Strange Objects
by Susan Trollinger
They call it the Creation Museum. It’s a museum. At least that is what Answers in Genesis (the Creation Museum’s parent organization) says it is. Although a number of scholars and commentators have contested that claim (and for good reason), we decided to go with it. So, assuming it is a museum, we asked, what is it a museum of? What is its object?
Art museums display art objects. Natural history museums display objects from the past that help to tell the story of nature over time. A women’s history museum or an African-American museum or a Native American museum displays objects taken from the history of a group of people that can help tell the story of that group of people over time. And so forth.
What is the object of the Creation Museum? Creation? Objects taken from creation that help tell the story of creation?
If we look at what is on display in the Bible Walkthrough Experience, which AiG says is the centerpiece of the museum, what we see there are a lot of life-size dioramas that feature stuff that the designers of the Creation Museum made in order to re-create scenes and stories from the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Adams and Eves (there are a few of each of them), animals (including dinosaurs, of course), plants, a Tree of Knowledge, a serpent, a waterfall and pool, lily pads . . . you get the idea.
What does it mean to have a museum whose apparent object is stuff that was created by AiG designers to stand in for the actual stuff of Creation? If much (most?) of the stuff on display in the Bible Walkthrough isn’t actually from Creation or the process of Creation how can it tell the story of Creation? How can this fake plant or that fake animal or that fake Adam help tell the story of Creation?
On AiG’s logic, all this fake stuff helps to tell the story of Creation because Genesis talks about it (or some of it—there are no references to dinosaurs in Genesis). If Genesis says there was an Adam, an Eve, a Tree of Knowledge, then they existed. And if they existed then re-creating them out of 21st-century materials and 3-D printers (or whatever) and putting them in a life-size diorama (or whatever) helps to tell the story.
Such a logic would strike most curators for mainstream natural history, science, or even art museums as odd indeed.
Is the object of the Creation Museum all this fake stuff? Or is it something else? In Righting America, we argued that by re-creating scenes from Genesis 1-11 in life-size (and smaller) dioramas, the point was to enable the visitor to experience the “historical referent” to which Genesis presumably refers. In other words, the point is not to display objects from the Creation that can tell us something about what that was like. Instead, the point is to create an experience within something called a “museum” that appears to refer to a real historical event that is captured in the pages of Genesis.
Even more importantly, by experiencing the scenes from Genesis as if they are real historical referents about which one can create a diorama and display it in a museum, the Creation Museum enables the visitor to experience a literal Word as if one, and only one, actually exists.
A Gift from White Evangelicals: President Trump
by William Trollinger
Exit polling data reveal that white evangelicals voted for Trump by an overwhelming 81 to 16 percent margin. Evangelical support for Trump was particularly important in swing states such as Florida.
To be sure, there are evangelicals who, like historian and blogger Chris Gehrz, are deeply dismayed by the fact that their fellow evangelicals voted for
a misogynistic, xenophobic, racist demagogue who appeals to every one of the lowest impulses in the American character; an uninformed outsider who has no meaningful experience predictive of success in the highest of political offices; a lazy narcissist whose character lacks all of the traits — wisdom, prudence, humility, empathy, willingness to learn from mistakes, openness to multiple viewpoints, commitment to national service — that normally check the arrogance common to presidents.
Gehrz’s dismay is not shared by the vast majority of his fellow evangelicals. Instead, the Trump victory has sent evangelical leaders such as Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell, Jr. into fits of ecstasy, with an euphoric Falwell exclaiming to the media that the victor was the “dream candidate” for American evangelicals.
It may seem startling to find evangelical leaders describing a “misogynistic, xenophobic, racist demagogue” as the “dream candidate.” But as we have been saying here for months, there is absolutely nothing surprising about evangelical support for Donald Trump.
In Righting America we have noted that, for the past century, much of American evangelicalism has been characterized by a fervent commitment to political conservatism, unfettered capitalism, and patriarchy. When it comes to race, white evangelicals resisted even the mildest challenges to segregation and voting restrictions, only very belatedly “recant[ing] their opposition to civil rights for African Americans” (187).
It turns out that race is central to the Christian Right story. Driven by “anger over the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to remove tax-exempt status from Christian schools that discriminated on the basis of race” (187), in the 1970s leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Sr. worked with Republican leaders to organize white evangelicals into a political movement. Soon the Christian Right became “the most reliable and perhaps the most important constituency within the Republican Party” (6).
From the beginning this Christian Right has been much more Right than Christian. The morality and character of conservative Republican leaders has never been their primary concern, be it Ronald Reagan’s lack of religiosity (they supported Reagan against the devout Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter) or Donald Trump’s litany of moral offenses. More stunning, perhaps, the Christian Right has happily ignored the teachings of Jesus when it comes to their economic and political commitments, as the aforementioned Jeffress made clear when he said that he would vote for Trump over Jesus because Jesus would be soft on terrorism.
Right. And in the end, that “soft” Jesus ended up on a cross. That’s not for the Christian Right. The Christian Right is not about losing. It is about winning. And the election of Donald Trump makes clear that the Christian Right is indeed winning, thanks much to the fact it has created “an intricate web of local evangelical churches and national organizations” (6) devoted to advancing their conservative political and economic agenda. Since the 1990s one crucial component of this right-wing juggernaut has been – as we detail in Righting America – Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis empire, with its “mind-boggling flood of print, media, and social media material” (11) and with its Creation Museum and now Ark Encounter, all of which combine to serve “as a Christian Right arsenal in the culture war” (191).
In his Times Higher Education (UK) review of Righting America Randy Malamud concludes by noting that, “Trumpism is the extrapolation of the Creation Museum and Righting America is right, America: we need to figure out – and quickly! – what is going on here.”
If this was not clear before Tuesday, it should be now.
Notes from a Trump Rally
Trump Rally, Regent University, October 22, 2016
by Jason Hentschel
When I planned to attend the Conference on Faith and History’s October meeting at Regent University, one of the largest evangelical schools in the nation, little did I know that a Trump rally would break out. While most of us in the CFH claim some affiliation with evangelical Christianity, I was probably the only one giddily excited that the Secret Service forced us to move across campus to make way for Trump’s undisguised effort to keep Virginia’s white evangelicals in the fold.
I skipped the last session of the conference – along with, come to find out, not a few of my colleagues – to see if I couldn’t get a firsthand look at Trumpism. I wasn’t disappointed.
Here are a few thoughts from the rally:
1). Donald Trump was uncharacteristically restrained and his talk relatively uninteresting. Those who preceded him on stage, however, weren’t. With televangelist and Regent founder Pat Robertson leading things off, Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, Tony Suarez of the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, and Virginia State Senator Frank Wagner pounded home a litany of classic evangelical touchstones, from abortion to Christian Zionism to religious liberty.
“We stand on holy ground,” Pastor Suarez prayed, evoking images of America as once again that Puritan “city on a hill.” He continued, “The covenant that those first settlers made stands the same: This land is dedicated to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Not to be outdone, Trump later chimed in with one of his more catchy sayings of the afternoon, “Imagine what our country could accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one God, saluting one American flag!”
Much, of course, was made of Clinton’s “Deplorables” tag, which has become something of a badge of honor for Trump’s evangelical supporters. “You know, in Hillary Clinton’s world, if you believe in the sanctity of life, you’re deplorable,” Senator Wagner exclaimed, re-appropriating the label to serve as both the evangelical and the Southern standard in this culture war. “If you’re a person of faith, you’re deplorable! If you’re a hard-workin’ Southerner, that somebody’d call ‘redneck,’ you’re deplorable! If you believe in fighting and protecting our God-given constitutional rights, if you believe in that, you’re deplorable!”
Ralph Reed, citing the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s statistic that seventeen million evangelicals failed to vote during the last election, drew a direct line from American patriotism to Christian nationalism, with a bit of Zionism thrown in: “Now, my friends, there are patriots, who rest in hallowed graves, beneath white marble crosses and Stars of David, in graveyards that dot every continent on this world, who gave their lives, who gave their limbs, who gave all that could be given so that you and I could have the most precious right that someone can have, the right to choose [our] own leaders.”
“God’s people,” Reed concluded, “are going to rise up like a mighty army… and we are going to shock the political establishment on November eighth!”
But, it was Wagner who drew tight the knot between evangelicals and Trump, foreshadowing a theme that could have summed up the afternoon: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re in a war. We’re in a war for this country. It’s a decision point: do we turn into a socialist country, or do we take our country back and make America…Great Again!”
Evangelical Christian values or Socialism. There, we were told, lies the battle for America’s soul.
2). That said, the Trump supporters I met were real people with real concerns. There’s no denying that we tend to run in circles made up of folk more or less like us, and this surely includes our political leanings. Still, I grew up in red Texas and in an especially conservative family – I don’t remember knowing a democrat until I got to graduate school – but I simply could not find a Trump supporter back home. Where were these supposedly millions of Trump supporters? I really wanted to know.
And, what I found was that they were, well, rather normal. I don’t think there’s any denying that Trumpism, as a movement, has some valid concerns, and I’m hardly the first critic to say so. In various ways, these folks’ have been ignored as a constituency, even if much of what they’re saying can be disputed. They feel cast-off, if not taken advantage of, and that’s a feeling as old as America.
3). Trumpism isn’t going to go away, and certainly not any time soon. Again, I’m not the first to suggest as much. Trump’s political brilliance lies in the fact that he has discovered and stoked something much bigger than him. This was readily apparent at the rally, where the invective against Clinton, Capitol Hill, and the status quo drowned out whatever cheers there were for the real estate mogul (and there were plenty of those). It is also readily apparent in those recent, frightening threats to remove Hillary at any cost.
The folk I stood next to in Virginia genuinely believed – to call it merely a “feeling” would be too weak – that Washington had not just ignored them; it had forsaken them. It took no time at all for things to get heated when a number of Trump supporters failed to make it into the rally before the gates closed, but it took even less time for them to start blaming Hillary and the corrupt political establishment for buying off that poor Secret Service agent who made the call to close the gates in the first place.
So strong, in fact, was this anti-Washington sentiment that I wouldn’t be surprised if Trumpism continues its populist barrage even should Trump win tomorrow. Sometimes the fires we stoke outgrow our capacity to contain them. Needless to say, whatever happens on Tuesday, Trumpism isn’t going away.
4). And, that’s because Trump and his campaign aren’t the only conductors driving this train. That Trump came to Regent explicitly to court evangelicals highlights, at the very least, the strength of the Christian Right as a political and cultural bloc. And yet, while the evangelicalism we see supporting Trump is bigger (and more diverse) than just one presidential candidate, it also appears well encapsulated in this year’s race. Much has been made of the apparent hypocrisy of evangelicals actively supporting, if not campaigning, for a candidate who flouts their moral sensibilities. (Notably, I didn’t see anybody wearing the “Bomb the S— out of ISIS” shirts that were for sale at the entrances to the rally.) Indeed, many of us have wondered just what it would take to make these folk finally jump ship.
Enter Pat Robertson, who stumped for his fellow billionaire to open the rally. The one-time presidential candidate has hardly been shy about his support for Trump, support he continued to dole out even after one of the most damaging weeks of the candidate’s campaign. What Pat gave us that Saturday afternoon was, if anything, a glance at the top of evangelicalism’s list of political ideals. As our “secular” nation stood shocked at a presidential candidate bragging about freely grabbing women “by the p—-,” Robertson chose to highlight one thing in his minute and a half stump, and that was Trump’s economic resiliency:
“You know, he’s gone from bankruptcy to ten billion dollars, so that’s not too shabby.”
The televangelist then went on to offer one of his patented predictions:
“I want to give a warning to the bookies in Vegas,” he said leaning into the podium. “If you bet against Donald Trump, you’re gonna lose your shirt.”
Forget the Christian moral life. Forget abortion, drugs, war, crime, and even religious liberty – all common themes pounded by others from that political pulpit that afternoon and all ostensibly important issues for evangelicals, not to mention a pastor to millions of them. But, for Pat Robertson, what matters most about tomorrow’s election – indeed, what matters most about this candidate, this country, and this world – is our pocketbooks, and whether or not they’re going to grow or shrink.
Sadly, that seems to be what Pat thinks his evangelical constituency cares most about, too.
American Rationalist reviews Righting America at the Creation Museum
The American Rationalist, published by the Center for Inquiry, features an excellent and comprehensive review of Righting America at the Creation Museum in the September/October 2016 issue. Here’s an excerpt:
The narrative tone is one of calm and restraint, which I must confess is more than I, for one, could have managed. These writers have handled the Creation Museum with a carefully focused magnifying glass; I’m afraid I would have used a bulldozer…
Susan and William Trollinger have shown us the Creation Museum with a starkness and a lucidity that borders on being frightful…One comes away not with a feeling of having read a book but with the feeling of having visited the Museum for real and having found it a dangerous (because so frequently persuasive) attack on reason itself and (I would add) so vociferous a denial of real science that, were the Museum’s viewpoint possessed of sociopolitical power, we would find ourselves hurled backward in time to an age in which independent thought was an evil not to be tolerated and science did not exist at all…
The Trollingers’ book is highly recommended as a fair-minded exploration of something most of us could scarcely have managed to write about in so even-toned a manner.
If you have had a chance to read Righting America, we’d love to hear your response, too!
Show and Tell at the Creation Museum
by Patrick Thomas
In this post, Patrick Thomas examines the process of re-configuring the word of God into a multimedia experience for Creation Museum visitors.
Each time I have left the Creation Museum, I have felt dizzy and a bit overwhelmed. Part of the reason is that there is just so much to see – dioramas, videos, replicas of archeological artifacts, animatronic people, small live animals, insects, scientific-looking graphs, maps, charts, timelines, and, of course, dinosaurs. This massive visual inundation is bolstered by a raucous blaring of narration, animal and environmental noises delivered by state-of-the-art sound systems.
During my second visit, I became more aware as I moved through the museum how these visual and sonic displays direct visitors’ attention. The goal, it seemed to me, was to ensure that visitors had plenty of evidence to see and hear the message of Biblical literalism put forth by the museum. And to be sure, to an unquestioning visitor, there appears to be plenty of evidence to support the Creation Museum’s claims about the literal history of a six, twenty-four-hour day creation.
In other words, by creating a constant, immersive, inundating experience at the museum, visitors are so overwhelmed by information that their ability to make connections across rooms, to question displays, or even to understand the placement of (let alone read) each Bible quote is diminished. Visitors certainly get their money’s worth, if “worth” was measured in amount of cognitive overload. And the cognitive overload is powerful for the museum; it’s a way to assert both the factual claim about a six, twenty-four-hour day creation and a way to assuage questions about this claim through the mental exhaustion of visitors. By the end of their time in the Creation Museum, visitors with lingering questions are simply too tired to ask.
The multimedia displays stand out to me more than any other aspect of the museum because they draw pointed attention to the artifice that runs throughout the museum. Put simply, the digital technologies used to create visual and aural encounters with creation defy any semblance of the natural world. They are beautiful, but in a way that is high-gloss, plastic, and slick. In displaying creation this way, the museum constructs encounters for visitors that further separate, rather than draw closer, the museum’s historical narrative of creation and the natural world itself.
One place in the museum where this separation is especially apparent is the Wonders Room, a startlingly bright space with lots of screens displaying high-resolution images and backlighting that visitors enter upon leaving four previously dark, loud rooms of the museum (the faux-gritty Graffiti Alley, an evening walk in the Culture in Crisis neighborhood, a twinkling lights-laden Time Tunnel, and the IMAX-inspired Six Days Theater). Sounds from the Six Days film, which runs on a loop, are audible in the Wonders Room, which serves as vestibule to the Garden of Eden.
On first pass, the Wonders Room is oddly reminiscent of a department store cosmetics counter (compare one to the other). The poster-size still images of contemporary creation appear beside each other, but it’s never quite clear what visitors are supposed to make of these images. Above each back-lit frame of these images, a smaller flat-screen TV displays scientific data alongside still and moving images of nature. In addition to the digital images, visitors see Biblical quotes taken out of context and displayed on screens and other poster-sized display boards (for a more detailed description, see Righting America, pp. 75-77).
What’s difficult about the Wonders Room is not just its technologically rich, and hence highly artificial, displays; it is also difficult to discern the ostensible function of this space. Prior to the Wonders Room, visitors are asked to “go back in time” from our contemporary world (signified by Graffiti Alley and the Culture in Crisis room) to the dawn of creation (which was, apparently, videotaped for us to watch in the Six Days Theater). Why not just move visitors directly into the Garden of Eden? And what does this shopping mall-like room have to do with creation?
For me, the ambiguity of the Wonders Rooms has an especially important role to play as a lead-in to the Garden of Eden diorama. Specifically, the Wonders Room serves as a space in which images of contemporary nature, in high-resolution and mediated by digital technologies, are invoked as a way to construct an equivalence for visitors between the contemporary and the ancient, between the artificial and the natural. Biblical quotations are posited as descriptions of, if not explanations for, the images of nature that visitors see, and these images are so appealing that they reduce any distinction between the glossy image of nature and nature itself.
What happens in the Wonders Room – the room that visitors experience before entering the Garden of Eden – is an erasure, specifically between the story of creation as told through the word of God in Genesis, and the story of creation as shown in the visual diorama of the museum’s Garden of Eden. As a result, what visitors do not see is that, despite the museum’s claim of presenting a literal account of creation, the Genesis 1 story of creation has indeed been altered. Severely so.
Quite literally (pardon the expression), the museum takes the Genesis 1 creation story out of the word of God and remakes it in the image and likeness of man. Or, perhaps more accurately, the story is re-created in the likeness of AiG.
Setting aside the problems associated with literal readings of Genesis (which writers on this blog have noted often – see a partial representation here, here, and here), what’s crucial to understand about the museum is that the artifice used to construct its representations of the ancient world cannot follow a literal reading of Genesis. To do so, the entire Genesis account, in its entirety, would have to be present in the museum, which it is not. The absence of the entire Genesis story is significant; after all, in a literalist tradition, why would the museum house anything but the Word of God, in it’s full-length glory?
If AiG cares about its status as authority on matters of biblical creation, it would be right to acknowledge the interpretive liberties that are absolutely necessary in transforming the creation story told to the creation story shown for a museum-like experience. Until then, visitors would be well advised to acknowledge even before entering the building that the story they are about to encounter is the result of countless interpretive decisions, and therefore, to view the museum with a more careful, critical eye toward how the word of God is reconfigured.
The Bunkum of “Biblical Creation”
by Frederick Schmidt
Frederick W. Schmidt is the Rueben P. Job Chair in Spiritual Formation at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL and blogs at Patheos.com
From the vantage point of exegetical scholarship, one of the most troubling phrases in the debate with creationists is the phrase, “biblical creation.” It appears over and over again in the literature on the subject, as the articles here at “Righting America” attest, and if you Google “biblical creation” in just .57 seconds the internet coughs up 20,900,000 results.
The phrase, of course, is shorthand for an approach to Genesis 1 that reads the poetry of the book as a “creation account” and offers up a schema for the way in which that creative act was accomplished. More subtly, but powerfully, the phrase also ties the schema to the authority of Scripture, making an implicit appeal to that authority, thereby pitting Scripture against science. The power of the appeal to “biblical creation” is such that it has drawn the parties in the debate over creationism into debates about the inspiration of Scripture. Worse yet, it has forced younger churchgoers into an implied choice between fidelity to the Bible (if not God) and ostensibly God-less alternatives.
The power of such appeals is difficult to over-estimate, particularly in Protestant circles where Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura (or “Scripture alone”) holds sway. Having chipped away at this issue some years ago in working with undergraduates, the world-ending weight of such choices is nothing short of an existential and spiritual crisis of the first order for young adults who have been raised in homes where this approach to both the Bible and the Christian faith hold sway. On the face of it, conversations about the subject appear to be all about interpreting Scripture, but for adolescents and young adults such conversations end up being about the very possibility of believing in God.
The frustrating thing about all this is that there is no such thing as “biblical creation,” not if one wants to argue that the writer of Genesis is offering a description of the way in which God brought creation into existence. While Christians and even Jews have interpreted it as such, it is far more likely that Genesis 1 is an affirmation of the exclusive claims made by the God of Judaism in the context of a polytheistic environment. Read as such, what the writer of Genesis is saying is, “On the first day, my God created your god and your god” and on the second day, “My God created your god and your god,” etc.…i.e., “your gods are not God.”
In other words, the writer of Genesis is offering what we might call a “confession of faith” in the primacy of the God of Israel. He is not writing a history of creation, never mind anything that might qualify as a scientific account of how God created the universe. This reading of Genesis also accords with the rest of the first three chapters, which is really the writer’s way of saying, “Here is how the world and our lives are,” not “Here is how the world and our lives came into being.”
Convincing creationists of this is, of course, nearly impossible. The religious authorization for their views is circular and creates the world-ending conundrum that the undergraduates in my classroom faced and others still do. If you don’t believe in the historical-scientific-literalist reading of Scripture you are, by definition, lost to both God and the church. But getting clear about the meaning of Genesis is the key to setting aside a range of topics associated with biblical interpretation with creationists is a non-starter and can lead to nowhere good for those who want to engage both the scientific and exegetical questions.
Here Comes Geocentrism!
by William Trollinger
While Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species posed challenges to traditional understandings of the Bible, many Protestants had little trouble accommodating Darwin’s ideas. But a significant minority resisted. Holding to inerrancy – the Bible is God’s Word, factually accurate and without error – these archconservatives asserted that the Genesis creation account is to be read plainly, “literally.”
But there is no such thing as one and only one literal reading of the Bible. In the century after Origin of Species most conservative Protestants held to an “old earth” creationism, rejecting mainstream biology while accepting mainstream geology. Regarding Genesis 1, they either read it as allowing for a large gap of time between the first and third verses of Genesis, or they held that the “days” in Genesis 1 were actually eras of undefined length.
There were creationists who viewed such biblical interpretations as insufficiently literal. In 1961 John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood, in which they argued that the universe is less than 10,000 years old, and that a global Flood described in Genesis 6-8 created the earth’s geological strata. Within a matter of decades this young earth creationism – with its rejection of mainstream geology and astronomy – had supplanted old earth creationism among most Protestant fundamentalists.
But the young earth consensus is itself under challenge by “geocentric” creationists, who argue that a truly literal reading of the Bible also requires a rejection of mainstream cosmology. As Gerardus Bouw, a leading geocentrist, has argued:
“So, if Genesis 1:1, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ is a clear statement that God created, then Ecclesiastes 1:5, ‘The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose,’ is just as clear a statement of geocentricity. And with that, we come to the real issue: Is the Scripture to be the final authority on all matters on which it teaches, or are scholars, to be the ultimate authority? The central issue is not the motion of the earth, nor is it the creation of the earth. The issue is final authority, is it to be the words of God, or the words of men?” (qtd. in Righting 146-147)
Ah, biblical inerrancy. The ever-expanding diversity of literal interpretations of Genesis continues apace. Perhaps the flat earth is just around the corner.
The Consequences of Winning (or, Who Really Won the Ham-Nye Debate?)
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
When Bill Nye (the Science Guy) debated Ken Ham (CEO of Answers in Genesis, parent organization of the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter), many commentators said that Ham won the debate just by being on stage with Bill Nye and looking like a good guy who wants to spread the Christian message.
According to the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, to be a good Christian one needs to read Genesis as an accurate historical account. That means believing that Adam and Eve were real, historic people; that the whole universe was created in six 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago; that dinosaurs walked the Earth with humans; and that Noah’s flood was a global catastrophe that accounts for all evidence for an old Earth.
But Noah’s flood doesn’t just explain away the evidence of an old Earth. According to the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, the global flood also provides instruction for salvation.
During the flood, the waters rose above every mountain top and remained that high for weeks. No land creature could survive that flood, unless they were on the Ark. But only eight people were on the Ark. And, according to a placard at Ark Encounter, there were as many as 20 billion people living on Earth when the flood waters started to rise.
Why did only eight people survive?
According to Answers in Genesis, God saved Noah (and his family) because he was a righteous man. The rest of humanity was not. Not a single one—not one adult, youth, child, or infant—was worthy of God’s grace.
The message for us? We either get right with a God who saw fit to destroy 20 billion people or prepare for the consequences. In the end, this is Ken Ham’s Christian message.
If You Disagree, You Are the Problem
by William Trollinger
This post begins with a story from Bill about an experience he had as an undergraduate at Bethel College, a Baptist school in St. Paul, Minnesota. For those readers who did not attend an evangelical college, see below for an example of the fun you missed out on!
Very early in my freshman year John and I became friends. We shared a love of basketball, and his humor was infectious. But sometime that fall John fell head-over-heels in love with a young woman who happened to be – as were many students at Bethel – a fundamentalist. Over a matter of weeks John became increasingly rigid in his theological views, and soon he and I found ourselves in the midst of intense debates. In the process John became very frustrated with my inability to understand Scripture the way he now did.
Finally, one evening in the dorm John set out two chairs, motioned for me to sit in one of them, and pulled out a Bible. He opened it to a passage in the Gospels (I can’t recall the text, but it was related to one of our disagreements), handed me the Bible, and asked me to read the designated verses. I complied, and when I indicated to him that I had finished reading, John exclaimed, “Now you see! Now you understand what I have been saying!”
But I didn’t see. As I told him, I still did not interpret the biblical passage in the way he did. This infuriated John. After a heated back-and-forth argument he finally just lost it, yelling at me that it was my prideful heart that kept me from seeing the truth. He then stormed out of the room, slamming the door for good effect.
One way to understand this story is as a ridiculous argument between two eighteen-year-old college students who did not know what they were talking about. But when it comes to John’s ad hominem attack, the reality is that this is simply standard practice in fundamentalism. This is not because fundamentalists are necessarily mean. Instead, the proclivity for the ad hominem argument is built into the touchstone of fundamentalist theology: biblical inerrancy.
According to inerrancy, the Bible is without error and without contradiction, factually accurate, and the final authority on every matter on which it speaks. More than this, and essential for inerrancy, the Bible “is also perspicacious, so clear that everyone everywhere and at all times can understand what the text says and what it means” (Righting 112).
All well and good. But here’s the problem. What about the fact that – even among those who hold to inerrancy – there is an incredible and ever-expanding diversity of biblical interpretations? As we note in Righting America,
The notion of biblical inerrancy . . . has not solved this problem. One can maintain that the Bible is “God-breathed,” errorless, and true on all matters upon which it speaks. One can proclaim with great conviction that it is consistent and perspicuous. One can promise to read it ‘literally.” But the question of what the text means remains, and the disagreements over what the text means remain. (134)
If the Bible is errorless, accurate, consistent, authoritative, and clear, how can this be?
Obviously, the problem cannot be with the inerrant text.
Obviously, the problem has to be with the reader. The reader who has the wrong interpretation. The reader who, in the eyes of Answers in Genesis (AiG), fails to interpret Genesis 1-11 as providing an accurate account of the six, 24-hour day creation of the universe followed by a global flood that drowned millions or billions of human beings.
And why do these readers of Genesis get it so wrong? According to AiG, “the simple answer is sin,” sin driven by “the desire to modify [the] understanding of God’s Word in order to accommodate human reason and the reigning views of science” (Righting 114). As Ken Ham says again and again and again, this sinful desire to modify the Bible – to “compromise” its meaning — is particularly true of scholars, who are driven by (to quote Ham) an “’academic pride’” that leads them “’to become so puffed up with all their supposed knowledge . . . that they make themselves the authority instead of God’s Word‘” (Righting 222).
If you disagree, you are the problem. You are sinful, you are prideful: that’s why you disagree. Of course, the ad hominem argument can always be turned back onto the attackers. Given that Ham and AiG claim to possess the One True Interpretation of God’s Word, it is almost too easy to turn the tables.
In other words, who’s prideful here?
When Inerrancy Isn’t Enough
by Jason Hentschel
Jason A. Hentschel has a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Dayton. His research focuses on the intersection of evangelicalism and modern American culture. He has contributed chapters to The Bible in American Life and The Handbook of the Bible in America, both forthcoming from Oxford University Press (2016-17).
In his 2014 debate with Bill Nye the Science Guy, Ken Ham’s defense of creationism rested on his appeal to the Bible’s perspicuity, or clarity. The biblical account of creation and the flood, he insisted, should be read as literal history – indeed, all of Genesis, not to mention 21 other biblical books and countless passages in others, should be read this way, too. As Ham put it to Nye that night, this is simply the “natural” way to read it. The meaning of Genesis, including its historicity, is obvious – so obvious, in fact, that there can be only one reason why we would interpret the book otherwise: we just don’t like it.
As the Trollingers explain, what Ham offers us here is a moral, if not a saving, choice:
People willfully reject what they know in their hearts to be true, that is, the literal accounts of Creation and the Flood. More specifically, sin is manifested in the desire to modify our understanding of God’s Word in order to accommodate human reason and the reigning views of science. (Righting America 114)
Thankfully, it appears there might be some cause to take Ken Ham’s emphasis on the Bible’s perspicuity as one widely misunderstood attempt at hyperbole. A common textbook used to teach biblical interpretation at evangelical colleges – including official “Creation College” Cedarville University – readily concedes that the Bible’s meaning might not be as clear as Ham has made it out to be. We are warned – curiously, much like we are in the Starting Points room at the Creation Museum – that “all of us read a text on the basis of our own background and proclivities,” and that this fact thereby forces us to discover and confront these presuppositions if we are to understand the Bible’s true meaning. (See Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral, 367).
Even Answers magazine takes a more cautious line than its founder. For instance, Tim Chaffey admits that “while the Bible is generally plain in its meaning, proper interpretation requires careful study and is not always an easy task.” He then goes on to lay out what he calls a “historical-grammatical” approach to interpreting the Bible, the goal of which is to discover the author’s intended meaning, or AIM. While the perspicuity of scripture is maintained as a principle of faithful interpretation, it’s offset by an insistence that we read each text extremely carefully and in light of its grammatical and historical contexts, as well as its place in the Bible as a whole.
What’s more, Chaffey concedes that we should listen hard to scripture’s past interpreters:
It is important to know how those who have gone before us have interpreted a passage in question. Although our doctrine must be based squarely on the Word of God and not on tradition or what some great leader believed, we should allow ourselves to be informed by the work of others who have spent long hours studying God’s Word. (“How Should We Interpret the Bible, Part 1”)
Indeed, Chaffey warns that we must “battle against our pride, which tempts us to think that our own views are always right or that the beliefs of a particular teacher are necessarily right.”
Such generosity and sober introspection is a welcome sight in young Earth creationist literature, but how this translates into action at the museum and other sites is a mystery. It’s a story quite common in the history of evangelical biblical interpretation, where the difficulty of actually interpreting scripture has been duly noted and the diversity of interpretations admitted, if uncomfortably. Two remarkably different visions of the nature of God, salvation, and the moral life have existed in evangelicalism for centuries in the form of Calvinism and Arminianism, and evangelicals who differ on these lines have figured out a way to live in the same religious house together. (Suffice it to say, Calvinists believe that God determines or controls our actions, whereas Arminians believe that we have free will.)
But, occasionally a particular interpretation of scripture does arise, one that stands so far beyond the pale it is considered an outright assault upon biblical inerrancy and authority. In the early 1980s, it was the reasoned claim that Matthew employed myth and creative fiction in his construction of the first Gospel. In the ‘90s, it surfaced in a segment of evangelicals who wondered if the gospel’s gender neutrality, along with various biblical accounts of early female leaders, might not open the door for women pastors today. A decade later, it came in the form of a complex question concerning whether or not God had knowledge of every future event, and led to an all-out civil war within evangelicalism’s leading academic society.
At each of these moments, outright assertions of the Bible’s inerrancy failed to fix the problem of interpretive disagreement, and so evangelical powerbrokers reached for the only weapon that could do the trick: declamations of character couched as commitment to biblical authority. Suggestions that the Evangelists used fiction and myth evidenced an historical skepticism characteristic of liberal antisupernaturalists. The push for women’s all-access pass to the ministry was an obvious capitulation to modern feminism. Doubts about God’s omniscience smelled suspiciously of Hegelian panentheism, which held that even God evolved over time, rather than biblical theism.
And today questions about Genesis’s historicity betray the incursion of atheistic evolutionary theory. Evangelicals characteristically encounter these moments right where the rubber meets the road, where their only solution to the failure of biblical inerrancy is to write off differences of opinion as products of intellectual dishonesty and biblical infidelity. Sadly, though less and less unexpectedly, lost in all of this is that warm generosity said to be characteristic of evangelical interpretation, that which takes seriously others’ “long hours of study” and the humility that maybe – just maybe – we might be wrong about something.
