Perhaps the least-insightful and most annoying response to the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham was the zombie-David-Broder pablum offered up with a pox-on-both houses sense of weary superiority to all by Jack Levison.
Levison sees disagreement and, like Broder, attempts to get everyone to agree by dropping the whole thing and just agreeing that he’s the most eminently sensible person around. No, thank you. Reality still matters, Jack, so the proper response to a debate between science and anti-science is not to say that some think the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and some think it is 6,000 years old, so let’s all be reasonable and say it’s 2,250,003,000 years old.
But let’s give Levison some credit for inadvertently reminding us of a few reasons this is so important. He lists three things “we lose sight of” if we get caught up in a “debate” over origins. But none of those things are “lost” due to such a debate — they’re only lost if one embraces young-Earth creationism and rejects reality — the reality of the world around us, and the reality of the text of the Bible as it actually is.
Others approach this subject with a similar desire to avoid conflict, yet without Levison’s Broderian self-aggrandizement. At Fuller Seminary’s Burner Blog, Mike Hensley offers some good advice to pastors who want to engage parishioners who have been sucked in by Ham’s rewriting of nature and the Bible. Hensley stresses the importance of pastors challenging such ideas from the context of relationship:
In other words, you’ll be more able to expand your congregation’s mental horizons if you first go visit the sick and attend some youth sporting events.
The more foreign the idea, the more relational groundwork you need to do before you can broach that topic. If human origins are a thorny issue with your congregation, it’s okay to wait a little while before you bring it up. The best way to avoid that uncomfortable moment when your views get you pegged as an outsider is to establish yourself as an insider first.
He also recommends approaching such topics with the goal of “adding to their way of reading Scripture or seeing God,” rather than of stripping away any misconceptions they may be clinging to.
I’m chewing over Hensley’s advice, partly to consider how it applies to someone like me — I’m not a pastor — and partly to consider how this might apply to other misconceptions, such as the various forms of Othering that remain the default position for so many American Christians or Americans in general.
One of my favorite bloggers, Richard Beck, also takes a conciliatory approach to this topic. He’s an inveterate peacemaker, and blessed are the peacemakers — but maybe not in this case. I think the mistake Beck makes here is to make a leap from Not the Most Important Thing to Therefore Not Important:
For my part, I could care less if you believe in creationism. Seriously, if you think the world is only 6,000 years old, knock yourself out. If you go to my church, it’s no big deal to me what you believe, one way or the other.
How’d this happen at my church?
I think it happened because we all share the opinion that the outcome of the Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate has nothing to do with how we love each other or how we love the people of our city.
Here’s the problem: the success of Ken Ham’s dogma has everything to do with how or whether the people in our churches love each other or love the people of our communities. Explaining why will take a bit more discussion.
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