hypothesis of evolution without divine guidance, and humans yet exist, the hypothesis of evolution without divine guidance is therefore false. But the form of inference is incorrect, as the philosopher Elliott Sober (among others) observes. To see why, take a homely example exactly parallel to Carter’s. Suppose that you buy a single Powerball ticket. If the drawing is conducted properly, it is very improbable (about 1 in 300 million) that you hold a jackpot ticket. But if you turn out to hold a jackpot ticket, are you entitled to infer that the drawing was rigged in your favor? Surely not.

Endorsement of the incorrect form of inference is not limited to creationists. The biologist Richard Dawkins, who is about as far from creationism as anyone could be, fell into the trap in his discussion of the origin of life in The Blind Watchmaker (1986), for example. But it is common among creationists, and Carter’s argument was creationist, at least in a broad sense, for he thought that it showed that it was scientifically necessary to appeal to divine guidance in explaining the facts of life. That was apparently a deviation from his settled views on science and religion, however: in Our Endangered Values, he relates, “I had always understood that we didn’t need scientific proof of the existence or character of God.”

It actually isn’t clear what Carter himself thought of Gould’s rebuttal. In Li ving Faith (1996), he wrote that Gould “later contradicted my argument — with good humor.” But in his later book Our Endangered Values, he seemed a little miffed, writing, “He didn’t respond directly, but subsequently quoted and slyly ridiculed my opinion.” Any rancor evidently subsided by the time of Faith: A Journey for All (2018), in which Carter listed the influences on his thinking about theology and philosophy, ending with Gould. Although he alluded to their arguments “about facts or principles,” he stressed their agreement about science and described Gould’s Rocks of Ages (1999) as one of his favorite books.

In any case, despite his dalliance with the creationist argument he proposed to Gould, Carter was a stalwart defender of the teaching of evolution. In 1980, as the presidential contest was peaking, his challenger Ronald Reagan declared that evolution “is a scientific theory only” and that “the biblical theory of creation” deserved a place in public schools. Carter replied, through his science adviser, that the scientific evidence for evolution was convincing and that schools ought to respect the constitutional separation of church and state. Since creationism was favored by about 44 percent of the American public at the time, Carter’s reply was — typically for him — both principled and courageous.

More Crimes Against History: Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical Indoctrination”

Feb 3, 2025 | 0 Comments

by William Trollinger

Last Wednesday the Trump Administration issued an executive order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which has as its goal to end “federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” As regards the teaching of U.S. history, the 1776 Project – established by the Trump administration in November 2020 and terminated by the Biden administration the following January – is reinstated, its goal being to produce a “patriotic education” that presents “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling” treatment of American history that makes clear how “the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles,” and that promotes “the concept of America’s greatness and history is proper.” Such an approach to America’s past will end the day when students “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of . . . actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin, in which the individual played no part.”

In other words, with Trump’s federal mandate fragile white males can finally feel good about themselves again!

The American Historical Association has it right:

This executive order . . . provide[s] a blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy. It requires teachers to rely on discredited conclusions that lack professional credibility or even to ignore the work of historians entirely. This includes the notorious 1776 Report, whose factual deficiencies render it little more than ideological polemic.

This “notorious” report – and the 1776 Project in general – was designed as a response to The 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize-winning project from The New York Times Magazine that “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

The Trump-created Commission issued its report on (not coincidentally) Martin Luther King Day 2021, just before it was dissolved by the incoming Biden Administration. Interestingly for a group with the goal of telling the “true history” of America’s past, it did not include one single historian whose work focuses on U.S. history. On the other hand, the Commission was chaired by the president of the very conservative Hillsdale College. It also included in its ranks College of the Ozarks president Jerry Davis. Davis, who arrived on campus the very week I left to take another teaching position, made the school (rated the most LGBTQ-unfriendly school in the nation) a hyper-militaristic right-wing bastion.

It turns that a good part of the report is plagiarized from other right-wing publications, without citations to let readers where the material is coming from. More than this, it is poorly written and chock-full of errors and “beliefs without history.” I suffered my way through the entire report (which means you don’t have to). Thankfully, it is not very long, with twenty pages of text and twenty pages of appendices. The first nine pages consists of a mind-numbing paean to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, highlighting what the authors see as their “universal principles,” such as “human equality, the requirement for government by consent, and the securing of natural rights” (7).

But it is in the next eleven pages that the authors get down to the task with which they had been charged, that is, to “’enable a rising generation to understand the . . . accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling’” history of the United States (1). (Notice the repetition of this language in the recent executive order). As I noted in a blog post just after the 1776 Report was published, here are a few lowlights from the last half of the report, along with my commentary:

“The most common charge levelled against the founders. . . is that they were hypocrites who [in their protection of slavery in the Constitution] didn’t believe in their stated principles . . . This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.” (10)
- Let me get this right. What has damaged America is not its 250 year tradition of enslaving human beings, and it is not the “long shadow of slavery” that resulted in a pervasive individual and institutional racism that continues to this day. Instead, what has really damaged America is noticing and commenting on the huge gap between the founders’ ideals and the institution of slavery. Check.
“The compromises at the Constitutional Convention were just that: compromises” (11).
- The Constitution – with its fugitive slave clause, and with its provision that the Southern states could count for representation 3/5 of each enslaved person who, of course, had no rights under the law – was simply a document containing necessary compromises. So we Americans should just chill out. Or, at least, we white Americans. The authors do not mention who constituted the compromising parties: white elite males. Black slaves had nothing to say about these compromises (just as their descendants had nothing to say about the thousands of Confederate monuments erected in the late 19^th and early 20^th century to honor those who fought to keep them enslaved). That is to say, these compromises were erected on the backs of African Americans.
- All of the above fits with the fact that in this document the discussion of slavery is remarkably abstract, as if it were a temporary legal glitch. No mention of family separation, sadism and torture, rape, on and on: not a word here in this “accurate, honest” document about the realities of slavery in America. Instead, what matters is that we focus on the “inspiring and ennobling” notion that slave-owning whites really did hold to the universalist ideals contained in the Declaration and Constitution . . . even while enslaving millions. Once again, black people vanish.
In the 1850s South Carolina’s John C. “Calhoun added a new theory in which rights inhere not in every individual by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ but in groups or races according to historical evolution. This new theory was developed to protect slavery” (12).
- Let me see if I understand. Prior to Calhoun promulgating his “group rights” theory there were lots of slaveowners who held to the idea that their black slaves had inherent rights as individual human beings? Even while the enslavers denied them their “inherent rights”? What is the evidence for this absurd suggestion? Once again, the realities of slavery disappear.
This conflict [between Calhoun’s group rights and the Declaration’s individual rights] was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives” (12).
- The scholars behind this “accurate, honest” retelling of American history have devoted this one sentence to the Civil War. That’s it. And note the passive voice: “conflict was resolved.” No mention of who was responsible for all these deaths. No mention of the fact that the South was determined, by any means necessary, to maintain slavery as an institution, and so instigated this war. No mention of the fact that the Confederates maintained that they were the ones who were truly loyal to the sentiments of the Declaration and Constitution. No mention of Confederates at all. Only, the “conflict was resolved.”
In line with Calhoun’s theories, “Progressives believed there were only group rights that are constantly redefined and changed and change with the times . . . Based on this false understanding of rights, the Progressives designed a new system of government” that led to “what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state” (13). The four paragraphs devoted to Progressivism are not only badly written (even worse than other sections of the document), but remarkably vague. But in Appendix IV – which includes discussion starters for civics classes — one finds this proposed question regarding the economic views of “progressive presidents” Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt: “In what ways do they differ from the principles and structure of the Constitution?” (39).
- Can we say loaded question? And right: If we could only go back to the 19^th century!
“Like the Progressives, Mussolini sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts” (13).
- Well, that is clarifying. Progressivism/New Deal = Fascism. Check.
“Everywhere American troops went [in World War II), they embodied in their own ranks and brought with them the principles of the Declaration, liberating peoples and restoring freedom.” (14)
- Really? Are the authors unaware that the U.S. military was segregated in the Second World War? Or do they understand Jim Crow segregation to comport with the “principles of the Declaration”?
“Communism’s relentless anti-American, anti-Western, and atheistic propaganda did inspire thousands, and perhaps millions, to reject and despise the principles of our founding and government. While America and its allies eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres. The increasingly accepted economic theory of Socialism, while less violent than Communism, is inspired by the same flawed philosophy and leads down the same dangerous path of allowing the state to seize private property and redistribute wealth as the governing elite see fit.” (14)
- Apparently the only good American is a right-wing free-market ideologue who dreams of dismantling the safety net for the most vulnerable citizens. The rest of us have been poisoned by Communist propaganda, thanks to professors and pop stars!
“Despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves, the postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery.” (15)
- Once again, when it comes to racial oppression, the report moves into the passive voice: “the postbellum South ended up devolving.” No. The postbellum South did not devolve. Instead, white southerners actively “redeemed” (their word) the region by quickly and thoroughly re-establishing their supremacy, with the active support of political, legal, and religious institutions in the South and the North. And the system of racial oppression remained in force for a century after the end of the Civil War. And the folks maintaining and reinforcing this system understood themselves to be acting in keeping with ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution (and the Bible). Is it anti-American to point this out?
“The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding.” (15)
- The second sentence is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous. Whole swaths of the American public (including my family and my church) hated the movement and hated Martin Luther King, Jr. And as Kevin Kruse has pointed out, these furious opponents to civil rights claimed “that it was their resistance that reflected the ‘principles of the founding.’ When Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for instance, he pointedly recited the entire Declaration of Independence to link his act of defiance to the colonists’ acts.”
“The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders . . . Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of ‘group rights’ not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers. The justification . . . was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities . . . We have [today] moved toward a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of ‘social justice, demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into ‘protected classes’ based on race and other demographic categories . . . This is the opposite of King’s hope that his children would ‘live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’” (16)
- More of the ridiculous. For one thing, while the authors want (in keeping with many white conservatives) to persuade Americans that the “I Have a Dream” speech is all we need to know about King, the reality (here comes another one of those pesky facts!) is that King strongly supported affirmative action – “special treatment” (in Christian terms, “repentance”) in response to the 350 years of slavery and oppression that African Americans had endured. Moreover, to quote Kruse again, “drawing a straight line from the South Carolina politician Calhoun, one of the most infamous defenders of Black enslavement, to the African Americans who advocated affirmative action as a remedy for that very enslavement is, to say the least, an incredible stretch.” Revisionist history, indeed!
“Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for American principles and history alike, in the process weakening attachment to our shared heritage. In order to build up a healthy, united citizenry, scholars, students, and all Americans must reject false and fashionable ideologies that obscure facts, ignore historical context, and tell America’s story solely as one of oppression and victimhood . . . [This is] historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth.” (18)
- This is an exercise in projection on the part of the authors, as their resentment and contempt for the academy in general and historians in particular is not in the least subtle. And when it comes to obscuring facts, ignoring historical context, and engaging in “historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth,” all I can say is: Look in the mirror. This document resembles nothing so much as the Lost Cause historiography after the Civil War, in its blatant historical inaccuracies and in its nostalgia for an America that never existed.
This sort of “deliberately destructive scholarship . . . is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.” (18)
- “Defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.” What “statues” are being defamed, other than a few Confederate monuments? Is that what is upsetting the authors – the fact that some folks (particularly, but not only, people of color) do not want to honor the leaders and soldiers who fought against the Union in behalf of slavery?
- Just as striking: This report came out two weeks after the “insurrection,” when the U.S. Capitol was violently breached and defamed by right-wing protestors who threatened democratically elected representatives. To understate the point, the folks who attacked the Capitol were not inspired by “leftist” or “liberal” academic historians to perpetrate these violent acts, but, instead, by a commitment to racism and white supremacy, and by a commitment to the president who commissioned this dreadful report.

We need more, not less, historical scholarship that honestly and straight-forwardly addresses the racism that has permeated American history for five centuries. This is not anti-Americanism, but, instead, the best means by which we can create a more just America. Instead of the 1776 Report, I wish that we would heed the wise words of W. E. B. DuBois:

Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things . . . And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” (Black Reconstruction, 1935)

(Note: this post is a revised version of my January 28, 2021 post on the 1776 Project.)

Tim LaHaye, David Barton, and Russell Vought: Pseudoscience, Pseudohistory, and Christian Nationalism

Jan 23, 2025 | 0 Comments

by Paul Braterman

Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is now interested in sharing scientific ideas with the widest possible audience, and was involved in successful campaigns to persuade both the English and the Scottish Governments to keep creationism out of the science classroom. He blogs at Primate’s Progress, paulbraterman.wordpress.com.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where Braterman is a regular contributor. You can find the full article here. And we are grateful to the editors for their permission to republish.

Tim LaHaye’s *The Battle for the Mind*. Image via Goodreads.

Tim LaHaye gives us a bridge between traditional morality, anti-Communism and Reaganism, and present-day Christian Conservatism, with humanism having taken the place of Communism. His claim that evil humanists had successfully conspired to take over the American power structure is echoed in today’s denunciation of the “deep state,” the end-of-the world thinking of his highly successful Left Behind novels underlies much of the religion-linked opposition to action on climate change, and his rejection as satanic of every idea that he regards as unbiblical now surfaces as anti-wokeism, along with opposition to examining America’s racist past and to the teaching of evolution.

Add to this his lamenting a morally superior past, his claim that American exceptionalism is biblical, along with capitalism, and his appeal to moral patriotic Americans (he repeatedly links those adjectives in his writing) to take back the country from the forces of evil, and we have a direct link to the doctrines of evangelical Trumpism. His claims that the US constitution is Bible-based, that the US “was founded on a basic consensus of Christian principles – more so than any nation in history,” and that the division of powers was inspired by a biblical awareness of the fallen nature of man, fall short of more recent assertions that the constitution itself was divinely inspired, but nonetheless point the way to the explicit Christian Nationalism now about to assume power.

LaHaye graduated in 1950 from Bob Jones University, then as now strictly six-day creationist and socially conservative, and at the time strictly segregationist, and proud of it. He later became pastor of Scott Memorial Baptist Church (a.k.a. Shadow Mountain), in the suburbs of San Diego. Here he served for 25 years, developing the church into a megachurch, while embarking with his wife on a broadcasting career, offering family advice from their socially conservative Christian perspective. In the 1960s he committed himself to anti-communism, joining the John Birch Society. He was also powerfully influenced by the philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who regarded faith as absolute, Genesis 1 – 11 as foundational to our knowledge of space and time, and all secular thinking that ignored this foundation as misguided.

In 1970, he helped establish Christian Heritage College (now San Diego Christian College) adjacent to Scott Memorial Baptist Church, with Henry Morris, the most significant figure in 20^th century Young Earth creationism, as Academic Vice President. Morris’ Institute for Creation Research was intimately connected with the College. The College’s Doctrinal Statement is Six Day creationist, and asserts the imminent return of Christ.

LaHaye’s The Battle for the Mind was published in August 1980 at the height of Reagan’s US Presidential campaign. It already contains, fully developed, the doctrines of Christian Conservatism. It takes the doctrine of guilt by association, which McCarthy applied to Communism and extends it to association with humanism. Humanism, in turn, is defined so broadly that LaHaye can apply the term to any doctrine that is not to his liking. Creationist science is the best science, and humanists only reject it, along with belief in God, to justify their own lack of morality. Here LaHaye shows an obsession with abortion and homosexuality, and defends capitalism on (unstated) biblical and moral grounds. He then justifies American exceptionalism by claiming that the separation of powers is inspired by a specifically Christian vision of humanity as fallen, so that institutions and rulers are not to be trusted. This in turn shows that the US was built “on biblical principles and a clear recognition of God.” Thus defending US national interests is doing God’s work. He claims that the US should have won in Korea and Vietnam, but was prevented by the influence of humanists. Disarmament is immoral because it weakens America. It is the duty of the religious to mobilize in order to capture the levers of political power, and in particular the judiciary. Evolution is part of man’s wisdom, as opposed to God’s, directly contradicts the Bible, and destroys the basis for morality. Those who accept it, even if they profess Christianity, are not really religious in their thinking, because they have been influenced by humanist ideas. It is therefore the duty of moral Americans to oppose them, and they must organize accordingly, in order to gain control of the centers of political power, as well as the judiciary and the school boards.

According to LaHaye:

The history of humanism can be illustrated by a bookshelf that runs from Aristotle through Paine and Hegel (!) to Bertrand Russell. There is also a favorable mention of Morris’ suggestion that it can be traced back to Nimrod at Babylon.
Humanism is the world’s greatest evil: “Humanists have totally rejected God, creation, morality, the fallen state of man, and the free-enterprise system [note the unexplained coupling of this last to religion]. As such they are the mortal enemy of all pro-moral Americans, and the most serious threat to our nation in its entire history. Unless both Christians and non-Christian lovers of virtue stand together as upright citizens, humanists will turn this great land into another Sodom and Gomorrah.”
True wisdom comes from God. Philosophy is foredoomed if it depends on unaided human thought, rather than God’s biblical revelation. This revelation, which teaches that man was created by a direct act of God, is easy to accept this because of the scientific evidence. The biblical precepts of morality are absolute, and are expressed in the last six Commandments, as well as in the much higher moral code of Christianity.
Whatever does not rely on God’s word, but on human judgement, is humanism. Humanist governments have imposed humanist education on the tax-paying public, with no regard to their wishes.
The Puritan work ethic, free enterprise, private ownership of land, and capitalism” emanate (in some unstated way) from biblical teaching.
A humanist does not think like a pro-moral American, and humanism has ingeniously conceived the plan to introduce an inordinate number of humanists into government, where they continually pass laws that favor the advancement of humanism and chaos, at the expense of the biblical basis for moral society that produced the liberty, peace, and safety we once enjoyed.
Evolution is scientifically unsound, but humanists accept it in order to do away with God, hence their advocacy of sexual activity and promiscuity. Their rejection of a personal God who is interested in the affairs of man is itself an “unscientific religious belief,” especially as the evidence for the existence of God is so convincing.
The feminist movement is led by humanists.
The humanistic ideas of psychology lead to permissive child raising, as opposed to the biblical practice of applying correction (he means spanking).
Leniency to criminals is another humanist error, based on the mistaken belief that humans are basically good.
The evils advocated by politicians under humanist influence include “abortion-on-demand, legalization of homosexual rights, government deficit spending, the size of big government, elimination of capital punishment, national disarmament, increased taxes, women in combat, passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, unnecessary bussing, ad infinitum.”

In a direct echo of what McCarthy said about communists in the State Department, he says that a group of 600 people with influence, including Congressmen and particularly State Department employees since 1940, have been humanists, which explains “our present status of military inferiority to Russia.” 275,000 Humanists control American social organizations such as the ACLU, the National Organization of Women, and the unions. They control TV, radio, newspapers, Hollywood movies, magazines, and porno magazines. They also control (remember that he was writing in 1980, not long after Roe v. Wade) the Supreme Court, state governments, government bureaucrats, public education, colleges and universities, textbooks, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations.

LaHaye warns us against things are many of us would regard as achievements. Among these are the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union (which he links to communism), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Organization of Women, as well as UNESCO, UNICEF, and the UN World Health Organization, which government diplomats often quote “on such issues as population control, birth control, abortion, and so forth.” Through these, “they have used the vast fortune paid by the United States for support of the UN to advance the cause of world humanism.”

LaHaye advocates Christian control of school boards, to prevent the teaching of evolution, which has resulted in “approximately 50 million school-age children . . . growing up in a moral vacuum, misled by educators to think of themselves as amoral primates.” The other campaign issues that he lists include making sure that no tax money is used to fund abortion, which he repeatedly refers to as murder. There should be stronger laws against homosexuality, and elimination of pornography and prostitution. He is opposed to infanticide and euthanasia, since “only God can exercise the right to decide who has the right to live.” (This despite his support of the death penalty.) Lawmakers should defend parents’ rights (unspecified). There should be no legalization of drugs. And finally, “any and all forms of religious humanism should be vigorously opposed, particularly in government and education.” (Remember: he regards evolution, and all questioning of biblical literalism, as humanist doctrine, and labels humanism a religion.)

In A Minimum Morals Test for all politicians, he suggests candidates be asked 21 questions, beginning with

Do you agree that this country was founded on a belief in God and the moral principles of the Bible? Do you concur that it has been departing from these principles and needs to return to them?

There are also questions on abortion, the legalization of drugs such as marijuana, prostitution, laws that would allow known homosexuals to teach school, and the right of parents to send children to private school, protecting the tax-exempt status of churches and of church-related schools, and, tellingly, whether candidates favor busing to desegregate schools (correct answer: NO), and “capital punishment for capital offences” (correct answer: YES).

All of this brings us to the Christian Nationalism of the 21^st-century. All we need is a pseudohistory, to parallel creationist pseudoscience. This we have with the work of the highly imaginative author David Barton. Barton’s only qualification is a 1976 BA in Religious Education from Oral Roberts University, which tells us that it seeks “To develop Holy Spirit-empowered leaders through whole-person education to impact the world.”

His 2012 book, The Jefferson Lies, which maintains that Jefferson and nearly all the founding fathers were believing Christians, had the rare distinction of being officially disowned by its publisher, Thomas Nelson, despite having reached the New York Times Best Sellers List, because of its manifold inaccuracies. It was, however, reissued as a paperback in 2016 by WND, a far-right news and opinion site and publisher better known for promoting various conspiracy theories. In any case, Barton had himself bought 17,000 copies of the Thomas Nelson edition, which continues to be available through third parties.

Barton is the founder of an organization ironically entitled Wallbuilders, whose main ambition seems to be undermining the wall of separation in the US between Church and State. His prominent followers include Mike Huckabee (now ambassador-designate to Israel), Michele Bachmann, and Mike Johnson, at the time of writing Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Huckabee, while Governor of Arkansas, said that he was not convinced by evolution, and that the theory of creation should be taught alongside. In 2017, he denied that Israel is “occupying” the West Bank, on the grounds that the Bible gives it title to what he describes as “Judaea and Samaria.” Bachmann, like Tim LaHaye, was powerfully influenced by Francis Schaeffer. She also rejects evolution, and thinks that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. We have described Johnson’s views here before. He considers Young Earth creationism the only valid kind of Christianity, believes that the US constitution was divinely inspired, and sees himself as a watchman on the wall (a deliberate echo of the name of Barton’s organization?)

Russell Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, obtained his first degree from Wheaton College, whose Statement of Faith, to which faculty must recommit annually, specifies “that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race.” He does not to my knowledge repeat Barton’s specific claims, but nonetheless argues that Christianity is part of the nature of American nationhood. In an unintentionally self-revealing article titled Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’ , written in response to criticisms, he answers his own question. He begins by justifying the concept of a nation by quoting words attributed to Moses in Deuteronomy, over 2000 years before the modern concept of a nation even existed. He goes on to impose an equally tortured and anachronistic interpretation on Psalms 2:1-2, saying that these verses “recognize the healthiness of a people, including public officials, consciously and publicly positioning themselves for the Lord or under God.” He perversely interprets George Washington’s words, “The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself as ordained,” as invoking Heaven rather than morality as fundamental to society, cherrypicks a statement from a 19^th-century Supreme Court judge who described Christianity as necessary to support a civil society, asserts that such views were common at the time, and concludes that it is appropriate to regard America as a Christian nation. In conclusion, he contrasts this attitude with those of its critics, who “have their own agenda: progressive, secular globalism.”

Not surprisingly perhaps, the structure of the argument is identical of the arguments used by creationists from Henry Morris’ The Genesis Flood onwards. An uncritical acceptance of Scripture with no attention to historical context, unstated reinterpretation of that Scripture to further an agenda, selecting and misconstruing quotations, claiming a monopoly of Christian thought for his own wealth-friendly version, and finally and most dangerously, grouping together wildly disparate opinions, to make it seem as if our choice is restricted to two alternative worldviews, only one of which is sanctioned by God.

In conclusion, let me quote his final two sentences in response to critics:

It’s their right, under our system, to have that view and to participate themselves. But let’s not pretend — and I say this with great respect to pastors and writers like Tim Keller [who maintained that evangelical Christianity should not commit to a political party] — that their agenda is about anything other than power.

Vought is direct-designate of the US Government’s Office of Management and Business, where he is expected, according to the Washington Post, to help enable Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations, and to impose his views by staffing the civil service with loyalists.

Power indeed.

Weaponizing Amish Culture: NPR Academic Minute and Interview with Susan Trollinger

Jan 9, 2025 | 0 Comments

Susan Trollinger is Professor of English at the University of Dayton. Among other publications, she is the author of Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia (Johns Hopkins, 2012). She is also co-author (with William Trollinger) of Righting America at the Creation Museum (Johns Hopkins, 2016), and “Is Resistance Proving to be Futile?: The Amish Amidst the Advance of Fundamentalism,” in Rhetoric and Religion as Resources for Resistance, ed. William Duffy (Peter Lang, 2025).

Gun-related merchandise in Amish Country. Image by Susan L. Trollinger.

Here is Susan Trollinger’s NPR podcast: Weaponizing Amish Culture. And below is our interview with Sue.

How did you – a woman who grew up in a thoroughly secular family in the exurbs of Chicago – end up spending thirty years studying and writing about Amish Country Tourism?
- I like writing about puzzles—things that, on the face of them, just don’t make sense. In the summer of 1996, I lived with my then-in-laws in Walnut Creek, OH—one of the three central tourist towns in one of the country’s largest Amish settlements. I thought that the draw for the millions of tourists who visited the settlement every year was the plain and simple life of the Amish. But what I saw on offer in the main tourist towns was anything but plain and simple. Walnut Creek was all about a Victorian aesthetic with lots of lace, elaborate tea sets, and Thomas Kincaid prints. Berlin was all about craft malls (selling quilts made in China), antique malls, and all manner of clutter. Sugarcreek showcased a manufactured Swiss theme with a giant cuckoo clock and a Swiss festival featuring Swiss-costumed yodelers, a parade starring a Swiss queen, and guys blowing alphorns and throwing boulders. What has any of that to do with the Amish, I wondered. It took me 15 years to figure that out.
Your first book was Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2012. In a paragraph, could you explain the book’s title?
- My book is about how the Amish get figured in Amish Country tourism as the guarantor of authenticity in a made-up world that invites tourists to enjoy a fantasy of an American life that never existed. I borrow from the theoretical insight of my sister, Barbara Biesecker, about nostalgia for a future. In the book, I argue that Amish Country tourism is not about remembering a perfect past. It is about projecting onto the future an imagined way of being that never was—a life in which gender is simple (it’s obvious who the guys are and who the gals are), gender roles are complementary and easy, women have plenty of time to produce comforting home-cooked meals, men spend their days engaged in productive and satisfying masculine labor, patriarchy rules, and White people are dominant. In this tourist economy, the Amish (supposed relics of the past) bring an apparent legitimacy to this fantasy. They seem to embody all of the components of the fantasy. They make it seem as if such a fantasy can be achieved, especially if you buy the right cookbook, or a woman’s devotional Bible, or 1950’s retro-style toaster (all for sale in Amish Country).
Two years ago you were invited to give a conference presentation on Amish country tourism today — a paper which really was an update of Selling the Amish. For that paper you revisited the tourist towns of Holmes County, Ohio. Can you briefly describe what you found in your first morning of research, and how did this make you feel?
- For Selling the Amish I interviewed shop owners, observed tourist behavior, and took thousands of photographs of merchandise in shops, restaurants, and museums aimed at tourists. But after the book came out, I shifted my focus. I gave talks around the state of Ohio for the Ohio Humanities Council on the Amish (and their profound economic shift from being an agrarian people to being an entrepreneurial people who excel at business). I also teach a course at the University of Dayton on the visual rhetoric of fundamentalism and the Amish. With the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Core program, and the English Department, I have taken my students once a year to the Amish settlement in eastern Ohio for a day. We didn’t go to tourist sites. With the help of Shelly (who owns Heartland Group Tours) we visited a New Order Amish school, a candle shop owned by five unmarried Old Order Amish sisters, and a Swartzentruber Amish farm (they are among the most tradition-minded Amish—no windshields or slow-moving signs on their buggies), finishing the day with dinner in an Old Order Amish home.
- All this is to say that for perhaps a decade I didn’t visit those tourist shops. And then for this conference presentation I returned. I was shocked. White Christian nationalism is everywhere: personal beverage containers in the shape of bullets, coffee mugs listing various calibers of guns with the quote “All faster than dialing 911,” and Christian crosses with images of the American flag superimposed on them. The Amish are pacifists. They won’t go to war. Sure, they own guns for purposes of hunting, but they don’t think that “the second amendment is [their] gun permit.” The disjuncture between who the Amish have been and how they are figured today in the context of Amish Country tourism by white Christian nationalism is nothing short of stunning.
In response to your Conversation article on this topic a reader commented: “I am having trouble getting my mind around the guns/patriotic merchandise. Are the Amish making money from the merchandise or do non-Amish own the stores and sell it? I would think the community would draw the line.” How do you respond?
- None of the stores that I visited in the three central tourist towns selling this kind of merchandise are owned by Amish. The Amish certainly supply stores and restaurants in these towns with baked goods, jams and preserves, fresh produce, furniture, and so forth. But, to my knowledge, the Amish are not making wood crosses with images of the American flag superimposed upon them or signs claiming that the Second Amendment is “my gun permit.” The shops selling White Christian nationalist merchandise tend to be owned by Mennonites and non-Mennonites who have embraced Protestant fundamentalism and/or evangelicalism and who go to trade shows to learn the latest retail trends for shops aimed at the kinds of tourists who make up the largest contingent of visitors to Amish Country: White middle Americans.
While your scholarship is not limited to the Amish – among other things, you have co-authored Righting America at the Creation Museum (John Hopkins, 2016) – you continue to write on the Amish. Could you briefly describe the article that is coming out later this year?
- When Bill and I visited the Creation Museum for the first time, we were taken aback by much that we encountered: animatronic T-Rexes playing alongside animatronic children (and not eating them), culture war narratives in which White evangelical Christians are persecuted while mainline Protestant Christians raise children who become drug and video gaming addicts, and mini dioramas depicting God’s global Flood slaughtering all but eight human beings – Answers in Genesis posits that there may have been as many as twenty billion people on Earth at the time of the Flood – because the rest, including the unborn, were so sinful that God had to exterminate them.
- Also present at the museum were a group of Old Order Amish (and, in fact, there have been Amish present virtually every time we have visited the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter). What? Taking the Lord’s Prayer absolutely seriously, the Amish forgave (almost immediately) a man who intended to sexually abuse Amish girls in a one-room school house in West Nickel Mines, PA and then shot and killed almost all of them before killing himself. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” If the Amish are to be forgiven their sins, they reason, they must forgive the sins of others. That being so, how could they possibly worship the extraordinarily vengeful God of young-Earth creationism?
- Bill and I have written an article about the influence of creationism and evangelicalism/fundamentalism on the Amish. For about a century, the wisdom was that modern technology— the tractor, radio, telephone, and television – would bring an end to the Amish. The Amish would simply not be able to resist such technologies. Soon the Amish would connect to the electrical grid, and purchasing automobiles would shortly follow. But the smart prognosticators had it wrong. The Amish are not plugged into the grid. And they remain committed to the horse and buggy (along with e-bikes).
- That said, it turns out that evangelicalism/fundamentalism and young Earth creationism have found a foothold among certain Amish groups. Fundamentalism can seem like serious Christianity—a Christianity that takes the Bible seriously, which is to say literally. Our argument (coming out soon as an article in a collection of essays on rhetoric, religion, and resistance) is that while the assumed great threat to Amish life has been modern technology, it seems that this threat might be eclipsed by modern Protestant theology in the form evangelicalism and fundamentalism, which challenge Amish centuries-old commitments and practices from the inside, convincing Amish that their historical Christian witness pales in comparison to the “authenticity” of White evangelicalism/fundamentalism and young-Earth creationism.
- As David Weaver-Zercher tells the story so well, Americans have had a long and deep investment in the Amish (for good and for ill) to either make them over in their own image or demonize them. Looks like the former is well underway in Amish Country these days. May the Amish find a way to remain wonderfully other.

Whither The Progressive Church Vision? How to Be Christian in the Empire

Dec 30, 2024 | 0 Comments

by Rodney Kennedy

Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published. In February we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with Kennedy about this book.

Book Cover of Walter Rauschenbusch’s *A Theology for the Social Gospel*. Image via TheViewFromThisSeat.

The church is called as faithful witness in the age of empire. By empire I mean the unholy coalition of MAGA evangelicals and authoritarian politicians (previously known as the Republican Party).

I borrow my theme from Harold S. Bender’s 1944 “The Anabaptist Vision,” an essay exploring the faith of the original Anabaptists. Bender believed in returning to and recovering an old faith. He outlined three basic components of the Anabaptist vision: discipleship, brotherhood, and nonviolence.

According to Bender (1897-1962) – a Mennonite historian – discipleship was central to the understanding of the Anabaptist movement: “The great word of the Anabaptists was not ‘faith’ as it was with the reformers, but ‘following’ (Nachfolge Christi).”

I too believe in returning to and recovering an old faith – the faith of the early Christian church in Acts. Make no mistake, I am not promoting a literal restoration of the early church (a la the Campbellites). Instead, I promote what James W. McClendon calls the baptist vision: “The church now is the primitive church and the church on judgment day.”

Progressives are not trying to create an idolatry of some imagined golden age of the church. We are attempting to recover our “first love” and act it out in bodily ways.

The results of the 2024 election traumatized me. One of my colleagues said to me, “We’re all in mourning here, too. Our country has betrayed us.”

Everything I had written and warned about Trump seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. As a student of presidential rhetoric and a preacher of the gospel I felt all my convictions were threatened. I took a deep breath and decided to do what I do – write my way to a new vision of the future.

Three critical traditions offer an alternative vision to Empire. The first is the early church practice of parrhesia (risky truth-telling). The second is the prophetic imagination rooted in the Hebrew prophets and the Black Christian experience. The third is the political imagination of Jesus: social gospel, social justice, and the gospel for the poor.

Risky Truth-telling

That a congenital liar could win the presidential election threw me back into the well-worn pages of my copy of Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech, a series of lectures about parrhesia. The term is usually translated in English as “free speech.” The French translation, franc-parler, suggests that the meaning is “frank speech.”

An age embracing lies so huge as to become believable needs to be checked by a new emphasis on truth. Foucault says, “Parrhesiaxesthai means ‘to tell the truth.’ …. To my mind, the parrhesiastes says what is true because he knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true.”

The speaker risks his life because he sees truth-telling a duty to help others, especially those in power. There is a recognition of the tension between truth and power. The speaker chooses the risk of death instead of security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of moral apathy. This positive meaning of parrhesia shows up most often in the New Testament book of Acts as a characteristic of the followers of Jesus.

New Testament professor, C. Kavin Rowe, refers to Acts as “a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life.” The early church offers a model for dealing with the power of Empire.

Luke shows the early church as a people with no interest in taking or dominating the state. In Acts, according to Rowe, “Christians do not want to replace the Emperor, nor do they want a Christian to be the Emperor. That would be a far too conservative politics.” The witness of the early church determined to “turn the world upside down.”

Here’s the prayer that needs to be on the lips of every progressive preacher:

“And now, Lord, look at their threats, and grant to your servants to speak your word with all boldness” (Acts 4:29).

Here’s the scene that should unfold in every progressive church:

“they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).

Here are the actions that should identify every progressive preacher:

“So he went in and out among them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord” (Acts 9:28); “So they remained for a long time speaking boldly for the Lord, who testified to the word of his grace by granting signs and wonders to be done through them” (Acts 14:3); “He entered the synagogue and for three months spoke out boldly and argued persuasively about the kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8).

And here is how progressive preachers should be remembered:

“proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31).

In Acts, the witness of Stephen suggests that he qualifies as a primary “truth-teller,” as a saint for the progressive church. Stephen gives bodily, fleshly reality to the word witness. The empire, of course, was “enraged” at the message of Stephen and “ground their teeth”:

“They covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul’ (Acts 7:57 – 58).

Speaking truth can contest a culture dominated by hyperbole, untruthful claims, lies, and threats. Speaking truth can restore the conviction that words matter, reasons matter, and rational deliberation matters in how we make decisions.

The Prophetic Imagination

MAGA evangelicals now occupy a position as defenders of the status quo of power. They traffic in established truth told by an Empire built on lies. Official truth is now carried by evangelical voices taking directions from Empire officials. They are allied with secular political parties, a sort of modern version of Pharisees mixed with Herodians and Sadducees. The MAGA god of nationalism has polluted the evangelical church.

The progressive task – assume the role of the prophet. The Christian Nationalists, the MAGA evangelicals, the network of independent Pentecostals in the place of power have the role of Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, declaring, “O progressives, go, flee away, and prophesy somewhere else; but never again prophesy in [D. C.] for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

We have an even more immediate prophetic resource at our disposal in the Black prophetic tradition. “The Black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf,” Cornel West claims. “What has kept American democracy from going fascist or authoritarian or autocratic has been the legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer. This is not because Black people have a monopoly on truth, goodness or beauty. It is because the Black freedom movement puts pressure on the American empire in the name of integrity, decency, honesty and virtue.”

Those who speak the truth will last because the truth never dies. The courage to be prophetic gives us a vision for moving forward.

The Social Gospel

Nothing enrages MAGA evangelicals like the social gospel of Jesus. In Luke 4, Jesus lays out his radical politics of a social gospel of neighbor and hospitality. He insists God loves foreigners. “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.”

Evangelicals have dominated Christian thought in America with an individual gospel of personal salvation. The stage is set for a vision of salvation as the practices capable of saving us from what Stanley Hauerwas calls “those powers that would rule our lives making it impossible for us to worship God.”

One glaring goal of Empire we can resist: The deportation of 11,000,000 migrants. Here we are on solid biblical ground: “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:34).

One question can be thrown at the feet of the MAGA prophets: Who is our neighbor? Our best neighbors may turn out to be non-American brown refugees in search of a better life. A progressive church will insist on a good neighbor approach, a place of refuge for immigrants.

During his 2024 campaign Donald Trump claimed, “Remember …. They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags,” Trump added. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.” The irony: The cross is not antithetical to social justice flags. The American flag is antithetical to the cross.

Asserting the politics of Jesus as the social gospel of “good news for the poor” here and now is the most powerful statement we can make in the face of the new outburst of Empire in America. There is no better way for progressives to respond than to present Christianity as a body always prepared to give hospitality to strangers.

Given the teaching of Jesus about the rich and the poor, I am fearful for the billionaires falling over one another in the new Trump administration. “Blessed are the poor,” says Jesus. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation,” says Jesus. “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23 – 24).

Jesus tells horror stories about the fate of the rich. The rich man who failed to be neighbor to Lazarus, “lifted up his eyes in hell to beg for a cup of water.” The rich man who was going to build bigger and more barns was told, “This night is your soul required of you.” Jesus is clear: If you are rich or desire to be rich, you have an immense problem. And now we think “riches” will save us and billionaires will rescue us.

A More Particular Word about Walter Rauschenbusch

If Baptists had a calendar of saints, Walter Rauschenbusch would be the first one admitted. Baptists have produced so few great theologians. Anabaptist theologian, James W. McClendon, in Ethics (vol. 1 of his systematic theology) wryly observes, “That there are few baptist theologies of merit will be granted by most observers.” And then he adds: Walter Rauschenbusch (1861– 1918) alone has attained cosmopolitan stature— and significantly, his starting point was ethics. For Rauschenbusch, salvation was fleshly, bodily, and material. He was not a Gnostic Baptist with all those layers of spiritualization and individual salvation.

His most important book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, was published in 1917. This was at the beginning of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in America. Rauschenbusch insisted the church adjust its theology to include a growing social consciousness.

Rauschenbusch still takes shots from conservative critics. Theologically, there’s Rauschenbusch living rent-free in conservative minds; politically, there’s FDR. One preached the Social Gospel, the other attempted to make it official U. S. government policy.

Rauschenbusch’s great-grandson, Walter Rauschenbusch, in Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21^st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church, includes a series of essays from well-known scholars: Phyllis Trible, Tony Campolo, Joan Chittister, Stanley Hauerwas, Cornel West, Jim Wallis, and Richard Rorty.

Even in this volume the criticisms of Rauschenbusch are included, particularly, criticisms of Rauschenbusch’s alleged lack of evangelical faith. I haven’t the space to refute these criticisms of Rauschenbusch, so I turn the arguments back on his critics. Why not take the evangelical faith and add the social gospel? Why not preach both individual and corporate salvation? A progressive preacher knows that the two belong together.

I agree with Stanley Hauerwas: “After Rauschenbusch, there is no gospel that is not ‘the social gospel.’ We are permanently in his debt.”

These are three powerful visions aiding our dissent from Empire – parrhesia (truth-telling), prophetic tradition, social gospel – that offer progressives a rock-solid foundation. Progressives offer a form of life that insinuates a thoroughgoing antagonism to the present powers.

The progressive alternative is a clear vision: “With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him” (Romans 12:1, J. B. Phillips New Testament).

Resisting the Evangelical Power Grab

Dec 3, 2024 | 4 Comments

by Rodney Kennedy

Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).

Attendees prayed during a Commit to Caucus event held by former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Image by Jordan Gale for *The New York Times.*

The anti-science, anti-history Bible thumpers have invaded America again. In the past, they have suffered massive defeats. In the 1920’s in Dayton, TN, they were unmercifully mocked and destroyed by Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken.

But they have not forgotten nor forgiven. At the ceremony opening the Creation Museum, Ken Ham revealed the smoldering resentment evangelicals still feel. He swore that he would repair the damage done to Christianity eighty-two years ago when Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial. “It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. “We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn’t prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science.”

A Review of Evangelical Wars

The fundamentalists/conservatives/evangelicals were only getting started. “Here they come again.” They returned with a vengeance in the 1910s with a campaign known as Prohibition. Led by Billy Sunday, J. Frank Norris, and an army of temperance workers, they managed to pass the 18^th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. This evangelical victory lasted until December 5, 1933, when it was repealed by the 21^st Amendment.

Evangelicals are always attempting to stop everyone else from doing something. It is their most distinguishable mark.

After decades of adding more layers of resentment, the evangelicals returned in the 1950’s as allies of American corporate tycoons. Kevin Kruse, in One Nation Under God, chronicles how corporate America created Christian America. Evangelicals managed to secure a few trophies that looked more like carnival trinkets: “In God We Trust” on our money, and “Under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance.

Then came the 1960’s and all hell broke loose for evangelicals. They were flotsam in a secular storm of anything goes. They nearly drowned fighting free love, drugs, the Civil Rights movement, and protesters against the Vietnam War. Evangelical angst festered and their desire for revenge multiplied exponentially.

In the 1960’s they attempted to rally around the support of segregation, but this failed. Racism is a bad look for Christians. (By the way, if you think anti-immigration isn’t racism, then you are as misguided as your 1960’s evangelical kin.) Randall Balmer, in Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, shows it was government interference in ‘segregation academies’ such as Bob Jones University [and Liberty University] that sparked the growth of the religious right.

Finally, they landed on abortion as the issue capable of reviving the moribund movement of evangelical faith.. To be clear, opposition to abortion was an afterthought for evangelicals.

The birth of the Moral Majority under Jerry Falwell aided in the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. But evangelicals were disappointed in Reagan, and in George H. Bush and in George W. Bush. Reagan and George W. Bush each served 2 terms – 16 years. 20 years of Republican presidents, and yet they were unable to bring evangelicals any victories. Roe v. Wade remained the law for more than 50 years.

Evangelicals rallied again in the 1990’s with the Tea Party and Newt Gingrich – a bomb throwing politician. Gingrich was the pre-Trump. He set the course for the politics of polarization that finally erupted in 2016.

Like a giant dragon awakened from his mountain lair, the evangelicals went whole hog for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Dana Milbank documents the “web of conspiracy theories,” designed to “restrict voting and discredit elections,” while “stoking fear of minorities and immigrants.” Trump is the full-grown man-child of this movement, this old, angry, resentful movement of fundamentalist and evangelical believers. As Robert L. Ivie puts it, “The Republican Party became ‘authoritarian’ and ‘deconstructionist’ over the course of the last twenty-five years, destroying truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, their own party, and U. S. democracy.”

As they marched into the corridors of power they were singing “God’s truth is marching on.”

With the overturning of Roe v, Wade, evangelicals were finally winners. The result has been cruel “red state” laws that have imposed inhumane penalties on women seeking abortions, on doctors providing abortion, and on friends aiding women in obtaining abortions.

The Evangelicals Are Back with a Vengeance

While I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, I see signs of impending doom. Evangelicals are big on signs, fake signs of the end. I am big on seeing with clear eyes what evangelicals have in store for the nation.

In previous evangelical movements, the rule of law, the courts of the land, including the Supreme Court, thwarted the evangelical goal of rule by the minority. Now, they have a president-elect who plans to shape the Constitution into his own image, with a compliant Supreme Court ready to revisit past evangelical losses and transform them into victories.

Let me state this plainly: Evangelicals are coming for our schools and universities, our First Amendment freedoms, our science and history curricula, our right to not be religious, our scientific knowledge of the reality of global warming, our trust in medical science and vaccines, our belief in the rights of women, minorities, and migrants, our sexuality, our freedom to love, our right to live in peace.

They offer a force-fed kind of salvation that destroys the freedoms of the First Amendment. They put school prayer and Bible courses along with David Barton-inspired “America was born as a Christian nation” history books in the curriculum.

They are coming to return prayer and the Bible to public schools. See, for example, Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida.

They are coming for gay marriage and transgender rights. How long do you think it will be before lawsuits are filed with the aim of making the way to the Supreme Court to declare gay marriage illegal?

Evangelical disgust with social justice will lead to serious attempts to defund the social safety net. The dismantling of the Affordable Health Care Act, the privatizing of Medicare, the eradication of the Department of Education, reducing SNAP, welfare, and protections for transgenders. Evangelicals believe in unconditional revenge, not the conditional eye for an eye.

The evangelical movement thrives on authoritarianism, certainty, and anger that combines with a pre-existing culture of fear and hatred. Trump’s demagoguery has taken the chains of a lethal evangelical movement and intends to wrap them around all our anchor institutions. This movement shows no signs of abating.

George Lakoff reminds us, “American values are fundamentally progressive, centered on equality, human rights, social responsibility, and the inclusion of all. Yet, the majority of Americans have voted for the most radical right-wing government in our history. “

Lakoff’s words are of the majesty of the prophetic. As he notes, the radical evangelicals are coming “with an authoritarian hierarchy dominated by evangelical leaders; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken government; no balance of power; priorities shifted from the public sector to the corporate and military sectors; responsibility shifted from society to individuals; and patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics, and the market.”

The evangelical movement is an unmitigated quest for power by using Trump and his minions to violate Constitutional rules and push the nation into a far-right mode.

A Resistance Movement

I can no longer pretend a kinship with the people who introduced me to faith. It is a terrible ripping of the cords of unity, but here I stand.

I hate, I despise your excessive praise songs and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me positive thinking, prosperity-promising sermons, I will not accept them; and the disgust you have for the social gospel, I can no longer tolerate. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your drums, guitars, trumpets, and saxophones. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

Our only choice is resistance against these “religious” people. I am unable to pretend there is a middle ground for mutual understanding, a symbolic space for negotiation, or a way to work with evangelicals.

I declare myself an enemy of the evangelical movement and its evil twin, Christian Nationalism. They are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. They are a generation of snakes and vipers who have enthroned a congenital liar, a thief, a fraud, a fascist, and the incarnation of evil as our next president. I will defy them at every opportunity.

Like Salieri arguing with God, over his disgust of Mozart, I declare, “From this day forward, you are my enemy. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile man-child and give me for reward only the ability to watch in horror as he destroys democracy …. Because you are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your victory.”

Tom Cotton’s White Christian Nationalist Thanksgiving Story

Nov 26, 2024 | 0 Comments

by William Trollinger

First-grader Thanksgiving Drawing. Via BlogHoppin.

Anyone who is paying attention at all knows that White Christian Nationalism is alive and well and on the rise in America. It’s everywhere, and these folks are thrilled that Trump the autocrat-wannabe has been elected president. See, for example, Art Jipson’s brilliant article on the New Apostolic Reformation.

Not surprisingly, White Christian Nationalists need a “usable past,” a history that comports with their understanding of America as a divinely ordained nation that was from the beginning rooted in the Christian faith. See, for example, the dreadful 1776 Report, which – in its deliberate effort to whitewash American history of its past and present racism – really is a crime against history.

Well, here we are, two days before Thanksgiving, a holiday that some White Christian Nationalists are determined to rescue from the clutches of “woke” historians and native American activists. At the forefront of the “Save Thanksgiving” campaign has been Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.

On November 18, 2021 Cotton delivered a 15 minute speech on the floor of the Senate in which he, as one blogger noted, address[ed] what he saw as “a pressing issue: the disturbing lack of patriotic appreciation of the Pilgrims and their contributions to freedom and democracy in the USA.” According to Cotton, the lack of Thanksgiving celebrations had to do with the fact that “the Pilgrims have fallen out of favor in fashionable circles.” And why is that? Because of an apparent loss of “civilizational self-confidence,” evinced by the fact that the New York Times ran an article in the Food Section (the Senator from Arkansas had time to scour the Food Section for attacks on American pride?) that referred to the traditional Thanksgiving story as a “myth” and a “caricature.”

Cotton (whose last name seems so appropriate) would have had to work hard to be less subtle in his racism, but then again, lack of subtlety is precisely the point, for Cotton in particular and White Christian Nationalists in general. “Civilizational self-confidence” certainly does not refer to the Native Americans, who had been here for millennia when the Mayflower landed (and who were dying and would continue to die in great numbers). Nor does “civilizational self-confidence” refer to the millions of Africans brought to the Americas in chains, with North America receiving its first slaves one year before the Pilgrims’ arrival.

But for Cotton, focusing on American slavery was precisely the problem. He connected the lack of “commemorations, parades, or festivals to celebrate the Pilgrims” not to the pandemic, but instead to “revisionist charlatans of the radical left [who] have lately claimed the previous year [1619] as America’s true founding.” Here Cotton was continuing his campaign – an ongoing campaign joined by all sorts of other White Christian Nationalists – against the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a campaign which has included an effort to have this project banned from public schools, as this effort to educate Americans about slavery and its legacy misses the point that slavery was a “necessary evil” that allowed America to be the great nation that it is today.

As regards Cotton’s effort to restore white pride in the Pilgrim story, he informed Americans that the Pilgrims came here “seeking the freedom to practice their faith.” In saying this he was suggesting a commitment to religious freedom that the Pilgrims absolutely did not have. On the contrary, the Pilgrims wanted the freedom to establish a community where their faith and only their faith would be allowed – a point that Cotton chose to elide (but would seem to fit the White Christian Nationalist vision for America.)

Cotton also mentioned that the Pilgrims “had to conquer the desolate wilderness” without noting why the wilderness was so desolate (the silence of the first winter in New England was rather terrifying for the Pilgrims). English traders had brought disease to the region for which the Indians had no immunities, and between 1616 and 1619 80% or more all Indians in the region were killed. As two scholars coolly put it in the Centers of Disease and Prevention’s journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases, this epidemic – these authors suggest chicken pox, trichinosis, or leptospirosis as the culprit – “may have been instrumental to the near annihilation of Native Americans, which facilitated successful colonization of the Massachusetts Bay area.”

Again, not a story that Cotton wanted to tell.

But the most remarkable omission in Cotton’s story may have had to do with Squanto. As I tell my students, the Squanto story is true. As Cotton rightly explained, he did come out of the wilderness to help the Pilgrims, teaching them how to grow corn and other crops, giving suggestions as to where to hunt and fish, and so forth. As William Bradford put it, Squanto “was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”

When I ask my students how they imagine Squanto communicating with the Pilgrims, most suggest “sign language.” A reasonable guess. But wrong. And here Cotton is right again: “Squanto spoke fluent English,” to the point that he served as the Pilgrims’ “interpreter” with other tribes.

But what is astonishing – or not, given Cotton’s White Christian Nationalist commitments – is that Cotton never explained why Squanto spoke fluent English.

Did Squanto stumble upon an English grammar book inadvertently dropped on the shore by one of the traders bringing disease to the region? Did one of those traders take the time to provide this Indian a crash course in the English language? Did Squanto’s role as a “special instrument sent of God” for the sake of the Pilgrims include receiving from the Holy Spirit the gift of speaking in English?

No.

The reason that Squanto spoke fluent English is that in 1614 an English trader named Thomas Hunt tricked Squanto and two dozen or so other Wampanoag Indians into boarding his ship. Then Hunt chained them below deck and set sail for Spain, the goal being to sell them into slavery.

We do not know how many Indians survived the voyage, or how many were actually enslaved in Spain. We do know that Squanto escaped – perhaps with the help of Catholic friars – and made his way to England, where he learned English.

In 1619 he was employed as a guide for a ship heading to New England. When he arrived, and disembarked near the village where he had grown up, he discovered that disease had killed all his family and their fellow villagers; all that remained were bones and rotting corpses. Taken in but held in tight control by Wampanoag Indians, as they did not trust him, in the spring of 1621 Squanto was allowed to serve as an emissary to the struggling Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims must have freaked out when they heard Squanto speak English. But why he spoke English is not of interest to Sen. Cotton. He wants an American history whitewashed of the horrors of slavery, be it slavery of Africans or Native Americans. He wants an American history whitewashed of Protestant religious intolerance, whitewashed of the annihilation of the native inhabitants.

In short, Sen. Cotton and other White Christian Nationalists want a grade-school history that inspires “civilizational self-confidence” among white students.

That is to say, they want to cancel history for their own political purposes. With Trump’s election, with the ascent of the Project 2025 agenda, there is much more historical erasure to come.

(Note: this post is an update of a November 2020 post.)

New Apostolic Reformation Evangelicals see Trump as God’s Warrior in their Battle to win America from Satanic Forces and Christianize It

Nov 19, 2024 | 2 Comments

by Art Jipson

Art Jipson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton. His research areas include white racial extremism, social movements and collective behavior, white collar crime, fraud, and corporate crime, sociological and criminological theory, unions and labor movements, Internet community, and the sociology of popular music.

Editors Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation. We are grateful for permission to share it here.

President-elect Donald Trump, joined by Melania Trump and Barron Trump, on Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. AP Photo/Alex Brandon

A growing movement believes President-elect Donald Trump is fighting a spiritual war against demonic forces within the United States. Trump himself stated in his acceptance speech on Nov. 6, 2024, that the reason that “God spared my life” was to “restore America to greatness.”

I have studied various religious movements that seek to shape and control American society. One of these is the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, whose followers believe that they are waging a spiritual battle for control of the United States. NAR is an offshoot of Protestant Christian evangelicalism.

NAR advocates claim they receive divine guidance in reconstructing modern society based on Christian spiritual beliefs. In 2015, an estimated 3 million adult Americans attended churches that were openly part of NAR. Some scholars estimate that the number of active NAR adherents may be larger, as the movement may include members of Protestant Christian churches that are not directly aligned with the NAR movement.

The beginning of the movement

NAR emerged in the late 1990s when theologian C. Peter Wagner popularized the term “New Apostolic Reformation.” Wagner argued that God was creating modern-day apostles and prophets who would lead Christianity in remaking American society.

The roots of the New Apostolic Reformation can be traced to the broader charismatic movement that sees spiritual forces as an active part of everyday life.

This view does not separate sacred experience from regular everyday life. For the much larger network of charismatic Christians and Pentecostal movements that emphasize a personal relationship with God, the world is full of the active presence of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts and direct divine experiences.

Core beliefs

Central to NAR is the belief that Christian religious leaders should be the main source of cultural and political authority in America.

NAR proponents argue that select leaders receive direct revelation from God, guiding the direction of churches and fighting spiritual warfare against demonic influences, which they believe corrupt the behavior of individuals and nations.

NAR advocates for a hierarchical structure in which religious leaders and their political allies hold authority in society.

They believe in “The Seven Mountains Mandate,” a way to represent Christian control of society through a strategy that Christians should infiltrate, influence and eventually control seven key areas in society – business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion – to bring about cultural transformation.

By doing so, NAR proponents believe they can establish a pure and true form of what they believe is a society ruled by divine guidance and strict adherence to biblical ideas.

Lance Wallnau, a prominent Christian author, speaker, social media influencer and consultant associated with NAR, has promoted the idea that such engagement where NAR Christian leaders hold authority through a government tied to divine will is essential for advancing societal transformation.

Wallnau has been a vocal supporter of Trump, viewing him as a significant figure in NAR’s vision.

Spiritual warfare

Followers of the NAR believe that they must engage in spiritual warfare, which includes prayers and actions aimed at combating perceived demonic influences in society.

A man in a blue suit speaks to a crowd with his one hand raised. In the background is a large billboard of Mastriano Delrosso — Evangelist Lance Wallnau speaks during a September 2022 rally for Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Chambersburg, Pa. Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

This practice often involves identifying “strongholds” of evil, around cultural issues, such as gay marriage, transgender rights and LGBTQ+ activism, and working to dismantle them. An example of this is a recent series of religious-based political rallies led by NAR leaders known as “The Courage Tour” that advocated directly for Trump’s second election.

The NAR emphasizes that Christians should expect to see miraculous signs, where extraordinary events, such as Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt, are interpreted to be explained only by divine or spiritual intervention.

The movement’s adherents also believe in faith-based healing and supernatural experiences, such as prophetic utterances and speech.

Trump as divinely ordained

Many NAR leaders and followers support Trump, viewing him as a divinely appointed figure who would facilitate NAR’s goals for societal reconstruction, believing he was chosen by God to fulfill a prophetic destiny.

They position Trump as a warrior against a so-called demonically controlled – and therefore corrupted – “deep state,” aligning with NAR’s emphasis on spiritual warfare and cultural dominion as outlined in the “Seven Mountains” mandate. NAR leaders followed Trump’s understanding of a corrupt government.

The NAR led a “Million Women” worship rally on Oct. 12, 2024, to Washington, D.C., in which the organizers sought to encourage 1 million women NAR adherents to come to pray, protest and support Trump’s campaign. The event was promoted as a “last stand moment” to save the nation by helping Trump win the election as a champion against dark, satanic forces.

Several prominent politicians, legislators and members of the judiciary, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, have flown the NAR-based “Appeal to Heaven” flag.

For NAR evangelicals, the presidential election is interpreted through a Christian apocalyptic rhetoric. In this rhetoric one candidate is a force for good, a warrior for God – Trump – and the other is led by demonic forces such as Harris. Trump’s 2024 win is seen as a critical moment of spiritual warfare where the forces of God defeat the forces of evil.

Criticism from many Christian denominations

Despite its growing popularity, NAR faces substantial criticism. Many mainstream Christian churches argue that the movement’s teachings deviate from traditional Christian orthodoxy.

Critics highlight abuse of authority by people who claim God is directing their actions and the potential for abuse of authority by those claiming apostolic roles. The embrace of Trump raises concerns about blending evangelical faith and political ambition.

Critics argue that the NAR’s support for Trump compromised the integrity of the gospel, prioritizing political power over spiritual integrity. The events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol further complicated this relationship, exposing the potential dangers of conflating religious beliefs with partisan politics.

Moreover, the NAR’s emphasis on spiritual warfare and the idea of taking control over society has raised other Christian groups’ concerns about its potential to foster an “us versus them” mentality, leading to increased polarization within society.

The New Apostolic Reformation represents a significant development, blending charismatic practices with a strong emphasis on politics and cultural transformation.

However, a large majority of Americans disagree that society should be remade based on religious theology. Thus, for now, the NAR movement’s fundamental views about religion and government are starkly at odds with most Americans.

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Tom Cotton’s White Christian Nationalist Thanksgiving Story

New Apostolic Reformation Evangelicals see Trump as God’s Warrior in their Battle to win America from Satanic Forces and Christianize It

The beginning of the movement

Core beliefs

Spiritual warfare

Trump as divinely ordained

Criticism from many Christian denominations

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