Creationism and The Rapture Are Perverse Rhetorics
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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear soon.
Alien vs. Predator manages to be a cross-genre film encompassing science fiction, horror, and action. This essay pertains to the existence of two perverse theological oddities, that also include science fiction, horror, and action: creationism, and the rapture. The theme of this article argues that creationism and the rapture are unnecessary accretions to Christian theology and are perversions. Creationism is the alien, and the rapture is the predator.
Such an unusual trope requires explanation. Creationism is an alien theology overlayed onto Genesis 1 – 11 to promote a right-wing agenda. This right-wing agenda includes creationists, rapture believers, revisionist historians, family values promoters. The “leaders” often appear together at evangelical gatherings. They are linked together with overlapping agendas that are identical to evangelical literalism. Hiding in the bushes of creationism and the rapture is a simplistic attempt to use Scripture to achieve the political goals of restoring America to its supposedly Christian roots.
Creationism and rapture are perverse theologies whose rhetoric perverts Scripture, misinterprets metaphorical texts, and promotes dangerous fantasies.
Literalism: The Tower of Babel for Creationism and Rapture
A glaring weakness of creationism and the rapture relates to their complete dependence on a literal reading of the Bible. The idea of a literal truth Bible is mapped onto the theories of creation and rapture, thus making both theories inadequate.
To establish the kingdom of literalism, fundamentalists must destroy the literary complexity of the Bible and its vast army of symbols. This crusade, like the attempt of numerous Popes to conquer the Holy Land, has claimed many victims. The Templar Knights of literalism have hacked, burned, and destroyed as many of the metaphors of the Bible as possible. Those they haven’t killed, they have imprisoned, so that the symbolic language of the Bible no longer speaks with ambiguity and aliveness. The remaining symbols, locked in the Fundamentalist State Prison of Certainty, are kept in solitary confinement with no visitors allowed.
Creationism and rapture share this perverted attempt to literalize texts of Scripture. These two right-wing ideologies once upon a time said, “‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be destroyed by these liberals.”
The literalizing of metaphorical texts is rhetorical murder. Metaphors, similes, analogies, stories, legends, and myths are intended as defenses against literalism. This collection of rhetorical weapons against literalism may be dubbed “troping.” While I think creationism and the rapture are “tripping” (a drug metaphor), I will be “troping” this pair of perverse theologies.
Genesis 1 Is a Poem
Creationists take the poetry of Genesis 1 and attempt to literalize it. They refuse to see this as a liturgical act, a litany of praise. They ignore the:
- Genre of the text – poetry.
- Liturgical usage of the text in Hebrew worship.
- Language of the text – worship.
The words of worship stick out in the poem: “It was good” appears six times in the text and “Very good” in the ending line of the poem. “There was evening and there was morning” are liturgical lines, not a dating of the length of the creative process. Genesis 1 has more in common with Psalm 8 than with any scientific account.
The poet Mary Oliver says, “When we talk about ‘a figure of speech,’ we are talking about an instance of figurative language.” Literalizing the poetry of Genesis 1 is like literalizing Byron’s “rose.” When Robert Burns wrote, “O, my Luve is like a red, red rose,” that rose is an image. Burns is not saying he is in love with a rose.
Creationism and the rapture add nothing to the epistemic value of Christian faith. I poke fun at creationism and the rapture because both ideas could disappear from Christian conversation and nothing would change. “In beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” “Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead.” That is sufficient.
Creationism
Rowan Williams says, “I think creationism is, in a sense, a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories. Whatever the biblical account of creation is, it’s not a theory alongside theories. It’s not as if the writer of Genesis or whatever sat down and said well, how am I going to explain all this… ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’”
A category mistake is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. For an advertising analogy, it is like other animals trying to be the Cadbury Easter Bunny. A pair of bunny ears does not make a rabbit out of a dog, cat, or mouse.
Creationism has always wanted to be a science. Not content with being bad theology, creationism set out on a quest to become a science. Decades of efforts led George McGready Price and Henry Morris to hammer out a kind of creation science. This led to the development of scientific creationism. Scorned and humiliated by all the disciplines of true science, creationists invented intelligent design. Creationism, in therapy, cries, “All I want is to be a science.”
Creationism appears more out of place than a food truck in a land of five-star Michelin restaurants. Of all the science books ever written, the Bible never appears on the list. Ken Ham’s tortured attempts to insist that he does “true science,” is a rhetorical trick. Creationism is not science.
Creationism: A Word Game, Not A Science
While creationists play with words, real scientists map the human genome. Creationism’s best effort in the attempt to be a science has been intelligent design. On inspection, “intelligent design” turns out to be a clever slogan not a science. It belongs with “It’s the economy stupid,” or “Make America great again,” not in a science lab with serious scientists. New clothes do not magically turn a religious idea into science. Dressing up creation science as an actual science is akin to the novel idea of evangelicals disinterring the body of Jim Crow, putting him in a red, white and blue suit, singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and insisting that neither Crow nor they are racists. Creationism’s word tricks feel more like “Wheel of Fortune” than actual science.
An analysis of the creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People, was prepared by Barbara Forest, a professor at Southeastern University in Hammond, Louisiana. Her analysis and testimony anchored the defense of evolution in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. She demonstrated that the phrase “intelligent design” had been abruptly substituted for creationism in 1987. The change took place immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court branded creationism a religious doctrine. Changing “creationism” to “intelligent design” does not equate to science. It’s a rhetorical trick, a bit of academic plagiarism. Sneaky huh?
Stripped of its artificial designs, its elaborate costumes, its attention to details filled with misinformation, creationism reveals that it is not a science. Instead, it’s a word game.
The Rapture
The American obsession with the rapture parallels the fascination of moviegoers with science fiction, horror movies like Alien vs. Predator. The idea is that there will be a literal “rapture” in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been “left behind.” Based on the dispensational theory of an ex-Anglican priest, the rapture distorts scripture with a false reading of apocalyptic literature.
The rapture doesn’t not have a single book as its primary biblical appeal. Rapture believers make use of texts all over the Bible. Bits and pieces of Ezekiel and Daniel, parts of Mark and Luke, and the entire book of Revelation prop up the rapture idea. But the strained attempt to take apocalyptic literature literally crashes on the same rocks that doom the ship of creationism.
The rapture earns its tropological name of Predator because of the violence it unleashes on the earth at the second appearance of Jesus. Perhaps it is the danger that the rapture presents that makes it more terrifying than creationism.
Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N. T. Wright asks, “We might begin by asking, ‘What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking?’” He offers this answer: “For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon?” The rapture precludes giving serious attention to the most dangerous crisis facing the earth: climate change. The reality of climate change puts, for the first time, humanity on the endangered species list.
I have imagined a debate with a learned and respected creationist. In my dream the creationist presents a long, detailed defense of his ideas. When my turn comes, for whatever reason, in the dream I have not prepared anything. Instead, I simply say, “Creationism is unnecessary to Christian faith” and sit down. I didn’t win the debate, but when I awakened from my dream, I was smiling. “Unnecessary” sums it up for me. Ken Ham’s propensity for circular, endless argument seduces progressives to dive into the murky waters of attempting to disprove creationism, when it disproves itself with its many words of defense.
After all, when your explanation has no testable steps, there are no means to disprove it. It just sits there, almost like the smile on Alice’s Cheshire cat. Creationists, almost as a reflex action of someone being smashed in the face, appeal to the “mystery of God.” This is what Christians do when faced with evidence they can’t explain. When the best argument creationists have is to cough up old ideas from the 18th and 19th centuries which attribute every unexplained natural process to the direct involvement of God, they are reduced to mere personal incredulity.
To creationism and the rapture I can only sing, “So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu, adieu, adieu.”
Cheer Up! Warmer is Better!
by William Trollinger
In his recent article, “Right-Wing Extremism is Going to Boil Us Alive,” Tom Engelhardt observes that
It could be the Gulf Stream collapsing or the planet eternally breaking heat records. But whatever the specifics, we’re living it right now . . . You couldn’t miss it – at least so you might think – if you were living in the sweltering Southwest; especially in broiling, record-setting Phoenix with 30 straight days of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit; or in flaming Greece or western China on the day the temperature hit 126 degrees Fahrenheit or sweltering, blazing Algeria when the temperature reached an almost unimaginable 135 (yes, 135!) degrees Fahrenheit; not to speak of broiling Canada with its more than 1,000 fires now burning (a figure that still seems to be rising by the week) and its 29 million acres already flamed out; and don’t forget Italy’s 1,400 fires; or Florida’s hot-tub-style seawater, which recently hit an unheard-of-101-plus degrees Fahrenheit.
And Engelhardt penned this just before terrifying fires engulfed Maui, virtually destroying the town of Lahaina.
As U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced three weeks ago, “the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
But good news! Answers in Genesis (AiG) CEO Ken Ham has confidently pronounced that “there’s no biblical or scientific reason for the cacophony of panic when it comes to climate change.” As regards science, Ham points us to AiG’s very own experts, Jessica Jaworski (M.S. in wildlife ecology) and Avery Foley (M.A. in theology from Liberty), who make the case that there is no need to attend to the “climate alarmism” promoted by alleged scientific experts in climate science, given that
- “Warmer is better! . . . if the world is warming, cold snaps will be reduced, and even if the number of heat waves were doubled, we’d still have a net reduction in human mortality.”
- Efforts to curb CO2 emissions not only would be very expensive, but “the impact on temperature would be so small that it’s basically undetectable, thereby having no positive impact on ecosystems or human well-being.”
- Climate scientists exaggerate global warming and the effects of CO2 on global warming, and thus “there is no rational basis for predications [sic] about future temperatures or for policy responses to such predictions.”
- “Warmer = greener. Atmospheric CO2 is crucial for life and contributes to a variety of ecological benefits – including increased plant productivity. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rises, plant growth also increases . . . The result is more food for everything that eats plants and everything that eats something that eats plants. For us, that means more abundant, and therefore cheaper, food.”
It’s a veritable love letter to fossil fuel corporations! Jaworski and Foley even start their article with the happy assertion that “fossil fuels lift nations from poverty.” Of course, there is nothing surprising about AiG contributors offering slavish support for Exxon et al., given that Ham’s organization eagerly promotes the ideas of the Cornwall Alliance, the Christian Right’s leading climate change-denial organization, an organization funded by (spoiler alert) the fossil fuel industry.
Can we say “follow the money”?
Anyway, these are the “scientific” reasons for dismissing “climate alarmism.”
As regards the Bible, well, the expert here is Ken Ham, who asserts that “we will never sort out all the claims about climate change until we all agree to begin with the right foundation – the Word of the infinite Creator God.” And according to Ham, the Bible teaches us that
Humans aren’t going to destroy themselves or the earth because God is in complete control, and he will determine when the ultimate catastrophic climate change will occur.
Ham’s biblical evidence for this assertion is Genesis 8:22, the favorite verse of climate change deniers: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
I confess that I am at a loss as to how this verse establishes that the Bible rules out the possibility of human-made catastrophic climate change. But making sense is not a requirement when it comes to fundamentalist proof-texting.
All this said, Ham proclaims himself a “climate change alarmist . . . [who feels the] need to warn people about the coming catastrophic climate changes that will affect all of humanity.” What does he mean? In his words:
I’m not referring to a supposed slight global temperature increase allegedly caused by humans burning fossil fuels. I’m referring to the ultimate catastrophic climate change everyone should be aware of when one day in the future, Jesus will return, and the earth (and the whole universe) will be judged with fire . . . because of our sin in Adam. (Emphases mine.)
Let’s leave aside AiG’s threadbare science (so clearly reflected in the Creation Museum) and its commitment to unfettered capitalism (whatever the cost). Let’s leave aside Ken Ham’s biblical cherrypicking and his violent dispensational premillennialism.
What is particularly striking here is the complete lack of empathy. Millions and millions suffering in sweltering heat, with particularly dire consequences for the poor and the homeless. Fires raging out of control, with towns (see Lahaina) turning to ash. Desperate migrants trying to go somewhere, anywhere, to escape the heat.
Of course, why would we expect an empathetic response from an organization that created a tourist site (Ark Encounter) that commemorates/celebrates the slaughter of up to 20 billion (their number, not mine) human beings (including children, infants, and the unborn)? Why would we expect empathy from an organization that puts a tourist photo shoot at the Ark door that, again according to AiG, God shut in order to consign all these billions of people (again, including children, infants, and the unborn) to a horrific mass drowning?
But cheer up! Warmer is better!
Quantity over Quality: Creationist Copia at the Discovery Center for Creation and Earth History
by Emma Frances Bloomfield
Today’s post comes from our colleague Emma Frances Bloomfield, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the intersection of science, religion, and politics from a rhetorical perspective. She received her PhD from USC Annenberg and wrote her dissertation on the similarities between science denial in the human origins and climate change controversies. She has written and presented on topics of the environment, digital rhetoric, narratives, political communication, and health. Her first book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, is available through Routledge’s series on Advances in Climate Change Research. Her second book, Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators, is forthcoming in spring 2024 from University of California Press.
In January 2020, only a few months before the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I visited the Discovery Center for Creation and Earth History run by the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, Texas. Opened in September 2019, the Discovery Center is an impressive space that uses advanced technology and a series of engaging exhibits to communicate what ICR purports to be the truth of creation science.
I analyzed the space in a recently published article titled, “Sensory Engagement with the Rhetoric of Science: Creationist Copia at the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History” (Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 25, issue 4, 2022). In the article, I argue that the Discovery Center uses sensory evidence to control and guide museumgoers’ attention and distract from a lack of traditional evidence, such as fossil records, experiments, or expert testimony. I draw upon the concept of copia (meaning abundance) to inform my analysis, which is a rhetorical trope that substitutes quantity over quality and creates a sense of intensity and importance around a topic as evidence for it. Take, for example, the communication strategy of Duane Gish, former ICR vice president, who is the eponym for the “Gish Gallop,” which is where creationists rattle off a series of “half-truth non-sequiturs” that are difficult for audiences to comprehend and evolutionary scientists to refute but appear impressive due to their quantity and succession (Eugenie Scott, 1994).
At the Discovery Center, I located copia in terms of intensity and quantity of sensory evidence. I categorize these sensory strategies as rotation, immersion, and interruption. Rotation arises when museumgoers are encouraged to turn from one piece of information to another. Immersion occurs when visitors are surrounded by various pieces of sensory information at the same time. Interruption is deployed when the museum space is punctured by noises or presences that draw attention away from some areas and redirect it to others. All three direct and redirect museumgoers’ attention to focus on certain noises, sights, and experiences over others. As forms of copia, these strategies work to amplify creationism’s importance and create an abundance of evidence to give weight to creationism in the manufactured controversy over human origins. While the full article has many more examples, I will briefly discuss one example of each of the three sensory strategies.
Rotation
One of the first rooms in the Discovery Center is the “portrait room,” where what first appear to be static portraits of scientists lining the walls. These portraits are in fact screens, which come to life to engage in a lively conversation about the role of faith in scientific discovery. As the conversation bounces from portrait to portrait, visitors spin to follow the conversation happening around them, rotating to follow the next screen that lights up and begins talking. The portraits speak quickly, one right after the other, so following the complete flow of the conversation is near impossible as visitors must quickly reorient and rotate to a new screen, potentially behind them. Just as in a face-to-face interaction, the portraits interrupt one another and have no preset order, forcing visitors to rotate quickly to keep up, and they may miss some of the key points during one’s reorientation to the newly active portrait. Visitors can thus be easily overwhelmed with conversation and unable to critically follow the arguments and discussion.
Immersion
Immersion primarily occurs in the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark rooms. Both rooms consist of full-scale dioramas that visitors can walk through and thereby find themselves within that part of biblical history. In the Garden of Eden room, visitors navigate a jungle landscape with storks, deer, parrots, monkeys, and velociraptors. They hear the roaring of a waterfall, the coos of birds, and the groans of dinosaurs. In the Noah’s Ark room, museumgoers can similarly hear the noises of animals and the crashing of thunder as they walk through pens filled with animatronic animals. Visually, visitors can look out the ship’s window with flashing lights to mimic lightning and the walls painted to look like a turbulent sea. As immersive dioramas, visitors are invited to turn to explore the variety of animatronic animals and noises that emerge from all sides. Instead of scientific evidence of creationism, the Discovery Center creates immersive experiences to simulate the accuracy and presence of biblical history, locating museumgoers in the center of engaging dioramas.
Interruption
After Noah’s Ark room is the Animal room, which is lined on one side by a beautiful façade of the Grand Canyon. Distracted by the large and deep diorama, visitors are startled by a roar vocalized by a life-sized animatronic Tyrannosaurs Rex stationed in the center of the Animal Room. The roar of the dinosaur interrupts museumgoers’ exploration of the Grand Canyon exhibit and its informational posters to redirect attention to the large animatronic figure. Although not a true threat, the unexpected roar from the animatronic dinosaur can surprise visitors and immediately hails their attention away from the Grand Canyon to be co-present with a T-Rex. As visitors explore the Animal Room and (attempt) to read the many interactive screens, the timed roar of the T-Rex is a constant distraction.
My experience at the Discovery Center was an interesting one. I saw many similarities to Ark Encounter, which I previously published about in the Southern Communication Journal and wrote about on this blog, but many differences as well. What struck me at the Discovery Center was the near complete reliance on museumgoers’ sensory experiences as the primary evidence for the truth of creationism. Museumgoers are encouraged to agree with ICR that creationism deserves space in contemporary scientific discussions due to the copia of evidence in terms of intensity and salience and the quantity of sensory information, which is deployed to rotate, immerse, and interrupt museumgoers’ experiences of the space.
I do not intend for this work (or any of my work) to disparage religious ways of knowing or the senses as sense-making tools. Instead, I propose that copia can be used verbally but also in sensory arguments at creationist sites to maintain the controversy over human origins. Thus, I consider it important to attend to the senses as powerful rhetorical strategies that may be leveraged as a tool to disrupt public understanding of and engagement with science.
Ronald Numbers (1942-2023): Rest in Peace
by William Trollinger
On June 02 Ron Numbers sent Sue and myself a goodbye email, letting us know that “I am now receiving hospice care, waiting for ‘The End.’”
Then, last Monday (July 24), he passed.
One of those people whom the world really cannot do without.
I realize – my daughters, who followed me into Ph.D. programs in the humanities, have told me this again and again – that I had and still have an idyllic view of my time in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I have this idyllic view not just because the campus is beautiful, or that some of my peers became lifetime friends (two of whom visited us this summer). I also had a host of professors who patiently taught me (and I had so very much to learn) what it means to be a historian, what it means to see and interpret the American past. Professors such as Al Bogue, Ed Coffman, Paul Conkin, John DeNovo, Diane Lindstrom, Tom McCormick, and Daniel Rodgers.
But my idyllic view of UW-Madison owes even more to my mentors. Most Ph.Ds in the humanities consider themselves fortunate to have one mentor, one faculty member who sticks with them after graduation, who looks for ways to promote their career, who provides advice on navigating the ofttimes challenging academic world.
But I had the ridiculous good fortune to have had three mentors: Paul Boyer, Carl Kaestle, and Ron Numbers. All three of these world-class scholars took me under their wing at Madison – Carl directed my dissertation, and Paul and Ron were on my dissertation committee – and then stayed with me for the decades after I received my Ph.D. I have no idea what my career would have become without their active interventions. For example, I have had:
- 1 book in a university press series edited by Paul, 1 article in a book co-edited by Paul, and 4 articles in an encyclopedia edited by Paul.
- 1 short book co-authored with Carl, 1 book co-edited with Carl and others (in which I also have an article), and 1 article in a book co-edited by Carl.
- 1 co-authored (with Sue) book in a university press series edited by Ron, 1 edited volume in a series edited by Ron (in which I also have an article), and 1 article in a book co-edited by Ron.
And all three of these great scholars and mentors were also humble, gracious, and kind – traits often in short supply in the academy.
Humble, gracious, and kind certainly described Ron Numbers. And what an outstanding and prolific scholar. To mention just a few of his most important publications: Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (Eerdmans, 2008, 3rd edition – first published in 1976); The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. with Jonathan Butler (Tennessee, 1993, reprint – first published in 1987); The Creationists (Harvard, 2006, 2nd edition – first published in 1992); Darwinism Comes to America (Harvard, 1998); Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. (Harvard, 2009); Gods in America: Religious Pluralism in the United States, ed. with Charles Cohen (Oxford, 2014).
Add to this a host of honors and prizes, including the History of Science Society’s George Sarton Medal “in recognition of a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar, selected from the international community.”
Ron’s scholarly achievements are even more remarkable when one takes into account his personal story. Raised in a strict Seventh-day Adventist family (his father and other members of his extended family were Adventist ministers), Ron – armed with a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley – wrote an academically acclaimed study (Prophetess of Health) of the church’s founder, in which he noted that, among other things, there were striking similarities between the transcriptions of White’s visions and the writings of well-known health reformers. The resultant controversy in the Seventh-day Adventist Church led to his being pushed out of his teaching position at Loma Linda University (an Adventist school).
Of course, Ron (to understate the case) landed on his feet. He was hired at the UW-Madison, where he remained for four decades. And it was at Wisconsin where he began his scholarly work on creationism. One of his most important interventions was to trace the tight connection between Ellen White’s 1864 vision of a six-day creation and the young Earth creationism of contemporary fundamentalism. Not surprisingly, Ken Ham and the folks at Answers in Genesis go to great – and absurd – lengths to reject this connection, in the process attacking (in Ham’s words) “the openly agnostic, apostate Seventh Day [sic] Adventist historian, Ronald Numbers.”
While Ron’s work on creationism undergirded my dissertation and first book – and much, much more – it turns out that his work was also very important to my father. As we note in the “Acknowledgments” for Righting America at the Creation Museum, my father was a geologist and an old Earth creationist (as well as a failed fundamentalist wannabe), holding to the notion that each of the Genesis 1 days corresponded with a geologic age. When young Earth creationism began sweeping through evangelical churches in the Denver area (where I grew up) in the 1960s and 1970s, Dad went ballistic (I can still remember him throwing Whitcomb and Morris’ Genesis Flood against the wall of his study).
So he went on a campaign against young Earth creationism, giving presentations in local evangelical churches in which – with charts and slides and transparencies – he patiently explained the geologic timetable and the law of stratigraphic succession, in the process arguing that an ancient Earth could be squared with Genesis. And in the bulging file folders containing the materials for these presentations – thanks to my brother Paul for sending all of this to me – I found a copy of Ron’s 1982 Science article, “Creationism in 20th-century America,” in which Ron discussed the emergence of “scientific creationism.” I can’t recall if I referred Dad to this article or Dad referred it to me, but I know that Ron’s point that creationism has a history, that it has changed over time (a point so clearly discussed in The Creationists), was crucial to my father’s efforts to persuade evangelicals to eschew young Earth creationism.
Perhaps my favorite memory of Ron Numbers is the February 2013 conference in Tallahassee: “Science without God: Religion, Naturalism, and Sciences, A Conference to Honour Ronald L. Numbers” (a.k.a. “Ronfest”). For two days the sixty or so of us in attendance discussed “the growth of so-called ‘methodological naturalism’ in science, which prohibits any appeal to supernatural explanations but leaves scientists free to believe whatever they want about the reality of God.” (Out of this conference came the 2019 book, Science Without God?) These conversations were fascinating, but for me the highlight was the evening dinner, in which person after person stood up to praise, thank, and tease Ron. So much affection for this great scholar and person.
And for good reason. Besides everything else, Ron was remarkably generous with his time, and not just with his former students. All sorts of folks – including a few I sent his way – benefitted from the Ron Numbers treatment.
And this includes Sue. As we were writing what became Righting America at the Creation Museum we each took the lead on certain chapters that best fit our training and expertise. And given Sue’s work in visual rhetoric, it made sense for her to tackle the Museum and Science chapters. But while the former was obviously in Sue’s wheelhouse, the latter involved both analysis of the visual presentation of the exhibits and, related, description and summary of the scientific “arguments” that were being made by the museum. It was a challenging intellectual task.
So it was with trepidation that Sue sent Ron the draft of her chapter on “Science.” We were at the Netherland Plaza in Cincinnati for a writing weekend when his detailed response arrived in Sue’s inbox. At the beginning his comments were rather skeptical. By the middle of the chapter, however, his tone changed, as he realized what Sue was trying to do (i.e., judge the Creation Museum by Answer in Genesis’ very own definition as to what counts as legitimate science). By the end of the chapter he was fully onboard, enthusiastically praising Sue for the critical assessment she had pulled off.
That night we celebrated. And not only because Ron’s affirmation was a great endorsement of our project, but also because Sue had now joined the ranks of Ron Numbers mentees/friends (which including our meeting in Milwaukee for a Brewers game).
When we heard from our friend Adam Laats last Tuesday morning that Ron had passed, we both cried.
Rest in peace, my friend.
Evangelicals and Climate Change Denialism
by Terry Defoe
Pastor Terry Defoe is an emeritus member of the clergy who served congregations in Western Canada from 1982 to 2016, and who ministered to students on the campuses of the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Evolving Certainties: Resolving Conflict at the Intersection of Faith and Science, a book which, among other things, chronicles his transition from Young Earth Creationism to evolutionary creation. Evolving Certainties is endorsed by scientists in biology, geology and physics, with a foreword written by Darrel Falk, former president of BioLogos, an organization that has as its goal the facilitating of respectful discussion of science / faith issues. Defoe has been educated at: Simon Fraser University (BA Soc); Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (M.Div.); and, Open Learning University, Burnaby, British Columbia (BA Psyc).
Evangelicals are the group most skeptical of human-caused climate change, and least likely to act upon the danger. For more than 100 years, evangelicals have been taught that evolution by natural selection is untrue; today, many are anti-vaxxers. In the evangelical culture, professional merchants of doubt muddy the waters with pseudoscience. Evangelicals are told that scientists are prejudiced against Christians, and that their data is unsubstantiated, manipulated and sometimes falsified. Perhaps the most troublesome obstacle and biggest paradox is the extent to which non-scientific factors – including theological beliefs, political affiliations, economic interests, and cognitive biases – cause evangelical climate change skeptics to hold on to their views despite the wealth of scientific evidence.
SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS
The scientific consensus is that climate change and global warming are an existential threat to the survival of the earth’s human population and all the living things that share the planet with them. With a growing world population and increasing demands on earth’s resources, it becomes imperative to ensure that our actions today do not compromise the well-being of future generations. Preserving the planet for future generations requires adopting sustainable practices and policies that balance human needs with the capacity of the planet to regenerate and support life. International agreements like the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set global targets and provide frameworks for collective action towards a more sustainable future. These initiatives aim to protect ecosystems, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote social equity, and ensure a thriving planet for future generations.
We need the habitual disposition to control our desires when it comes to caring for the natural world. Frugality, or the habitual disposition to control desires and be content with what we have, can indeed play a role in caring for the natural world. Consumerism and excessive consumption have been identified as contributors to resource depletion, waste generation, and carbon emissions. By cultivating a mindset of frugality and contentment with what we have, we can reduce our ecological footprint and promote sustainable living.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson has documented in Starry Messenger, ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree on the reality of climate change, and these scientists agree that the time to act is now. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), composed of thousands of scientists from around the world, has consistently provided robust evidence on the reality and risks of climate change. Most scientific experts agree that urgent action is needed to mitigate and adapt to the impacts. The severity of the issue is based on careful analysis of data and projections.
There are three possible responses to scientific concerns about the environment. The first is to accept the reality of climate change and begin working to overcome it. The second is to ignore it and look the other way. A third is to attack both the message and messenger. Many or most evangelicals have chosen the second or third options.
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FACTORS
For many individuals the most important factors influencing their views on climate change are not scientific but social and cultural. For most evangelicals, there is a price to pay should they depart from the accepted views of their family, church, and/or denomination. It is not primarily the facts that matter, but how their loved ones and their fellow evangelicals will react. We human beings assign a higher priority to acceptance and affirmation from our group than we do to seeking out the truth for truth’s sake. That is why scientific challenges to the evangelical religious worldview are met with anger, rationalization and even conspiracy ideation.
FACTOR ONE – RELIGION
Most evangelicals believe that Jesus Christ will return to the earth someday soon, and at that time the earth as we know it will be radically changed (although evangelicals disagree among themselves as to the specifics). So as evangelicals see it, the scientific evidence for dramatic global warming can be safely ignored, especially given that they are taught (based on Genesis 8:21-22), that the world will end only when God himself decides–
Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human
heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long
as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.
Believers in the imminent return of Christ are thus convinced that they cannot justify short-term expenditures to avoid a manufactured or invented crisis. Evangelical orthodoxy teaches that the fate of the earth is predetermined. They believe that their focus should primarily be on spiritual matters, rather than making extensive efforts to address long-term environmental issues like climate change.
More than this, Genesis 1:28 describes the creation of the world and humankind, highlighting the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). This verse has been traditionally understood by evangelicals as granting human dominion or stewardship over the earth, giving them the authority to utilize its resources for their benefit. That is to say, the emphasis is often on humanity’s rule and control over creation.
FACTOR TWO – POLITICS
Most US evangelicals support the Republican Party. And in the last generation, the GOP has veered sharply to the right, becoming more defensive and punitive towards those who disagree. This polarization increased by several orders of magnitude under the Trump presidency. Under President Trump – beloved by many or most evangelicals – science was politicized, and scientific experts were repeatedly contradicted and often ignored. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration’s response to the COVID pandemic was an unmitigated disaster.
A sophisticated right-wing disinformation machine produced and is producing pseudoscience. This Republican war on science is a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies. It is a war on the scientific method, which is constructed in such a way as to keep people from fooling themselves.
It is often observed that conservatives have a preference for limited government intervention and a more market-oriented approach to societal issues, including environmental policies. In The Truth About Denial, Adrian Bardon discusses the challenges global warming brings to conservatism, given that “… climate change is a form of impact science that represents a massive threat to the existing social and economic order [and] solutions require massive government intervention.”
Moreover, the monetary cost of dealing with climate change is a clear threat to the established system of production and consumption. North Americans tend to define prosperity as an ability to consume goods and services. This consumer-driven perspective often emphasizes economic growth as a measure of success. However, the impacts of climate change have increasingly highlighted the need for a broader understanding of prosperity that incorporates sustainability and environmental considerations, an understanding that works against conservative commitments.
FACTOR THREE – EDUCATION
US evangelicals criticize higher education for indoctrinating students with liberal ideas. As Bardon documents, the official party platform of the Texas GOP, for example, has specifically included its opposition to teaching critical thinking skills in the school curriculum: “We oppose the teaching of higher order thinking skills and similar programs which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the students fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
In order to counter that perceived bias, several evangelical denominations sponsor parochial school systems. The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod and the Seventh-day Adventist Church are examples. Parochial schools allow these conservative denominations to control what their students learn, about climate change, history, and more.. But more than these particular denominations, fundamentalist Christians in the United States are encouraged to place their students in Christian schools, schools whose textbooks routinely pooh-pooh the realities of climate change and global warming.
Rather than shielding students from uncomfortable information, the best education systems present students with many different points of view and teach critical thinking skills. A poor system is ideologically driven and inhibits students’ ability to think independently. “In order to seek truth,” Rene Descartes once wrote, “It is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
HISTORICAL PRECEDENT
In their article, “Galileo and Global Warming,” Rachel Roller and Louise Huang point out interesting similarities between a 16th century theological controversy involving Galileo Galilei and the contemporary evangelical response to global warming.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) lived around the time of Luther (1483-1546). Copernicus was a Catholic priest who studied the heavens. Based on his observations, he proposed the counter-intuitive idea that the earth orbits the sun, a theory called heliocentrism. This idea was later picked up by Galileo (1564-1642) in Italy. And Galileo’s telescope showed that it was, in fact, true.
Galileo’s claims were rejected by theologians of the day because he had the temerity to challenge orthodoxy, which, based on several verses of the Bible, argued that the earth does not move. Some individuals were invited to look through Galileo’s telescope and see the evidence for themselves. They refused, saying that God didn’t intend for human beings to have telescopic vision, a classic example of motivated denial.
The current controversy over global warming is therefore not the first time that Christians have been reluctant to accept implications of new scientific evidence. In our day, climate change has implications for how we perceive and interact with the natural world, and it requires significant societal and economic changes to mitigate its impacts. Those who work diligently to communicate the needs regarding climate change and global warming find it easy to feel overwhelmed, considering the opposition they often face. The magnitude of the problem and the complexity of its causes and solutions can make it feel like an uphill battle.
Acceptance of climate science is more likely when issues are framed in ways that resonate with rather than threaten group identity. It is counterproductive to force people into an ideological corner. It’s critical to get people of different persuasions to work together on issues of mutual interest. Evangelicals are called upon to be good stewards of God’s creation. Dealing with climate change gives them a chance to do just that.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
The people who most need to hear the message are least likely to accept it. Attaching derogatory labels to those engaged in denialism are counterproductive. People need to be able to sit down calmly and discuss these issues.
Young evangelicals have set up something they call Creation Care. They’re working hard to get the word out. They’re building relationships with new grassroots networks. They’re organizing college campus speaking tours, mobilizing other young people, and contacting conservative lawmakers with the message. The active involvement of the younger generation, including young evangelicals, in addressing climate change through initiatives like Creation Care is an encouraging development.
Climate change has the potential to have far-reaching and profound impacts on various aspects of our lives, including ecosystems, economies, human health, and social systems. It is crucial to recognize the urgency of addressing climate change and taking proactive measures to mitigate its impacts and adapt to the changes that are already occurring. Safeguarding the planet and creating a sustainable future not only benefits our generation but also ensures a livable and thriving world for future generations. The decisions we make today will have long-lasting effects on the well-being and quality of life for those who come after us.
Who Wins the Battle 0ver Women’s Ordination?
by Peggy Bendroth
Peggy Bendroth served over 15 years as executive director of the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston. She has written and edited eight books on American religion, including Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (Yale 1993); Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism (Illinois 2003), co-edited with Virginia Brereton; The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past (North Carolina 2015); and, Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen (Oxford 2022).
“We’ve been ordaining women since 1853!” Unlike most Facebook posts, this one was short and to the point. The United Church of Christ hasn’t had a lot to boast about lately, given its declining numbers and influence, but this little humble brag was probably too hard to pass up. While Southern Baptists are busily ousting congregations with female pastors, their liberal UCC cousins have only to invoke the name of Antoinette Brown, who was ordained to the South Butler, New York, Congregational Church more than a century and a half ago.
American Protestants have rarely wasted much sympathy on each other. Moral schadenfreude is an old and established tradition, going back to the earliest days of religious disestablishment, when everyone suddenly realized that the devil would take the hindmost.
This particular stick in the eye, however, set me to blogging. The statement is not just lacking in a certain Christian sympathy but it misinterprets Congregational history almost as egregiously as the Southern Baptists are misreading the New Testament. And not just Congregational history—we want to believe that today the mainline Protestant churches are a bastion of liberal tolerance, a standing rebuke to evangelical intolerance. But at least as far as women’s ordination is concerned, the story is far too messy, complicated, and discouraging for a single sentence in a Facebook post.
First of all, Brown was ordained because she could be: nineteenth-century Congregational polity allowed local churches to make their own decisions about pastoral leadership. Though women’s rights certainly entered in, practical concerns did so too. In fact, the tiny smattering of women who were licensed or ordained to lead Congregational churches in the years after 1853 took on the hardship cases, churches without enough money or influence to hire a man. Until very recently, with the influx of female pastors in the 1990s and afterwards, the so-called “big steeple” congregations were reserved for big steeple men.
And here’s the other thing: without taking anything away from Brown and her South Butler congregation, you don’t get points for doing something once, or even a few times afterwards. You have to keep on doing it, and then make it a rule. And on that score, Congregationalists, and mainline Protestants in general, have relatively little to boast about, even alongside their conservative evangelical cousins.
This is why I titled my recent book about mainline Protestant churchwomen “Good and Mad.” Though the gender politics in those mostly white, mostly northern moderate-to-liberal churches have never been as dire as the Southern Baptist case, the mainline moral cushion is hardly luxurious. Up through most of the twentieth century mainline churchwomen were prohibited from all forms of church leadership. They could not be pastors, nor could they be deacons or elders; they were all but entirely excluded from decision-making denominational boards or committees. Sometimes the reasons were related to polity and sometimes to theology, more rarely to biblical proof texting. The main rationale rested on stereotypes of women as vapid, disorganized, and power-hungry.
We now know all and more than we need to know about evangelical misogyny, the abuse perpetrated by tiny men in charge. But the historical record also demonstrates, over and over, that mainline Protestants worried about “feminization” too, if not more. In their case, fears of feminine takeover were almost justified. Women were the clear majority of church members, the vast majority of Sunday attenders, and really, really good at doing the churches’ business. Keenly aware of the institutional skills and fundraising prowess of denominational women’s organizations, the men in charge had a dilemma. They could not do without the income generated by Ladies Aid bake sales and sewing bees, much less the thousands of missionaries recruited, trained, and supported by unpaid volunteers running women’s missionary organizations. But what if the women became too powerful? What if they decided to run everything? One story line of twentieth-century mainline churches is, in fact, the dogged efforts by denominational officials to reign in this so-called “shadow church,” to co-opt by any means possible that formidable female network.
Everyone treaded lightly. For their part, the women knew that their separate power structure required compromise. They had to allow the men to at least look like they were in charge. That also meant that ordination was mostly off the table. If the pulpit was the last bastion of masculine privilege, then so be it. Why start a fight that would in the end only benefit a handful of women with seminary degrees? “Sometimes I wonder,” a Congregational woman mused in a 1940 survey, “if our Christian life would be more vital and more vigorous if our men would . . . take over all the offices of the church.”
No wonder women’s ordination took so long. Far from championing Antoinette Brown et. al., the mainline churches dragged their feet until their reluctance became unseemly. As Methodist theologian Nelle Morton lamented to a gathering in 1970, “We have learned, through heartbreaking disappointments and dehumanizing work inequities, that competence, creativity, and efficiency are not enough to deal with a male supremacy that has become a pervasive structured force in our church.”
Feminism only made headway after a series of tradeoffs, and then not until about thirty or forty years ago. It happened once the vast network of women’s organizations had been crippled or dismantled, victims of ecumenical merger agreements and quests for “efficiency.” It happened when longstanding fears of feminization became less intense than the feminist critique gathering strength in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet even today, for example, the revolution is far from over. According to one recent study by Benjamin Knoll and Cammie Jo Bolin, the female minister is more a matter of theory than practice. Despite the fairly strong support for women’s ordination, only nine per cent of the respondents to a major survey attended congregations with a female minister.
Yet, in the end, if there’s anyone to feel sorry for, I don’t think it’s women in the mainline churches, or even their Southern Baptist sisters. Those most deserving of our pity are the Southern Baptist men fighting over the deck chairs on a sinking ship, now the sole owners of an institution with a depressing, if not frightening future. And not only that, the embattled patriarchy has summoned the wrath of smart, articulate, and spiritually dedicated women, thoughtful Christians with every reason to be both “good and mad.” That is something to worry about.
Yikes! Creationist “Scholar” Explodes With Ad Hominem Attacks
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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear soon.
As I read Jerry Bergman’s attack on William Trollinger, I confess that I was less than interested, because he uses all the same argumentative tropes that occur when a creationist feels exposed, put down, or criticized. Like Ken Ham, Bergman mistakes criticism for personal persecution. The first line of his article reveals his insecurity and the “chip on the shoulder” that attaches to almost all evangelicals.
Why do creationist rebuttals sound the same? Why do they insist on garden-variety emotional responses? The writer is always feigning personal injury: His feelings are hurt. He throws around rhetorical terms that suggest his critic is illogical.
And in Bergman’s article, he reaches into the grab bag of an introductory public speaking textbook and inserts rhetorical tropes like “ad hominem,” “glittering generality”, and the feared “either-or fallacy.”
The most glaring rhetorical mistake in the article is the insistence that William Trollinger uses ad hominem arguments when the opposite is true. Bergman’s use of ad hominem arguments reminds me of David Barton writing a book called The Jefferson Lies when the book itself was filled with Barton’s lies, distorted facts, and misinformation.
A word about the rhetorical trope – ad hominem. Rhetorical scholar Jennifer R. Mercieca defines and explains ad hominem argument:
- Argument ad hominem (Latin for “appeal to the person,” attacking the person instead of their argument). Used by a demagogue to misdirect the audience’s attention and attack the character of their opponents. Ad hominem is a technique that shifts attention away from the issue by refocusing our attention on the person who raised the issue, or at a secondary level, on the demagogue’s attack on the person. If successful, ad hominem attacks prevent critical thinking, as our attention is no longer on the debated question and is instead on the person.
According to argumentation scholars Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst there are three variations of ad hominem attacks:
- First: “direct personal attack,” which “consists of cutting down one’s opponent by casting doubt on his expertise, intelligence, character, or good faith.”
- Second: “circumstantial attack,” which cast doubt on the “motives of one’s opponent for his standpoint” by making them appear self-interested or biased.
- Third: “tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy),” in which “an attempt is made to find a contradiction in one’s opponent’s words or between his words and his deeds.”
And Bergman goes overboard when it comes to ad hominem attacks. The emotional dam bursts when he asserts that:
- “in examining Trollinger’s response, I was looking for evidence of mistakes of factual content in my article. However, it can be seen that Trollinger’s response was purely irresponsible name-calling from a militant anti-Christian who opposes Christian schools and the core Christian beliefs. Was Trollinger pro-Vietcong, omitting the atrocities committed by them?”
At last, an actual ad hominem argument appears, but it comes from Bergman, not Trollinger! Unpack this paragraph for evidence:
- Trollinger engages in purely irresponsible name-calling.
- Trollinger is a militant anti-Christian.
- Trollinger opposes Christian schools.
- Trollinger opposes the core Christian beliefs.
- Perhaps Trollinger was a secret Communist, supporting the Vietcong while ignoring the atrocities committed by those Communists.
Somewhere in the posteromedial cortex of what passes for the creationist’s mind lurks the ghost of the rabid anti-Communist crusader Joseph McCarthy. Rhetorically, you can’t get more ad hominem than this.
But Bergman, once he unleashed the throttle on the Ad Homimen train, can’t stop himself. He goes even further:
- “Trollinger’s article purports to be about me and my article on Darwinism and Vietnam, but I am not responsible for what others, who claim to be Christians but who do not live up to the Christian standard, say or do. His article not only attacks me personally but expands into a wholesale condemnation of the Christian church and modern Christians.”
Mr. Bergman can’t resist the name calling and the personal insults. He sounds more like Donald Trump – the king of nicknames – than a careful scholar schooled in reticence and humility.
Look in the mirror Mr. Bergman and ask thyself: “Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the most ad hominem of all?”
And the mirror will respond: “You’re looking at him, dude.”
Yikes! Creationist “Scholar” Attacks RightingAmerica
by William Trollinger
Dear Jerry (if I may):
Oh my. It appears that my discussion of your article on Darwin and the Vietnam War has struck a nerve. So it is that you have mustered your creationist weaponry in a full-scale assault on me and my critique. I am sorry to say, however, that there are 1 or 2 (ok, more like 9+ ) serious weaknesses/inaccuracies/falsehoods in your article that I must call to your attention:
- “One of the most recent critics of those who rightly put much of the blame on Darwin and Galton [for Nazism] is William Trollinger, a Catholic college professor at the University of Dayton. Trollinger instead puts much of the blame on Martin Luther, Bible believing Christians, and Creationists.”
- Jerry, it is ludicrous to assert that I blame Creationists for the Holocaust – you will need to provide chapter and verse for this absurd suggestion.
- But here is what I said in my critique of your article, material which you have conveniently left out in your attack on me: “Many scholars have convincingly argued that the Darwin-to-Hitler conceit is absurdly simplistic, and of course leaves Christianity and Christians off the hook: ‘The Anti-Defamation League has vigorously critiqued the Darwin-to-Hitler trope, pointing out that such an argument . . . neatly erases the multiple factors that led to the Holocaust, including a Christian anti-Semitism that long preceded Charles Darwin. Focus on Darwin-to-Hitler, and the slaughter of German Jews by eleventh-century crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition and its persecution of Jewish converts, and the history of Church teachings versus the Jews conveniently disappear. By focusing on the role of evolution in leading to the horrors of Nazi Germany, one does not have to consider the historical import of Martin Luther’s venomous words in ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’: ‘Set fire to their synagogues or schools . . . Their houses should [also] be razed and destroyed . . . They are a heavy burden, a plague, a pestilence, a sheer misfortune for our country’ (Righting America, 183-184).”
- Jerry, I am afraid that your monocausal explanation of Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust just does not hold up.
- “He states that he grew up in a fundamentalist church as a creationist, but his college education and reading anti-creationist publications turned him against this worldview.”
- Jerry, again, where do I say that my college education and my reading of anti-creationist literature turned me against fundamentalism and creationism? I know this is a standard trope in fundamentalist polemics, but you fail to provide evidence.
- As regards fundamentalism, it was my church’s support of the Vietnam War and opposition to civil rights that prodded me to begin my move out of fundamentalism/evangelism (a journey that began when I was 12 years old).
- As regards creationism, and as I explain in Righting America, I was never a young Earth creationist, thanks in good part to my father, who was a geologist. As an old Earth creationist, Dad was horrified when flood geology and the idea of a young Earth began to infiltrate evangelical churches in Denver (where I grew up). I confess that, for his sake, I am glad that he had passed when the Creation Museum opened in 2007.
- Trollinger “had a short stint as an assistant professor of history at the College of the Ozarks and, next, as an associate professor of history at Messiah College, both Christian colleges. Why he left the first two college positions is unknown. He ended up at the University of Dayton in the fall of 1996 teaching undergraduate courses for the Department of History and M.A./Ph.D. courses for the Religious Studies Department.”
- Jerry, here you are borrowing a classic Tucker Carlson tactic, insinuating (but not asserting) that there may be something scandalous about my departures from these two “Christian colleges.” Perhaps if you had more familiarity with higher education you would recognize my path as a rather standard professional trajectory.
- But it’s interesting that while you refer to Ozarks and Messiah as Christian colleges – thus suggesting that I had to leave because I lost my faith (which I didn’t) – you don’t refer to the University of Dayton (UD) as a Christian college. Is that because UD is a Catholic university? Is that because you agree with the Answer in Genesis (AiG) assertion that the Catholic Church “is a false church that enslaves hundreds of millions of people in a false gospel” (World Religions and Cults, vol. 1, 110)?
- “Here is an example of [Trollinger’s] ad hominem tactic: ‘Ken Ham has produced (along with many other writings making the same point) Darwin’s Plantation, a book whose title could easily lead the historically unaware reader to believe that Darwinism was responsible for American slavery .. . even though Origin of Species appeared in 1859, just four years before the Emancipation Proclamation.’ This book nowhere makes this claim, nor does Ken Ham even infer it.”
- Jerry, I confess that you are relentless at excising material that works against your argument. So, for example, here’s the sentence from my article that comes after “Emancipation Proclamation”: “And it is not just the title: the cover of Ham’s book has a photo of African American slaves working the fields.”
- It does not take a Ph.D. in visual rhetoric – it does not even take a course in visual rhetoric – to understand that, with this cover, Ham is strongly suggesting the connection between Darwinism and slavery in the United States. (See photo).
- And as I also note in the article (and Jerry, again, good job of removing material that works against your argument): “Of course, to suggest that Darwinism is responsible for slavery in the United States is a very convenient way to elide the fact that ‘in antebellum America millions of white Christians . . . stood on their literal reading of the Word of God to issue forth a raft of proslavery polemics and to deliver an almost-infinite number of proslavery sermons” (Righting America, 186).
- “The insinuation that Darwin (in England) contributed to the end slavery [sic] (in America) makes no sense.”
- What makes no sense, Jerry, is that I never made such a ridiculous insinuation. Again, where’s your evidence?
- Trollinger’s article involves “a wholesale condemnation of the Christian church and modern Christians.”
- Once again, Jerry, I have to ask: Where’s your evidence of a wholesale condemnation of the church and Christians? Or am I right to understand that, for you, Christian=Protestant fundamentalism? (See next response.)
- “In examining Trollinger’s response I was looking for evidence of mistakes of factual content in my article. However, it can be seen that Trollinger’s response was purely irresponsible namecalling from a militant anti-Christian who opposes Christian schools and the core Christian beliefs. Was Trollinger pro-Vietcong, omitting the atrocities committed by them?”
- On what basis, Jerry, are you arguing that I am a “militant anti-Christian who opposes Christian schools and the core Christian beliefs”? I am a practicing Catholic who teaches at a Catholic university, and who every Sunday recites the Nicene Creed. Talk about “core Christian beliefs”! Of course, the creed does not make reference to an inerrant Bible or to young Earth creationism, which may be your problem.
- But, Jerry, is your point that, as I suggested above, Catholics are not Christians (and the only Christians are Protestant fundamentalists, like you)?
- Pro-Vietcong? Where are you getting this, Jerry? Is this because I point out that you give short shrift to American atrocities in the Vietnam War? Is that what makes me pro-Vietcong?
- “Lastly, Trollinger claimed, ‘It is not in the least surprising that Bergman’s list of references contains virtually nothing from the best and most substantive work on the Vietnam War.’ This was another tactic intended to discredit the article: a blank assertion without documentation. He neglected to give the title of this ‘most substantive work on the Vietnam War.’ It could well be that I did consult it. This was possibly a big lie tactic.”
- Jerry, once again your reading comprehension leaves much to be desired. I am not referring to one book on the history of the Vietnam War; I am referring to the large body of exemplary historical work on the topic. There is absolutely no evidence here that you consulted any of this. And if you did make use of one of these historical studies, that should have appeared in your references. That’s what scholars do.
- And I love your use of the phrase “big lie tactic.” (Sarcasm.)
- Trollinger closed with a distraction: a blatant case of the either-or fallacy combined with a glittering generality: ‘the past and present of human history can be reduced to a binary. On one side it is a literal Genesis 1-11, young Earth, capitalism, and heaven. On the other side it is reason, old Earth, Darwinian evolution, socialism, and hell. It’s all so simple.’ In other words, agree with him or you are unreasonable.”
- So Jerry, this is either a hilarious example of not understanding what you are reading, or it is a case of malicious excision. I say this because you left out the five words preceding this quote: “For the folks at AiG.” That is to say, this quote is NOT referring to me, as I absolutely reject this ahistorical binary. I am referring to you, Ham, and the legion of culture war fundamentalists.
Jerry, four years ago your creationist buddy, Ken Ham, launched a full-scale attack on me and rightingamerica. Of course, I responded, and it turns out that my final paragraph in response to Ham works well as my final paragraph here.
- Jerry, if “Creationists Slandered About the Darwin-Nazi Connection” were a paper written by a University of Dayton student in one of my first-year classes, I would have written this at the bottom of the paper: Failure to provide substantive evidence to back your claims, and a dismaying tendency to resort to ad hominem attacks. This is not acceptable for a university-level paper. Revise and resubmit.
- And this is for you, Jerry: You have until the end of fall semester to make these revisions. I think you will need the time.
Robert Jeffress and the Idol of Christian Nationalism
bgy 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, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear soon.
On July 04, 2023, America feels like an antique shop on Fifth Avenue, filled with rooms and rooms of precious, irreplaceable sets of china, rooms that have been invaded by “raging bulls of Bashan.”
One of those “bulls of Bashan” is the Rev. Dr. Robert Jeffress. I recently received a fund-raising appeal from Jeffress. He offered to send me a copy of his book, America Is a Christian Nation, in exchange for a donation. Since I have a personal rule against making contributions to scam appeals, misinformation, and false claims, I did not send Jeffress a check. Instead, I have deconstructed his argument that America is a Christian nation.
From the outset, I am happy to state my case in straightforward language: America was not founded as a Christian nation. America has never been a Christian nation. America is not now a Christian nation.
Jeffress writes, “Hello Rod, Revisionists would have you believe that our founders intended for a complete separation between Church and State.” Jeffress confuses the entire membership of the American Historical Association with “revisionists.” What Jeffress should have said was that “American historians teach us that our founders intended the separation between Church and State. They didn’t imagine the nation becoming as secular as it is today, but they certainly meant for church and state to be separate.”
The book Jeffress is hawking is a larger version of his annual Fourth of July sermon. American historian John Fea says,
I do not have the space in the book to counter in depth the false and problematic claims Jeffress makes in his “America Is a Christian Nation” sermon. But it is worth noting that his manipulation of the past to advance his Christian Right agenda and scare his congregation into political action comes straight out of the playbook of David Barton, his friend and fellow conservative political activist.
David Barton is an entire ocean of misstatements, propaganda, false claims, and bad history. Barton is a history “hobbyist.” He wrote a book called The Jefferson Lies. Conservative evangelical historians debunked the book and showed that the “lies” in the book were “Barton lies” as he manufactured sayings of the founding fathers. Barton’s misinformation was so atrocious that the book’s publisher, Thomas Nelson, took the unprecedented step of removing the book from publication.
Jeffress should come clean by admitting that “my friend David Barton, who is not a historian, but a Republican political consultant who fabricates history, is my primary source for the false claims in my book.”
In their book, The Anointed, Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson point out that Jeffress and his fellow evangelicals have confidence that liberal, secular experts at leading universities should retreat in the face of his campaign to educate children with traditional Christian principles. On Main Street, where Jeffress preaches, worships, shops, and runs his corporation (The FBC of Dallas), the insights of credentialed, experienced historical experts are demeaned.
Jeffress claims that American historians teach that “Christianity should be absent from all aspects of our government.” This is a false and easily debunked assertion, but it is a bogus and emotionally-freighted charge that is designed to scare easily-frightened evangelicals.
Jeffress follows his fear appeal with his most blatantly false statement: “Our nation was founded on Christian principles, and the founders wanted our government to uphold those principles.”
Will Campbell, no stranger to strong language, offers solid refutation of Jeffress:
They preach that America was founded by right-wing Christians, who espoused the same theology as they do. Who were these people? How about John Adams, Daniel Webster, or Thomas Jefferson? Won’t work. They were Unitarians. What of Benjamin Franklin? A deist. Thomas Payne? A self-avowed atheist. There were no right-wing pietists in the motley crew that shaped America’s earliest documents. They weren’t trying to establish a Christian nation. Quite the opposite. They were fleeing from entanglement with anybody’s religion, for they had seen where governments based on religion led. They had seen the beggary, the bloodletting inhumanity of theocracies, and wanted no part of it. Church was never to be state. State was never to be church.
Jeffress expresses certainty in his dubious view of American history:
I’ve written a book whose title boldly declares what I know to be true: America Is a Christian Nation. Many would dispute that claim, but my book provides evidence for this truth using the very words and actions of the founders themselves. The book is a short read, accompanied by beautiful patriotic photos that I think you’ll appreciate.
But it is not that historians “would dispute that claim.” They would go further, dismissing Jeffress’ claim on the grounds that it is false and easily disproved. While historians use a more refined language, they would agree with Campbell:
THERE ARE LIES BEING TOLD ABOUT THE BIBLE AND AMERICA. BY PEOPLE WHO SHOULD know better, and probably do. They pose as the Messiah’s evangelists on programs subsidized with tax exemptions and protected by the same First Amendment they frequently denounce. They clothe a blatantly political agenda in pious rhetoric and peddle it as gospel.
Jeffress claims that fifty-two of the original fifty-five signers of the Constitution were evangelical believers. False. He claims that the First Amendment applied only to Protestant denominations. False. His selective and misleading interpretations of the First Amendment and the founding fathers reach a crescendo near the end of the book when he throws the kitchen sink at the “revisionists.” He assumes, without evidence, that increased violence, illegitimate births, divorce, and low SAT scores are the direct result of the Supreme Court ruling that allegedly removed prayer from public schools. False.
Here Jeffress echoes Mr. Flood Geology, Henry Morris, who insisted that
prayer and Bible reading had disappeared from the public schools, replaced by drugs, sex education, and demands for the tolerance of homosexuality. Standards of dress, obscene language in public, teenage pregnancy, and promiscuity ominously pointed to a culture in decline. Even nativity scenes and traditional Christmas greetings were under attack.
I have no doubt that Robert Jeffress is a sincere person. His appeal in the letter is heart-felt at times. He really seems to believe that America is threatened by liberal hordes, and that all good Christians “must preserve America’s unique heritage and fight for our religious freedoms. By understanding our nation’s Christian roots, we can work to bring our country back to its founding principles.”
But notwithstanding his apparent sincerity, Jeffress’ book is chock-full of misleading and false claims. How he manages to square these bogus claims is a sheer act of acrobatic interpretation, but he pulls it off in his concluding appeal for money: “I want to make sure that you know that your donation will help us continue sharing the truth of God’s Word and provide even more resources to help you grow in your faith.”
Beware of Christian Nationalists peddling fake history lessons packaged in appeals of fear of the future and a sweeping nostalgia for a past that never existed. The belief that America is a Christian nation is the dominant idol in our nation. I define “idol” as any love that exceeds love and loyalty to God. In reality, God doesn’t need a secular political kingdom, a Christian nation.
God already has a politics: The church. The church is an alternative to a nation-state operated by Christian Nationalists. So don’t send Jeffress any money and don’t read his Barton-inspired book, because America is not now, never has been, and never will be a Christian nation. What matters is whether we are going to be the Christians who embrace the politics of Jesus – suffering, sacrificing love on behalf of the entire world.
Here’s the letter I wish Robert Jeffress would send to all his followers on this Fourth of July, 2023:
The current dis-ease in our land means that we are vulnerable. The immense violence in our midst means there is great suffering, but it is also our moment of truth about the vulnerability we share with others. For now, we can empathize with other people who live through upheavals, civil wars, and violence for years and even decades.
What should we do with this knowledge? Should we try to close this door of vulnerability? Should we try to frighten our people with false visions and dead dreams of a nation founded by God and endowed by God to be the most powerful nation in the world?
No.
Instead, we should say to the world: We will try to learn from our previous mistakes. America was not founded by evangelical Christians. Neither were all our founding fathers “born again Christians.” There is no special divine dispensation from God for the United States. We are guests on this planet, part of the world community. We are all connected to each other, dependent on each other. As Christians we should not attempt to rule the nation, set strict rules for how others are to live. Instead we should embrace diversity, plurality, equality, and the flourishing of all peoples of all kinds.
Our vulnerability must extend – and this may be the hardest task of all – to our commitment to become suffering servants for the world and to be the honest and caring brokers of the needs of the whole world. We need to accept the reality that America doesn’t possess a righteousness that is lacking in other nations, other religions, and other races.
The evil in this world has not been the product of the bad behaviors and actions of liberals, feminists, and gays. The evil is also with us and within all of us. Only together can we move forward to create a world more just, more equitable, and more empathetic.
Sincerely, Robert Jeffress
Ok, I’m dreaming. But I wish.
On this July 4 gather with family and friends for a rousing patriotic celebration. Hot dogs, bar-b-que, cheeseburgers, crawfish etouffee, beer, picnics, fireworks, and parades from shore to shining shore should mark the day. But don’t confuse it with Christianity. Round up the bulls of Bashan and put them in a pen before they destroy the foundations of democracy with their religious pretensions!
Happy Fourth of July!
The Unholy Trinity in Fundamentalist Parenting: A Rhetorical Analysis
by Camille Kaminski Lewis
Camille Kaminski Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Rhetorical Studies with a minor in American Studies. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism, was a scholarly attempt to stretch the boundaries of both Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory on tragedy and comedy as well as stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. (The story of that publication is available at The KB Journal.) Last year she published an edited volume, White Nationalism and Faith: Statements and Counter-Statements on American Identity (Peter Lang); see here for our interview with Lewis about this book. She is currently working on an original manuscript titled, Klandamentalism: The Puzzling Intersection of Race, Religion, Revivalism in America” and an edited volume, “One Hundred Years of Women Debating the Equal Rights Amendment: An Anthology, 1923-2023 (Peter Lang, 2024).
Two weeks ago the Huffington Post published my story about the catalyst for my leaving fundamentalism. Watching Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People made me remember again what I had left behind when I said “no” to Bob Jones University’s campus day care: no, they were not allowed to hit my 2.5-year-old son.
As I said for HuffPo, for too many people the grace alone that they claim for their personal salvation never applies to the children in their care. Adults get grace; children get hit. Some people say it like this: in fundamentalism, you have to go through hell to get to heaven.
As I was combing through the “receipts” from our exodus, I rediscovered a folder of 2010 recordings from a ladies’ Sunday School class on parenting.
It was chilling.
This example illumines why spanking is so necessary to the process of producing Shiny Happy People like the Duggars. For these fundamentalists, hitting vulnerable children is a sacramental, painful transaction that, they claim, guarantees a child’s salvation.
It’s a sacrament.
Surveying all the conservative evangelical literature on parenting since the 1960s, it becomes plain that spanking is “a means of grace.” The parenting experts contend unequivocally that parents save their children from eternal damnation when they hit their little ones.
The particular texts I saved are from a 2010 parenting seminar in a conservative evangelical church here in Greenville, South Carolina at Mount Calvary Baptist Church.
Jan Patterson, a missionary for the Gospel Fellowship Association, handles the “discipline” talk in this 9-week series for women-only. Now “discipline” for fundamentalists is never about life-long education or what the Greeks called paideia. “Discipline” is always code for hitting. The Duggars ominously call it “encouragement.”
Patterson explains to her fundamentalist audience why they must hit their child. She says [31:42], “you spank the foolishness out … but you replace it with God’s wisdom.” She uses Proverbs 22:15 as her proof which states “folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.”
Now let’s think about this for a second. Proverbs are by nature never literal. A stitch in time never literallysaves nine. That English proverb isn’t even really about sewing. It’s an easily remembered rhyme to remind us that when we do small work now, we mitigate larger work later. Clean up the breakfast dishes now so you don’t have a huge pile tonight. And it’s not even a command. It’s advice.
So, none of the “rod” proverbs are intended to be literal commands.
Look at Proverbs 22:15 again: the verse makes the “rod of discipline” the agent of the action which opposes “folly.” Discipline or instruction is the antidote to youthful foolishness. That’s the message. Of course, a child wants to eat nothing but chicken fingers and fries, but eventually through education (from parents, teachers, and life experience) that child will realize there’s a wide variety of choices out there and picking variety is better in every way.
But notice how Patterson alters the proverb. For her, the entire weight of this education rests on “you.” “You spank the foolishness out,” she says, and “you replace it with God’s wisdom.” You, alone, hit. You, alone, subsequently install godliness—like you’re defragging a hard drive or cleaning out a closet. If you map it out, you see that for these fundamentalists, the individual adult parent holds all the knowledge and wields all the power, and the child must passively receive it. No teacher, no neighbor, no aunt—not even the Holy Spirit—intervenes between that single parent hitting out the bad and replacing it with the good. And this hitting is, according to these fundamentalists, commanded by God. “There is no way to avoid this and be an obedient Christian,” Patterson concludes [16:48].
Putting the entire weight of redeeming a child’s soul through hitting that child is mind-blowing. Coding that hitting as “instruction” is twisted. And any curriculum that’s intentionally pain-based is irrational, ineffective, and sadistic.
It’s painful, but secret.
But for them the pain is essential. One of the speakers, Jana Brackbill (a Bob Jones University Class of 1973 graduate) concedes in the discipline talk that the “rod” in Proverbs might be interpreted broadly [30:00]. That is, it could be a glue stick, or it could be a wooden spoon or a piece of PVC. But that’s the extent of the variation. Whatever it could be, the “rod” must be a material instrument that causes pain.
It must hurt, she says, since “it is supposed to be corrective. It is supposed to be sufficient to cause to bring about that correction.” The parent must dispense “real pain” and should “want to give some pain,” “execute pain,” or “inflict pain.” Pain is the only means of education for these evangelicals. If there’s not pain, it’s not biblical.
Yet in the same paragraph where Brackbill is insisting on imposing pain, she warns her younger audience in a coded fashion [43:50] that “we do have to be careful about, you know, bruising or causing huge welts or things like that … [since] our children have to be in nurseries and go to the doctor.” The warning about bruising and welts is necessary not because it’s bad for the child. The warning is necessary because it’s bad for the parent. It’s bad to get caught by the legal system. These mothers must hit but they must never leave evidence of hitting. Three times these older women caution the younger ones not to do their hitting “publicly.” Brackbill vaguely explains that “there are ways that you can work around those things” where “those things” are the civil protections of children.
If hitting is so clearly commanded by God, why hide it? Is it possible that mere proverbs are not so clear after all?
It’s transactional.
Another (unidentified) woman chimes in at the end of the talk with the same infantilized voice Michelle Duggar uses, but she still speaks with an authoritative tone. She describes her recent difficulty with her four-year-old child [47:22]. She had hit him so much in one day that he was “black and blue.” It’s a startling confession after the warning about bruises.
At the end of the day in her example, the mother “went to give [her son] a hug,” and the little preschooler repeated to his mother, “and God doesn’t love me, right?” She actually said “yes” – that God didn’t love the child because of his behavior – and continued, “Your sin will always keep you away from God just like it keeps you away from Mommy and Daddy.”
Imagine being four and being told that your childlike actions cut you off from your mom and dad. It all depends on you. The transaction is all in your hands. You either passively comply and get love, or you are utterly alone in the universe.
This is terrifying.
“You” have to hit hard enough to hurt in a hidden place on a child’s body and in a hidden place in the community so that you can save your child from eternal torment. It all depends on the “you,” the parent while it all depends on the child as well.
This maniacal curriculum is what I left behind when I said “no” to Bob Jones University. God the Father commanded it in a vague proverb about instruction and leaves the individual parent to follow blindly. Jesus never enters their metanarrative, and the Holy Spirit will never dissuade them away from causing the welts and bruises God commanded. Their unholy trinity is the parent, the pain, and the child.
Is it any wonder that these evangelicals align with a maniacal tyrant to lead them? If they comply with the power, maybe they’ll be less likely to get hit themselves.
