The Christianist Struggle to Ignore the Non-Existence Adam and Eve

While the Christianists and their political whores in the Republican Party like to depict gays and gay marriage as the biggest menace facing western civilization and the Christianists' perverted version of Christianity, in actuality, by far the much bigger threat is the fact that science has pretty much proven that the Adam and Eve of Genesis never existed. They are merely a myth promoted by ignorant and uneducated nomadic tribesman. And it follows that, if they never existed, there was no serpent and Fall, no Original sin, no exile from the Garden of Eden, and ultimately no need for a Messiah. Or certainly not a Messiah as depicted in the Bible which the Christianists and Christian fundamentalists like to describe as "the inerrant word of God." Indeed, the Bible proves to be anything but inerrant and the entire story line of most of the Bible collapses. What one is left with is one folk version - and many others exist - of the origin of the earth and mankind. Moreover, the role of Christ as the Messiah who the New Testament claims to have been predicted by the Old Testament likewise falls into serious question.

While the reality of this enormous theological crisis has not trickled down to local parishes and pastors, the danger to Christianity (especially the fundamentalist version) as we know it has not been lost by some in the upper tiers of various denominations or in more intellectually inclined seminaries. And frankly, the problem is not one that can be easily circumvented unless one is willing to simply embrace ignorance and close one's eyes to the truth - something that unfortunately many fundamentalist seem all too ready to do. In a piece on Huffington Post, Pete Enns, former Professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary for 14 years and currently a professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University, tries to paper over the devastating blow the non-existence of Adam and Eve. Ultimately, while he tries to explain away why Adam and Eve should not be taken to be historic personages, he fails to address the fact that without them, the whole Christian messages collapses. Here are highlights from his post:

If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn't. If you believe, as evangelicals do, that God himself is responsible for what's in the Bible, you have a problem on your hands. Once you open the door to the possibility that God's version of human origins isn't what actually happened -- well, the dominoes start unraveling down the slippery slope. The next step is uncertainty, chaos and despair about one's personal faith.

That, more or less, is the evangelical log flume of fear, and I have seen it played out again and again.

In recent years, the matter has gotten far worse. Popular figures like Richard Dawkins have done an in-your-face-break-the-backboard-slam-dunk over the heads of defenders of the biblical story. They've taken great delight in making sure Main Street knows evolution is true, and therefore the Bible is "God's big book of bad ideas" (Bill Maher) and Christians are morons for taking it seriously. Evangelicals have been on high alert damage control mode.

Evolution is a threat, and many evangelicals are fighting to keep Adam in the family photo album. But in their rush to save Christianity, some evangelicals have been guilty of all sorts of strained, idiosyncratic or obscurantist tactics: massaging or distorting the data, manipulating the legal system, scaring their constituencies and strong-arming those of their own camp who raise questions.

These sorts of tactics get a lot of press, but behind them is a deeper problem -- a problem that gets close to the heart of evangelicalism itself and hampers any true dialogue. It has to do with what evangelicals expect from the Bible.

Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, "What does the Bible say about that?" And then informed by "what the Bible says," they are ready to make a "biblical" judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about "human origins." It isn't. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to do such a thing [explain human origins] is simply wrongheaded.

Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel's monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.

Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver. These kinds of conversations are already happening, though too often quietly and behind closed doors. Evangelicals owe it to their children and their children's children to bring the discussion out into the open.

The fact that the Bible is not inerrant - indeed, it's flat out wrong on many things - terrifies evangelicals and fundamentalists. Their entire neat little world falls apart and, perhaps most terrifying of all, they have to think for themselves and find a way to live with uncertainty. As a corollary to this, I continue to believe that gays are a flash point with evangelicals because if the Bible is wrong about us, then it's likely wrong about most if not everything. Which means they have wasted their lives and often been miserable for no legitimate reason. And that realization is the worse of all.