Charlottesville, Evangelicals, and Anti-Semitism
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.
Charlottesville, Evangelicals, and Anti-Semitism
There’s a very large evangelical church where I live that is known for its ardent support for the nation of Israel. Every year the church hosts a large public event featuring a speaker on the topic “God’s plan for Israel.” They celebrate with an evening in honor of Israel with Israeli food, music, and dancing. They also send teams to Israel multiple times a year in order to send a message of “unconditional love and support for Israel.” The teams visit holy sites, perform for Israeli citizens, and visit with Zionist leaders. Their devotion to Israel even makes it into their statement of faith. Naturally, I watched with interest to see how the church’s leadership might respond to the reports coming out of Charlottesville, VA.
As most know by now, on August 11 and 12, hundreds of white supremacists converged on Charlottesville, VA for a “Unite the Right” rally. They were met by a large group of counter-protestors, including religious leaders, members of antifa, representatives of Black Lives Matter, and unaffiliated citizens of Charlottesville. In the end, 35 people were injured and three people died, including 32 year-old Heather Heyer, who was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors. Two Virginia State Police also died in a helicopter crash. They had been monitoring events from the air.
Widely circulated footage of the weekend’s events showed the anti-Semitism of the rally on full display. Armed marchers were throwing Nazi salutes and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil” (an English translation of the Nazi slogan Blut und Boden). They held signs that read, “Jewish media is going down” and “Jews are Satan’s children.” They displayed swastikas on banners, flags, and T-shirts. On Saturday, a faction of the marchers surrounded Congregation Beth Israel during Sabbath worship, threatening to burn down the synagogue. Fear and hatred of Jews was the dominant theme of the rally, as well as a core tenet of many participating organizations.
The publicity received by the “Unite the Right” rally and the violence it precipitated led some evangelical leaders and churches to issue statements condemning white supremacy and hatred. But few called out the marchers’ anti-Semitism directly. I wondered: What would my Israel-supporting local megachurch have to say?
The answer: nothing. There were no announcements in church, no mentions in sermons, and nothing on Twitter, Facebook, or the church website. And they weren’t the only ones. Many evangelical leaders and churches that would typically trumpet the cause of Israel were silent about the virulent anti-Semitism on display in Charlottesville. Also troubling was the lack of response to President Trump’s “blame on both sides” rationalization.
Of course, Christianity has been implicated in anti-Semitism almost from the beginning. Early church fathers often blamed “the Jews” for killing Christ. Christian leaders like John Chrysostom, Jerome, and Martin Luther openly promoted anti-Semitism (with the writings of the latter contributing to the anti-Semitic furor that ultimately led to the Holocaust). Jews throughout Christian Medieval Europe were subject to humiliating restrictions and forced to live in ghettos or even be expelled from their communities. Following the horrors of the Holocaust, though, many Christian thinkers, churches, and denominations became self-critical about the anti-Semitism in their traditions and sought to root it out.
Yet, the white evangelical relationship with Jews and Jewishness is distinctive. As Robert O. Smith has documented in his book, More Desired Than Our Own Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism, when the Puritans came to the New World they brought with them a “Judeo-centric” interpretation of prophecy. They understood the Jewish people to be divinely ordained allies against the perceived evils of Catholicism and Islam, as well as the symbolic referent for their own covenant with God in America. This led to the view of America as a “redeemer nation” like Israel. This American affinity for Israel and Judeo-centric prophetic interpretation was later popularized by the dispensational premillennial interpretation of the Bible (spread first by the Scofield Reference Bible and popular Bible conferences and, much later, the Left Behind series).
When Jerry Falwell and his evangelical colleagues founded the Moral Majority in 1979—the beginning of the activist Religious Right—the sixth plank in their platform articulated support for the state of Israel. Falwell often declared in his preaching: “To stand against Israel is to stand against God.” Many white evangelicals today have adopted the same position, seeing their political support of Israel closely linked to faithful Christian practice. Because these evangelicals understand the nation of Israel to occupy an irrevocable place in God’s plans, they are some of the most vocal backers of the nation of Israel, even as they also seek the religious conversion of Jews to Christianity.
But, if evangelical Christians are so committed to the nation of Israel, why were so many silent about this nationally publicized anti-Semitic event in Charlottesville, not to mention the surge in anti-Semitism nationwide over the past year?
Smith demonstrates that the premillennial dispensational interpretation of scripture often leads practitioners to see Jews less like real people and more like symbols in their eschatological narrative. It is possible, therefore, that many evangelicals who offer full-throated support for the nation of Israel still see Jewish people simply as supporting actors in the Christian story. Many evangelicals are eager to trumpet the cause of Israel as a national player in their eschatology, but they are not as concerned with individual Jews, and their safety and well-being in America. The aftermath of Charlottesville has made clear that the ideological, political, and even financial support for Israel does not translate into evangelical solidarity against anti-Semitism. Perhaps this is especially true when such solidarity would require acknowledging the failed moral leadership of Donald Trump, for whom 81% of them voted.
Pure Fundamentalism, Guaranteed: Part Two
by Tim Gloege and William Trollinger
In the “Suggested Readings” section of Righting America (313-316) 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.” One of the very best of these books is Timothy Gloege’s Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (2015). Below is the second half of Tim’s interview with rightingamerica.
Tim Gloege is a historian and independent scholar based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He earned his Ph.D. in United States History from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. His first book, Guaranteed Pure, was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Most recently, he contributed an essay to The Business Turn in American Religious History (edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem, and John Corrigan). Thanks to a grant from the Louisville Institute, he is researching a second book on Protestant liberals in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. You can follow Tim on Twitter @timgloege.
You make much of the point in the book about the difference between “churchly conservatives,” on the one hand, and fundamentalists on the other. Can you summarize that difference, and why it matters?
“Churchly” is a sort of shorthand name I give to a much older and fundamentally-communal way of being a Christian. Ask a churchly person how they know they have an authentic faith and they’ll say “because I’m an active and sincere member of my church.” For them, church and tradition, creeds and sacraments are central to their faith.
I contrast a churchly orientation with the evangelical orientation (fundamentalists are evangelical in this sense). For evangelicals an authentic faith means, first and foremost, a radically-individualistic “personal relationship with God.” Most conservative evangelicals (but not all) say that church attendance is important, but this only because they think it is helpful to their individual faith—not because it is an essential part of it. Nor do they believe or do something simply because it is what past tradition has always taught; they must be personally persuaded that it is helpful or effective or true.
I make a big deal of this for a few reasons. First, it challenges the unhelpful definitional habits in our field of equating “evangelical” with “conservative.” In fact, for most of its history, the evangelical orientation has been a liberalizing force—whether during the Great Awakening, among nineteenth century sects, or even someone like D. L. Moody. (This is not to minimize the real damage it did to non-Christian faiths, only to say that it was not seeking to maintain the churchly status quo.) Even today, the notion of “spiritual but not religious” faith of someone like Oprah Winfrey partakes in an evangelical orientation.
The “churchly” category also helps us get away from trying to define evangelicalism with traditional doctrinal categories. Doctrine has never been a rallying point for evangelicals. At best, it has been a problem to solve; more often, it has just been ignored. That’s why evangelical “theology” is so disjointed and self-contradictory. Evangelicals are not stupid; rather they just don’t care about systematic theologies. Contrasting it with churchly conservatives who do care about doctrine for its own sake, helps us see this.
Finally, the “churchly” category helps us to better historicize evangelicalism and Protestantism. It helps us situate the birth of evangelicalism in the (primarily British) Enlightenment, and tempers overreaching definitions of Protestantism as religious individualism.
One of the most brilliant parts of Guaranteed Pure has to do with your discussion of the creation of “the fundamentals” as the rallying point for the movement. What’s weird here — but not talked about by fundamentalists themselves — is that not only are “the fundamentals” not rooted in creeds or church history, but there is not agreement among fundamentalists as to what constitutes “the fundamentals.” Could you say something about this?
This gets at one of my big pet peeves. Too many historians of American Protestantism act as if there is this united thing called Protestantism that broke away from Catholicism. But that’s not what happened. Instead, many independent reform movements broke away from the Roman Church around the same time, in different places and under different circumstances. There was no unity between these groups (Lutherans and Calvinists could not broker a cooperative arrangement, and that’s not even including Baptists or Anabaptists or Anglicans.) So what exactly is there about “Protestantism” to conserve? Apart from rejecting the Roman Catholic church, there’s nothing holding Protestant sects together. Thus the later impulse to reject denominations – to simply be a “Society of Friends” or “Christians” — ironically resulted in additional denominations.
All that’s background to The Fundamentals project. This publication was not conserving what was; rather it was attempting to create something that did not yet exist.
What was new about The Fundamentals were the techniques they used to that end. They didn’t rally around a charismatic leader or get a bunch of trained theologians into a room to hash it out. Instead, a small coterie of ministers, evangelists and businessmen—appointed by no one other than the oilman who was funding the project—decided they would formulate the “essentials” of conservative Protestantism.
They created it as one creates a mosaic. Although the project organizers recruited some reputable scholars, it was the organizers, not the authors, who chose the topics. They assembled these bits of and pieces into a whole that few of the participants would have created, or even signed on to, had they been asked. More than this, there were major disagreements among the organizers, contradictions between individual essays, and nothing approaching consensus in the movement that arose in the 1920s. The only thing that everyone agreed on, it seems, was that they didn’t like Biblical higher criticism.
Thus, the major accomplishment of The Fundamentals was to model a set of techniques, borrowed from modern business, to create (and quietly recreate when necessary) a system that appeared coherent (if one did not look closely. What the Protestant essentials entailed changed based on the situation. These same techniques are still used today.
In the book you make the provocative and insightful observation that, in the fusion of capitalism and evangelicalism, “conservative evangelicals [have] effectively hobbled their ability to offer systematic critiques of capitalism.” But in Bill’s review he wonders if your book actually suggests a more radical conclusion. Borrowing from The Communist Manifesto, he posed the following question: “Has evangelical Christianity in the United States simply melted into the capitalist ether, leaving in its place an unholy religious consumerism that is much more about niche brands and market shares than it is about anything faintly recognizable as the Gospel?” How would you respond to this question?
I love this question and agree (mostly) with the basic premise. Without consumer capitalism, the conservative evangelical movement as it operates in the United States today—that network of institutions and celebrity leaders, those assertions about who God is, how God interacts with humanity, how believers engage their faith—all that wouldn’t exist. The religious ecosystem that is evangelicalism and the cultural system it fosters doesn’t hold together without it. Show me a conservative evangelical who rejects the premises of modern consumer capitalism and I’ll show you a person on their way out.
Where I’d stop short is in calling evangelicalism an “unholy” or an “inauthentic” form of Christianity. And I do that because making such evaluative statements is not my business as a historian. To be clear, it certainly is not a form of Christianity I personally have any interest in. I also think it is entirely different animal from the Protestantism that existed in the United States before the Civil War. And post-Trump there’s little evidence that it really promotes the “gospel of love” adherents think it does.
But I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying that, because of all this, it therefore this isn’t “real” Christianity. That’s really a fundamentalist move: no different from saying that because liberal Christianity accepts evolution and questions the historicity of biblical miracles and rejects biblical inerrancy and holds a different theory of atonement, it therefore is an entirely different, non-Christian faith. It isn’t.
Also, that claim makes it sound like there is a “real” Christianity “out there,” independent of historical context. I don’t think there is. Religion is culture in the same way that water is hydrogen and oxygen. It is a particular cultural formation that is both unique, but also inextricably entwined with other arenas of human experience.
Could you say a little about your next project?
Yes, my current project tackles the other side of this story—Protestant liberals—in a more systematic way. If what I (and other recent scholars) have claimed about fundamentalism is true, then we need to rework the ways we talk about liberals as well. What were the core differences between fundamentalists and liberals? Why did they have a falling out in the early twentieth century? What were liberals saying about fundamentalists in their correspondence? How were they understanding self and society and ways of knowing and how were they applying it to their religious beliefs and practices? How did they relate to modern capitalism?
Pure Fundamentalism, Guaranteed: Part One
by Tim Gloege and William Trollinger
In the “Suggested Readings” section of Righting America (313-316) 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.” One of the very best of these books is Timothy Gloege’s Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (2015). In this post and the next we feature Tim’s interview with Righting America, which includes discussion of the book’s main arguments and their implications, and which should induce readers to read the book for themselves! (See also Bill’s glowing review of Guaranteed Pure.)
Tim Gloege is a historian and independent scholar based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He earned his Ph.D. in United States History from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. His first book, Guaranteed Pure, was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Most recently, he contributed an essay to The Business Turn in American Religious History (edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem, and John Corrigan). Thanks to a grant from the Louisville Institute, he is researching a second book on Protestant liberals in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. You can follow Tim on Twitter @timgloege.
How did you end up writing on this topic? Why fundamentalism, and why Moody Bible Institute?
I started writing on fundamentalism while working on a MA degree as an attempt to understand my personal background. (I was raised in this milieu, though I found myself increasingly out of step with it.) When I started a history Ph.D. at Notre Dame I thought I was done with fundamentalism. But I got sucked back into the topic while reading for my comprehensive exams. I realized there was an untold story about the intersection of fundamentalism and consumer capitalism, and that I was in a good position to tell it.
Using the Moody Bible Institute (MBI) to tell this story was an obvious choice. A key figure in its history was Henry Parsons Crowell, who helped modernize MBI in the early 1900s, and who is known to business historians as President of Quaker Oats and one of the pioneers of modern marketing techniques. And as I continued to research, I stumbled upon faith healers, labor uprisings, and corporate barons. What more could you ask for?
What do you mean when you say in your introduction that, in fundamentalism, conservative evangelical leaders created a “new form of ‘old-time religion’ that was not only compatible with modern consumer capitalism but also uniquely dependent on it”?
One of the major findings of the book is that fundamentalism’s reputation as “traditional” is itself a fundamentalist invention. And they created this impression by using modern promotional techniques, developed in the 1880s, that corporations have been using ever since. But it wasn’t just specific techniques. The ways that they understood self and society were also taken from modern capitalism. Unlike other forms of Christianity, they treated believers and potential converts as modern consumers (rather than citizens or family members). Saving faith was a product to be acquired, not a pilgrimage, as the Puritan John Bunyan imagined it. All that to say that conservative evangelicalism—what we think of as “old time religion” today—is radically dependent upon modern consumer capitalism in a way that other forms of Christianity are not.
In our work on young Earth creationism we have been struck by how many creationists have backgrounds in engineering (including, at Answers in Genesis, the ubiquitous Bodie Hodge). This is no surprise to you, given that, in Guaranteed Pure, you make the point that there is a strong connection between business, law, and engineering and conservative evangelicalism. Why is this the case, and how does this relate to the fundamentalist rejection of Darwinism?
Many historians have tried to explain the differences between fundamentalists and liberals as the difference between old and new, “anti-modern” and “modern.” But a number of scholars (myself included) think this obscures more than it reveals. It suggests, for example, that people can live independent of their social and cultural context, which of course goes against the core insight of the historical profession.
So how do we explain the difference? My reading of the evidence suggests that there are two fundamentally different “modernities” at work. One of these, the one in which fundamentalism is rooted, is also foundational to modern business, our legal system, engineering, and medicine. The other is rooted in post-Darwinian science.
Take our understanding of “the self” and its relationship to society. Our political, economic, and legal systems presume an Enlightenment understanding of the self as a rational, autonomous, decision-making individual. We are who we are (and do what we do) because of the choices we make. Societies are simple aggregates of individuals, nothing more. A scientific understanding of humanity starts at a different place. The self is, at root, a combination of nature and nurture, genetics and environment. Individual choices are always encumbered, constrained, and shaped by many factors beyond an individual’s control. Societies and social systems are more than the sum of their parts; each has their own logic that affect those who are enmeshed in it.
You can map most major political debates to these different understandings of the self: poverty, drug abuse, racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, and so on. Evangelicalism’s intrinsic individualism aligns them on the Enlightenment side of these debates.
The second major distinction has to do with how knowledge is created: the process or method of investigation. Once again, law, business, and especially engineering cluster together. They focus on reaching a specific goal and using whatever method is best for getting you there. The other approach, common in academic research, focuses on creating and executing a specific method of investigation and then accepting whatever results that method produces. The first method works great if you are an engineer wanting to build a bridge or increase battery life. It is great for a defense attorney trying to muster the best defense for a client or a doctor treating a specific disease. The other approach is best for open-ended investigation. It’s the method we historians use and it regularly produces surprising and unexpected results.
Where things go wrong is when the engineering/legal approach is applied to an unsuitable scientific or historical question. This explains why so many fundamentalist projects go so terribly wrong, since this is the only valid mode of knowledge creation they recognize. Creation science isn’t trying to discover the origins of life. It’s trying to prove what they think they already know: that God created all species directly and the human race out of the dust of the earth. They are not discovering truth, they are solving a problem. Nor are fundamentalists trying to discover the complex history of the ancient biblical text; rather they are proving that God inspired an inerrant text. They are not investigating whether America was founded as a Christian nation, but proving that the founders were all “orthodox” Christians who saw the world as they do today.
And it’s not just fundamentalists who are guilty of this. Oil companies try to disprove global warming. Secular libertarians try to prove free markets fix everything and government “interference” makes everything worse. Drug companies try to prove that their multibillion dollar drug is safe and effective. Intentionally or not, all are making the same basic mistake.
Back to the Future, Klan-style
by William Trollinger
America, 2017. We have a vociferous and angry Christian Right, an ongoing and increasingly heated cultural argument over who is truly American and who is not, and a government campaign to close the borders and deport the unwanted. We have a resurgent white supremacy movement (neo-Nazis and all) that is definitely not – as we saw in Charlottesville – hiding in the shadows at the margins of American life.
Close your eyes, and you could imagine that it is the early 1920s. One of the most significant features of American life in those years was the inescapable, powerful presence of what historians refer to as the Second Ku Klux Klan. This KKK was both connected to and distinct from the First Ku Klux Klan, which was based in the post-Civil War South and had as its goal to terrorize African Americans into not exercising their newly-won rights as American citizens.
The 1920s Klan expanded its list of enemies beyond African Americans to include immigrants, Jews, and Catholics. The Second KKK also expanded its reach beyond the South. In fact, the white-robed Klansmen with their fiery crosses and hateful rhetoric seemed to be everywhere in the early 1920s. Very strong in the Midwest and West, some historians have estimated that at its peak the KKK had five million members (that is, 4% of the total population of the US.)
In the 1920s Dayton, Ohio was a Klan hotbed, and the University of Dayton (UD) was a particular Klan target. But as was the case at the University of Notre Dame and at Regis University (CO), UD students fought back. For more on this, check out Bill’s piece on UD’s College of Arts and Sciences blog: “The KKK and UD in the 1920s.”
Oh, and it is worth noting that in August 2017 University of Virginia students and faculty resisted the invasion of white supremacists. Deja vu all over the place.
Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Jake Dorn Said No
by William Trollinger
This past Tuesday the field of U.S. history lost a terrific scholar and we lost a wonderful friend, as Jacob Dorn, Wright State University professor emeritus, died at the age of 77 after suffering a heart attack over the weekend.
In his teaching Jake was the best sort of historian, determined to tell the truth about the past, even when that truth included the ways in which the wealthy and powerful have exploited those less wealthy and less powerful. For Jake, true Christianity involved a commitment to the equality of all human beings and advocacy in behalf of the oppressed. Micah 6:8 – which was read at Saturday’s memorial service at Dayton’s Westminster Presbyterian Church – says it all:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Not surprisingly, as a late 19th and early 20th century U.S. historian, Jake was enamored with the social gospel and Christian socialism. Among a host of other publications, he was the author of Washington Gladden: Prophet of the Social Gospel, and editor of Socialism and Christianity in Early 20th Century America. Bill concluded his 2003 review of the latter book with a statement that is even more relevant today:
It is particularly important for evangelical and fundamentalist schools to purchase this book, if for no other reason than to suggest to their students that there exists – bizarre as it may seem these days – a tradition of Christian political thought that imagines the possibility of government as an agent of good, and that understands a just society to be one in which the basic needs of all its citizens are met.
Jake was strongly opposed to fundamentalism in all of its religious and political manifestations. That said, he was also strongly committed to dialogue and tolerance. So it was quite fitting that, at the memorial service, Jake’s daughter-in-law read a selection from one of his favorite texts, Harry Emerson Fosdick’s famous 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”:
When will the world learn that intolerance solves no problems? This is not a lesson which the Fundamentalists alone need to learn; the liberals also need to learn it. Speaking, as I do, from the viewpoint of liberal opinions, let me say that if some young, fresh mind here this morning is holding new ideas, has fought his way through, it may be by intellectual and spiritual struggle, to novel positions, and is tempted to be intolerant about old opinions, offensively to condescend to those who hold them and to be harsh in judgment on them, he may well remember that people who held those old opinions have given the world some of the noblest character and the most rememberable service that it ever has been blessed with, and that we of the younger generation will prove our case best, not by controversial intolerance, but by producing, with our new opinions, something of the depth and strength, nobility and beauty of character that in other times were associated with other thoughts. It was a wise liberal, the most adventurous man of his day—Paul the Apostle—who said, “Knowledge puffeth up, but love buildeth up.”
Will intolerance win the day? Will fundamentalism win the day? Not if Jake Dorn – the legacy of Jake Dorn – has anything to say about it.
The Evolution of Creationism in American Higher Education: Part 2
by Adam Laats
Today, our colleague Adam Laats continues his exploration of the history of young earth creationism as a doctrine of evangelical colleges and universities. As he demonstrates below, in the last century creationist colleges have wrestled with many iterations of creationist science and mainstream scientific thought, each with unique consequences for students and believers. Yet radical creationist orthodoxy is different, a special kind of relationship to mainstream science.
Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History (by courtesy) at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His new book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, is due out in early 2018 from Oxford University Press. His earlier books include The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard UP, 2015) and, with co-author Harvey Siegel, Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Adam blogs at the wonderfully named I Love You But You Are Going to Hell.
The Evolution of Creationism in American Higher Education: Part 2
Adam Laats
Before World War II, the biggest creationist battle was between the “day-age” camp and the “gap theorists.” They didn’t agree on the details, but they all agreed that the earth must be ancient. Back then, very few creationists held young-earth beliefs. Only in the 1950s—when mainstream evolutionary science had figured out the big problems with Darwin’s ideas—did young-earth beliefs gain any real popularity. And a big part of the reason they did so was because so many creationist colleges were pulling away more and more distinctly from radical young-earth thinking.
By the late 1950s, for example, Russell Mixter at Wheaton College in Illinois had become what one historian called “the evangelical oracle on evolution.” There was a lot to learn from mainstream evolutionary science, Professor Mixter argued. Real creationism, Mixter thought, meant accepting the contributions of mainstream science, but insisting always that those contributions must always illustrate the ways God created.
Fundamentalists quaked. Outside of a few smallish groups such as Seventh-day Adventists and Missouri Synod Lutherans, most conservative Christians in the United States had never insisted on the notions of a young earth, a literal worldwide flood, or a literal six-day creation not so very long ago.
Opening the floodgates, 1961.
The evolution of creationism at leading creationist colleges changed all that. Fundamentalists faced a new dilemma. They had either to accept something like Mixter’s “progressive creationism” or reject utterly the basic concepts at the heart of mainstream science. Beginning in the early 1960s, more and more chose the latter.
Inspired by the work of John Whitcomb Jr. and Henry Morris, huge numbers of conservative Christians in the United States embraced a new, innovative orthodoxy, one that insisted on the radical notions of a young earth and a young humanity directly created by God. Fundamentalist colleges such as Morris’s Christian Heritage College in California, Bob Jones University in Greenville, and Liberty Baptist College in Virginia (it became Liberty University only in 1985) latched on to the new radical creationist orthodoxy as yet another way to prove their faith.
By the 1970s, creationist schools of thought had been incarnated as literal brick-and-mortar creationist schools as well. Institutions such as Wheaton College taught a broad array of creationisms, especially including Mixter’s vision of progressive creationism. Colleges such as the fledgling Liberty and Christian Heritage insisted on only one idea: young-earth/flood-geology thinking.
As a result, these days, in addition to ziplines and a bookstore, the Creation Museum offers young-earth creationists a college guide as well. Families choosing any of the schools on that list can feel confident that their kids will learn only radical young-earth ideas. When I asked a few years back why Ken Ham cared so much about college, he offered a clear and succinct answer:
when professors at these Christian colleges teach that millions of years and evolution can be mixed with Scripture, they open a door to put man in authority over God’s Word, thus undermining the authority of Scripture. And if as a result of this someone begins to doubt the Bible’s authority in regard to its history, then this can lead to (and has done so with numerous people) the rejection of the gospel based in that history.
The answer, for Ken Ham at least, is a new type of creationist college that insists only on the Creation Museum’s new type of creationist orthodoxy.
Did it work? Is the reason so many college graduates embrace young-earth creationist ideas because they attended one of these innovative radical-creationist colleges? We can’t know from the Gallup results. If we want to understand creationism, though, we need to know the history of creationist colleges.
The Evolution of Creationism in American Higher Education: Part 1
by Adam Laats
In the “Suggested Readings” section of Righting America (313-316) 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.” And the hits just keep coming. Over the next few months we will highlight a number of books on fundamentalism and evangelicalism that will soon be published or have just been published. We start with Adam Laats’ eagerly-anticipated (and not just by us!) Fundamentalist U. In this post and the next Adam draws from his book to discuss the emergence of young Earth creationism at fundamentalist colleges.
Today’s post is authored by Adam Laats, Professor of Education and History (by courtesy) at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His new book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, is due out in early 2018 from Oxford University Press. His earlier books include The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard UP, 2015) and, with co-author Harvey Siegel, Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Adam blogs at the wonderfully named I Love You But You Are Going to Hell.
The Evolution of Creationism in American Higher Education: Part 1
Adam Laats
We all know the numbers. Since the 1980s, somewhere around forty percent of adult Americans have told Gallup that they think humans were created by God in their “present form” within the last ten thousand years or so. That number is shocking enough. Buried in the latest Gallup poll results, however, is an even more astounding fact. Of the college graduates who responded, about a quarter picked radical creationism. And just over a fifth of people with graduate degrees did so.
| Humans evolved, God guided process | Humans evolved, God had no part in process | God created humans in present form within last 10,000 years | |
| Education | % | % | % |
| High school or less | 33 | 12 | 48 |
| Some college | 38 | 16 | 42 |
| College graduate | 45 | 27 | 24 |
| Postgraduate | 45 | 31 | 21 |
How is this possible? How can so many people be educated, hold college degrees, and yet disagree so very radically with a central fact of modern science? In spite of what pundits in the evolution/creation battles have always said, our disagreements about evolution and creationism aren’t simple fights between science on one side and ignorance on the other. They are not conflicts between knowledge and non-knowledge. Rather, the creation/evolution fights are fiercest between two groups of people who “know” very different things, between two groups of people who have been educated very differently.
In my new book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press), I explore the most important network of educational institutions that have midwifed and nurtured American creationism. These colleges, universities, seminaries, and Bible institutes include some familiar names such as Liberty University in Virginia, the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Bob Jones University in South Carolina, and Wheaton College in Illinois, as well as some less-familiar schools such as Biola University in California, Gordon College near Boston, and a host of others.
From Biola’s student newspaper, The Chimes, 1939.
Why did creationists want their own colleges? They thought “many college graduates” were learning too much of the wrong ideas and not enough of the right ones.
Identifying these creationist colleges is a far cry from understanding them. Throughout the twentieth century, the schools in this network have served as the institutional homes for American creationists. They have shaped and debated the nature of American creationism. But besides their universal agreement that evolutionary ideas constituted a clear and present spiritual danger to young people, creationist colleges haven’t agreed on much else.
By looking at the history of those creationist schools, we can get a much better sense of the real contours of American creationism. Perhaps most important and most shocking to people who don’t know the history of these schools, the radical young-earth creationism that attracts so many headlines these days—the kind on display at the Creation Museum—is not a holdover from Puritan days or even from Scopes-Monkey-Trial days.
Rather, as the career of creationism in higher education shows, radical creationism is a novelty of the space age. The ferocious defense of orthodoxy staged by the folks at the Creation Museum is not a defense of traditional fundamentalist beliefs, but rather a 1950s innovation. More on this in the next post.
A Deafening Silence
by William Trollinger
In a blistering August 23 LA Times op-ed historian Randall Balmer makes the case that contemporary American evangelicalism is an ethical disaster. One example is the fact that in the 2016 election 81% of white evangelicals voted for a man who “flaunted his infidelities and . . . boasted about his tawdry behavior toward women.”
But for Balmer, it is on the matter of race where evangelicals have shown their true colors. Not only did white evangelicals vote overwhelmingly for a man who “undeniably appealed to racist sentiments,” but “the deafening silence from leaders of the religious right in the wake of the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Va.” is clear evidence that “racism [is] at the very heart of the movement.” As Balmer concludes,
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, evangelicals took the part of those on the margins of society – women, the poor, workers, people of color. The 2016 election, coupled with the religious right’s anemic response to racism and white supremacy, suggests that this once proud and noble tradition is morally bankrupt.
Among those who have been silent or equivocal in the wake of Charlottesville, Balmer lists a veritable Christian Right who’s who: James Dobson, Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Richard Land, Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, and Paula White. For those who want to claim that the Christian Right leadership is not racist, then this list of “court evangelicals” (to use historian John Fea’s apt term) is pretty damning counter-evidence.
But wait. Perhaps Answers in Genesis (AiG) CEO Ken Ham offers a ray of moral light in the Christian Right darkness. After all, on the AiG website Ham has posted a one minute audio clip, “The Biblical Answer to Racism,” in which he notes that “as Christians, we should have nothing whatsoever to do with racism,” given that “there is only race, the human race.” And in the Creation Museum, there is an exhibit devoted to proclaiming that “According to God’s Word . . . We’re All One Race – ‘One Blood.’” (Righting America 179).
Alas. The folks at AiG elide the fact that white Christians “stood on their literal reading of the Word of God to issue forth a raft of proslavery polemics and to deliver an almost-infinite number of proslavery sermons”; they ignore the fact that biblical literalists supported segregation and opposed the civil rights movement; they remained mute during the Confederate flag controversy in the wake of the 2015 killing of nine A. M. E. church members by a white supremacist in Charleston (Righting America 186-191).
And Ham himself? Since July 2016 (the month Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination) Ham has issued nary a blog post regarding white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, the rise in racially-motivated hate crimes, and – most recently – the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. To bring this silence into focus, in these same fourteen months Ham has written 24 posts addressing various and very specific manifestations of the LGBTQ “menace” that threatens America, including, most recently, an attack on LGBTQ activists for “exhibit[ing] considerable hate toward Christians.”
In short, Ken Ham and AiG confirm Randall Balmer’s depressingly compelling argument. The deafening silence of Christian Right leaders in regards to racism and white supremacy points to a moral bankruptcy at the heart of the movement.
One Final Surprise at the American Atheists convention
by William Trollinger
The Christian Right works overtime to sell the story that America is in the midst of a life-or-death culture war, with Christians on one side and atheists and humanists and secularists on the other.
According to this Christian Right binary, the American Atheists would obviously be the headquarters for the enemy forces in the culture war. But the recent convention in Charleston bore little resemblance to this cartoonish narrative. Instead, many of the presentations we heard on August 19 were all about blurring the boundaries, all about atheists reaching out to non-atheists in order to work for a common good.
Perhaps the best example of this was the presentation given by the organization’s National Program Director, Nick Fish. Fish spoke about the Christian Right’s effort to eliminate the Johnson Amendment, a provision signed into law in 1954 establishing that tax-exempt organizations (including churches) can not endorse or oppose political candidates. With the encouragement of conservative Republicans, President Trump used National Prayer Day to sign an executive order designed to weaken enforcement of this regulation, and efforts continue apace to eliminate the Johnson Amendment altogether.
In his comments Fish pointed out that 72% of Americans – and 90% of evangelical pastors – oppose the effort to eliminate or weaken the Johnson Amendment. According to Fish, this is clear evidence that concern about breaking down barriers to the separation of church and state is not simply “an angry atheist issue.” Instead, a large majority of Americans agree on this issue, and atheists and the church community must work together to ensure that all people – those who are religious and those who are not – have the right to believe whatever they want, without governmental interference.
In his opening remarks at the convention David Silverman, American Atheists president, asserted that he has “much more in common with the believer who strives for social justice than the atheist who is a bigot.” Right. When it comes to American society, perhaps the salient division is not the Christian v. atheist/secularist/humanist binary as defined by the Christian Right. Perhaps the salient division is between those who support a common good for all Americans (which includes the separation of church and state), and those who don’t.
Speaking at the American Atheists Convention
by William Trollinger
Saturday at the American Atheists Convention in North Charleston involved twelve back-to-back presentations in the (ice-cold) Marriott ballroom. Besides those mentioned in our last post, there were also presentations on:
- “The Threat of a Religious Right Supreme Court Abolishing Secular Government”
- “No Secular State, No Human Rights”
- “Unlikely Allies: The Fight to Protect the Johnson Amendment”
- “The Satanic Panic: The Witch Hunt of the Late Twentieth Century”
- “The Future of Atheist Activism”
Our presentation on Righting America at the Creation Museum was the very last presentation of the day. In our experience at academic conferences, late afternoon or early evening papers are poorly attended, as everyone is heading out for drinks and/or dinner. Given that we were going on at 5:45 PM, we assumed the crowd would be sparse, and those who were there would be distracted by thoughts of catching a cab to one of the fabulous restaurants in downtown Charleston.
We were wrong. Not only was the hall nearly full, but the attendees were quite attentive – and quite gracious in their responses and their applause. And what did we have to say in our paper (entitled “What the Creation Museum Is and Isn’t Doing and Why It Matters to Us All”?) Well, here’s the thesis statement:
The Creation Museum is not about the actual biblical text any more than it is about science. Instead, it is about using the young Earth creationist Bible as a tool in the process of constituting its evangelical and fundamentalist visitors as Christian Crusaders who must fight a culture war against atheists and secularists and feminists and progressives and liberals and those who identify as LGBTQ.
After our talk there was a book-signing, during which we had the pleasure of meeting some very interesting people, including scientists who were trying (and failing) to make sense of young Earth creationism, as well as attendees from the Deep South who talked about how they had to keep their atheism closeted. (Side note: Anyone who thinks that separation of church and state is the norm across America is kidding themselves.)
In short, the two Catholic interlopers at the 2017 American Atheists Convention were treated very well.
