What the Creation Museum is Really About

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@vjtorley

Regarding the fight against racism, I’d agree that it is not yet over. What I would say, however, is that it is almost won.

I think you and Chris are referring to different definitions of racism. You are talking about the social and/or legal toleration of overtly racist acts by individuals. Chris is talking about systemic justice issues and white privilege in society. People may generally agree that personal acts of discrimination on the basis of race are wrong and socially unacceptable. But it is still a fact that there is widespread discrimination inherent in our systems and shared cultural constructs, and many white people are blind to this kind of overarching societal racism.

Many conversations about race stall because people have very different ideas about what racism is.

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

I agree Christy, and would add that if we do not recognize it as a problem both in ourselves and in society, we are not going to be motivated to find the solution.

[wvtrollinger]

Although Dr. Torley has announced that he is retiring from this conversation, I nevertheless feel compelled as a scholar of U.S. history to respond one last time given his assertions (accusations?) that I suffer from political correctness, that I need to recant my historical assertions, that my claims are so ridiculous that I must be joking, and (most recently) that I suffer from an unhealthy obsession with Ken Ham and Donald Trump. Again, as a historian, I want to make two responses.

First, Dr. Torley misunderstands my point about AiG and slavery. As we note in Righting America, Ken Ham and AiG do talk about slavery and speak out against it as unchristian – this is not a terribly radical move in 2017, but there is no question that they do this. More than this, Ham and his colleagues (and Dr. Torley) repeatedly assert that it was Christians who led the antislavery movement, and that if people – in keeping with these antislavery Christians – would simply rely on the Word of God racism would disappear.

But Mr. Ham, AiG, and Dr. Torley (conveniently?) ignore the fact that there were millions of Christians in antebellum America who used the Bible to make the case for slavery. As Mark Noll, Molly Oschatz, and other scholars have argued, those arguing in behalf of slavery made great use of a literal reading of the Bible to make their argument. And they were not just using “the curse of Ham” to make their case, as they were able to mine many other passages from both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament to make their case.

And this did not end with the end of slavery. Into the 1960s biblical literalists were making great use of the Bible to make the argument for the maintenance of segregation. All this to say that history tells a much more complicated story about Bible-believing Christians and the fight against slavery and institutional racism. And it would behoove white evangelicals to attend to this history.

My second response has to do with an earlier comment made by Dr. Torley: “You can’t unreservedly condemn an action such as flying a flag as ‘racist,’ without knowing the intentions of the person performing the action. For many Americans, the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, but for some older folk, it represents Southern pride. I think Ham was wise to avoid this issue.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Torley is also avoiding this issue. As I asked of him earlier, would he make the same argument regarding the swastika? Given that the Confederate flag did not reappear in American life until the 1950s, when it was flown by the Ku Klux Klan and other whites in opposition to the civil rights movement, its connection with racism seems pretty clear.

Would Dr. Torley tell African Americans and others who are deeply offended by this symbol in behalf of slavery and segregation that they should not be offended by it? If only it were just “older folk” who are flying the Confederate flag. That it is not suggests—contrary to Dr. Torley’s claim—that racism is, regrettably, not on the verge of disappearing from the United States.

[DonJ (Donald Johnson)]

FWIIW, I like the 6 models of Creation by Gerald Rau. I am agnostic on biogenesis and EC otherwise, so I fall between 2 of his models. I think any of the 4 theistic models are possible for a faithful believer. I distinguish between a YEC and a YEC-ONLY. Ham thinks that is one is not YEC, then one is not faithful to what is revealed in Scripture. This is arrogant and I do not want to be a reflection of his arrogance with another model.

[Reggie_O_Donoghue (RiderOnTheClouds)]

Reading the article, I am convinced that Sola Scriptura is a dangerous doctrine, and should be discarded. It gives one free reign to ignore the Bible’s historical context and ignore anything which contradicts the Bible.

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@Reggie_O_Donoghue

I am convinced that Sola Scriptura is a dangerous doctrine

It’s a dangerous doctrine only if it’s understood outside of the corrective context it was developed in. The ironic thing about certain YEC only groups invoking it is that sola scriptura doctrine was originally advanced to combat the idea that any human interpretation of the Bible could be considered infallible. The idea was that authority comes from Scripture itself not from the church authorities telling everyone what Scripture meant. So Scripture could be rightfully used to challenge the church authorities’ interpretations.