Ken Ham – Homeschoolers Anonymous

How Answers in Genesis Shattered My Faith in Creationism

February 23, 2016May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team17 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Tim Evanson.

Editorial note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog, Love, Joy, Feminism. It was originally published on February 17, 2016.

Earlier today, Answers in Genesis posted an article titled There Is Hope for Atheists! In this article, Ken Ham writes about witnessing to atheists. He explains that when he reads the “blasphemous and vitriolic” comments of atheists he understands that most of them have never heard sound apologetics arguments.

At Answers in Genesis, through our resources, conferences, and other outreaches, we do our best to defend the Christian faith using apologetics against the secular attacks of our day. But in doing so, we need to also point people to the truth of God’s Word and challenge them concerning the saving gospel. We use apologetics to answer questions and direct people to God’s Word and its message of salvation.

There’s no greater thrill in this ministry than to hear how God has used what has been taught by AiG to touch someone’s life—for eternity. Last week, I was introduced to one of our new volunteers, Donna, who is helping sew some of the costumes for the figures that will be placed inside our full-size Ark. She had responded to my Facebook post asking for seamstresses.

I discovered that she became a Christian in 1993 after attending one of my seminars (called “Back to Genesis” with the Institute for Creation Research ministry) at Cedarville University in Ohio. The Bible-upholding seminar was such an eye-opener to her about the reliability of the Bible that she became a Christian.

We asked if she would share her testimony.

Donna begins her testimony as follows:

The Lord opened up this atheistic evolutionist’s eyes decades ago, through exposure to Ken’s ministry.

I was a die-hard evolutionist, completely convinced that the fossil finds in Olduvai Gorge supported the “evidence” that we evolved from less-complicated, early hominid creatures, like the so-called “Lucy”.

To keep a long story short: I attended a Creation Seminar at Cedarville College [now Cedarville University], sat in rapt attention as Ken Ham told me “the rest of the story,” and I realized that all of the fossil finds I believed supported evolution were, in all cases, misinterpreted. I was blown away! So, learning the truth about evolution preceded my realizing that God was real (after all!) and that the Bible was His Word. I became a creationist before I became a believer in Christ.

Ken Ham goes on to write that atheists are “walking dead people” and that he likes to remember, when witnessing to atheists, that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and that even so God’s Word can convert atheists. He finishes with this:

If the Lord has used AiG, including our Creation Museum, in your life to bring you to salvation, would you please let me know? Thank you.

So, here’s the problem. I actually credit an Answers in Genesis conference with letting the air out of the last of my young earth creationism. Yes, that’s right, in a sense you could argue that an Answers in Genesis conference led me to give up my creationism.

I was in college. It was there that I first truly came into contact with individuals who accepted evolution. The only time before this that I’d engaged a defender of evolution in debate was the time I was stuck in a car with my aunt for ten straight hours, and I’m pretty sure she was humoring me. I grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family. I read creationist literature from my church library starting when I was very young. I attended Answers in Genesis conferences as a teen and bought Answers in Genesis literature at homeschool conventions with my own money. I knew my stuff.

The problem was that when I was in college I came in contact with individuals who deconstructed my arguments without any trouble.

It was uncanny. I returned time and again to my creationist literature—the Answers in Genesis website received a lot of traffic from me during those months—and came back with new arguments and information to throw at my opponents, only to have those arguments soundly deconstructed as well.

There was one young man in particular—Sean. I later married him, as my regular readers will know. Sean and I spent hours debating the fine points of creationism and evolution. Sean had been a creationist himself some years before, but high school—and arguing on the internet—had changed his mind. But even as he pointed out flaws in every argument I could come up with, I had hope. I had an incredible amount of respect for Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, and I was sure that if I could just get Sean to an Answers in Genesis conference that would do the trick. You may imagine my excitement when I learned that an Answers in Genesis conference was coming to a church in our area! Sean agreed to come, and I was sure our arguments were coming to an end.

That conference was an utter failure for me on more fronts than I’d realized going in. For one thing, Sean was unconvinced—and it wasn’t because he wasn’t listening, he was. But the real problem was that I was unconvinced. I hadn’t realized that hours of listening to Sean deconstruct creationist arguments would change the way those same arguments sounded to me when I heard going forward, but it did. I sat there in that church sanctuary with an instant rebuttal springing to mind for each point the speaker made, and I knew some of what he said was simply factually false.

I spent some time perusing the creationist literature they had for sale at the conference and kept running into the same problem—I knew rebuttals to everything I saw printed there.

I realized with growing horror that much of the material there was either flat-out lying or skillfully misleading people.

As we drove away from the church, I was quiet—shaken. I had seen this conference as a way of finally convincing Sean that I’d been right while at the same time reinvigorating my own beliefs, and it had failed on both accounts. Not only did this conference not give me new arguments and rebuttals, it shattered my trust in Answers in Genesis in particular and creationist literature more widely.

I spent a few weeks reading and researching, looking beyond Answers in Genesis’ materials to wider scientific resources. Answers in Genesis may have shattered my faith in creationism, but I still had a few questions about evolution that needed answering. After several weeks of study, I was satisfied. I left aside young earth creationism for good and became a theistic evolutionist. It was difficult, at first, because I was afraid my entire faith would fall apart after accepting evolution. After all, I’d heard Ken Ham repeat time and again that Genesis was the foundation of the Bible, and that without Genesis, the gospel story would collapse.

I’m no longer a Christian today, but evolution isn’t to blame there, strictly speaking. I spent some years as a progressive Christian, and even converted to Catholicism. I loved Catholicism’s embrace of the natural world and science, and its willingness to accept historical scholarship on the Bible. It was ultimately the fallout from a near-cult experience that led my faith to collapse. but in a sense, it was the collapse of my faith in young earth creationism that made me willing to see the beliefs I’d been taught as fallible, and open to asking questions.

I can’t speak for Donna, whose testimony is quite above—her journey is her own. Still, I find Ken Ham’s request to hear from his readers about the way “the Lord has used AiG . . . in your life to bring you salvation” highly ironic given my own experience.

Ken Ham’s Colossal Failure: Samantha Field’s Story

August 5, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team35 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

Samantha Field blogs at Defeating the Dragons.

Many of my high-school days were spent reading books like Darwin’s Black Box and The Case for a Creator. My church and family were six-day Young-Earth Creationists, and defending this interpretation of Genesis 1-2 from Neo-Darwinian or Gap theory was central to my faith system at the time.

Without a literal understanding of those chapters, I believed, the Gospel fell apart.

For many years I made it my mission to stay current with all the creationist arguments—I’m fairly certain I’ve read any layman-accessible book on the subject that was published before 2005, and I read the Answers in Genesis blog and Ex Nihilo (now called Journal of Creation) fairly consistently up until 2009. Creationism was important enough to me that I defended it even when I struggled with the rest of Christian theology and the concept of a loving God in particular.

In college, I decided that it was pointless for me to keep reading only books written by creation scientists, so I started picking up other works like The God Delusion and A Brief History of Time. Dawkins’ book rattled me because he agrees with fundamentalists about the nature of God but is far starker and blatant in his descriptions, but nothing any of these books said about creation really shook me. I already had arguments that “disproved” their position.

During this time, I got involved in a fairly heavy internet debate on creationism that went on for weeks. Interestingly enough, even though the debate started out extremely antagonistic, it grew milder and eventually I became friends with a few people from the “opposition.”

Toward the end of that conversation, one of my fellow debaters brought up a point I’d never encountered before: endogeneous retroviruses. He sent me a few journal articles about it, and after reading them I was deeply disturbed. ERV insertion points in human and chimp genomes matched too closely for comfort, and I was sick and tired of the “common creator” defense. A common creator could explain a lot of things from an early 20th century phylogeny perspective but not with modern understandings of genome mapping—and most especially not ERV insertion points.

So, I did what any good creationism-defender would do: I wrote a letter to Answers in Genesis. I outlined the debate I was in, included links to the journal articles, explained all the research I’d already done (which included everything AiG had on genetics at the time), and asked if there was a creation scientist who’d studied ERVs and had a compelling argument against them as evidence for common ancestry.

The letter I got back was … infuriating would be putting it mildly.

They sent me a link to an AiG article on genetics that didn’t even mention ERVs (they’ve since updated a page to include it after I called them on it last year, but they only fall back on their position regarding “junk DNA” and don’t engage with the evidence satisfactorily), and then they went on to call into question my salvation, my faith, my relationship with Jesus, my intelligence, and my dedication to creationism.

They didn’t even bother answering my question.

They sent back an irrelevant blog post and then told me that my actual problem was not having enough unflinching, blind, unquestioning faith in the creationism model.

If I really believed in creationism, then my confidence should be unassailable and no amount of evidence for common ancestry should bother me, they said.

That was when the house of cards come crashing down. I’d spent the last few years struggling with other aspects of my faith, struggling to believe in God, struggling to believe that Christianity was true. I’d clung to creationism like a lifeline because if I could prove creationism, then Christianity was a fact no matter my doubts about the matter, and I didn’t have to go through the excruciating process of asking questions I didn’t want to think about.

I’d turned to AiG in a literal moment of desperation because they were my intellectual stronghold. AiG supposedly encouraged learning, thinking, engaging, criticizing, evaluating. They represented the last reserve I had in keeping my fundamentalist faith intact, of believing in Christianity as a literal, falsifiable, provable fact.

What I received from them was the opposite of everything I’d trusted them to be. I thought my question would be received warmly, my willingness to engage with evolutionary arguments praised.

Instead they shamed me for daring to do what I’d always believed was a central part of creation science: asking questions.

At that moment, I could no longer in good conscience defend creationism or any other part of my fundamentalist faith—the only faith system I believed had an ounce of integrity or truthfulness on its side. I was rudderless.

It’s been five years since then and I’ve managed to reclaim my identity as a Christian, although Ken Ham would probably condemn me and my progressive beliefs in the harshest language possible. In a way, I should probably thank him. Without such a colossal failure on his part, I might never have had the opportunity to really start questioning everything I believed.

The Racism In Our Science Books

November 11, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on January 22, 2013.

I grew up reading copious amounts of literature from Answers in Genesis and attending conferences where Ken Ham and other leading creationists were speakers. I’ve been to the Creation Museum, and I’ve been reading Answers in Genesis’ Answers Magazine for close to a decade now. And one thing that was drilled into me over and over again is that racism is rooted in the theory of evolution and that creationism, which teaches that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, is the antidote to evolution.

One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism is Ken Ham’s contribution to efforts to mend racial prejudice, and I do think Ham is genuine in his efforts. He believes that the understanding that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, and ultimately from Noah’s three sons, is what is needed to curb racism. He also believes that the roots of racism are found in the theory of evolution, and that it was this theory of the races that inspired such atrocities as the Holocaust. Ham’s ideas – that racism stems from evolution and that creationism is the antidote – are echoed by other prominent creationists, including creationist heavyweight Henry Morris.

I grew up reading this literature and firmly rejecting both (overt) racism and the theory of evolution.

Here is an image from the Creation Museum, an image which describes a theory of human origins that I accepted as gospel truth until college:

I was taught, and Answers in Genesis teaches, that Africans are the descendants of Ham, that Europeans are the descendants of Japheth, and that Asians and Middle Easterners are the descendants of Shem. I’m not surprised, then, to learn that some public school classrooms in Texas are using creationist textbooks that contain the following image:

Growing up in a Christian homeschool family, the textbooks we used for subjects like history and science were suffused with religion, and this theory of racial origins is exactly what I was taught – and what Answers in Genesis teaches. What I didn’t realize, and what Answers in Genesis seems weirdly oblivious to, is this:

This theory of racial origins is actually, well, racist.

Somehow this flew over my head growing up – which is weird, given my familiarity with the Bible – but the story of Noah’s three sons is not somehow equal or without preference or value judgment.

Genesis 9: 18-27

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth.

Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness.

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

“Cursed be Canaan!

The lowest of slaves

will he be to his brothers.”

He also said,

“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem!

May Canaan be the slave of Shem.

May God extend the territory of Japheth;

may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,

and may Canaan be his slave.”

“The curse of Ham” was used by antebellum Americans as a justification for slavery.

Africans, after all, were descended from Ham, and Ham was cursed by God and ordered to serve his brothers Shem and Japheth. (For more background, I highly recommend Sylvester Johnson’s The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God.) In other words, in spite of what Answers in Genesis maintains, racism both long predates the theory of evolution and has frequently sprung from the Bible and from the creation account itself.

Am I saying that the theory of evolution has never been used to justify racism? Of course not. Am I saying that modern creationists are of necessity racist? Not at all. What I am saying is that Answers in Genesis’ insistence that racism stems from the theory of evolution and that creationism is automatically anti-racist is both overly simplistic and factually incorrect. While I am very glad Ham wants to combat racism, I don’t think he completely understands that he is working to do so by promoting a theory of origins – that all men descend from Shem, Ham, and Japheth – that has long been seeped in racism. While this idea may hold no racist implications for him, it does for many others, especially in the American South.

(After writing the above I read this excerpt from One Blood, and I suddenly wonder if I am giving Ham too much of the benefit of the doubt. I clearly need to reread the book. Ham argues that “the curse of Ham” was actually only meant to be a curse on Canaan, but he somehow does that without making things much better at all.)

The Skeleton in Doug Phillips’s Closet Is Now in the Creation Museum. Literally.

July 17, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Andrew Snelling, Ken Ham and Michael Peroutka (L-R) stand in front of Ebenezer the Allosaurus. (Photo: Answers in Genesis) — Andrew Snelling, Ken Ham and Michael Peroutka (L-R) stand in front of Ebenezer the Allosaurus.
(Photo: Answers in Genesis)

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

In case you missed the news, the Creation Museum — labor of love par excellence of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis — acquired some dinosaur bones. Those bones, belonging to 30-foot-long, 10-foot-high Ebenezer the Allosaurus, are valued at $1 million. According to Ham, Ebenezer is named after the “stone of help” that the Hebrew prophet Samuel set up to honor his God. Ebenezer was unveiled to the public on May 23 of this year.

There has been a healthy debate over the significance of Ebenezer when it comes to the Creationism vs. Evolutionism debate. Ham believes Ebenezer will “expose the scientific problems with evolution” and “help us defend the book of Genesis.” In contrast some have argued that, depending on how much or little data was collected during its excavation, Ebenezer might be “useless scientifically.”

But there are other — and maybe more significant — debates buried underneath the surface. Just this last week there’s been widespread discussion over whether the Creation Museum should have accepted the gift of the bones in the first place. The bones were donated by the Elizabeth Streb Peroutka Foundation, a foundation that focuses primarily on “putting an end to the catastrophe of abortion.” The catch is that Michael Peroutka, the man who runs the foundation (along with his brother, Stephen Peroutka), appears to be a white supremacist sympathizer.

Michael Peroutka is currently a debt collection lawyer and a Republican candidate in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. He is more known, though, as the presidential candidate for the Constitution Party in 2004. (The Constitution Party was started in 1992 by Howard Phillips, the father of Doug Phillips — disgraced former HSLDA attorney, president of Vision Forum, and homeschool celebrity, now being sued by his nanny on charges of molestation.) During Peroutka’s 2004 presidential campaign, he ran as “the home-school candidate.” This image wasn’t helped, however, by revelations that he “had disowned two teenage stepdaughters who accused him of abuse.” (One of his daughters claimed he sexually abused her, though she later retracted that claim.)

Also during his 2004 campaign, Peroutka was endorsed by the League of the South — a white supremacist and nationalist organization and Neo-Confederate hate group. The League’s founder, Michael Hill, has expressed his organization’s white supremacy quite blatantly, describing American slavery as “God-ordained” and calling for a hierarchal society composed of “superiors, equals and inferiors.” In 2013, Peroutka joined the Board of Directors of the League of the South. (You can see Peroutka’s name on the League’s website in this December 2013 archived screen capture.)

But even more curious that Peroutka’s disturbing connections with white supremacy is the actual history of Ebenezer the Allosaurus. The Creation Museum, Ken Ham, and Answers in Genesis have all conveniently neglected to mention this history. And I say “convenient” because they are all entirely aware of that history.

See, Ebenezer the Allosaurus is the dinosaur that Doug Phillips lied about and stole.

You won’t find this in many of the news articles about Ebenezer. (Except for Right Wing Watch and io9. Props to them for connecting the dots.) Somehow this origin story has been forgotten. So let’s review:

Answers in Genesis geologist Andrew Snelling says that Ebenezer was “found in the Morrison Formation of North America (specifically in northwestern Colorado).” And in their October 2013 press release first announcing the dinosaur donation, Answers in Genesis said the following:

One blessing in getting the allosaur was that the Creation Museum did not seek it out. Ten years ago, the Elizabeth Streb Peroutka Foundation bought the specimen and housed it. Thousands of hours later, the bones of this magnificent fossil are almost completely cleaned and restored thanks to the DeRosa family of Creation Expeditions.

Ah, yes. The DeRosa family of Creation Expeditions. That rings a bell.

And here is how Michael Peroutka explains the situation, as quoted in the Capitol-Gazette:

Peroutka said his foundation is a small family charity he and his brother, Stephen, established and named after their mother. It was meant to give financial aid to groups “dedicated to ending the holocaust of abortion,” he said.

But the organization’s mission took a “slight detour,” Peroutka said, after a meeting with the DeRosa family of Crystal River, Fla., during a home-schooling excursion.

He said the family told him they were part of a group that discovered a dinosaur specimen in Colorado and that there were competing claims over its ownership.

Peroutka said his foundation purchased the fossils “to settle those claims.” It’s unclear how much the charity originally paid for them.

The skeleton was excavated about 10 years ago on private property owned by a Christian woman near the town of Dinosaur, Colo., museum representatives said.

So we have several indicators of what allosaurus this is:

1) Northwestern Colorado

2) The DeRosa family

3) A home-schooling excursion that ended with “competing claims” over ownership

Well, there’s only one allosaurus that fits that description. And we’ll let WorldNetDaily circa 2002 handle this one:

A dinosaur fossil expedition for home educators has excavated a large, rare, intact allosaurus, a discovery that organizers say helps debunk the theory of evolution… Under the leadership of Doug Phillips, president of Vision Forum and an adjunct professor of apologetics with the Institute for Creation Research, and Peter DeRosa, a veteran archaeologist and paleontologist with Creation Expeditions, the team of 30 home schoolers spent a week earlier this month hunting for and excavating fossils in a privately owned location in the Skullcreek Basin of northwest Colorado.

Yes, the allosaurus that Peroutka’s foundation bought — which has now been donated to Ken Ham’s Creation Museum — is the very same one “discovered” by Doug Phillips and his homeschooling paleontologist stars over a decade ago. This was the subject of Phillip’s so-called “documentary” Raising the Allosaur.

Except that, you know, Doug Phillips lied about all of it.

In 2004, Terry Beh (former writer for Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family) and Mary Gavin (home-school parents of five children and nine grandchildren) wrote a blog post titled, “Villainy Behind the Mask of Virtue: Vision Forum Unmasked.” In that post, Beh and Gavin call Doug Phillips and his documentary out for “grossly violating” Christian ethics, in particular ethics against stealing and lying. Basically, a group of individuals discovered Ebenezer and did the hard work of extracting the bones, and then Doug Phillips swooped in and completely rewrote the history about what happened — and then sued the original people involved in order to claim full credit. Here’s an excerpt from Beh and Gavin’s post:

The controversy surrounds the excavation of an allosaurus discovered in northwest Colorado by landowner, Dana Forbes. Forbes, who originally found the allosaur in October 2000 and is featured in the beginning of Phillips’ film, was not given credit for the discovery. The Forbes abandoned both their land and their dream of blessing the creation community through tours and scientific studies on the land through the deceitful actions of Doug Phillips.

Vision Forum deceived and bullied many parties involved in order to profit from the exciting discovery. Chief among them is Joe Taylor, who owns perhaps the largest creation fossil museum in the world which is located in Crosbyton, Texas. Taylor, the lead site manager for the allosaur excavation [and part owner of the allosaur], is not featured in Phillips film at all.

Tom DeRosa, president of Creation Studies Institute and Mike Zovath, field representative for Answers In Genesis [presently vice-president of AiG] were part of the original dig. When the Vision Forum group came to the Forbes property in May of 2002 to film “Raising the Allosaur” over three partial days of digging, all that was left of the allosaur was the end of the tail, which had been plaster cast the year before to protect it from erosion.

By the time the Vision Forum group (composed primarily of homeschool families that paid $999.00 per person) had departed, the skull had not yet been found. This is why there is no footage of it being excavated in the film….

Legal demands and threats were made against Taylor to surrender the bones. Under threat of a lawsuit, and believing it wrong to sue a brother, Taylor reluctantly let them have it. The bones were taken to a makeshift “lab” owned by Doug Phillips. Consequently, Taylor suffered devastating financial losses and has had to shut his museum down several times as well as sell his museum displays just to survive.

Another account about Doug Phillips’s unethical and bullying behavior regarding Ebenezer the Allosaur can be found on Under Much Grace. Joe Taylor was also sued by the DeRosa family for speaking out against Doug Phillips’s film. (The DeRosa family were the stars of the film.)

Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis are well-aware of this history. Their field representative, after all, was present during the original dig. However, neither Ham nor his organization have ever called out Phillips’ attempts at deception and theft, despite being asked to in 2007. Instead, Ham eagerly accepted Vision Forum’s “George Washington Award Man of the Year” from Doug Phillips, saying Phillips was a “ministry friend” and he was “honored” to accept the award. Ham and Phillips continued to speak together over the following decade at homeschool convention after convention, all the way through last year, when both were the keynote speakers at the 30th Annual CHEA Homeschool Convention in California, along with HSLDA’s Elizabeth Smith. (This was mere months before Phillips resigned due to his sexual abuse of Lourdes Torres-Mantufuel being discovered.) Then again, Ham’s silence in this case proved to benefit him: he was the one who ended up with Ebenezer, a $1 million boon to Ham’s creationist empire — an empire built by Ham’s own history of him bullying others, much like Doug Phillips.

11 Homeschool Celebrities Explained With GIFs

June 4, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team23 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Homeschool celebrities.

They run our lobbying organizations, write our books, and garner all our blog views. Our parents thought they were God’s messengers and we thought we should keep our thoughts to ourselves. Now that we’re grown, our perspectives have changed a bit. So we think it’s worthwhile to look at 11 current and former homeschool celebrities — and explain them using gifs.

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1. Michael and Debi Pearl

The Pearls have a unique approach to communicating the love of Jesus to children. It goes something like this:

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2. Doug Phillips

Last year Doug Phillips realized his most Hazardous Journey wasn’t a vacation. It was the public backlash against revelations that he had an extramarital relationship with a woman that involved — well, we weren’t sure exactly what it involved.

When Phillips first admitted infidelity, he spun it as just some species of “emotional fornication” or something:

But then it came out that, no, the relationship wasn’t just “inappropriately romantic and affectionate,” as he originally stated. The “relationship” was Doug Phillips repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman. As far as his original statement went, Phillips was suddenly like:

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3. Bill Gothard

Bill Gothard, like Doug Phillips, has discovered that sexually abusing young people doesn’t make you popular. However, unlike Phillips, Gothard faces over 30 individuals accusing him of abuse. At this point his attempts to explain his situation are sounding like this:

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4. James and Stacy McDonald

As the media and homeschoolers are circling the wagons around Bill Gothard and Doug Phillips, their former fans with crushes on Patriarchy are doing everything possible to now hide that fact. People like James and Stacy McDonald are pulling previously written posts and urging Patriarchy advocates to change the words they use. The McDonalds’ response here boils down to:

“No Patriarchy to see here. Move along!”

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5. Doug Wilson

Then of course there’s Doug Wilson. When he’s not too busy with obsessing over the latest blog post by Rachel Held Evans, Wilson is fighting the biggest threat Western Civilization has ever faced: women playing unladylike basketball.

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6. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have a TV show. The plot of that TV show can be described by staring at this gif for approximately 19 seconds… and counting…

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7. Ken Ham

No homeschool celebrity list would be complete without a shout-out to Ken Ham. If you find it somewhat difficult to believe Adam and Eve enjoyed candlelight dinners on the backs of dinosaurs while trying to avoid talking snakes, well, Ken Ham has one message for you:

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8. Kevin Swanson

Kevin Swanson is like the Drunk Uncle of Christian homeschooling. From defending child marriage, comparing child abuse to “dead little bunnies,” warning people Frozen is Satan’s attempt to indoctrinate children into “the lifestyle of sodomy,” to his actual statement that “There’s a contrast between the feces-eaters and the church,” sometimes we wonder if he rocks himself to sleep at night screaming,

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9. Mary Pride

Mary Pride found her way home in 1985. It involved outbreeding non-Christians and calling children “the new n*****s.” When it comes to people and organizations working tirelessly to protect children from abuse, Pride is all,

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10. Michael Farris

In the midst of all the drama in the homeschooling world, Michael Farris stands in the foreground leading the charge against Obama, Common Core, and the not-Nazi Germans who hate homeschooling as much as he loves freedom. And Michael Farris loves his freedom:

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11. Matt Walsh

Ah yes. Finally, there’s Matt Walsh:

Ham on Nye

February 7, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team40 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kierstyn King’s blog Bridging the Gap. It was originally published on February 6, 2014.

I actually didn’t plan on writing anything about the Ham on Nye debate Tuesday night.

I planned on drinking and eating popcorn and watching everything implode in a talk-past-each-other kind of way. My mouth hurt (still does, I have even better numbing stuff now, but it makes my lips stick together), we ended up getting milkshakes because Ham is more triggering and milkshakes are more comforting.

The debate went as I suspected it would – more cathartic for me and those of us who have left the Young Earth Creationist camp we were raised with. Ham had all the same material, I’d heard everything he’d said before at VBS, in DVD’s, and his theology permeated my “science” books even though they weren’t exclusively AIG. I knew all his answers, I’d seen all of his graphics, he said absolutely nothing new, at all, I remembered everything verbatim from my previous encounters with AIG as a child. To Nye, this idea is so unfathomable that he had trouble grasping and understanding his audience and I don’t know that he knew what he was getting into. To the people in that room, YEC is more than a science…theory(?), it is, in a very real way, a (the) foundation of their religion. Believing in a Young Earth is somehow, essential to this brand of christianity, my whole family, I think, is Young Earth, my immediate definitely, if not my grandparents too.

None of the arguments made in the debate were really going to change anyone’s minds I don’t think. I don’t know how many people were listening to it like a presidential debate, being really on the fence about religiously-intoxicated creationism and mainstream science, but who knows.

During the Q&A session though, Nye said one thing, one groundbreaking thing, and I don’t know if he even realized it.

He said “I don’t know“.

What he probably didn’t know (or maybe did) when he walked into a room and an audience loaded with people who have been raised or told all of their lives and all of their childhood that they have to know all the answers to everything all the time and that “I don’t know” is not an answer and if you don’t know, something is wrong – saying “I don’t know” in a way that did not have defeatist or negative connotations is something that people raised in this sheltered and toxic environment have probably never heard. Their parents may have, but have denied themselves and their children that option, they’ve rejected the idea of not knowing for the burden of having to always know and have thrust that upon their children at very young ages.

Fellow homeschoolers have written about having to know the answers to all questions – even questions about the legality of homeschooling from the time they were like 6. This is true and this is devastating and this is too much, no one, let alone any child should be required to know the answer to everything. Yet this is what fundamentalists do – they require themselves and everyone they gather into their brand of religion (or non-religion) to have all of the answers to everything. They must always be able to back up a question with a pre-scripted answer that allows for no nuance. I don’t know is invalid.

People asked him the questions creationists are scripted to ask evolutionists (because they don’t know the answer but we do! HA!) and he answered, happily, excitedly, unashamed, and like he had been waiting to say it all night because it’s such a beautiful answer: I don’t know.

Ken Ham, and every entrenched creationist in the audience I’m sure scoffed at Nye’s reply. But what he said, in those three words, is something more powerful than he can know.

Because to the people who were watching who are tired of having to know everything because they realize they don’t know, who are maybe doubting, who are maybe thinking, who are maybe just trying to keep their head down to get by but secretly (even so secretly they may not realize it yet) want to taste something different, something not straight out of the book, Bill Nye just introduced the concept of freedom.

Because the freedom to not know (and that be an okay, even good thing) after coming from an environment where you must know is so so powerful. But one of those things, where you only realize it’s power once you’ve come to terms with the idea that it’s okay to not have the answers.

Bill Nye just introduced hundreds or thousands of people to the idea that “I don’t know” is valid, and okay, and not wrong.

That is the most important thing (I think) that happened in the debate, that’s what I haven’t been able to get out of my head. I don’t know. And it’s beautiful.

Ken Ham — The Evolution of a Bully: Jeri Lofland’s Thoughts

October 23, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team24 Comments

Jeri’s post was originally published on her blog Heresy in the Heartland on October 16, 2013. It is reprinted with her permission. Also by Jeri on HA: “Generational Observations”, “Of Isolation and Community”, “His Quiver Full of Them”, “David Noebel, Summit Ministries, and the Evil of Rock”, “The Political Reach of Bill Gothard”, and “Bill Gothard on Education”.

Last week, in an approach founder Ken Ham described as “cordial and engaging”, the creationist organization Answers In Genesis sponsored billboards like this one in several major cities. I can’t help wondering who Ham’s atheist friends are, and how long they will remain his friends with engaging expressions of cordiality like these.

*****

I first encountered Ken Ham at an ICR conference in Michigan.

I was a young homeschooled kid and adored Ken Ham from the first time he opened his mouth. I loved his Aussie accent, his beard, his jokes. I retold his story about “nursing the baby” way too many times. Science was my least favorite subject, but I liked history and social studies and I believed his every word.

It never occurred to me then that Ham might be wrong about fossils, Cain’s wife, homosexuality, or the book of Genesis itself.

*****

In 1974, Ken Ham himself was searching for answers.

Ham taught science in a public high school in Australia, but apparently, teaching about evolution and millions of years presented a challenge to his faith. A church friend directed him to the book The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris (a hydrologist and founder of the Institute for Creation Research in California) and John Whitcomb (a theologian).

Morris viewed the Bible as a history book and was excited to share his notions of catastrophism and how a global flood a few thousands years ago could have shaped all the geological forms we see today. Morris was greatly influenced by a Seventh-Day Adventist named George McCready Price, who went searching for geological evidence to support the visions of Ellen White, who proclaimed that the fossils were “thus preserved as an evidence to later generations that the antediluvians perished by a flood. God designed that the discovery of these things should establish faith in inspired history“.

Morris, a Baptist, read Price’s book on “flood geology” in 1943, then quietly repackaged this novel approach to geology in his 1961 book The Genesis Flood. A decade later, Ken Ham was thrilled with Morris’ solutions that could simply do away with the “millions of years” question. He felt compelled to tell as many people as he could about these new answers.

Ham quit his teaching job in 1979 to start Australia’s Creation Science Foundation (CSF) with fellow schoolteacher and fundamentalist John Mackay. At first, CSF operated out of the Hams’ home. Ken Ham later wrote that Mackay had suggested on multiple occasions that he (Mackay) and Ham could be the two witnesses described in Revelation 11 (an idea Ham says he could not accept).

Dr. Carl Wieland, a medical doctor and former atheist, believed he had encountered the supernatural while playing at card tricks with his wife.

Recognizing that modern science and telepathy were incompatible, Wieland became a creationist and even founded a creationist magazine Ex Nihilo. When Wieland joined forces with the fledgling CSF, the young magazine’s name was changed to Creation.

In 1987, Ham moved to America with his wife Mally and their five children, first to work with Films for Christ on a creationist documentary, then to work for the Institute of Creation Research as a traveling speaker to popularize ICR’s creationist message. Ham continued to direct CSF from across the Pacific until 2004. Carl Wieland, still recovering from a near-fatal car accident that took his sight in one eye, served as CSF managing director in Australia. But the Creation Science Foundation was about to rip wide open.

Margaret Buchanan, a widow, and her disabled daughter, Debbie, joined the CSF staff in 1984. Margaret served as Ham’s personal secretary. Shortly after the Hams left Australia, John Mackay, angry about being replaced as editor of Creation magazine, called Buchanan at her home, told her not to come in to work, and made bizarre accusations.

Mackay claimed Buchanan practiced witchcraft and necrophilia and was a tool of the devil.

(Mackay told Ham that he had had to cast demons out of his dog and a black cat because of Buchanan’s satanic influence.) Another staff member then sprinkled Buchanan’s office space with grape juice to cleanse it of evil spirits. Buchanan agreed to take a four-week leave of absence while staff considered the whole affair.

When the board finally decided Buchanan was innocent, Mackay laid down an ultimatum. He would not stay unless she was dismissed. So Mackay left, with a handful of followers, to lead his own creationism organization. When Margaret and two other staff members tried to meet with Mackay at his home, he threatened them with police action if they did not leave his property. Mackay was later excommunicated from his Baptist church. CMI’s website includes more than 63 sordid pages of documents dealing with the allegations, investigations, witnesses, diary accounts, signed letters, and more.

In the stormy aftermath of Mackay’s departure, Dr. Andrew Snelling, a CSF scientist who later followed Ken Ham to ICR, admitted to having had concerns about Mackay’s “extremely sloppy research”:

I worked alongside Mr. John Mackay for some years when he was with the Foundation…

As a Christian and a scientist, I have become more and more concerned with some of the claims he has been making, particularly in the area of geology. Instances have come to my attention that are either totally untrue, or misleading, even to the point of deception. Even while working with him I was concerned about an emerging pattern of extremely sloppy research, coupled with a tendency to gloss over opposing facts, even when they were graciously brought to his attention by myself and others, which drew progressively closer to the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. My concern, then as now, was his growing potential for bringing discredit to the whole creation movement.

Warnings such as these are difficult to give about someone professing to exercise Christian ministry. Undoubtedly, if past experience is any guide, Mr. Mackay will skillfully seek to have them interpreted as further ‘persecution’.

(Meanwhile, Dr. Wieland ended up divorcing his wife and marrying Margaret Buchanan. Of course, this added to the tension within the organization as some staff members believed the Bible forbade remarriage after divorce.)

In 1994, the Hams left ICR to found their own layperson-oriented creation ministry (CSM), and moved to Kentucky with the Creation subscriber list. CSM (USA) and CSF (Australia) were closely tied and their leadership overlapped significantly. Before long, “the board decided to change the organization’s name to “Answers in Genesis,” to reflect the fact that the ministry was not just about “creation,” but the authority of all of Scripture—as well as about evangelism and equipping believers to build a biblical worldview.”

According to Ham, the Australian and American AiG organizations made a “mutual” decision to separate in 2005 over differences of philosophy and organization and met “cordially” to iron out the details. Other sources describe the split much less pleasantly, writing of a years-long “bitter power struggle”, “domination”, taped phone calls, and accusations “of deceptive conduct”. The Australian organization rebranded as Creation Ministries International (CMI). Still more friction arose over printing and distributing Creation in the U.S., with AiG introducing its own Answers magazine sometime after the Creation Museum opened in 2007.

Today, creationism has become a multi-million industry with AiG strongly dominating the market.

AiG materials are available in 77 languages. The organization conducts evangelistic campaigns and literature distribution at the Olympic Games. Plans are in place for the construction of an amusement park around a “replica” of Noah’s ark, partly to serve as a warning of God’s judgment for tolerating homosexuality.

Ken Ham and his brother Steve authored the parenting study Genesis of a Legacy, in which they teach that children are foolish sinners who are actually disobeying God when they disobey a parent. Instead of “reasoning” or allowing “questioning” or “delay”, the Hams advocate John MacArthur’s approach: “short, stinging strokes to the backside”, “painful enough to make the consequences of disobedience… unforgettable”.

Based on the story of Adam of Eve, Ham is a staunch opponent of gay marriage.

He has written an article suggesting that if homosexuality is to be deemed morally acceptable, then child sacrifice should have an equal status.

He also opposes efforts by schools to accommodate transgender students. His suggestion that transgender students are disguising their real motives betrays a truly painful ignorance of gender issues:

Sadly, these school authorities don’t recognize the sinful heart of man and what can come out from it. Surely schools officials have thought about the potential for high school boys to pretend to “identify” as a female just so they can have access to the girls’ restroom and, maybe, to their locker room—winking to their friends as they do it?

*****

AIG prayed for my request. :) — AIG prayed for my request. 🙂

For years, I read Ham’s books, got his newsletter, sent him my money and my prayer requests. I was excited about the progress of the creation museum as they overcame the opposition of the community to build a temple to unchanging Truth.

Then, I had kids of my own. Before I knew it, they started to gravitate toward picture books about dinosaurs and stars at the library. My parents had always rejected books that mentioned “millions of years” or talked too much about biological “adaptations”. I didn’t want to discourage my kids with unnecessary censorship, and I didn’t want them to grow up feeling as uneasy around science as I was. So I started researching. As a homeschooling mom, it was important to me to be able to teach them accurately about dinosaurs and astronomy and geology. And as a Christian, I looked for trustworthy sources who shared my belief in the inspired truth of the Bible.

But what I learned shocked me, and sparked new questions.

The next time I visited my parents’ house, I pored over the latest book from AiG, studying their answers. And I felt lied to. AiG isn’t about the data, or the scientific method. AiG doesn’t offer scientific responses to questions about the rock strata or the age of the earth or fossils of whales with hips. They can’t offer plausible explanations for day and night and light and vegetation on Earth before the Sun appeared on the fourth day of creation. Most of their “answers” can be summarized as “Well, a global flood could have caused…” And they pretend there is no contradiction in the two Genesis creation accounts.

AiG is about one specific religious agenda — a fundamentalist approach to Biblical doctrine that assigns everyone who is “wrong” to hell.

Suddenly Ken Ham, my former idol, looked more like a bully.

*****

In 2010, Rachel Held Evans rocked many in the evangelical world with her book Evolving in Monkey Town, in which she considered the scientific validity of theistic evolution. When Ham shook his head sadly over the “indoctrination of our age” and “compromising church leaders”, dismissing the faith of Christians who also embrace modern science, Evans posted an articulate and heartfelt response on her blog:

“We are tired of fighting. We are tired of drawing lines in the sand. We are tired of Christianity being cast as a position in a debate when it is supposed to be a way of life.

“What we are searching for is a community of faith in which it is safe to ask tough questions, to think critically, and to be honest with ourselves. Unfortunately, a lot of young evangelicals grew up with the assumption that Christianity and evolution cannot mix, that we have to choose between our faith in Jesus and accepted science. I’ve watched in growing frustration as this false dichotomy has convinced my friends to leave the faith altogether when they examine the science and find it incompatible with a 6,000-year-old earth. Sensing that Christianity required abandoning their intellectual integrity, some of the best and brightest of the next generation made a choice they didn’t have to make….

“Ken likes to frame his position as an unwavering commitment to the authority of Scripture, but in reality his is an unwavering commitment to one interpretation of Scripture.“

The following year, Ham was banned from speaking at a homeschool convention in Cincinnati after making “mean-spirited” remarks about another speaker, a Bible scholar and theologian who approaches the Old Testament very differently than Ham does. AiG also used its deep pockets and legal staff to bully a smaller Christian ministry with a similar name, threatening them with charges of trademark infringement.

And this month, AiG’s billboards appeared. Responding to criticism over his message to his “atheist friends”, Ham both defended and reiterated his satisfaction with his own belief that atheists will spend eternity in hell, while mocking the notion that dead people cease to exist. He described atheism as “sad” and “purposeless”.

*****

Many, many followers of Jesus doubt Young Earth Creationism, and even St. Augustine considered the Creation account to be allegorical.

Exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

But no one told me that. I swallowed the whole Ham sandwich: you couldn’t have faith, or sin, or Jesus, or heaven, or God… without Adam, Eve, Eden, a global flood, and less than 10,000 years. The only problem was, when I could no longer believe in a young earth, the rest of the story disintegrated, too.

Once upon a time, my meager tithe checks helped build Ken’s creation museum. Today I am one of his “atheist friends”, taking my kids to see dinosaur footprints and ancient rocks. Ham’s cartoons (the red “Abortion” balloons flown from the castle founded on Evolution) and his jokes (“God didn’t make Adam and Steve”, “fossils don’t come with labels!”) led directly to my atheism.

My life is neither sad nor purposeless.

But if it makes him feel better, Ham can thank his God that I’m finally wrong.

Incorporating Thinkers: A Lesson in Debate Theory and Wolves

August 15, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Slightly more than a week ago, a blog called Thinkers Incorporated (TI) published three posts about Homeschoolers Anonymous. TI describes itself in the following way:

Thinkers Incorporated is a unique blog devoted to the study and application of effective reasoning. With the purpose of promoting rational thought, inspiring a love for thinking, and spreading ideas worth contemplating, Thinkers Incorporated is regularly updated and promises new material for your scrutiny each week.

There are currently four writers at TI: Joseph Clarkson, Luke Adams, Owen Stroud, and Paul Hastings. From what I have read, they were all homeschooled to one extent or another. Most of them did homeschool speech or debate via NCFCA. Some have been involved with the Institute for Cultural Communicators, which is the organization that grew out of Communicators for Christ. ICC/CFC is the same organization that Nicholas Ducote and I both worked for, and also the same organization that Josh Craddock (the guy that called us “homos”) worked for.

Small world, huh?

Paul Hastings is the Legislative Liaison for the Texas Home School Coalition and also did some film work for the trailer for the IndoctriNation movie. Joseph Clarkson is currently homeschooled and recently completed an internship with the Texas Home School Coalition. (By the way, if you are wondering why “Texas Home School Coalition” sounds familiar, it is probably because either (1) it was in the news recently over the whole Ken Ham/atheism debacle, or (2) it was the group behind Texas’ “Tim Tebow” bill.) Luke Adams, who also interned with the Texas Home School Coalition, is attending Hillsdale College. Owen Stroud is a junior at Texas A&M University and interns with Texans for Fiscal Responsiblity.

When I read the first post from TI, which was Joseph’s, I had some serious disagreements with him. I also noticed he (and also the other two) got quite a few facts wrong about HA.

But more than anything, I was struck with how much I actually agree with him.

We both experienced some positives about homeschooling. We both agree that there are problems in the Christian homeschool movement. We both agree that we should not use generalizations. So while Joseph clearly had some qualms with HA (and while I think those qualms are unfounded), it was a breath of fresh air to hear someone “take us to task” but do so in a way that did not involve calling us “homos” or saying we “deserve a beatdown.” He did imply I have “rudimentary marketing skills,” but, hey — you cannot win every battle and I can only make things go viral every once in a while.

In the spirit of dialogue, I want to both point the HA community to the TI series as well as preface that pointing with some thoughts of my own. These thoughts are:

1. We Are An Inclusive Community

I have two overarching objections to the Thinkers Incorporated series. Although, honestly, “objection” is not the right word. Objection might imply I am opposed to hearing the voices of the TI writers. The fact is, I am willing to hear their voices. So these are less objections and more observations. The first observation is this:

Insofar as the writers at Thinkers Incorporated are (1) alumni of the Christian homeschool movement and (2) admitting that movement has problems that should be addressed, their voices are not excluded from Homeschoolers Anonymous.

The writers at TI go to great lengths to communicate that that they grew up in the same world we did but they had positive experiences. They also balance this positivity by each admitting that they saw problems within the Christian homeschool movement.

Normally I would just say, “Well, that’s a wrap!”

But the curious thing is, the TI writers seem to think that those two aspects of themselves make them distinct from, or other than, or even opposed to, Homeschoolers Anonymous. But that is simply not the case. Just look at me, as a glaring example: I, like them, would describe my experience in general as positive. But I, like them, saw negative aspects as well.

This is certainly not the case for everyone in the HA community. Some of us had generally negative experiences. Some of us had rather mixed experiences. We are by no means homogenous. We have vastly differing political and religious beliefs. And it is honestly amazing — and so encouraging — to see that so many different people from different ideologies and beliefs can come together and give each other space to speak.

Have you thought about how amazing that is? We listen to each other’s stories and express so much compassion, love, and respect for one another, even when we disagree.

That is what makes this community beautiful and healing.

And that is what makes the TI series strange to me: what they wrote is not somehow “other than” Homeschoolers Anonymous. In a sense we can “co-opt” what they wrote.

For all you debaters and debate alumni out there, this is a great example of how the “mutual exclusivity” requirement has real-life implications.

For all you non-debaters, I will try to explain this as simply as possible.

In policy debate, there are two teams debating a topic. One team argues for the topic and one team argues against the topic. The team arguing for the topic is the “affirmative” (because they are affirming the topic). The team arguing against the topic is the “negative” (because they are negating the topic). The affirming team, in order to actually affirm the topic, usually does two things: (1) they point out that the way things currently are is problematic, and (2) they propose a solution to fix those problems — the solution being the debated topic.

For example, let’s say the topic is, “Resolved: we should make the Christian homeschool movement better.” The affirmative team in this case would say, “Right now, there problems in the Christian homeschool movement. Children are getting hurt because of these problems. Our solution is to make the Christian homeschool movement better by bringing awareness to these problems.”

In this case, the negating team would have several options if they wanted to negate this topic. Here are just two examples: (1) The negative could argue that we do not need to make the Christian homeschool movement better because there are no problems. If something ain’t broke, why fix it?

Another tactic would be (2) the negative could argue that, yes, there are problems, but the other team’s solution — bring awareness — is misguided. In this case, the negative team would offer a counterplan.

Since the negative team in this case has to argue against making the Christian homeschool movement better, their alternative solution to the affirmative team’s problems must therefore involve something other than making the Christian homeschool movement better. Otherwise the affirmative team could just say, “Well, our opponents agree that there are problems, and they also agree we should make the Christian homeschool movement better — so, really, we’re just two affirmative teams here who merely disagree as to how to make the movement better. So we win.”

The key concept here is that, when the team arguing against the topic is willing to admit that there are problems that require a solution, their solution needs to be at odds with the other team’s solution. They need to be mutually exclusive, in other words. If the affirmative team’s solution to problems in the Christian homeschool movement is, “We should increase awareness,” and the negative team’s counter plan is, “We should avoid generalizations,” these solutions are not mutually exclusive.

One can increase awareness while also avoiding generalizations.

So the affirmative team could co-opt (or to use debate theory jargon, “permute”) the negative team’s solution as part of their own solution.

That is the idea of mutual exclusivity.

2. TI is not mutually exclusive to HA

While explaining that idea, I have also explained my second observation about all of the writings by Thinkers Incorporated about HA. My second observation is simply that everything they said about communication — avoiding generalizations, stereotypes, and ad hominems — I completely agree with. So I am not really sure what the point was.

Is homeschooling very diverse? Yep.

Are Christian homeschoolers very diverse? Yep.

Should we try to avoid demonizing homeschooling as an educational option while we bring awareness to problems in our homeschooling environments? Yep.

Should we try to avoid demonizing Christians who choose to homeschool while we bring awareness to problems in our homeschooling environments? Yep.

And so on and so forth.

By posturing themselves as somehow “opposed” to HA and our goal of making homeschooling better for future generations, it actually just makes everything a bit more difficult. Because that opposition makes it harder to take their suggestions from a non-defensive posture ourselves. (And to be fair, they are not opposed to our mission; they are opposed to our “narrative,” however they interpret or misinterpret it.)

It is one thing to say, “Hey, can I share my positive experiences so I can help you balance out your narrative?”

Or, “Hey, I notice you have some pro-regulation posts regarding fighting child abuse. I also believe in fighting child abuse, but I believe self-policing is a better solution. Can I write about self-policing as an alternative?”

To either of those questions, I would respond, “Absolutely!”

But it is another thing to say things like, “They’re a wolf doing a poor job of putting on a fleece” (as Paul Hastings did), or “They sound like bitter, angry children who need to go to their earthly parents and heavenly father to work things out” (as someone responding to Paul Hasting’s comment did). If you acknowledge there are problems, and you actually care about fixing those problems, then by all means let’s work together! We can agree to disagree on many things — this is evident from the fact that the HA community consists of Millennials, Gen X’ers, Boomers, current homeschoolers, former homeschoolers, students, parents, conservatives, moderates, liberals, libertarians, Marxists, Christians, atheists, Buddhists, Protestants, Catholics, Universalists, and so forth.

I highly doubt any one of us agrees entirely with any other one of us. But we all care about figuring out ways to make homeschooling better.

If that makes us wolves, we will proudly howl at the moon.

To read the Thinkers Incorporated series

Having said all that, I want to reiterate that I appreciated hearing these voices, and to understand how some people — who admit there are problems in this movement — perceive our “narrative.” Unlike what some people have alleged, Homeschoolers Anonymous is not some tone-deaf echo chamber whose arch-enemies are God, country, and homeschooling.

It is for this reason that, over a week ago, I reached out to Joseph and asked him to contribute something to HA. I also mentioned our upcoming positives series to him, so that if any of the TI writers wanted to add their voices, they knew they would be explicitly welcome. I sincerely hope they participate.

If you are interested in reading what Joseph, Luke, and Owen wrote over at Thinkers incorporated, the links are provided below. I am also posting on HA some thoughts that Lana Hope at Wide Open Ground had about the TI series. As a community here at HA and also more broadly as members or alumni of the Christian homeschool movement, my hope is that we can have a spirited dialogue about all these issues together.

This dialogue that we are finally having — and I include the TI writers in that dialogue — is one of the main reasons I wanted to create Homeschoolers Anonymous.

The TI series:

Joseph Clarkson, “Lending Perspective to the Homeschoolers Anonymous Narrative”
Luke Adams, “Continuing to Lend Perspective to the Homeschoolers Anonymous Narrative”
Owen Stroud, “Additional Perspective on the Homeschool Anonymous Narrative”

How I Learned To Stop Being Afraid and Love Other Religions, Part One: If Satan Made Xanax, And Other Worldview Myths

July 31, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team9 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from R.L. Stollar’s personal blog. It was originally published on July 30, 2013.

*****

“Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today throughout North America. Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible world-views are locked in a bitter conflict that permeates every level of society.”

~James Dobson and Gary Bauer, Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids, 1990

*****

Part One: If Satan Made Xanax, And Other Worldview Myths

When I enrolled in the Eastern Classics program at St. John’s College back in 2005, I encountered many and varied responses from fellow evangelical Christians. Some proved encouraging and others not so.

The most common response, though, was: “Are you a Buddhist?”

As the months passed and the time of graduation grew closer, the question changed, but only slightly:

“Have you become a Buddhist?”

At first the question provoked but a smile. As it grew more regular, however, and as I began to know more about Eastern philosophies and religions as well as what actually occurred in the minds of the questioners, it provoked a thought process. I realized that, to many Christians I knew, “Eastern” meant “Buddhist.” And “Buddhist” meant some tranquil species of rebellion against the American Jesus — like if Satan made Xanax for the mind. I vividly remember one individual who commented that, if I were to study Eastern religions, I better not become a Buddhist: Buddhists have no emotions whereas, you know, Jesus wept.

Such comments are likely the result of ignorance regarding world religions. A good number of the people who asked this question in 2005 did not shun inquiry. They merely lacked familiarity with Buddhism. They did not know (as I did not know prior to a year of study in the Eastern Classics) that Buddhism, like Christianity, has a dizzying number of denominations, each vying for doctrinal dominion. Consequently, when someone asks me now if I agree with Buddhism, I experience great difficulty answering the question: “Which denomination?” I have to ask. I have great fondness for the emotional freedom and experience-based practices of Diamond Way Buddhism, for example, whereas I dislike the asceticism of Theravada Buddhism. American Zen Buddhism is another story.

I have thus realized, after these conversations with friends and fellow students, that the American Christian mind (maybe even the American mind) has a paltry understanding of some of the longest-standing and deeply rooted ideas of the world. American evangelicals especially do not take time to appreciate, let alone understand, a good number of their strongest opponents in the sphere of religion. Those who have taken time (seemingly not much) only do so to construct flimsy card-houses with the purpose of a surprise attack.

You have groups like Summit Ministries and Worldview Weekend, training up the next generation with nothing more than an arsenal of generalizations, simplifications, and shameless reductionism.

No one seems interested in taking the ideas of other religions at face value and learning to see any sort of beauty or value in them.

To say that other religions can be beautiful or valuable is not an exercise in relativism. But granting this beauty or value will likely suffer the fate of being interpreted as such by many of today’s “worldview” champions. The old guard of American Christianity and Christian homeschooling — Dobson and Bauer, from this post’s opening quotation, and people like Summit’s David Noebel and John Stonestreet, or homeschooling’s Kevin Swanson and Ken Ham — is terrified of anything that sounds “postmodern.”

Postmodernism is like intellectual dub step to the old guard.

In today’s evangelical culture, a defense of religion as an aesthetic and social phenomenon seems indistinct from a defense of religious pluralism and intellectual apathy. But that’s because this culture is so afraid of “liberal” arts to the point that it cannot comprehend some basic philosophical and sociological concepts. The fact is, to understand religion as an aesthetic and social phenomenon grants humanity the freedom to explore a ground to aesthetics and society that condemns, rather than condones, an unwillingness to pursue truth.

But first: what does “religion” mean? And what would it mean, that one can perceive this noun’s content as “aesthetic” and “social”?

To the evangelical culture, religion is either Christian and thus true or pagan and thus untrue. This proves a stunted understanding, however, because religion is neither one nor many truth-claims which one can either affirm or reject. Religion is no doubt a phenomenon which entails truth-claims. But it also entails much more. Religion is a complex totality of human and other elements, only one element of which is the sort of truth-claim that one can package into propositions.

We need to start seeing religion — and any particular religion — not as a mass of disembodied doctrines but as what sociologist Peter Berger calls a “world conspiracy.” “World conspiracy,” in fact, seems the best definition for religion.

What does this mean?

In The Sacred Canopy, Berger explains that,

“The condition of the human organism in the world is…characterized by a built-in instability. Man does not have a given relationship to the world. He must ongoingly establish a relationship with it.”

The world abounds with the sort of innate precariousness that a Buddhist would term as impermanence — “All things pass,” sighs Kaoru, one of the main characters in Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji. This line is almost identical to Solomon’s sentiment in Ecclesiastes.

Human and other life forms, buildings and projects, ideas and romances—these all rise and fall, constantly, perpetually, each and every day. As a result of this precariousness, human beings go about selecting structures of meaning in which they can operate. Humans construct families, work places, technology, and institutions in which to control the elements of the world that bear chaos. Out of their constructions human beings hope for an order, a society. Peter Berger says,

“Society, as objective reality, provides a world for man to inhabit. This world encompasses the biography of the individual, which unfolds as a series of events within that world”

But humans need more than order: they need to feel meaningfulness within that order. They require that order to be “ordained” in some way. Thus,

“a meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals.”

This nomos is religion:

“Religion is that human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established, wherein ‘cosmos’ implies not a galaxy but order.”

This final addition to the human world-building project grants the project and its everyday objects and endeavors a sense of purpose, an all-encompassing reason for pursuing the ends of the society. Berger terms this sense of purpose or reason a “sacred canopy” cast over world-building. It is a “world conspiracy” in the sense that humans work together to give their reality a meaning:

“Religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant”

What Berger as a sociologist calls a “world conspiracy,” or “sacred canopy,” a theologian like N.T. Wright might term “worldview.” (1) Jamake Highwater, a historian and philosopher of sexuality, preferred the term “mythology” in his 1991 book Myth and Sexuality:

“All human beliefs and activities spring from an underlying mythology—those metaphors, informing imageries, and paradigms which deeply influence every aspect of our lives and which determine our attitudes about reality—about the world and about ourselves: good and evil, normalcy and abnormalcy, fact and fiction, justice and injustice, beauty and ugliness, power and powerlessness.”

Whether one prefers world conspiracy, sacred canopy, worldview, or mythology as a descriptive, the common factor among the ideas is that human being itself contains within it a hope and passion for carving out a home in a hostile existence.

This hope and passion — and all its nuances, quirks, failures, and successes — is the stuff of religion.

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Part Two: When Buddhism Saved My Life >

Rewriting History — The History of America Mega-Conference: Part Four, Kevin Swanson Is Tired Of Losing

July 15, 2013May 14, 2020HA Editorial Team20 Comments

Rewriting History — The History of America Mega-Conference: Part Four, Kevin Swanson Is Tired Of Losing

HA note: This series is reprinted with permission from Ahab’s blog, Republic of Gilead. For more information about Ahab, see his blog’s About page. Part Four of this series was originally published on July 9, 2013.

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Also in this series: Part One: First Impressions | Part Two: Doug Phillips on God in History | Part Three: “Religious Liberalism” And Those Magnificent Mathers | Part Four: Kevin Swanson Is Tired Of Losing | Part Five: Messiah States and Mega-Houses | Part Six: Doug Phillips Rages Against the 20th Century | Part Seven: Christian Vikings, Godly Explorers, and Strange Bacon | Part Eight: Closing Thoughts

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After celebrating July 4th, I returned to the History of America Mega-Conference on July 5th to observe more workshops. On Friday morning Kevin Swanson presented a workshop entitled “Why 19th Century Literature Was at War with God”. Swanson, host of Generations Radio, has a long history of eccentric comments documented by Right Wing Watch, and he was no different in person. I’m not sure what troubled me more: Swanson’s acidic tone, or the hyperbolic content of his talk. His seething hatred for The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and other 19th century writers was both irrational and unsettling.

Swanson began his talk by lamenting that America is not the Christian nation it supposedly once was and is not doing as well as it had in the past. The United States is breaking down, he claimed, because the Western world is slowly “apostatizing” as families and civilizations disintegrate.

Swanson reserved special rancor for liberal professors. Citing Ken Ham’s 2011 book Already Compromised, he told listeners that liberal arts professors in Christian colleges are highly likely to believe in evolution because of their liberal leanings. Apostasy always begins in the liberal arts departments of Christian colleges, Swanson insisted, adding that many liberal arts colleges are “corruptible” because of their very foundations. Harvard and Princeton have already been “compromised”, and many professors at Wheaton College voted for Obama, Swanson said with regret.

Swanson further caricatured liberal arts studies with bombastic words. He sneered at liberal arts departments for their admiration of Karl Marx, whom he called a “Satanist” and “atheist” with an wrong-headed epistemology and a flawed view of history. Swanson also looked askance at liberal professors for their love of Harry Potter books and the gay Dumbledore character. Society is locked in a battle between worldviews, one with battle lines laid out in liberal arts departments where the next generation is receiving its education, he said.

“I am tired of losing!” Swanson shouted. “Is anyone else tired of losing?” The audience applauded.

Swanson proceeded to rant disjointedly against Catholics, LGBTQ persons, and other people he blamed for “apostasy”. The Roman Catholic church represents so much “apostasy” from the Christian faith is because of its liberal arts heritage, starting with Thomas Aquinas, he claimed. He wondered aloud how America went from the Christian primers of its early history to children’s books such as Heather Has Two Mommies.

Swanson seemed baffled that America has allegedly come to lead the “Neronic* agenda”, his term for the LGBTQ equality movement. Even “pagan” leaders in Africa were disgusted by the “hatred toward God” expressed by President Obama’s support for same-sex marriage.

The root of the present situation, Swanson posited, is that powerful intellectual men, “many of whom were possessed by the Devil himself”, introduced dubious ideas into universities. Swanson called these men nephilim (a reference to human-angel hybrids in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33) because they led to the destruction of the world through the Great Flood in the Bible, just as they are destroying society today.

Feverishly, Swanson launched a polemic against Thomas Aquinas. In Summa Theologica, Swanson explained, Aquinas separated sacred and philosophical knowledge, with philosophical knowledge based on human reason. This division of knowledge gives man the ability to “think autonomously” apart from God, which Swanson blasted as Aquinas’ greatest error. Over a span of 400 years, thinkers such as Locke and Descartes celebrated philosophical knowledge and the supremacy of the human mind, which Swanson branded as toxic to faith.

In the 1700s and 1800s, tension between the Bible and classical writings — the beginnings of “apostasy” — could be found in the writings of the Founders, Swanson asserted. By the turn of the 19th century, most Americans rejected the idea that God holds authority over human actions, Swanson claimed. Such was the idea undergirding 19th century “cults” that rejected the idea of the Trinity and embraced Arianism, he insisted.

Swanson was furious that in today’s world, science says that the universe is billions of years old, parents are discouraged from spanking children, and the Bible is being rejected because it doesn’t jive with humanism. Ethics, philosophy, and science have been divorced from the Bible, he lamented.

Swanson pointed to Emersonian Transcendentalism as a powerful influence on 19th century American religion. Emerson’s aunt raised Emerson in the Hindu religion, Swanson claimed, describing Emerson as a pacifist who encouraged others to follow their hearts and make it up as they go along. Swanson further caricatured Transcendentalism as a system in which man allegedly defines his own ethics as he goes along and creates his own reality.

Swanson was especially livid over the popularity of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in high school and college literature classes. He accused Hawthorne of hating his Christian heritage and dying a nihilist who allegedly saw no purpose in life. He further blasted Hawthorne for allegedly attending seances, marrying into one of the worst “progressive” families of his era, and having ties to Horace Mann, a supporter of public schools. Hawthorne allegedly mocked Christianity in his writings, referring to Cotton Mather as a devil. Finally, Swanson accused Hawthorne of allegedly doing enormous damage to America’s Christian heritage with his writings. Events such as the History of America Mega-Conference have such small attendance because people have read Hawthorne and become corrupted.

And here’s where things get … weird.

Swanson believed that Hawthorne’s sister was “demon possessed” and sought to see Hawthorne’s children possessed as well. He claimed that an unearthly force moved Hawthorne’s hand as he wrote The Scarlet Letter, a story “forged in Hell”. Outrageously, he claimed that both Hawthorne and Herman Melville admitted to being demon possessed (!?).

Swanson shuddered at the alleged power of The Scarlet Letter, warning listeners not to underestimate the ways that its “Satanic effects” can change nations. Attacking the novel as “stupid” and a “farce”, Swanson claimed thatThe Scarlet Letter represents two gospels. The gospel of Dimmesdale, he claimed, preaches repentance without faith in Christ, as Dimmesdale finds self-atonement rather than substitutional atonement for his adultery. The gospel of Hester, on the other hand, is one of love divorced from law, thus rendering love meaningless, he said.

Swanson’s wrath toward the fictional Hester was brutal. He called Hester a “prophetess” of adultery in a later age, when high divorce rates, premarital sex, and out-of-wedlock births would surge. Swanson also accused Hester of being the predecessor of Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, and other feminists with “unyielding and rebellious hearts”. Hester, in short, was the harbinger of a “feminist world” in which the family is crumbling.

As the workshop churned on, Swanson’s gave voice to more visceral hatred ofThe Scarlet Letter. The moral of the novel, he insisted, was that witchcraft, homosexuality, incest, and feminism are better than Christianity. The Bible commands the death penalty for adultery, but Hawthorne and today’s average Christians loathe the death penalty.

Wait a minute. Did I just hear Swanson defend capital punishment for adultery? I thought. The audience sat rapt, apparently unfazed by Swanson’s rant. Are you people okay with this? Hello!?

Swanson observed that many Christians are embarrassed by what the Bible commands regarding adultery, homosexuality, and witchcraft. Such Christians love Jesus but hate his law, he said, and thus American religion is solidly anti-Biblical law.

Swanson lobbed similarly hateful accusations at Mark Twain, stunned that so many homeschooling families have Twain’s books in their homes. According to Swanson, Twain was an “apostate”, communist, atheist man who hated the Biblical God and was possibly possessed by Satan (!?). As proof of this, Swanson said that Twain allegedly acknowledged he was writing letters from Satan himself when he composed Letters from the Earth. Twain also encouraged women to commit adultery, Swanson asserted with no small amount of disgust.

Predictably, Swanson blasted Huckleberry Finn, criticizing the eponymous main character for not fearing God and mocking the notion of divine judgment. The novel, he explained, was about slavery, with Huckleberry Finn choosing to help his enslaved friend at the risk of his eternal soul. Rather than praise Finn’s moral courage, Swanson launched into a diatribe about vast numbers of Americans being “enslaved to the welfare state” today. He branded “Muslim” slavery, in which people are kidnapped and sold, as evil, but said that he wished he had time to discuss a Biblical view of slavery.

Huh? I thought. Slavery is wrong, no matter who practices it. Full stop. I don’t care if there’s a “Biblical” form of slavery. It’s wicked. What is wrong with this man?

“Do not read the heathen stories to your children,” Swanson warned the audience. He urged listeners to teach their children the Bible first, instead of giving them a “Greek” education. “Give them the Bible! Let them know the book of Deuteronomy better than they know The Scarlet Letter,” he demanded, to which the room erupted in applause.

Deuteronomy? I fumed. You mean the Deuteronomy brimming with bloodshed and genocide? The Deuteronomy with guidelines for owning slaves? The Deuteronomy that allows warriors to take conquered women as sexual booty? The Deuteronomy that instructs communities to stone rape victims and women who don’t bleed on their wedding nights? No, Kev, I’m NOT teaching THAT to a child.

Swanson concluded by encouraging listeners to give their children a “war of the worldviews”, to give them Biblical context for supposedly ungodly classics they might read. A 14 year-old is not ready for Plato and Aristotle, he claimed; rather, parents should give their children Christian ideas and writers first, then expose them to “heathen” works in their late teens. That way, children will understand how evil such “heathen” ideas are.

In short, Swanson was advocating a closed information system for homeschooled children, in which parents shield their offspring from non-Christian ideas until they approach adulthood. In my opinion, this approach could only produce children who are utterly disconnected from their cultural heritage, from mainstream America. When such isolated children reach adulthood and leave their bubble, how will they navigate American culture if so many important ideas have been either demonized in their eyes or left out of their education altogether?

Then again, maybe I should be more optimistic. In an age of book stores, libraries, and the internet, young people are likely to encounter ideas outside of their upbringing and read books such as The Scarlet Letter. Swanson and his ilk may find that creating a closed information system for children will be harder than they imagined.

Later, as I recuperated from the workshop in a nearby pub, I tried to digest what I’d just heard. Demon possessed authors? Capital punishment for adultery? Biblical slavery? A closed information system meant to stifle the minds of children? This is sick, I thought. This. Is. Madness.

Swanson’s feverish words, and the audience’s approval, impressed upon me a disturbing truth: Christian Reconstructionism and superstitious hysteria are alive and well in small corners of our culture. People like Swanson earnestly embrace a fundamentalist worldview, and have every intention of inflicting it on the next generation of homeschooled children.

Stay tuned for more talks from Vision Forum’s History of America Mega-Conference!

* A reference to the Roman emperor Nero.

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To be continued.