Evangelical Schools Under God’s (or Ken Ham’s) Judgment
by William Trollinger
In his forthcoming book, Evangelicalism in America, Randall Balmer tells the story of addressing a group of Christian college presidents. When the discussion turned to the question of what they feared most in their jobs, Balmer reasonably expected that they would say budgetary crises or faculty scandals or liability suits. But these presidents suggested a stunningly different nightmare scenario:
“Their biggest fear, each of them agreed, was the possibility that James Dobson of Focus on the Family would take a dislike to their schools, for one reason or another, and use his huge media empire . . . to issue a condemnation. This had happened to other schools, they assured me, and the consequences were devastating: Parents refused to send their children, and donations dried up. For these presidents, the lesson was clear: Don’t mess with Dobson or, by extension, with any of the moguls of the Religious Right.”
Balmer’s story further confirms that American evangelicalism is dominated by entrepreneurial gurus who, by dint of their huge followings, exercise enormous influence over evangelical organizations. This is particularly true for evangelical colleges, most of which are small, tuition-driven institutions with only modest endowments.
Ken Ham makes no bones about the fact that he seeks to exercise such influence. As we describe in chapter five of Righting America, “Judgment,” Ham calls to task evangelical colleges for their failure to uphold the young earth creationist line when it comes to science and interpreting the first few chapters of Genesis.
But Ham does not limit himself to a general lament about the state of evangelical higher education. He names names, calling out particular faculty members and particular Christian colleges and seminaries that are “willing to compromise on Genesis and not take an authoritative stand on the clear words that God has given to us in His Word.”
There are two points to note here. First, as we suggest in Righting America, there is no question that Ham’s condemnations are having an impact on evangelical colleges. Ditto for his praise, as “safe” schools are placed on Answer in Genesis’ list of creation colleges. And as the AiG empire expands, Ham’s influence on evangelical educational institutions expands with it.
The second point has to do with audience. While Ham expends great energy in attacking secularists and atheists and liberals, in many ways his real audience is evangelicalism. In fact, he uses his attacks on “the enemy” to help constitute American evangelicalism as a young earth creationist army in the culture war. As evangelicals who have endured his attacks can attest, and as we document in chapter five of Righting America, if you do not line up with him, you are part of the enemy force.
Judgment time, indeed.
Righting America reviewed in the LA Times
This week’s Los Angeles Times features a review of Righting America at the Creation Museum. Colin Dickey, essayist and author of Afterlives of the Saints (Unbridled Books, 2012), says
“…the most compelling elements of the book focus on the history, evolution and construction of the museum as a cultural space and then explore how the Creation Museum fits into that history….reading the museum as one would a work of literature, the Trollingers demonstrate how the museum presents this false choice: Rather than being about providing the visitor with the means to make an informed choice, the Creation Museum is about “constructing the visitor in a totalizing history (or story that purports to account for every event — real or possible) that reveals the hidden truth for all time.” It goes without saying what that hidden truth is.”
Read the full review here.
A Surprising Sight at the Creation Museum . . . But of the Sort You Might Not Expect
As we visited the Creation Museum seven times to write our book, we encountered a number of surprising sights. The now famous life-size diorama in the Main Hall that features two children happily playing at the edge of a pond while two small T-Rex stand nearby is just one. But there are more, and we talk about many of them in our book.
One surprising sight we did not mention in the book was the number of Amish people we saw there. Each time we visited the museum, we encountered at least one group of Amish people. Judging from their clothes, men’s beards, and women’s coverings, most appeared to be Old Order Amish from Ohio or Indiana.
Why are the Amish visiting the Creation Museum?
To be sure, the Amish have always taken the Bible seriously and, therefore, have believed that God created the heavens and the Earth as Genesis 1-3 describes. But they have never been big on insisting on two other tenets of young earth creationism — namely, that God created the earth in six twenty-four-hour days, or that the Earth was created in its present form less than 10,000 years ago.
Unlike fundamentalists, the Amish do not put a premium on arguing that they have the most literal, and therefore most true, interpretation of the Bible. While they certainly think the Old Testament is important, they have always emphasized the New Testament, especially the teachings of Jesus. For the Amish, following Jesus in one’s daily life is more important than establishing one’s credentials as a biblical literalist.
Moreover, they don’t put a lot of stock in science. The Amish are Christians as a matter of faith and confession. Neither faith nor confession need be grounded in scientific method or fact.
As Old Order Amish have moved off the farm and into other kinds of work in factories, tourism, cottage industries, and the like, many have come to enjoy more free time, disposable income, and wealth. They now travel for leisure in ways they did not do in the past. They are looking for interesting destinations, and the Creation Museum appears to be on their short list of places to visit.
When we interviewed Amish community leaders in Indiana and Ohio, we learned that they knew lots of Amish who have gone to the Creation Museum. One person we spoke with reported that neither he nor his wife could think of any Amish people who had not been to the Creation Museum, and that they knew many Amish people who had gone multiple times.
The Amish are a humble people who seek to follow Jesus. They have never been big on right doctrine, proselytizing, or apologetics. Instead, they have focused on how they might witness — through their dress, hard work, and pacifism — to the Kingdom of God on Earth.
The Amish have largely succeeded in resisting, or outright rejecting, modern ideologies that favor individualism, competition, and redemptive violence. They have also been deft at negotiating modern technologies so that their family and community lives have not disintegrated due to increased speed and fragmentation.
But can the Amish resist fundamentalism, also a modern discourse, with all of its trappings of right doctrine, judgmentalism, and violence? We pose this question in our upcoming paper, “Dinosaurs in Eden: Fundamentalism and the Plain People,” which we will give at Elizabethtown College’s conference Continuity and Change: 50 Years of Amish Society, June 9-11, 2016.
Note: Portions of this blog entry are based in Sue’s previous book, Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia (JHUP, 2012).
Immersing Ourselves in the Creation Museum
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
Many people who read our book might assume that the claims we make in it were clear to us from our first visit to the Creation Museum. As is the case with most worthwhile research projects, achieving such clarity from the start is rare. And it was not at all clear to us from the beginning of the Righting America project what our final result would be.
What propelled our work, however, was an assumption we made: that if we could slow down our experience of the museum, we might have a better understanding of its constitutive parts and how those parts work together. Likewise, in order to really understand the the Creation Museum, we had to immerse ourselves in it to examine it piece by piece, room by room.
At the most basic level this meant visiting the museum seven times between 2008 and 2014. On each visit we took extensive photographs and notes. When we have mentioned this field work to friends we are frequently asked if museum workers bothered us. We know that some Creation Museum visitors have been made to feel uncomfortable: one friend reported that he was repeatedly questioned by museum workers as to how he was feeling about being at the museum. In Pray the Gay Away Bernadette Barton discusses the discomfort felt by her lesbian students during a class visit (we talk about this in chapter 4 of Righting America).
But we were never bothered by folks at the museum and rarely even approached, even though we were obvious in our note-taking and photo-taking. Maybe this is because we are white, middle-aged, not prone to creative attire, and free of tattoos and piercings?! Whatever the reason, in our seven visits we were quite free to look very, very closely at what is on display at the Creation Museum.
One implication of this time-consuming close reading of the museum is that we were able to filter out some of the overwhelming aural and visual clutter to see what is there “beneath” the constant voiceovers and the flood (a pun that is just too easy!) of textual bits. In this sense our method is similar to what Sut Jhally does in his series of Dreamworlds video series. By slowing down and meticulously examining hundreds of MTV videos — silencing the video music and focusing on the images — Jhally is able to document in horrifying detail that the world of MTV involves, at heart, a nightmarish commodification of women.
For us, slowing down and meticulously examining the content of the Creation Museum shows that, contrary to what one might expect, there is not much science (even science as they define it) and — perhaps more surprisingly — not a lot of Bible. It is not that there is no science and Bible; it is that there is not nearly as much as we expected.
Instead, there is a lot of politics, a Christian Right politics devoted to fighting the culture wars, a Christian Right politics bolstered by a persistent message of damnation for those who are not with them on the Right side of history. And as we also discovered, when one goes beyond the confines of the museum to look at the larger world of Answers in Genesis — with its print and online materials, with its audio and video creations, and with its speakers and conferences — the emphasis on culture war, politics, and judgment is even more visible. That is to say, and to borrow from one of Ken Ham’s favorite formulations regarding the connection between science and the Bible, AiG confirms the Creation Museum as a Christian Right site.
RACM reviewed in Anthropology Review Database
Cultural anthropologist Jack David Eller, adjunct professor at University of Northern Colorado, provides a thoughtful and very thorough review of our book for the Anthropology Review Database.
Eller notes:
For those of us who are unlikely to ever visit such places—because they are too far away or too irritating—the Trollingers have provided a service by describing and critiquing the Creation Museum. They have further proven their point that the museum “is not an inexplicable anomaly precariously existing on the fringes of American life. Instead, it is a mainstream Christian Right institution. Not only do its scientific, biblical, and political commitments represent and appeal to many of those on the right side of the American mainstream, but it joins with a host of other Christian Right organizations in seeking to shape, prepare, and arm conservative Christians.” (p. 234).
Read the extended review here.
First Review!
Judy Solberg, former librarian at Seattle University, reviewed Righting America at the Creation Museum as part of Library Journal’s weekly non-fiction Review XPress. An excerpt:
The authors argue that the museum helps shape and prepare conservatives to be aggressive and uncompromising cultural warriors…This fascinating and detailed analysis will be of great interest to academics in both the humanities and the social sciences.
Read the full review at Library Journal Reviews.
Taking the Creation Museum Seriously
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
Because we think the Creation Museum matters, in Righting America we take the museum seriously. At the most basic level, this means taking seriously what the museum says about itself and what Answers in Genesis spokespersons say about the museum.
In the book’s first three chapters we examine the Museum as a museum, the Museum’s science, and the Museum’s use of the Bible. As we observe in the book’s introduction,
these chapters start with what the Museum/AiG assert — that the Museum is a state-of-the-art museum, that it displays lots of ‘real science,’ and that it is committed to upholding biblical authority — and then we compare these assertions with what is going on at the museum (14-15).
To study the Museum this way, we do not engage questions about whether the Creation Museum is a “real” museum, whether the science displayed in the Creation Museum is “real” science, or whether the Creation Museum’s approach to biblical interpretation is “legitimate.” These questions may have merit (although we find good v. bad more compelling than, say, real v. fake), but they are not questions we engage precisely because we are more interested in what the Museum does than what it is.
To understand the Museum, we had to take into account everything that is going on there. A lot is going on and all at once: videos, dioramas, images, voiceovers, and much text on placards, displays, and more. To really understand what is going on we had to slow everything down and painstakingly examine the wide range of content presented at the museum.
Add to this some of the flood of electronic and printed material produced by Answers in Genesis, and this is a project that took a significant amount of time. If our goal was to mock the Museum, or if our goal was to take at face value what Ken Ham and AiG said about the Museum, we could have done this work very quickly. But we were determined to take the Museum seriously, as scholars, and so we put in the time.
In subsequent posts, we’ll discuss our approach to studying the Museum and AiG’s materials as a way to show more about the scholarly work that is behind Righting America.
Why the Creation Museum?
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
Why would anyone devote an entire book and a blog to the Creation Museum?
We have to admit this is a very reasonable question. In fact, it is a question we have asked ourselves on a number of occasions, particularly while sitting in a Cincinnati restaurant at the end of a day in which we had been immersed in the sights and sounds of the Museum.
Visiting the Creation Museum is an intense multimedia experience. Regardless of the number of our visits, each time we left the Museum we were exhausted. The massive amount of sights and sounds we encountered gave us little time to actually think about what was going on in the Museum.
In part, our book grows out of our continued thinking about the Museum. It is a reflection of how we made sense of the sensory overload we encountered. Our thinking about the Museum is informed by the history and politics of its sponsoring institution, Answers in Genesis.
But really, why devote so much attention to what some see as a seemingly inexplicable and bizarre cultural site? Why devote a whole book to a place that claims that the universe was created less than 10,000 years ago, that a global flood less than 5,000 years ago accounts for geological strata and the fossil record, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together?
To many people, it may seem preposterous to answer these questions. However, many other Americans do not find these ideas preposterous at all. Millions of Americans have visited the Museum; millions more will most likely visit the Museum’s companion structure, the gigantic replica of Noah’s Ark set to open on July 7, 2016.
While some folks visit the Museum or will visit the Ark to gawk and mock, it’s clear that most visitors find much of what is presented to be quite compelling and believable.
As we posit in Righting America at the Creation Museum, to see the Museum, the Ark, and their sponsoring organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG) as “wacky but essentially irrelevant outpost[s] on the far outskirts of American life is a huge mistake” (2). Despite the fact that many folks wish it were otherwise, AiG and its tourist destinations lie squarely in the American cultural, religious, and political mainstream (albeit the right side of that mainstream).
As we embarked on what eventually became Righting America our goal was simple. We wanted to understand and explain the Creation Museum. That is to say, we wanted to understand and explain the Museum’s message and how the Museum conveys this message. And we wanted to explore what the Museum and its message means for America. (Spoiler alert: understanding the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis proves to be quite helpful for understanding the 2016 presidential campaign.)
What is wonderful about this blog is that we are not confined to the pages of Righting America. We can continue to comment on the Museum, the Ark, and AiG (and comment on their comments!), while also broadening our examination of creationism and fundamentalism in American life. Better, we can include you in the conversation. We hope you will add your voice!
Self-Introductions: Sue’s Story
by Susan Trollinger
I earned my PhD in Rhetoric and Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. There, I learned how to read texts not only rhetorically but politically. I learned that texts–whether speeches, films, advertisements, television shows–put readers/viewers into ways of being in the world that intersect with power and politics. Fascinated by the conservative turn in American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century, I wrote a dissertation on Third Wave feminism and the ways women were figured to resist and contest the new conservatism.
Later, I turned my attention to the visual rhetoric of tourism, especially tourist sites with a religious theme or connection. For those unfamiliar with visual rhetoric, it is a sub-field within rhetoric and communication, composition, English, and other fields, that explores how images, artifacts, spaces and other aspects of our world beyond text shape our beliefs, values, and ways of being.
In my previous book, Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), I looked at the visual rhetoric of Amish Country tourism in the largest Amish settlement in the world, located in eastern Ohio. I was interested in the apparent contradiction between the ostensive pull to the plain and simple life of the Amish and what Amish Country tourism seems to offer–Victorian-themed inns; gift shops filled with lace, ornate tea pots, and gourmet coffee; and large-scale restaurants featuring hot and cold buffets.
What I found was that the visual rhetoric of Amish Country tourism invites visitors to put themselves into the story of a place that promises compelling resolutions to modern anxieties about gender, time, technology, and ethnicity. I also found that while Amish Country tourism often reduces important challenges that Amish life poses to to a matter of consumer choice (e.g., buy an Amish-style cookbook and transform your life) it also helps visitors to entertain questions about what it might mean and what it might take to live differently.
As I was working on Selling the Amish, I became interested in Protestant fundamentalism as it was becoming more politically active and rhetorically successful. When Bill and I heard that the Creation Museum was under construction, we started talking about bringing together our areas of expertise and curiosity to examine this museum. We wanted to know what sort of Christian the Creation Museum creates and what that might mean for faith, culture, and politics.
One of the most satisfying aspects of writing this book was writing it with someone who really knows the history of Protestant fundamentalism and who has a keen rhetorical sensibility. Rhetoric is historical, and history is rhetorical. Bringing together our common and different strengths, we tried to put forward a reading of the museum that examines it seriously in all of its facets as a museum that puts forth powerful arguments about science, the Bible, politics, and judgment.
Self-Introductions: Bill’s Story
by William Trollinger
We recognize that visitors to this blog will want to know who we are and how we came to the Righting America project. In our next few posts, we introduce ourselves and our work to illustrate much of the work we’ve done over the past four years.
Books do not just appear out of thin air. They take a painstaking amount of effort to research, develop, write, and re-write. And so we’d like to help others understand how we conducted the work behind our book.
Our professional biographies can be found here, but by way of personal introduction, here’s how we each found ourselves immersed in the study of the Creation Museum and fundamentalism.
Bill’s Story
Righting America at the Creation Museum grows out of my three decades of historical work on fundamentalism, creationism, and the Christian Right.
I received my Ph.D. in U.S. history, with a focus on the early 20th century, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My dissertation project examined the social and political history surrounding the development of midwestern fundamentalism. I expanded that project into my first book, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Wisconsin, 1990).
As I detail in God’s Empire, Riley led the 1920s fundamentalist crusade against theological liberalism and against the teaching of evolution in the public schools. He also created a remarkable grassroots fundamentalist enterprise centered around First Baptist Church of Minneapolis and the affiliated Northwestern Bible School. Riley connected his fundamentalist theology to a far right politics infused with a vicious anti-Semitism that brought him to the attention of the FBI in the years just before World War II.
When I first presented a conference paper on Riley’s politics and anti-Semitism, the commentator (a friend and a very well-regarded historian of fundamentalism) remarked that I had overstated the importance of all this for Riley and moreover, Riley’s bigoted right-wing political commitments did not characterize fundamentalism in general.
But in the decades since that presentation, it has become increasingly clear to me that one cannot understand fundamentalism without understanding its deep connection to ultra-conservative politics and economics.
In short, my previous work on the history of fundamentalism and creationism, and my strong conviction that politics is central to this history, prepared me well for Righting America at the Creation Museum. That, and a terrific co-author whose own academic preparation and experience allowed her to see what I could not have seen!
