Hi, Peter -
I’ll jump in here & defend you a little bit, because I think I get where you’re coming from, and I’m pretty sympathetic to how you feel.
I appreciate your clarity in separating out the leadership of organizations like AiG vs. rank & file YEC believers. And as (I think) @jammycakes noted above, that latter group should include folks like youth pastors, etc., who are likely just utilizing the available resources they find from places like AiG, but really shouldn’t be held too heavily responsible for their lack of underlying scientific education otherwise. I realize that this latter group is not the issue in your original post. And I genuinely feel sorry for those folks, and sometimes wonder how it is that I was never one of them. The prerequisite conditions were all certainly there for me.
As @Christy has mentioned, one of the things that you see on this particular forum on a regular basis is a YEC advocate who starts threads (or hijacks existing ones) and goes into all the old familiar claims and arguments in (apparently) an attempt to show the rest of us how wrong we all are. Some of the regulars here will actually engage them in a bit of a back-and-forth, and God bless ‘em; they have more patience than I do. I just don’t bother, because I just find those circular reasoning arguments all so tiresome. I think of these folks as the forum’s “YEC of the month,” because invariably they just give up, but another one comes along the next month. Who knows, maybe it’s the same guy — they seem to always be guys; the ladies who visit the site are as a rule much more polite and genuinely inquisitive about EC positions — just re-appearing under a new username.
As one who was raised a good Southern boy, one of the things that I’ve come to believe as I’ve gotten older — and presumably crankier — is that within certain Protestant circles there’s a bit of an over emphasis on being so nice all the time. That is, heartfelt Christianity often equates to one’s being overtly nice at almost all costs. Think Ned Flanders. To be sure, kindness and gentleness are listed among the fruit of the Spirit which Paul describes to the Galatians, but the Southern Protestant nice thing kinda dials it up a couple notches.
I don’t think the gospel accounts support the notion that Jesus was some 1st century Jewish version of Ned Flanders — at least not all the time. He had particularly strong words for three groups of people:
- Those who had turned the Temple courtyard into some sort of atonement flea market,
- Pharisees, and
- Those who would cause children to “stumble” with regards to their faith. He saved perhaps his harshest words for this latter group: “millstone around the neck”/“cast into the sea.”
I would submit that the leadership of AiG is engaged in both (2) & (3) above. To my way of thinking so much of contemporary YEC “orthodoxy” is practically indistinguishable from 1st century Phariseeism; and groups like AiG have done — and continue to do — severe harm to Christian young people in America, forcing so many of them into their false dichotomy where many opt to abandon the faith entirely. We’ve all come across those stories.
And I don’t think that assuming motive has to be part of the calculus here at all. When Mr. Ham refers to the Big Bang as an “atheist theory” (and he does), it simply cannot be because he’s never heard of Lemaitre and doesn’t know the history of the latter’s big idea (and of the friar himself). So he’s being deliberately untruthful. Whether he’s doing so to sell books, generate website hits, raise his own stature in the American Christian community, or even if he genuinely believes that he’s salvaging biblical truth from a culture war standpoint — none of that necessarily matters. It’s still a lie. And I think that’s your point, or at least one of them.
You mentioned racism as a corollary example in one of your posts above, and I’ll piggyback off of that. The people of God should decry racism and other injustices when we encounter them. Imagine that if I were here spouting off white supremacy nonsense and attempting to dress it up in biblical clothing, such as the Curse of Ham or some such thing (as in Noah’s son, not Ken…boy that joke just writes itself, doesn’t it?). You would have every right to call me out on it in no uncertain terms. One might say that you’d even have a responsibility to do so. And I’m not too sure how you do that in a Ned Flanders kinda way. I’m also not sure that it matters much whether you want to try to crawl inside my head and figure out what my underlying motives might be.
Obviously, comparing racism and origins science isn’t apples-to-apples. And — before anyone conflates what I’ve said — no, I’m not comparing YEC leaders to racists. In fact, one thing I’ll commend AiG for is their explicit rejection of racism. So…credit where it’s due. The bottom line in this example is that I’d be promoting something that’s terribly destructive and an affront to the Kingdom of God, and one of the consequences is that untold numbers of people made in God’s image (both young and old) will decide that they now want nothing to do with his church if it involves the kinds of things for which I’m advocating. And I’d submit that none of you should feel obligated to be particularly nice in the manner in which you call me out on it.
The challenge for us in all of these things is of course how one addresses them prayerfully, and with the Spirit’s guidance, since none of us carries the moral clarity and authority that Jesus had. At least I don’t, so I’ll just speak for myself here.
