Leading Creationist Organisation Appoints Conspiracy Theorist To Key Position
by Paul Braterman
Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is now interested in sharing scientific ideas with the widest possible audience, and was involved in successful campaigns to persuade both the English and the Scottish Governments to keep creationism out of the science classroom. He is a regular contributor to 3 Quarks Daily, and blogs at Primate’s Progress, paulbraterman.wordpress.com.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily. We are grateful to the editors for their permission to republish it here.
One month ago today, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis appointed Martyn Iles, formerly director of the Australian Question Lobby, to the position of Chief Ministry Officer, ministry of course being Answers in Genesis’ core activity. Here’s why that matters.
Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.
Answers in Genesis (AiG) is the world’s largest Young Earth Creationist organisation. AiG has a full-time working staff of 1200 and, according to its 2021 tax declaration, assets of almost $82 million. It owns the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky as well as other major assets, and its massive outreach programme includes formal publications, Answers magazine, and an extremely active website.
AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists.
There comes a time in the life of every successful businessman (it usually is a man) when he starts to consider his legacy. Ham is now 71. The vigour of his early writing, which had attracted Henry Morris’ attention in the 1980s, has faded into stale repetitiousness, and his articles on the AiG website now describe themselves as produced with the help of research staff. It seemed at one time as if Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, was his obvious heir apparent, but Hodge’s own writing is superficial and tedious. (Disclosure; both Ham and Hodge have attacked me by name in their writings.)
Iles is now, therefore, in an extremely strong position within the organisation, for which he has excellent credentials. He is a successful organiser and money raiser, and responsible for targeted interventions in Australian electoral politics. His Youtube series The Truth of It has a major following, and as we shall see is very good at what it does. Thus we can expect him to be a major influence on AiG in its direction and messaging, and to enhance its appeal and effectiveness. He has already been announced as a key speaker in next year’s homeschooling conference.
It is therefore a matter of some general concern that Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, believes in male domination (while I was preparing this piece he told us that “A word like ‘independent’ is a direct assault on God’s design for women” and that a good woman is “Submissive to husbands. including imperfect ones”), is adept at promoting an intolerant agenda in the name of freedom of speech, has (ever so obliquely) inflamed concerns about vaccines, takes the historical truth of the early chapters of Genesis for granted, and thinks abortion should be illegal because God approves of population growth, among other reasons. Worst of all, he preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world.”
For an example of Iles defending the indefensible, provided that the indefensible is based on religious belief, see his condemnation of Covid vaccine mandates.
To see him in unrestrained conspiracy mode, watch [1] his response to the World Economic Forum’s concept of a Great Reset, according to which we should use the pause imposed by Covid to rethink current industrial policy and its large-scale environmental impact. This notion offends against his core belief that the planet is in God’s hands, so that WEF’s concerns are fundamentally misguided. Like others, he presents the Reset concept, and the interest shown in it by governments, institutions, and major companies, as a conspiracy to do away with capitalism and democracy. Here, Iles is in lockstep with the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry and for laissez-faire economics. As a sign of this conspiracy (and here I am reminded of Q-Anon) he points to the way in which the slogan Build Back Better, which occurs in the WEF literature, is echoed by politicians as diverse as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Justin Trudeau, while as co-conspirators he identifies the entire climate change movement, as well as Black Lives Matter which, like other creationist writers, Iles describes as Marxist.
Iles’ full talents are on display in his The Truth of It YouTube, Climate Totalitarianism, which I recommend to students of rhetoric. Its thousand closely argued words are a masterpiece of misdirection, false dichotomy, strawmanning and vilification of opponents’ positions (the word cancer occurs four times); emotional engagement with the concerned, leading to a promise of reassurance and erasing of anxiety; imposing an intellectual superstructure (which he calls hierarchies of control) on the Bible and then using this superstructure to argue that mere worldly science can be safely ignored; slyly referring to fossil fuels by another name (mineral resources) as put there by God for humanity to use; and hinting at massive totalitarian conspiracies behind climate policy. All reinforced by dramatic phrasing, intonation, and gestures.
The title of the series, The Truth of It, prepares us for the message that anyone Iles disagrees with has been misleading us. The individual podcast title, Climate totalitarianism, casts the entire climate issue in terms of individual freedom versus governmental overreach, echoing his recurrent motif of a conspiracy of the powerful against the godly. And his opening sentence, “Well, it looks as if in the post-pandemic world, we’re going to be increasingly preoccupied with climate change,” describes a crisis over 50 years in the making as if it was just the next thing that they want us to worry about.
Iles then gives us two examples of net zero policy in action. Firstly, the enforced shutdown of Netherlands farms, early victims of the climate juggernaut (“there will be more”). I can find no reference to these alleged closures; the most relevant EU document that I could find sought, on the contrary, to reduce the loss of farmland, but no matter; our sympathies have been engaged with the alleged victims of the juggernaut, as have our fears, since we may be next. Secondly, eating bugs rather than red meat. Clearly, the net zero policy is unnatural, disgusting, and destructive.
Where do such misguided policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.” (The word “cancer,” in connection with any concerns about human impact on the planet, occurs three more times in this presentation.)
If only our decision-makers would pay proper attention to the Bible! There they would find (Iles gives chapter and verse) that the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Noah, were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, that Adam and his descendants were given dominion over everything on earth, and that God promised Noah that springtime and harvest would never cease as long as the Earth endures. Those who are worried about climate change have failed to recognise the hierarchy of control, according to which the planet was created to be adequate to human needs. It is humanity’s right, and indeed duty, to get to work and enjoy what has been made available, in the secure knowledge that caring for the planet as a whole is not their responsibility, but God’s.
Notice here the construction of a vast theological superstructure on a narrow biblical foundation, followed by the claim that this superstructure is itself biblical.
Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”
Fear not. This nervousness is dispelled if we remember the hierarchy of control, and what God has promised: “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his intended Australian primary audience.
Governments pursuing environmental goals are in an extremely stressful situation, he tells us, since they are going against fundamental human nature, and must use totalitarian methods to impose their will. But this stress is unnecessary, if we remember the divinely ordained hierarchy. Humankind is steward of the planet, but God is an even greater steward, and we should listen to His word.
The most alarming part of Iles’ sermon is what he does not say. He simply bypasses the scientific evidence that business as usual risks unacceptable damage to the environment. Implicit in his position is the acceptance that such things, if they happen, will represent the working out of God’s will.
For those who see us as approaching the End Times, as I suspect Iles does, this is merely spelling out the obvious. For the rest of us, terrifying.
***
I thank Dan Phelps for useful background information about AiG’s empire, and the Rev Michael Roberts for helpful comments.
1] Disclosure. Life is short, so once I’ve got the flavour of a presentation, I just scan the transcript.
It’s Not (Just) about Drag: Weaponizing Children in the Anti-LGBTQ+ Culture Wars
by Patrick Thomas
In 2023, the need to celebrate Pride month seems more urgent than usual. Given the increasing presence of far right hate groups at LGBTQ+ events (such as the neo-Nazi gathering at a Columbus Drag Brunch), bomb threats of queer spaces, and at least one case in which an Ohio LBGTQ+ affirming church was firebombed with Molotov cocktails – taking the time to reclaim queer joy and commemorate the roots of queer liberation feels especially important.
Of course, protests of Pride events are nothing new. In my 20-something years of attending Pride events in many different places, I’ve encountered a fair number of displeased citizens – mostly evangelical preachers armed with megaphones trying to shout down the revelry with some fiery, Sodom and Gomorrah-obsessed routine. While I am uncertain that this strategy has ever been successful in converting Pride attendees, I have always been grateful to the many “angels” who – borrowing the silent, protective counter-protest technique popularized in response to Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church’s presence at Matthew Shepard’s 1999 funeral – create a visual barrier of white cloth between Pride participants and hateful preachers.
What is more concerning this year is the number of friends and colleagues who did not attend Pride this year out of concerns for personal safety and the risk of attacks, especially with larger attendance expected in this first “post-pandemic” summer. I understood their concern; in fact, in the week leading up to my local Pride, I discussed possible exit plans and meet-up spots with the friends in case of an attack. This concern is real: with the near 30-fold increase in anti-LGBTQ+ protests over the last five years (averaging 41 protests per month in 2023 – up from an average of 3 per month in 2017-2022), Pride also feels riskier than it has in a very long time. This is because the current protests against Pride differ from those of previous years. Where there were once a few rogue preachers, there are now some strange bedfellows: anti-gay preachers are joined by the likes of Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, Moms for Liberty, and any number of far-right groups that seem ready and able to act upon the hate that conservative evangelicals have long spread against Pride events. And the new target of this increased hate? Drag performers.
One of the most popular targets of right-wing hate has been the popular practice of library reading clubs and Drag Queen Story Hours. Initiated by artist Michelle Tea in 2015, Drag Queen Story Hour provided early literacy instruction through storytelling and reading in public libraries, bookstores, and community centers. Most notable about Drag Queen Story Hour is that in addition to interacting with drag queens, children listen to and read a diverse range of books, including children’s books with LGBTQ+ characters.
The far right’s opposition to/obsession with drag queen story hour centers on their supposed concern for the safety of children. Though my research is weak on the subject, I am unable to locate a single instance in which a child was harmed by a story hour. Nevertheless, defending children from drag queens has proven to be an effective way of galvanizing conservative support against the gender-bending art form in both the public square and in state legislatures. As historian Emily Johnson notes, “There is no better moral panic than a moral panic centered on potential harm to children,” and for conservatives, the false dichotomy of if-you’re-for-children-you’re-against-drag has some real rhetorical heft. What gets lost in this framing is the fact that it relies on some horrifyingly homophobic assumptions for some measly political gains. Not to mention the fact that none of the groups protesting Drag Queen Story Hour have offered their own time to read to children.
The vitriol against drag performers is not only visible in libraries. It’s also been ushered into state legislatures. In March 2023, Tennessee passed the first law banning public drag performances in which minors might be present. While Trump appointee US District Judge Thomas Parker ruled it unconstitutional last week, the law has served as a template for at least 14 other states who have initiated similar bans for drag performers. Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign noted this bill as one of more than 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced into state legislatures in 2023 alone, a record year for legislative measures aimed at banning books, gender affirming health care, participation in sports programming, gender-related DEI curricula, and eliminating state protections for LGBTQ+ individuals on the basis of equal protections by “sex” (essentially removing protections in housing, employment, credit, and education for LBGTQ+ people).
Legislative bans on drag performers provide a rather unique – and odd – case given the rise of popularity of drag in mainstream culture (thanks in large part to the global phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race, as well as the recirculation of classic drag films such as Paris is Burning, The Birdcage, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch on video streaming services). Anti-drag backlash is puzzling given that drag itself is an art form dead-set on not taking itself seriously. Camp, parody, and silly playfulness are the norm rather than the exception in drag performance. As anyone who has worn them can tell you, heels make it harder – not easier – to run, attack, or perform any other basic maneuver to threaten or intimidate another person. Why, then, would drag cause such concern?
Speaking to LGBTQ Nation, Sybastian Smith of the National Center for Transgender Equality explains that the drag bans themselves aren’t really about drag performers:
Five of these bills have specified that exposure to the LGBTQ+ community is child abuse, most of these bills ban minors and ban drag performers from public spaces…six of these bills have defined drag performers as people who dressed and expressed differently from their ‘biological sex’ or ‘gender identity,’ and we have concerns that this also applies to everyday transgender people.
Smith’s reading of the anti-drag legislation is bleak, but, I fear, correct. For one thing, the assumption that “exposure to the LBGTQ+ community is child abuse” (emphasis mine) is as damning of conservatives’ true motives as it is infuriating to LGBTQ+ people – and it reeks of McCarthy-era homophobia. Banning drag performers from public spaces is a direct attempt to outlaw Pride festivals and parades – events at which drag performers are often the center of festivities as performers, emcees/hosts, and/or grand marshals.
More troubling, however, is how Smith reveals the focus on drag as a red herring for the actual target of conservatives: transgender people. By extending the definition of drag to “people who dress and express differently from their biological sex or gender identity,” drag bans provide a way to criminalize the existence of transgender individuals.
So here we see the real motive of the fervor over men in dresses reading to children, the moral panic around children’s exposure to LGBTQ+ people (despite the fact that some of these children are LGBTQ+ themselves), and the outrage over public drag performances. None of this vitriol is really about drag queens per se. Instead, drag is a cover, a conservative code word for transgender people. The real motive is not to stop drag queens from performing, but to make the existence of transgender people illegal, to make trans* identities and expressions criminal offenses.
The LGBTQ+ community and our allies must fully recognize these legislative threats for what they are: attacks on the very right to life. These attacks weaponize children to create false panic and fallacious binaries between the moral right and the queer wrong. We must use Pride as a way to come together, align our powers, and continue to fight back against the many forces conspiring to literally kill our queer families. Some simple actions that anyone can take include:
- Know LGBTQ+ Youth Rights: Consult the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Know Your Rights” updates for LGBTQ+ Youth, including the latest information on gender-affirming healthcare for trans* youth.
- Call Your State Legislators: Currently most LGBTQ+ focused legislation is passing through state legislatures, so following your state’s house and senate dockets can be a useful point of information for knowing the status of LGBTQ+ rights in your state. For reference, the Human Rights Campaign provides helpful State Roundups each quarter.
- Attend (and Speak Up!) at Local School Board Meetings: One of the most successful local campaigns against LGBTQ+ youth have been through local school boards. Extremist groups like Moms for Liberty have turned school boards against LGBTQ+ affirming policies and practices. Speaking up against anti-LGBTQ+ policies can have a countereffect.
- Support Your Local Drag Queens: Some of the most successful fundraisers in the Dayton area are the Rubi Girls, a drag troupe 40 years strong who have raised over $3 million for HIV/AIDS research, local charities, and their own college scholarship program. Find your local queens and tip them well!
Speaking Ill of the Dead, or, Words on Pat Robertson’s Passing
by William Trollinger
While speaking ill of the dead is generally frowned upon, there are those whose passing should not blind us to the hate they spread and the harm they did. In this regard, see below for three articles in response to Pat Robertson’s death last Thursday.
- Jeet Heer, “Pat Robertson’s Genocidal God Has Called Him Home,” The Nation
- “Pat Robertson was a ‘man of God,’ so it’s worth asking what sort of God he worshiped. In 2010, an earthquake struck Haiti and killed between 100,000 and 160,000 people. Robertson took to The 700 Club to blame the earthquake on a ‘pact to the Devil’ that Haitians allegedly made when they overthrew French imperial rule in 1804. According to Robertson, Haitians ‘got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’”
- Rick Perlstein interviewed by Greg Sargent, “How Pat Robertson created today’s Christian nationalist GOP”, The Washington Post.
- “Every time a riot breaks out at a school board meeting because the board wants to recognize that gay people exist, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow. Every time a crusade against teaching the history of race in America leads to a school limiting access to Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow.”
- Mikey Weinstein, “’One Little Jewish Guy,’ as Pat Robertson Called Me, Says Good Riddance to ‘One Little Dead Guy’”, Daily Kos
- “On several occasions over the years, the rabidly antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic Pat Robertson publicly and hatefully attacked both myself personally and my civil rights organization, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) on his CBN show ‘The 700 Club,’ [calling me] ‘one little Jewish radical’, . . . ‘one little Jewish guy’ . . . ‘one little atheist Jewish man.’”
Is Donald Trump the Embodiment of Evil?: A Response To My Critics
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 sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – has recently been published. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, is the focus of this interview. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear soon.
Some readers of my book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, are claiming that I have committed rhetorical malfeasance by claiming Donald Trump is evil. Interestingly, these critics agree on most or all of the following:
- Trump is a danger to democracy
- Trump is a serial liar
- Trump is a conman
- Trump is a cruel, insulting, mocking bully
- Trump is a philanderer
- Trump has, in the last six years, broken nearly all of the Ten Commandments
And yet, these critics still insist that I have overstated my case by claiming Trump is evil.
I have to say that I am uneasy with the fact that the focus on this claim has led critics to give short shrift to the biblical, philosophical, and rhetorical arguments I make. That said, I wish to respond to the notion that I have been wrong-minded to call Donald Trump “the incarnation of evil.”
At the outset, it’s important to note that I have not depicted Trump as some sort of mythical supernatural manifestation of Satan – a cosmic figure. The ability to overrate and embellish Trump resides with those evangelical preachers who early in 2016 insisted that Trump was “God’s anointed.” I am using “evil” in a more human, incarnational, garden-variety way.
I should note that at no point in my writing have I been unaware of the serious opposition to the use of the word “evil” that rises from theological scholars, psychiatrists, and rhetorical scholars. Terry Eagleton argues the use of the word “evil” serves “to shut down thought.” The word “evil” suggests a blanket condemnation that precludes the necessity of investigating what lies behind the atrocious rhetoric and actions of Trump.
Admitting the truth value of that statement, I believe that I was not content to simply label Trump as evil. I was looking for what was behind his atrocious words and actions.
More than this, and at every word that I plastered on the pages of my book, I was aware of the reticence that rhetorical scholars have always felt at indicting a speaker personally. Yes, my own discipline of rhetoric has historically advised analytical restraint in subjecting a speaker’s person to rhetorical investigation. This is known as the Wizard of Oz Rule. Joshua Gunn suggests that the critical distance afforded by the analyses of personae, genres, and styles enables a critic to make depersonalized, ethical observations.
There’s the possibility that I should have confined my critique to Trump’s “perspective,” instead of Trump’s person. I blew through this stop sign as if I was drag racing in a 1968 Camaro, because I felt that it was an ethical necessity to name Trump as something no other American president had ever been called: evil. I stand by that assessment in the face of my critics.
And the fact is that rhetorical scholars have already served as the canaries in the coal mine when it came to Trump. Like prophets of the Old Testament, these diligent scholars have repeatedly warned of the dangers of Trump’s rhetorical strategies:
- Bonnie Dow says that the election of Trump threatened her teaching of the principles of rhetoric “that words matter, that reasons matter, and that rational deliberation should be central to how American culture makes decisions.”
- Paul Johnson argues that Trump’s incoherent vacillations between strength and victimhood enable his white audiences to disavow hegemonic whiteness and align themselves with a marginalized, political exiled subjectivity.
- Robert Ivie focuses on demolition as the “guiding trope” of Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric.
- Jennifer Wingard portrays Trump as the “product of a spoiled bunch” rather than just a “spoiled apple in the barrel.”
- Ryan Skinnell says “Donald J. Trump is a notorious liar”.
- “Trump’s rhetoric is centered on the preservation,” says Michael J. Steudeman, “of a conception of American identity rooted in whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity.”
- Anna Young labels Trump a populist who traffics in rhetorics of fears and loathing.
- Joshua Gunn emphasizes that Trump’s political style is perverse.
There’s not a single good reason for disputing any of these rhetorical markers of Donald Trump. This is the primary reason I gathered all these critiques into one tropological rotten barrel of apples and extended these assertions to a basic claim: Donald Trump is a secular revivalist, an evangelical preacher who traffics in evil, flaunts evil, and makes evil appear good. As Isaiah lamented, “Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5.20) I argue that an embodied evil lies at the heart of Trump’s personhood.
I go beyond the critiques of rhetorical scholars to claim that there has never been a president that acted and spoke in terms that can be described as so completely saturated by evil. Trump’s persona and person are the same. As Gunn has asserted, “Trump on the stump is all there is—that there is nothing more to Trump than his spectacle. As co-creators of popular perception, this spectacle includes us, too.” In short, I think that judgments of Trump’s character (ethos) are unavoidable. This makes my case a study in the Aristotelian mode of proof known as ethos.
At no point do I feel free from the truthful conclusion of rhetorical scholar Roderick Hart that Trump is us and we are Trump. We are all preachers with unclean lips and we live in the midst of a people of unclean lips. Our only possible redemption is to accept God’s invitation: “Come let us argue it out together.”
Is Trump a mere bully? Is he a common conman, and if so, is he P. T. Barnum or Bernie Madoff? Trump is a serial liar. Is that indictment alone capable of making the indictment that he is evil stick? I concluded yes. After reading careful and helpful reviews of my book, I still conclude that Trump talks evil, spreads evil, and is, therefore, evil. (Here’s our interview with Rod Kennedy about the writing of Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy. And for a review of his book by one of the critics, see here.)
Answers in Genesis finances, more lame responses from Taylor University administrators
by William Trollinger
Below are two links you may very well find interesting, if you are interested in how Answers in Genesis (AiG) conducts itself financially, and how Taylor University administrators remain committed to removing a faculty member who attends seriously to race in America.
- AiG’s IRS 990 form: The ever-intrepid Dan Phelps has mined AiG’s IRS 990 form to uncover (among other things):
- Ken Ham has lots of relatives on the payroll.
- AiG has a corporate jet.
- Ark Encounter is losing money (but donors are making up for the shortfall).
- (not from the IRS 990 form): Answers Academy is looking for a science teacher. If you follow this blog, it’s unlikely you are an eligible candidate.
- Taylor University president and others continue to stonewall in an effort to protect fragile white evangelicals from American racism: In a public forum Taylor’s president and others continue to dodge the fact that Julie Moore was non-renewed as a writing instructor because she focused her course on racial justice, and she included a quote from Jemar Tisby on her syllabus. And there’s a recording that substantiates this claim! See here for our original article on all of this.
- The GoFundMe to support Julie Moore is still active if you would like to contribute.
An Asian-American Missioner in the Appalachians
by Br. Thomas Nguyen, G.H.M.
Br. Thomas is a brother of The Glenmary Home Missionaries, a community that ministers to rural populations in the United States. He is a second-year Pastoral Ministry Masters student at the University of Dayton. His studies, his missionary experience, and his lived experience as a Vietnamese-American Catholic form his views. As he says, “my missionary bent makes me more sensitive to those who are marginalized in our society. The attacks on Asians during COVID have re-invigorated my zeal to fight for justice, especially racial justice. My goal is to help all people see the fullness of the scriptures which have social and spiritual impact. In order to restore justice and peace at times we have to ‘bust the wall of ignorance.’”
Wow!!! Asian cultural appreciation month, what a month! In the big cities, I see and hear about all the food festivals going on from one town to another. Doesn’t your mouth just water thinking of a hot boiling bowl of ramen where the noodle is chewy and soft? The broth is so rich and nutritious, your sinuses clear just taking a good sniff! As you scoop up that egg, the warm, hot, flavorful yoke just drips into your bowl making the already flavorful bowl of ramen become even more irresistible. Ummm….yum!!! It makes me wish I had a bowl of ramen right here and right now!
You must be wondering why in the world I am making you salivate by describing a yummy bowl of ramen? There is a reason! I sometimes think that in the eyes of some white Americans Asians are seen as only being good for their food and services.
Think about it. Why is it an Asian food fest and not an Asian cultural festival? I am not complaining, but I am wondering if there is a better way for Asians to help others understand and appreciate our deep/complex culture. And it seems like white Americans are still very ignorant about Asian culture. Because of such ignorance, we have recently had a series of violent offenses against Asian Americans. It seems when Asians perform a service (nail salons, physicians, I.T. service, etc.) – assuming they have done their job well – they are praised and tolerated. But when something goes wrong, when something like COVID is blamed on Asians, “Su Chung” automatically gets blamed for something they did not do. Does that make any sense?
As a Catholic missionary, I am obligated by Canon law to have a novitiate year (basically a spiritual year.) During this spiritual year, I was assigned to one of Gelnmary’s rural missions for five months. I was assigned in a county that was located in the Central Southern part of the Tennessee. One of the ministries I was involved with included helping at a Food Bank. For the most part, my work there was good; I was liked by many of the locals and they appreciated my work. However, there were moments when some of the people I served spewed racially prejudicial things at me. I want to make it very clear before I explore some of these stories that they are racially prejudicial (as I perceived) and not racist, as “racist” – strictly speaking – pertains to when people see their race as superior to another person’s race. I am making this distinction because though I fight against racism I don’t think it is helpful to lump everything racial into the category of racism. I believe this lumping creates a certain oversensitivity that does more harm than good in the fight against racism.
Let me give an example of the racial prejudice that I experienced. As a policy, the food bank tells all its volunteers that they are to give families only one portion of food that the coordinators had determined to be fitting for one family. Of course, sometimes we made exceptions, but this is a general policy to make sure everyone had their proper portion. Anyway, on this one occasion there was a big Caucasian man who wore a cowboy hat, who walked with a solid, brown, wooden cane, and who asked for a second portion to bring home to someone else. The policy at the food bank is that, unless the other person is with them, we cannot give them a second portion. I tried to explain this to the man; when he was not satisfied, I went inside to talk to one of the managers of the food bank about how to resolve the situation. As I came back one of the volunteers reported that the man said, “What is that little Asian boy doing, acting like he is the boss?” I won’t get into how I reacted, but I will just say I just shook it off.
What I want to look at here is what the man said. What if I was the boss? Was there anything stopping me from being the boss of the food bank? What I am looking at here is the obvious prejudice that he was letting out in his question. Prejudice is by definition pre-judgment; when we form a judgment about someone before fully knowing. In and of itself the pre-judgment is not wrong, it is just by definition immature and not fully developed. However, the man made a pre-judgment that I could not have been the boss there, but was acting in a boss-like manner, giving orders and all. And the “little Asian boy” part was rather dismissive as well, as it suggested that he saw me as a kid (I was 26 at the time).
I wonder if beneath all this was a sense of resentment because it was a man of a minority race telling him the rules of the place (which was my job). I wonder if things would have been different if a young Caucasian male came and talked to him instead of me. Unfortunately, resentment by other races is something Asians experience a lot. Though many Asians are apparently treated well, thanks in good part to their practice of “lying low,” I argue that there is in fact a sense of resentment. One can see this when we look at how some major universities treat Asians, what some politicians have said about Asians, and the treatment of Asians post-COVID. All of this points to a deep sense of resentment that lies under the nice looking surface.
Asian Americans are not seen as equals, no matter how much they have achieved, no matter what contributions they have made to American society. Ask yourself during Asian cultural appreciation month: what are the contributions that the Asian community has made to American society? Are they visible or are they invisible? At the end of the day I am not writing these words for Asian Americans alone, but for all humans, so that they may be seen and respected as they should. As I truly do believe that everyone is created in “the image and likeness of God,” this means in a literal sense we should be treated like deities. This is not a call for false worship or idolatry but for a profound respect for the “Godness” that exists in every human person!
Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy: An Interview with Rodney Kennedy
by William Trollinger
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 sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – has recently been published. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, is the focus of this interview. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear soon.
1. Having just written and published The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump, what prompted you to write Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy?=
Stanley Hauerwas, in the preface to Working with Words, says, “The world probably does not need another book by me.” Those words made me ponder whether the world needs another book about Donald Trump. My answer, as this work makes obvious, was yes. My reasons for writing about Trump are many. Trump is still a danger, a menace to democracy. I am convinced that Trump remains an important subject for evaluation because he has created a certain spirit in our political environment, and I believe it is toxic. Most of all, I write because I am a dissident, a dissident in the description offered by Vaclav Havel: “You do not become a ”dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
2. Befitting your Ph.D. in rhetoric and your lifetime as a Baptist minister, in this book you make great use of current rhetorical scholarship as well as Plato, Proverbs, and the Psalms. Could you say a little about your research methodology?
I write more as a preacher than as a scholar because I have been writing sermons for sixty years. I find it impossible to write without incorporating biblical texts. When I read biblical narratives, I read them metaphorically. I am not locked into a reduced literalism. This enlivens my biblical imagination, a technique that I learned first from African American preachers like Gardner Taylor.
For example, the story of Paul preaching to the philosophers in Athens amazes me. On the one hand, there is the astounding boldness of St. Paul to take on the embedded wisdom of a long-standing pagan philosophical tradition. Then there is the analogical reality that we now find ourselves in the same place. We too are attempting to speak to a generation of “philosophers” who mock and deride the Christian faith. I find it fascinating to consider the epistemological possibilities that are presented to Christians preaching in a secular age. Here I combine the study of Charles Taylor, especially his A Secular Age, and the work of philosopher James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular. They raise the question of how we are to witness in a secular age, an age that considers all talk about God as “babbling.” In fact, I just preached a sermon on this very idea:
“The word seems a perfect fit for the old story of the tower of Babel. It’s a story explaining how people came to speak so many languages, but as a metaphor it rings true. We are babblers and the towers we have constructed; towers of grandness, wealth, and power are falling. We have not been the same since 9/11 when the Twin Towers – symbol of our financial wealth, were destroyed by war criminals. Now, we are scared that the economy will tank, and another Great Depression is around the corner. And, out of fear, we babble. That’s what some scared people do – they talk incessantly and with a serious dose of paranoia.
“Charles Taylor claims that our world is a world suspended between the enchantment of transcendence – a default setting of believing in God – and the malaise of immanence, a flat space where there is no God. If we don’t pay attention to the swelling numbers of the exclusive humanists, there is not going to be a church. Immanence is destroying transcendence. If some people in the house of God don’t sacrifice some time, some intellectual sweat, some thoughtful effort to communicate with this Age, this house is going to be destroyed. Some people are going to have to step up and say, ‘There is still God in this house.’ And the God in this house loves gays, transgenders, women, minorities, immigrants, and the whole world of human flesh. It’s that simple. That puts the ball in our court. In the minds, mouths, and lives of believers – which is exactly where it belongs.”
3. I found this statement particularly striking: “To describe Trump as a demagogue, a psycho, or a fascist retreats to a rhetorical safe zone. To assert as I do that Donald Trump is evil, the incarnation of evil, is to say something about the ethos of an actual human being” (87). What do you mean by “rhetorical safe zone,” why have scholars and other observers stayed in that safe zone, and what has caused you to leave the safe zone?
There has always been a sort of unwritten rule in rhetorical studies not to use the criticism of a person’s ethos as a critique of the “person.” In psychology this is called the “Goldwater Rule”: It is unprofessional and unethical to psychoanalyze public figures whom you have not analyzed personally. Rhetorical scholars have exercised a similar caution. In my research I discovered that rhetorical scholars were of one mind in asserting the dangers of Donald Trump. They have found him to be a demagogue, a charlatan, a bully, a deranged populist, a rhetorical pervert, a demolition machine. But then I realized that the rhetorical scholars had not gone as far as necessary. It dawned on me that Trump was the definition of embodied evil. He was too dangerous not to expose. Safety was ignored and I started writing Good and Evil out of a sense of necessity. The book became an example of the biblical concept of parrhesia – the fearless speaking of the truth to the powers, in the process taking personal and professional risks in order to do one’s duty.
4. Speaking of escaping the rhetorical safe zone, you devote a chapter to comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. And while you repeatedly note that you are not claiming Trump equals Hitler, this is indeed a daring comparison. Why go there, and what do we learn from such a comparison?
I struggled with my conclusions surrounding Trump, but I was convinced that Kenneth Burke, in his brilliant “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” offered a challenge I could not avoid. The words startled me: “Let us try to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man has concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”
Even more convincing was Burke’s argument that Hitler’s appeals relied upon “a bastardization of fundamentally religious patterns of thought.” My head was spinning from my previous work on the “total identification” of Trump and the Evangelicals.
I was completely convinced that my line of thought was necessary when I read these words from Burke: “Our job is to find all the ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America be unable to perform a similar swindle.”
For me the die was cast. Trump had to face the judgment that he is a “medicine man” selling a “fake salvation.”
There was, in retrospect, some deliberate rhetorical satire involved on my part. Trump’s favorite rhetorical trope is paralipsis: “I’m not saying, but I’m just saying.” Trump is a master at this rhetorical strategy. Using Trump’s brand of paralipsis: I’m not saying Trump is Hitler. I’m just saying that he talks like Hitler, thinks like Hitler, and uses Hitler’s rhetorical techniques in ways that make Burke’s warning about such a politician gaining power in America became very real.
5. Again and again in the book you make reference to a central question regarding the Trump phenomenon, i.e., how is it that so many Christians, particularly evangelicals, have given themselves over to this evil man? How do you answer this question, and what does this say about the state of Christianity in 21st century America?
My deepest heartbreak is the selling of the evangelical soul to Trump. I detest evangelical teachings on evolution, creation, the rapture, the end of the world, and the origin of America. I detest their anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-history, anti-global warming rants. But I find all of this relatively harmless when compared to accepting the political power offered by Donald Trump.
I am convinced that the evangelicals accepted the gifts of the Devil that Jesus rejected in the temptation narrative. Look at Luke’s words about the temptation of Jesus. “Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’”
Don’t you see? The devil tells Jesus that political power has been given to him and he can give it to anyone he pleases. I believe the Devil has given that power — that Jesus refused — to evangelicals. In return, they are worshiping him while claiming to worship Jesus. How else can people waving Jesus flags take part in the January 6 invasion of our nation’s capital?
In short, evangelicals have not so much given themselves over to Trump as they have surrendered everything to the Evil One. Trump is simply their instrument of gaining power and control over absolutely everything and everyone.
6. You conclude your book with two chapters, “The Rhetorical Good: Vaclev Havel” and “Singing for Democracy” (which focuses a lot on Walt Whitman), that suggest the possibility of a democratic, inclusive, and empathetic rhetoric. Could you elaborate a little on this, and are you hopeful that such a rhetoric could take the place of Trumpian rhetoric?
Thanks for asking this question. The concluding chapters are the heart of my argument. I have a deep respect for the work of Havel – the dissident poet. He is the political embodiment of St. Paul’s “rhetoric of folly.” I have written about this previously with my rhetorical colleague Kenneth Zagacki.
My trust in the gospel of Jesus remains rock solid. In my first book, The Creative Power of Metaphor, I offered a new rhetoric for preachers – inclusive, empathetic, and democratic. It is the heart of my own theology of preaching. In my research on Walt Whitman, I had the pleasure of reading In Walt We Trust by John Marsh. The subtitle of the book puts it exactly right for me: How A Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself. I am adamant that the church has no choice but to dissent vigorously from the anti-gay agenda of evangelicals. My hope is that we will have the boldness to preach the gospel of hospitality, the church as the place that makes a space for God and all the people God created to feel at home.
7. Hard on the heels of Good and Evil will soon appear yet another book: Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit. Could you tell us a little about this book, and how it connects with your previous books? And what is the projected publication date?
Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit is now in the editorial process. I think that the publication date will be December 2023. This book is my life’s work – a preaching book. Here I have attempted to be the generalist I have always been, and I appeal to preachers to read well and read deeply from the novelists, the poets, the philosophers, and the rhetoricians. I am convinced that the ancient line of poet/philosopher/rhetorical preachers — which originated with St. Paul – dominated the church until at least the 18th century. Today, it competes with a populist version of preaching that doesn’t have the same respect for the intellectual traditions of the church. Dancing with Metaphors attempts to give the preacher the necessary cross-disciplinary tools she needs to confront a secular world.
8. Between books, articles for various outlets (including monthly posts for rightingamerica), and sermons – and I am sure I am leaving something out! – you seem to be writing constantly. How do you explain your incredible productivity? Do you ever have a day off?
I have been practicing the art of writing for more than 60 years. A sermon a week for 60 years equals about 3,000 sermons of 1700 words per sermon. That’s 85,000 words per year or the equivalent of a book a year for 60 years. That’s more than 5 million words.
I am not aware that I am that productive. I find myself feeling rather “slothful” at times. Writing is so hard, and it requires all my attention. My mind has been trained over all these decades to be prepared for any idea or subject that might cross my mind. There are mornings when I awake and there’s an article waiting for me. I sit at the computer and try to type fast enough to keep up with the words tumbling from my mind. I am grateful. Focus and passion and mental toughness, according to David L. Cook, are requirements for what I do. By the time I’m 140 I think I will have come close to perfecting these ideals.
At the moment, I have a number of possible book ideas floating around in my head. I plan to publish some of my previously published essays later this year. I think it is important to produce material from the left wing of the church. I played baseball for about 20 years of my life, and I was a left-handed pitcher. I write left-handed and I write from the progressive left-wing of the church. I love the arguments. People think I’m angry, but I’m not. I am delighted to be engaged in ongoing arguments.
In particular, I am preparing a book that takes on the evangelical attacks on American history/historians and scientists. I believe that progressive pastors need to say more about our fellow truth-seekers – the historians and scientists – and I intend to say it.
I am currently engaged in watching the sermons of the pastors of the 100 largest churches in America. It is a fascinating experience to observe the most successful preachers in the world using preaching techniques that bring into question everything I have thought to be true about preaching. I anticipate publishing the results of this research in two years. The book is tentatively called, On Preaching: Twenty-Five Lessons from the Last Twenty-Five Years.
As I have reached the age when I am too old to serve as a full-time pastor, I have turned to writing. I write to know what I think. Writing has become my therapist for feeling useless. I want to be involved in the future of the church because church matters and church has a future. And it may not be dominated by the evangelicals. As a sacramentalist, I think the Episcopalians, the Catholics, and the new United Methodist Church (disencumbered by the moralistic conservatives who are rushing to join the Global (?) Methodist Church) will have a lot to say about the shape and vitality of the church.
I write furiously. I think that it may be my unconscious desire to think I can ward off the approach of death, but that discussion would require therapy. When I was young I expressed my desire to die in the pulpit preaching a sermon. I now think no congregation should have to go through that in order for me to satisfy a selfish dream. So I will keep writing and concentrate on how I’m living.
Thank you for this opportunity.
Banning Books to Protect Fragile White Students
by William Trollinger
White fragility is really a thing.
When pressed, Taylor University’s provost, Jewerl Maxwell, explained to writing professor Julie Moore that the specific reason she was being fired had to do with the historian Jemar Tisby. Moore had not assigned any of his terrific writings, but she had included this Tisby quote on her syllabus:
The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression. History and Scripture teach us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth.
Yikes. Can’t have those fragile white evangelical students seeing the truth of America’s racist past and present . . . and, especially, can’t have their fragile white evangelical parents realizing that their children are learning the truth about America’s racist past and present.
Taylor’s decision to fire Julie Moore is appalling, especially when one takes into account that Marion – the Indiana city just 14 miles from Taylor – was the site of the particularly horrific 1930 lynching of two African Americans, Thomas Shipps and Abram Smith. In response to Moore’s firing, the Marion Community Remembrance Project Coalition – dedicated to remembering this awful event and its victims – has expressed its unhappiness with the university, asserting that
We stand wholeheartedly with the BIPOC students of Taylor University who are impacted by this decision. We reject the implications of Provost Maxwell’s actions: that their voices, stories, and experiences are not valid or worthwhile in a post-secondary educational setting.
Yes, Taylor’s decision to fire Julie Moore is appalling. Unfortunately, it turns out that the “voices, stories, and experiences” of BIPOC students are also not valid or worthwhile in many K-12 educational settings. This is particularly obvious when one looks at the escalating campaign to ban books from classrooms and school libraries.
PEN America is an organization that “works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others.” So it makes sense that PEN America is working overtime to keep track of these book bans.
The organization has identified four types of book bans:
- Banned in school libraries and classrooms.
- Banned in school libraries.
- Banned in classrooms.
- Banned pending investigation (which can last months or even years).
Here are the key findings from PEN America’s most recent report:
- “During the first half of the 2022-23 school year [there were] 1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles, an increase of 28 percent compared to the prior six months.”
- “The full impact of the book ban movement is greater than can be counted, as ‘wholesale bans’ . . . in which entire classrooms and school libraries have been suspended, closed, or emptied of books . . . are restricting access to untold numbers of books.”
- “This school year, instances of book bans are most prevalent in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina.”
- “Overwhelmingly, book banners continue to target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. In this six-month period, 30% of the unique titles banned are about race, racism, or feature characters of color. Meanwhile, 26% of unique titles banned have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.”
From PEN America’s list of books that were banned this past fall, here are 42 of the banned books that deal with race and racism.
White fragility is really a thing.
Fragile White Evangelicals: Taylor University and the Firing of Julie Moore
by William Trollinger
As one who taught for eight years at a “moderate” evangelical university, I speak from personal experience when I say that the gap between so-called moderate evangelical schools and hardline fundamentalist schools is not very large.
And that is because evangelical and fundamentalist schools appeal to the same conservative constituency, the same conservative donors and parents. The difference is that hardline fundamentalist schools – think Bob Jones University and, now, Cedarville University – can simply be up front about who they are. But the so-called moderate evangelical schools are much more invested in appearing academically respectable, while at the same time always looking over the “right shoulder” to make sure its very conservative constituency is content.
As a result, and as I experienced first-hand, evangelical schools will occasionally find it necessary to “purge” faculty members who may suggest to their conservative constituency that the school is not “safe.” A very recent example? Taylor University and Julie Moore.
A well-published poet and teacher of writing, Moore was at Cedarville as the school made its hard right turn (in the process firing dozens of faculty and staff and hiring a known sexual predator). She has written about her experience here at rightingamerica.
In 2017 she escaped to a more “moderate” evangelical school, Taylor University.
But now she has been fired at Taylor. And this is because, according to the provost, there were student complaints about readings she assigned that had to do with racial justice (readings that included Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Letter to My Son” and Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”).
In her conversation with the provost (Jewerl Maxwell) – there’s a recording of this meeting! – the flabbergasted Moore pressed him for specifics. Maxwell’s response? “Jemar Tisby is the main focus.”
Tisby is a public historian and popular speaker who has written terrific works such as The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. But he has become persona non grata in certain conservative white evangelical circles because, well, he tells the truth about the American church’s complicity in racism.
But here’s the thing (and remember, there’s a recording). Moore responded to Provost Maxwell that
while she quoted from Tisby – whom she said she admires – in her syllabus, she’d not assigned any writings by him to students. Her protest went unheeded as Maxwell told her he did not want to debate specifics.
What? That’s the response? You don’t want to “debate” the “specific” reason you just offered up to Moore as to why she was being fired? Are you kidding?
Then there’s President Michael Lindsay’s response, which he emailed to the Taylor community:
We understand and empathize with a faculty member’s disappointment when a contract decision does not go as they hoped. Multiple personnel factors are considered when the University decides not to renew a contract, as was the case here. We strongly disagree with what has been asserted [but are not able to elaborate].
What? Disagree with what? Are you kidding? Did I mention that there is a recording?
Yes, indeed, these comments from the top administrators at Taylor University are (to understate the case) lame. But here’s the thing. They can get away with such responses because, in firing Julie Moore, they are signaling that Taylor will never be “woke,” Taylor will be a “safe” school for fragile white students, Taylor – the school that in 2019 brought in Mike Pence as commencement speaker – will continue to cater to their right-wing constituency.
That is, firing a writing teacher who has her students deal with racial justice, well, that sells.
But of course, there’s a human being paying the price. The gifted Julie Moore, who is out of a job . . . although, to be fair, Provost Maxwell is praying about it. (What exactly he is praying is not clear.)
A gofundme site has been set up for Moore and her family. Please consider contributing.
Greedy for Certainty: The Strange Fruit of Literalism
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 sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – has recently been published by Wipf and Stock (Cascades). And his newest book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has just been published (a Q/A with the author is forthcoming).
Harold Bloom may seem an odd spokesperson when the subject is literalism. Yet Bloom’s primary contribution is his insistence that metaphor produces a new kind of knowledge as a defense against death-dealing literal meaning: “Literal meaning and the powerful presence of a precursors’ meaning are equivalent to death in that they prevent the impulse to communicate further.”
Why does a literal reading of the Bible hold such attraction for Christians? More to the point: How has belief in literalism led to “Christian nationalism,” to such awful ideas about how immigrants should be treated, to discrimination against women and minorities, to an insistence that women can’t be ordained as pastors, to screams about “wokeness,” “Critical Race Theory,” “replacement theory,” White supremacy, climate denial, and an anti-vaxx movement?
Why are literalists so determined to be free from everything, even truth itself?
Perhaps we can think of literalism as an attempt at providing epistemological comfort for believers. More than this, literalists, not content with a literal Bible, grant their preachers an authority to speak literally about issues that never occur in the Bible. A climate change denier can make fun of the science of climate change and speak like a literalist to his congregation. The congregational consciousness automatically confers the authority of biblical literalism on every word that proceeds from their pastor’s mouth. We have the literal transference of literal belief in a literal Bible. Now, the pastor has literal authority on subjects he may not even understand. He boldly refutes history, psychology, and science. In the face of overwhelming evidence for God taking her sweet time to create the universe, the literalist attacks the theory of evolution as if it were invented by the devil.
This reaches the heart of the issue and might explain the truly tragic spectacle of someone like Robert Jeffress – a prominent Southern Baptist pastor and Fox News commentator who made his name as a hardline advocate of a literal Bible – arguing that Jesus will [literally] return to earth and rapture believers within the lifetime of Jeffress. His epistemological love of literalism has crashed right into and up against a limit: his unfettered pursuit of Mammon and his right to – the freedom to – having his own opinion carved in the stone of biblical literalism. A presumed lover of truth and reason, he is driven to deny the most crucial truth in the world today (as pollution and climate change are on the verge of destroying our planet). His literalizing of everything important to him and his tribe is a tragic spectacle. Or perhaps more accurately: farcical.
The remarkable irony here is that Baptists especially are allegedly congenitally against political correctness and authoritarianism, and yet they have themselves become the most staunch defenders of a kind of biblical correctness and authoritarianism. I believe that this has to do with an insecurity about not being able to see, actually see God. I think that the ambiguity, contingency, and uncertainty of having faith in God, is more than a literalist can tolerate. They are greedy for certainty. They possess a longing to maintain a Cartesian sense of certainty about everything.
Most of all, they have substituted a literal Bible for God. Since God can’t be seen out in public, they have replaced God with words about God. A literal Bible is a replacement god. Biblical literalism is the ultimate bastard child of Descartes.
The obsession of evangelicals with literalism crowds out the value of truth. In the end, their attempt to impose the scientific method on Scripture ends up being the attempt to drive a square peg into a circular hole. Not wishing to live with uncertainty, tension, insecurity, and not knowing, they have attempted to foist literalism on all of Christianity.
Hebrew scholar Richard Elliott Friedman has written a book called The Disappearance of God, in which he maps divine recession in the Hebrew Bible. Friedman shows God receding from the scene, leaving the responsibilities of just and holy living to actual human beings. God seems to step back, not intervene, so that human beings have room to take responsibility. This flies in the face of literalism which portrays God as a coercive presence and a God constantly intervening to get God’s way. The literalist doctrine of creation insists on divine intervention rather than divine persuasion. Somehow literalism always circles back to creation.
After the debacle at Babel, no human ever visibly saw God again. Once Moses saw God’s backside on Mt. Sinai, the period of visible encounters with God came to an end. God assumed a lower profile, working miracles for smaller and smaller audiences. Even angels got scarce: there is no evidence they tended to anyone after Elijah. Barbara Brown Taylor says,
Gradually, the prophetic experience of God became one of visions and dreams. From Hezekiah on, the world described in the Hebrew Bible was one from which God had largely retired, leaving humans to interact with other humans. The acts of God were over. The remembered words of God took their place. The world was no longer a place where seas split and snakes talked, but one in which human relationship to the divine was largely a matter of personal belief.
The evangelicals are not happy with God disappearing from the scene. They need God to thunder from Sinai. They insist that God show the world who is boss, and if God will not take charge, then the evangelicals will do it for God. They tell us that they have the Word – the literal Bible, the Sword – that now speaks what God would speak if God were to show up one morning in Washington, D. C. The literalists shout, “You may not need a literal Bible, but we do.”
The literalists are taking the same approach John Calvin took in his argument with the Roman Catholics over miracles. Calvin insisted that our confidence should rest on the Word of God and not on signs and wonders. Miracles were not only fraudulent and diabolical, but they were also unnecessary. Calvin argued vigorously for a limited age of miracles and the subservience of miracles to the scriptures themselves. God never allowed true miracles to overshadow the sacred text. I Cor. 13 listed temporary gifts that long ago passed away. Calvin called them counterfeit miracles. Christians didn’t need miracles because they had the Word of God. Literalism not only offers us a physical, material idol – the Bible – but it also ignores the reality that all language about God is tentative, contestable, and often combatable. People find themselves disagreeing with one another about texts, meanings, and interpretations. The result has often been strife, schism, and war.
Literalists, by and large, seem unwilling to admit the natural order of theological language: it is, in fact, composed of arguments. The word “argument” implies at least two possible interpretations, and as David Cunningham note, “this, in turn, implies multiplicity and contingency.” Rather than face the reality of such a world, evangelicals created their own archetypal metaphor: literalism. What remarkable irony to discover that “literalism” is a metaphor.
Like a crying baby that can only be comforted with a pacifier, evangelicals require a literal Bible to be comforted that they are right, certain, and possessors of the entire truth about, well, everything. When you hear David Barton pontificating a horde of misinformation and false claims about the founding fathers of America, you are face to face with a literalist who has read American history badly. When you hear Ken Ham insist that he is actually the scientist and that biblical literalism is the true science of creation, you are witnessing a literalist who knows neither the word of God nor science.
Take a deep breath. Relax. God is alive and well on planet earth. We are not required to embrace certainty. It is perfectly acceptable to live within the uncertainties of a risky universe and do so with faith. After all, our faith is in God. Our most ancient creed, The Apostle’s, never mentions the Bible. Instead, it boldly professes, “I believe in God, maker of heaven and earth.”
