Righting America, a blog run by my friend Bill Trollinger at the University of Dayton, is “a scholarly conversation about topics discussed in [his book with Susan Trollinger] Righting America at the Creation Museum, including creationism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, the culture wars, the Christian Right, and so forth.”
MacArthur “does not think that the evidence for ice-cap melting is scientific, and that other factors are at play: ‘This is all political [and] financial agendas, class warfare, class envy . . . driven by the socialist mentality, even some of the feminist mentality.’ . . . As MacArthur puts it, citing Revelation and the integrity of scripture: ‘God intended us to use this planet, to fill this planet for the benefit of man. Never was it intended to be a permanent planet. It is a disposable planet. Christians ought to know that.’ And that is a statement that would leave anybody who cares about this world speechless.”
“Not surprisingly perhaps, the structure of [Russell Vought’s argument in behalf of Christian Nationalism] is identical to the arguments used by creationists . . . An uncritical acceptance of Scripture with no attention to historical context, unstated reinterpretation of that Scripture to further an agenda, selecting and misconstruing quotations, claiming a monopoly of Christian thought for his own wealth-friendly version, and finally and most dangerously, grouping together wildly disparate opinions, to make it seem as if our choice is restricted to two alternative worldviews, only one of which is sanctioned by God.”
I am proud to find myself in the company of the other articles selected, available through the top link.
It has not even been a full calendar year, but the damage reports keep rolling in. With so much going on, it is easy to lose track. So Katherine Wu at The Atlantic has taken the time to remind us of the scope and magnitude of the losses of 2025. While this isn’t a laundry list (the Silencing Science tracker kind of does that, if that is what you are looking for), it does take a bit of a step back to consider the magnitude of what has happened. Among the casualties are numerous collaborations, a retreat from ambitious research, interruption or destruction of long-term datasets, and damage to the pipeline of future scientists. Much of this damage is irretrievable. And so fighting to prevent even more damage, such as proposed elimination of the NCAR center in Boulder, is needed to try and keep as much alive through this time as possible.
December 20 was the 20th anniversary of the day on which Judge John Jones III handed down his decisive ruling, in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, that Intelligent Design was a version of creationism, which is religion and not science, and as such violated the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution and could not be taught within the publicly funded school system. Given changes in the US legal landscape, we need to ask whether this ruling is still secure. And given everything else that is happening in the US at the moment, we may wonder whether this even matters. Here I lay out why I think that the ruling is not necessarily secure, review what is at stake, and argue that it matters very much indeed.
What we now call Christian Nationalism has its roots in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, when creationists such as Tim LaHaye fused together political conservatism, the newly adopted abortion issue, literalist Bible-based religion, and the rejection of evolution science as Humanist, un-American, and as we would now say Woke. We can see the influence of these ideas today in Trump’s administration, where at least three cabinet ministers (Pete Hegseth, Scott Turner at HUD, and Doug Collins at the VA) are creationists, as are Speaker Mike Johnson, Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel, and Russell Vought who at the Office of Management and Budget has enormous day-to-day influence. To these we might add Vice President Vance, and Health [sic] Secretary RF Kennedy Jr. These are not creationists, but share their disdain for the scientific and academic establishments; Vance rose to stardom by telling the US Religious Right that “the Professors are the enemy,” while Kennedy’s onslaught on established science is all too well-known. Thus creationism is closely coupled to the rest of the Regime’s war on reality.
As for the claim, pervasive in the creationist literature, that evolution acceptance involves religion denial, I should mention here that Judge Jones himself is a committed Lutheran, and has offered himself as an example of the compatibility of Christian belief and evolution acceptance, while Ken Miller, a crucial witness at the trial and indefatigable campaigner against creationism, is a devout Catholic, author of Finding Darwin’s God, and co-author of a widely used high school textbook, Miller and Levine Biology.
In 2004, creationists on the board of the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania attracted press attention by objecting to the adoption of Miller and Levine, on the grounds that it was “laced with Darwinism,” to the exclusion of creationism. This led to correspondence with the Discovery Institute and with the Thomas More Law Center, who told them about the alternative textbook (alternative as in alternative facts) Of Pandas and People, which the Center were eager to promote in order to introduce Intelligent Design into the public school system.1
According to its website, the mission of the Thomas More Law Center is to
Preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage; Defend the religious freedom of Christians; Restore time-honored moral and family values; Protect the sanctity of human life; Promote a strong national defense and a free and sovereign United States of America. The Law Center accomplishes its mission through litigation, education, and related activities.
This places it firmly within the Christian Nationalist movement, as I described it earlier. As for Intelligent Design, it is the view that nature in general, and the appearance of new groups of living things in particular, is controlled by an unspecified designer (or Designer). This view is clearly incompatible with evolution science. To quote Pandas,
Most significantly, all design proponents hold that the major groups of organisms had their own origins.
The identity of this designer is not specified, although the Discovery Institute, which is a major promoter of Intelligent Design, seems more recently to be abandoning the pretence that the designer is anything other than God.
The board accepted copies of Pandas for the school, and also ordered the biology teachers to read to their classes a statement declaring among other things that
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People, is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.
Very courageously, teachers refused to present such nonsense to their classes, since that would violate their professional ethic, and the statement was then read out by the school superintendent.
A group of outraged parents, among them Tammy Kitzmiller, promptly took the School District to court, invoking the Establishment Clause, and their cause was embraced by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Center for Science Education, who assembled a formidable coalition of expert witnesses. The ensuing trial has been the subject of several books, and a PBS documentary, Judgement Day, still available on YouTube, in which some of the participants play themselves. There is also a moving compilation here of short statements by some of those involved.
Of Pandas and People had its own interesting evolutionary history. The academic editor, Charles Thaxton, was an Old Earth creationist, who had testified in Kansas State hearings to his rejection of common descent, while the co-authors, Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis,2 were Young Earth creationists. The original title was Biology and Creation, and its target was the creationist market that appeared to be opening up when, in 1981, the State of Louisiana passed a law saying that if evolutionary science is to be taught, creation science should be taught as well. This law was challenged by a group of parents, teachers, and ministers, on First Amendment grounds, with support from numerous scientists including 77 Nobel Prize winners, and in the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court upheld their challenge 7-2. In doing so they invoked the Lemon test, which requires a secular purpose for government activity, and opposes government activity which advances (or indeed impedes) religion.
Nothing daunted, the authors simply changed the original title to Of Pandas and People, and partly rewrote the text, replacing “creation science” and “creationism” with “intelligent design”. During the discovery phase of the Kitzmiller trial, the plaintiffs obtained copies of the intermediate drafts, one even containing the expression “cdesign proponentsists”. The Missing Link!
It is also noteworthy that the Pandas (1989) was the first book to refer repeatedly to “intelligent design,” predating the work of Phillip Johnson and the Discovery Institute in the 1990s. Thaxton and Kenyon are currently listed as Fellows of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which exists to promote Intelligent Design, while simultaneously maintaining that this is a different thing from creationism.
The Discovery Institute has repeatedly defended Pandas, and several Discovery Institute Fellows, including Stephen Meyer and William Dembski, provided expert witness statements in preparation for the Kitzmiller trial although, with the honourable exception of Michael Behe, they withdrew without giving evidence after a complicated dispute with the Thomas More Law Center.
Judge Jones now has understandable concerns about the direction of the US legal system itself. In his 2005 judgement, he also used the Lemon test, but this is no longer in effect. As he noted in 2022,
While applying the Lemon test is hardly perfect, I found it to be a sound and logical way to evaluate the case that came before me.
As a result of the recent Kennedy decision [which permitted prayer by a high school coach after games], federal judges are now directed to utilize a history-based approach in place of the more structured Lemon test when deciding cases. I would respectfully submit, as one who used the Lemon test and found it to be soundly crafted, that this new approach will lead to increasingly disparate decisions by lower court judges that will be based on ad hoc analysis and excessively subjective findings.
The result will necessarily be that the line of separation between church and state will become increasingly blurred. I am quite sure that this is precisely what the majority intended, but I would submit that we are about to enter an era where, like it or not, we will see the Supreme Court allow much more religion in the public square. Not an earthquake to be sure, but at least an aftershock of major proportions.
Remember that the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard had also been decided on the basis of the Lemon test
Abeka textbook, via Mila Oliveira/AL.com
Very recently, Judge Jones has told us that the case was so clear that he would rule the same today. I note however that other judges might feel differently, and that the case was made much easier to decide by what he had referred to as the School District board’s “breathtaking inanity” (the existing board members were soundly defeated in an election that took place while the judgement was being written). Moreover, the increasing use by Republican-dominated States, which is where creationism tends to be strongest, of school vouchers which parents can use at their discretion, could provide a pathway whereby public money, and pupils who would otherwise be publicly educated, are funnelled towards private schools not bound by the Establishment Clause. In Alabama, this is already leading to the use in these schools of textbooks from Bob Jones University and Abeka, whose offerings explicitly describe evolution as scientifically incorrect, satanically inspired, and motivated by the wish to justify immorality. Unsurprisingly, the Abeka texts also play down the evils of slavery, and explain the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as an understandable reaction to the incompetence of State governments dominated by freedmen.
A further Abeka abstract
I had forgotten how bad Pandas actually is. Its title is a reference to the fact that the term “panda” is applied to two very different animals, the giant panda which is a bear, and the red panda, which is more closely related to raccoons. Although they are only distantly related, both these species have separately evolved a false thumb, a striking example of convergent evolution. All this has been known for over a century, with recent confirmation by DNA phylogenies, but for some strange reason the book chooses to present this as evidence of the inadequacy of evolution science, in favour of Intelligent Design.
The book is obsessed with Darwin (died 1882), whose name appears in some shape or form 262 times in its 144 pages, repeatedly describes current evolution science as Darwinian (a little bit like describing current atomic theory as Daltonian), and completely misrepresents recent scientific findings to make them appear contrary to evolutionary thinking, when in fact the very opposite is true.
This obsession with Darwin runs throughout the entire creationist literature. It has the rhetorical effect of trivialising the work of thousands of other scientists, facilitating the reiteration of objections that were valid in 1859 but long since resolved, and enabling mined quotes from Darwin to be presented as criticisms of present-day evolution science.
Arguments such as those in the book have attracted more attention from philosophers than they deserve. Around the time of the trial, I had a long email correspondence with the noted philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, towards the end of which he said that Behe, Dembski, and Thaxton, advocates of three different versions of Intelligent Design, had produced arguments that required an answer. In reply, I said that I totally agreed with him; the answer was, in each case, that they were wrong. Prof Plantinga did not reply.
For many reasons, I think it is important to put forward a sampling of the book’s many errors, which I do here in an Appendix. The Discovery Institute (see e.g. here and here) continues to maintain that Kitzmiller was wrongly decided, and to promote Pandason its website.
I thank Glenn Branch, Wesley Elsberry, Joe Felsenstein, John Harshman, Kim Johnson, Nick Matzke, and Larry Moran, for helpful comments and personal reminiscences. However, the responsibility for any errors and omissions is entirely my own
Appendix: The book starts off by exploiting the confusion, universal in the creationist literature, between the admittedly unresolved problem of the origin of life, and the validity of the evidence for evolution. This is just like questioning our enormous body of knowledge about how languages evolve, because the origin of language itself remains obscure. There is the predictable heavy focus on the limitations of the Urey-Miller experiment, which demonstrates how easily the building blocks of life can arise (but admittedly nothing more), with the unfounded objection that molecular oxygen was present on Earth from the earliest times (it wasn’t).
We have the question-begging analogy between the DNA code, and the use of symbolic codes (language) in communication, although it was clear by the late 1960s that around 90% of the human genome lacks function. Overall probabilities of changes involving more than one gene are miscalculated by pretending that all the changes have to happen at once, and there is no awareness of the new opportunities offered by gene duplication (which by 1970 had been the subject of an entire text), or of how one change alters the fitness landscape to permit others.
The book concedes the reality of formation of new species, but compares it to the limited degree of change accomplished by animal breeders, and asserts that it can only occur “within the existing higher level blueprint of the organism’s whole genome.” This is obviously a preparation for the theory of variation within “created kinds,” developed in the 1940s by the Young Earth creationist Frank Lewis Marsh to explain how all the animals could have fitted into Noah’s Ark. The chapter on The Fossil Record predictably focuses on gaps, and claims that
the various taxa are not connected to one another. There is no gradual series of fossils leading from fish to amphibians, or from reptiles to birds… Fish have all the characteristics of today’s fish from the earliest known fish fossils, reptiles and the record have all the characteristics of present-day reptiles, and so on.
To be fair, the spectacular discoveries of Tiktaalik, and of the sequence leading from a hoofed mammal to whales, still lay in the future, but even in its own time, and indeed long before, the claims in this passage had been soundly refuted. The intermediate position of Archaeopteryx between reptiles and modern birds was recognized by 1870, although it remains unclear whether Archaeopteryx is on the direct line leading to modern birds, or merely a close cousin.
After quote-mining Darwin, the book does indeed discuss Archaeopteryx, pointing out that it has modern style feathers, but “eight [unspecified] reptilian features,” incompatible in some unstated way with “current Darwinian [sic] theory.” So after lamenting the absence of intermediate fossils, the book immediately rejects the most noted and venerable example, on the grounds that its properties are intermediate.
Next is the evidence from the fossil record for punctuated equilibrium, misrepresented in order to lay the groundwork for claims of separate creation, with the assertion that the search for natural causes of the formation of new taxa, and the appeal to Intelligent Design as ad hoc explanation, make comparable use of philosophical assumptions. Sure enough, in a later chapter the dotted lines by which the book at this point represents the formation of new taxa is simply removed, on the grounds that the actual birth of the new taxon was not observed, and replaced by de novo appearance. Thus the branching tree of life is replaced by a series of parallel lines, with utter disregard for all the evidence for common ancestry.
A chapter on homology refers to the “body plan” shared more or less completely by all mammals, without mentioning that this is most easily explained by common descent. It also blurs the crucial distinction between homology and analogy, by invoking such superficial similarities as that between the European wolf and the marsupial Tasmanian wolf. Worse. we are told that the existence of analogies is an argument against evolution by natural processes, because
This amounts to the astonishing claim that are random, undirected process of mutation and natural selection somehow hit upon identical features several times in widely separated organisms.
Here we have one of the central fallacies of creationist reasoning. Mutation may be random, but natural selection is the very opposite, pushing change in the direction of increased fitness. And similar challenges are likely to evoke similar evolutionary responses, as we see.
We also have here what might politely be referred to as extreme selection bias, since on detailed examination, analogous features are anything but “identical.” The streamlined shape of a whale, as the book points out, is analogous to the streamlined shape of a shark, but the analogy is so superficial that whales swim by moving their tails up and down, while sharks swim by moving them from side to side.
Worst of all are the two chapters on Biochemical Similarities. These use the then newly available comparisons of amino acid sequences in the protein cytochrome-c in different organisms to construct what would be, if true, a fatal argument against the evolutionary account. Here the authors say, in detailed discussion (p. 140), that
In this and countless other comparisons, it has proved impossible to arrange protein sequences in a macro evolutionary sequence corresponding to the expected transitions from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. There is no hint of intermediate in these data. All are virtually every distant from the dogfish. This is truly amazing, because amphibia are usually considered intermediate between fish and mammals.
This is what they were referring to in their earlier claim (p. 40) that
Major advances in molecular biology have given us new quantifiable data on the similarities and differences in living things. We must never give the impression that our present scientific knowledge has provided all the answers, but we can say that the data have not served to support a picture of the organic world consistent with Darwinian evolution. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, if it really were true that sequence data really had “not served to support” the evolutionary narrative, that would have been a fatal objection. So what’s wrong with this argument?
It is based on a fundamental confusion between ancestral and existing species. The authors are committing what I have referred to as the Frozen Frog Fallacy, which makes the naïve common-sense assumption that since amphibians are older than reptiles, present-day amphibians will have been less affected at the molecular level by the passage of time. But time does not stand still, and amphibians, just as much as reptiles, have been evolving since the time that amphibians and reptiles parted company.
Left: differences in cytochrome-c, as reported by Pandas. Note that for any chosen pair, the number of differences should relate to the time since last common ancestor, as found.
Consider what has happened since dogfish and mammals last shared a common ancestor. First we have the split between cartilaginous fish and bony fish, some 460 million years ago (times given by Timetree, as an average of published estimates). 430 million years ago, amphibians emerged from bony fish, and gave rise in turn to reptiles, 350 million years ago, while the split between reptiles and mammals (actually, “reptile” is not a well-defined biological term, but that does not matter here) occurred some 30 million years later. But if you compare a dogfish with a tuna, or a frog, or a turtle, or a pig, Timetree will in each case give you the same evolutionary distance of 460 million years, because that is how long ago the entire evolutionary line that gave rise to present-day bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, pigs, and you and me split from the line that gave rise to dogfish and other sharks.
Forgive me for labouring this point, but such errors are central to the book’s entire argument. Contrary to their claims, the data overwhelmingly support a picture of the organic world completely consistent with what they insist on calling “Darwinian” evolution, and difficult to explain in any other way. What they do not support is the authors’ flawed reasoning, understandable in first-year undergraduates, but inexcusable in textbook writers.
Footnotes
1 Specifically the 2nd edition, 1993, henceforth Pandas, which is the version that I discuss here.
2 Barbara Rorrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, Oxford University Press, 2004. page 275
Throughout most of the UK (Northern Ireland is a partial exception) evolution is regarded as established science, and no politician would make belief in separate creation part of their platform, for fear of ridicule. In the US, this is far from being the case. Although evolution has become more widely accepted over time, one third of Americans still believe that God created humans in their present form. Here I discuss the enormous influence of creationism in US politics and analyse the arguments put forward in its favour, as set out for example by Charlie Kirk, the recently slain leader of Turning Point USA.
Mike Pence, Vice President during Trump’s first term in office, had argued in Congress for creationism, while creationists have been prominent in the various faith councils supporting Trump. At least three members of his present cabinet (Pete Hegseth, Scott Turner at HUD, pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, Doug Collins at the VA, one-time pastor at Chicopee Baptist Church) are committed creationists, as is Mike Huckabee, another former Southern Baptist pastor, now ambassador to Israel. So is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who has done pro bono work for Answers in Genesis, now the leading creationist organization. Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025, whose role at the Office of Management and Budget is pivotal role in the distribution of federal funds, is an elder of a church that explicitly rejects evolution, and sees Satan as “the unholy god of this age.” Vought is also acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and on 28 October 2025, in this capacity, rescinded the rule that, in some States, prevents medical debt from showing up on credit reports.
We can understand the link between creationism and US right-wing politics in terms of the appeal to US conservatives of loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. These all favour absolutist theology, which demands submission to divine authority, loyalty to the community of believers, and the preservation of pure doctrine. With this in mind, we can understand the appeal of Christian Nationalism and Trumpism to creationists. Thus as early as 2015, Answers in Genesis praised Trump, not for any specific policies, but because he spoke, just as Jesus spoke to the Pharisees, as one with authority.
Interior scene, Answers in Genesis’ Ark Encounter. None of this is biblical
Creationists claim to be following the only natural interpretation of the sacred text, despite the fact that the text itself is full of ambiguities, contains scientific impossibilities (such as the creation of day and night, evening and morning, before the creation of the sun), and has been the subject of fierce controversy among believers since the beginning. Present-day versions are dominated by Young Earth creationism, which became dominant among US evangelical Christians in the decades following its foundational text, The Genesis Flood, in 1961. After various schisms, the group associated with that book has set up a number of organizations, most notably Creation Ministries International and the Institute for Creation Research, with the most prominent organisation now being Answers in Genesis, founded by Ken Ham when under circumstances leading to litigation he broke away from the other two major organisations. Answers in Genesis operates the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, both in Kentucky, as well as a worldwide publication network.
All this is of major political significance. From its beginning, the modern Young Earth creationist movement has been connected with right-wing American politics. Tim LaHaye, now best known for the Left Behind series of books, developed in his 1980 book The Battle for the Mind the thesis that creationism was the only valid form of religious belief, and was associated with true American values, while evolution was linked to humanism, internationalism, socialism, and immorality. From this it followed that it was the duty of true believers to involve themselves in politics. Such arguments were influential in forging the links between evangelical Christianity and the modern Republican Party as constructed by Ronald Reagan.
Two other developments further cemented evangelical creationism to right-wing politics. The first of these was the adoption by the Reagan campaign of the abortion issue. As late as 1973, evangelical Christians had no strong position on abortion, which was regarded mainly as an issue for Catholic voters. However, in 1975, Paul Weyrich and allies used the issue to rally evangelicals to the Republican cause, presenting it as a matter of biblical morality although the Bible itself is completely silent on the matter. Here they were helped by the theologian Francis A. Schaeffer, and the distinguished surgeon (later US Surgeon-General) C, Everett Koop. Schaeffer’s spiritual retreat at L’Abri in Switzerland taught the Young Earth version of creationism.1 Koop was not only an extremely skilled surgeon but an effective and courageous public educator.2 He was nonetheless a creationist, being enormously impressed by the complexity of the human body. So is Ben Carson, Donald Trump’s Surgeon General during his first administration, a brilliant surgeon who has separated conjoined twins and yet regards evolution science as inspired by Satan.
The other one significant development was the emergence of a creationist climatology. From 1970 if not earlier, we have seen the emergence of a scientific consensus that tells us that the Earth is currently warming at an alarming rate, and that much if not all of this warming is due to the emission of greenhouse gases by human industrial activity. This consensus is reinforced by analysis of past climates, as inferred from the study of annual bands in deep cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, going back hundreds of thousands of years. Young Earth creationists are forced to explain the formation of the ice sheets in some other way, and from 1987 onwards have developed their own fantastical explanations (also among the unbiblical things mentioned on the Ark Encounter), involving extreme moisture transfer in the aftermath of Noah’s Flood. This leads in their logic to denial of the importance of greenhouse gas emissions, making them allies of the US anti-environmentalist Right. A pivotal role here is played by the Cornwall Alliance, which combines biblical literalist creationism with libertarian free market beliefs, and which has direct links between on the one hand Answers in Genesis, and on the other the Heritage Foundation, birthplace of Project 2025.
With this lengthy preamble, we can make sense of the hidden agenda of Charlie Kirk’s December 2024 U-tube, I Help College Students Understand the Case for Creation Over Evolution.
He stands with his microphone against a backdrop that reads “You are being brainwashed,” a slogan directly attacking the entire university curriculum, including, as we shall see, evolution science. He is very good at what he does. His black T-shirt exaggerates his arm movements. His voice conveys conviction, passion, and at the same time reasonableness and approachability, while his actual words show a carefully crafted informality and imprecision, enabling him to give an impression of bridge building when he is in fact doing a very opposite.
He is being questioned by a member of the crowd (a plant?) who identifies himself as Jason, says he is there to defend evolution, and then advances in its favour a couple of extremely weak arguments, albeit arguments that fit in well with Kirk’s own ideology. In a series of tightly choreographed exchanges, Kirk replies with a distillation of the standard creationist elements against evolution, before proceeding to declaim in favour of creationism as a pillar of his own faith, moving on to a set piece about the Resurrection as historical proof of Christianity, and promising his audience “a sense of purpose that nothing can explain” if, like him, they accept Jesus into their hearts.
If making a case for evolution, I would refer to such things as family relationships originally based on observation of existing species, increasingly confirmed by a fossil record enormously richer than that available to Darwin, and triumphantly verified by comparisons of DNA, the same kind of method now routinely used by individuals to trace their ancestry. I might add detailed anatomical similarities, evolutionary relics such as gill arches and yolk sacs in the embryos of mammals (including of course us), the distribution of species past and present over the globe, and finally the basic mechanism by which evolutionary novelties arise. All of this has been understood in outline for over a century and is now explainable down to the molecular level (for a summary, see here).
Jason mentions none of this, but opens the case for evolution by comparing it to free market competition, which allows the cream to rise to the top in society. In reply, Kirk proclaims himself a strict creationist, but in a display of reasonableness says that a range of views are possible, and would Jason contemplate the possibility that God created and directs evolution. Jason plays into Kirk’s hand by seizing on the word “created,” and agreeing that the universe had a beginning, but did it need a beginner and why should that beginner be Christ? Kirk replies that we (notice the reference to a collective identity, which is what he is offering his followers) believe that the universe has a beginning point and an end point, words that he repeats for emphasis (notice how Kirk has dragged in the concept of an end time, never far in the background of apocalyptic Christian Nationalist politics).
Having disingenuously claimed not to have studied the subject in sufficient detail, Kirk then gives us a distillation of the standard creationist arguments, with which he is clearly very familiar:
Evolution hinges on far more faith than creation. To believe that the way that we are currently composed, and having species change, is an Act of Faith. Now Darwin was more of an adaptionist than an evolutionist, in the sense that he proved adaptation but he did not prove Evolution. He theorized evolution. He could be right, I don’t think he is, but he through his finches, he wrote that yes, animals or birds will adjust to the environment of which they are in. We do not have any evidence nor can you, you can guess, in the fossil record of actual species change, does that make sense?
The first two sentences here simply ignore the entire body of evidence for evolution, while paving the way for a later argument from improbability. In an apparent show of intellectual generosity, Kirk acknowledges that Darwin has got something right, but that something is mere adaptation, rather than evolution. Here we have the creationist admission that change does happen (they could hardly deny this), coupled to denial that such change could ever lead one kind of living thing to transform into another. As for the fossil record, Kirk is referring to two common creationist arguments. Firstly, the seemingly reasonable comment that no individual fossil is evidence of species change. True up to a point, since any fossil must represent its own viable species, although it is commonplace for fossils to show a mosaic of features already present in their ancestors, and novelties that they pass on to their descendants. The other idea being referred to is the alleged incompleteness of the fossil record. Darwin himself described this as a grave objection to his theory, unless gaps on the record would be filled over time. This of course they have been, and we now have, as Darwin did not, whole sequences pointing to successive changes, as clearly as footsteps in the sand.
The reference to Darwin’s finches is surprisingly common in the creationist literature, although these finches played very little role in Darwin’s own work, and the birds that he used as examples of change in The Origin of Species were pigeons.
In reply, Jason launches into a naïve exposition of evolutionary psychology, and one that suits Kirk’s purposes suspiciously well. He points out that
as a general rule of thumb like women are the sexual gatekeepers and men are the sexual pursuers
and that this difference is explained by evolution, since a woman’s investment in the child is much greater than a man’s.
Cue for Kirk to kill two birds with one stone:
But maybe God, God, maybe God, God made it that way, right?
Kirk is alluding to the well-known Christian Conservative doctrine of complementary roles for men and women, invoking God (note the repetition) for support, and preparing the ground for a more general version of the Argument from Design.
Jason: Maybe, but a lot of things like that point towards evolution of some sort?
Kirk: For sure, but I think you would I think you’re close, because you’re marveling at the design, and therefore we believe it was designed.
Note again the reference to “we,” the apparent generosity of his argument (“I think you’re close”), and the judo move by which he transforms the fitness of organisms from an argument in favour of evolution to one in favour of design.
Kirk now puts forward at some length, while claiming to appeal to reason, the standard creationist argument that the complexity of living things could not have arisen simply by chance. This of course is true, but a central point 3 of evolutionary explanation is that the complexity has arisen step-by-step, by trial and error and repeated winnowing.
Jason here argues that evolution occurs by selection at the gene level, no conscious effort required. To which Kirk replies
Of course I don’t disagree with any of that. We just think all of that was designed into us, right.
He’s lying. He disagrees with all of it. The claimed agreement is an affectation, to pretend that there is symmetry between evolutionary and design-based explanations.
Kirk then gives his own exposition of Scripture, designed to be as noncommittal as possible on matters of doctrine. He has no strong opinion about the age of the earth, but what matters is that God came first, and in succession created the universe, then nature, then animals, then man. The Ten Commandments are good, therefore the Bible as a whole is good. The details don’t matter, but reason commends the twin doctrinal pillars of Creation, and the Resurrection. The Resurrection is well attested by four separate accounts, written from different viewpoints (here Kirk pre-empts the obvious objection that the Gospel accounts contradict each other), as well as reference by Josephus and other unnamed historians. (The kindest interpretation here is that Kirk has not actually read the relevant section of Josephus, which is obviously4 a later out-of-character revision.) Moreover, why did the apostles allow themselves to be martyred in witness to their faith in the Resurrection, if it was not an actual event? I must admit that Kirk does seem to have a point here. However, I noticed that his chief example is St Paul, who never met Jesus and had no first-hand knowledge of his life and death.
The initial question, namely the scientific validity of evolution, has now been buried beneath layers of distraction, while creationism is being extolled by association, as Kirk launches into his final triumphant declaration of how faith in Jesus has transformed his own life.
We can be sure that Kirk’s movement, Turning Point USA, will remain influential in American politics, and perhaps beyond (there is already a Turning Point UK, which has been addressed by Nigel Farage, proprietor5 of the hard Right Reform Party). It is now thoroughly subsumed into the Trumpian juggernaut, with a governmental campaign of reprisals and intimidation, initially directed against Kirk’s critics, spilling over to the Regime’s opponents in general.
Judge John E, Jones III, US Government image
Turning Point USA is in direct contact with the US Education Department through the Civics Curriculum initiative announced by Education Secretary Linda McMahon just a week after Kirk’s death. This connection has troubling implications, not only for Civics, but for other subjects as well, including the teaching of evolution. In the US, it is unconstitutional for any part of Government to promote a religion, and the courts have repeatedly ruled that for this reason creationism cannot be taught in publicly funded schools. The most recent and most notable of such cases was Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board, where Judge Jones also ruled that Intelligent Design was not science, but a form of creationism. Here the decision, handed down in December 2005, appeared to be so strongly worded as to preclude further challenge, but Judge Jones now fears that that may no longer be the case, given recent rulings6 by the present Supreme Court. So this may be one of the numerous battles that appeared won decades or even centuries ago, but will now need to be fought, all over again, with outcome uncertain.
I thank Randall Balmer, Glenn Branch, Andrew Petto, Dan Phelps, Michael Roberts, and William Trollinger for helpful and enjoyable discussions, and Susan Trollinger for the Ark Encounter interior photo.
Footnotes
1] My friend Michael Roberts, transitioning from geologist to Church of England priest, had intended to spend some time at L’Abri, until his assigned tutor told him that geological dating was based on a circular argument, since the sediments are used to date the fossils and the fossils are then used to date the sediments. Michael, who had just mapped out the Precambrian geology of large areas of southern Africa without a single fossil in sight, was not impressed
2] Whenever I hear blanket condemnation of creationists, I think of Koop. While morally opposed to abortion, he resisted pressure from the Reagan Administration to describe it as injurious to mental health. He was also responsible for the recognition of the strength of nicotine addiction and for government initiatives to restrict smoking, and in the face of mealy-mouthed officialdom sent information about AIDS to every US household. He also urged that violence in America be treated as a public health problem.
3] I almost wrote “the central point,” but my biologist friends repeatedly remind me that much, perhaps most evolutionary change is the result of random drift.
4] “Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man… for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him.” No Jew would ever use such language.
5] Strictly speaking, major shareholder. Reform UK is actually incorporated as a limited company.
6] Judge Jones relied heavily on what was known as the Lemon test, based on religious intent. This he sees as being replaced by more permissive criteria, such as historical practice.
An earlier version of this post appeared in 3 Quarks Daily
Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.
We aresocial psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. During the pandemic, we surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate why people believed COVID-19 misinformation, like false claims that 5G networks cause the virus.
The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.
This factor outweighed how people felt about COVID-19 in general, their thinking style and even their political beliefs.
Our survey measured it on a scale of how much people agreed with sentences including “Following coronavirus prevention guidelines means you have backed down” and “Continuous coronavirus coverage in the media is a sign we are losing.” Our interpretation is that people who responded positively to these statements would feel they “win” by endorsing misinformation – doing so can show “the enemy” that it will not gain any ground over people’s views.
When meaning is symbolic, not factual
Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.
When people think symbolically this way, the literal issue – here, fighting COVID-19 – is secondary to a psychological war over people’s minds. In the minds of those who think they’re engaged in them, psychological wars are waged over opinions and attitudes, and are won via control of belief and messaging. The U.S. government at various times has used the concept of psychological war to try to limit the influence of foreign powers, pushing people to think that literal battles are less important than psychological independence.
By that same token, vaccination, masking or other COVID-19 prevention efforts could be seen as a symbolic risk that could “weaken” one psychologically even if they provide literal physical benefits. If this seems like an extreme stance, it is – the majority of participants in our studies did not hold this mindset. But those who did were especially likely to also believe in misinformation.
In an additional study we ran that focused on attitudes around cryptocurrency, we measured whether people saw crypto investment in terms of signaling independence from traditional finance. These participants, who, like those in our COVID-19 study, prioritized a symbolic show of strength, were more likely to believe in other kinds of misinformation and conspiracies, too, such as that the government is concealing evidence of alien contact.
In all of our studies, this mindset was also strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes, including beliefs that some groups should dominate others and support for autocratic government. These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.
Attempts to debunk misinformation look weak to someone who values a symbolic show of strength, while standing by a disprovable statement seems powerful. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Why people endorse misinformation
Our findings highlight the limits of countering misinformation directly, because for some people, literal truth is not the point.
For example, President Donald Trump incorrectly claimed in August 2025 that crime in Washington D.C. was at an all-time high, generating countlessfact-checks of his premise and think pieces about his dissociation from reality.
But we believe that to someone with a symbolic mindset, debunkers merely demonstrate that they’re the ones reacting, and are therefore weak. The correct information is easily available, but is irrelevant to someone who prioritizes a symbolic show of strength. What matters is signaling one isn’t listening and won’t be swayed.
In fact, for symbolic thinkers, nearly any statement should be justifiable. The more outlandish or easily disproved something is, the more powerful one might seem when standing by it. Being an edgelord – a contrarian online provocateur – or outright lying can, in their own odd way, appear “authentic.”
Some people may also view their favorite dissembler’s claims as provocative trolling, but, given the link between this mindset and authoritarianism, they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.
Is this really 5-D chess?
It is possible that symbolic, but not exactly true, beliefs have some downstream benefit, such as serving as negotiation tactics, loyalty tests, or a fake-it-till-you-make-it long game that somehow, eventually, becomes a reality. Political theorist Murray Edelman, known for his work on political symbolism, noted that politicians often prefer scoring symbolic points over delivering results – it’s easier. Leaders can offer symbolism when they have little tangible to provide.
When Representative (now House Speaker) Mike Johnson told us that the cause of school shootings was the study of Darwinism, he did so from the platform of Shreveport Christian Center, on which there were no religious symbols, but two flags equally prominent, that of the United States, and that of Israel. This symbolizes the political position of the Christian Right in the US, now and for many years past Israel’s main source of external political support.
It is not my intent here to discuss the situation in Gaza. I have already done this elsewhere, and information is freely available, for example from Médecins Sans Frontières,1 whose reports are based on the evidence of medical personnel on the spot, and Sky News, one of whose notable reports describes the operation of the current aid distribution system. Reuters issues regular reports (e.g. this, from mid-July, giving a UN estimate of 875 for total number of Palestinians killed in six weeks while trying to collect food), while for distinguished comment from within Israel, see e.g. here and here and here.
Here, I have set myself the more modest task of describing how US biblical Christianity uses support of Israel as a plank in its alliance with the American Right. Their success in doing so does much to explain the otherwise mysterious inability of US politicians to influence Israeli policy, despite Israel receiving almost $18 billion in the year following the October 7, 2023 attack. I will also point out that while this support is unconditional politically, it is not so theologically, may prove a broken reed (to invoke a biblical expression) when it comes to resolving any major crisis that it helps create, and has already, at a crucial juncture, sabotaged Israel’s own peace initiative.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999, and with brief intervals from 2009 until now, has done much to nurture this support. He is unusual in his long and close association with United States, and understanding of US politics. He spent six years of his childhood in the US, where his father was for a while a Professor of Jewish history at Cornell, and was later a student at MIT where he earned degrees in architecture and management. In 1982, he returned to the US in order to promote Israel’s public relations, which he continued to do while Israeli ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. Prominent contacts he made during this period include Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump, Mitt Romney, and prominent evangelicals, including John Hagee and Robert Jeffress, on whom more below. He shares the strong pro-capitalist ideology of the Christian Right, whom he has cultivated even at the expense of the more flexible and Democratic-leaning majority within American Judaism.
There is a school of thought, understandably popular with authoritarian preachers, that regards the literal words of the Bible as the eternally true Revealed Word of God, independent of context and invulnerable to questioning. Applied to the natural world, this leads directly to creationism, since the biblical creation narratives are separated from their cultural and cosmological contexts. Applied to human affairs, the words of the Old Testament prophets are divorced from a history that included biblical Judaea, the destruction of the First Temple, the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE, and the return leading up to the building of the Second Temple, while the apocalyptic passages of both Old and New Testaments are divorced from the struggles between Judaism and Hellenistic and Roman paganism, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the ensuing horrors of Roman rule and unsuccessful rebellion.
This deracinated exegesis leads naturally to a huge preoccupation with the Jewish people, the birth of a Jewish nation-state, and the regularly foretold although repeatedly postponed Apocalypse. Dispensationalism is one extreme version, now particularly influential in the United States. It combs both Old and New Testament for descriptions of the End Times, and generates an extraordinarily detailed timetable, including signs and wonders that will culminate in the Rapture (always hinted at as imminent), while since 1948 the establishment of modern Israel has been taken as evidence that the End Times are already approaching. We are warned of signs and portents, leading to a seven-year Tribulation, to be followed by Jesus’ triumphant reappearance that ushers in the Millennium. It is from this perspective there we need to understand the nature of the commitment of the US Religious Right to the State of Israel, with a preoccupation with the End Times not far behind.
Dispensationalist advocacy of the return of Jews to their ancestral home actually predates the modern Jewish Zionist movement. William E. Blackstone, a real estate developer turned dispensationalist preacher, organized a conference to advocate this in 1890, which gave rise to a declaration signed by John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, and presented to President Harrison.
The claim that the foundation of the State of Israel is a sign of the End Times is spelt out in Henry Morris’ The Bible and Modern Science, 1951, which speaks of Revelation as an indubitable history of the future in the same way that Genesis is an indubitable history of the past. (Henry Morris went on to co-author The Genesis Flood, key text in the mid-20th century revival of Young Earth creationism.) His colleague Tim LaHaye, whom I have already discussed here as a link between Morris’ creationism, and Ronald Reagan’s Christian Republicanism, was explicitly and lucratively dispensationalist, and is best known today as author of the Left Behind series. LaHaye wrote several other works regarding prophecy, including a Prophecy Study Bible. Together with Ed Hindson, a professor at the evangelical creationist Liberty University, he spelt out the implications of these beliefs in the slim 2015 volume, Target Israel, caught in the crosshairs of the End Times.
The approaching End Times, according to LaHaye and Hindson. Confession: I am unable to find references to these events in the verses cited.
The rebirth of Israel plays a central role in this book. It takes Ezekiel’s image of dry bones, reconnecting and coming to life, which clearly describes the return from Babylon (538 BCE onwards), and applies it to the formation of modern Israel. Tortuous interpretations are also imposed on other texts. For example, the Hebrew word Rosh (head) in Ezekiel 38:2, describing Gog of Magog, and generally translated as “chief,” is taken as a proper name and applied to Russia. But Russia did not come into existence until 1500 years after Ezekiel’s death. This very fact is taken as evidence that Ezekiel must have been divinely inspired, and was refering to a forthcoming Russian attack on Israel (hence the title of the book). Throughout, there is heavy emphasis on the special role of Israel and the Jews, with repeated reference, also found in theologians who do not accept End Times dispensationalism, to Genesis 12:3, God’s promise to Abraham:
I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Unlike the covenant with Moses, this covenant was not replaced by the New Testament covenant, and so it continues in force. Old and New Testament prophecies from Deuteronomy onwards predict that that Israel would be scattered, but that during the latter days they would be gathered together to take part in the tribulation. Israel’s survival is a miracle, surrounded as it is by enemies, with little support from Western nations. Writing in 2014, a year in which Israel received $ 3.1 billion in general military aid from the US, and a further billion in anti-missile defense, the authors complain of deteriorating relations between Israel and the US, and say that this was prophesied by Zechariah.
Similar arguments had been put forward 45 years earlier, by Harold Lindsey, in The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold over 28 million copies. Lindsey was opposed to the formation of the European Union, and in his later writings to the United Nations, as steps towards a World Government to be headed by the Antichrist, and his views had considerable influence within the Reagan Administration. Importantly in today’s context, he opposed any two-state solution after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, since Israel was entitled to all of the land of Canaan. He anticipated LaHaye’s view that the War of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38) refers to in imminent attack of Israel by a coalition read by Russia, and the same interpretation is still being graphically promoted by churches such as the Dispensationalist Heritage Church, which maps biblical names onto modern political entities with graphic precision.
Tom DeLay, Republican Representative and powerbroker from 1995 for a decade, until finance scandal ended his career, is a biblical literalist creationist, who read into the Congressional record a letter saying that the Columbine shootings happened “because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.” He was a strong supporter of the most extreme Israeli territorial claims, and in 2005 successfully blocked US aid to the Palestinian Authority. In this way he sabotaged the first step towards a two-state solution, despite it being at that time favored by the Bush administration, as well as American Jewish organizations, and the then Israeli government under Ariel Sharon, who had come to see implications of long-term occupation as unacceptable.
If biblical territorial claims are taken as a starting point, a two-state solution is contrary to God’s will, which is why the pioneering televangelist Pat Robertson regarded the stroke that put an end to Sharon’s career as a divine judgement for his 2005 decision to dismantle Israeli settlements in Gaza.
Jerry Falwell, creator of the Moral Majority and founder of Liberty University, was a dispensationalist and strong supporter of Israel. He was honored by the Israeli government in 1980 for his contributions to their cause, and in 1981 said that one reason why God had raised up America was for the protection of His people, the Jews.
James Dobson, who became prominent in the 1970s for very biblically advocating spanking, has had a major influence on evangelical Christianity through his networks, which attract more than 220 million listeners worldwide daily. He was a member of Trump’s 2016 Faith Advisory Board, and his Family Institute celebrated the first hundred days of Trump 2025, praising his policy towards Israel, on the grounds that “The Jews are God’s chosen people, and Israel is a covenant land given to the Jews by Jehovah as an everlasting possession.” Hence approval of Trump’s Middle East policies in general and Huckabee’s appointment in particular.
After the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Trump rewarded his evangelical supporters by appointing Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is on record as saying that there is no such thing as a West Bank, since the territories concerned, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria, were promised to Israel by God. Recently, he distinguished himself by visiting a farm in Israel devoted to breeding red heifers, for sacrifice on the altar of a future rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.
Paula White’s National Faith Advisory Board lists “Support strong U.S.- Israeli Relations,” as part of promoting a strong America, among its Pillars.
The megachurch pastor John Hagee preaches of knowing God’s love for Israel, which he first visited in 1978. In 2016 he revived the organization, Christians United for Israel, which now claims more than 10 million members. A search for “End Times” on his website brought up a message (now deleted, though I have a screenshot) saying among other things
There is no time to waste! October 7 [2023; the date of Hamas’ incursion into Israel] was the end of the world as we knew it
while a link still active at the time of writing promotes Hagee’s book The End of the Age; the Countdown has Begun.
The disastrous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which I have discussed elsewhere, is headed by the evangelical Johnnie Moore, whose qualification appears to be a PhD in public policy from Liberty University. Moore was co-chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 evangelical advisory board, and among those who successfully advocated moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. From 2018 until 2021, he was a Trump-nominated commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom. He is a frequent visitor to Israel, for which he describes himself as zealous advocate.
The America First Policy Institute, founded in 2021 to promote the Trump agenda, and with strong links to the 2025 Trump administration, argues on biblical grounds that the US should always stand with Israel.
Among leading dispensationalist leaders, Robert Jeffress, whose sermons are broadcast to over 900 radio stations in the US, was also part of Trump’s 2016 Faith Advisory Board. He strongly welcomed Trump’s moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and said that Trump is “on the right side of history” and “the right side of God,” while both the charismatic Lance Wallnau and the dispensationalist Mike Evans compared the move to that of the Persian king Cyrus, praised by Isaiah for allowing the Jews to return from Babylon to Jerusalem. (This, and much more on the connections between evangelicals and Trump, is spelt out in John Fea’s Believe Me, Eerdmans, 2018). David Jeremiah, who was also part of the 2016 Faith Advisory Board, had in 1981 succeeded Tim LaHaye as the senior pastor at Scott Memorial Baptist Church (now Shadow Mountain Community Church). He has, like LaHaye, written a novel based on dispensationalist predictions, as well as a book alerting us to 31 undeniable signs of the apocalypse, and runs Turning Point broadcast ministry. Following dispensationalist predictions closely. he spells out in detail the argument that God’s promise to Abraham includes far greater territory than that of Israel today, or even Israel plus the West Bank.
If friends of Israel wholeheartedly welcome such support, they need to pay closer attention.2 For what happens next in this scenario is that while peace will be achieved between Israel and its neighbors, this will be temporary, Israel will be attacked again as never before, and peace will only come with Christ’s return and judgement. This has been part of dispensationalist doctrine ever since the 1880s. And we should never forget that this judgement includes condemnation of all those Jews who persist in rejecting Christ, an echo of Christian anti-Semitism since mediaeval times.
Such anti-Semitism is never far beneath the surface of Christian extremism. In the 1930s, as detailed by the historian Carl Weinberg, the American Religious Right was strongly anti-Semitic. William Bell Riley, in some ways a forerunner of today’s politicized Christianity, openly sympathized with Hitler, and he and others believed in the existence of a satanic Jewish Communist conspiracy that aimed to undermine Christian morality, with the ultimate goal of crowning the Antichrist King of the whole world.
Pat Robertson’s 1991 The New World Order, a New York Times bestseller, also combined an anti-Semitic subtext with apocalyptic prediction, echoing the 1930s conspiracy theories about the secret operations of international bankers.
James Hagee has made some very strange remarks about Jews in the past. He has said that Scripture suggests that the Antichrist “is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx,” and that Hitler was sent by God for the purpose of driving the Jews back to Israel.
In his 1980 book Listen, America!, Jerry Falwell called the Jewish people “spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior,” and in 1999 said that he was convinced that the Antichrist would be Jewish. He also said, in 1979, to an I Love America audience,
I know a few of you here today don’t like Jews, and I know why. He can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose.
Tim LaHaye described the creation of Israel as the “fuse of Armageddon,” but the Jews themselves would be
destroyed by the anti-Christ in the time of the seven years of tribulation; a potential dictator waiting in the wings somewhere in Europe who will make Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin look like choirboys.
And, in Target Israel:
Eventually, Israel will sign a covenant with the Antichrist, and that will initiate the seven-year Tribulation.
“Eventually,” what does that mean exactly, what, in the eyes of these evangelical leaders and their successors, will constitute “a covenant with the Antichrist,” and at what point will they decide that Israel must decide to follow Christ, or face the consequences? Friends of Israel need to ask themselves, among many other things, whether it is wise to court allies with such ambivalent attitudes, who cheerfully consign Israel to a future of extreme violence, and whose ultimate objectives differ so completely from their own.
As for the substantial issue of how we can move forward from where we now are, that is beyond the scope of this essay.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism is unacceptable, incoherent, and harmful, and should not be used in formulation of policy.
First, my own credentials. I am Jewish. I passed my bar mitzvah test at what was then Jews’ College, London, with distinction. I have led congregations in prayer, and after decades of godlessness still feel nostalgia for that shared activity. And there is a field in northern Israel, close to the Lebanese border, that I helped clear of stones with my own hands.
At the tiny rural Church of England school that I went to when evacuated from London during World War 2, the older children would dance round me in a ring, singing
Jew, Jew, put him in the stew.
I think my dislike for bad poetry dates from that time.
I have been told that the Jews killed Jesus, and had fistfights at school in response to anti-Semitic insults. And of course, I was told that the Jews had all the money.
I remember the first images out of Belsen in Life magazine. My parents tried to hide them, but whether by accident or design they did not make a very good job of it.
When I applied to a secondary school in the highly competitive environment of the late 1940s, I knew that I had to do better in the entrance exam than a Gentile applicant, because the school had decided to place a limit on the number of Jews it would admit (common practice at the time, although it would now of course be illegal).
I have known Holocaust survivors, and been good friends with people whose escape from the Nazis was a matter of lucky contacts and good fortune.
And more recently, I have been addressed by people scolding me for this or that action of the Israeli government as if I were personally responsible for it.
So I regard myself as well acquainted with anti-Semitism, from the horrific to the trivial.
I have been thinking much of late of the distinction between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel, and had come to conclusion that the attempt to stifle such criticism by labelling it as anti-Semitic is despicable.
Then, belatedly. I came across the definition adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. Although it is, on the timescale of the phenomenon, very recent, and describes itself as non-legally binding, it has been enormously influential. I consider it self-contradictory, divorced from reality, and likely to cause dissension and do great harm.1
The definition proper reads:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
So far, so good, but so non-specific that any alleged example would require a judgement call (actually, this may not be such a bad thing). For this reason, the definition is accompanied by what is intended to be helpful text, which early on states that
criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.
Unfortunately, two important examples of what is considered anti-Semitism directly contradict this worthy principle:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Is the state of Israel a racist endeavor? Yes, because the Law of Return gives any Jew, together with their family, the right to enter Israel and become citizens. No, because Jews are not a race. Yes, because almost always “Jew” is defined by inherited identity. No, because Jews have a special need for a refuge from persecution. Yes, because you do not need to be suffering persecution in order to have the right to enter. No, because within Israel there are 2 million Arab citizens with full citizen rights, among them Arab judges and university professors. Yes, because Arab citizens are discriminated against and under-served, to say nothing of the very different ways in which Jews and Arabs are treated in the Occupied Territories. No, because that last represents a strategic necessity. Yes, because…
Is contemporary Israeli policy comparable to that of the Nazis? Yes, because Arab lives are treated as of no value. Because children are being starved to death. Because of mass destruction and displacement. Because Israeli plans for the Gaza strip and, implicitly, for the West Bank, include seizure of Lebensraum and removal of populations. No, because there is no explicit policy of mass extermination (though it is worth remembering that mass extermination of Jews only became Nazi policy in 1942).
You may agree or disagree with what I just said. That’s not the point. The point is that these are matters that we urgently need to discuss. The IHRA would shut such discussion down, since in my last two paragraphs I have on their definition committed anti-Semitism more than half a dozen times.
It is difficult and dangerous to set limits to acceptable speech, for many reasons. Such limits may work best for very specific cases (e.g. when the IHRA, and many others including the German government, describe Holocaust denial as anti-Semitism), or where couched in terms of broad generalities, as in the part of the IHRA definition that they (and I) have presented in bold. Beyond that, the task becomes increasingly difficult in these tumultuous times, and much of what I have written here in 2025 would not have been applicable in 2016 when the definition was formulated. Faced with these realities, I would suggest that an organization whose noble mission it is the remembrance of the past may not be the best guide for how to respond in the future.
Since I wrote this piece, Paul Coyne has drawn my attention to the far superior Jerusalem Declaration definition of anti-Semitism, unveiled in 2021 and signed by distinguished scholars of history, politics, and Holocaust and related studies, both inside and outside Israel, whose organizers explicitly wished to avoid the problems discussed here; the definition, which is accompanied by illustrated guidelines, simply states that Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish). ↩︎
William Jennings Bryan (seated, left) being cross-examined by Clarence Darrow, the trial having been moved outside because of the heat (via Wikipedia)
As many readers will know, July 2025 saw the centennial of the trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes was found guilty of the crime of teaching evolution, in breach of Tennessee’s Butler Act, although what is most remembered is Clarence Darrow’s devastating cross-examination of the Prosecuting Attorney, William Jennings Bryan. The Butler act itself stayed on the statute book until repealed in 1967.
The centennial has evoked numerous responses from creationists, the very worst of which I discuss here. It was not an easy decision – a close competitor was an article in Answers in Genesis, which attributed Bryan’s humiliation to his willingness to contemplate an ancient Earth. But the winner is Mike Mueller writing for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Here is my summary and analysis. Spoiler; it discusses 10 separate scientific and historical issues, every one of which it gets the wrong. Enjoy!
The Reverend John MacArthur, 1939 – 2025. He returned to the theme of a throwaway Earth in November 2021, comparing it to a used styrofoam cup. I also mention here his lawless defiance of COVID pandemic regulations, and refusal to admit the serious nature of the disease. We can see all these attitudes at work in the conduct and policies of the present US regime. An earlier form of this piece appeared nearly 5 years ago in The Conversation, where it has received over 350,000 reads.
Every so often you come across a piece of writing so extraordinary that you cannot help but share it. One such piece is a sermon on global warming by American pastor John MacArthur. Full of beautifully constructed rhetorical flourishes, it is forcefully delivered by an experienced and impassioned preacher to a large and appreciative audience.
For me, as a man of science, it is the most complete compilation of unsound arguments, factual errors and misleading analogies as I have seen in discussions of this subject. But it’s important because climate change is a big election issue this November [2020] in the US, where there is a growing movement of evangelical Christians who deny its existence, while Joe Biden promises a “clean air revolution”.
The minister of the COVID-denying, law-defying Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California – which has encouraged worshippers to congregate as normal despite state COVID-19 restrictions – MacArthur is an impressive figure whose Study Bible has sold almost 2 million copies.
He regards the infallibility of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, as essential to his faith, and his sermon about global warming can only be understood in that context. MacArthur’s rejection of the science is shared by other major US ministries and organisations such as Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and the Discovery Institute.
Primate's Progress 
