Celebrating the Reformation Quincentenary with the Creationists
by Susan Trollinger
Here at rightingamerica Sue and Bill decided to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther posting the 95 Theses by taking Sue’s Visual Rhetoric class and Bill’s Protestant Christianity seminar on a field trip to two of the most remarkable examples of what the Reformation hath wrought. We mean, of course, the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter!
Students at the Creation Museum (c) 2017 by Susan Trollinger
It is fair to say that our students were bewildered and sometimes horrified. Here are a few of their observations:
About the Creation Museum
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- Rose: “I was struck by the near-constant stream of audio. It only stops when the visitor arrives at the Jesus exhibit.”
- John: “Dragons from the moment you walk in the door, just breathing the fires of fantasy all over you!”
- Jerome: “I was surprised by the use of fantasy (dragons) combined with the “adventure” music reminiscent of video games like Skyrim 4 or World of Warcraft. Genesis is an adventure! They have worked very hard to create their own world, in the process answering all questions you might have about “holes” in their world. Their world-building would make a fantasy writer proud!”
- Diane: “I was particularly taken by the tattered magazine covers plastered on the wall at the beginning of the “Culture in Crisis” section. The specific headlines chosen, the way they are arranged/juxtaposed, with images of radical Muslims, 9/11, missing children – all of this seems designed to prey on contemporary anxieties of Americans while failing to contextualize/explain the images. The collage is meant to speak for itself, but it does this by constructing a narrative of destruction.”
Students at Ark Encounter. (c) 2017 by Susan Trollinger
About Ark Encounter
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- Rowen: “The most fascinating parts of Ark Encounter are the detailed explanations. The descriptions of the methods and the technology by which the Ark supposedly allowed for waste management and air ventilation are things you just have to see to believe.”
- Karen: “I thought the section about the people on the Ark was very intriguing. Before you enter this exhibit there is a placard that explains the ‘Creative License’ that allows them to make up details about the people and the presents these details as ‘facts.’ They assume races and personalities for all of the women on the Ark, but it is all fiction.”
- Joe: “I was most startled by the Fairy Tale Ark exhibit. It seemed designed not only to instruct adults on the dangers of childish versions of the Ark, but also to lure innocent children into a horror-inducing display. I saw kids who were smiling as they came running in, only to have the smiles disappear with disillusionment.”
- Cory: “The emphasis on judgment and condemnation was terrifying. I feel like most of the displays go out of their way to belittle human beings and human life. The Ark presents a traumatizing and dangerous theology.”
Traumatic theology aside, it was a very good day, made possible by the University of Dayton College of Arts and Sciences, which once again demonstrated its commitment to experiential learning. We can say that this is an experience that our students will not soon forget!
P.S. In an event sponsored by the Ohio Humanities Council, this Thursday night (Nov. 02) Bill is giving a presentation at the annual meeting of the Auglaize County Historical Society: “Terrorizing Immigrants and Catholics: The Ohio Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.” The talk will be at 7 PM in the St. Joseph Parish Life Center in Wapakoneta, OH.
A Response to “Free to Be Feminist?”
by Emily McGowin
Today’s post comes from our colleague Emily Hunter McGowin. Dr. McGowin has a PhD in theology from the University of Dayton and MDiv from Truett Seminary. Her work is at the intersection of religion, theology, and ethnography. Her first book, Quivering Families: The Quiverfull Movement and Evangelical Theology of the Family, will be published by Fortress Press in May 2018. Her work has also appeared in Ecclesial Practices, New Blackfriars, and a collection of essays, Angels on Earth: Mothering, Religion, and Spirituality. Emily is a regular speaker in Denver, CO, where she is theologian-in-residence at Church of the Resurrection. You can learn more about Emily at her website.
In their post, “Free to Be Feminist?,” Bill and Sue Trollinger rightly point out how fundamentalist/evangelical rhetoric regarding female subjugation changed in the 1960s and 70s following the inroads made by second-wave feminism. Rather than argue women are subservient to men as a result of the Fall (per Gen. 3:16), evangelicals began to argue that female subservience was rooted in God’s original design for creation. If male headship is rooted in God’s design, then feminism is a rejection of and rebellion against that divine design.
Then, over the past few decades, some evangelicals took the argument for patriarchy even further: Not only is male headship rooted in God’s design for creation, but it’s also rooted in God’s Triune nature.
Often called the eternal subordination of the Son (ESS), this position suggests the Son is in an eternally subordinate relationship to the Father. In short, they are equal in glory and power, but unequal in roles (as the Son submits eternally to the Father). This then becomes the model for women’s subordination to men: equal in worth and honor, but unequal in roles (as the wife submits to the husband).
I rehearse this narrative because it is important to recognize these rhetorical shifts. As patriarchy has been threatened in 20th and 21st Century America, evangelicals have attempted to shore it up, particularly within Christian spaces. First, patriarchy was constructed as a consequence of the Fall. Then, patriarchy was interpreted to be central to God’s original creative design, leaving no room for seeing it as a reversible result of sin. And then, in recent decades, patriarchy has been reinterpreted (by some) as rooted in God’s Triune nature. It wasn’t enough for patriarchy to govern the world; it has to be embedded in the ground of all being, too.
But there’s additional insight to be gained about fundamentalist rhetoric by considering it in an even broader historical framework. The fact of the matter is that, until the mid-20th Century, the argument for patriarchy within Christianity was predicated upon the assumption that women were, in their very nature, deficient. That is, compared to men, women lacked intelligence, were emotionally unstable, and were more subject to temptation. As a result of this fundamental deficiency, women should be subject to men—in the home, in the church, and in the world.
The assumption of women’s natural deficiency crossed the boundaries of Christian traditions, showing up in Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant sources. Anglican theologian William Witt has written about this matter at great length in reference to Anglican disputes over women’s ordination (and I understand he has a book in the works as well). It’s impossible to replicate his arguments here. But a few of the examples from his research will illustrate what once was the traditional Christian consensus on women’s subjection to men:
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“[D]o you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.” – Tertullian, 2nd C.
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“To woman is assigned the presidency of the household; to man all the business of state, the marketplace, the administration of government … She cannot handle state business well, but she can raise children correctly…” – John Chrysostom, 4th C.
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“[G]enerally, proverbially, and commonly it is affirmed that women are more mendacious and fragile, more diffident, more shameless, more deceptively eloquent, and, in brief, a woman is nothing but a devil fashioned into a human appearance.” – Albert the Great, 13th C.
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“For good order would have been wanting in the human family if some were not governed by others wiser than themselves. So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates.” – Thomas Aquinas, 13th C.
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“Nature, I say, doth paynt [women] further to be weake, fraile, impacient, feble, and foolishe.” – John Knox, 16th C.
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“[Women’s] judgments are commonly weakest because of their sex.” – Richard Hooker, 16th C.
These are but a few examples of the near-universal agreement of Christian teachers through the centuries that women are biologically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually inferior to men—what Witt calls “an inherent ontological incapacity.” That is to say, until the mid-20th Century, the standard reasoning about the relation of the sexes was that women are subject to men due to their natural inferiority. Of course, for many reasons such reasoning ceases to be viable today. So, the Christian “traditionalists”, including fundamentalists/evangelicals, have shifted their rhetoric. Now women’s subjection is rooted in the order of creation, the language of a couple of Pauline epistles, and, for some, the Trinity itself.
I share this broader context for evangelical antifeminist rhetoric because it reveals something important. Those fundamentalist and evangelical “traditionalists” who have altered their arguments to maintain women’s submission to men are, in fact, theological innovators. Indeed, within the wider frame of church history, all who choose to speak of women as the moral, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual equals of men are promoting a “progressive” agenda. The realization that women are, in fact, fully human has made theological innovators of us all.
This is not to say, of course, that all innovation is created equal (ESS is particularly concerning, in my view). But it is to acknowledge that, 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, therefore, that some evangelicals are looking for more sophisticated arguments for women’s subordination today.
God Hates, Part Two
by Rebecca Barrett-Fox with William Trollinger
In Righting America we note that “in the twenty-first century, the study of American fundamentalism has really come into its own, with a surfeit of outstanding works, many of which pay close attention to economics and politics” (315). One of the best and most provocative of these books of these books is Rebecca Barrett-Fox’s God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (University Press of Kansas, 2016). Today we continue Rebecca’s interview with Righting America (read Part One here) which should induce readers to read the book for themselves!
Rebecca Barrett-Fox is a sociology professor at Arkansas State University. The author of God Hates, she researches and writes about religion, hate, and sexuality and gender. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Hate Studies, Thought & Action, Radical Teacher, and elsewhere. You can follow her research at her blog, Any Good Thing, or read her commentary on politics, culture, and family from a (mostly) Mennonite perspective at Sixoh6, and elsewhere.
In his Journal of American History review Bill concludes by observing that “God Hates is a disturbing book, more for what it says about the Religious Right than for what it says about Westboro Baptist.” In the book you make the case that, for all of the Religious Right’s efforts to distance itself from Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), the similarities are quite striking. How would you respond to those who would argue that the conservative evangelical “hate the sin, love the sinner” response to LGBTQ individuals is not at all like the hate dispensed by WBC?
I don’t want to ignore important historical, theological, and political distinctions between WBC and the Religious Right. But in terms of attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people, I don’t think those distinctions matter. If anything, I think the Religious Right is crueler, in part because they are more influential politically and because so many queer people have been injured within those churches. Those churches have a duty to care for their flock, but such churches hurt people all the time.
Theologically, I also find the Religious Right to be incredibly hateful. If you are gay, is it worse to be condemned for an eternity of separation from God’s love because God hates you or because God loves you? In WBC’s view, God sends you to eternal torture because he hates you for reasons that you can never know and, out of his rejection of you, you become gay. Is it more compassionate to be taught that God loves you so much that Jesus died for your sins, but that’s not enough to make up for the fact that you love a person of the same sex? I think I rather prefer a God who is a bit more honest, if inscrutable, than one who says his love is endless but somehow can bring himself to condemn you to eternal torture anyway.
That may hurt the feelings of readers who see themselves as gentle Christians who love their LGBTQ+ friends but condemn their sin. But that is not how their theology is experienced by gay people.
In the final paragraph of God Hates you argue that “the goal of opponents, then, should not be to silence church members – for not only does that goal seem unlikely to be met, but it endangers the First Amendment – but to give no aid or comfort to the message, to reject its underlying theology” (181). Would you elaborate on this point, and would you argue that all forms of hate speech should be allowed?
I don’t see a tension between free speech, which is our right to speak in the public sphere in accordance with the laws that govern that space and to build our own private spaces for speech, and hate speech, which denigrates people based on immutable characteristics, either individually or collectively. I do see the tension as between free speech and subsidized speech, which is how, unfortunately, we’ve come to treat much hate speech.
We have the right to say hateful things if they don’t present an imminent threat or rise to the level of harassment, but the public doesn’t have to subsidize such speech by providing white nationalists with on-campus space to meet or access to university bulletin boards when they are not contributing to the purpose of those places. White supremacists have every right to build their own spaces to meet, as WBC has done, and to picket in public spaces, such as sidewalks, when they abide by the requirements of the law regarding time, place, and manner, as Westboro Baptists have done. Snyder v. Phelps, which centered on the pain of a father of a fallen Marine, was painful, but it provided some clarity in this area.
Now we see officials in universities and places like Charlottesville accommodating white supremacists and punishing protestors, even victims of white supremacist violence! The difference in our political response, I think, is clear: We see soldiers as worthy of protection from hate (even when their picketers adhere to the law), but we don’t see people of color, immigrants, and Jews as worthy, even when their picketers are violating the law. Wisconsin is now putting into place a law that makes protesting such speech on campus punishable—and the state calls it a “free speech protection” law!
We are deciding that the costs of allowing hate speakers to speak is the infringement upon the rights of those who protest them. The alt-right and other white supremacists are getting their speech subsidized by the rest of us, and the greatest costs are being borne by those who stand up to hate most directly. I absolutely believe this to be linked to the content of both hate speech and counterpickets today. We have a president who has signaled all the way down the line that hate speech against people of color, Muslims, immigrants, and Jews is acceptable. And not only has that unleashed more of such speech, it has cowed the local leaders who should use all the legal weapons they have in combatting it.
I think our best defense against hate is policy change. When we create more just policies, attitudes eventually change, too. In an era of fake news, we also need accurate stories about our own history and a more clear-eyed accounting of our present moment. And we need to, every single time, tell hate speakers “no.” We need to show up and constantly keep the pressure on. Make it too costly for them to do business in your town. Make them pick up and move on, over and over again. Use your free speech to counter every single word they say. Lives depend on it.
Finally, we need something better to believe in. There are better stories than ones of fear and hate. We need to find them and tell them, loudly and repeatedly.
There is a movie coming out on Westboro Baptist Church, based on a memoir by Fred Phelps’ granddaughter (who defected from Westboro). Have the producers contacted you – if they haven’t, they should! – and what do you know about the movie?
I am hopeful that the film will give us a model of how people can change. Megan Phelps-Roper was a key member of the church, a leader among the young people and WBC’s social media pioneer. Megan was also incredibly close to her mother, and leaving meant losing that relationship. She has since done the work of listening to those she victimized, reflecting on her upbringing, and building a good life. Hers will be the third memoir of an ex-WBC member, and at least two more are in some stage of writing or production. Megan’s story is particularly compelling because she moved so far—from a leader to an empathetic critic.
I’m encouraged that there are so many such stories that could be told. Many young people have left WBC, though family sizes are so large that the church can go on for a very long time, even if no new members enter. Organizations such as Life After Hate work with people trying to extricate themselves from hateful—and often violent—organizations. We have some good ideas, based on research, as to what works to get folks out of such groups, but we can always learn more from stories such as Megan’s.
No calls yet from Reese Witherspoon or others involved in the film yet. I hope they do read God Hates, though—and if they are reading, give me a call!
Could you say a little about what you are working on now?
I’m working on a book project on hate in contemporary American Christianity. I focus on how policies, such as the Trump’s proposed travel ban and the expiration of our federal health insurance program for children, both reflect and enflame racism, xenophobia, sexism, and hatred of the poor. The manuscript considers the spectrum from the most explicitly hateful groups to the alt-right, the alt-light, and mainstream Republicans to see how these groups work together and where we might have hope to split them apart. It will include ethnographic work, though I can’t speak too much about that at this point.
I’m also co-editing the Encyclopedia of Hate with Dr. John Shuford and wrapping up some smaller projects on counterprotests of WBC, models for transformative counterprotest, supporting conservative students’ learning in the college classroom, and religion in the Army of God, an extremist anti-abortion group. Unfortunately, there is a lot of work to be done in the field of religion and hate. I’m thankful, though, to get to do it.
God Hates, Part One
by Rebecca Barrett-Fox with William Trollinger
In Righting America we note that “in the twenty-first century, the study of American fundamentalism has really come into its own, with a surfeit of outstanding works, many of which pay close attention to economics and politics” (315). One of the best and most provocative of these books of these books is Rebecca Barrett’s God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism,and the Religious Right (University Press of Kansas, 2016). In this post and the next we feature Rebecca’s interview with Righting America, which should induce readers to read the book for themselves! (See also Bill’s very positive review of God Hates in the Journal of American History.)
Today’s post is written by Rebecca Barrett-Fox, professor of sociology at Arkansas State University. The author of God Hates, she researches and writes about religion, hate, and sexuality and gender. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Hate Studies, Thought & Action, Radical Teacher, and elsewhere. You can follow her research at her blog, Any Good Thing, or read her commentary on politics, culture, and family from a (mostly) Mennonite perspective at Sixoh6, and elsewhere.
University Press of Kansas
Of all the topics about which you could have written, you selected Fred Phelps and the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. How did you make the decision to spend years working on this topic?
My initial motivation for visiting Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) was simple curiosity. I’d spent my college years in central Pennsylvania during a time of high anxiety among conservative Christians around the turn of the millennium. A student of religion even then, I saw pastors preaching messages about stockpiling food, water, and weapons, and I saw people—including people I knew and had always thought to be rational—building bunkers in the Appalachian Mountains in preparation for Y2K. So I’d had a lot of first-hand experience with the more extreme versions of Protestant Christianity, and I was pretty comfortable in such spaces and felt at ease having conversations with believers who take the word of God very seriously, even if they understand it in ways that might be quite different from mainstream Christianity.
So it was an easy decision to visit WBC, which is located about half an hour from the University of Kansas, where I earned my PhD. I’d seen them on TV and in person at pickets, and I wanted to see them in their own space to understand them from their own perspective, even just a little bit. I was very naïve about that project, I see now. I knew the church was virulently homophobic from their pickets, but I had expected some additional message to church members that made them come back week after week. Instead, the church service focused on people outside the church and how they were hell bound. Over time, I came to understand that such messages reinforce one of the church’s key beliefs: there is hope (not assurance) for those within the church, but there is no hope for sinners who reject the church’s teachings, and that includes anyone who leaves it.
I quickly became interested in why congregants would sacrifice so much—reputations, respect, careers, safety, a wider dating pool—to be part of a group that was so reviled and provided what seemed, on the surface, so few rewards, though I have come to see WBC as offering all kinds of benefits for its members. I was knee-deep in research when the church began picketing at military funerals, changing the course of my research to consider the relationship of the church to the broader American culture, specifically to the Christian Right and its defense of the invasion of Iraq and war in Afghanistan. At the same time there was a sea change in public opinion and law regarding the rights of LGBTQ+ people that was making many conservative Christians aware of how marginal their attitudes toward sexuality are—and we’re living in the backlash of that moment now.
You could just answer this question with “Read my book!” That said, in a few sentences could you explain what compels WBC members to picket military funerals with signs such as “Fags Doom Nations” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and how it has nothing to do with “converting people to their church or changing people’s sexual orientation”?
You get right to the most challenging paradox of WBC! As hyper-Calvinists (a term I use with no pejorative connotation), Westboro Baptists believe that God chose each person’s salvation or damnation at the start of time. Why, then, do they preach at all? And Westboro Baptists have been told to shut up by other hyper-Calvinists who agree with their theology – including their belief that if God loved you in the first place, you wouldn’t be gay – but find their tactics both unnecessary and embarrassing.
Westboro Baptists would say that they picket for a few reasons. First, God tells them to, and they must obey God, just as Noah built the ark out of obedience. Second, while they don’t believe that you can convert to Christianity on your own, they do believe that God can convert you. It could be that you are one of God’s elect but just don’t know it, but through encountering Westboro Baptist Church, you will hear God’s voice calling you—and when God calls you, it is always an “effectual calling,” so you will respond by obeying. This also means that if you hear WBC and don’t hear the voice of God in their words, you know that you are one of the damned. WBC doesn’t preach just to find the elect—they also preach to make sure the damned know that they’re damned. Finally, they preach because everyone, elect and damned, must obey. In WBC’s perspective, all humans are totally depraved. We’re like prisoners on death row—and we’re guilty of our crimes. The governor may pardon some of us, but the rest of us can’t complain that he’s unjust if he doesn’t pardon all of us, since we all deserve death. But even if we aren’t pardoned, we still must obey the law. Your obedience won’t save you from hell, but it is still what we owe to God. WBC wants you to know that.
I would also add that the picketing tests who is committed, and makes them commit further. When you picket, you are guaranteeing that your face will be in the news and on social media, thus risking your employability and incurring lots of other opportunity costs. Those sacrifices keep you in the church. Finally, counterprotests are often, in the church’s eyes, lewd and violent, and thus they illustrate how terrible the world outside the church is. Taking children to counterprotests teaches them that they don’t want to join the world of hopeless sinners.
One of the most striking aspects of your research is that you conduct interviews with Westboro Baptist church members, and you do so with compassion and without condescension, even as they are articulating remarkably repugnant theological ideas. How were you able to do this?
I know a lot of Christians who hold what I think are “remarkably repugnant theological ideas.” They use them to justify war, racism, violence against children, the sexual abuse of women, allowing refugees to drown rather than welcoming them. Most Christians don’t say that God hates these people, and they may even claim that these kinds of violence are acts of love.
But that sounds cynical, which I am not, despite my long foray into hyper-Calvinism. I can listen to Westboro Baptists because I see in them—or at least, most of them–a desire to love and obey God. It’s easy to see how a certain kind of fundamentalism, especially when it’s practiced outside of relationship with any other churches, trains the direction of those desires. I can be sympathetic to that because I can imagine how many of us, living within those confines, could end up on a picket line and truly believing that the hurt we are causing someone else is an act of love. I wish that weren’t the case for Westboro Baptists, and I’ve had to wrestle with very personal forms of anger and hurt when they targeted people I love, but I think it’s important for us to understand how particular theological views push people toward particular actions.
It may also help that I don’t believe in hell, of course.
Joel Osteen, Evangelicals, and Donald Trump
by Emily McGowin
Emily Hunter McGowin has a PhD in theology from the University of Dayton and MDiv from Truett Seminary. Her work is at the intersection of religion, theology, and ethnography. Her first book, Quivering Families: The Quiverfull Movement and Evangelical Theology of the Family, will be published by Fortress Press in May 2018. Her work has also appeared in Ecclesial Practices, New Blackfriars, and a collection of essays, Angels on Earth: Mothering, Religion, and Spirituality. Emily is a regular speaker in Denver, CO, where she is theologian-in-residence at Church of the Resurrection. You can learn more about Emily at her website.
After hurricane Harvey made landfall in Houston and scenes of catastrophic flooding began to circulate on the internet, Twitter was whipped into a whirlwind of hatred and snark about one particular Houston resident: Joel Osteen, mega-church prosperity preacher and author of the best-selling book, Your Best Life Now. Twitter users across the religious and non-religious spectrum made Osteen an object of their derision because it appeared as though Osteen’s gigantic Lakewood Church (housed in the former Compaq Center Arena, home of the NBA’s Houston Rockets) refused to shelter Harvey’s flood victims. Eventually, the church did open its doors but the PR damage was already done.
In response to the social media storm, Kate Bowler, professor at Duke Divinity School and author of the critically acclaimed Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, offered her perspective in an article in The Washington Post, appropriately titled, “Why people hate Joel Osteen.” Bowler’s assessment is on point and I don’t want to review her argument here. Rather, I want to suggest another reason for the anti-Osteen outrage: People hate Joel Osteen because he represents the excesses and contradictions of evangelicalism, something brought to the forefront by their overwhelming support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. The fact that evangelicals continue to have very favorable views of the president, despite increasing support for impeachment among the rest of the population, continues that trend.
Evangelical leaders would certainly take issue with the claim that Joel Osteen represents evangelicalism. They have never considered Osteen one of their own, criticizing him as much, if not more, than anyone else in America. Across the evangelical spectrum, Osteen’s critics target him for his less-than-fully-orthodox theology and the perceived dangers of his prosperity preaching. And there’s no doubt that, in terms of intellectual genealogy, Osteen’s gospel owes as much to the mothers and fathers of New Thought in the late 19th Century as to the evangelical Great Awakenings (see Bowler’s book for more).
Yet, by all other cultural markers, Osteen is representative of evangelical culture. Osteen reveres the Bible as God’s word without error and mines it for truths that have immediate, practical application to believer’s lives. Osteen’s gospel is privatized, individualistic, and therapeutic, focused on one’s personal relationship with God and its benefits. This simplistic Jesus-fixes-everything approach to faith is ubiquitous in evangelical culture, demonstrated in bestselling books, contemporary Christian music, Christian radio, and innumerable self-help blogs, podcasts, and conferences across the country. The underlying message is one of individual responsibility: You are responsible for your situation in life and the right decisions can change everything. Osteen sees a direct correlation between personal effort and God’s blessing, something evangelicals share, even if they don’t put it quite so starkly.
Osteen pastors a non-denominational church, like most evangelical mega-churches in the US, with an emphasis on emotive music, dramatic preaching, and calls for immediate response (often called “invitations”). Although he pastors one church, Osteen makes creative use of technology and new media to spread his message around the world. (Osteen reaches every US television market and over 100 countries worldwide. He even has his own Sirius XM channel.) Osteen shares the evangelical culture’s commitment to the free market’s invisible hand, never passing up an opportunity to capitalize on prior successes. (Osteen’s personal net worth is estimated to be around $40 million.) Newer and bigger is most definitely better. [Editor’s note: our colleague Zach Spidel has shared his first-hand account of Christian leadership training, which mirrors Osteen’s model.] Osteen also shares in the widespread evangelical myopia regarding broader socio-economic and cultural context for personal problems. By and large, theirs is a decidedly “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach to political issues that necessarily fails those who, in Dr. King’s words, have no boots to begin with.
Yes, evangelical leaders try very hard to distance themselves from Osteen and his prosperity preaching, but such call-outs are standard fare. Evangelicals (and fundamentalists before them) make a habit of publicly condemning those with whom they share the closest family resemblance. In this regard, evangelicals have retained the separatist tendencies of their fundamentalist forebears, who often split from those theologically closest to them over differences in biblical interpretation and ministerial practice. They may criticize Osteen on a regular basis, but evangelical leaders simply cannot disown him. Especially not when their people tune in for his TV broadcasts, stream his sermons over the Internet, listen to his 24-hour XM channel, and help make his books bestsellers.
Interestingly, a similar dynamic plays out between some of the same evangelical leaders and President Donald Trump. By now everyone knows 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 election. When Trump proclaims, “the evangelicals love me, and I love them,” it is for good reason. Even as some evangelical leaders seek to separate themselves from Trump, by and large, those sitting in their pews are not following suit.
Yet, what few leaders seem to recognize is the resemblance between Osteen’s message and Trump’s. It’s no coincidence that prosperity preachers occupy Trump’s inner spiritual circle and he has expressed great admiration for his childhood pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking. Indeed, the slogan “Make America Great Again” is perfectly attuned to prosperity gospel logic while also playing on nostalgia for white evangelical dominance.
Yet, the failings in both Osteen and Trump’s approach to the world are rendered painfully clear in light of disasters like hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Mere weeks after Osteen offered “prayers” rather than housing for displaced flood victims in Houston, Pres. Trump chose to remind Puerto Rico, an American territory devastated by Maria, of their heavy indebtedness to “Wall Street and the banks” and criticized their response to the disaster by suggesting, “They want everything to be done for them.” If God favors “winners” who make their own success, then there’s no good reason to help “losers”, relieve the indebted, or bring good news to the poor. Blessed are the strong, the brash, the bold, those who do for themselves and do not depend on others.
For better or worse, because they voted for him and continue to defend him in droves, evangelicals are now associated with Trump’s excesses. And Trump’s excesses are Osteen’s excesses. Donald Trump offers a less polished, more nationalistic version of Osteen’s prosperity preaching. So, when Twitter explodes over the perceived hypocritical behavior of Joel Osteen and Lakewood Church, evangelicals are being targeted too. Hatred for Osteen is also about hatred for evangelicals and what they have come to represent, fairly or unfairly, in the American cultural imagination.
Some evangelicals will interpret this reality as proof they are on the right track. There are always those happy to be hated as evidence they are doing God’s will. But I think more circumspection is in order here. If both Osteen and Trump represent a perversion of the gospel and its truth, and if so many evangelical leaders preach against Joel Osteen and some evangelical leaders cautioned against Donald Trump, then why do so many of their people still throw in their lot with both of them?
Free to be Feminist?
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
“I grew up evangelical, I became a feminist, and ever since I have felt consigned to the evangelical margins, in my family and in the church. Your paper fits my personal experience, but I find this so depressing. Is there any sign that mainstream evangelicalism is starting to embrace feminism, or are evangelical women just doomed to be subordinate?”
This was one of the questions we were asked last Thursday after giving our paper, “Feminist Rhetoric and the Hegemonic Struggle of Patriarchal Fundamentalism,” at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference here at the University of Dayton. And it is a question that continues to haunt us.
In our paper we argued that from its very beginnings in 1919 Protestant fundamentalism has been resolutely committed to the idea that, in home and in church, women are to be subordinate to men. For the first few decades the theological argument was that female subordination was rooted in the divine Curse pronounced on woman as punishment for Eve’s successful temptation of Adam to violate God’s prohibition against eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. But as second-wave feminism made inroads in evangelicalism in the 1960s and 1970s, fundamentalist leaders shifted their argument; drawing upon Calvinist theology, they argued that patriarchy was part of God’s plan from the very beginning. Women were not cursed to be subordinate; instead, women were cursed to be unhappy with their subordination. That is to say, the Curse is Feminism.
All this plays out at the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. At the Creation Museum there are very few representations of women and very few female voices in the videos and voiceovers; Eve is the one exception, but, in keeping with conservative evangelical theology, all moral responsibility for the Fall rests on Adam’s shoulders. Eve plays, at best, a supporting role. Adam is the moral agent.
There are considerably more representations of women at Ark Encounter, most notably in the ark’s “living quarters,” where the wives of Noah and his sons are given names, ethnicities, and hobbies (as none of this is in the Bible, the degree of “artistic license” taken by folks committed to biblical inerrancy is breathtaking).
The most interesting of these is Japheth’s wife, Rayneh, who is the only (as far as we can tell) animatronic female figure in the Ark. Rayneh stands on a raised platform and laments that her best friend did not get on the Ark while also wondering why her friend had to perish in the Flood. Rayneh appears here to be raising important moral questions about the kind of God depicted at Ark Encounter—a God that (according to a digital display elsewhere in the Ark) created a flood that killed as many as 20 billion human beings. Are we to understand Reynah to be a female figure who is also a full-blown human agent wrestling with tough moral and theological questions?
No. Instead of screaming in torment at a genocidal God who found it necessary to drown 19 billion-plus people, she wants someone (God, perhaps?) to “help her understand” why her friend had to die.
It turns out that it is all rather simple. According to the placards arranged around her head,
“First, God created all living things, which gives Him authority over all things. Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Second, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve death and judgment.”
In other words, all those 19 billion-plus people drowning in the Flood waters are getting exactly what they deserve. No lament needed or, perhaps, even appropriate. The question for Rayneh, then, is not whether she ought to worship a God like that but, rather, whether she is willing to submit to the authority of that all-powerful male God. Notably, no “men” in the Ark struggle with this question. Instead, they are busy praying to that God, operating the Ark, and so forth.
Rayneh’s distress about her friend’s death at the hands of an angry God is not to be taken as a sign of moral complexity. It is a sign of moral immaturity. Just read the placards, Rayneh. Patriarchy, indeed.
When the powerful rhetorics of second-wave feminism made their way into conservative Protestantism – inspiring evangelical women to challenge patriarchal fundamentalism – fundamentalist rhetoric became more radical, rooting female submission in the very structures of God’s Creation. The Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter instantiate this rhetorical shift.
And yet, feminist rhetorics remain a profound challenge to patriarchal fundamentalism. So in an effort to “lock down” patriarchy once and for all, in the last two decades fundamentalist theologians (echoed by the folks at Answers in Genesis) have developed the argument that the Trinity (God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit) is hierarchical, and that the eternal submission of Jesus to the Father and of the Spirit to Jesus and the Father is the model for men and women in the family and in the church. If patriarchy in home and church can be tied to patriarchy in the Trinity, so the argument would suggest, then any claims for equality between men and women would be forever rendered illegitimate.
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 who are allegedly obsessed with maintaining the “fundamentals of the 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.
Perhaps, just perhaps, such theological desperation is an indication that evangelical women who want gender equality in home and church may someday get their wish.
Religion at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference
by William Trollinger
The 2017 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference here at the University of Dayton was a huge success, with approximately 475 attendees, and with – by our count – 188 separate sessions over four days.
Not surprisingly, we gravitated toward sessions that dealt with religion. Here are four highlights:
- Ashleigh Petts (North Dakota State University), “Writing and (Re)Reading Julian of Norwich into the Rhetorical Tradition”: Julian was a late 14th-century/early 15th-century anchorite who is best known for her 1395 collection of mystical visions, Revelations of Divine Love (which happens to be the first English-language book published by a woman). As Petts pointed out, Julian articulated a notion of God the Father and Mother, and – more provocatively – the idea of Jesus as our divine Mother. All of this was perfect for the feminisms and rhetorics conference, as was Petts’ argument that, when it comes to Julian’s rhetoric, it is past time for scholars of rhetoric to let it stand on its own, as a woman’s voice, as opposed to evaluating it on the basis of comparison with the male rhetoric of, say, Augustine.
- From chapter 60 of Revelations of Divine Love, here’s Julian on “Mother Jesus”: “The mother may give her child suck of her milk, but our precious Mother, Jesus, He may feed us with Himself, and doeth it, full courteously and full tenderly, with the Blessed Sacrament that is precious feed of my life.”
- Rebekah Trollinger (Earlham College), “Religious Rhetoric and Alternative Feminisms: Rebecca Cox Jackson and Black Womanhood in a Shaker Community”: Jackson was an African-American woman who in 1830 had a very dramatic conversion experience during a thunderstorm, an experience that led her to commit to obeying her inner voice/God’s voice – which came to her in dreams and visions – for the rest of her life. Obeying God’s voice meant preaching, leaving her husband and committing to celibacy, joining the Shakers (and then challenging the Shakers regarding their racial discrimination). For Trollinger, Jackson’s story highlights the challenge that religious women may pose to the idea of “agency”: while Jackson was all about obedience to God (a notion that seems to work against agency), this obedience actually led her to challenge racial and gendered inequalities.
- In this regard, when it comes to both Jackson and Julian (not to mention Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers), it is interesting to consider the ways in which direct revelations from God have liberated women from aspects of patriarchy.
- William FitzGerald (Rutgers University-Camden), “Erasure and Authority: Recovering a Feminist History of the Serenity Prayer”: The Serenity Prayer is a commonplace in devotional writings and various twelve-step recovery programs. It is also commonplace to attribute the prayer to Reinhold Niebuhr, especially after Fred Shapiro – who in 2008 suggested, as Laurie Goodstein reported in a front-page New York Times article, that Niebuhr did not write the prayer – affirmed in 2014 that the author was indeed Niebuhr. But now here comes FitzGerald, who after exhaustive research argues that credit for the prayer should be given to Winnifred Wygal, a long-time YWCA official and student of Niebuhr’s at Union Theological Seminary. As FitzGerald noted at the end of his paper, this is certainly not the first time a woman’s voice has been silenced by a man’s voice.
- Here’s the most popular form of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
- Meghan Henning (University of Dayton), “’Hell Hath No Fury’: Gendered Bodies in Ancient Medicine and Early Christian Hellscapes”: In this paper (which is part of a larger book project) Henning, who is the author of Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell, discussed how, in early Christian apocalyptic literature, the bodies in hell were “feminized,” in keeping with how ancient medical texts described the ‘weaker’ and more problematic bodies of women. For example, just as Galen and others posited that the uterus produced worms, so some of the Christian hellscapes made much of the fact that bodies in hell were often covered with worms.
- An academic paper that featured a graphic description of worm-covered bodies?
So it was at the 2017 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference! In the next post we will talk about our conference presentation, which, sad to say, did not include worms (but did include waste removal).
Feminisms, Rhetorics, and . . . Fundamentalism?
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
It is a big week here at the University of Dayton (UD). Thanks in great part to the heroic efforts of the conference organizers – our colleagues and friends Liz Mackay, Peg Strain, and Patrick Thomas (who also happens to be the rightingamerica.net website guru) – UD is hosting the 11th Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference. The conference features a great program that stretches over four days, and that includes a keynote address by Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric and recipient of a 2016 MacArthur “Genius” Award.
On Thursday afternoon Bill and Sue will be speaking on “Feminist Rhetoric and the Hegemonic Struggle of Patriarchal Fundamentalism,” a presentation that uses the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter as case studies. In keeping with Righting America at the Creation Museum, this paper has as its starting point the notion that from the movement’s origins in 1919 Protestant fundamentalism has been distinguished by a strong commitment to a set of core principles:
- Biblical inerrancy, that is, the Bible is factually accurate and without error. (Note: while there may be the occasional fundamentalist who disagrees with one of the following principles, in particular #3, we argue that to be a fundamentalist is to be committed to biblical inerrancy.)
- Creationism, that is, the first few chapters of Genesis provide a factually accurate account of the creation of the universe.
- Apocalyptic premillennialism, that is, the Book of Revelation (in particular) provides a factually accurate account of the “end times,” including the fact that the end is “imminent” and will result in the rescue of true Christians and the mass slaughter of non-Christians and not-really-Christians.
- Economic and political conservatism, including strong support for unfettered capitalism, strong opposition to the expansion of the welfare state, and a deep desire to return America to its former status as a “Christian Nation.”
- Patriarchy, that is, wives are to be subordinate to their husbands and women are to be subordinate to men in church.
But as we argue in the paper, while the commitment to patriarchy has remained consistent, the arguments in behalf of patriarchy have changed over time, in part because of the pressures placed on patriarchal fundamentalism by feminist rhetorics. About this, and about how all this plays out at the museum and the ark, we will have more to say after the conference!
Ministry in a Post-Christian Society: Part 2
by Herbie Miller
Herbie Miller is the pastor of Corinth Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Dayton, OH. He has a PhD in theology from the University of Dayton’s Department of Religious Studies. His academic work centers on historical theology and American Christianity. He has published in U.S. Catholic Historian and is an adjunct lecturer for Emmanuel Christian Seminary.
In my last post, I described how the history of Corinth Presbyterian Church in east Dayton reflected the general decline of mainline American Protestantism. I also discussed how this church is finding hope and direction amidst this decline by redoubling our commitment to our neighborhood. Doing this has led to developing unexpected friendships with its new neighbors, refugees from Burundi, the Congo, and Tanzania.
In early 2017, a member of Corinth — a Rwandan who happens to be one of the main translators for Swahili speakers in the Dayton area – was approached by the local Shoes 4 The Shoeless to identify east African refugee families who might be in need new shoes. When he asked our leadership if we would open our cavernous multipurpose room for a shoe giveaway, we were delighted to say yes!
On the day of the event, over 200 refugees received new shoes. At the shoe giveaway, plans were made for Corinth to host a joint prayer service which would be co-led by myself and one of the ministers from the refugee community. Attended by members of Corinth and a few refugee families, this service was a special time of connection and bonding. Wanting to deepen our friendship with our neighbors, Corinth then welcomed them to our “Family Game Nights,” where we play games, enjoy snacks, and have a pretty epic dance party at the end (using our 70s era disco ball and all!) Then we had Vacation Bible School together. And not long after that, our church kitchen was the site of cooking and nutrition lessons administered by the Ohio State Extension Office of Montgomery County.
Soon an opportunity presented itself that would give us a chance to use our space for the long-term benefit of our new friends, thanks to Robin, a local advocate in behalf of refugees who has made a special effort to connect them with local churches. Robin approached Corinth Presbyterian to ask if we would let her administer a tutoring program for these families in our church building. Recognizing that tutoring and English language instruction are crucial elements in helping these families succeed in American society, we gave the tutoring program a green light.
Currently, the church hosts two nights of tutoring per week, each session lasting from 6:30 to 8pm. Approximately 25 children from elementary school age up through high school are coming to get help with their homework and practice English, while five adults are receiving ESL instruction. The volunteers who tutor are a mix: there are Corinth members; interested individuals (and sometimes their children) from the Dayton area who want to serve the immigrant population; and, local high school and college students. The desire to volunteer has been so great that on nights when volunteer turnout is low we “only” have a student to tutor ratio of 2:1!
As a minister, what inspires me most are the stories of changed lives. Just the other night, Robin exclaimed in writing: “It’s so easy to take education and literacy for granted! Tonight, a young mother of two children read a book for the first time! She asked if she could take it home and read it to her 2 year old! Her excitement is contagious!” All of those exclamation points are not just grammatical excess; there is real, ongoing excitement about changed lives.
Our new neighbors’ excitement is breathing new life into our church. Their grit and faith are inspiring us give sacrificially of our time and finances. And, in a way, they’re welcoming us back into our own neighborhood. They’re reminding us of the importance of knowing our neighbors; responding to their actual needs; and being flexible enough to go where God is leading.
Ministry in a Post-Christian Society: Part I
by Herbie Miller
Herbie Miller is the pastor of Corinth Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Dayton, OH. He has a PhD in theology from the University of Dayton’s Department of Religious Studies. His academic work centers on historical theology and American Christianity. He has published in U.S. Catholic Historian and is an adjunct lecturer for Emmanuel Christian Seminary.
I’m the pastor of a small and lively Presbyterian church in a working class neighborhood in east Dayton, OH. Like most Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations, my church’s membership numbers have followed the downward trends of mainline Protestantism. Yet, the 70 or so people who attend our weekly services have not gotten the memo that they should be pining for the 1960s when their membership rolls swelled to 700. Instead, they’re leaning into the future in hopeful anticipation of what God has planned for them. One source of this lively (yes, Presbyterians can be “lively”!) congregation’s hope comes from its belief that God has placed them in a specific neighborhood at a specific moment in history to carry out the work of Christ.
From its beginnings in 1942, Corinth Presbyterian Church understood itself to be a “neighborhood church,” primarily serving the (mostly) white, working-class or middle-class families who lived in the Hearthstone neighborhood that surrounded it. Having never moved from its current location on Corinth Boulevard, the congregation has always felt a deep connection with its neighborhood. Historically, Corinth was populated by people who lived within walking distance of the church. Corinth’s membership swelled to 769 in 1960, in large part, because of something all realtors know about what drives up property values: location, location, location!
But the subculture of mainline Protestantism has been dissolving for the past 50 years. And it’s not just mainline Protestantism. Rapidly increasing numbers of Americans identify themselves as religiously “nonaffiliated.” As a result, the social pressure to attend church has radically declined. In the case of Corinth Presbyterian, as individuals and families from the neighborhood moved away and found other churches, the people who moved into the neighborhood didn’t replace their predecessors in the pews.
In early 2017, Corinth’s leadership formed a self-study committee (so Presbyterian!) that would ask three basic questions about the congregation:
1) What is our history?
2) Who are our neighbors?
3) What is God calling us to?
Among the many valuable insights this study produced, one stood out: Dayton’s immigrant population has doubled in the last decade, and these immigrants have included a good number of refugees from east Africa. Between 250 and 400 refugee families a year are resettled in this region, with about 40 percent coming from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And east Dayton – where Corinth Presbyterian is located – is one of the targeted resettlement areas for these African refugees.
In short, what Corinth’s self-study team learned was that while its building hadn’t changed in the last forty years, its neighbors had. With this in mind, this little church has decided to double down on its commitment to being a neighborhood church. Other churches can pick up stakes and head for the suburbs. That’s not what we are doing. The place we occupy in East Dayton is not superfluous to the ministry God has called us to. It is integral to who we are.
In the following post, I will discuss the ongoing relationship between Corinth and the refugee families, and how it is enriching for both.
