From the Archives: Mirror Images: The Jefferson Bible and The Fundamentalist Bible
by William Trollinger
Today we revisit a post from November 8, 2021 in which we examine the use of “creative editing” of the Bible that is done at the Creation Museum, especially when it comes to the representation of Jesus.
I taught for eight years at Messiah University (PA), which is – as the name might indicate – an evangelical school.
(Side note: At my campus interview I suggested – in what I thought was a brilliant moment of levity – that the athletic teams should have as their nickname “Messiah Complex.” Except for me, no one laughed.)
While Messiah is a moderate evangelical school (e.g., biblical inerrancy is not part of the faith statement), it attracted (and, I presume, attracts) a good number of fundamentalist students, many of whom had been homeschooled or had attended fundamentalist high schools.
One day in my U.S. history survey class, when I was talking about the American Revolution, I said in passing that the author of the Declaration of Independence was something akin to a deist. After class three distressed young women confronted me, letting me know that I was completely wrong about Thomas Jefferson’s religious beliefs, as they had learned in high school that he was an evangelical.
I happened to know that the library had a copy of the The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (more commonly known as The Jefferson Bible). Jefferson created this work by literally taking a razor to a KJV Bible, cutting out certain Gospel passages and gluing them together as a summary of Jesus’ teachings, in the process removing all supernatural references (including the Resurrection and other miracles).
So I suggested to these students that they go to the library and take a look at what Jefferson had produced. And so they did. And at the next class the same three young women approached me. And again they were quite agitated, but not for the same reason; as one of them blurted: “I was lied to: Jefferson was no evangelical – I don’t think he was even a Christian!”
But then, there’s the Fundamentalist Bible. And one way to think of the Fundamentalist Bible is to understand it as the mirror image of The Jefferson Bible. The supernatural is all there, but many or most or all biblical references to social justice have been cut out by way of a virtual razor.
Take, for example, what one finds in the Jesus exhibit at the Creation Museum. As we noted in Righting America (48), when the Museum opened in 2007 there was almost no Jesus in the place. Not only was there just one Jesus statue tucked away in a corner (which was moved to the main foyer for the holidays), and almost no quotes from Jesus on the ubiquitous placards.
Then, ten years later, the museum opened a three-room Jesus exhibit. The Jesus here is, to quote Susan Trollinger, a “powerful, authoritative, God-approved, superhero Jesus” who performed miracles, rose from the dead, and will be returning to Earth soon to annihilate his enemies.
The Creation Museum’s vindictive-superhero Jesus is definitely not the Jesus of The Jefferson Bible. This becomes even clearer when one realizes that there is only half of one placard devoted to Jesus’ “Instructions” (the other half of the placard is devoted to “Rebukes,” which is telling in itself.) Not only is there so little on Jesus’ teachings, but what is included on this placard has been so severely edited that museum visitors will not come away from the exhibit with any notion that Jesus had anything to say about social justice.
Take, for example, the snippet from Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters.” What exactly does that mean? Well, here is the full verse:
No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
This is not a subtle editing job. Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) have taken the razor blade to Matthew 6:24, and the result is that Creation Museum visitors do not have to wonder if there’s anything about capitalism and the accumulation of riches that might be at odds with the Gospel.
But then look at “Rebukes” on the right side of the placard. One of these rebukes comes from Matthew 25:41: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
There is no question that this verse is supposed to be an example of, as noted at the top of the placard, “the consequences of rejecting Him.” Conveniently enough, the folks at AiG have failed to include the following five verses:
“For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Talk about an unsubtle editing job! In truth, “editing job” is quite the euphemism for what the folks at the Creation Museum have done to the Bible. A few judicious slashes with the virtual razor blade, and voila, we have a superhero Jesus who is poised to condemn sinners and neglect those who, like him, suffer.
But what about fundamentalist study Bibles, where editors cannot – unlike Jefferson and unlike AiG – simply excise passages that they do not like?
Well, when it comes to Matthew 25: 31-46, these Bibles have done the next best thing. That is, they say that Jesus’ words do not apply to us today. Instead, as one learns from The King James Study Bible: Reference Edition (p. 1036), The MacArthur New Testament Commentary: Matthew 24-28 (pp. 122, 124-125), and The Henry Morris Study Bible (p. 1445), these words apply to the seven-year Tribulation at the end of history. The test will be whether or not one helps the refugees – apparently those who convert after Jesus has taken up the “true Christians” in the Rapture – fleeing the forces of the Antichrist. According to Morris, those who turn “the refugees away, and perhaps even reporting them to the authorities, will be sent away into everlasting judgment.”
In other words, what these study Bibles proffer is an interpretive razor blade, an extraordinarily esoteric explanation of a passage whose meaning is (unlike so many passages in the Bible that are a challenge to interpret) pretty plain and obvious. What’s not to get? If you want to call yourself a Christian, Jesus says, then get busy about easing the suffering of the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned. This reading, by contrast, is not rooted at all in the biblical text. Instead, it successfully excises unwelcome suggestions that Jesus and the Bible have anything to say to us today about working for social justice.
The Jefferson Bible and the Fundamentalist Bible. Mirror images.
Thinking Revivals: One Way to Understand What Happened at Asbury
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, will appear by the end of April.
“The kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe the good news!” To repent is not to feel bad but to think differently. In its concern for helping every individual to make his own authentic choice in full awareness and sincerity, Protestantism (especially evangelical Protestantism) is in constant danger of confusing the kingdom itself with the benefits of the kingdom.
If the revival at Asbury has helped students make their own authentic choice to follow Jesus in full awareness and sincerity, then God bless that revival. But if the revival confuses the kingdom of God with the benefits of the kingdom, we have a problem.
John Howard Yoder says, “If anyone repents, if anyone turns around to follow Jesus in his new way of life, this will do something for the aimlessness of his life. It will do something for his loneliness by giving him fellowship. It will do something for his anxiety and guilt by giving him a good conscience.” So the students at Asbury, whose “revival” is to proclaim a closer walk with Jesus and liberation from anxiety and guilt, are not wrong. Repentance, after all, as a “change of mind” is a good thing. As Yoder notes, if anyone repents, it will do something for his intellectual confusion by giving them doctrinal meat to digest, a heritage to appreciate, and conscience about telling it all as it is. If students repent it will do something for their moral weakness by giving them the focus for wholesome self-discipline, it will keep them from immorality, it will get them to work on time. So, revivals have their place.
But all this is not the Gospel.
Turning to a rhetorical critique of the Asbury revival, I submit that it sounds more like a movement of melancholy – a sense of loss of an old way of life. Barbara Biesecker, in “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” says Slavoj Zizek’s definition of the melancholic’s so-called lost object is “nothing but the positivization of a void or lack, a purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself.” Evangelicals, caught in the fantasy of a lost time – a lost glory of when America was truly righteous, Christians were truly Christians, and men were truly men – are, in this sense, melancholic. While there has never been a time in our history when America was holy and righteous, evangelicals long for the imagined “good old days,” and they are trying to repair the breaks in the imagined dome of American piety and recover the age of enchantment.
The Asbury revival – and the related revivals at other evangelical schools – then turns out to be the equivalent to American’s post-9/11 patriotism. Instead of a bona fide collective conversion, Americans flocked back to churches for a few Sundays and then reverted back to the old habits of neglecting the gathering together. The only thing left was the commitment to hyper-patriotism and continued outbreaks of anger, resentment, and revenge against a secular world.
Such a critique of a student revival may sound harsh, but such critiques have always shown up in evaluations of revivals in American religion. Jonathan Edwards, a thorough-going and thoughtful Calvinist, the reluctant leader of the First Great Awakening, and perhaps America’s greatest theologian, critiqued his own revival and argued that there were differences between genuine revivals and fake revivals. I can’t think of any preacher who has ever given as much attention to the nature of revival as Edwards. His works on revival include Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions, Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, Treatise on Religious Affections and Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. From the latter work, Edwards reflected on the nature of revival:
Is the revival genuine, or is it a mere outburst of superficial emotion? Do we find empty enthusiasm backed by nothing of substance, or does the enthusiasm itself signal a major work of God? In every recorded revival in church history, the signs that follow it are mixed. The gold is always mixed with dross. Every revival has its counterfeits.
When Billy Sunday dominated the “sawdust trail” as America’s most famous revivalist, he faced waves of criticism. For example, a liberal Congregationalist minister in Oak Park, Illinois, William E. Barton (1861-1930), attacked Sunday’s pulpit manner:
We wish he would stop his profanity….damned stinking something-or-other, ‘To hell with’ something or somebody…. We wish he were a gentleman….He is a harsh, unjust, bad-tempered man…a very defective Christian.
From Jonathan Edwards – scholar, Calvinist, and quiet preacher – to Billy Sunday – athletic, populist, rude talking, ill-mannered, and emotional – America has run the gamut of revivalists. Criticism of revivalists has varied from excessive prejudice to thoughtful reflection, but criticism of revival is as relevant now as it ever was.
From the perspective of this critic, I would say that the revival at Asbury is genuine. There is no doubt that the students are very sincere. I think the revival exemplifies the moving of the Holy Spirit in individual lives. I believe that the students were deeply moved and many of them transformed. The experiences in this revival suggest students being born again to a stronger Christian commitment.
My concern is that the revival didn’t go far enough. It didn’t demonstrate a genuine “change of mind” – the literal rendering of repentance. As Stanley Hauerwas makes clear,
The gospel is the proclamation of a new age begun through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That gospel, moreover, has a form, a political form. It is embodied in a church that is required to be always ready to give hospitality to the stranger.
A revival in a bastion of evangelical exclusion, a revival that re-intensifies anti-gay, anti-diversity, anti-science, and anti-history, is not deserving of the name revival.
A revival should focus on the “lack” rather than the perceived mythological “loss.” Future-oriented revival opens the door to new interpretations of how people who are different are to be treated. Revival would offer a counter to the severe rationalism of evangelical faith that no longer rely on universal principles chiseled in stone in a literal Bible. Instead, it will be fluid and deal with particular circumstances, changing circumstances, including the advance of ethical consciousness as a new way of interpreting the Bible.
I want to suggest that the Jewish approach to the interpretation of Scripture offers a better way of approaching the possibility of genuine revival. The Hebrew word “peshat” means “straight” and refers primarily to the surface of literal meaning of the text. This is the plain, simple, and often decontextualized interpretation of the text. The second method of Jewish exegesis, the “drash,” refers to how the text is to be lived and applied. Here is the seedbed for revival.
On this reading, revival is not God doing something in our hearts. This is the kind of sequestered revival that offers meaning and purpose to the individual, but has little to do with the production of practices that will save us from a lack of showing hospitality to strangers.
A revival has to be more than immediate, individual, and narcissistic. Instead, true revival leads to concrete, physical, bodily practices for the benefit of Others.
True revival would involve the Hebrew definition of repentance: “to turn” or “to return to the paths of justice and righteousness. The Jewish sense of justice (Tsedek) calls for those who are “revived” to be compassionate and caring. Built into the notion of Tsedek is a natural tension between the dictates of equity and mercy. There is a blending of love and justice, truth and peace. Ultimately, revival produces actual, material, physical changes in the lives of Others, especially the “least of these.” Justice cannot be achieved by the affects of personal revival.
My prayer would be that the student revival at Asbury move beyond a grasping for the old orientation – the imagined idyllic world of a pious and righteous America – and instead create a reorientation in favor of justice and mercy. If this revival moves in this direction, then the students may bring about the conversion of their older leaders who are so wedded to secular politics and MAGA philosophy. If this revival moves in this direction, then we may have a true Methodist revival of social concern and “catholic” faith, and a true Baptist insistence on “Jesus as Lord” as opposed to the powers and principalities.
May it be so.
Biblical Marriage Isn’t Biblical
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 on Monday, March 20, 2023 at 3 Quarks Daily. We are pleased to share it here with permission from the author.
There are two possible attitudes towards Scripture. One is to regard it as the direct and infallible word of God. This leads to certain problems. The other one, equally compatible with devotion, is to regard it as the recorded writings of men (it almost always is men), however inspired, writing at a specific time and place and constrained by the knowledge and concerns of that time. This invites deeper study of what was at stake for the writers, the unravelling of different narrative strands and voices, and discussion of whatever message the Scriptures may have for our own times. I expect that most readers here will adopt the second approach, while those who adopt the first are not to be dissuaded by mere rational argument, so why am I even discussing it?
Because we need to expose the hypocrisy of those powerful false prophets who, while claiming to be guided exclusively by Scripture, systematically misapply, distort, and even completely misquote the sacred text. That exactly is what Answers in Genesis, like other creationist organisations, does in its online writings, and in its Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.
I have come across four specific areas that concern me (no doubt there are many others):
- Climate change
- Abortion
- Entry into the Ark, and subsequent dispersal
- Biblical marriage
I have written here before about the lengths to which all the major creationists organisations will go, acting in concert, to downplay the significance of human-caused global warming. Here I want to draw attention to just one of their regular arguments, most recently presented as a refutation of Greta Thunberg’s compilation The Climate Book.
The argument is that God’s promise in Genesis 8:22 should reassure us, so there is no need to be alarmed. Here is what the verse actually says:
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
We are told that whatever is happening can’t really be all that serious, because of this promise. But if you look at the actual text, it merely says that there will not again be a total disaster on the scale of the Flood. This is a very limited commitment, as spelt out more fully over several verses later on in Genesis 9:9ff [1]. Nothing here to preclude widespread famine (a recurrent theme in the post-Flood world of Genesis), or indeed any degree of devastation, short of total annihilation.
Next, abortion. What does the Bible say about abortion? Absolutely nothing! The creationist organisations cite references to children in the womb and conclude that abortion is murder, from the moment of fertilisation onwards; see e.g. Creation.com’s article, Abortion: The answer’s in Genesis.
No it isn’t. Various verses are used by creationists to establish that the Bible regards the fetus as a person, but line by line examination of the verses cited shows that they say no such thing. In support of its claim that abortion is murder, with no exceptions for irrelevant details like rape or incest, Answers in Genesis cites a passage, Exodus 21:22-25, that refers to an accidentally induced miscarriage. This is the only place where the Bible says anything at all relevant to abortion. However, the actual text shows the very opposite of what is claimed; causing someone’s wife to miscarry is a mere civil matter, to be settled by paying damages, and this is explicitly contrasted with bodily harm to an actual person, to be punished with an eye for an eye in retaliation. I give the messy details in a footnote [2], for the benefit of those readers interested in such matters.
You may have felt sorry for all those unfortunate people drowned in Noah’s Flood. According to the Creation Museum, you don’t need to, because they’d been told what was coming but didn’t pay attention. Genesis tells us that Noah was a righteous man in his generation, and 2Peter describes him as a preacher of righteousness . Working from this basis, the museum tells us that Noah tried to warn all those wicked people, but they refused to listen. There is even an animatronic Methuselah, whose lifespan overlapped Noah’s, telling visitors about this.
Except the Bible actually tells us the exact opposite. There is no reference whatsoever to Noah warning anyone except, of course, his immediate family. 2Peter does indeed tell us that he was a preacher (I was wrong about that detail in my earlier article), but we are not told what he preached about, or to whom. And quite explicitly, in Matthew 24:38-39 (emphasis added),
For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away
It seems that Noah, like his Babylonian counterpart Utnapishtim, kept his explosive knowledge to himself.
The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, offers visitors the experience of visiting Noah’s Ark, with every impression of authenticity, down to scuff marks on the decks. So that’s how he did it!
It’s a fraud. All the Bible tells us is that the Ark was 300 cubits long by fifty cubits wide by thirty cubits high. Answers in Genesis argues that these overall dimensions do not imply that it was actually shaped like a pencil box. On this narrow point I would agree with them, but on little else. The method of construction, keel and frame, was not developed until around 500 A.D., while Architect magazine says of the actual structure “From a technical standpoint, of course, the ark is still more a building than a boat. Besides being up on concrete piers, it wouldn’t fare any better in a flood than a typical museum building.” According to Irving Finkel of the British Museum, in his scholarly The Ark before Noah, the proportions of the Ark are based on a boat type used on the Euphrates as late as the nineteenth century. These are built upwards from a platform of woven branches, while the Ark Encounter incorporates over 90 tonnes of steel plating, while its cross-beams are 4 ft diameter spruce logs, which required custom built 21st Century machinery.
One final detail regarding the Ark story. In Genesis. it is immediately followed by a table of genealogies, and then the Tower of Babel episode, starting with the statement (Genesis 11:2) that
And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar [Mesopotamia] and settled there.
But if they had been migrating away from the mountains of Ararat, where the Ark rested, towards Shinar, they would have been coming from the west! The Creation Museum has a simple solution to this problem; truncate the verse displayed to read
It came to pass that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
and, in the accompanying video, change it further to read “They moved down from the mountains of Ararat.” Problem solved.
Regarding marriage, the Answers in Genesis position has been directly carried over from that of Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, foundational text of the 20th to 21st Century creationist movement, in his 1989 The Long War Against God. As Genesis shows us, man and woman were originally one flesh; therefore marriage is between one man and one woman, polygamy is wrong, and same-sex marriage a violation of God’s law.
Moreover, according to AiG echoing Henry Morris, the women’s liberation movement is misguided because
The God-given relationship between man and woman is expressed most clearly in the comparison with the relationship between Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:24–25):
Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her .
Ephesians 5 is thought to be a genuine Pauline epistle, so if you really think that Paul was expressing the unchanging will of God, that must be the way God wants it. It is clearly the way that Henry Morris and AiG want it.
Genesis, however, is something else again.
I will stick with the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, since they presumably represent the pinnacle of virtue. Abraham and Sarah (at this point still known as Abram and Sarai) are childless after many years, so Sarai tells Abram to sleep with her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, which he does, begetting a son later called Ishmael. At this point, Abram is 86 years old, while Sarai is 10 years younger. Hagar gets uppity, so Sarai complains to Abram, who tells her to deal with Hagar as she sees fit. Hagar runs away, but the Lord tells her to go back again. In due course Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah, and God grants them a child, to be called Isaac. Hagar and Ishmael now get booted out, but Abraham puts in a good word for Ishmael, and God promises look after him. By now Abraham is a hundred years old. In due course, Sarah dies, and Abraham (now aged 137) takes a third wife, Keturah, who bears him six sons. There is also reference (Genesis 25:6) to the children of his concubines, but whether these are in addition to those already mentioned is not clear.
Between Sarah’s death, and Abraham’s marriage to Keturah, he arranges for his son Isaac (40 years old at the time) to marry a relative, to be brought from Abraham’s birthplace in Mesopotamia, and entrusts the matter to his senior servant, Eliezer. The whole thing was arranged without bride or groom ever having seen each other, though the bride (Rebecca) did give her agreement. Rebecca seems to have called the shots in that marriage, but apart from that there was nothing that Answers in Genesis could take exception to. It was Rebecca who tricked Isaac into giving his major blessing to Jacob, rather than to his marginally older twin brother Esau.
Rebecca realises that Jacob had better stay out of Esau’s way for a while, and manipulates Isaac into telling him to visit his uncle Laban back in Haran in Mesopotamia, and marry one of his daughters. We all know what happens next. Jacob sees Rachel, it’s a love match, but Laban makes Jacob work tending his flocks for seven years, as bride price. When the seven years are up, Laban does a bait and switch, and Jacob finds himself in bed with Rachael’s older sister, Leah. Paying off the bride price for Rachel takes another seven years, before he can have her, at which point he is married to both.
Both Rachel (when she initially had difficulty conceiving) and Leah (when she was past childbearing) gave their handmaids, originally provided to them by their father Laban, for Jacob to sleep with. No moral problems here of course, since the handmaids were the wives’ property, legitimately acquired. Adding together the handmaids and his wives, Jacob ended up with twelve sons, roughly [3] corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel, Israel being a synonym for Jacob. So now we can add, once again, the forced concubinage of female slaves to our concept of Biblical marriage, along with bigamy.
So, to date, biblical marriage includes bigamy, fathers selling their daughters, and female slaves being impregnated in accord with their owners’ wishes.
There is yet more to come, again involving Jacob’s immediate family, casting further light on woman’s biblical role. If a married man were to die childless, according to biblical rules it would then become the duty of his nearest adult male relative to sleep with the widow, the offspring to be considered as children of the man who had died, in order to keep his inheritance alive. This was, after all, the woman’s function. If the relative refuses to do his duty, the widow then publicly shames him in open court by untying his shoelaces, before she is free to remarry according to her wishes. This (the shoelace ceremony, though not the rest of it) is still embodied in Jewish family law. The practice, known as levirate (brother-in-law) marriage, is behind the life-and-death drama of Genesis 38 (where Jacob’s son Judah is tricked into doing his duty and impregnating Tamar) as well as the idyll of the Book of Ruth, set ten generations later, in which Ruth seduces her late husband’s kinsman. The male relative’s duty, and the shaming ceremony, are specified in detail in Deuteronomy, so you can’t get much more biblical than that.
Happily, our morality is not biblical. Fathers do not have the right to sell their daughters. Monogamy is almost universal. Wives do not have slave girls who can be ordered to get impregnated on their behalf. We do not poke people’s eyes out as punishment. And most of us (I hope) do not really think that wives are duty bound to “submit to their husbands,” let alone “in everything.”
There is, however, one bit of biblical morality that I would strongly advocate. The bit in Exodus, and again in Deuteronomy, where it tells you not to bear false witness. And that’s one bit that Answers in Genesis and the like violate shamelessly. So next time you come across any of the creationist organisations quoting Scripture, check out what the text actually says, because whether or not you trust Scripture, you certainly can’t trust their use of it.
I thank Emma Frances Bloomfield, John Crooks, the Rev. Michael Roberts, and Susan and William Trollinger for helpful discussions.
1] An example of the repeated near-duplications in the Flood narrative, now almost universally regarded by biblical scholars as the merging of two separate accounts.
2] The article I cited is by Jonathan Sarfati, among the most erudite and logical proponents of creationism. He refers to Psalm 139:13–16, a beautiful passage. In Sarfati’s chosen translation:
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
Here we have a celebration of the process by which a person comes into being within the womb. The very opposite of the claim that the fertilised egg is already the equivalent of a person.
Next, like other creationist antiabortionists, he cites Jeremiah 1:5:
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.
Similar language is used about special individuals throughout the Bible. But again, this celebrates the process of formation of the person, and God’s knowledge of his future role. No help here for the anti-abortionist.
Central to Sarfati’s argument is Genesis 25:21–22, where the word ben, meaning “child” or “son,” is applied to the fetus. From this, he claims that the fetus should be as fully protected as a fully formed person. However, there is a direct biblical refutation of such an interpretation, in the case considered in Exodus 21:22-25:
When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
I’m not sure how many would agree with such penalties, but that’s not the issue here. The miscarried fetus is described as “her children”, using the word yeled that describes a child after birth. The point is that despite the use of this word a clear distinction is made between merely causing a miscarriage (settled by paying compensation), and bodily harm or killing.
3] Only roughly, because the descendants of one son (Levi) did not have lands of their own, while Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, were both granted their own territory.
Charles Darwin was Responsible for the Vietnam War?
by William Trollinger
For young Earth creationists, Charles Darwin is the eternal bogeyman. Interestingly, it is not just or even primarily because evolution is at odds with the biblical account of creation. As Carl Weinberg (author of Red Dynamite) has pointed out, for
George McCready Price, the godfather of young-Earth creationism . . . and those who followed him, the main problem with evolution was NOT that its claims lacked scientific evidence or even that it contradicted the Book of Genesis. Rather, evolution was bad because it made people who believed in it do bad things. It made us behave in an immoral, “beastly” or “animalistic” way.
To make this case, young Earth creationists have engaged in “creative” historical work. For example, 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. And it is not just the title: the cover of Ham’s book cover has a photo of African American slaves working the fields.
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; in the South, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese observed, “evangelicals, having cited chapter and verse, successfully enlisted the Bible to unify the overwhelming majority of slaveholders and nonslaveholders in defense of slavery as ordained of God.” These white Christians argued that opponents of slavery . . . were undermining the authority of the Bible with their unbiblical antislavery arguments that depended more on Christian experience, humanitarianism, and morality than on the “literal” meaning of the text. (Righting America, 186)
By the way, the aforementioned cover photo on Ham’s book fades into the photo of a Nazi concentration camp. Ham asserts in Darwin’s Plantation that “perhaps the most infamous application of evolution to justify racism was Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime” (92). The Darwin-to-Hitler trope is commonplace among young Earth creationists. As Henry Morris asserted in The Long War against God, “Hitler became the supreme evolutionist, and Nazism the ultimate fruit of the evolutionary tree” (75).
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, usually “offered by those who wish to score political points in the debate over the teaching of intelligent design,” 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)
One of the most prolific promoters of the young Earth creationist Darwin-to-Hitler trope is Genesis Apologetics’ spokesman Jerry Bergman, with books such as Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview: How the Nazi Eugenic Crusade for a Superior Race Caused the Greatest Holocaust in World History (2012) and The Dark Side of Charles Darwin: A Critical Analysis of an Icon of Science (2011). With his Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation from Wayne State University and his Ph.D. in biology from Columbia Pacific University (an unaccredited correspondence school that lured students with the possibility of a doctorate in less than twelve months), Bergman has now turned his “historical expertise” to the Vietnam War, with an article in the 2023 volume of Answers Research Journal (ARJ).
First, a little context regarding ARJ. This AiG online publication advertises itself as a “professional, peer-reviewed technical journal” that produces “cutting-edge creation research.” The titles of articles that appear in the ARJ make clear that this is not a typical scholarly publication, e.g., “Ruminating on Created Kinds and Ark Kinds,” “Jesus’ Resurrection: An Archaeological Analysis,” “To the Ark and Back Again? Using the Marsupial Fossil Record to Investigate the Post-Flood Boundary.”
Even more striking is the fact that just a few individuals write the bulk of the articles. And recently Bergman leads the pack. In the past four years 61 articles have appeared in ARJ, and he has written 20 of these articles (most of which are anti-Darwin diatribes). This comes to approximately 33% of all ARJ articles published since 2020. One could easily think of ARJ as Jerry Bergman’s vanity press.
And now we come to his most recent offering: “The Central Role of Darwinism in the Vietnam War.” I confess that, as an American historian, I find this piece almost unreadable. But here are some main points, as I can make them out:
- While Confucian peace philosophy was important in Vietnamese society, thus producing an orderly and nonviolent culture, the embrace of “Darwinism’s survival-of-the-fittest ideology” by Vietnamese intellectuals was “one key factor in the events that led up to the Vietnam-American War” (126).
- “French Catholicism did not spread past the coastal wealthy urban populations into the Buddhist rural areas . . . Had the church aggressively opposed communism and supported the power of the Scriptures, perhaps the awful results of Darwinism, secularism, and modernity could have been mitigated” (127).
- Conclusion: “Darwinism had a major, but complex, influence on the development of communism which, in turn, had a profound influence of the Vietnamese people that resulted in the Vietnamese-American War” (128), the result being up to 3 million dead.
A few comments:
- Bergman’s Darwin-to-Vietnam trope is even more simplistic and even more distorted than the Darwin-to-Hitler trope. In this telling, Darwinism destroyed the Confucian paradise that was Vietnam, and the result was three million dead.
- There is absolutely nothing here about the injustices perpetrated on the Vietnamese by the French colonial rulers. Not one thing. And this is very much in keeping with the dreadful history textbooks used in fundamentalist schools, books in which it is claimed that “colonialism was a benign and humane institution that benefitted the indigenous peoples of Asia and Africa.”
- Also in keeping with the fundamentalist history textbooks, this telling of the story preserves American innocence. Here there is no anti-Asian racism, no carpet bombing, no napalm. Here there is no My Lai, with its mass rape and its slaughter of hundreds of children, women, and the elderly. Here there is no reference to Bible-believing evangelicals who – I grew up in such a church – wanted to bomb the hell out of the Vietnamese.
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. When you have your eternal bogeyman, in-depth scholarly research is beside the point. Instead, and as we suggest in Righting America, for the folks at AiG 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.
Sam—Our Family’s Greatest Gift
by Julie Nichols
Julie is a practicing Catholic, native Texan, wife of 28 years, and a mother of young adults (including a daughter-in-law). She is an Academic Language Therapist who serves children and adolescents with developmental, learning, and cognitive disabilities. She is also an advocate for disabled, Neurodiverse, and LBGTQ+ youth and their families, Julie loves modern-day theological challenges, time with her family, attending Mass/Church, her pet birds, and eating Mexican food on the San Antonio Riverwalk with her friends and family. Julie’s articles have appeared in New Ways Ministry, Outreach, Fortunate Families, Faith-on-View, and Catholic New Zealand, as well as in medical, educational, and secular LGBTQ+ publications like Therapist.News, Zipe Education, MarkPShea, and Gay News Today (Science section).
In August of 2000, our third child Sam was born as a premature baby into a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Beaumont, TX. My husband and I knew that our lives would never be the same, although an inner peace accompanied the unknown. As Sam developed through his infant and toddler years, his behaviors and development were certainly different and distinct from those of his older brother and sister who were 16 months and three years older.
By the time Sam reached the age of 2, an extended family member at a reunion told me that she thought our son was autistic. Since she was raising a daughter with Autism, I suspected that her instincts might be correct. After taking Sam to several local doctors in San Antonio, one of them referred me to a new local developmental pediatrician in town. Right before Sam’s third birthday, he received a diagnosis of High-Functioning Autism. With the help of this brilliant Catholic developmental pediatrician, Dr. Patricia Harkins, Sam started a very intensive intervention prescriptive plan. He received 20-25 hours a week of Applied Behavioral Analysis, and another 4 to 6 hours a week of Speech and Occupational Therapies. The interventions worked so well that Sam was ready for a regular first grade classroom at age seven.
As the years went on, Sam continued with researched-based therapies, but to a lesser intensity. And my career shifted from general education to special education, which grew into graduate work and educational therapy as Sam and his siblings grew older. Sam’s after-school activities were therapies and tutors until he started altar service in the Church at age thirteen and the Boy Scouts at age fourteen. In middle school, my husband and I moved Sam to a small private Christian school that accommodated children with disabilities, which is where I established a private practice. We were both there for 6 years until Sam graduated from high school.
With my husband’s assistance, Sam completed his Eagle Scout Honor, graduated with a regular high school diploma, and left for college at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. During his studies in Huntsville, he became a licensed pharmacy technician at a local pharmacy after two years of on-the-job training. During COVID, Sam returned home to finish his college career and work. Although he still lives at home now at age 22, he is living a full and productive life and eventually wants to get married and leave home.
Parents of neurodivergent children, it is possible to raise well-adjusted, productive, autistic adults. In our case, it wasn’t easy, but parenting in general isn’t easy. In retrospect, our family would not be who we are, nor would I be serving in the field of educational therapy, if it were not for Sam. Sam not only shaped me as a professional, he instilled compassion, love, humility, and sensitivity into our family. God formed our family through Sam, who is truly our greatest gift.
With this background of our family’s story as one piece of many, I am planning to write a book about various specific personal experiences and broader professional experiences, which will also tie into current faith, political, and cultural conflicts (including my own first-hand encounters). While this plan for the book is in its infancy stage, I have published many articles about these intersectionalities.
And in this book I hope that my own experiences, tied to broader social issues, will bring hope and healing to a world that needs love, light, compassion, and the Real Jesus, not the GOP Jesus.
Megachurch forces all members to sign anti-LGBTQ+ statement, or be removed from membership
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, is coming out any day now!
First Baptist Church — a megachurch in Jacksonville, Florida — is requiring its members to sign a “Biblical Sexuality Agreement,” an anti-LGBTQ+ statement that denies the existence of trans people, opposes same-sex marriage, and calls same-sex intercourse ungodly.
The church’s senior pastor used anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation to explain why all church members must sign or resign.
The statement reads: “As a member of First Baptist Church, I believe that God creates people in his image as either male or female, and that this creation is a fixed matter of human biology, not individual choice. I believe marriage is instituted by God, not government, is between one man and one woman, and is the only context for sexual desire and expression.”
Members will need to sign the statement by March 19 or else be removed from the church, First Coast News reported. At the same time, the church continues to insist that it is a welcoming church that spreads the love of God across the city, and that it loves, absolutely loves, everyone.
Right.
Part of me revels in the notion of asking members of a Baptist church to take a solid, even literal stance on social issues. What disgusts me is Baptists taking stances on social issues that put them on the wrong side of justice and righteousness. My question: What’s next? Will the pastor roll out a statement on abortion in 2023? A statement on supporting the Republican nominee for president in 2024? Will he issue statements on biblical interpretation?
Has this church been poisoned by secular politics? I fear the answer is yes. When churches experience an increase in attendance from 100 to 1500 during a pandemic because the pastor rants about COVID conspiracies, opposes vaccinations, and generally spreads misinformation, then we know that the poison is spreading.
Perhaps the pastor will issue a statement that wives should graciously submit to their husbands. Perhaps statements will follow demanding adherence to young Earth creationism and the fantasy that America was founded as a Christian nation. Perhaps church members will start pushing for statements against “wokeness,” Critical Race Theory, Disney World, and the state income tax. Perhaps there will be church members demanding statements supporting prayer in public schools, no restrictions on gun ownership, and the firing of schoolteachers who teach evolution and the reality of racial inequality. Perhaps there will be the demand that church members demonstrate their patriotism by placing American flags on their freshly kept lawns in their gated communities. Perhaps church members will issue edicts demanding that their church follow the lead of Robert Jeffress and have fireworks in the sanctuary to celebrate the Fourth of July.
I can hardly wait to see more resolutions from the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida. But the problem with such statements is that once you start, where do you stop? Have you noticed that the fundamentalist/evangelical vehicle has no “stop” button? Once they go on a righteous outrage campaign, there’s always something else that requires their attention. These intensely political animals are experts at ferreting out issues that get a positive reception from other moralists. For example, the current panic among evangelicals and Republicans about transgender persons looks like an easy win. There’s the sense that people will go along with oppressing transgender individuals because it is offensive to the common person. But it won’t stop there. This is a beast that must constantly be fed, with new groups to be consigned to the fires of hell.
And how long will it be before other statements will have less than unanimous support and division will creep into the fellowship? Then the church will split and there will be two churches. With each passing year, there will crop up sincere church members, zealous for the commandments of God, and they will want to have statements that ensure that all the members are really, really conservative enough. Suspicion will grow. Mistrust will pop up like Kudzu on a Florida interstate.
Baptists still have a modicum of contentiousness, wrangling, arguing, fighting, and misbehaving in their spiritual DNA. The fact that they have been mostly submissive sheep since the fundamentalist takeover in the 1980s doesn’t guarantee that this tranquility will always be the default setting. It doesn’t take much to set off a group of Southern Baptists. Ticking time-bombs and Southern Baptists have a lot in common except that Southern Baptists are more volatile. For example, at the slightest hint of a liberal within a hundred yards of a Southern Baptist church, they spring into action like a mobilized National Guard. When they get a fix on the suspected liberal, the gnashing of teeth and the growling and hissing can be heard six blocks away from the church. The poor suspect never sees it coming as he gets blasted out of the water with the high-powered weaponized rhetoric of the good people of God.
The good pastor of FBC Jacksonville may be the one who has taken his finger out of the dike that has been holding back reams and reams of paper statements from repressed Southern Baptists.
But there’s something else. Thinking that he is taking a stand against an evil, secular culture, the pastor of FBC Jacksonville may discover that he is aiding and abetting an absolute rebellion against his kind of Christianity, his kind of exclusion, his kind of judgment.
So I am very pleased to suggest some alternative, helpful, and biblical statements for the pastor to submit to his huge congregation as conditions of membership:
- “As a member of First Baptist Church, I believe that Jesus has established his rule on earth and commands me to love foreigners, immigrants, and outsiders. He has called me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.”
- “In the spirit of Romans 12, I will feed my enemies when they are hungry and give them something to drink when they are thirsty.”
- “In the spirit of Leviticus 19, when an alien resides with me in my land, I shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides in my land shall be to me as a citizen; I shall love the alien as myself, for I too was an alien in the land of Egypt, and the Lord my God brought me out of the land of Egypt.”
As regards their current anti-LGBTQ+ statement, the pastor and the church members should not expect that their current statement is going to hold back the righteousness of God and the mercy of God and the love of God for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and queer persons.
If FBC Jacksonville persists in this anti-God, anti-Gospel, anti-empathy, anti-human stance, they should sign a contract to build an ark.
Because the flood of righteousness, mercy, and justice will ultimately sweep them away.
Another Racial Divide
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.’”
An issue that has been on my heart and mind in recent years is the racial divide that still exists in America. For a country that brags and prides itself on progress, human rights, freedom, and civil liberties, there is still much work to be done on this terrain.
The events that acted as a catalyst for me in contemplating the racial divide in America were George Floyd’s murder and the violence against Asian Americans during the rise of COVID. If the death of George Floyd showed us anything, it is that we have a huge problem on our hands, and that is systemic racism! It is not enough to acknowledge the sins of the past and go on as if America has rooted out its racism. The work for racial peace should happen until no one is attacked, killed, or discriminated against based on the color of their skin.
In fighting racism, I am not just talking about the racial divide that exists between Caucasians and African Americans, but I am talking about all forms of racism. Many Americans will acknowledge that a racial divide exists between Whites and Blacks. But I am speaking here about a group that sometimes gets ignored when one speaks about the racial divide in America. I am speaking about a racial community that I am a member of: Asian Americans.
When the reports about attacks against Asians came out during the rise of the pandemic, it was not at all a surprise to me. This resentment and discrimination against Asians has existed for years; it is nothing new under the sun. What upset me was that the hate turned physical. I was enraged seeing members of my racial community being beaten and attacked for just being Asian. I would compare the attacks on Asians to the killing of George Floyd.
These attacks forced me to examine myself. What do I mean by this? This series of attacks against Asians did not come out of nowhere. I believe many Asian Americans (myself included) deserve partial blame for this. Before you say “don’t blame the victim,” let me explain.
These attacks came from an unsubstantiated fear of Asians (especially the Chinese) spreading COVID. Underneath this fear lies a deep resentment that some Americans have for Asians. Racist and derogatory statements have been slung at Asians for years. But the reason why I claim that Asian Americans are partly to blame for this is the reality that many Asian Americans have been taught to ignore casual racism. Many Asian Americans reading these words can attest to the accuracy of this statement. I was taught to lay low and ignore racially prejudicial comments. Many Asians have sucked it up, blown off insults, silently moved on, and became successful. Asians trade dignity and face to move up in status.
Asians are stereotyped as being cooperative, quiet, polite, and smart, but at what cost? The attacks on Asians that occurred during the pandemic made me question what we have gained by this “silence” and what price we have to pay for it. The silence has given Asians the name “perfect minority” because we stay silent when other races trample all over us. There is a reason most of the racial jokes that are said about Asians would not pass with other racial groups.
For me, silence was a way to survive; to be honest, ignoring casually racist comments seemed the best strategy. It took these violent attacks to make me realize how dangerous the silence I have been so accustomed to can be. The attacks caused me to be more articulate about my culture and the pains of my people. I became more aware of the need to speak out about my experience. Yes, I would risk not being seen as cooperative, and I would make some people feel uncomfortable at times, but at least my speaking up might decrease people’s ignorance. The attacks made me ask what role I could play in eliminating the poison of racism.
The daily silence that many Asian Americans are taught leads people to take advantage of them. People think our silence means they can walk all over us. Our silence makes us invisible. People take for granted our success, as if being born Asian means being successful. There are so many Asian students that have to work their butts off to make it through medical school, and yet they have their hard work dismissed as simply the result of “being gifted.”
This is the reason why I can no longer keep silent, not just for the racial barrier that exists for Asians, but for Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and all racial groups. Like John the Baptist, my calling as a prophetic minister does not allow me to be complacent and silent. I must preach the Gospel truth to all people. That means I must proclaim to all people that they are beloved in God’s eyes.
Unfortunately, from my experiences in the rural South, this reality has yet to fully penetrate the hearts and minds of some American “Christians.” I am not saying there has been no progress, for there has been. But is it enough? Unfortunately, no. I don’t believe the work for racial justice is done until all people can go out of their residences unafraid of being attacked because of their racial identity. The truth of the Gospel cannot be realized and lived out to its fullest until there is true peace on earth.
Unfortunately, this cannot happen until preachers preach the Gospel in all its fullness, not veiled by a political agenda. Being Christian should not be seen as identical to being Republican. Being Christian means embracing the scriptures in all its uncomfortableness. It is not being silent, but it is speaking the truth no matter the cost. Surely Jesus did not preach a “comfortable Gospel,” otherwise he would not have been left hanging on that cross! The Gospel message should make you and I shiver in our boots. The Gospel, as Jesus testified with his life, was as social as it was theological. Our mission is not done until there is total peace, for God’s kingdom is a peaceful kingdom.
Let us begin building the kingdom by breaking down racial barriers and replacing them with acceptance and love. Let us build a kingdom where every suffering is seen for what it is. Let us build a kingdom where no one is INVISIBLE and no one is killed as a result of their INVISIBILITY!
“Yes, Dr. White, your Cedarville students need revival”
By Alex Mattackal
Alex Mattackal is a current J.D. candidate and holds a B.A. in International Studies and Spanish from Cedarville University. She took two years after her undergraduate degree to serve as an AmeriCorps Disaster Recovery Fellow, securing and disbursing federal funds for victims of Dayton, Ohio’s Memorial Day tornadoes. She is located in the Atlanta metro area and is passionate about public service and advocacy.
(This was written in response to Cedarville University President Dr. Thomas White’s February 13th chapel. All quotes are taken directly from his message.)
I’ll begin with the legal issue: under Title IX, as soon as a university is made aware of an incident involving any sex discrimination, sexual harassment, or sexual violence, it must immediately and formally investigate. If the investigation uncovers evidence, the university must take immediate action to remedy the situation and its effects. If a school knowingly allows the hostile environment to continue, they are in violation of Title IX. Action can be taken before an investigation concludes to protect the claimant and others.
On February 13th, Cedarville University students planned a protest in response to the administration’s mishandling of Title IX cases. Said mishandling is broad and recurring.
The plan was to walk out after worship, once President Dr. White took the stage to give the sermon. He disrupted this routine and their plans, taking the stage for a surprise announcement. One would think that the university president, in his first address to a crowd of students processing through a serious on-campus incident colored by Title IX claims, would say anything other than:
“These past few months have been really difficult for me.”
The optics of the message are dystopian. White stepped off a plane from a two-month hiatus culminating in a vacation in Fiji (perhaps sponsored by his “friend of the university”) and onto a campus community eager for direction from their President.
“My name is Thomas White,” he opens, and pauses expectantly for the cheers that follow. He smiles at the student who yells “nice tan!” and confesses: “these past few months have been really difficult for a lot of people. . . difficult for me.” He supports this with a laundry list of things that are, no doubt, personally difficult for him, including his mother-in-law’s passing. His voice is thick with emotion, and though he doesn’t mention the protest once, it’s clear he’s minimizing it in comparison to real problems. It’s a guilt trip – as clumsy as it is clever, as tone-deaf as it is manipulative.
His tone is gentle, pastoral, and confident in its power to influence from the pulpit, in its certainty that this issue will blow over. (Why shouldn’t it? It always has.) After all, the university’s mishandling of Title IX cases is only substantiated by what White calls:
“Rumors,” “gaps in information,” and “guesses.”
White launches into a strange anecdote about feeling convicted about being nosy about a fictitious death’s attendant circumstances. He condemns this behavior with a tut-tut: it’s our “typical sinful inclination” and “human nature” to “wanna know everything” and, damningly, “assume the worst.” Under this interpretation, students’ concern for how the university handles Title IX cases relegates them to mere busybodies and gossips. Wanting more information about what White would consider to be people’s personal lives, not a pattern of university behavior, is sinful. It’s telling that he does not contemplate that, according to statistics, at least a sixth of his audience are survivors, maybe wondering: how will the University treat me if I come forward? Instead, White puts himself and the students in the same category of mutual confusion: “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
This is a cunning misdirection. A university and a student do not “walk together, hand in hand, shoulder in shoulder towards Christ.” Cedarville University shoulders the ultimate weight of responsibility for the well-being of their students. They are morally, biblically, and legally responsible for their safety. These are young adults. Some are minors. The appropriate response to a victim’s cry of “you should have protected us” surely cannot be “I’m not perfect. This institution’s not perfect . . . You’re not perfect.” What blatant blame-shifting. Students are hardly asking for perfection – just accountability.
Another misdirection surfaces when White blames Title IX confidentiality requirements for the lack of university transparency: “they can’t tell you or others about every detail.” While Title IX reporting is confidential, it is wholly inaccurate to say that the university has no impact on how, or whether, cases are investigated and complainants are given adequate redress. White argues that the administration’s responsibility was ended when:
“We spent money. We increased budgets.”
White stresses the university’s establishment of the Title IX office 2.5 years ago (not addressing that the timing lines up with his Title IX scandal). He says that they exhausted resources and found “professionals with extensive training.” (Author’s note: I’m making no comment on their qualifications here, merely quoting White’s rhetoric.) Unsaid, but implicit here, is an exasperated: what more could you possibly want?
White attempts to distance the administration and Cedarville policies from the Title IX office, lest their errors fall on his shoulders. (“In case you’re wondering, the President’s office is not involved in those policies and procedures.”) In doing so, he shifts the blame yet again onto a familiar target: “the federal government complicates everything in life.” Yet it’s counterfactual to say that the administration has no impact on Title IX’s work.
Cedarville’s Title IX policy, in Section VI(B), “Amnesty,” provides the university an exemption. Everything besides the specific issue in the complaint can be grounds for discipline as set forth in the University Handbook. While students cannot be dismissed for reporting, they can be subjected to “institutional or counseling remedies consistent with our values.” It appears that if a student reports that they have been sexually assaulted while spending the night off-campus and drinking, they have no protection from “institutional remedies” for that behavior – especially if they don’t disclose the full situation up-front.
Of course, it makes sense that a culture which demands that victims be silent can’t hear how they are affected by institutional policies. Purity culture is a suppression machine that grinds on, oiled by university policy. The Cedarville handbook expressly forbids sexual contact of any kind. There are dress codes in place; curfews; segregated dorm rooms – if something bad happened to you, you were doing something bad. Accordingly, if you report, you can’t be expelled, but you are subject to discipline of some kind.
So White says that he tells Title IX administrators, just as he tells every other member of university faculty, to:
“Do what’s right and let God sort it out.”
White defends the administrators against the students claiming that the administrators “don’t care for victims.” He delivers one last clinching guilt-trip: students accusing the administrators of mishandling Title IX cases is “like me saying to you who are in social work, ‘you don’t care about people.’ All of you would go — I’m giving my life because I care about people! I wanna make a difference in the world. And our team does. I know them personally. I know that they care.”
While I’ve been critical of White’s handling of the issue, it’s my position that the Title IX administrators probably do care about victims. It’s valid to assume, as he does, that they entered that profession for that reason. However, whether or not they care about victims is, unfortunately, not at issue. Whether they see all victims as victims, with undiscriminating equity, is at issue. Whether cases are handled fairly and appropriately is at issue. Whether university policy, fundamentalist culture, victim blaming, and fear of retaliation affects those cases is at issue. We have to consider those biases in a way that is honest and non-pejorative.
His introduction, full of redirection and sleight of hand, sets up White’s final manipulative masterstroke. He pivots to an attempt to manufacture a spiritual revival, apropos of Asbury University. Here, it functions not as a genuine movement, but as another powerful manipulative tool. What Christian doesn’t want revival? Unsubstantiated “rumors” fade in the light of Glory; difficult questions need not be answered. Now, if you protest, you’re interrupting revival. Whether White should have forced revival is an entirely separate spiritual issue. What it did there, in that chapel, in that context, is help make a problem go away.
After White made it as socially, emotionally, and spiritually difficult as possible to do so, a small crowd of students walked out of the chapel after worship. The recording captures the jeers and laughs of the crowd that ushered them out.
However, the Facebook livestream was edited to remove almost everything that this article mentions. Alumni commented “Support the silenced. Stand with survivors” in solidarity – most of those comments were removed with the edit. If everything is truly above-board, why was this done? (The archive site has the full version available, but it’s far less front-facing than the Facebook page; also, no comments are allowed.)
I spoke to students following the chapel, and many were elated, riding an emotional high, grateful to White for bringing campus back together, for explaining that the protest really was just silly and misguided. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether White wanted to replicate the movement at Asbury with genuine earnestness or obfuscate the Title IX issue. It’s an age-old tactic with age-old results: bow your head and close your eyes.
Answers in Genesis’ Bigotry “Pinkwashed” by the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitor’s Bureau
by Daniel Phelps
Daniel Phelps is a retired environmental geologist for the commonwealth of Kentucky. He has also taught part-time in Kentucky’s Community College system. His work to expose the pseudoscience behind Ham’s Ark Encounter was featured in the award-winning 2019 documentary, “We Believe in Dinosaurs.” In 2021 the Paleontological Society – the world’s leading scientific organization devoted to studying invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology, micropaleontology, and paleobotany – awarded Phelps the prestigious Strimple Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in paleontology by someone who does not make a full-time living from paleontology. Phelps is founder and president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society.
In late 2022, I began receiving, almost daily, “sponsored posts” in my Facebook feed for the Ark Encounter that were sponsored by the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (NKCVB). The NKCVB is partly funded by a tax charge when hotel rooms are rented in Northern Kentucky. Since the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum are Kentucky tourist sites, the mere advertising of these sites is not objectionable. However, the wording describing the Ark Encounter is objectionable. The “sponsored ad” (see Figure 1 below) and working on the the NKCVB website https://www.meetnky.com/about-us/ is troublesome. The advertisement states that the Ark Encounter is “a full-sized replica” of Noah’s Ark, indicating that the NKCVB agrees with Answers in Genesis that the Ark actually existed. Obviously, one cannot have a “replica” of something that never existed.
I was about to ignore this as just another inane thing that Answers in Genesis (AiG) has received from a taxpayer supported government entity. However, I noticed that the NKCVB has the imprimatur of Destination Marketing’s Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Accreditation Program and The International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (actually the IGLBTQ+ Travel Association). This seemed very odd, given AiG’s stances on diversity and sexuality. Thus, I sent the directors of NKCVB, Destination Marketing, and The International GLBTQ+ Travel Association the letter below via email on January 2, 2023, and, after not hearing from any of the three organizations, again on January 18. I know my email reached all three organizations received my message because of “out of office” replies.
I also sent an additional email on January 20, concerning a political rally at the Creation Museum cosponsored by AiG and a minister advocating the execution of women who have had abortions. As of February 7, I have not heard from the organizations. They have all had plenty of time to address my concerns.
Does the NKCVB have the integrity to alter the wording of the descriptions of the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum? Back in 2007, the NKCVB changed a rather bigoted description of the Creation Museum after public outcry (see https://ncse.ngo/tourism-agency-charged-improperly-promoting-creation-museum). Will they remove the description of the Ark A a “replica”?
The support of the pro-diversity organizations for AiG’s claims and bigotry is, at the very least, disturbing. Will these organizations have their seals of approval removed from the NKCVB site because of AiG’s bigoted positions? When phony environmental groups support polluters, it is often called “greenwashing” and “green-scamming.” Is the support of these two groups for the NKCVB an example of “diversity-washing” or “pinkwashing”? Why is AiG’s bigotry being ignored by these groups who supposedly support diversity?
Below is the text of the email I sent, first on January 2, 2023:
Dear Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, Destination Marketing Accreditation Program, and The International GLBTQ+ Travel Association,
Back in 2007, I was involved in a dispute with the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (NKCVB, https://www.meetnky.com/about-us/) because your website described the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation Museum as a “museum that will counter evolutionary natural history museums that turn countless minds against Christ and Scripture.” This slur against real science museums was nothing less than astounding. Fortunately, this dispute was resolved after a short time and after several newspaper articles and resulted in your organization using less offensive language on your website description of the Creation Museum (see: https://ncse.ngo/tourism-agency-charged-improperly-promoting-creation-museum ).
Recently, I have been receiving, numerous “sponsored” advertising on my Facebook feed concerning the Ark Encounter, another attraction owned by Answers in Genesis (Figure 1). The advertisement states that the Ark building is “a full-sized replica”, apparently promoting AiG’s fallacious claim that the Ark was a real part of human history. Disturbingly, this is stated without even considering that one cannot have an “exact replica” of something that never existed. Could this language be changed without making the NKCVB appear to support AiG’s fundamentalist Christian claims? Since the NKCVB is in part supported by Kentucky tax money, I argue that such a change would be for the best.
I was also surprised to see the seals of both Destinations International DEI Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion and The International GLBTQ+ Travel Association on the NKCVB website. The imprimatur of these organizations is surprising considering the positions held by AiG, a religious ministry who owns both the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. I would like to hear how, in light of AiG’s positions, this approval is given to the NKCVB. I can understand the NKCVB doing some advertising for the Creation Museum and Ark since thy are local attractions. I do not understand how Destinations International DEI Diversity and The International GLBTQ+ Travel Association can possibly support this in light of AiG’s horribly bigoted views.
AiG’s Statement of Faith (https://answersingenesis.org/about/faith/) makes all of their employees agree before hiring to numerous bigoted, homophobic, and transphobic positions. (See specifics below.) With regards to diversity, the Statement of Faith states: “The concepts of ‘social justice,’ ‘intersectionality,’ and ‘critical race theory’ as defined in modern terminology are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing.” Even more hateful is the portion of AiG’s Statement of Faith where homosexuals are equated to people committing incest and bestiality. See also, https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/05/08/answers-in-genesiss-statement-of-faith-becomes-more-strident/
Besides the offensive material in AiG’s statement of faith, there have been many other incidents. In 2014 the Creation Museum received an Allosaurus dinosaur skeleton from neo-Confederate and former board member of the League of the South white supremacy advocate Michael Peroutka (see: https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2014/05/dinosaur-fossil.html). Last October the Ark hosted a talk by White Christian Nationalist Tony Perkins (see: https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2022/09/extreme-right-wing-Christian-nationalist.html ). I also encourage Destinations International and The International GLBTQ+ Travel Association to view the multitude of YouTube videos posted by AiG, many of which bully gays and transsexuals (see: AiG’s YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@answersingenesis).
I am a white, heterosexual male, but I know bigotry and hate when I see it. AiG has ghastly positions with respect to diversity, inclusion, and sexuality, and should not be receiving the imprimatur of anti-bigotry and anti-discrimination groups. Please let me know why your seals appear on the NKCVB page.
Sincerely,
Daniel Phelps
Lexington KY
From AiG’s Statement of Faith:
- “The concepts of ‘social justice,’ ‘intersectionality,’ and ‘critical race theory’ as defined in modern terminology are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing (Ezekiel 1:1-20; James 2:8-9).”
- “The only legitimate marriage, based on the creation ordinance in Genesis 1 and 2, sanctioned by God is the joining of one naturally born man and naturally born woman in a single, exclusive union as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other and has commanded that no sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, prostitution, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, abuse, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God (Genesis 1:27-28, 2:24; Matthew 5:27-30; 19:4-5; Mark 10: 2-9; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 1 Thessalonians 4:3-7; Hebrews 13:4).”
- “Gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated. A person’s gender is determined at conception (fertilization), coded in the DNA, and cannot be changed by drugs, hormones, or surgery. Rejection of one’s biological sex (gender) or identifying oneself by the opposite sex is a sinful rejection of the way God made that person. These truths must be communicated with compassion, love, kindness, and respect, pointing everyone to the truth that God offers redemption and restoration to all who confess and forsake their sin, seeking his mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ (Genesis 1:26-28, 5:1-2; Psalm 51:5, 139: 13-16; Jeremiah 1:5; Matthew 1:20-21, 19:4-6; Mark 10:6; Luke 1:31; Acts 3: 19-21; Romans 10:9-10; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Galatians 3:28).”
Editor’s note: As anyone who takes the time to check these verses out, AiG has taken proof-texting to a new level. That is to say, these verses don’t actually make the biblical case that they claim. Just see the verses that they claim are against social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory.
The Hell That Patriarchy Promises and Too Often Delivers: A Very Personal Review of Women Talking
Susan Trollinger
I was silent for something like two years. He terrorized me. Central to the terror was that I never knew exactly when he would come after me. What I knew was that he would. It might happen in his home. He was my brother-in-law, so I was often there. Or it might be in a conference hotel stairwell. He was on the faculty of the rhetoric department at the University of Pittsburgh where I was pursuing my PhD, and he was an expert in classical rhetoric—the area within the discipline of rhetoric that was my joy. As I headed into that stairwell, he would follow me, letting me that he was going to “help” me get some ice. Or it might be in the burger joint in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning (at Pitt), where he would move into areas of conversation that sickened me.
Women Talking. A film about women in a remote and ultra-conservative Mennonite colony who have had enough. “The men” (as the women refer to them) have been “attacking” them—a euphemism of sorts for what these men (some are barely old enough to be called men) do. For years, they have been tranquilizing the girls and women (from age 5 to age 65) with sedatives made for cows, and then raping them.
When these women dared to talk about what had been done to them, “the men” told them that they were demon possessed or just making things up. In the true story, upon which this film is based, as many as 151 women and girls in a conservative Mennonite colony in Manitoba, Bolivia were sedated, raped, and gaslighted. Miriam Toews, a Canadian Mennonite writer who tells stories about things she knows, wrote the award-winning novel upon which this Oscar-nominated film (directed by Sarah Polley) is based.
I spent 15 plus years among Mennonites, so I have some (limited) idea of the world these women inhabited. It’s a world of the faithful remnant. You are the chosen. That being so, there can be neither spot nor wrinkle. And if you’re like these women in an ultra-conservative Mennonite colony, your job is to protect the fantasy that there is no spot or wrinkle. It doesn’t matter what the facts are.
If you do find the courage to face the violence that has been done to you, as the women of this film do, you sing a hymn. It might be “How Great Thou Art,” or the Mennonite anthem (the hymn famously known among Mennonites as “606”) “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” Or perhaps, one of my favorites: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”
Still, you are in this horrible economy. It’s an economy according to which God’s love for you is predicated on your loyalty to this “faithful remnant.” And loyalty means that whatever particular form your suffering takes, even if that involves being raped by your father or brother or uncle, you are to endure it. It is your cross to bear. More than that, you are obliged (unless you want to spend eternity in hell) to forgive “the men.” Seventy times seven.
In one of the opening scenes of the film, we are positioned by the camera (in a manner reminiscent of Hitchcock’s innovative camerawork in Psycho) as if suspended from the ceiling over a young woman’s bed. Looking down, we watch as she comes to consciousness and sees (probably not for the first time) new dark bruises on her inner thighs and blood stains on her nightgown and sheets. What we don’t expect is the older woman, in her sixties or more, who runs into the bedroom in her plain dress and head covering, to comfort the young woman.
We might imagine that this film is about the horrors of a religious sect that pins its salvation on the suffering of women. And, to be sure, it is. And it is about so much more.
This film has a lot to teach us about the complexities of women’s suffering under patriarchy, about how women have learned to punish one another for their suffering, and the incredible fortitude it takes to acknowledge the pain of the other—whether sister, mother, four-year-old daughter, or adolescent son. And to do something about it.
It would be pretty to think so (to borrow a line from Hemingway) that this story of women’s suffering under patriarchy were limited to ultra-conservative Mennonite sects. But, alas, it is not.
By the way, the man who saw fit to terrorize me was not a Mennonite. Obviously, you don’t have to belong to a conservative religious sect to be a predator. Worse, and as Bill’s previous post made clear, patriarchy (of a particularly violent sort) is on the march.
What is so remarkable about this film is that we spend most of our time with these women and girls (denied an education and therefore illiterate) in a hay loft as they work through the question of whether they should just stay and endure the abuse, stay and fight the abuse, or leave. They talk. They yell. They cry. They witness one another’s suffering. And then they act.
You get women talking. There’s no telling where that may lead.
