by William Trollinger

In his wonderful book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr talks about how we should read the Hebrew prophets as starting in a place of righteous anger, and then moving from there to sadness and then to compassion. This growth process – “from order into what seems to be disorder, and finally reaching some sort of reorder” – is one we should follow as human beings.  As Rohr puts it,

Without this growth process, most of us believe our first presented order is all there is. This is why we have so much immature religion. What we learn early in life, with the mind of a four-to-six-year-old, is just to get us started. We first need the ark and the horrible flood to be literal, but when we act as is this is the main point of such stories, it puts us in an untenable and even absurd position. Where did Cain and Abel’s wives come from, for example? Did the whole earth really speak the same language before the Tower of Babel? . . . “Now that I have become a man,” Paul says, “all childish ways must be put behind me” (I Corinthians 13:11). Such passages are a shout-out and a demand for an adult Christianity, rather than the version that sentimentalizes faith at the childish level.

In Rohr’s terms, it would seem that young Earth creationism is the epitome of religious immaturity. And Ark Encounter (the Answers in Genesis (AiG) tourist site near Williamstown, Kentucky) takes this childish faith to a whole new level. 

According to a plaque inside the Ark, God drowned up to 20 billion people in the “horrible” (Rohr’s word) global flood – just for context, the current world population is 8.3 billion – while sparing only eight individuals: Noah and his wife, plus three sons and their wives. 8 people lived, while up to 20 billion people, including infants, toddlers, and children, were drowned. Assuming that 40% of the ten billion women were of reproductive age, and assuming that 4% of these women were pregnant at the time of the flood, then 160 million unborn were also killed.

As Ark Encounter would have it, God determined that these up to 20 billion infants, toddlers, children, and adults – plus the 160 million unborn – deserved to be slaughtered. The only explanation offered for why these billions of human beings had to be drowned is that, according to a placard, since God “gave life, He has the right to take life,” and anyway, all humans “deserve death and judgment.” 

To refer to AiG’s God as genocidal seems the ultimate understatement. 

But there’s more to the religious immaturity of Ark Encounter. The eight people whom God saved from the flood are presented as residing in plush quarters – library and large kitchen included – and having a great time, eating great food, making music, and creating artwork. (Just to be clear, all of this is AiG’s addition to the biblical account). They are living large, all while a horrific slaughter is occurring just outside the walls of their big boat. 

Maybe their music is supposed to have drowned out the screams? Or maybe the screams are just music to their ears?

It is obvious that visitors to Ark Encounter are expected to identify with the lucky eight who are comfortably, smugly basking in their luxurious rooms. Inside the walls of the Ark, tourists can contentedly enjoy the fact that they too are safe. This is brought home by the fact that AiG has prominently placed a “keepsake photo” site near the door that God supposedly shut and locked as the waters were rising, thus ensuring that not one of the billions of human beings trapped in the Flood would escape their watery execution.

Every time we have visited Ark Encounter, we have witnessed a happy smiling family posing for the camera at the Ark door.

This is religious immaturity on steroids. Besides everything else, what does this tell us about the state of evangelicalism in 21^st-century America?