Yet More Fabricated History: Herbert Wendt’s Search for Scopes
by Glenn Branch
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
Unsurprisingly, in the spate of articles and commentaries commemorating the centennial of the Scopes “monkey” trial in 2025, there have been a lot of complaints about misconceptions and misinformation about the history — some justified; some not. To add to the chorus, here is a protracted complaint in particular with regard to the discussion of the Scopes trial in a relatively obscure book — In Search of Adam: The Story of Man’s Quest for the Truth about His Earliest Ancestors (1956), a translation of the Ich suchte Adam: Die Entdeckung des Menschen (1954). Herbert Wendt (1914–1977) was a German science writer specializing in zoology, anthropology, and archaeology, according to the German edition of Wikipedia, which adds that he attained international recognition with Ich suchte Adam, which was translated into twenty foreign languages. In Search of Adam was the August 1956 selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Well, In Search of Adam may or may not be a good book overall, but its discussion of the Scopes trial, occupying the first four pages of chapter 14, is terrible. Wendt starts by reminding the reader that evolution extends to humans, adding, “By July 21, 1925, the day on which the Dayton Monkey Trial ended, scientists in various parts of the world were on the point of solving some of the remaining puzzles about Adam,” providing examples of various relevant scientific work in 1925, including Raymond Dart “brooding over the ‘Taungs’ [a legitimate variant of “Taung”] child.” Wendt claims that “all these men heard of the Dayton affair,” although he provides no evidence of it. And he imputes to them, again with no evidence, acceptance of the Conflict Model of science and religion, writing, dramatically, that they remembered with trepidation the “legions of pioneers who had fallen on the battlefields of science. And they glanced at the calendar. Yes, it really was July 21, 1925.”
A bit of dramatic license might be excused, especially in setting the stage. But when Wendt turns his attention to the details of the Scopes trial in the next paragraph, Scopes is claimed to be “a young elementary schoolteacher”: he was, of course, a high school teacher. The Butler Act itself is claimed to have prohibited “any mention in public educational establishments of Darwin’s theory and the fields of learning associated with it”; it was not nearly so broad, forbidding teachers only “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes is also claimed to have aspired “to give American farmers’ boys some idea of the struggle for survival and the ape man of Java”; it’s unclear whether Scopes actually ever taught evolution in Dayton, or wanted to, although he accepted evolution and objected on principle to the Butler Act.
Continuing, Wendt writes,
A puritanical inspector of schools had called attention to the infringement of the law by Mr. Scopes. A worthy provincial judge, who had probably never even heard of Darwin, meditated over the case for weeks. He searched the statutes of Tennessee, found that Scopes really had defied a prohibition, and eventually resolved to give the lad who told innocent children fairy tales about monkeys the lesson he richly deserved.
Of course, Scopes was recruited as a willing defendant in a test case of the Butler Act, at the behest of locals (including Walter White, the Rhea County superintendent of schools, who later joined the prosecution team — although he actually wasn’t admitted to the bar till 1944) who wanted to put Dayton, Tennessee, on the map. They were, of course, briefly successful, as Wendt correctly notes: “Dayton became world-famous overnight.” But he adds, “Real estate prices rocketed.” Did anybody really move to Dayton on account of the trial?
When the scene shifts to the courtroom, Wendt continues to err. He says that the trial lasted twelve days: although it began on July 10 and ended on July 21, 2025, the court was not in session on the weekend, so it actually lasted eight days. The expert witnesses for the defense are claimed to have been “answered by bellows of laughter from the farmers” (i.e., the audience): only one expert witness spoke in court, and there are no reports of laughter at his testimony. Scopes is claimed to have “attempted to justify his conduct to the jury” and then “canned-food tins, empty bottles, and lumps of filth were hurled at his head”; he spoke only once in court, during his sentencing, and there are no reports of anyone throwing anything at anybody in the courtroom. “The hard-boiled defense counsel” — Wendt is referring to Clarence Darrow; none of his colleagues is ever acknowledged — “found his carefully prepared speech completely ruined by shouted oaths and personal insults”: pure fiction.
Discussing the aftermath of the trial, Wendt outdoes himself in invention. “No sooner had sentence been pronounced than thousands of men and women in Dayton fell to their knees and sang psalms”: there are no reports confirming such a spontaneous chorale. “Next day an epidemic of typhoid fever broke out among the tightly packed masses of people in Dayton and there were more than a hundred deaths.” Ironic if true! And, by now surprisingly, not entirely false. In her Reframing Scopes (2008), Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette quotes a letter from Helen Miles Davis to her husband Watson Davis, who covered the trial for Science Service, warning, “Don’t get typhoid, which, I see[,] has broken out near there.” A footnote adds, “The disease was a concern for all present in Dayton that summer.” Davis himself relinquished a hotel reservation in Dayton to a minister who later contracted typhoid and died shortly after the trial. He was, however, a Unitarian minister, which undermines the irony.
As for Scopes, he “was obliged to give up his schoolteaching”: he was actually offered a new contract to teach in Dayton, but declined in order to pursue graduate studies in geology at the University of Chicago. “His monkey trial had made him so popular that his future was assured”: although he received a lot of offers to capitalize on his fame, he declined them. He suffered a fair amount from his notoriety, too. In 1927, he was recommended for a graduate fellowship, which he was eventually denied: the president of the university administering the fellowship advised him to “take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.” “He became not a biologist, but a car salesman”: it is altogether unclear what Wendt is thinking here. Scopes never completed his Ph.D.; he was a petroleum geologist throughout his career, during which, he wrote, “There were no high lights [sic] and I had the same number and the same kind of experiences as anyone else who did that type of work.”
Wendt fails to mention the fact that, in 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes’s conviction, on a technicality, while leaving the Butler Act on the books. Instead, he rushes onward to offer a summary. In the last paragraph of his discussion, he writes, “The affair at Dayton was a last grotesque revolt against the new conception of history [i.e., evolution] which America itself, apart from its remote recesses, had long since generally accepted”; the Scopes trial was not a “last” revolt, unfortunately, but writing in the mid-1950s, before the rise of creation science and intelligent design, Wendt can be excused for using the adjective. “The world laughed, and soon forgot the trial”: certainly not, especially in its centennial year. “And the natural scientists, profoundly shocked, once more stated emphatically that a picture of humanity which left out of account its historical and biological basis resembled a tree without roots or a house without a substructure”: at last, a point of agreement!
In Search of Adam poses no threat to the status of Jerry Bergman’s The Other Side of the Scopes Trial (2023) as the Worst. Book about the Scopes Trial. Ever! — but that’s only because it devotes only four pages to the trial. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that their discussions of the Scopes trial are similar, although Wendt and Bergman differ about evolution: both are convinced that anyone who differs with them is ignorant, incompetent, and malicious, and both are so sure of themselves that they transmit or fabricate — it’s often not clear which — spurious details to support their views. A difference, though, is that although Bergman often misuses his sources, he typically (though not always) cites them, while Wendt cites no sources. It’s customary to blame the Broadway play and Hollywood film Inherit the Wind for misinformation about the Scopes trial, but since Wendt wrote before the play’s debut in 1955, the source of his misinformation is a mystery.
Crime Against History: Slavery, Race, and the 1776 Report
by William Trollinger
Below is an excerpt of an essay of mine that was published in the Summer, 2025 issue of New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, an issue which is devoted to white Christian nationalism and education. A link to the complete article can be found at the end of the blog post.
With the 2025 executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” the Trump administration reestablished the 1776 Commission, which produced The 1776 Report. This report . . . reveals how White Christian Nationalists wish to mandate that a hyper-patriotic American history be taught (at the K-12 level and beyond).
. . . . . . . . . . . .
It is crucial to note, as many commentators have, that the 1776 Report was designed to be a direct rebuttal of the 1619 Project. Developed by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and other writers, this Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazine project “aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” So, it is not surprising that questions of race and slavery are at the center of the 1776 Report. According to the authors, historical revisionism of the sort found in the 1619 Project “tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination.” This “deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic bonds that unite all Americans … silencing the discourse essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust, and hatred.” More than this, it “is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.”
What violence are the authors referring to? Certainly not the attack on the US Capitol, which took place 2 weeks before the 1776 Report appeared. And “defamation of our treasured national statues?” The authors are clearly lamenting the fact that some Confederate monuments have been torn down or defaced. Not surprisingly, seeing the realities and effects of slavery—including family separation, rape, torture, and much more—has led some Americans to not understand Confederate statues as “treasured national statues,” but, instead, as monuments celebrating those who fought to keep the enslaved, enslaved (and as memorials designed to keep blacks, who had no say over the creation of these monuments, in their place).
But for the authors of the 1776 Report, too many 21st-century Americans understand slavery as a sin unique to the United States: although “it is very hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America … to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times,” the “unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.” But as evinced by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the founding fathers contributed to an emerging “dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities” that culminated in “the Western world's repudiation of slavery.”
In this regard, the 1776 Report is most animated in its effort to rescue the Founders from what it sees as dishonest slander regarding slavery: “The most common charge leveled against the founders” is that “they were hypocrites who,” in creating a Constitution that protected the institution of slavery, “didn't believe in their stated principles.” This “charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.”
As the authors see it, what is dividing and harming 21st-century America is not the long shadow of slavery and the resultant racism—individual and institutional—that is still with us today. Instead, what is dividing and harming America is seeing and talking about the enormous gap between the founders’ ideals and the realities of slavery, realities that are conveniently elided in the 1776 Report.
Of course, the authors have to deal with the bothersome fact that the Constitution incorporated provisions that protected slavery in America. They respond that although the founders knew slavery was wrong, at the Constitutional Convention they agreed to compromises that were designed to allow the creation of a United States of America while continuing to hold their firm conviction that all men are created equal. According to the 1776 Report, the 3/5 clause was designed “to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons for purposes of increasing their congressional representation,” a claim that conveniently ignores how this clause gave Southern states much more power—including greater representation in the House of Representatives—than if their slaves (who had no more rights than oxen) had not been counted at all.
Then there was the slave trade: “the Constitution forbade any restriction” of it “for twenty years after ratification—at which time Congress immediately outlawed it.” The 1776 Report does not mention that not only did the United States government not make great efforts to enforce this provision, but there is no mention here of what became a burgeoning domestic slave trade. Finally, there was the fugitive slave clause. According to the authors, while this was “perhaps the most hated protection of all,” what we need to keep in mind is that although this provision “accommodated pro-slavery delegates,” it “did not sanction slavery in the states where it existed.” This banal statement does not elaborate on what exactly this “accommodation” meant for black people desperately trying to escape the horrors of their condition, nor is there any reference to the particularly odious 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
The 1776 Report goes to great lengths to argue that the death of slavery was planted in the country's origins: the “Declaration's unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly contradicted the existence of human bondage and, along with the Constitution's compromises understood in light of that proposition, set the stage for abolition.” Of course, if this were the case, if the nation's founders were committed to the notion that slavery was wrong, if slavery's end was built into the founding documents, then what happened? Why did slavery not die out? Why was the Civil War necessary to kill it?
According to the 1776 Report, over the first half of the 19th century increasing numbers of Americans came to reject the idea that all men are created equal. This idea was best articulated in the 1850s by South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, who “rejected the Declaration's principle of equality” as a “self-evident lie,” rights “inhere not in every individual by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,’” but, instead, “in groups or races according to historical evolution. This new theory was developed to protect slavery—Calhoun claimed it was a ‘positive good.’”
The logical implication of this historical claim in the 1776 Report is that, at the beginning of the 19th century, most white Americans held to the idea that each human being had inherent rights as an individual. That is, most Americans—presumably including most white Southerners, presumably including most slaveholders—understood that slaves had inherent rights as individuals, even while these slaves were forcefully and violently denied the opportunity to live out their “inherent rights.” Given the “logic” of this argument, this meant that at some point, white Americans would live out the truth of the Constitution and conclude that slavery had to be abolished. But according to the authors, with the advent of the notion of “group rights,” white Americans—particularly white Southerners—abandoned the inevitability of abolition that was built into the Constitution. As a result, it took a war to eliminate the institution of slavery.
Not surprisingly, there is no evidence provided here that at some pre-Civil War moment in time—1830, perhaps?—some significant percentage of whites (North and South) were committed to racial equality. And pointing to the Declaration of Independence is not evidence for this claim. However, this gap highlights the historical lacunae in this report (and as will be noted later, and despite what the 1776 Report claims, “history” is actually not the point here). We are presented with the founders and the founding documents as part of an effort by the authors to rebut the charge that they and their Constitution benefited or bolstered the institution of slavery. But there is no discussion of the slave South, no discussion of the slave economy that benefitted both North and South, no discussion of the realities—of the horrors—of slavery. Regarding the Civil War, there is but one single sentence: “This conflict”—a conflict (according to the authors) between Calhoun's group rights and the Declaration's individual rights—“was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives.” That is it. Note the passive voice. Note also the failure to observe that the Confederates adamantly maintained they were the ones fighting on behalf of the principles contained in America's founding documents (a point their latter-day defenders continue to make in arguing that Southerners went to war on behalf of “state's rights”).
When it comes to Reconstruction and its aftermath, to which the 1776 Report devotes but one paragraph, the authors assert that “despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves, the postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery.” Once again, note the passive voice. But the postbellum South did not “devolve”; instead, white Southerners aggressively worked to re-establish their supremacy (in their words, to “redeem” the South). Interestingly, and to their credit, in this instance the authors undermine their own passive voice, acknowledging “the violence of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan” that prevented blacks “from exercising their civil rights, particularly the right to vote.” There is also reference to the establishment of Jim Crow laws, although not a word about how the Supreme Court—supposedly devoted to upholding the Constitution—made possible the creation of a Jim Crow South, no reference to the active willingness of white Northerners to go along with this (and in some places establish and enforce their own Jim Crow laws), and—most important here—no discussion of how supporters of Jim Crow used the founding documents (and the Bible) to make their case.
That the authors spend so little time on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the decades of Jim Crow America (the latter topic also gets but one sentence) reveals that the authors of the 1776 Report are in a rush to get to the “horrors” of the 1960s (and beyond). As the authors see it, the decade started very well with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. King (at least, the King of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech) gets a lot of play in this report:
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
According to the report, the Civil Rights movement—“a national movement composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions”—secured legislative reforms regarding segregation, housing rights, and voting. More than this, the movement “presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding.”
This latter claim has no basis in historical reality. In 1963, only 35% of white Americans had a favorable view of King, a number that had dropped to 25% by his assassination in April 1968. I know this to be true from personal experience: the Denver, Colorado evangelical church of my youth hated King and his movement, as did my family (my father exploded when, the night after King was shot, I innocently said at the dinner table that a great American had been killed). More than this, and as Kevin Kruse has observed, these angry opponents of civil rights asserted that—and I also heard this in home and church—their opposition was rooted in their commitment to America's founding principles: “When Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina filibustered the Civil Rights of 1957, for instance, he pointedly recited the entire Declaration of Independence to link his act of defiance to the colonists’ acts.”
According to the 1776 Report’s historical narrative, the Civil Rights movement very quickly began pushing for programs antithetical to King and his articulation of the principles found in the Declaration of Independence. Driven by the conviction that “past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action, in the form of preferential treatment to overcome long-accrued inequalities,” these programs, which involved the “abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of ‘group rights,’” were similar to those “advanced by Calhoun and his followers.”
Again, the authors have strayed far from historical reality. Although they presume (in keeping with many white conservatives) that all we need to know about King is his “I Have a Dream” speech, the fact is that King strongly supported affirmative action as necessary in response to the 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow oppression. And to quote Kruse again, “drawing a straight line from the South Carolina politician Calhoun, one of the most infamous defenders of Black enslavement, to the African Americans who advocated affirmative action as a remedy for that very enslavement is, to say the least, an incredible stretch.”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
What we have in the 1776 Report is ideology, a Far-Right ideology, and definitely not history. And for all the claims that what we have now in K-12 and higher education is “indoctrination,” for all the calls that “states and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions,” this is precisely what we get in the 1776 Report. The goal is not an open, “honest” educational system. The goal is an illiberal educational system that indoctrinates its students with a patently false history. In this regard, the American Historical Association has it exactly right in pointing out that Donald Trump's executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” provides
A blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy. It requires teachers to rely on discredited conclusions that lack professional credibility or even to ignore the work of historians entirely. This includes the notorious 1776 Report, whose factual deficiencies render it little more than ideological polemic.
The reality is that we need more, not less, scholarship that frankly and truthfully addresses the past and present of racism in American life. We need more, not fewer, efforts in public history that frankly and truthfully addresses “the long shadow of slavery” in the United States.5 Instead of adhering to the false history and ideological strictures of the 1776 Report, we would be much better off if we heeded the wise words of W. E. B. DuBois from his monumental 1935 work, Black Reconstruction:
Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things … And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable? (p. 714).
The complete article, “Crime Against History: Slavery, Race, and the 1776 Report,” can be found here.
Donald Trump’s Sermon on the Mount
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this rightingamerica interview. And there are more books to come!
Preface
This post is not sarcasm, hyperbole, fiction. What is below are direct statements from Trump’s speeches. My only contribution here is framing Trump Truth as a sermon. We need to read Trump, not as a politician with policies but as evangelical preacher with parables.
His speeches ramble along like those of a poorly educated country preacher. In my childhood, such preachers would run out of something to say and they would pause, make a beeline to the cross and then fill us with graphic, physical descriptions of the death of Jesus. Trump’s sermons invariably return over and over to illegal immigrants.
The sermonic form of Trump’s speeches is an attempt to lead America out of weakness, defeat, and failure. It’s an altar call from a tent revival. The President-cum-preacher lambasts America as a failing nation (sinful), a nation in need of salvation that only Trump can provide, a nation filled with enemies almost supernatural and powerful, a nation that needs to be made great again (sanctification). He even includes a "personal testimony" of how he had been spared the assassin's bullet by God and now is the chosen vessel to lead the people to a new birth. You can't get more evangelical than this.
For the past ten years I have mistakenly believed that if you provide fellow Christians with the evidence that Trump is a serial liar, they will no longer support him. I was wrong.
MAGA believe his “lies” are the truth. A MAGA Facebook friend told me, “Trump has never told a lie.”
Trump’s lies, and here is the magic, are transformed into “Trump truth.” MAGA doesn’t believe the media, the fact checkers and the politicians are telling the truth. Trump tells the truth.
And to the MAGA disciples, Trump sounds like he is telling the truth. He is a fearless, frank speaker. He says things no other politician would dare say. He makes accusations so mind blowing people think they must be true because otherwise they would be absurd.
Trump has the major characteristic of the Greek word parrhesia – frankness. The word means “to say everything that which is said.” Read enough Trump speeches and you know he says everything he has in mind; he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely in his speeches.
A Trump speech is a series of claims not backed up with evidence. He makes assertions without offering proof. Trump truth is easy, simple, emotional, and raw energy. Once you believe something Trump says, you are soon capable of believing everything he says. What Trump says, MAGA believes. This is “Trump truth.”
Trump Truth is a sermon intended for MAGA believers. Maybe South Park was on to something when they called the opening episode of their new season, “The Sermon on the Mount.” So I have composed what I call “Trump’s Sermon on the Mount.” The content here has been gleaned actual quotes from his speeches at Pennsylvania rallies in the 2024 campaign. The composite sermon I have produced are direct words from Trump speeches in Harrisburg, Latrobe, Philadelphia, Erie, Johnstown, and Reading, Pennsylvania.
Here is what Trump Truth looks like in one sermon.
Trump’s Sermon on the Mount
When Trump saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he took the stage, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:
- It’s a great crowd. There’s a lot of people, so massive, as far as the eye can see. And the crowd when I preached on January 6 was the largest crowd I have ever spoken to, larger than Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.
- You are the greatest people in the world – patriotic Americans who love America. And we are going to make America great again. God bless you.
- Blessed are the rich, for they are the smartest people in the world.
- Blessed are those who mourn for our country. It’s in a helluva of a mess. I can fix it and you will be comforted. I alone can fix it.
- Blessed are the tough guys, for they will inherit the earth. I said to Dana White UFC, he’s got a big fight going on right now. He’s a good friend of mine. You know what he said the other day? They said, “Who’s the toughest person you’ve ever met?” He said, “Definitely Donald Trump.” He said, “Donald Trump.” How about that?
- Blessed are those, like you, who are persecuted for your tremendous Christian faith, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.
- Blessed are you when the radical, extreme, evil Left reviles you and persecutes you and utters all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. They have done it to me. No one has ever been as persecuted as me, not even Lincoln.
- And Kamala Harris is the most extreme liberal candidate in the history of our country by far. She’s an extreme radical left lunatic.
- She’s a communist. She will totally destroy health care and Social Security. Believe me she is awful.
- She voted in favor of deadly sanctuary cities numerous times. She supports open borders and defunding the police.
- But, you know, although she is going to kill social security, because by putting all of these illegal aliens into Social Security, it’s dead. It’s dead. She opposes even saying the words illegal alien and radical Islamic terrorists. She backs mass amnesty, mass amnesty and citizenship for all illegal. She supports mandatory gun confiscation. Believe me.
- She wants government intervention to slash consumption of red meat. That means they don’t want your cows. Get rid of your cows.
- Now we’re laughed at all over the world. They’re laughing at us.
- The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024. And they will not steal this election from me. We’re going to be too big to rig, right? Too big to rig, too big, too big to rig.
- But you know what’s crazy? The craziest thing. So you don’t mind if I go off teleprompter all the time. It’s such a shame. I have these great speech writers. And I hardly speak about this, but I could read the most gorgeous speech. But I tend to — I tend to go off about 75 percent of the time
- Under Kamala’s policies, criminals, rapists and vicious gang members are pouring in from South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions and insane asylum. You know, insane asylum is a step above, right?
- These illegal immigrants are monsters, murderers, rapists. They are Hannibal Lector. They are eating the dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. They are poisoning the blood of Americans.
- I heard, after I was almost assassinated that Trump is going to be a nice man. And I really agreed with that for about eight hours or so. And then I realized they were trying to put me in prison for doing absolutely nothing wrong. They went to judges who are crooked judges. They went to judges who are fake. They had prosecutors who are Democrat, radical lefts, and always in areas where it’s like three percent Republican or less. And I said, you know, these are bad people. So I was nice for about …. three, four or five hours. And then I said, these are bad people. We have to win this battle.
- When you are attacked like I have been attacked, you don’t turn the other cheek. You screw’em five, ten, fifteen times harder than they screwed you. You get even.
- And every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor. Thank you very much, because I’m being indicted for you. You like my mugshot. Did you like the mugshot? Love you.
- It’s the number one selling mugshot in history. It beat Elvis and it beat Frank Sinatra. And I’m proud to admit it and I’m proud to tell you that you have made mine bigger than both of them by a lot.
- When they want to try and say he’s cognitively impaired, you know, I stand up here for two hours and I speak without a mistake.
- Meanwhile, our crime rate is going up. How about where they say our crime rate is going down? We just had one hundred and seventeen people shot. You could take just Chicago and the whole nation’s Congress crime rate. Look, these are bad people. They’re phony people. They’re liars. They cheat on elections. They do a lot of bad things.
- You can’t believe the crime statistics. They are made up by Biden’s people in the White House. Believe me, crime is going up.
- And every single day you read about one of these horrible monsters from parts unknown who raped a young girl, killed her, cut her up, uses knives, not guns because it’s a slower death. These are monsters.
- And we have them in our country. We’re going to get them the hell out of our country. Because we have become a dumping ground for the world and we’re not going to take it anymore. We’re going to get rid of these liberal lunatics like Kamala.
- Believe me, I’m really rich. I have many treasures – golf courses, resorts, motels, real estate – all over the world. No one knows as much about wealth as me. “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
- Don’t listen to the fake media. Israel wouldn’t have been attacked if I were president. Putin would not have attacked Ukraine. The recent hits on Israel wouldn’t have taken place. We wouldn’t have had inflation. You wouldn’t have had that horrible disaster in Afghanistan. None of these things would have happened. America would be respected again.
- Never forget our enemies want to silence me because I will never let them silence you. And in the end, they are not after me. They’re after you. I just happen to be standing in their way and I will continue to stand in their way. I will always be here. I’ll be here. I don’t know. I’m getting tired of protecting you, but I love it.
Now when Trump finished saying these words, the crowds believed him, for he taught them as one having authority and not as a normal politician.
A Hermeneutical Challenge: Toward an Accurate Interpretation of the Genesis Creation Accounts
by Terry Defoe
Terry Defoe was educated at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia (BA, Sociology, 1978), Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (M.Div., 1982), and the Open Learning University, Burnaby, British Columbia (BA, Psychology, 2003). Defoe served as a chaplain at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He has been interested in the science / faith dialog for more than 30 years. His intellectual journey took him from young earth creationism to an evolutionary perspective. Details at www.evolvingcertainties.com. In 2018, two years after he retired, he published Evolving Certainties: Resolving Conflict at the Intersection of Faith and Science, which received endorsements from scientists affiliated with the BioLogos Association, including a Foreword from its first president, biologist Darrel Falk of Point Loma University, as well as scientists holding membership in the American Scientific Affiliation, a group Defoe joined in 2019.
Introduction
Hermeneutics is a technical term for the theory and methodology of interpreting texts. It seeks an accurate interpretation of materials, as well as analyzing the process of understanding itself. The word is derived from a Greek word meaning “to interpret.” It is often linked to Hermes, the Greek messenger god, tasked with interpreting messages from the gods and passing them along to humans. Hermeneutics studies the role preconceptions and contexts play in understanding. It investigates ways to bridge thegap between the author’s original intent and the reader’s understanding. When it comes to understanding the Scriptures, “it’s all about hermeneutics.” And when it comes to hermeneutics, it’s all about context.
The Hermeneutical Question
Biblical hermeneutics begins with a simple question: “Did God say that?” An even more important question — a specifically hermeneutical question -- follows: “Did I hear God correctly?” We modern Christians are certainly not the first to hear these words. Our goal is to hear them as the original audience did — a formidable task given differencesin culture, language and the vast span of time separating us from them. Understandingthe scriptures requires a thorough knowledge of ancient semitic culture. Our world is very different from theirs. This is Walton and Longman’s summary of the issuesinvolved:
The Scriptures were not communicated in our language – not addressed to our culture – do not anticipate questions about the world and its operations that stem from our modern situation and issues. . . . If we read modern ideas into the text, we skirt the authority of the text and in effect are compromising it. The result would be toarrogate authority to ourselves and our ideas. The text cannot mean what it never meant. What the text says may converge with modern science, but the text does not make authoritative claims pertaining to modern science.
On the other hand, our essential humanity has not changed. All of us, throughout the vast expanse of time, are sinners in need of grace. And our broken relationship withGod must be restored through Christ.
As a Lutheran pastor ordained in 1982, at the age of 32, my intellectual journey has taken me from one hermeneutical paradigm to another. When I was in my 20’s, after sometime away from the faith, I joined an evangelical church. Young-earth creationism (YEC) was baked into the package and I wasn’t given the possibility of opting out. Ihave since learned that despite outward appearances, young-earth creationism is notprimarily about science. It’s about defending a proprietary hermeneutic which I was expected to adopt.
That hermeneutics was based, I was assured, “… on what the Bible said.” I was clearly warned that any other view, especially an evolutionary perspective, would lead medown a slippery slope to unbelief. I began to read up on the subject and discovered a huge literature discussing this topic. My study began, accompanied by a few guiltpangs and the feeling that I had somehow betrayed my trust in God’s word. Church workers and pastors who care about integrity are fully aware of the fact that Godholds them to a higher standard in their interpretation of the Word. They know that getting it wrong has serious consequences.
Literalism
In much of evangelicalism, a literalistic reading of the scriptures is encouraged. But literalism is not the best tool in the hermeneutical toolkit. Literalism is unaware of, or dismissive of, the context of the words. Consider the following thought experiment:
- You are blindfolded and are led into the university library stacks.
- You are told to reach out and pull a book off the shelf — any book will do.
- It turns out that the book you chose at random was an advanced physics text. If you do not have the requisite background, “just reading the words off the page” will not yield the level of understanding you seek.
Pre-Scientific
Like police officers investigating a serious incident, interpreters of the scripturesdo their best to piece together a realistic portrait of the way things were in ancientIsrael, cognizant of the fact that enduring theological truths are often embedded in a pre-scientific framework. Scripture is pre-scientific not anti-scientific. The “science” in ancient Israel was the best science of the day. It wasn’t wrong, just different. Scripture’s descriptions of the natural realm are phenomenological — common sense observations. Scripture’s authors lacked the tools and technology which would enable them to describe nature scientifically. Ancient Israel was an oral not written culture. Trade routes distributed ideas as well as merchandise. A blending of thematerial and supernatural was normal for people back then.
Ancient Near East
Accurate hermeneutics recognizes the influence that neighboring nations had on Israel. There is no doubt that neighboring nations like Babylon and Egypt (commonly referred to as the Ancient Near East) influenced ancient Israel. We should not be surprised to hear that the Genesis creation accounts were critical of Babylonian creation mythology. In the Babylonian account, astronomical entities were divinities with oppressive power over humanity. In Genesis, on the other hand, the author makes it clear that the heavenly bodies are inanimate entities serving humanity.
Cosmology
Accurate hermeneutics requires knowledge of Israel’s cosmology. Water is a prominent factor. Above the earth is the firmament — the Hebrew word (raqia) refers to metal pounded flat — metal robust enough to support God’s footsteps. It was commonly believed that there were waters both above and below the firmament. At the time of the Noahic flood, the waters above were released and inundated the earth. Below the earth was the shadowy realm of the dead called “sheol.” The ancient Israelites and a succession of others through history, up to the time of Martin Luther, understood the stars to be globes of fire attached to the underside of the firmament. It was believed that a strong wind could disconnect them from the firmament and cause them to fall to the earth.
Historicity
Many Bible narratives contain echoes of past events, but are told theologically. For example, many Bible scholars are of the opinion that the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis are a unique literature with a sophisticated literary structure, presenting several important spiritual themes. Genesis chapters one through eleven appear to be theological commentary, partly symbolic, recounting the history, concepts, and stories of the time. Old Testament authors were not historians in the modern sense of the word. Most important to them were the spiritual principles underlying historical events. It is as if these authors were painting portraits while New testament authors were trying to take photographs. Brush stroke by brush stroke, or pixel by pixel, information that God wanted humanity to know is recorded in his book.
Hermeneutical Toolkit
In a very real sense, the Bible is an anthology with the Holy Spirit as its editor. Because many literary devices are employed in the Bible’s sixty-six books, accurate hermeneutics requires a variety of hermeneutical tools and the expertise to know which tool works best with which type of literature. Interpreters need to analyze a document before attempting to interpret it. The Bible is replete with numerous documents, authors and esoteric names, places, and challenging concepts. All of this makes it critically important to analyze each document in terms of its literary dimensions, theological teachings, historical and cultural features before moving on to interpretation. The most accurate interpretations are not literal but literary. The opening chapter of Genesis is structured thematically. Two sets of three days, where the first set of days describes the creation of realms and the second set describes the filling of those realms. The opening chapter of the Bible declares God's sovereignty, wisdom, and goodness. It sets out the sabbath as a pattern for human life. And, as wehave seen, it also counters ancient Near Eastern creation myths.
The Framework Hypothesis
The first chapter of Genesis is not primarily a chronological account but a literary or poetic framework designed to convey theological truths about God and his creation. Genesis chapter 1 appears to be the ritual commemoration of the creation event placed into the context of sabbath observance. It is not a scientific or historical record, asit would be if it was written today. It is a theological or topical explanation of creation.
The Framework Hypothesis states that the creation account, with its sequence of daysand emphasis on the sabbath, is in fact a literary framework for a narrative in which, after the “work” of creation, God takes his place on his throne overseeing the cosmos.Humanity is given a co-regent role, responsible for the stewardship of the earth. Thus,the details -- the days, the garden, the serpent, the tree -- are symbolic representations of deeper spiritual truths.
Inerrancy
Inerrancy is a critical evangelical doctrine -- the belief that the Bible is without error in everything it deals with, including statements about the natural realm. Many evangelicals are of the opinion that should a discrepancy arise between the Bible and science, science must be in the wrong.
Evangelical orthodoxy rejects the higher critical method, a system of Bible interpretation that originated in Germany in the 19th century. The higher critical method (or higher criticism for short) applies critical, academic and other secular scholarly methods to the study of the Bible, treating it much like any other ancient text. Higher criticism is an interpretive paradigm that discounts the miraculous and questions the historicity of scriptural accounts.
This said, a growing number of evangelical scholars argue that inerrancy is a philosophical category that has passed its “best before” date. They contend that the doctrine of inerrancy is not drawn out of the scriptures but imposed from without, alien to scripture’s nature and intent. A better word for inerrancy, they claim, is “trustworthiness” or “integrity.”
Conclusion
Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), mathematician, Lutheran theologian and associate of Martin Luther, assembled a group of scholars at the University of Wittenberg – a group which came to be known as the Wittenberg Circle. Group members included mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514-1574) and astronomical educator Erasmus Reinhold (1511-1553). Melanchthon was a contemporary of Copernicus. Melanchthon argued that Copernican heliocentrism contradicted the plain words of scriptures such as Psalm93:1: “The world also is established, that it cannot be moved.”
Copernicus put theologians on the horns of a dilemma. Was he correct and the traditional hermeneutic in error? While Melanchthon and Luther said no, the Circle scholars said yes. Eventually, the traditional hermeneutic was updated. And the church moved on.
This group of scholars shows us a non-destructive way to deal with scientificchallenges to traditional doctrines. That kind of gracious forbearance is sorely needed in the church today.
Further Reading
For those of you who are interested in reading further, below are some of the sources I drew upon for this post:
Dennis Danielson, The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution.
Ted Davis, “Science and the Bible: The Framework View.”
James K. Hoffmeier, Gordon John Wenham, and Kenton Sparks, Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither?: Three Views on the Bible’s Earliest Chapters.
Dennis Lamoureux, The Bible and Ancient Science: Principles of Interpretation.
Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate.
John H. Walton, “Reading Genesis 1 through Ancient (not Modern) Eyes.”
Robert S. Westman, “The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory.”
Editor's Note: This post is also available on Academia.edu.
From Creationism to QAnon: Answers in Genesis and the Culture Wars
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
We are pleased to announce that our article, “From Creationism to QAnon: Answers in Genesis and the Culture Wars,” has been published in the June issue of Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society.
Below is an excerpt from our article. The full article can be found here.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
If promoting creationist theories is not the primary agenda of the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis (AiG), what is? As we detail in this article . . . much or most of what one finds in AiG articles, blog posts, videos, and social media entries involves culture war battles. There is much that could be said here, especially regarding sexuality, but we limit ourselves to three examples. The first has to do with climate change denialism. [Note: the other two examples we give have to do with COVID/anti-vax, and the QAnon conspiracy.] As K. L. Marshall has pointed out in “Revisiting the Scopes Trial,” many Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals “have come to deny anthropogenic climate change and support their views by pointing to the conclusions produced by creation science, which claims to have its basis in the divine authority of the Bible.” Ken Ham and other AiG writers are perhaps the leading creationist producers of climate change denialism, and what they have written is, conveniently enough, a moving target. According to AiG publications:
- There is no conclusive evidence that the Earth is warming.
- But if the Earth is warming, it is not significant, and it is not because of humans.
- But if the Earth is warming and it is significant, this may be a good thing.
- But if the Earth is warming and it is significant and is not a good thing, this simply another chapter in climate history, which is the story of dramatic change and catastrophe (as we see with Noah’s Flood).
- Government needs to stay out of climate politics, allowing capitalism – God’s blessed economy – to proceed smoothly.
- God has promised that “While the Earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)
- God and only God will destroy the Earth.
According to AiG, people concerned about global warming “have the wrong starting point (man’s word) and the wrong history (evolution and millions of years), so they come to wrong conclusions about the future.” Zealous climate activism “is a false religion with false prophets” who are actually anti-Christian leftists driven by politics and greed. Jenna Scaramanga and Michael Reiss have observed that “both climate denialism and creationism are conspiracy theories” in that, “when pressed to explain the overwhelming scientific consensus, both the creationist and the climate denier must resort to an imagined cover-up by scientists.”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
In the end, it is clear that AiG and the Creation Museum are not just devoted to popularizing creationist theories. Rather, they promote a very specific of interpretations that feed into different strands of the culture wars: scientific and medical thinking, progressive and fundamentalist Christianity, and theories about political conspiracies pervading the culture. Climate denialism, COVID/anti-vax, QAnon, and young Earth creationism are all wrapped into one package. Given the ongoing and ever-more-heated culture wars that are polarizing American culture, we must pay attention to what is happening at the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter and in AiG’s virtual space. It matters to all of us.
‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: John MacArthur’s reckless End Times theology
by Paul Braterman
Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Interested in sharing scientific ideas with the widest possible audience, he was involved in successful campaigns to persuade both the English and the Scottish Governments to keep creationism out of the science classroom. He blogs at Primate’s Progress, paulbraterman.wordpress.com.
The Reverend John MacArthur, 1939 – 2025. He returned to the theme of a throwaway Earth in November 2021, comparing it to a used styrofoam cup. An earlier form of this piece appeared nearly 5 years ago in The Conversation, where it has received over 350,000 reads.
Every so often you come across a piece of writing so extraordinary that you cannot help but share it. One such piece is a sermon on global warming by American pastor John MacArthur. Full of beautifully constructed rhetorical flourishes, it is forcefully delivered by an experienced and impassioned preacher to a large and appreciative audience.
For me, as a man of science, it is the most complete compilation of unsound arguments, factual errors and misleading analogies as I have seen in discussions of this subject. But it’s important because climate change is a big election issue this November [2020] in the US, where there is a growing movement of evangelical Christians who deny its existence, while Joe Biden promises a “clean air revolution”.
The minister of the COVID-denying, law-defying Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California – which has encouraged worshippers to congregate as normal despite state COVID-19 restrictions – MacArthur is an impressive figure whose Study Bible has sold almost 2 million copies.
He regards the infallibility of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, as essential to his faith, and his sermon about global warming can only be understood in that context. MacArthur’s rejection of the science is shared by other major US ministries and organisations such as Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and the Discovery Institute.
In this sermon, MacArthur paraphrases “a scientist at Cal Tech” (except not a scientist at all, but the novelist Michael Crichton, best known for Jurassic Park), as saying in a lecture:
Consensus science is the first refuge of scoundrels … invoked only in situations where there is a political, social, financial agenda but no scientific support.
The reverend has the most serious reasons possible for rejecting the scientific consensus concerning the age of the Earth, the origins of humankind, the history and prehistory of the ancient near East and the peopling of continents: it is totally incompatible with the Genesis account of creation, Adam and Eve, the flood and the dispersion of peoples from the Tower of Babel.
Error, denial and misunderstanding
As for global warming itself, the reverend channels standard climate change denial, but all his arguments are unsound and have been convincingly refuted to the satisfaction of an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists (see in-depth discussion at Skeptical Science). He understates the amount of global warming, incorrectly describes the full record as dating back only 30 years, and cites the Little Ice Age as evidence that the changes currently taking place are natural. There’s more:
Here’s the key, friends, this is the real deal. Legitimate science recognises a close correlation between sunspots and climate change … The sun is the source of temperature changes because of its infrared variations. … There is absolutely no evidence that CO₂ contributes to warming. On the contrary the opposite is true. Warming produces CO₂ … It’s the other way round.
Here we have a collection of half-truths and misunderstandings, typical of denialists claiming to represent “legitimate science”. As the graph below shows, the 11-year sunspot cycle is a minor deviation, and the temperature increase since 1980 has occurred despite the fact that over that period the amount of solar energy falling on Earth has gone down slightly. Incidentally, this solar energy input is concentrated mainly in the visible, not the infrared, region of the spectrum, and it is the roughly balancing heat outflow from the Earth that is in the infrared.
MacArthur offers a false dichotomy between saying that CO₂ warms the oceans, and warmer oceans release more CO₂. Unfortunately, both these statements are true. There is a positive feedback loop: human-released CO₂ is the primary driver, but its effect is amplified by the fact that yet more CO₂ is then released from non-human sources. Regarding CO₂ itself, MacArthur seems to be even more confused:
By the way, plants produce CO₂. What man produces is marginal … Industry doesn’t affect CO₂ in the environment or atmosphere.
Plants do produce CO₂ but they absorb more than they emit. However, when it comes to humans, their activity may cause only a small imbalance each year between CO₂ emission and natural uptake, but this imbalance is cumulative. CO₂ levels are now 50% above pre-industrial, and subtle atomic differences clearly show that fossil fuel is the source. But according to MacArthur, “There is no scientific reason to believe that ice caps are melting”.
Despite the Arctic Monitoring and Assement Programme’s video on this subject, the reverend does not think that the evidence for ice-cap melting is scientific, and that other factors are at play:
This is all political [and] financial agendas, class warfare, class envy … By the way, US$100 billion has been spent to make a case for global warming … driven by the socialist mentality … even some of the feminist mentality that resents male success.
All is now clear. Talk of global warming is part of a politically motivated conspiracy. But US $100 billion? That’s 600 years’ worth of all federal climate research spending. Clearly, those pesky socialists and feminists are formidable fundraisers. However, none of this matters because environmentalism is fundamentally misplaced. As MacArthur puts it, citing Revelation and the integrity of scripture:
God intended us to use this planet, to fill this planet for the benefit of man. Never was it intended to be a permanent planet. It is a disposable planet. Christians ought to know that.
And that is a statement that would leave anybody who cares about this world speechless.
What the Scopes Trial Meant: Bryan, the Modernists, and Science
by Edward B. Davis
Edward B. (“Ted”) Davis, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Messiah University, writes about Christianity and science in the Scientific Revolution and modern America. His new book, Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era (Johns Hopkins, 2024), is the source of most of the information and some of the wording here. He was an advisor for recent exhibits about science and religion at the National Museum of American History and the Museum of the Bible. For additional information about the book as a whole, stream a podcast hosted by the Congregational Library & Archives (Boston).
This July marks the one hundredth anniversary of the most famous event in the history of American religion and science, the trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee high school. The rookie teacher was convicted of violating a new state law prohibiting public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.” Ironically, both the prosecution and the defense wanted a conviction. Responding to a solicitation from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Dayton school board had asked Scopes to stand trial, hoping to find him guilty so the law itself could be overturned in higher courts—a strategy that ultimately failed.
Scholars have generated an enormous literature related to Scopes in the century since it happened. WorldCat database returns more than 1,200 books catalogued with “scopes trial” as a keyword, including more than 500 with that phrase in the title of the book or one of its chapters. Using the single word “scopes” multiplies both numbers by factors of four and three, respectively. Why did I write one more book about a topic so well explored? Serendipity. Decades ago, while doing research on antievolutionist Harry Rimmer before the internet revolutionized historical research, I stumbled upon a virtually unknown tract about “Science and Religion” from 1926. The author, naturalist Samuel Christian Schmucker of West Chester (PA) State Teachers College, was prominent in Nature Study, an early form of environmental education that stressed taking students outside, Under the Open Sky, to borrow the title of one of his books. He was also a nationally known popularizer of evolution in the 1910s and 1920s, especially at Chautauqua where his lectures (illustrated with lantern slides) drew the largest crowds. Two of his books were used as texts by the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle, rather like a college without walls. He had been such a popular teacher that the science building at West Chester, dedicated twenty years after his death, was named for him—only to have his name removed three years ago when his strong support for eugenics became widely known on campus; one of my articles was cited in the process.
When I first saw Schmucker’s pamphlet, I could not identify the American Institute of Sacred Literature, the now-defunct entity named at the top of the front cover (above). Soon I learned it was a correspondence arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, and that Regenstein Library holds a large archive of papers and correspondence related to it. There and in the correspondence of Shailer Mathews, the theologian and Dean of the Divinity School who supervised the AISL, I found letters from dozens of leading scientists about their religious beliefs, which are mostly unknown to historians. They were surrounded by other documents about the “Science and Religion” pamphlets, some of which were listed when I turned the page. Ten were published between 1922 and 1931. The full set of authors and titles (see the table of contents from my book) included some important names in American history: Nobel Laureate physicists Robert Millikan (president of Caltech) and Arthur Compton (who chose Fermi and Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project), Mathews, and the most famous liberal preacher of his generation, Harry Emerson Fosdick. All but one—Columbia physicist Michael Pupin, a Serbian Orthodox believer who was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1925—were religious modernists. In other words, the pamphlets were written by the very people whose ideas William Jennings Bryan most despised, those liberal Protestants who wanted to “modernize” Christianity by discarding biblical miracles and the orthodox creeds, in favor of the Social Gospel and vaguer notions of God that (in their view) did not conflict with modern science.
Intended to diminish opposition to evolution and to persuade Christians to adopt more positive attitudes toward modern science, the pamphlets were distributed to high school principals in every state, university campuses, scientists, clergy, and legislators. Very scarce today, the pamphlets and their history constitute a revealing window on the Protestant modernist encounter with science, adding new context for understanding Bryan and his religious opponents at the trial. Hundreds of books scrutinize Bryan and his fundamentalist friends, but the modernists are typically seen only as Bryan’s foil or the obvious alternative to Bryan’s folly. That is why I wrote the first book about modernist views of science and religion between the world wars: it’s high time someone took a closer look at them.
What did I learn? Bryan’s concerns about evolution and education were partly shared by the modernists, especially his view that survival of the fittest undermines human decency and morality. They also agreed with Bryan view that college professors were undermining the religious beliefs of students. Where for Bryan this problem was also rooted in evolution, the modernists blamed philosophical reductionism, the view that science somehow “explains away” our humanity, since chemicals have no values and we are nothing more than pre-programmed biochemical machines. Bryan rejected all efforts to baptize evolution, while the modernists sought to base their theologies of nature heavily on evolution and modified their conceptions of God, often in radical ways—tossing divine transcendence under the bus in favor of a purely immanent god who had not created nature or its laws. Many modernists also embraced eugenics as an effective means to bring about the kingdom of God on earth through the elimination of undesirable traits and behaviors from the germline. At the same time, perhaps surprisingly, the modernists still accepted design in nature, despite rejecting the traditional Christian theology embraced by many advocates of “intelligent design” today. Finally, the modernists uncritically accepted the “Conflict Thesis” of Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper—the idea (now rejected by historians) that Christian theology has always been unable to engage science in fruitful conversation and must be discarded in order to make social and intellectual progress. For more on each point, see the longer version of this essay at BioLogos.
Is there a middle way between Bryan’s uncompromising rejection of all forms of “theistic evolution” and the modernists’ wholesale rejection of classical theism in the name of “science”? In the culture war of the 1920s, Protestant thinkers who accepted both evolution and the Nicene Creed, as Asa Gray and others had done in the 1880s, were thin on the landscape. None of the pamphlet authors qualify, since Pupin was not a Protestant. For the person in the pew, the stark choice seemed to be Bryan or the modernists. Those with more discernment were hard to hear amidst the din of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.
We still find ourselves today in a culture war involving religion and science, and in one way it’s even more polarized. Young-earth creationism, which had no traction among fundamentalist leaders in 1925, is so dogmatically literalist that even Bryan gets criticized for betraying the Bible. A list of “compromised” evangelical leaders compiled by Answers in Genesis includes not only Bryan, but a virtual who’s who of evangelical leaders past and present: Billy Graham, Reuben Torrey, James Orr, Charles Spurgeon, Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, James Montgomery Boice, Gleason Archer, Bill Bright, Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Bruce Waltke, and Tim Keller. They all made the mistake of interpreting Genesis differently than AiG. They did not “uncompromisingly contend for the literal historical truth of Genesis 1–11, which is absolutely fundamental to all other doctrines in the Bible.” (For more on creationism’s uncompromising tone, see my comments here.)
Nevertheless, in another way the situation has changed fundamentally. In 1925, there was no one like Francis Collins, an adult convert from atheism to evangelical faith who succeeded the outspoken atheist James Watson as director of the Human Genome Project and later headed the National Institutes of Health. Nor was there anyone like the late Charles Townes, one of the greatest experimentalists of the last century and a traditional Christian who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the maser (ancestor of the laser). Another Nobel Laureate, physicist William D. Phillips, identifies as an “ordinary” Christian, sings in his church’s gospel choir, believes that science cannot deny miracles and affirms the bodily Resurrection. Astrophysicist Joan Centrella, a leading expert on general relativity, became a Christian early in her career and led Bible studies for her departmental colleagues. Distinguished climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is an active member of an evangelical church in Texas, where her husband Andrew Farley is the head pastor. These names could be multiplied dozens of times. Two organizations of Christians in STEM fields, the mainly Protestant American Scientific Affiliation and the recently formed Society of Catholic Scientists, have several thousand members, most of them traditional Christians who accept evolution and some of them as accomplished as Compton or Millikan. Neither organization existed in Bryan’s day, when nearly all eminent American scientists whose beliefs are known to me were agnostics, atheists, or modernist Protestants.
The contemporary conversation about religion and science is certainly subtler, broader, and deeper than when John Scopes walked into Rhea County Courthouse.
Mike Huckabee: A Scary Dispensationalist Huckster
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this rightingamerica interview. And there are more books to come!
The New York Times daily word game of Connections asks participants to match four words that fit the same category. Here are four words that might not seem to fit the same category, but they do: Zealots, Mike Huckabee. red heifers and the rapture. All of them belong to the genre of false prophecy.
Zealots
The Zealots were a violent political party of Judaism in the first century. They believed violence was the only acceptable response to Roman rule.
In his most explicit statement about the futility of Zealot violence, Jesus said: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:28 – 31).
Jesus, the “green wood” of peace and nonviolence, is the polar opposite of the “dry wood” – the violent Zealots.
The Zealots lived and breathed the toxic fumes of anger, resentment, and revenge. The word “zeal” means “hot under the color.” The root of “zeal” means “dark red” and it connotes the face when it is enraged. Red, therefore, is the perfect color for MAGA Republicans.
The last stand of the Zealots occurred at Masada – a mountain fortress. According to Josephus, when the walls were breached in 73/74 CE, the Romans found nearly 1,000 inhabitants had died by mass suicide—a claim that remains debated among historians.
MAGA evangelicals dream of the final battle of Armageddon (Megiddo). Armageddon is, according to the dispensationalists, the site of the climactic battle in the world – “the mother of all wars.”
The distance between Masada and Megiddo is 138 miles, but the distance in political and theological miles is immense. Zealots always live on the edge of suicidal tendencies. They cannot abide this world and would rather leave it if they can’t control it.
Our current batch of Zealots – MAGA evangelicals – burn with zeal against immigrants, gays, transgenders, university professors, minorities, and an array of alleged enemies of America. They dream of Jesus returning “soon and very soon” to destroy in flames all their enemies.
They have no idea that their final moments are more likely to resemble Masada than fictional victory at Armageddon.
Mike Huckabee: A Modern Zealot
Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, is a Zealot. He is also a Southern Baptist preacher who holds to and promotes end times dispensational theology.
Historian Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy in Modern American Culture should be required reading for anyone trying to understand what has gone wrong in America in the past ten years. How America has fallen under the influence of crazed, right-wing “prophets and apostles” seizes the mind. Boyer reminds us, “Prophecy belief is far more central in American thought than intellectual and cultural historians have recognized …. The popularizers of a specific belief system – dispensational premillennialism – have played an important role in shaping public attitudes on a wide range of topics ….”
President Trump sent a man filled with theological nuclear material to the most explosive region in the world. Huckabee, in full dispensationalist mode, has visited Shiloh, an ancient site of God’s tabernacle. He held an official meeting in Judea and Samaria. This marks the first time in history that an American ambassador has held a meeting in Judea and Samaria with a representative forum of Israeli authorities beyond the Green Line, which demarcates the area captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War.
Ambassador Huckabee said, "I cannot imagine coming to Israel and not seeing Shiloh, because it is one of the most important biblical sites that validates the Jewish connection to the homeland, going back 3500 years."
Huckabee seemed oblivious to the history of Shiloh. Psalm 78:60 notes that God “abandoned his dwelling at Shiloh.” The house at Shiloh fell down. Caryle Marney said in a sermon, “For 900 years in a long, slow way the waters of Shiloh trickled downhill until Samuel’s early days when old Eli was really old, his sons defected, and the ancient holy man fell, broke his neck, and someone named the newborn baby Ichabod. The ‘glory of the Lord’ had gone away.”
Huckabee has claimed “there is no such thing as a Palestinian.” He has insisted there is plenty of land outside of Israel for a Palestinian state. In addition, Huckabee opposes the two-state solution. He supports Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria (the territory’s biblical name). There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Believing he can wipe away history with denials suggests Huckabee is more humbug and huckster than holy man. And his Christian nationalist, dispensationalist spin on Israel’s history makes a mockery of Paul’s claim that Christians are “ambassadors for Christ.” Instead, Huckabee offers a revisionist history of Israel that rivals David Barton’s fictional history of America.
Ambassador Huckabee sent an exceedingly sycophantic and dangerously explosive text to Trump:
Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century—maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you. I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s. You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave. I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU! It is my honor to serve you!
Along with the fawning flattery of President Trump, the Christian nationalism and pseudo patriotism, and overweening theodicy, this message crawls with theological inconsistencies and contradictions that would require a book length refutation.
I have compared the words of Huckabee with the words of Ezekiel, a true prophet. No prophet had more firsthand experience with false prophets than Ezekiel. His prophetic counterparts attempted to twist the truth, tried to discredit Ezekiel’s credentials as a preacher of the word, and caused great trouble for his work among the exiles.
Huckabee, like the false prophets in Ezekiel, has been irresponsible by exceeding his commission and giving a message dictated by his own caprice. Huckabee entertains the absurd idea that God directs the decisions of President Trump. “I believe you will hear from heaven.” Ezekiel: “They have envisioned falsehood and lying divination; they say, ‘Says the Lord,’ when the Lord has not sent them, and yet they wait for the fulfillment of their word!” (Ezekiel 13:6). “Its prophets have smeared whitewash on their behalf, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ when the Lord has not spoken” (Ezekiel 22:28)).
Huckabee feeds Trump’s illusions. Yet Ezekiel warns, “For there shall no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel” (12:24). The audacity of Huckabee’s claim that God will speak to President Trump unravels in the light of Ezekiel’s condemnation of false prophets claiming to have a word from God when God has not spoken at all. Where are the prophecy police when you need them? Never has a preacher more needed someone with a badge, wearing a mask, to arrest Huckabee, slap handcuffs on him, and lead him away.
Huckabee couches his message in the language of religious war. Like most MAGA evangelicals, Huckabee has replaced truth and faith with a sickening nationalism. Here are Will Campbell’s word regarding such nationalism:
It is the insistence that what we have done is sacred. It is that transference of allegiance from what God did in creating the whole wide world to what we have done with a little sliver of it. Patriotism is immoral. Flying a national flag – any national flag – in a church house is a symbol of idolatry. Singing “God Bless America” in a Christian service is blasphemy.
The Red Heifer
Huckabee’s dispensationalist view moved into the category of exceedingly weird when he visited a farm in the occupied West Bank where five red heifers are penned. The five red heifers came from Byron Stinson, a Texas rancher.
Hoping to hasten the End Time a group of ultra-Christian Texas ranchers helped fundamentalist Israeli Jews breed a pure red heifer, a genetically rare beast that must be sacrificed to fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy found in the biblical Book of Numbers. The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, “This is a statute of the law that the Lord has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect, in which there is no blemish and on which no yoke has been laid. You shall give it to the priest Eleazar, and it shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence” (Numbers 19:1 – 3).
There is nothing here about end times, but dispensationalists find biblical evidence even where none exists. When our nation’s foreign policy involves “red heifers,” we should know we have a problem.
The red heifer is supposed to be the first animal sacrificed on the altar of the new Temple when it is finished. The problem: the second most sacred holy site of Muslims – the Dome of the Rock – currently stands where the Temple will need to be built. This would, of course, mean total war between Israel and the Muslim world.
The idea of the world’s fate wrapped in a perfect red heifer seizes the mind.
The Rapture
Millions of Americans believe that we are approaching the day when Jesus will rapture his Church. MAGA prophets are making wild claims that Trump is a prophet sent by God to usher in the End Times, and that attacking Iran is necessary to bring about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ.
White evangelical Christian fundamentalists have a perverted relationship with Israel. On one hand, they believe that Jews are damned to eternal hell because they don't accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah; on the other hand, they consider themselves very pro-Israel because of the role they think Israel will play in the End Times.
Ambassador Huckabee sits in Jerusalem with what he thinks is the plan of God and the timetable for the return of Jesus. His position in Israel makes him the most dangerous false prophet in the world.
1 in 4 Americans Reject Evolution, A Century After the Scopes Monkey Trial Spotlighted the Clash between Science and Religion
by William Trollinger and Susan Trollinger
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared at The Conversation. We are grateful to the editors to republish it here.
The 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Dayton, Tennessee, teacher was charged with violating state law by teaching biological evolution, was one of the earliest and most iconic conflicts in America’s ongoing culture war.
Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” published in 1859, and subsequent scientific research made the case that humans and other animals evolved from earlier species over millions of years. Many late-19th-century American Protestants had little problem accommodating Darwin’s ideas – which became mainstream biology – with their religious commitments.
But that was not the case with all Christians, especially conservative evangelicals, who held that the Bible is inerrant – without error – and factually accurate in all that it has to say, including when it speaks on history and science.
The Scopes trial occurred July 10-21, 1925. Between 150 and 200 reporters swooped into the small town. Broadcast on Chicago’s WGN, it was the first trial to be aired live over radio in the United States.
One hundred years after the trial, and as we have documented in our scholarly work, the culture war over evolution and creationism remains strong – and yet, when it comes to creationism, much has also changed.
The Trial
In May 1919, over 6,000 conservative Protestants gathered in Philadelphia to create, under the leadership of Baptist firebrand William Bell Riley, the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, or WCFA.
Holding to biblical inerrancy, these “fundamentalists” believed in the creation account detailed in chapter 1 of Genesis, in which God brought all life into being in six days. But most of these fundamentalists also accepted mainstream geology, which held that the Earth was millions of years old. Squaring a literal understanding of Genesis with an old Earth, they embraced either the “day-age theory” – that each Genesis day was actually a long period of time – or the “gap theory,” in which there was a huge gap of time before the six 24-hour days of creation.
This nascent fundamentalist movement initiated a campaign to pressure state legislatures to prohibit public schools from teaching evolution. One of these states was Tennessee, which in 1925 passed the Butler Act. This law made it illegal for public schoolteachers “to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
The American Civil Liberties Union persuaded John Thomas Scopes, a young science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, to challenge the law in court. The WCFA sprang into action, successfully persuading William Jennings Bryan – populist politician and outspoken fundamentalist – to assist the prosecution. In response, the ACLU hired famous attorney Clarence Darrow to serve on the defense team.
When the trial started, Dayton civic leaders were thrilled with the opportunity to boost their town. Outside the courtroom there was a carnivalesque atmosphere, with musicians, preachers, concession stands and even monkeys.
Inside the courtroom, the trial became a verbal duel between Bryan and Darrow regarding science and religion. But as the judge narrowed the proceedings to whether or not Scopes violated the law – a point that the defense readily admitted – it seemed clear that Scopes would be found guilty. Many of the reporters thus went home.
But the trial’s most memorable episode was yet to come. On July 20, Darrow successfully provoked Bryan to take the witness stand as a Bible expert. Due to the huge crowd and suffocating heat, the judge moved the trial outdoors.
The 3,000 or so spectators witnessed Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan, which was primarily intended to make Bryan and fundamentalism appear foolish and ignorant. Most significant, Darrow’s questions revealed that, despite Bryan’s’ assertion that he read the Bible literally, Bryan actually understood the six days of Genesis not as 24-hour days, but as six long and indeterminate periods of time.
The very next day, the jury found Scopes guilty and fined him US$100. Riley and the fundamentalists cheered the verdict as a triumph for the Bible and morality.
The Fundamentalists and ‘The Genesis Flood’
But very soon that sense of triumph faded, partly because of news stories that portrayed fundamentalists as ignorant rural bigots. In one such example, a prominent journalist, H. L. Mencken, wrote in a Baltimore Sun column that the Scopes trial “serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land.”
The media ridicule encouraged many scholars and journalists to conclude that creationism and fundamentalism would soon disappear from American culture. But that prediction did not come to pass.
Instead, fundamentalists, including WCFA leader Riley, seemed all the more determined to redouble their efforts at the grassroots level.
But as Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan made obvious, it was not easy to square a literal reading of the Bible – including the six-day creation outlined in Genesis – with a scientific belief in an old Earth. What fundamentalists needed was a science that supported the idea of a young Earth.
In their 1961 book, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, fundamentalists John Whitcomb, a theologian, and Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer, provided just such a scientific explanation. Making use, without attribution, of the writings of Seventh-day Adventist geologist George McCready Price, Whitcomb and Morris made the case that Noah’s global flood lasted one year and created the geological strata and mountain ranges that made the Earth seem ancient.
"The Genesis Flood” and its version of flood geology remains ubiquitous among fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants.
Young Earth Creationism
Today, opinion polls reveal that roughly one-quarter of all Americans are adherents of this newer strand of creationism, which rejects both mainstream geology as well as mainstream biology.
This popular embrace of young Earth creationism also explains the success of Answers in Genesis – AiG – which is the world’s largest creationist organization, with a website that attracts millions of visitors every year.
AiG’s tourist sites – the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky – have attracted millions of visitors since their opening in 2007 and 2016. Additional AiG sites are planned for Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
Presented as a replica of Noah’s Ark, the Ark Encounter is a gigantic structure – 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, 51 feet high. It includes representations of animal cages as well as plush living quarters for the eight human beings who, according to Genesis chapters 6-8, survived the global flood. Hundreds of placards in the Ark make the case for a young Earth and a global flood that created the geological strata and formations we see today.
Ark Encounter has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars from state and local governments.
Besides AiG tourist sites, there is also an ever-expanding network of fundamentalist schools and homeschools that present young Earth creationism as true science. These schools use textbooks from publishers such as Abeka Books, Accelerated Christian Education and Bob Jones University Press.
The Scopes trial involved what could and could not be taught in public schools regarding creation and evolution. Today, this discussion also involves private schools, given that there are now at least 15 states that have universal private school choice programs, in which families can use taxpayer-funded education money to pay for private schooling and homeschooling.
In 1921, William Bell Riley admonished his opponents that they should “cease from shoveling in dirt on living men,” for the fundamentalists “refuse to be buried.” A century later, the funeral for fundamentalism and creationism seems a long way off.
Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America: Three Reviews
by Sean Swain Martin, Andrew McNeely, and Laura M. Tringali
Editor’s Note: The phenomenon of Catholic fundamentalism is finally starting to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. In 2024 Chelsea Ebin’s The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building was published by the University of Kansas Press (sometime in the next few weeks my review of Ebin’s book will appear in American Catholic Studies).
And now, from Oxford University Press, comes Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America. Below are three reviews of this important book, which are followed by a wonderfully gracious response from the author himself. Enjoy!
Sean Swain Martin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. His American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism (October 2021) published by Pickwick Publications, explores the centrality of epistemological certainty in the work of Scott Hahn, attributing to Hahn a specific Protestant fundamentalist approach in his very popular Catholic theological contributions. Sean specializes in American Catholicism, Christian Fundamentalism, John Henry Newman, and early modern philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in theology from the University of Dayton as well as an M.A. in philosophy from Georgia State University. When not teaching or endlessly grading, Sean and his wife, Beth, are raising two insanely adorable children, Gwen and Milo, and a wildly destructive dog, Luna, in Onalaska, WI.
Newly published in March, 2025, Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America should be regarded as the standard to which all subsequent works must be measured. An unassuming 200-page Oxford University Press text with a relatively plain black dust jacket and simple red and yellow typeface, Massa’s work bears all the markings of yet another obscure, academic tome destined for the shelves of a few university libraries. Inside, however, hides a masterful account of how mid-20th century Catholic sectarian organizations laid the foundation for the bombastic hard-right Catholic media and internet vitriol plaguing the American Church today.
The crowning achievement of Massa’s account lies in his demonstrating the theological and historical depth of what so often gets dismissed as a thoroughly anti-intellectual and unserious phenomenon. Beginning with the story of Jesuit Leonard Feeney, whose St. Benedict Center developed in response to the liberalism across the street of Harvard University, Massa successfully navigates the confusion of Feeney’s derisive, mocking rhetoric blended with a deeply historical (even if problematic) theological tradition. While it often seems that it is only the antagonism and ridicule of Feeney, and then subsequently Gommar Depauw, Mother Angelica, and several others, that gets bequeathed to the next generation of fundamentalists, Massa properly identifies and then dismantles the theological tradition that undergirds the fundamentalist position. This allows the reader to recognize these theological commitments at work in Massa’s accounts of the more contemporary fundamentalisms of Christendom College, Crisis magazine, and Church Militant. That is, Massa allows his readers to recognize theological method to the (oftentimes literal) madness of the current expressions of Catholic fundamentalism.
While Catholic Fundamentalism in America largely succeeds in the heavy theological lifting of critiquing the fundamentalist framework by employing the contributions of Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, and, specifically, Thomas Kuhn, what rescues it from sharing the fate of so many excellent academic texts is Massa’s commitment to following the discussion into the horrifying depths of internet and social media communities. Massa understands that while Michael Voris’s fundamentalist attacks on the American Catholic Church is important, to fully understand it is to also cite the theological musings of, for instance, “baseballmomof8” and those like her who haunt the halls of Church Militant and Crisis blog comment sections. For better or for worse (and it seems to me that it is much worse), the majority of Catholic theological discourse takes place in these spaces. For academic theologians to overlook these discussions, as has almost entirely been the case, is a terrible mistake. Not only is Massa able to highlight the importance of these internet communities, but he is also able to introduce his readers to the work of those already at work in these places, such as the contributions of the incredibly insightful Mike Lewis (mistakenly identified as “Mile Lewis” by Massa), co-founder of the website Where Peter is.
Despite all of its many successes, the one failing of Massa’s excellent work lies in a mistake that he inherits from one of the first researchers of Christian fundamentalism, George Marsden. Massa identifies fundamentalism, in keeping with Marsden, as a particular Christian militarism, that is, a willingness to describe one’s position as being at war with the remainder of popular, and popular religious, society. Where Marsden, and thus, Massa, fail is not in naming militarism as the hallmark of fundamentalism. I actually agree with them that it is.
But, rather, they fail in situating militarism as a subsequent expression of a particular theological ideology. Massa comes incredibly close to recognizing the heart of fundamentalism when he refers to the theological systems of the early portion of his discussion as solipsistic. He understands that, for many of these fundamentalist voices, their perspectives depend upon epistemologies that are informed entirely upon their own contributions. That is, every fundamentalist is completely and absolutely certain of their conclusions, and there is nothing external to themselves that can shake them from their certainty. What Massa and Marsden fail to recognize is that certainty, epistemological solipsism, is itself a militarism. To reject our own fallibility and the reality that we are irrevocably imbedded in a myriad of communities that stretch out across the world around us, into the generations of the past, and extend into the future, is to be at war with the remainder of the human community.
Certainty is, in its very essence, violence.
Andrew McNeely is a Ph.D. student in Theology at the University of Dayton. McNeely’s research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century evangelicalism and fundamentalism at the intersections of theology, education, politics, and American culture. His dissertation research documents the twentieth-century Christian Day School movement and its contributions to contemporary American evangelicalism and the formation of the Christian Right.
The last decade or so has witnessed an abundance of scholarly exposés highlighting the ever indefatigable energy of American Protestant fundamentalism. A whole slew of scholarly studies have demonstrated that no realm of American culture seems to be untouched by fundamentalism. Aside from the low hanging fruit of politics, studies as of late have explored the following realms of fundamentalism’s extensive reach. To name only a few: education, Wal-Mart, big oil, music, publishing, film, sport industry, the military, the FBI, suburbanization, literary fiction, museum exhibits, fast food, social media spaces, tourist city destinations, and theme parks. The list goes on.
Until recently, however, few studies have explored fundamentalism’s reach into American Catholicism. Can one be Catholic and fundamentalist? In his Catholic Fundamentalism in America, Mark Massa takes up this question and argues, through seven case studies, that some quarters of American Catholicism have indeed succumbed to fundamentalism. Massa locates the origin of Catholic fundamentalism in the controversy surrounding Leonard Feeney, S.J., of the St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, prior to Vatican II. According to Massa, the events that unfolded with the so-called Feeneyites “crafted the paradigm for American Catholic fundamentalism–an anti-modern, reactive, and sectarian impulse that has been with us ever since” (p. 9). Massa identifies five protracted characteristics of Catholic fundamentalism that the Feeneyite controversy birthed: “its sectarian impulse, its championing of an older paradigm of Catholic identity…, its use of American political monikers, its militant tone in denouncing its enemies…of the True Church, and its appeal to apocalyptic urgency in denouncing fellow Catholics…” (p. 18).
Limited space does not permit me to comment on each of Massa’s seven case studies of Catholic fundamentalism, all of which are simultaneously fascinating and bizarre. I would, however, like to introduce a few remarks concerning historiography. Of course, as George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, and an earlier generation of historians portrayed them, fundamentalists aspired to purity in both doctrinal certainty and practice, militantly separating their boundaries from modernism. Massa predicates and develops his five distinctives of Catholic fundamentalism on and from this Marsden-Carpenter paradigm. But as my opening remarks suggest, a new school of historiography has taken shape since the turn of the century, qualifying and overturning previous conceptions and categories that the Marsden-Carpenter paradigm established. Fundamentalists were never really all that isolated; nor were they always militant. In fact, many remained quite amiable. Of course, some leaders militated against secular authorities in order to safeguard their own intellectual resources and institutions, but this didn’t always stem from an anti-modern or sectarian persuasion. As historian Brendan Pietsch noted in his 2015 study of first-generation Dispensationalists: “They did not reside in marginal social positions, read the Bible literally, or militantly oppose modernity.” Fundamentalists, to the contrary, often viewed themselves as distinctly modern, sometimes even suggesting that their organizational efforts were more modern than secular authorities and their related institutions. Under the Marsden-Carpenter paradigm, it’s difficult to square the current GOP’s political platform with the supposedly sectarian, isolated, and anti-modern fundamentalists who helped shape it.
Massa’s exploration of Catholic fundamentalism does not engage sources of the recent historiographical turn in fundamentalist studies. This by no means negates the fact that these groups are Catholic fundamentalists, but one wonders if engagement with the new historiography might have better illuminated the modern strategies at play in these groups’ increasing popularity. In other words, are Catholic fundamentalists, especially those associated with Mother Angelica, EWTN, Crisis magazine, ChurchMilitant, or Dr. Taylor Marshal, Ph.D. (who never fails to broadcast his credentials), really just isolated, sectarian, and anti-modern Catholics? Each respectively appear quite comfortable using modern technologies and being socially active both culturally and politically. Perhaps they see themselves, as the later historiography of fundamentalism concurs, as thoroughly modern actors competing in the spiritual marketplace of consumption, pioneering a new “old-time” vision of Catholicism? These are important questions that remained unexplored in the study.
But Massa has nevertheless conducted a deep amount of spade work for further interpretative developments and studies on Catholic fundamentalism–a subject that remains all too neglected. Therefore, let us thank him.
Laura M. Tringali is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include the intersection of religion, gender, and culture in the United States. Her publications include “Enraptured by Rapture: Production Context, Biblical Interpretation, and Evangelical Eschatology in The Rapture, Left Behind, and This is the End” in Journal of Religion & Film, co-authored with Meghan R. Henning and Robert G. Joseph (Oct 2024); “Life-Giving Bodies: Towards an Analogical Relationship Between Breastfeeding and the Eucharist” in New Horizons (2023); and” The Female Standard: Evaluating Cultural Expectations for Women in Scripture and Politics” in Lumen Et Vita (2020).
Mark Massa’s timely Catholic Fundamentalism in America comes in an early wave of scholarly interest in the parallels between Catholic and evangelical conservatism in the United States. His argument is framed by Thomas Kuhn's now famous notion of paradigm revolutions, a linchpin also found in George Mardsen’s historical work on American Protestants. In the field of scientific study, Kuhn argued, science did not progress as if it were a cumulative process or compilation of discoveries. Scientific progress, rather, is better understood as disjunctive, marked by major paradigm shifts in which a dominant scientific model was demonstrated to have too many anomalies to continue to be the reigning paradigm. At such a point, it would be replaced by a new paradigm. In Massa’s text, the paradigm shift that created Catholic Fundamentalism was the mid-twentieth century transition from a “Church as perfect society” Catholicism marked by an uncompromising claim that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church, to a “People of God” Catholicism marked by ecumenism.
Massa offers five characteristics of Catholic Fundamentalism: sectarianism, the paradigm of Tridentine Catholicism, an ahistorical understanding of the Catholic past, the use of political monikers in the presentation of Church teaching, and rhetoric of apocalyptic urgency. Through a thematic exploration of exemplars including Leonard Feeney, the Society of St. Pius X, and Mother Angelica, he makes a compelling case for not only the existence of but also the prevalence of the Catholic Fundamentalism that has surrounded us for decades.
Massa makes an important point that a movement of fundamentalism among Catholics emerged before the Second Vatican Council. Since conservative Catholic distaste for the novus ordo and other reforms following the council is a salient characteristic of the movement in our present moment, one may be tempted to mark Vatican II as the birth of a traditionalist counter-movement. Massa points to Leonard Feeney and the religious order he founded after he was dismissed from the Jesuits, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as an early source of fundamentalist thought among Catholics in the United States. He describes the group as illustrative of “an anti-modern, reactive, and sectarian impulse that has been with us ever since” (9).
The Second Vatican Council, though, does mark a significant moment. Feeney’s contingent found themselves at odds with the post-Vatican II Church because, like the Protestant Fundamentalist who came before them, there was a paradigm shift that they rejected. Not “higher criticism” of the Bible that challenged the perfect truth of the Scriptures or Darwinian theory that transformed scientific thinking, as were significant factors in the shaping of Protestant Fundamentalism. But rather, a paradigm shift toward ecumenism for the Catholic Church that seemed, for Feeney and those that followed, to make too many concessions to modernity and to undermine the Catholic claim to being the One True Church.
As Massa explains and draws comparisons to Protestant Fundamentalism in the United States, he relies heavily on the influential work of George Marsden and Margaret Bendroth to the detriment of engaging more recent scholarly work. The texts Massa frequently cites from Marsden and Bendroth were published in 1980 and 1993, respectively. Though Massa’s writing predates a second Trump Administration, scholarly and journalistic interest in evangelical support of Donald Trump and the political power of this voting bloc has dominated the conversation about American evangelicals (Fundamentalists) in the last decade. Fundamentalist Catholics, to use Massa’s apt label, share the militant and “culture war” mindset with American evangelicals. In 2025, the alignment of Catholic and evangelical Trump-supporters is a crucial part of the conversation about the political and cultural significance of both groups.
Massa’s historical and theological work in this text is both timely and important. His historical narrative makes illuminating connections that will catalyze scholarly discourse on contemporary Catholicism in the United States.
Author's Response:
I want to thank Sean Swain Martin, Andrew McNeely, and Laura M. Tringali for their very smart and insightful reviews of my monograph on Catholic fundamentalism. All three make important observations that I need to consider and incorporate into my text for the book's second edition (e.g., more of a focus on militarism as an essential feature of the movement, the inclusion of "amiable" fundamentalists who don't want to break away, etc.). And as I always tell my own doctoral students, "you will soon be offering smart rejoinders to my scholarship that I will have to consider in revising my scholarly work." These three young scholars have done just that, so I'll head off to the library today to look up the texts they mention and ponder how I will rewrite the next version of the text. -Mark S. Massa, S.J.
