even the hoax of global warming,” he said in February,
calling it more “
political science” than science.
Teaching the Impossible
And what about higher education; the liberal, secular
source of so much that Santorum finds disgusting?
For those select few who do get an education, rather than working on a road crew, what should be
taught in the classroom? “Darwin’s theory of evolution
should not be taught as absolute fact in the science
classroom,” he has mused. On law and history Santorum
squares off against what he sees as a
separation-of-church-and-state dogma. Earlier in his
campaign he assured voters that “God gave us laws
that we must abide by.” Since much of this runs counter to
how courses are taught in American colleges and
universities, Santorum offered a solution in an informal interview in October, 2011: “Just like
we have certifying organizations that accredit a college,
we’ll have certifying organizations that will accredit
conservative professors. If you are to be eligible for
federal funds, you’ll have to provide an equal number of
conservative professors as liberal professors.”
Perhaps such a university, in the name of fairness, would
include paleontology courses taught by someone who believed
that dinosaurs were contemporary with humans and that
fossils unearthed today are of animals drowned in Noah’s
flood.
Could such a university be accredited? The short answer is
yes. A handful of fundamentalist colleges and universities
across the country incorporate such views into their science
curriculum. Knowledge denial, though, can easily find other,
more subtle ways to reach willing audiences, and even creep
into the classrooms of credible universities. One strategy,
endorsed by Santorum and heavily promoted by
anti-evolutionary groups like the Seattle-based Discovery
Institute, is to falsely claim that there is a actual
scientific debate going on about evolution and urge
educators to “teach the controversy.”
There is, of course, no such controversy in the scientific
community.
Homeschooling parents, evangelical teachers at private
schools, and instructors at unaccredited religious colleges
and Bible institutes share a common educational paradigm (as
Julie Ingersoll has detailed here at
RD –Eds). Outside the normal conversations about what
counts as established knowledge, they are vulnerable to
messages like that of the Discovery Institute and they are
cheered that a godly candidate like Santorum is speaking for
them. What are teachers to make of a claim by a scholar with
scientific credentials who assures them that evolution is
controversial—especially if that scholar is a religious
believer who holds a PhD and shares their faith commitments?
Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American
evangelicalism, reaching even into the classrooms of popular
schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University
(the largest evangelical university in the world), where
students are taught that the earth is 10,000 years old. Millions
of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a
real debate when it comes to human origins. They also come
to learn that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice
that can be repaired with prayer. They are taught that
secular historians are suppressing the vision of the
Founding Fathers and that America was supposed to be a
Christian nation.
Controversies that should have died decades and even
centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in
the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers,
say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have
been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking
of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses
of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral,
family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that
the present age is not.
Knowledge Denial
Ken Ham’s Answers
in Genesis project is dedicated to the proposition
that God wrote the Bible himself and that all knowledge
needs to be based on a simple literal reading of that
ancient book. As the organization’s name suggests, the book
of Genesis is filled with “answers” that God provides to
many important questions: How old is the earth? What is the
proper relationship of males and females? What is marriage?
Why were animals created? Why are there so many languages?
Where did humanity originate? Why do people behave the way
they do?
Some suggest that Ham’s alternative theories are benign.
“With regard to those evangelicals—and for that matter
those ultra-orthodox Jews—who believe that the earth is less
than 10,000 years old and either that there were no
dinosaurs or that they lived alongside human beings, my
reaction has always been: So what?” writes conservative radio host and
columnist Dennis Prager in a response to our recent NYT op-ed on the
evangelical rejection of reason. “[W]hat real-life problem
is caused by people who believe otherwise?” he asks, as if
knowledge is only relevant when it has a practical value for
everyone alike.
Answers in Genesis argues that starting assumptions,
rather than data and theories, determines whether a
researcher believes the earth is six thousand or
four-and-a-half billion years old. Who can be sure, anyway?
Ham encourages students to ask their teachers “Were you
there?” when those teachers suggest that the earth is very
old, or that dinosaurs predated humans. As Ham would say,
God, of course, was there and told Moses what
happened “in the beginning.” That’s the “answer.”
Professionally constructed dioramas in Ham’s Creation Museum
show dinosaurs looking over Eve’s shoulder.
Similar knowledge denial occurs on questions of gender
roles and human sexuality. Organizations like James Dobson’s
Focus on the Family claim that homosexuality is an
inherently perverse and sinful life choice that can be
reversed. Gay adolescent evangelicals consistently
experience their sexual awakening with alarm, denial, and
self-loathing—with parents and other authority figures
seemingly aligned in condemnation, and unavailable when
needed most. But the so-called “reparative therapy” such
youth are steered toward has been shown to be not only utterly ineffective but also
psychologically damaging.
The American Psychological Association has stated
definitively that “homosexuality is not an illness. It does
not require treatment and is not changeable.” The American
Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics,
along with numerous other professional organizations, have
adopted similar stances.
But still young people, including those that frequent the
clinic run by Michelle Bachmann’s husband, are encouraged to
seek deliverance from their condition. The emerging
acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage, claim many
evangelical leaders, reflects the moral decay of society,
not an open, more accepting world. Or, as Santorum told viewers of Fox News: “There are
all sorts of studies out there that suggest just the
contrary, and there are people who were gay and lived the
gay lifestyle and aren’t anymore.”
Amateur Hour
As conservative Christians adopt a counterview on sex and
gender, they learn alternate versions of history, too.
Populist historians within evangelicalism, like the
prominent Texas Republican, David Barton, promote the idea
that America is slouching toward Gomorrah. America is God’s
chosen republic, Barton asserts: the nation has been an
explicitly Christian country from its earliest days and
needs to reverse its sinful migration away from its biblical
roots. Professional historians, by contrast (including
leading evangelicals like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and
George Marsden) emphasize the plurality of beliefs in early
America and highlight the distance between the past and the
present. Yet, how does the man or woman in the pew, faced
with choosing a curriculum for church or home school, know
who is presenting history more accurately?
The amateur historians, biologists, and social scientists
who produce alternative curricula for evangelicals speak as
beleaguered culture warriors. They offer winsome personal
testimonies and refer to the Bible so often that it can
sometimes seem as though their ideas actually come straight
out of the Bible. They seem trustworthy—in contrast to their
secular and often agnostic Ivy League counterparts. We have
used the term “anointed” to reflect evangelical
experts’ remarkable ability to come across as messengers
from God.
These anointed leaders advance their alternative knowledge
claims by casting doubt on the relevance of “secular”
credentials, scientific consensus, and even higher education
in general. Some of them wave away the conclusions of
professionals, academics, and credentialed experts as the
mutterings of eggheads with their own egghead agendas.
Glenn Beck, one of Barton’s most enthusiastic promoters,
can hardly utter the word “professor” without sneering and
making air quotes with his fingers. Many evangelicals,
skeptical that a PhD after a name gives any reasonable
authority, have come to sympathize with and even celebrate
Fox News’ most well-known anti-intellectual Bill O’Reilly.
O’Reilly, who pitted his understanding of science against
that of Richard Dawkins in a recent show, is fond of
scoffing, “sorry, professor, not buying it,” suggesting that
expertise is really just opinion.
A number of thoughtful evangelicals are alarmed at the
surging anti-intellectualism within their ranks. And there
are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists,
and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who
do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields.
Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they
do not speak the language of biblical inerrancy,
anti-evolution, and conservative politics embraced by other
Christians.
Take Francis Collins, for example, one of America’s most
well-known scientists and an enthusiastic evangelical
Christian. Despite having directed the Human Genome Project
and ascended to the head of the National Institutes of
Health, Collins’ credentials mean absolutely nothing to
millions of evangelicals who prefer to get their science
from Ken Ham, who has no stature of any sort in the
scientific community.
Many conservative evangelicals reject Collins because he
believes in evolution, and does not read the first chapters
of Genesis literally. In his bestselling The Language of God, Collins
recalls speaking at a national gathering of Christian
physicians and having some of his audience walk out “shaking
their heads in dismay” when he confessed to being an
evolutionist. People have stormed out of Southern Baptist
churches when they discovered he accepted evolution. Others
have come to the microphone after a talk and implied that,
in accepting evolution, he was “under the influence of the
devil.”
Collins regularly gets critical commentary from
non-believers like Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris, but, as he has said, the “nastiest”
messages come from fellow Christians, “infuriated that
someone who claims to be a believer could say these things
about the truth of the evolutionary process.”
Highly publicized comments made by recent GOP candidates
suggest that the stakes are incredibly high. Rick Perry made
it clear during his short run that he was not on Collins’
side. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire in August he told
a child that Texas teaches creationism along with evolution.
(Though that, in fact, is not true.) Perry’s Texas has long
drawn the spotlight in these faith-driven culture war
battles. Conflicts over what kind of history should be
taught in public schools, recently waged in Texas and
Virginia, are no longer secular struggles. These skirmishes
pit good against evil.
The Bible as Measuring Rod
Conflict between generally accepted ideas and
“insider-approved” evangelical alternatives has roiled the
evangelical world for decades. Thirty years ago the pop
philosopher and culture warrior Francis Schaeffer (in the
news most recently as an influence on Michele Bachmann) went
head to head with several evangelical historians within the
academy. It started when Schaeffer wrote an anti-secularist
battle plan, A Christian Manifesto (1981),
intended to get Christians engaged in politics. Evangelicals
must “own” America’s Christian heritage said Schaeffer. The
nation was founded on the principles of the Bible and the
Reformation, he argued, and the founders “understood that
they were founding the country upon the concept that goes
back into the Judeo-Christian thinking that there is Someone
there who gave inalienable rights.” Those principles had
vanished in the 20th century and the government now rested
in the hands of materialists and humanists.
Within a year A Christian Manifesto had sold
approximately 300,000 copies, winning the enthusiastic
endorsement of Jerry Falwell, who distributed it to viewers
of his television program.
Evangelical historians dismissed Schaeffer as a
propagandist. He was clearly not a scholar, Mark Noll told Newsweek.
Writing in Christian Century, one historian called
Schaeffer to task for reading contemporary politics back
into the 18th century. The founders’ civil religion may have
drawn on the ideals of theism, but this hardly made the
country they were founding into a Christian nation.
Unfortunately Schaeffer’s views survived and are now alive
and well in the messages of David Barton and the late Peter
Marshall—the two most popular historians for homeschooling parents, Tea Partiers,
and evangelicals in general. Barton—whose education consists
of a bachelor’s degree in Christian education from Oral
Roberts University—dismisses his critics, suggesting that
the peer review process and the heavy interpretive component
of professional history make it unreliable. He dismisses
complaints about his credentials by referring to the
unvarnished truth of the primary sources he employs, just as
fundamentalists invoke their literal reading of the Bible.
The Bible is the measuring rod.
(And as Paul Harvey discusses this week on RD, Barton has
been busy stoking the fires of culture war this season,
calling Obama America’s most “biblically-hostile”
president.)
Biblicist watchdog Georgia Purdom recently summed up this Bible-centric
approach in a review (or indictment) of our book. She
explains that her organization valiantly goes “against the
grain of the secular academic establishment while we stand
on the authority and trustworthiness of God’s Word from the
very first verse (as opposed to word of finite, fallible
man).”
The intellectual trajectory of American evangelicalism is
not encouraging. High-profile evangelical scholars like Duke
Divinity professor Stanley Hauerwas, Francis Collins,
theologian N. T. Wright, psychologist David Myers, or the
historian Mark Noll often seem like guttering lamps
struggling against powerful anti-intellectual winds
determined to extinguish them.
The anti-evolution Discovery Institute, to take one
example, spends much of its energy attacking Collins, who
has neither the time nor the resources to respond.
Influential conservative donors pressure evangelical college
administrators to fire “liberal” faculty, creating a brain
drain that leaves their respective communities even more
intellectually impoverished.
Meanwhile, the turnstiles at Ken Ham’s creation museum turn
briskly.
