• The 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial serves as a hook for this profile of Ken Ham. I go back and forth between viewing Ham as a true believer or as a cynical grifter. I think he does too, because some of what he does and says can only be explained by genuine devotion to his illiteralist ideology and some of what he does and says can only be explained if he’s just a money-grubbing Gantry* fleecing the rubes.
In any case, that piece is wrong-footed from the get go because it accepts Ham’s bogus premise that his Ark Encounter theme park is based on a “literal reading of the Bible.” It’s not. it’s based on a literal reading of the folklore constructed around the Bible.
This is the same mistake religion reporters tend to make when talking about the Left Behind books or any of the Omen fan-fiction promoted by self-proclaimed “Bible prophecy scholars.” Reporters just parrot those folks claims that everything they teach is based on “a literal interpretation of Revelation,” when it’s absolutely nothing of the sort. If you literally read the literal book of Revelation, you will never arrive at their constructs and checklists.
In any case, the biblical story of Noah defies a “literal” reading. That’s partly because it just doesn’t work. It’s an attempt to adapt an intrinsically polytheistic story as a monotheistic one and that attempt never quite succeeds. The original story is about a dispute among the Gods. The adaptation gets rid of the pantheon of Gods, but it keeps the dispute, which makes the one God in this story — a single character forced to play both the hero’s and villain’s roles — seem inconstant and unreliable.
This is yet another reason to prefer the Much Better Bible Story of the Much Better Noah and Her Sisters, i.e., the story of Zelophehad’s daughters. In that story, God is the Good Guy. In that story God changes, but remains steadfastly trustworthy.
• “Quakers march against Trump’s crackdown on immigrants carrying on their long faith tradition ”
This counts as both Flushing Remonstrance blogging and as John Woolman blogging. Quakers just out here playing their greatest hits.
• Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards was invited to speak at a North Carolina Rotary Club on the recovery from Hurricane Helene but instead just used the platform for a standard-issue MAGA rant that, like all of Trumpism, fails all four prongs of Rotary’s Four-Way Test. Edwards got belligerent when Rotarians raised their signature issue, the eradication of polio), and wound up taking an awkward swing at one of his constituents.
It takes a special kind of jerk to be able to start a fight at a Rotary luncheon. And it takes an even more special kind of jerk to view their fundraising against polio as a hostile, partisan attack on you personally.
• Speaking of Hurricane Helene, this ProPublica piece by Jennifer Berry Hawes, Mollie Simon, and Cassandra Garibay is deeply reported, vivid, gripping, and heart-breaking: “Prescient Warnings About Helene Didn’t Reach People in Harm’s Way.”
* Sinclair Lewis’ novel Elmer Gantry was published in 1927. It’s upcoming centennial could serve as the news hook for another profile of Ken Ham, and of David Barton, Lance Wallnau, The Liar Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, Jim Garlow, Hank Kunneman, Charlie Kirk, Sean Feucht, Paula White …
If you haven’t seen it, the 1960 movie version of the book is pretty terrific. Burt Lancaster is charming and chilling and just terrific in that. Lancaster won an Academy Award for the role, which he deserved, but which also makes me want to go off onto a tangential rant about how it’s possible that Andy Griffith wasn’t even nominated for his astonishingly good work in a similar role a few years earlier, as Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd.
I recommend both movies to anyone attempting to understand the character of people like Ham, Barton, Wallnau, TLTP, et. al.
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