Will Answers in Genesis Acknowledge the Women’s March?
by Patrick Thomas
Last weekend, an estimated 4.7 million people convened around the globe for the Women’s March, a grassroots movement aimed at protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump and the numerous anti-woman policies and actions that comprised his US presidential campaign. The marches in Washington D.C. and 575 other cities highlighted how Trump’s campaign remarks and promises for policy making violate any number of already protected civil rights – including women’s rights, immigrant and workers’ rights, the rights of LGBTQ individuals, and environmental and healthcare protections.
Protesters march outside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Video credit – Patrick Thomas
Crowds gather between the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum and National Museum of the American Indian – Photo Credit Patrick Thomas
On the day of this monumental march, Answers in Genesis published an advertisement for an upcoming conference series at Bob Jones University. On Twitter, Ken Ham spent the day vacillating between attacks on secularism in public schools (blaming violence and low test scores on the lack of biblical education) and laments about the 44th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.
As one of the largest nonviolent gatherings in US history, it is surprising that such a significant moment would receive zero attention from Ken Ham and AiG. To date, the organization offers neither critique nor support of the event. A quick keyword search on AiG’s site turns up no results related to last week’s monumental event – nothing to even acknowledge the event took place.
Then again, should we be surprised?
In Righting America, the Trollingers describe the noticeable lack of women on display at the Creation Museum, noting that “women are largely absent or relegated to secondary roles…The ubiquitous voiceovers are male. Most of the talking heads on the various video screens are male…The Biblical Authority room is filled with male authority figures from the Bible” while the women who are portrayed in various dioramas are inanimate and mute, shown performing domestic duties and (silently) listening to the male figures (p. 171).
Of course, Eve plays a significant part in the Museum’s Garden of Eden, but even Eve’s role is purposefully limited, in part due to AiG’s odd interpretation of Genesis 3:16. As the Trollingers explain, rather than acknowledging sexual equality of Adam and Eve, AiG has long argued that Eve’s subordination to Adam is divined by God in the original created order, a subordination that parallels the hierarchy of the Trinity. Despite a literal reading of Genesis 3:16, which would indicate that Eve’s subordination to Adam is a consequence of sin, AiG asserts that “What God’s Curse has wrought is not submission, but, instead, the inability of wives to rest easy with their God-ordained submission” (Righting, p. 174).
Even ignoring AiG’s claim that Eve’s subordination is divinely ordered, the message to evangelical women remains: their lives are determined by the choices of others.
Perhaps this helps to explain AiG’s radio silence about the Women’s March. After all, what would an organization that maintains such a hopeless message to women have to offer a global movement of millions of people who celebrate the lives, contributions and rights of women?
It is sad, indeed, to think about the opportunities missed by AiG to show the true spirit of Christianity and love by celebrating women’s rights at the march. Those that attended, like myself, experienced the hope and joy that can only be attained through the personal, human connections of communities gathering under the common cause of protecting equality and justice. The images of the march, which show thousands standing in solidarity for the rights of all, stand in such stark contrast to the Museum’s images of thousands drowning in the global flood. Such differences are good reminders that when it comes to the mission of AiG, judging women’s lives will always take priority over protecting them.
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- Crowds gather at rally site to hear Gloria Steinem – photo credit Patrick Thomas
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- Creation Museum diorama of beginning of the Flood & launch of the Ark. Photo Credit – Julie Flinn
Trump, Ham, and Alternative (Attendance) Facts
by William Trollinger
The similarities between Donald Trump and Ken Ham are eerie. Even about attendance.
We have all seen the photos. And they are dramatic. There is no getting around the fact that attendance at the 2009 presidential inaugural – estimated to be 1.8 million – dwarfed the estimated 800,000 at the 2017 presidential inaugural.
credit: Binyamin Applebaum via Twitter (@BCApplebaum)
But the fact that folks in the media and many, many others noticed and commented upon this observable reality infuriated Donald Trump. He got angrier through Inauguration Day, blasting the press while continuing to claim that there were 1.5 million in attendance. Press secretary Spicer continued the attacks on the media while asserting that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” When pressed to explain Spicer’s false claims, Trump aide Kellyanne Conway said that Spicer did not lie but instead presented – in a stunningly memorable phrase – “alternative facts.”
And then there’s Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG), who convinced the small town of Williamstown, Kentucky in 2013 to issue $62 million of bonds for the building of Ark Encounter. This is a sweet deal for AiG, given that – as we have reported before – over the next three next decades 75% of the Ark’s property taxes will go to repaying these bonds.
How did Ham and AiG seal this deal? By telling Williamstown that in its first year the Ark Encounter would “attract between 1.2m and 2.0m visitors” which will be “followed by annual attendance increases.” With this influx of tourists, which would surpass annual visitors to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Williamstown’s leaders believed that a building boom would soon follow bringing numerous new restaurants and hotels as well as jobs for local residents. They must have been even more thrilled when, in 2015, Ham and AiG upped the estimated attendance to 1.4m to 2.2m in the Ark’s first year.
The Ark opened on July 7, 2016. Almost immediately, observers – including this site – noticed the empty parking lots and the short ticket lines. See these photos from Thursday, July 7, 2016 (opening day) and Saturday, July 23, 2016:
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- Entrance to Ark beneath Ark structure on morning of Saturday, July 23, 2016 (photo by Susan Trollinger)
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- Parking lot opposite ticket-booth building on the morning of Saturday, July 23-2016 (photo by Susan Trollinger)
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- Ticket-booth building and accompanying parking lot on the morning of 7-23-2016 (photo by Susan Trollinger)
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- Main ticket-booth building at noon on Thursday, July 7, 2016—opening day (photo by Susan Trollinger)
Like Trump, Ham almost immediately went after the critics. In his August 15 post, “Ark Encounter’s Impact — Responding to Misinformation,” Ham blasted “the anti-God, agenda-driven secular media” for “try[ing] to fulfill their own (negative) prophecies about this Christian ministry” by “spread[ing] false information about the Ark Encounter.” While Ham refused to “release daily attendance figures” – claiming that if he did they would “get twisted and misquoted by secularists anyway” – indications are that first-year “attendance will be way beyond the minimum,” and closer to 2.2 million.
A la Trump, this is a bold claim – over 2 million visitors in the first year of the Ark – but with no substantive evidence to back it up. But every once in a while attendance numbers slip out:
- In a October 26 post advertising the premiere of The Atheist Delusion (a film in which fundamentalist Ray Comfort attempts to prove God’s existence to an assortment of atheists) at Ark Encounter, Ham noted that “this world-class themed attraction” had drawn over 400,000 visitors.
- In a November 16 interview with the Grant County News, entitled “Ark attendance nearing 500,000,” AiG’s Mark Looy noted that the Ark had attracted 425,000 visitors and claimed – without evidence – that the Ark is on track to exceed the 1.4m visitor mark by July 2017.
- In a December 26 fund-raising plea, Ken Ham boasted that “in just the few months we’ve been open, almost half a million guests have toured the life-size Ark.”
- January 7, 2017: Ark Encounter achieves its half-year anniversary and is silent about attendance.
What does all this mean? Will Ham intensify his attacks on those who suggest the Ark is not doing as well as he and Looy have said? And if the Ark does not attract 1.0-1.5 million visitors in the next six months, will AiG offer up some alternative facts?
We shall see.
Is Truth Served by Untruth Really Truth?
by William Trollinger
Are untruths acceptable in the service of some larger Truth?
The answer at the Creation Museum and at Answers in Genesis (AiG) seems to be a resounding “yes.”
How else to explain the museum’s iconic tableau of Martin Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, when it turns out that – contrary to what the museum would have you believe – the museum’s Luther is actually posting a call to culture war issued by a fictional character named Fritz from a nineteenth-century novel? (Righting, 139)
How else to explain the museum’s map that identifies Geochelone tortoises living in the present-day Amazon basin and that displays the path that some of these tortoises (on a log) took to get from there to the Seychelles Islands, when there are no Geochelone tortoises living in the Amazon basin and when two tortoises could not possibly have managed the approximately 14, 600 mile voyage (on a log) across the Pacific Ocean and Indian Sea? (Righting, 99-101)
How else to explain AiG’s claim that biblical literalists led the fight against slavery in antebellum America, when the truth is that white Christians “not only used a literal reading of the Bible as the basis for their innumerable proslavery sermons, but they also aggressively attacked their opponents for undercutting the authority of God’s Word by making unbiblical arguments against slavery”? (Righting, 184-186)
How else to explain the fact that Ken Ham suggests that “opposing gay marriage was Jesus’s top priority while he was on Earth,” when the reality is that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality? (Righting, 166)
How else to explain Ken Ham’s peculiar scientific method? Instead of observing some phenomenon, articulating a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis, and then confirming OR denying it as mainstream scientists do, Ham’s (and AiG’s) method is to start with a Truth derived from a literal reading of the Bible (such as the Earth is about 6,000 years old or Noah’s Flood was global), develop a model to support that Truth, and look for evidence to support the model. If evidence used to support the model turns out to be false, don’t deny or even question the Truth. That is not allowed. The Truth revealed by a literal reading of the Bible is the Truth no matter what the facts are.
But wait a minute. Is Ken Ham’s (or AiG’s) literal reading of the Bible really THE Truth? Especially if the facts are untrue?
Mennonite World Review features RACM
We are very pleased to find this kind review of Righting America on the Mennonite World Review website!
Historian Rich Preheim writes:
The Trollingers…explore the religious, scientific and political dimensions of the Creation Museum and the beliefs it represents…
The book is not a defense of evolution but a comprehensive critique of the museum and the movement behind it. The writing is measured, devoid of bombast and bile, which makes the book effective as the authors rely on facts and cogent arguments. They describe exhibits that don’t adhere to stated principles, opportunistic applications of Scripture and dubiously employed uses of theology, history and science — all in a facility that douses visitors with a flood of information in a fast-paced environment that obscures the shortcomings. The Trollingers “slow it all down” so readers can more fully understand the Creation Museum.
Read the full review here.
“We all deal with the same evidence” (AiG). Really?
by Susan Trollinger
A foundational premise for AiG is that “We all deal with the same evidence (we all live on the same earth, have the same fossils, observe the same animals, etc.).” Building on that premise, AiG claims that “The difference lies in how we interpret what we study.” On the face of it, this might seem to be a reasonable argument. To paraphrase, the paradigm or “presuppositions” (to use AiG’s language) that one brings to the study of any evidence will shape (if not determine) the interpretation that is developed of that evidence.
But is AiG right? Do we all deal with the same evidence?
Yes, we all live on the same planet. Yes, we all have the same fossils (in some theoretical sense, since most of us probably don’t have any fossils). Yes, we all observe the same animals.
Or do we?
In the Science chapter of Righting America, we offer a close reading of the many placards and videos that are displayed in the Wonders Room and the Flood Geology area. Our central question about these placards and videos is: Does the Creation Museum provide, as it promises, abundant scientific evidence for a biblical creation and a young Earth? In the course of conducting that reading, we came across one especially interesting placard that may be relevant for the question at hand.
The placard appears in the Flood Geology area and more specifically in the section that offers an account of what happened after the Flood. A primary purpose of that section of the Flood Geology area is to answer some challenging questions that a global flood poses, including how the relatively few creatures on the Ark (just two per “kind” for a total of about 16,000, according to AiG) dispersed very rapidly so that they were able to re-populate all of the continents in a short period of time.
The placard of interest presents the “biogeographical rafting model.” (Just a note—for AiG, creation scientists develop models based in evidence that are supposed to confirm a biblical creation and a global flood.) Although the placard is somewhat cryptic, it appears to mobilize evidence on behalf of the idea that after the Flood animals were quickly dispersed by the “billions of trees” brought down by the Flood. Those trees, so the model argues, became “log mats [that] served as ready-made rafts for animals to cross oceans.”
The evidence on the placard comes in the form of three maps. The first map shows coastal areas on opposite sides of oceans where plants or animals of similar types currently reside. A second map shows where the Ark landed (in present-day Armenia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) with arrows indicating the paths animals took to this or that continent once the flood waters receded. A third map identifies three locations where giant tortoises (Geochelone) reside (the Amazon basin, Galapagos Islands, and Seychelle Islands). Each location is accompanied by a photograph of a tortoise. In addition to the tortoises, the map displays arrows indicating the location of large circular currents in the oceans and the path that the tortoises took from the Amazon basin to the Seychelles. (Just a note: two tortoises [one female and one male] would have to successfully complete each leg of the trip. In addition, they would also have to leave behind at least two more tortoises [one male and one female] so that they could produce the population of tortoises that we now see in each location.)
The path begins with a 700-mile trek over land from the Amazon basin to the coast of South America. It continues with a 650-mile sea-voyage on a log north along the coastline of South America to the Galapagos Islands. The third phase of the trip consists of an 8,400-mile sea-voyage (on a log). The last leg of the trip would be a 6,200-mile sea-voyage from New Guinea, across the Indian Ocean, to the Seychelles. By the way, all distances here assume a straight-line path from each starting point to each destination (Righting America, 100).
In the science chapter, we did not attempt to discern the truth-value of scientific claims made in the Creation Museum since we are not scientists. Except in the case of this one placard. As we studied this placard carefully in an effort to understand it, we realized that certain features of the model strained credulity to such an extent that we had to ask a few factual questions.
We contacted Justin Gerlach who is “a zoologist with particular expertise in Geochelone tortoises, senior member of the faculty at Robinson College at the University of Cambridge, and scientific coordinator of the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles” (Righting America, 99). We shared the evidence that appears on the maps with Professor Gerlach and asked him to comment.
Here’s what we learned:
- While the tortoises that live in the Amazon basin look like Geochelone tortoises (that is, they are big), they are not, in fact, Geochelone tortoises (as the placard suggests).
- Moreover, there is real skepticism among scientists with expertise on tortoises that the kind of tortoise found in the Amazon basin share a common ancestor with the Geochelone tortoise. (Thus, they may have no relationship to one another whatsoever.)
- While Geochelone tortoises are very good at “dispersing” themselves over water—that is, they are good at floating in water and can be carried across long distances from one land mass to another—there is no way they could survive a trip of the kind that the third map charts. Even assuming ideal weather conditions and the tortoises’ ability to navigate the currents (on a log) in such a precise way as to chart a straight-line path from each starting point to each destination, such a trip would take at minimum five months to complete. A much more likely scenario, said Gerlach, would be that they would “’be stuck in the middle of the Indian Ocean for months or years’” (Righting America, 101).
AiG says that the differences between what they say is true and what mainstream scientists say is true is not a factual matter but a matter of interpretations that are based in two different paradigms—creation and evolution.
But is that all? It would seem from this example that there is more going on here than that.
The tortoise that AiG sees is not the same tortoise that Justin Gerlach sees. AiG’s Geochelone tortoise lives in the Amazon basin. Justin Gerlach’s does not. AiG’s Geochelone tortoise shares a common ancestor that walked off the Ark. Justin Gerlach’s does not. AiG’s Geochelone tortoise can float on a log for many months (if not years) as well as navigate complex currents in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean (on a log). Justin Gerlach’s cannot.
If we all share the same evidence then why don’t these two tortoises look the same? It would seem that while Gerlach’s tortoise is grounded in actual scientific evidence, the Creation Museum’s tortoise is a fanciful invention aimed at proving a biblical creation no matter what.
But if that is the case then who are the folks that care about the truth and who are the post-truth relativists?
Useful Fictions
by Jason Hentschel
Jason A. Hentschel has a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Dayton. His research focuses on the intersection of evangelicalism and modern American culture. He has contributed chapters to The Bible in American Life and The Handbook of the Bible in America, both forthcoming from Oxford University Press (2016-17).
In defending the faith, does it really matter if you are not telling the truth?
In an earlier post, “Post-Truth at the Creation Museum,” we learned that Ken Ham’s New Year’s Day blog entry is accompanied by a tableau of Martin Luther’s famous nailing of his Ninety-five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg. Except it’s not actually the Ninety-five Theses but a fictional quote from a character named Fritz in a nineteenth-century novel.
With good reason, the earlier post suggests that “this seems pretty deceptive.” Surely that’s a possibility, but I wonder if the fault might actually be something much less devious, albeit all the more frustrating. Evangelical apologetics has tended, especially in its immensely popular evidentialist variety (think of Josh McDowell’s classic Evidence that Demands a Verdict or Lee Strobel’s bestselling Case for Christ series or David Limbaugh’s 2014 cookie-cutter rehash, Jesus on Trial), to benefit from sloppy, often secondhand, historical work and an understandably eager and susceptible audience.
The story of James Bartley, once believed to have survived being swallowed by a whale, is paradigmatic. Seemingly ever since the tale broke in 1891, conservative Christian commentators began touting it as ripest proof of the Bible’s own Jonah story. As it turns out, Bartley’s experience, like Ken Ham’s Luther, was a fake, though it took nearly a century to discover as much. The real story, however, is the work it did for evangelical apologetics and the battle against challenges to the Bible’s historicity. Messiah College’s Edward Davis, who did the hard work of tracking down the real source of the Bartley legend, could have been describing the evangelical apologetic drive in general when he explained the attraction and resiliency of such fictions: “More than anything else,” those feeling beleaguered in their faith want “to give people reasons to believe, to strengthen their faith in the gospel by strengthening their faith in the literal words of the Bible, to debunk the claims of atheistic scientists and apostate theologians.”
We all like winning arguments, especially in support of our most cherished beliefs, but sometimes ideology and partisanship have a tendency to baptize otherwise shoddy research and weak, one-sided argumentation. Amateur historian David Barton, president of Wallbuilders.org and frequent guest of conservative pundit Glenn Beck, is famous in evangelical circles for offering the Founding Fathers’ earnest evangelicalism as propaganda for 21st-century conservative politics. His 2012 book, The Jefferson Lies, which addresses the same apologetic concerns, has the notorious distinction, however, of being labeled the “Least Credible History Book in Print.” So poor is Barton’s research and his conclusions so stretched that quite a few conservative Christian scholars, who in other respects might have agreed with him on significant social and political concerns, called Barton out for consistently putting the ideological cart before the factual horse.
At a time when the President-elect has a well-documented history of offering outright conjecture as authoritative fact – to the welcoming applause of millions – it is probably no surprise that we find this loosey-goosey approach showing up in the Creation Museum and other laboratories of evangelical apologetics. The thing is, it’s a real question whether or not such intellectual sloppiness, if pointed out, will have any serious deleterious effect or even if honest rebuttals will be welcomed, much less granted.
Why? The answer may be as simple as this: People want it to be true. The Bartley legend garnered little skepticism from conservative Christians locked as they were in a battle with a heterodox historical criticism. They wanted, even needed Bartley’s story to be true because they wanted Jonah’s to be true, too – as shown by their continued insistence that such fishy experiences, if not exactly Bartley’s, must be possible. Ken Ham’s readers likewise want (need?) Luther to have offered a defense of the Young Earth Creationist project because it’s a project that furthers some of their most cherished religious beliefs and cultural concerns. Indeed, it matters little if Luther actually said the exact words given on Ham’s tableau; they are something he would have said, given the same circumstances in which we live today.
All of this helps make sense of what apologetic projects like the Creation Museum actually do for evangelicals who presumably already accept the message being sold. That is, apologetics offers them the assurance that what they know to be true is really true. To be sure, the museum masterfully builds upon this apologetic assurance for running its culture war. Indeed, in the end, it appears that it might just be the culture war itself that subtly keeps Answers in Genesis’ apologetics afloat, which leads one to think that, in the war on evolution and secularism, evangelicals, for all their insistence upon upholding objective and absolute truth, look strangely like political pragmatists: whatever works to advance the cause.
Even if it is only a useful fiction.
The Materialist Assumptions of Creationism
by Frederick Schmidt
Frederick W. Schmidt is the Reuben P. Job Chair in Spiritual Formation at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL and blogs at Patheos.com.
Teaching undergraduates at an evangelical college taught me a lot about the culture in which we live. Whenever the creation stories in Genesis became a topic of conversation in the classroom, inevitably their significance for the creation debate became an issue as well.
Elsewhere, I have talked about what I really believe that the creation stories of Genesis One are all about (“Righting America” and at Patheos), so I won’t repeat those points here. But those classroom conversations also convinced me that the creation debate is mired in thoroughly materialistic categories.
Allow me to explain.
Those who believe that the origins of the universe are entirely natural make arguments for a universe without God that are materialist. That is not surprising. To argue that “behind the last natural process that we have identified and understood, there is yet another process to be identified and understood” is logically consistent with their position. Indeed, for them, giving primacy to what can be known with the senses and confirmed scientifically is the only sensible way to make the argument.
Now, of course, we should note that those arguments are often marked by an overreach that moves from true science to scientific rationalism. Science can describe the way a process unfolds; it often cannot account for the existence of the process itself.
Less consistent is the tendency of creationists to argue that “behind the last natural process that we have identified and understood is where we find God at work.” That argument was one that I heard time and again in the classroom, and elsewhere among creationist arguments.
If you believe that God is the creator of the universe, there is more than one problem with this way of thinking about creation.
For one, the logic of the argument is itself materialistic.
Deferring the question of divine initiative in creation to the end of their argument, the creationist supposes that if God is to be found anywhere, God is found just beyond the place where our knowing and our senses fail us. That logic surrenders far too much.
If God is ultimately the author of creation — by whatever means — then the means themselves are a product of God’s creative work. And our thinking on creation should not deny God that.
For another, the logic of the argument abandons a conviction that is thread through both the Jewish and Christian traditions: namely, that God is active in the world and in its history.
What sets the Jewish and Christian traditions apart from other religious traditions is the conviction that God, though transcendent, is also immanent – i.e., that God is wholly other and yet engaged with creation in all its aspects. In Genesis, the singular claims of that God are emphasized. In the covenant with Israel, that engagement is reasserted; with the incarnation, the Christian tradition gives new expression to the depth of that engagement.
The logic that asserts, “God can be found behind the last process that has been identified and understood” essentially treats God in deistic categories, arguing that God is involved in creation only after every materialist claim has been exhausted.
That approach creates a third problem: A God of the gaps or, more accurately, a God of the fringes, whose creation is bereft of any indication that God is its author or has claims on creation.
Another way of putting this, perhaps, is to say that criticisms one and two above have spiritual and moral consequences.
If the material world is void of God’s manifest presence and if God is transcendent, but not immanent, then the result is faith in a god who has no relevance for breathing souls.
We may “come from God” in some remote fashion, and we may return to God beyond the grave. But without the conviction that God is active in the world, spiritual and moral judgments fail to connect us with ourselves, with others, with the world around us, and with the moment in which we live.
It is not surprising, then, to find that the same religious atmosphere that argues for a god of the fringes is often accompanied by an understanding of the Christian life marked by the same disconnect. Thus, much of Protestant fundamentalism is given to what amounts to a two-part understanding of the Gospel: Part one, get saved and move your name from the column of “damned and going to hell” to the column marked, “saved and going to heaven.” Part two of that “Gospel” is, “Here is a set of rules to follow that will keep you from making a mess of part one.” In that kind of spiritual world, the integration of life with the journey into God and the integration of redemption with moral and spiritual formation is difficult if not impossible to achieve.
But that is the consequence of giving so much weight to a materialist’s view of the world.
Post-Truth at the Creation Museum
by William Trollinger
Sometimes this blog writes itself. Or, more precisely, sometimes the folks at Answers in Genesis (AiG) write it for us.
In his New Year’s Day post, Ken Ham celebrates the fact that this year marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, which started when “Martin Luther nailed 95 theses – complaints about the church’s unbiblical ‘doctrines’ – to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany.” But here in 2017, when there is “rampant compromise in the church, particularly in regard to the book of Genesis,” Ham and AiG seek “to ignite a new reformation” (emphasis in original) by “calling the church back to the authority of the Word of God,” in the process inspiring “Christian leaders to recognize the vital need to teach creation apologetics to children and teens . . . and oppose any compromise within the church with evolutionary/millions of-years [sic] beliefs.”
There is nothing surprising about Ham’s celebration of the Reformation, particularly given AiG’s position (as articulated by Terry Mortenson) that “the Catholic Church is not the true church of Jesus Christ but is a false church that enslaves hundreds of millions of people in a false gospel.” And the call for a new Reformation has been a staple of the fundamentalist movement from its very inception in 1919 when William Bell Riley compared the first World’s Conference on Fundamentals on the Faith to “’the nailing up, at Wittenberg, of Martin Luther’s ninety-five Theses’” (God’s Empire 38).
In an effort to drive home the Wittenberg connection, Ham includes in his post a photo of the tableau of Luther nailing his propositions to the church door which one finds in the Biblical Relevance room of the Creation Museum. But a close look at this tableau reveals that, as we point out in Righting America, the Museum’s Luther is not posting the Ninety-five Theses, but instead the following:
If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.
There is no getting around it. Museumgoers and blog readers are clearly supposed to think they are seeing a representation of Luther posting his Ninety-five Theses, but that is not what they are seeing. This seems pretty deceptive.
To be fair to Ham and the museum, if one looks very closely at the text one can see that it is credited to “Martin Luther, correspondence.” But wait a minute. What sort of citation is “correspondence”? What correspondence, and when? Why is the museum so vague?
It turns out that the museum cannot be more specific about when and where Luther wrote this call to culture war, because “it turns out that the quote does not actually come from Luther, but instead from . . . a nineteenth-century historical novel by Elizabeth Rundle Charles” (Righting 139). The novel, Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family by Two of Themselves, does deal with the Reformation, and Luther is a figure in the novel. But amazingly, the quote cannot even be attributed to Charles’ fictional Luther, as it is spoken by a character named Fritz.
You can’t make this stuff up. And there is more. On the very day that Ham uses a photo of the Creation Museum’s Luther posting a text that is not the Ninety-five Theses (though that is what we are supposed to believe it is) and that is not even by Luther (though the museum says he is the author) but is instead a speech spoken by a fictional Fritz from a nineteenth-century novel – on this very day the lead article on the AiG website was a piece by Avery Foley entitled, “2016: The Year Truth Was Irrelevant.” In this piece Ms. Foley laments that we have moved into “a post-truth culture” in which “truth is no longer an objective reality” but instead is what’s true for me – my beliefs, my opinions, determine my truth” (emphasis in original).
Sounds like a pretty good description of what is going on at the Creation Museum. Is this the state of fundamentalist apologetics? Is it post-truth?
Is the Ark Sinking?
by William Trollinger
Here we are, entering 2017, and just a week from the six-month anniversary of the opening of Ark Encounter. In his end-of-the-year fundraising plea Ken Ham reports that “in just the few months we’ve been open, almost a half million visitors have toured the life-size Ark, and thousands more have already booked bus and group tours for next year!” (italics in the original). Donate to “this cutting-edge ministry that’s actively involved in contending for the faith in our very anti-Christian, secularized world,” and you will be supporting both the building of “a pre-Flood village near the Ark” as well as the expansion of the petting zoo to include “an outdoor teaching stage so guests can learn about biblical animal kinds and modern species.”
We do not know what “almost a half million visitors” means exactly. But let’s say the Ark has had 500, 000 visitors in the first six months. Extrapolating from this, this could mean a million visitors for the year. Of course, given that we are past the free publicity attendant to the Ark’s opening, and given that (because the Ark opened on July 7) 2/3 of the summer vacation months have been accounted for, this seems a generous estimate.
But let’s be generous. Let’s imagine that the Ark will have one million visitors in its first year.
Good news? Well, it depends. Take, for example, the people of Williamstown, a sleepy town of 3952 residents located just a few miles from Ark Encounter.
The people of Williamstown gave Ark Encounter $62 million in Tax Incremental Funding (TIF). This is quite the gift (and one which Ham and Answers in Genesis say little about), especially given that for the next thirty years 75% of the Ark’s property taxes will go toward repaying the TIF bonds, and not to the town of Williamstown.
Of course, the people of Williamstown gave this gift for a reason. They were hoping that Ark Encounter would produce an influx of tourists and the development of hotels and restaurants that would prove to be a great boon to the Williamstown economy. That is to say, Williamstown placed a bet on Ark Encounter. To be specific, they placed a bet on the projected attendance numbers provided to them by Ark Encounter.
So what were those projected numbers? As we reported on this blog a few months ago:
The feasibility study produced by America’s Research Group (ARG) – headed up by Ken Ham’s friend, Britt Beamer – to accompany the issuance of the bonds predicted that the Ark Encounter would “attract between 1.2m and 2.0m visitors . . . during the first year of operations” (A-38) . . . numbers [that] are equal or better than the 1.4m visitors who annually visit Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry . . . [and numbers that] “will be followed by annual attendance increases” (A-13).
As we have noted in earlier posts, there was evidence from the beginning that the Ark could fall short of its low-end projection of 1.2 million visitors in the first year. In fact, within a month of the Ark’s opening the Williamstown mayor was lamenting the fact that his small town was not seeing the promised economic benefits. Ham vigorously responded by attacking developers for listening to “the continual stream of negative, false information from the secular media and atheist bloggers” while simultaneously claiming that “indications are that attendance will be . . . closer to [2.2 million].”
Given “almost a half million visitors” in the first six months, Ham’s prediction is not looking so good. It is inconceivable that Ark Encounter’s plans to expand their petting zoo or what GQ’s Jeff Vrabel “objectively describe[d] as tobacco country’s saddest zoo” will result in Ark attendance going from 83,000 visitors per month to 250,000 visitors per month in the first half of 2017. It is hard to imagine that Williamstown officials hoping for a windfall of tourist dollars are satisfied by – as enthusiastically reported by Ken Ham – the opening of Shem’s Snack Shack, with its “‘gourmet hot dogs flooded with flavor,’ as well as sides, sandwiches, and ice cream.”
But while lower-than-expected attendance and the lack of development might be bad for Williamstown and Ark investors, they may not be bad for Ken Ham and company. That is because, under Tax Incremental Funding guidelines, if Ark Encounter does not meet its attendance projections, if it does not produce the economic windfall Williamstown thought it had been promised, it is not Ark Encounter that is on the hook. Instead, the debt burden falls on the investors and the taxpayers.
Whether Ark Encounter is attracting enough visitors to bring a profit is unknown. Maybe it is or maybe it isn’t. But it is a whole different question to ask if it is bringing in enough visitors, as promised, to make the huge tax break that the people of Williamstown gave to Ark Encounter a good deal for them. That is to say, what is good enough for Ark Encounter may not be good enough for the people of Williamstown.
Cousin Boudreaux Frightened by Baptist Creationists
by Rodney Kennedy
We are pleased to welcome Baptist minister Dr. Rod Kennedy back to the blog, this time with another story about his cousin Boudreaux.
My cousin Boudreaux called very early Christmas morning. His voice was a mere whisper. I asked him why he sounded so frightened. He told me that he was hiding in the closet because he was afraid the police were coming to arrest him.
Now, Boudreaux is a solid citizen, a law-abiding, God-fearing American and there’s not a reason in the world for him to be afraid of the police. And he was calling having just returned from midnight mass, where the vast congregation sang “Silent Night,” “Joy to the World,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Where the priest assured them that their sins were forgiven, and where he celebrated the Blessed Sacrament of Holy Communion: “The mystery of faith,” “The body of Christ,” “The blood of Christ.”
But it turns out that Boudreaux has been listening to his Baptist friends go on and on about the “war on Christmas.” It seems these days that all you need is two or three Baptists to gather and before you know it there are wars and rumors of wars in abundance. Boudreaux is always open to conspiracy theories and the idea that Christianity is to be declared illegal strikes a chord in his brain.
So on Christmas morning he sat in a closet in his own house, afraid he would be arrested for singing Christmas carols.
I did my best to talk Boudreaux out of the darkness and back into the light. I reminded him that God’s purposes are peace and praise. I told him that, instead of protesting the alleged “war on Christmas,” he needed to bear faithful witness to the gospel of Jesus. If people reject the message he is to “shake the dust” from his feet and move to the next opportunity. This is basic Christian practice.
I also told Boudreaux that Christ can’t be taken out of Christmas. His name is there: “Christ-mas.” People can reject Christ or not accept Christ, but no one can take Christ out of anything, anywhere, anytime. This silliness about taking Christ out of Christmas is just another version of claiming that the Supreme Court took God out of public schools. A noted Baptist freedom fighter often reminded us, “God has never missed a day of school.” God is always present. Jesus is in all things. He is always present. I reminded Boudreaux that his Catholic faith has given him a much larger vision of “Almighty God” than the God of his Baptist friends who can be so easily knocked out of school and chased out of Christmas.
Boudreaux’s Baptist friends are dominated by a dark archetypal metaphor: “LIFE IS A WAR.” As soon as the dominant reality of life becomes war, everything is poisoned. In a war zone, you do not just have people who disagree with you. You have enemies. Enemies in every tree, creek, and shop. Enemies who are out to destroy your way of life.
I was not surprised when Boudreaux told me that his Baptist friends got a lot of their very dark ideas from Answers in Genesis (AiG) and the Creation Museum. Not surprised because the museum, which had a chance to bear eloquent testimony to the creating power of God, instead chose to make its message a declaration of war against everyone refusing to believe in a literal creation.
I told Boudreaux that the museum not only does not have much Jesus, but it also does not have much solid Jewish theology. There’s a much greater celebration of creation in the Psalms, the prophets, and Job than you will ever find at the Creation Museum. The ancient Jews knew that one of their great poets, sitting on the side of a mountain, moved by the Spirit of God, had imagined what it must have been like for God to create the world. They knew the poet wasn’t present at the dawn of creation all those billions of years ago. But it didn’t matter because the glory of the story and its truthfulness were all that mattered. We would be more Christian if we were more Jewish in our understanding of God and creation.
I also reminded Boudreaux that the story of Noah’s Ark is absent of Jesus. It’s all about dire warnings about the coming destruction, last time by water, this time – so say the folks at the museum — by fire. How odd to call this a message of hope. And how odd that the Creation Museum scholars are so blinded by the rainbow being used as a symbol of “gay rights” that they miss the basic theological point. The bow, in the Genesis account, stands for God’s “war bow,” and God has put his war bow away to bring about a world of peace and praise.
The militancy and warmongering of the Creation Museum spill over into its twin brother, Rapture Theology. The Rapture imagines Jesus as a conquering warrior returning to destroy humanity. This theology is war at its worst, “the mother of all wars.” Interestingly, Boudreaux has never been attracted to the Rapture. I think it is because he has all that experience in the Catholic Mass repeating the words, “The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world.” His imagination just can’t grasp a warrior lamb, even if his Baptist friends find it thrilling.
Finally, Boudreaux tells me that he is leaving his dark room to go into the kitchen. He pours a cup of strong Community coffee, and says he feels much better. He might even go to the Mall and return some of the Christmas presents he doesn’t really like. “Boudreaux,” I say, “If you want to keep Christmas, you will stay out of Malls, the cathedrals of the pagan god of Mammon.”
Boudreaux laughs and we say our goodbyes. I know he is still going to the mall. But I also know that he is not afraid of being arrested by the mythical secularist police. At least, until he has another conversation with his Baptist friends.
