Taking a look at a (truly boring!) fundamentalist polemic

I just listened to a Christian fundamentalist podcast hosted by Alisa Childers speaking to a Dr. JR Miller on the topic of Does a Belief in a Historical Adam and Eve Matter to Christianity? 08/08/2021.

I'm linking to it but not embedding it. It's useful if you can endure an hour or so of boredom to hear some contemporary Christian nationalist thought. It's theological and Biblical hermeneutical value is, well, very low.

That entire podcast elaborates simplistic fundamentalist anti-evolution and anti-abortion arguments.

But they do try to sound like they read books. Miller says that "what it means to be human thousands or millions of years ago in that framework [evolution] or what it means to be human a thousand years from now is something completely different." (9:20ff in the video)

This is one of many places in this podcast where it would be good for your nonsense detector to start beeping.

The species Homo sapiens, of which modern humans are the only surviving branch, emerged around 315,000 years ago according to current findings. That would be 685,000 years later than one million years ago, and the 315,000 number is the old end of the time range, the more recent one being a piddly 30,000 years ago. (Russell Howard Tuttle, The emergence of Homo sapiens Britannica Online 07/22/2021)

Of course, all this is based on paleontology and biology and carbon dating and other science-y stuff like that, so Dr. Miller may not recognized all that as valid.

He also uses a common fundamentalist trope claiming that Darwinian evolutionary theory is responsible for racism, because only assuming the Adam and Eve story as literally true allows us to say that all humans are somehow equal. Not that Christian nationalists actually believe or behave like they think everyone is equal. But that's because they disapprove of the "bad choices" in life that they perceived non-white people to be making all the time on a large scale.

In fact, the main theme of the podcast actually focuses on that an other elaboration on the narrative that white racism wasn't really all that bad, but anyway it was all the fault of Mean Libruls and them thar scientists they love so much. Because they have to believe in "Darwinism" and that means they have to advocate eugenics - at least as JR Miller argues it.

As a description of the historical development of racism, any relation of their presentation to the actual history is largely incidental.

In case there is something that might be gained by the rhetoric, I'll note the following.

• Both Miller and Childers refer to the concept of imago dei, presumably to sound deep and mysterious because it's Latin. (Wait, isn't it a bit "Catholic" for them to be using Latin? But Miller is cool enough to use the Hebrew term, betselem elohim.) Imago dei is a common theological term referring the notion that humans were created in the image of God.
• Miller talks about the "Darwinian world view," whatever that may be. It's typical for fundamentalists to use that kind of framing to imply that Darwin's scientific theory of biological evolution by natural selection is something comparable to a religion or a sweeping ideology or philosophy.
• It tends to get more hardcore as it goes on. After 26:00, Miller argues/implies that Mean Libruls and "modern," progressive Christians - "progressive" is a dirty word in their world - want to use eugenics to get rid of poor people. (This is nonsense, but it's a stock Christian Right talking point.)
• Miller tosses in miracles in just before that. Because, why not?
• Of course, they get into abortion, which is part of their key ideology, which is deeply opposed to women's rights
• Hitler got his Nazi ideas from Darwin, or something like that. Somehow.
• Miller is broad-minded: He thinks both "Young Earth Creationists" and "Old Earth Creationists" have valuable things to say. He wouldn't want to hurt either of their feelings, I guess.

We see in this video one of the ironies of the fundamentalist approach. The idea is that the Bible should be read literally as science and history. But this long, boring conversation theoretically about the story of Adam and Eve says almost nothing at all about the story of Adam and Eve that appears in the Book of Genesis. The podcast is devoted to a polemic against the theory of evolution and against abortion. It reminds me that Mark Twain did a charming story called Eve's Diary, which is far more worthwhile to read than listening to that podcast.

To close: Don't take any factual or historical claims in that podcast as accurate without verifying it from a good source. But as fundamentalist theology goes, this

A grim example of using Christian fundamentalism to justify gruesome cruelty

In my recent sampling of conservative Christian podcasts, one I found is notably disturbing. It's on the podcast of one-time Christian contemporary music star Alisa Childers, an interview with a religious sort-of-scholar and entrepreneur Clay Jones on the topic, Why Did God Command the Canaanite Conquest? 03/14/2021. I'm linking to it because I'm posting about it but not embedding it. Because it's creepy. The teaser for it on Childers' YouTube channel uses this image:

For the "heathens" and "unchurched" out there, the conquest of Canaan refers to the Israelite (Hebrew) tribes taking control of the area that would become the Davidic kingdom of Israel. "As told by the [Biblical] Deuteronomist, the conquest of Canaan by Joshua and the Israelite tribes was swift and decisive." (Biblical literature: The conquest of Canaan Britannica Online)

Because of the very influential "Christian Zionist" trend among American Christian fundamentalists that more-or-less unconditionally supports and admires the hardcore rightwing in Israeli politics, how the fundis approach the concept of God's granting the Promised Land to the Hebrews in the Old Testament has a more specific contemporary political meaning.

For the most part, even the most devout believers don't have a lot of trouble understanding that traditional stories handed down from the dawn of the Iron Age, which occurred in the Mediterranean region roughly circa 1200-550 BCE, bear some strange and unpleasant signs of the times in which they lived.

So while most Christians and Jews would find some of the actions taken or ordered by God as reported in the Scriptures to be appalling by modern religious and humanitarian standards, many of them either don't dwell on it much or read the stories as symbols and analogies of some kind. Walter Benjamin in his famous Critique of Violence essay, for instance, took the dramatic story of Korah, who rebelled against the leadership of Moses during the long trek to Canaan described in the Scriptures, as a representation of an important aspect of the nature of law. Gustave Doré created a dramatic picture of how Korah ended up:

And, hey, who doesn't occasionally think it would be convenient if the earth would just swallow up people who annoy you?

But Christian fundamentalists face the particular problem of claiming that the Christian Bible is not only divinely inspired but literally the direct words of God infallibly preserved in the version of the Bible they are using. (The Prophet Mohammed had to settle for direct transmission of the Qur'an from the Archangel Gabriel [Jibril].)

Which gets to why Jones' account more-or-less endorsed by Childers in this video is so disturbing. They focus on whether it was just for God to command the Hebrews, as recounted in the Bible, to "not let a soul remain alive" (!) among specified Canaanite tribes. (Deuteronomy 20: 16-18) Jones describes at some length the sins, particularly sexual sins, of which the Canaanites were guilty. And is pretty emphatic in justifying the slaughter of children. It's just gross. He even uses the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is in Genesis and describes events long before the post-Exodus conquest of Canaan, in order to share his opinion of what disgusting sluts Lot's daughters were. And the heavy ethnonationalist element he wraps into that explanation along with crude psychological assumptions is hard to overlook.

For anyone taking this discussion seriously as anything but fringe fundamentalism, their commentary on what counts as genocide today is strikingly uniformed, at best. (Rafael Lemkin is credited with coining the term "genocide" in 1944.)

I'm discussing that podcast because it's a good example of how some of the uglier characters in the conservative Christian orbit work with some grim, seriously inhumane sentiments and model grotesque attitudes in the form of religious interpretation.

I would argue that this is an inherent problem for a literalist, fundamentalist version of Christianity. Which is a big part of why authoritarians are so often attracted to fundamentalism. This kind of story is a favorite talking point for village atheists as well as the more highbrow New Atheist variety. But even very conservative versions of Christianity can avoid or mitigate this kinds of conclusion. Very importantly, the Bible is heavily filtered in almost all churches through ministers and teachers, who would generally rather not try to talk through theological/philosophical questions of "theodicy," the origin of evil.

For another, the Christian religion generally embraces the notion that Jesus inaugurated a New Covenant with humanity, to replace (or at least hugely supplement) the original divine covenant with Israel as the Chosen People. So even in the broadest concept, Christians already accept that God officially made a reset of how he would relate to humanity. So, unpleasant Old Testament models of conduct can be fairly easily dismissed by arguing that they were officially updated with the New Testament.

In reality, mainstream Catholic and Protestant Biblical scholars have little problem with incorporating the findings of historians, archaeologists, and textual critics who recognize that in terms of actual history, there is limited material evidence for the conquest of Canaan as described in the Old Testament. Or for the Exodus out of Egypt, for that matter.

None of that makes it any less sickening how Clay Jones uses a crude fundamentalist to justify deliberate killing of civilians, very specifically including children. He even makes the argument that the Hebrews were doing the Canaanite children a favor to put them to death because it meant they (probably) all went to Heaven. And at least some in his audience will have no problem in applying that alibi to contemporary situations. This is sick stuff. With sadistic smiles included during the telling.