The Fundamentalists War On Thinking Christians

Just as the evangelicals in the Republican Party base are increasingly insistent that GOP candidates meet religious extremist imposed ideological purity standards, so too are thinking Christians being driven out of fundamentalist affiliated colleges.   Any signs of accepting modern knowledge and science or any recognition of objective reality is nothing short of heresy.  Through "statements of Faith" and increasingly by outright firing, professors that do not fully embrace ignorance are on the witch hunt hit list.  The latest target is Professor Tom Oord of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU).  An obvious issue needs to be reviewing the accreditation of such institutions and whether or not scholarship funds should be available for backward, discriminatory institutions (in my view, the answer is no).  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the growing witch hunts at such colleges and, in my view, misnamed universities.  Here are highlights:

Evangelicals have just voted another intellectual off their island.  On the eve of April Fools’ Day, while on vacation in Hawaii with his wife, Professor Tom Oord got an email from the president of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) notifying him that he was being terminated. NNU is one of eight schools sponsored by the evangelical denomination Church of the Nazarene.

Oord was a tenured full professor—the highest rank in academia—who had been on the NNU faculty for 13 years, after several years as my colleague at Eastern Nazarene College (ENC).  Oord was the university’s leading scholar, with 20 books on his CV; by most measures he was also the denomination’s leading scholar and one of a tiny number of Nazarene theologians whose reputations reached beyond evangelicalism. Oord had won multiple teaching awards and was wildly popular with students and respected by his colleagues. He had brought over a million dollars of grant money to the University—a remarkable accomplishment for a professor at a small unsung liberal arts college.

Oord, however, was controversial.  He strongly supported evolution and had long been a target of creationists in the denomination. He embraced “open theism,” the view that God does not know the future but responds in love—rather than coercive control—to events as they occur, rather than foreordaining everything. Fundamentalist critics called him a heretic and had been vying for his termination for years.

Getting rid of tenured faculty requires administrative creativity. In Oord’s case a small downturn in graduate enrollment cracked open a legal door that allowed the president to declare a financial problem. Curiously this financial problem required the termination of only one faculty member. Even more curious, this financial problem came in a year of record overall enrollment when NNU was celebrating its great financial health in press releases.

Alexander and Oord, however, have been at odds for years. As recently as last year Alexander informed Oord that he would not be returning because a theological review board was investigating him and was about, in so many words, to declare him a heretic.

The controversy at NNU is, tragically, just one of many related incidents that has plagued the Church of the Nazarene. In 2007 biologist Richard Colling was forced out of another Nazarene University for his book arguing that evolution was true and should be understood as God’s way of creating. In 2010 I left Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) after years of being attacked by fundamentalists as a heretic for my views on science.

An entire college could be staffed with the victims of fundamentalist witch-hunts in the Church of the Nazarene. And, if we add the victims of witch-hunts in other evangelical traditions, we could staff a major research university.

The controversy at NNU is one battle in the long war that is being waged—and slowly won— against thinking evangelical Christians. Battles at the various institutions are eerily similar and unfold along the following lines: Progressive, educated scholars push their traditions to make peace with new ideas, to be open to reconsidering historical positions on human origins, the nature of God, the morality of homosexuality, the meaning of Bible stories, the status of other religions.

American evangelicalism’s failure to make peace with the progressive scholars within its ranks—or even keep the conversation going—has alienated it from a broad range of scholarship. In The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, historian Randall Stephens and I lament that most evangelicals now get their science from young earth creationist Ken Ham, their history from the discredited revisionist David Barton, their social science from the homophobic James Dobson.  

Noll coined the term “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” to describe the intellectual crisis of his religious tradition—a crisis created by that tradition’s inability to break free of the fundamentalism out of which it arose.

One has to wonder why anyone hires a graduate of such institutions.  They certainly are not well educated.  Of course, the same holds true of Liberty University here in Virginia.  I would never hire a Liberty graduate since they obviously have been educated in a world of fairy tales and delusion.

The Descent of Evangelical Christians into Abject Ignorance

This blog has looked before at the correlation between the belief in Bible inerrancy and low levels of education with evangelicals routinely being revealed as the least educated overall and the most believing in the Bible as inerrant fact.   As the evangelical Christians - those I call the Christofascists - have taken over the Republican Party we now see only 43% of self-identifying Republicans believing in evolution.  The sane and educated people have simply left the GOP, a party that once valued science and knowledge.  But even among Evangelicals there is an exodus of the younger educated factions who go to college, receive an education and come to see the religious faith in which the have been raised/brainwashed as unacceptable.  A Piece in The Daily Beast authored by a professor at an evangelical college looks at the downward spiral among evangelicals.  Here are excerpts:

According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.

The connection between acceptance of evolution and political affiliation has grown stronger over the past three years, exacerbating the polarization now plaguing Congress. Among Democrats, acceptance of evolution increased by 3 percent, to 67 percent, while among Republicans it decreased from 54 percent to 43 percent.

The trajectory is not encouraging, especially as it runs in parallel with a steady increase in the evidence for evolution—evidence now piled so high that not even one evolutionary biologist at any of America’s research universities rejects the theory. Evolution is as widely accepted in biology departments as gravity is in physics departments.

So how is it that 64 percent of America’s “white evangelical evangelical Protestants,” an unusually powerful and wealthy demographic, remains so strongly opposed to evolution?

I am a white evangelical Protestant, or at least I was until persuaded to leave a couple of years ago. Raised in a parsonage, I grew up in that tradition and, after earning a Ph.D. in physics, I taught science, including evolution, at an evangelical college, one of approximately 160 similar—and accredited—institutions in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Most evangelical colleges teach evolution, albeit quietly, carefully, and often tentatively, although there are exceptions. 

In an ideal world these efforts should slowly trickle onto Main Street, where they would inform ordinary evangelicals, including those who run for Congress. In time, Darwin’s dangerous idea should become widely accepted, just as Christians gradually gave credence to Galileo’s dangerous idea about the motion of the earth.  But that is not what is happening.

For a quarter century I taught scientific theories of origins—evolution and the Big Bang Theory—under a cloud of suspicion that waxed and waned but never totally disappeared. With few exceptions, my mostly evangelical students accepted these ideas. I took informal polls indicating that most of the 50 percent of my students who rejected evolution at the beginning of my course accepted it by the end. My colleagues at other evangelical colleges report similar experiences. We were hopeful that these evangelical students would become leaders of their faith communities and gradually persuade their fellow evangelicals that evolution was not a lie from hell—which was what many of them had been taught in Sunday school. But instead scientifically informed young evangelicals became so alienated from their home churches that they walked away, taking their enlightenment with them.

An alarming study by the Barna group looked at the mass exodus of 20-somethings from evangelicalism and discovered that one of the major sources of discontent was the perception that “Christianity was antagonistic to science.” Anti-evolution, and general suspicion of science, has become such a significant part of the evangelical identity that many people feel compelled to choose one or the other. Many of my most talented former students no longer attend any church, and some have completely abandoned their faith traditions.

[S]ome professors, alarmed by the persistent gap between the evangelical community and the findings of science—the gap that drives their students out of their churches—have naively presumed to educate their larger faith communities by writing books and articles in support of scientific theories of origins such as evolution and the Big Bang. Their quiet whispers thus become loud proclamations. Influential leaders read their books and are horrified to discover that a faculty member at “their” college is spreading “lies from the pit of hell” and destroying the faith of the students. Campaigns of various sorts are mounted and pressure exerted on the college leadership to remove that dangerous professor.

Productive scholarship that would be highly valued at other institutions became instead a major liability. Administrators complained that I was too controversial and creating public relations problems . . . 

I spent countless hours in the office of a succession of college presidents, explaining why Christians needed to make peace with evolution, no matter how painful. I was forced to communicate and even meet with hostile external constituents to defend well-established science against people who knew nothing about it beyond the challenges it posed to their interpretation of the Bible. One such watchdog group, the Reformed Nazarenes, rejoiced when I finally left the college.


My story is far from unique. Indeed, it’s almost typical. Understandably, only a handful of evangelical scholars have published books and articles in defense of evolution, but many of them have been forced to resign as a result.

It is no surprise that American Christofascists are focusing so much effort on Africa.  To thrive, their poisonous religious beliefs require (i) an ignorant, uneducated audience, or (ii) simple minded individuals who due to their own psychological issues are terrified to think or question hogwash that has been spoon fed to them.   It is frightening that such mental midgets now hold so much sway over the GOP which seems engaged in a race towards utter ignorance.