The Creation Museum’s Ongoing Problem with History
by William Trollinger
In conducting our research for Righting America at the Creation Museum we were surprised to discover that the museum is rather “loose” when it comes to factual accuracy, and not just regarding matters of science. For example, despite the museum’s oft-stated pronouncement that the Bible is inerrant – factually accurate and without error – a close look at the placards reveals, among other things, a willingness to edit the biblical text in “creative” fashion, including the excising of verses without providing ellipses to let readers know that text has been removed. (Righting America 136-137)
But the most dramatic example of factual “creativity” involved not science and not the Bible, but history. In the Biblical Relevance room we found – along with a model of Gutenberg’s printing press – the iconic tableau of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints Church in 1517. Or, at least, that is what we thought the Creation Museum’s Luther was doing. But then, in our fifth or sixth visit to the museum, we looked more closely at the tableau. To quote from Righting America:
The Luther figure is not actually posting the ninety-five theses, but, instead, the following: “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment are attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him . . .” While the museum credits this call to culture war to “Martin Luther, correspondence,” it turns out that the quote does not actually come from Luther, but instead from a character named Fritz in a nineteenth-century historical novel by Elizabeth Rundle Charles. (139)
This fake history was on display at the Creation Museum for almost a decade after its 2007 opening. But at some point in the past year or two the folks at the museum – to their credit – took down the fictional Luther text. Not to their credit, they have not (as far as we know) publicly acknowledged the change they made, when they made it, and why they made it.
Still, the fictional quote is gone. But the iconic Luther tableau remains. Of course, one would reasonably assume that the speech from the Elizabeth Rundle Charles novel has been replaced with an excerpt from the 95 Theses. But no. Instead, what the Creation Museum Luther is now nailing to the door is a quote from Luther’s 1521 speech at the Diet of Worms, including this excerpt:
I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me.
It is fair to ask: Given that the museum has come this far when it comes to historical accuracy, removing the “Fritz quote” and replacing it with something close to what Luther actually said, why not go all the way and post text from the 95 Theses?
Obviously, we can’t say for sure what their thinking was. What we can say, however, is that the 95 Theses did not herald a break away from the Church. Instead, what Luther posted in 1517 was a series of debating points regarding the abuse of indulgences. He was not rejecting the notion of purgatory. He was not rejecting papal authority. He was trying to reform the Roman Catholic Church from within. Now, by 1521 (when he makes his speech at the Diet of Worms) his theology did pose fundamental challenges to the Catholic Church. That said, it was by no means inevitable that the “reform-from-within” Luther of 1517 would become the Reformation Luther of 1521.
Of course, this messy, nuanced, contingent historical narrative is not the linear Reformation story on display at the Creation Museum. Instead what visitors see, even with the change in the Luther tableau, is a convenient smoothing out of that story that keeps the much simpler, linear narrative intact. And, not incidentally, the quote from Luther’s speech at the Diet of Worms is so much more dramatic than the 95 Theses, and so much more in keeping with the museum’s commitment to culture war.
So it goes with the complexities of human history and historical accuracy at the Creation Museum.
Happy to be Included!
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
We (Bill and Sue) are very pleased that our essay, “The Bible and Creationism,” is included in this just-published volume from Oxford. It is an honor that editor Paul Gutjahr asked us to join such an august list of contributors, which happens to include rightingamerica.net contributors Rebecca Barrett-Fox and Jason Hentschel.
In this essay – which was great fun to write – we trace the evolution of creationism over time. As we discuss, Biblical creationism emerged in the late nineteenth century among conservative Protestants who were unable to square inerrancy and its “literal” reading of the Bible with Charles Darwin’s theory of organic evolution. But over time a variety of increasingly literal “creationisms” have emerged. For the first century after Origin of Species (1859) old Earth creationism – which accepted mainstream geology – held sway. With the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood, flood geology (Noah’s flood explains the geological strata) and young Earth creationism took center stage. Waiting in the wings, however, is geocentric creationism, which rejects mainstream biology, geology, and cosmology.
We conclude the essay by noting that:
In the end, all forms of creationism – old Earth, young Earth, geocentric – hinge on this point of biblical authority. All creationists affirm that they stand on the authority of the Word, but that still leaves open the questions as to what that Word – read plainly, commonsensically, literally – actually means, and to what degree can that plain, commonsensical, literal Word be reconciled with mainstream science. The historical trajectory of creationism suggests that we will see less, not more, reconciliation in the future. Put differently, in fifty years [geocentrist] Gerardus Bouw, like [young Earth creationist] George McCready Price before him whose arguments once were seen as ridiculous, may be squarely in the creationist mainstream.
For those who are interested, here’s the complete essay: The Bible and Creationism
Troubling Histories: Feminism, Science, and Evangelical Commitments
by Patrick Thomas
Today’s post comes from our colleague Patrick Thomas. Last year, Patrick organized a series of posts on observational and historical science, authored by our colleagues in the University of Dayton natural sciences departments. Below, Patrick draws connections between those earlier discussions of creation science and more recent posts on feminism in evangelical culture.
For the last two months, the topic of feminism in evangelical culture has been a prevalent one on the Righting America blog, and I’ve been hoping to enter that conversation for some time. In part, I’m interested in this conversation because of the work I did to organize the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference at which Bill & Sue Trollinger presented. In part I’m interested because I found Dr. Emily McGowin’s post – in which she explains the eternal subordination of the Son as a most contemporary iteration of evangelicalism’s response to feminist thought – particularly enlightening for understanding the degree to which evangelical leaders are threatened by feminism. Through the notion of eternal subordination, McGowin explains, “not only is male headship rooted in God’s design for creation, but it’s also rooted in God’s triune nature.”
Both the Trollingers and McGowin point out that the rhetorical shifts of the evangelical anti-feminist stance are contemporary responses to 20th and 21st century feminisms, social movements that pose great concern to evangelicals. To an outsider to evangelical culture like myself, what’s most striking about the way evangelicals embed a patriarchal structure into the triune nature of god is not just the way that such a rhetorical shift ignores the Biblical literalism upon which so much of contemporary evangelical rhetoric maintains its position. It is not just the way that this rhetorical shift ignores human history altogether. It is not just that, as Dr. McGowin rightly points out, “despite Christ’s own teachings and pattern of life, the Christian tradition has often failed to affirm the full humanity of women. It should come as no surprise…that evangelicals are looking for more sophisticated arguments for women’s subordination today.”
What is most surprising to me, especially after reading McGowin’s helpful explanation, is that I couldn’t help but think: haven’t I heard this somewhere before?
It is striking how much the evangelical response to feminism mirrors the evangelical response to scientific inquiry (especially inquiry leading to evidence opposing a young earth). For example: both responses
- explain that it is because of original sin that humans fail to understand the divine design,
- ignore the efforts of thousands of years of human inquiry,
- and aim to confirm foregone conclusions.
More importantly, despite the evangelical claim – rooted in Biblical literalism – that True Doctrine is unchanging, both require revision over time.
For feminism, the notion of eternal subordination of the Son is the latest revision to evangelical beliefs about patriarchal social relations. As Dr. McGowin summarizes,
“First, patriarchy was a consequence of the Fall. Then, patriarchy was interpreted as central to God’s original creative design…in recent decades, patriarchy has been reinterpreted (by some) as rooted in God’s triune nature.”
For scientific inquiry, the revision is observational science, or the idea that credible scientific data is limited to that which “involves . . . observation, using one or more of our five senses (taste, sight, smell, hearing, touch) to gain knowledge about the world and to be able to repeat observations” (Ken Ham, The Lie, 47) because “No living scientist was there to observe the big band that is supposed to have occurred 15 billion years ago” (Ken Ham, The Lie, 47). As we have pointed out numerous times (like here and here), observational science obscures scientific evidence that opposes a young earth by rendering it unreliable. Yet, as the Trollingers point out in Righting America at the Creation Muesum (and elsewhere on this blog), much of the scientific data presented at the Creation Museum fails to meet the evangelical metric of “observational science” (Righting America at the Creation Museum, 88-94).
It is troubling that the kind observational science evangelicals advocate has yet to be operationalized in the ways that evangelicals claim that it functions. Equally troubling is that by rendering historical science invalid because it is “in the past,” evangelicals rely on a conception of science that is contradictory: observational science posits that the only valid scientific evidence stems from human observation, yet humans are inherently unreliable (i.e., sinful) observers.
The evangelical response to feminism similarly ignores history to such a point that it wavers on the edge of Christian orthodoxy. As the Trollingers point out:
“The Councils of Nicaea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE) established that the equality of the Father, Son, and Spirit is orthodox Christian theology. So it is remarkable that the folks making the argument that patriarchy in home and church is analogous to patriarchy in the Trinity are the same folks allegedly obsessed with maintaining the “fundamentals of faith.” That they are so willing to flirt with what has traditionally been defined as heresy so as to keep women in their place seems dramatic evidence of the threat that feminism poses to fundamentalism and evangelicalism.”
In other words, the shift in evangelicals’ anti-feminist stance signals the degree to which they are willing to compromise their seemingly unwavering beliefs – the True Doctrine – in an attempt to re-assert hegemonic authority. By ignoring Church history and their own epistemic commitment to Biblical inerrancy, the evangelical anti-feminist stance relies on yet another contradictory position: for all the claims of commitment to Biblical literalism, there is no literal way to read the triune nature of God, certainly not one that allows us to spell out in literal terms the eternal subordination of the Son.
Tracing the congruencies between the evangelical stances toward feminism and science reveals a troublesome rendering of evangelicals: that it is more important to assert righteousness in the present than maintain connection with the history of their own doctrine. Given the apparent contradictions and compromises to their own epistemic commitments, I’m hard pressed to see what beliefs, other than their own assuredness, evangelicals are fully committed to. A troubling result, indeed.
The similarities that evangelicals display in their approaches to feminism and science invite further exploration. I wonder what other similarities are available, and where else we might look to find these patterns in the logic of evangelicalism.
Weekly Standard article features Righting America at the Creation Museum
In his November 17 Weekly Standard article, “Love to Tell the Story,” Grant Wishard compares Washington’s Museum of the Bible (which, when Wishard wrote, was just about to open) with two other evangelical “pilgrimage sites”: the Sight and Sound Theatres (Lancaster, PA and Branson, MO) and the Creation Museum/Ark Encounter (Petersburg and Williamstown, both in KY).
In his very interesting article, Wishard makes good use of Righting America at the Creation Museum. One of his observations is that in contrast with what one finds at the Answers in Genesis (AiG) sites, the Museum of the Bible’s evangelical message is muted, to the point that visitors might not even know they had been preached to. As Wishard points out, this is certainly not a problem at the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter!
This is a good piece of journalism, but we were brought up short by this passage:
For all its insularity, though, the Creation Museum is, on its own terms, hugely successful. And it’s way more fun than anything you’ll find in the Smithsonian.
More fun? For whom? We have to ask. Surely, not for those positioned on the “wrong” side of its culture war rhetoric.
The “Magic” of Museums
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
It was certainly a privilege to be included in last Saturday’s American Academy of Religion (AAR) roundtable discussion of “Museums and the Public Understanding of Religion,” organized by Hamilton College’s S. Brent Plate. In his introduction to the session, Brent talked about how important it is that museums, which welcome as many as 800 million guests a year, powerfully shape the popular imaginary regarding religion.
- Lauren Turek of Trinity University (TX) gave a very interesting talk – complete with artistic renderings – on a proposed (but never-built) museum on Jews in the western United States that was being designed to enable visitors to experience something of the religious practice and experience of Jews from the past.
- Peter Manseau (who also happens to be the author of the critically-acclaimed The Apparitionists) talked about the new exhibit he curated at the National Museum of American History on “Religion in Early America,” in the process highlighting the exhibit’s emphasis on religious diversity and its goal to “normalize” religious differences such that visitors might feel less anxiety about those differences.
- Diversity was also at the heart of Laura Weinstein’s fascinating discussion of an exhibit she curated at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, in which beautiful pages selected from various editions of the Koran in the museum’s collection were displayed next to thoughtful personal responses written by local Muslims.
- Finally, there was a powerful presentation on religion at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Curator Eric Williams and Yolanda Pierce (formerly at the museum but now dean of the Howard University School of Divinity) talked about the intense reaction many visitors – particularly African American visitors – have in response to objects at the museum, such as Nat Turner’s Bible (which he had in his possession during the rebellion) and beautiful shards of stained glass that were retrieved from the ashes of the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, in which four young girls were killed.
In short, four compelling presentations on four intellectually credible museums (including one not yet built), all of which take seriously both the diversity of religion in America and the diversity among museum visitors and their responses to those representations.
And then, for something completely different, there was our presentation on the Creation Museum/Ark Encounter (both Answers in Genesis (AiG) sites) which, rather than embrace religious diversity or seek to calm anxiety about it, instead aim to transform Bible-believing Christians into Christian Right culture warriors to the point that they will even reject earnest old Earth fundamentalists as beyond the pale.
Boston University’s Stephen Prothero was the respondent to the papers. Among other questions he posed, he asked all of us to explain the power of the objects in our museums to make moments and things from the past seem real in such a way that they often inspire heartfelt emotional responses. He asked: “Is this magic? Is this sleight-of-hand?”
What a great question. Especially for us. As we noted in our response, the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter borrow the exhibit and display strategies of natural history to create (many, if not most, objects on display are created by AiG) and to constitute those objects in such a way as to invite visitors to experience them as authentic relics from the past. Borrowing from the workings of traditional dioramas, which re-create within a museum setting a scene from a distant time or place or culture, the Creation Museum’s walk-through Garden of Eden serves as a peephole into the early chapters of Genesis and constructs them as historical referents. As people, places, and stories that actually happened. Likewise, at Ark Encounter, an entire walk-through diorama creates a three-dimensional space in which the living quarters on the Ark, never mentioned in Genesis, offer visitors an experience of what life on that huge vessel might have been like. There visitors come to know by name individuals such as Noah’s daughters-in-law (also never mentioned in Genesis) along with their ethnicities, gifts, and favorite hobbies. In these ways, both the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter create/construct objects, people, and scenes designed to enable visitors to feel intensely that these objects, people, stories are real and only separated from them by time and space. Magic, indeed.
In response to our paper, several in attendance indicated that they were frightened by our presentation. For them, museums today are charged with educating publics in ways that defy division, faction, and strife. At the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter it would appear that just the opposite is underway. Scary, indeed.
Righting America Goes to Boston!
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
We are off to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) annual meeting in Boston, where at 4 PM on Saturday we are participating in a roundtable discussion on the topic, “Museums and the Public Understanding of Religion: Sacred Art, History, and Science on Display.” Here’s how the AAR program describes the session:
There are over 850 million visits every year to museums in the United States, much more than attendance at sporting events and amusement parks combined. Museums are go-to places for educational field trips, must-see destinations for tourists, for hands-on scientific exploration, and flint stones of socio-political controversy. And they are filled with religious objects. . . . Each panelist will reflect on their own experiences at the intersection of religion and museums, commenting on how museums engage, promote, and influence the public understanding of religion in the United States.
Two highly-respected scholars of religion are in charge of the session: S. Brent Plate (Hamilton College) organized the roundtable and will serve as chair, and Stephen Prothero (Boston University) will serve as respondent. The session will include presentations on the National Museum of American History (Washington), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History (Washington), and . . . the Creation Museum/Ark Encounter (Petersburg/Williamstown, KY).
What??? How can comments about Ken Ham’s creationist tourist sites possibly fit in the same academic conversation with discussion of these three reputable museums? Will the theologians and religious studies profs in the audience head for the exit once we put up our Creation Museum photo of dinosaurs cavorting with children?
We have no idea how this is going to go. But it should be fun!
John Oliver Gives Ark Encounter A (little) Break
by William Trollinger
In the end, John Oliver let Ark Encounter off easy.
In the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight Oliver went after state and local tax incentive schemes that are designed to encourage companies to build or expand, but that routinely fail to produce the jobs and development that they promise. And Ken Ham’s big boat just outside Williamstown, Kentucky was Exhibit A.
There are some very funny bits here, including Oliver’s commentary on all the sexual activity that must have been taking place on the Ark (two-by-two and all that – as is often the case with Last Week Tonight, this is not an episode to watch with children!). And then there’s discussion about the Ark’s obsession – and it really is an obsession – with the question of waste removal. According to placards at Ark Encounter, the “manure problem” may have been solved by the use of “slatted floors or multiple-level cages,” which, as Oliver observes, is “really not a good answer, as you do not want to be the animal on the lowest level of that ship.”
As regards tax incentives, Oliver rightly observed that Ark Encounter is receiving $18m in sales tax rebates from the state of Kentucky, “the justification for taking [this] gamble on a gigantic ark [being] that it would be a boon to the whole area.” But when Grant County Judge-Executive Steve Wood is asked about the Ark’s economic impact on the town of Williamstown, his response is blunt:
“Nothing. I don’t mean to sound negative in this interview, but there’s nothing here.”
Oliver’s discussion of Ark Encounter is hilarious, pointedly critical, and on the mark. But for all of this, Oliver understates the governmental support that Ark Encounter has received. As we have noted before, in 2013 Williamstown issued $62m of junk bonds and loaned the proceeds to the Ark. “Loaned” belongs in scare quotes, given that, over the next thirty years, 75% of what Ark Encounter would have paid in property taxes will instead be used to pay off the loan.
Combine this with the sales tax rebate, and the result is a huge governmental subsidy for Ark Encounter. In fact, without the $62m loan/gift from Williamstown, it is hard to imagine how Ken Ham’s big boat would have been built. And yet, Williamstown has nothing to show for it. Shuttered shops in downtown, a paucity of foot traffic, no development at the interstate exit. “There’s nothing here.”
The story is even worse than the story told by John Oliver. And that’s saying something.
P.S. For more on Oliver’s story on Ark Encounter, see what our friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and I Love You But You Are Going to Hell have to say.
Hiding in Plain Sight: Creationists and Anticommunist Politics, Part 2
by Carl Weinberg
Today’s post comes from Dr. Carl R. Weinberg. Weinberg is Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I (Southern Illinois University Press). He is completing a book manuscript entitled Red Dynamite: Creationism and Anticommunism in Modern America.
On November 7, 1917, one hundred years and three days ago today, workers and soldiers loyal to the Bolshevik Party seized power in Petrograd, Russia, and established the first workers’ republic in world history. As I pointed out in my last post, for the past century creationists have been rabidly anticommunist, seeing in Marxism the clearest possible evidence that evolution results in the devolution of morality.
Since the end of the Cold War, Answers in Genesis (AiG) has not often deployed the anticommunist weapon. But when they do, it is a blunt instrument. See, for example, Ken Ham’s May 2017 fundraising letter, published online as “Exposing the Connection: How Evolution Impacts Morality.” In this letter, Ham is careful to qualify his causal claim about evolution and morality: “While we do not argue that evolution directly causes immorality, people can use Darwinian thinking to justify their behavior.” But these subtleties go out the window when AiG’s Bodie Hodge analyzes “The Results of Evolution: Could It Be the Bloodiest Religion Ever?” The article features a table listing the “casualties” of evolutionary thinking, indicting a list of communist leaders (plus Hitler) who led their followers into revolution and/or war. Lenin and Trotsky alone are responsible, in Hodge’s view, for 15 million deaths attributable to the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. (The twentieth-century total which includes, among other conflicts, World War I and World War II, along with all abortions from major countries, is 778,000,000.)
Speaking of Hitler, AiG is fond of pinning his crimes on evolutionary thinking. But this conveniently leaves out an awkward fact: antievolutionist William Bell Riley was a big supporter of Hitler. In the early 1930s, Riley discovered the viciously anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion and blamed communism and evolutionism on an alleged Jewish conspiracy.1 In 1934, Riley explained that Hitler’s “anti-semitism has some just basis.” He cited a recent article which praised Hitler for reducing unemployment, restoring law and order, and promoting a unified nationalistic spirit. Riley even suggested that Hitler was a divine agent. “To me, at least,” he wrote, “it was nothing short of help from on high that enabled him to snatch Germany from the very jaws of atheistic Communism.” If he had to choose between Germany and Russia, Riley concluded, he would choose Hitler’s Germany “a thousand-fold.”2 When Riley did a public about-face on the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, it is telling that his pamphlet Hitlerism: Or, The Philosophy of Evolution in Action (1941) said not a single word about Hitler’s treatment of Jews.3
This all might seem worlds away from Ken Ham and AiG. But in 1946, a year before Riley’s death, searching for a successor to run Northwestern when he was gone, the old man offered the job to a young graduate student at the University of Minnesota who had just published his first book. His name was Henry Morris. Having read That You Might Believe, Riley recognized in Morris a man who understood the moral menace of modern communism and the role of evolution in facilitating it.4 Anticommunism was a common thread that united generations of creationists.
Though Ken Ham does not talk about communism these days—red-baiting has lost its caché and Ham is ever the populist—his letter does contain an echo of that Red Dynamite theme. He offers two case studies of evolution-inspired immorality. The first, more familiar to younger readers, is Bill Nye’s new TV show—Bill Nye Saves the World, an episode of which featured Rachel Bloom singing “My Sex Junk.” Ham’s historical example is less familiar but more relevant—Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, one-time socialist, eugenicist, and grandson of Charles Darwin’s “bulldog,” T. H. Huxley. Ham quotes Aldous Huxley about his youthful rebellion, which aimed at restraints on both “sexual freedom” and the “political and economic system.” As Huxley described it in 1937, he was engaged in “political and erotic revolt.”5 Ham’s second example reminds us that AiG’s campaign against evolution is fundamentally about morality and power—what are the standards of right and wrong, and who decides, in the words of famed Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, how should we then live?6
Just as in 1917, these are still the fundamental questions posed today for the working people of the world, confronted by the latest slow-burning capitalist depression disguised as a “recovery.” Regardless of who is in the White House, the valuable lessons of the opening years of the Bolshevik Revolution will need to be relearned. This momentous anniversary is a welcome opportunity to clarify the real stakes in the battle over evolution today.
Notes
1William Bell Riley, Protocols and Communism (Minneapolis, MN: L. W. Camp, 1934).
2William Bell Riley, “Why Recognize Russia and Rag Germany?” Pilot (January 1934): 110.
3William Bell Riley, Hitlerism, or The Philosophy of Evolution in Action (Minneapolis, MN: Irene Woods, 1941).
4Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; 2nd ed.), 220–21.
5On Huxley’s interest in eugenics and his left-wing politics, see Joanne Woiak, “Designing a Brave New World: Eugenics, Politics, and Fiction,” The Public Historian 29 (Summer 2007).
6Francis A. Schaeffer, How Then Should We Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1976).
Hiding in Plain Sight: Creationists and Anticommunist Politics, Part 1
by Carl Weinberg
Today’s post comes from Dr. Carl R. Weinberg. Weinberg is Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I (Southern Illinois University Press). He is completing a book manuscript entitled Red Dynamite: Creationism and Anticommunism in Modern America.
On November 7, 1917, one hundred years ago today, workers and soldiers loyal to the Bolshevik Party seized power in Petrograd, Russia and established the first workers’ republic in world history. What does that have to do with the history behind the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation Museum? Far more than you might think. To understand why, it will help to consider an AiG fundraising letter I received this past May from Ken Ham, (published online as “Exposing the Connection: How Evolution Impacts Morality”). Since I have spent a number of years researching creationism—which explains why I’m on the AiG mailing list—I’ve learned something about what makes creationists tick. But I recognize that most evolution-minded people have trouble understanding why anyone in the twenty-first century would continue to believe that God created humans in the last ten thousand years. Their eyes glaze over (or their heads explode) when creationists go on about the alleged faults of radiometric dating or the Biblical “evidences” that humans and dinosaurs lived happily together in the Garden of Eden before Adam bit into that apple. As young people are wont to ask these days, “Seriously?”
Ken Ham’s letter helps answer that nagging question. It is a remarkably open and honest acknowledgement of why evolution really matters to creationists. And it has little to do with biology or geology. For all the millions of dollars that Ham and his colleagues have spent on scientific-ish museum exhibits, films, and books, their main concern is not “molecules to man.” What AiG really cares about is social evolution: how morality and power relations change over time. In his letter, Ham explains that when people are taught that life arose and evolved through only natural processes, without a creator God, they are deprived of a solid moral code based on God’s authority. This allows for a morality that evolves. For Ham, it is evolving in a downward direction. As evidence, he points to the growing opposition to “Christian morality, such as marriage being one man and one woman and abortion being murder.” To boost his own authority, Ham notes that the late Dr. Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), AiG’s predecessor, “had also been writing about this connection between evolution and morality in most of his early books.” Ham is right about Morris. Which brings us back to the Bolsheviks.
To find a systematic materialist worldview arguing that morality changes over time, as society and power relations change, look no further than Marxism. Although we have been misled for decades into thinking that only capitalist robber barons like John D. Rockefeller made use of Darwin for political purposes, left-wing social Darwinism was deeper and more widespread.1 The tradition started with Marx and Engels—big fans of Darwin’s achievement—and continued through the pre–World War I Socialist parties of the Second International and into the international communist movement inaugurated in Petrograd a century ago.2 Lenin and Trotsky, and their followers in the U.S., led a public campaign that elevated Marxist-Darwinism to a high level. Even as the murderous Stalinist regime later presided over the destruction of Soviet genetics, they did it in the name of proper evolutionism.3 In the early years, the Bolsheviks also began to overturn traditional power relations—between landlords and peasants, between employers and workers, between oppressor and oppressed nationalities, but also between men and women. Under the new regime—before many policies were reversed under Stalin—abortion was legalized; marriage and divorce became civil, not church, procedures; and economic opportunities began to open up for women.4 One would therefore expect that antievolutionists, and their broader milieu of Christian fundamentalists, would take notice. And they did.
If you read Henry Morris’s works written in the decades before Ken Ham started his creationist career in 1975, you’ll find that he consistently took aim at a range of worldviews that allowed for social and moral evolutionism. But communism took the cake. From That You Might Believe (1946) to the young-earth creationist blockbuster co-authored with John C. Whitcomb, Jr. The Genesis Flood (1961) to restatements of his thesis in Twilight of Evolution (1963), Evolution’s Troubled Waters (1974), and Evolution in Turmoil (1982), Morris indicted Marxism above all for pulling the rug from under a God-centered system of morality. As Morris and Whitcomb put it in The Genesis Flood in a section tellingly titled, “The Importance of the Question,” atheistic evolutionism formed “the backbone of the whole scientific structure of Communistic philosophy.” There were other “man-centered philosophies,” they wrote. But “Communism is the most dangerous and widespread philosophy opposing Christianity today.”5
When Morris started writing in this vein in 1946, he was standing on a decades-long creationist anticommunist tradition. One of its earliest exponents was George McCready Price (1870–1963). A Canadian-born creationist geologist, Seventh-day Adventist, and godfather of young-earth creationism, Price wrote about the combined moral dangers of socialism, communism, and evolutionism in a series of works in the 1910s and 20s.6 For Price, a key Biblical passage for understanding the immoral political and social consequences of evolutionary thinking was Matthew 7:15, in which Jesus warned about trees that bore “evil fruit.” In The Predicament of Evolution (1925), Price wrote about those fruits in alarming terms: “Marxian Socialism and the radical criticism of the Bible, though arising first in point of time, are now proceeding hand in hand with the doctrine of organic evolution to break down all those ideas of morality, all those concepts of the sacredness of marriage and of private property, upon which Occidental civilization has been built during the past thousand years.”7 For its criminal consequences—for encouraging a profound challenge to both gender and property relations—Price labeled evolution “Red Dynamite,” from which my book takes its title.
Indiana-born William Bell Riley was singing a similar tune. Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, central leader of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, and founder of the Northwestern Bible College, Riley was, outside of William Jennings Bryan, the leading antievolutionist of the 1920s.8 He paid little attention to biology—he was far more concerned about evolutionary social science textbooks. They were dangerous, Riley explained to his flock, because they built a bridge that enabled an invasion of “Soviet propaganda.” The infusion of communist ideas would lead to the “overthrow of the State.” America would become like Russia: “infidelity, mental and moral; rapine, plunder, robbery—these will be universal.”9 Riley’s indictment of Soviet Russia drew on widely reprinted fake news stories alleging that the Bolshevik government had nationalized the nation’s women and set up a Bureau of Free Love to distribute them equally among the male population.10
And with the next post, we will bring the anticommunist creationism back to Ken Ham and AiG.
Notes
1Kampourakis, eds, Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 139–46.
2Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).
3Nikolai Krementsov, “Darwinism, Marxism, and genetics in the Soviet Union,” in Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 215–46.
4Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (IU Press, 1997).
5John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1961), 444.
6Carl R. Weinberg, “Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits: Evolution, Eschatology, and the Anticommunist Politics of George McCready Price,” Church History 83 (September 2014): 684–722.
7George McCready Price, The Predicament of Evolution (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1925). The full text of the book is available online at: http://www.creationism.org/books/price/PredicmtEvol/.
8William Vance Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
9“Evolution or Sovietizing the State Through Its Schools,” in William Bell Riley, Inspiration or Evolution (Cleveland, OH: Union Gospel Press, 1926; 2nd ed.), 109–10.
10Julia L. Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia,” JAH 100 (March 2014): 1043; “Bolshevism Bared by R. E. Simmons,” New York Times, February 18, 1919, 4.
Terrorizing Immigrants and Catholics
by William Trollinger
“Is your sleep troubled by the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and related hate groups?”
This was one of the questions I (Bill) was asked last Thursday night at the St. Joseph Parish Life Center (Wapakoneta OH), after my presentation on “Terrorizing Immigrants and Catholics: The Ohio KKK in the 1920s.” This presentation was the featured address of the Auglaize County Historical Society’s annual meeting, and was sponsored by the Ohio Humanities Council. (Sue is also a Ohio Humanities Council speaker.) More than 50 people were in attendance, and they were wonderfully receptive and lively!
As I noted in my presentation,
“The white-robed Klansmen with their fiery crosses and their fiery rhetoric seemed to be everywhere in the first half of the 1920s. While the Klan worked hard to keep its membership lists secret, historians have estimated that at its high point perhaps four million Americans were members of the Klan. And unlike the first KKK, this second KKK was a truly national organization, having more members in the Midwest and the West than in the South. Indiana was the site of the Klan’s greatest political achievements, with control of the governor’s office and other state-level positions. But Ohio seems to have had more Klan members than any other state of the Union, with perhaps 400,000 members at its peak.”
KKK Demonstration in Dayton, OH on September 21, 1923.
For the second KKK, which presented itself as the supremely patriotic organization, to be a “100% American” required that one be a white Protestant Christian. In the Midwest in general and in Ohio in particular, the Klan’s raison d’etre was the terrorizing of Catholics (many of whom were recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe). The Klan was particularly strong in cities such as Youngstown and Dayton, which had seen a great influx of Catholic immigrants in the years between 1890 and 1920. But the fact is that in the first half of the 1920s the KKK hosted innumerable rallies in cities and towns throughout the entire state.
In the Q/A period I got some great questions, including:
Q: Why was the Klan so strong in the 1920s, when the economy was relatively good, and not the 1930s, during the Depression?
A: The Klan was very much a product of the post-World War cultural crisis, which also featured the Red Scare and the emergence of the fundamentalist movement. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that that the Second KKK consisted solely or primarily of individuals who were at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; in many ways the Klan was quintessentially middle class.
Q: Did everyone who joined the Klan support the organization’s hateful rhetoric and actions?
A: Well, it is fair to say that some folks joined the KKK as they would join any other social club or lodge. Moreover, in certain places there was great pressure placed on people to join the Klan. That said, the KKK was a hate group, and to be a member of the Klan was – in the end – to support its hateful agenda and terrorist activities.
Q: What did the KKK think of the Mafia? (A question asked to much laughter!)
A: Well, the Klan supported Prohibition, and the Mafia made enormous money bootlegging. And many/most Mafia members had some connection with Catholicism. So, let’s say the Klan was not big on the Mafia!
Most interesting, a number of folks in the audience related family stories about the Klan. Perhaps the most amazing was from a woman whose grandfather was a Klan leader; his last name started with a “K,” and he named his son (her father) such that his initials spelled out K.K.K. But then this son married a Catholic woman. Yet another example of how love and sex triumph over hate!
Not surprisingly, I had a series of questions about the contemporary Ku Klux Klan and the alt-right movement. And in response to the questioner who asked if I was troubled, of course I said yes. Here is how I ended my presentation:
“In US history we have had an ongoing conflict over what it means to be an American. On the one hand we have those who argue that anyone can become an American: along with being able to speak basic English and having a rudimentary understanding of American history and government, one simply needs to affirm his/her loyalty to the ideas and ideals articulated in the Constitution. On the other hand we have those in this country who argue that to be truly and fully American one needs to be the right race, the right ethnicity, the right religion. The 1920s Ku Klux Klan held to the latter position. A century later, it is not clear whether they were on the winning or losing side of this argument about what it means to be an American.”
