I must respond to Clifton Adcock’s recent article covering the
Reclaiming America for Christ event titled “Reclamation project” (Aug.
10, Oklahoma Gazette), which detailed one instance in a long
series of troubling anti-reality events in recent history. I will
address a few key points and encourage my fellow Oklahomans to look at
these ideas and others with a more discerning and skeptical eye.
—Dinosaurs
and the Bible: It’s puzzling that prominent figures still publicly
proclaim the Earth only a few thousand years old and that man and
dinosaur coexisted, despite vast bodies of evidence conclusive to the
contrary. Evolution is well-documented scientific fact. Gravity is also
“just a theory.” G. Thomas Sharp, founder and chairman of the Creation
Truth Foundation and founder of the Institute of Biblical Worldview
Studies, claims “significant observational support” for a young,
designed Earth, but there just isn’t any evidence that isn’t tainted
with confirmation bias.
—Public office and creationism:
Were
this a “Reclaiming America for Allah” rally, we’d likely hear more
reporting on the protests than on the content of the rally itself. This
ideology’s supporters conveniently forget that one of the greatest
aspects of a representative democracy is that our elected officials are
intended to protect our society as a whole from an oppressive majority
rule, and it’s this tenet that prompted the Establishment Clause of the
First Amendment to prevent any sort of theocracy from rising up.
—America’s Christian heritage:
Even
cursory fact-checking will reveal problems with this idea. Pastor Paul
Blair claims that almost all of the founders were Christian, but a
closer look reveals that most fell into the categories of Deist,
cultural Christian, and agnostic; none of whom would claim today’s
fundamentalists as ideological allies.
I’m troubled that our media as a whole hasn’t approached this movement with a more skeptical eye. I encourage the Gazette to
lead the charge for sensibility and take care not to give credence to
such thoroughly debunked nonsense without a healthy dose of
fact-checking.
Res ipsa loquitur.
—Travis Ray Nance
Oklahoma City
This article appears in Aug 10-16, 2011.