Phil Vischer | Being Evangelical

Vischer:

And I was thinking about God, you know, breathing, forming Adam from the dust and breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. And I thought, okay, I remember thinking, does God have lungs and a mouth? No, I don’t—so I think that’s probably some kind of symbolism or, you know, poetic language. And that just occurred to me, well, if, if the mouth and the lungs could be poetic, then couldn’t the dust be poetic? So I wrote a paper. I remember writing a paper freshman year of Bible College—couldn’t the dust be poetic for lower life forms? Wouldn’t that be possible? And it was the first time I found myself kind of saying this isn’t free from questioning, right?

Phil Vischer, VeggieTales creator and host of the Holy Post podcast.

Stump: 

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking to some really great and well-known people on this podcast over the last few years—NT Wright, Francis Collins, Jane Goodall. But my kids were way more impressed when they heard I was going to talk to Bob the Tomato. If you’re not familiar with him, he and Larry the Cucumber were the co-hosts of the wildly popular animated video series Veggie Tales that retold Bible stories for kids. Phil Vischer was the voice of Bob the Tomato and a bunch of other characters (several of which I coaxed him into doing for us). But that’s not really why we’re talking to him here. He has become an influential voice and thought leader in Evangelical Culture. 

As the host of the Holy Post podcast for the past few years, Phil has spent a lot of time talking about what it means to be an Evangelical. That topic turns out to have an interesting overlap with many of the topics we’re engaged with. And Phil has not avoided wading into the controversial side of things. We ask him about a couple of those episodes that stirred the pot a bit with some evangelicals when he talked about young earth creationism and systemic racism. Not everyone will agree with everything Phil has to say but the conversation was really enlightening about the complicated divisions that exist within evangelicalism today. Whether you use that term to describe yourself or not, I think you’ll find this episode interesting.

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump: 

Well, Phil Vischer. Good to have you on the podcast. Thanks for talking to us. 

Vischer:

Thank you, glad I could be invited and drop by.

Stump: 

So you have one of those voices that people of a certain age within American evangelicalism will find eerily familiar.

Vischer:

Hi, kids. I’m Bob the Tomato. You mean that voice? Is that the voice?

Stump: 

I was gonna say, could you give us a little bit of “if you like to talk…”?

Vischer:

[singing] If you like to talk to tomatoes. Hello Bob, we’re talking about science and religion.

Stump: 

So how many different voices were there that you were behind? And how do you…

Vischer:

VeggieTales I did about 20. I think about 20 different characters. About half of the main characters and then my buddy Mike Nawrocki was like, I’m Bob the tomato, he’s Larry. I’m Jimmy Gourd. He’s Jerry. I’m Philippe the French pea. He’s Jean Claude the French Pea. But you know then, I’m Archibald Asparagus. So good to see you. Now I’m going to interview NT Wright. You can kind of switch characters or draw your upon grape: Hi, I’m a very old grape that doesn’t understand why I’m in a show about vegetables. Yeah, it’s fun. It made my kids when they were young get so sick of it at times. They would sometimes just say “Dad, would you just talk like a real dad?”

Stump: 

Well, I have three kids who grew up watching VeggieTales which means I spent a lot of time hearing VeggieTales from the other room. Yesterday I was preparing to talk to you and found myself going down a YouTube rabbit hole listening to silly songs like “Oh Where is My Hairbrush?”

Vischer:

And now it’s time for Silly Songs with Larry, the part of the show where Larry comes out and sings a silly song.

Stump: 

“Barbara Manatee” and “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything”.

Vischer:

I have a four and a half year old granddaughter and she just discovered VeggieTales and it was through the silly songs so we pulled out the top 10 Silly Song countdown DVD. I had to get a DVD player. Like how does this work again, physical media? I’m confused. So I was just like, well, this is good. It’s been so long. Oh, that’s pretty good. 

Stump: 

Well, at the risk of sounding like a complete fanboy, I also have to say that when I worked at a Christian college, I was in a band that would often play for students and probably the most acclaim I ever got as a musician was one time when our band covered “You’re His Cheeseburger” and had all the students singing along with us. Goodness, that was Mr. Lunt, wasn’t it? Were you him too?

Vischer:

Yeah, that’s me too. Yeah, I’m him too. [singing] He said to her I’d like a cheeseburger. And I might like a milkshake as well.

Stump: 

That was an epic song.

Vischer:

Yeah, Mike wrote that, and to be inspired—this did not win us many fans in ultra conservative Christianity—to be inspired, we were all sitting around the studio listening to Meatloaf. Some of his classic power ballads. That was kind of the inspiration. But you know, you have to look for inspiration sometimes in places that are outside your normal tribe.

Stump: 

So, Meatloaf on VeggieTales. Sounds like a little conflict of interest.

Vischer:

Or at least a decent lunch. I don’t know.

Stump: 

Well, and I also thought I should at least ask that you know that tomatoes aren’t technically vegetables, right? 

Vischer: 

Neither are cucumbers, technically. Anything with seeds on the inside is a fruit. That’s what we learned in about year three, that the whole premise was faulty.

Stump: 

Okay, so why are we at BioLogos really talking to you? Well, you’ve got your own podcast now, The Holy Post, you’re involved in producing other media. And it seems to me that you’ve got your finger on the pulse of American Evangelical culture, at least one strand of it. And that’s something we at BioLogos try to understand, as we try to speak into it and even speak from it to some extent. So we’d like to get some of your insights on that. But before we go straight there, can we hear a little bit more about you yourself? Where’d you come from? What was your family like growing up?

Vischer:

Me myself? I came from a very, very, very conservative Christian family. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was the first nondenominational radio preacher in America. We’re from the Christian Missionary Alliance, a conservative denomination founded by A.B. Simpson in the 1890s. My great-grandfather knew Simpson, was ordained by Simpson, was sent from Nyack to Chicago, planted the first CMA Church in Chicago that was later pastored by A.W. Tozer. And then moved on to Omaha, Nebraska and planted the Omaha Gospel Tabernacle. And then was asked by the Woodman of the World Insurance Agency who had just built a building their new headquarters in 1921, that when it was built, was the tallest building west of the Mississippi. They just launched a new radio station and they asked him if he would come do a little service on the first Sunday of the radio station to kind of give a devotional and say a prayer and you know, dedicate the station for the good of the world. And he did and it went over so well that they asked him to do it again every Sunday. He preached on the radio from 1923 until 1964, when he died, at which point it was the oldest, longest-running radio show in America. So there’s some weird stuff in my background. My mother, this gets even better, my mother has a memory of sitting on the couch in my great grandfather’s living room, on the couch in between on one side of her Bob Jones, Jr. and on the other side of her Bob Jones Sr. She was eight years old, sitting in between the two of them. So I got deep roots.

Stump: 

And so at least according to your Wikipedia page, that fount of all knowledge, you and I are pretty close to the same age, you might have me by a little bit. Did you have the typical sort of youth group experiences growing up in the 80s: listening to Christian music, going to church camp, all that sort of thing?

Vischer:

I didn’t do church camp because I was just too shy. I didn’t really like to leave the house that much. I like to build Legos and clay and experiment with super eight millimeter cameras, and people kind of freaked me out a little bit. So I stayed home, mostly, but my safe place for socializing was church, was a youth group. We were in Muscatine, Iowa until I was near the end of middle school. Then my parents’ marriage fell apart and my dad moved out of state. At that time in Muscatine, Iowa, there wasn’t a whole lot of reason for us to stay there. And family friends of ours, a friend named Evan Welsh was the chaplain of Wheaton College. My great-grandfather spoke at Wheaton every year, when he was alive, he’d come out and do a chapel at Wheaton, or in Moody, so we knew Wheaton College very well. So the chaplain of Wheaton College went to my mom and said, why don’t you guys consider starting over somewhere else? Why don’t you come up and look around here? So my mom drove up to the Wheaton area and looked around in 1980, and bought a little house and moved us up. So I had one month left of middle school when we moved up to the Wheaton area and kind of started our lives over again.

Stump: 

And we’ll talk a little bit about views of science within evangelicalism in a bit, but how about you personally, in that regard? Any interesting encounters with science or tensions maybe that you inherited with science from your faith views?

Vischer:

It didn’t come up much when I was very young, that I remember. So it really wasn’t until high school that… I loved my physics class. I liked biology. I hated dissecting things, even a worm is like, too much, too gross. So I wasn’t huge on biology, but I’m learning all this stuff, at a big public high school in the Chicago area, learning all this stuff. I remember at one point going home, you know, to my mom and saying, “Mom, do we believe in evolution?” And she didn’t have an answer.  She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no, she was a little deer stuck in the headlights moment of “I don’t know how to answer that question.” 

Stump: 

So how did you get out after that?

Vischer:

I kind of felt like I was on my own. I remember having a poster at one point in my room, that was—I don’t know who produced this poster. It was a very detailed painting of all of the supposedly intermediate humanoids, hominids, whatever they were, that had turned out to be fake, you know, and it was, you know, Piltdown Man and Java man. “This turned out to be the bone of pig” you know, and it ended with, man thinks he’s so wise, but only God is the source of wisdom. So I thought, okay, well, I guess this is the side I’m on. I don’t know if it was from our Christian bookstore, or someone at church gave it to me, but it was, we’re gonna take it to those guys that are telling us that we’re wrong, and that God didn’t do anything. And so I thought, well, I guess this is the side that I’m on. I’m not entirely comfortable, but if this is the side that I’m on, I was ready to go to bat for my team. I was a team player, I didn’t like to break the rules. I didn’t like to get in trouble. So if the poster said there were absolutely no primitive, upright walking creatures that led to us, then that’s what I believed. Then I went off to a conservative Bible college, St. Paul Bible College, this is our denominational school in the Minneapolis area, where my dad had gone before me and my sister had been there the year before, just for a year. I was kind of timid, I was thinking about moving to LA and going to film school, but that sounded terrifying, because LA is just full of heathens and heathen behavior. So I thought, I’ll go to this little college in Minneapolis and get a Bible certificate. 

I don’t know why I ended up writing a paper on Genesis 1. I don’t know if it was assigned, I don’t know if I picked it, I don’t remember. But I was looking at Genesis 1, and I was like, okay, this is kind of the crux of everything here. I was thinking about God breathing, forming Adam from the dust and breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. I remember thinking, does God have lungs and a mouth? No, I don’t— So I think that’s probably some kind of symbolism or poetic language. That just occurred to me, well, if, if the mouth and the lungs could be poetic, then couldn’t the dust be poetic? So I wrote a paper. I remember writing a paper freshman year of Bible College, couldn’t the dust be poetic for lower life forms? Wouldn’t that be possible? And it was the first time I found myself, you know, kind of saying this isn’t free from questioning, right? Whether the interpretation that I’ve inherited, is it okay if I question that interpretation? I had no idea how new Young Earth Creationism was in its popularity in the church at that point, that it didn’t go back very far at all, that all the fundamentalist fathers were old earth guys. They were day-age guys or gap theory guys, I didn’t know that. But I just thought, what if this could be a metaphor? Then why couldn’t this be a metaphor? So, it loosened the tension quite a bit, and just enabled me to pursue both faith and… as Francis Bacon would say, to read the book of Scripture and the book of nature side by side, and assume that if they conflict, I’m either reading one or the other incorrectly.

Stump: 

Well, I’m going to loop back to some of that about young earth creationism and what you’ve had to say about that in the last year. But to set the context for that, let’s move to a different E word instead of evolution. Let’s talk a little bit more about evangelicalism. You do these explainer videos now which are very nice, by the way, and about a year ago, you did one called “What is an Evangelical? Toward the end, you asked what is evangelicalism today? You answered and I’m quoting you here, “it’s a hot mess”. And I encourage everybody to watch the video. I think we can link to it in our show notes. But can you give us maybe a quick overview of how evangelicalism came to be the hot mess that it is today?

Vischer:

Yeah. In the video, we go back to the first time we see the word evangelical used as a noun not as an adjective. “You are an Evangelical,” they were evangelicals, and it was a descriptor of the followers of Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. So it meant something specific there in that they were people that had a very high view of Scripture. They were conversionists and they were revivalists. They thought that you’re not a Christian because you’re born in a Christian country or even because you’re born in a Christian family, you’re a Christian because you yourself have made a choice to follow Jesus. Ideally that’s happened at a big revival meeting somewhere which is what Whitfield and Edwards were doing all over the English world. So that’s where it started. It kind of was distilled down eventually to a high view of Scripture, conversionism, activism — biblicism, conversionism activism, and Crucocentrism, the centrality of Jesus and the cross, the importance of the Bible and the authority of Scripture, and the importance of a personal conversion experience. That’s what evangelicalism was. Then you hit 1875 through 1920 and the modernist fundamentalist controversy, where modernist theology from Germany lands first at Union Seminary and then spreads to Princeton Seminary and splits the Presbyterian denomination in half between modernists and fundamentalists. So you have this movement which is on my side, which was to say, we’re losing the fundamentals of the faith, we need to circle the wagons and defend the faith. The Scopes Monkey Trial was a big central hinge point in that, circling the wagons and defending the faith. Over time that fundamentalist side became more and more associated with the South and the modernist side became more and more associated with the North. The fundamentalist side started taking on more characteristics of Southern Christianity, which could include anti-intellectualism, separatism, I mean, this was the part of the country that literally tried to leave. So there began to be a separatist streak and you see it in the formation of schools like Bob Jones University, “we’re not going to send our kids to your schools anymore, because you’re going to turn them all into atheists and communists.” And that separatism and growing anti-intellectualism, then inspired guys like Harold Ockinga and Billy Graham and Carl Henry to say, No, we have a high view of the Bible, but we also have a high view of the mind. And we don’t want to abandon the culture, we don’t want to abandon the life of a mind, we think there needs to be something else, which started the Neo-evangelical counter-movement to fundamentalism, and that was kind of centered around Wheaton, Illinois, Wheaton College, they founded Fuller Seminary to be a center of Neo-evangelical thought. The whole idea was, we’re going to hold to the Bible, we’re going to hold to the orthodox historical faith, but we’re going to reject the separatism and the anti-intellectualism of fundamentalism. And so it was pretty clear for a while if you were a Southern Baptist, you would not call yourself an Evangelical, you were a Baptist. Evangelical was a northern thing. It was Billy Graham and Carl Henry, and Christianity Today until we get to the 1970s, and you’ve got guys like Jerry Falwell that have decided that they need to kind of come out of exile and exert political power. A lot of that came down to the move by the IRS to take away the tax exempt status of any school that practiced racial segregation. 

Stump: 

So this is really interesting. I think a lot of people today have heard the sort of revisionist history that that movement by Falwell and the attempt to get involved with politics had a lot more to do with abortion. But when you unpack this, you show pretty convincingly that that’s not the case, right?

Vischer:

The historian Randall Balmer has done a great deal of work on this. Interviewing the key people that were involved to say, you know, what, when when did the Moral Majority adopt abortion as a key platform? It was not at the beginning. What moved Jerry Falwell to become politically active was the IRS suing Bob Jones University and attempting to take away their tax exempt status, which would have badly wounded the school. And then the fact that…

Stump: 

Specifically because they wouldn’t allow people of color to come? 

Vischer:

Yes, they did not allow their first African American student to attend until 1971. And at that point, you could only be married if you were Black, because if you were single and Black, that would present an existential threat to misogyny, if you were on campus. They would not allow interracial dating on campus until the year 2000 after George Bush, the Jr. spoke there. And everyone remembered that… he just spoke at a school that doesn’t allow interracial dating, and there was so much pressure at that point. But yeah, the “segregation now segregation forever” attitude was pretty thoroughly ingrained in parts, not all, but parts of Southern Christianity. That’s what Billy Graham was rebelling against. It’s what Harold Ockinga and Carl Henry were rebelling against is that that’s not a part of Christianity. Discrimination is not a part of that.

Stump: 

So we have these Northern, then they were called Neoevangelicals.

Vischer:

Yeah, like the Matrix.

Stump: 

So this is soon after World War Two?

Vischer:

Yes. And then you have the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals founded by Harold Ockinga, you have the founding of World Relief, also by Harold Ockinga, out of the National Association of Evangelicals, the founding of the National Religious Broadcasters also out of the NAE. So all of these structures, Post World War Two structures. World Relief was founded as War Relief by Harold Ockinga, because so many fundamentalist Christians had become so inward looking that there wasn’t a lot of concern for the suffering of people in the war around the world. So that was a war relief effort that then became World Relief. 

So this was a major movement. If you look at Intervarsity Press and, and Tyndale House, all these northern publishers, most of them were founded in the 20 years after World War Two. New missions agencies, all sorts of parachurch organizations that were all part of the Neoevangelical movement, and it was primarily in the North. Billy Graham association was in Minneapolis, because he was at the time the President of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis. So this was a whole kind of a Northern saying we’re going to be conservative Christians but in a different way than we see being practiced by, Bob Jones Sr. and Bob Jones, Jr. and others in the South. At that point, that led Bob Jones Jr. to declare about Billy Graham, this is an exact quote “Billy Graham is doing more harm to the cause of Jesus than any other person on earth.” So that’s how bad it was. I mean, people people now, particularly the mainstream media. And this is largely why I do what I do. If you ask a reporter from the New York Times, what’s the difference between Billy Graham and Bob Jones? They’d said nothing, they’re are the same. Well no, Bob Jones thought Billy Graham was a heretic. When Billy Graham did a crusade near Bob Jones University, Bob Jones Jr. said if any student attends that crusade, they’ll be expelled from the school. You would be expelled from your Christian college for attending a Billy Graham crusade. That’s how distinct Southern fundamentalism was from Northern Neoevangelicalism. Until Jerry Falwell wanted to start a political movement and some others Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrick and there were others, like how do we mobilize that each one had something they were upset about. Phyllis Schlafly was upset about feminism. Jerry Falwell was upset about integration in schools and forced busing. Paul Weyrick just wanted Republicans to win. That’s really what it was entirely about. And he couldn’t figure out why there couldn’t be a coalition of conservative Catholics, conservative Mormons and conservative Christians to put Republicans into the White House. That’s where the religious right came from, which forced busing wasn’t nearly the issue in the North that it was in the South. So that was not a nationally unifying issue. It wasn’t until Francis Schaefer and C. Everett Koop started writing about abortion and euthanasia and did a film series produced by his son, Frankie Schaefer that toured churches called “Whatever Happened to the Human Race.” That was in 1979. That film series made abortion an issue, which was then picked up in 1980, when most of the conservatives that were trying to make this new coalition decided that Ronald Reagan was their guy. Do you follow that? Because I got a wall chart.

Stump: 

I’ve seen some statistics lately, and by that I mean here in just the last couple of months, that are suggesting that the term evangelical is becoming less and less about religious identity and more about political affiliation. For example, the percentage of evangelicals who go to church is down considerably. Even the percentage of evangelicals who identify as Christian is going down, so that evangelical is taking on these other connotations. I know lots of people personally now who say, I’m not so sure I want to keep using this word to describe myself. Almost in The Princess Bride, “you keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means” anymore. You say you’re hoping to hold on to the term. Give us a little bit more of what’s behind that, what you think the word should mean, and whether we can recapture what it means as opposed to what it’s starting to mean, in popular media, at least.

Vischer:

There are a group of evangelical thinkers, Ed Stetzer, David French, Russell Moore, that are, Beth Moore is another example, that were extremely, I don’t know if disturbed is the right, disturbed with the white Christian embrace of Donald Trump. That’s a growing group of people. There are some that have said, I just can’t use the word anymore. Most of the ones in this circle are saying, No, it’s a good term, it’s a historical term, it has a meaning, let’s fight to redeem it. That’s kind of where I am because, and David French has brought this up, if I say I’m no longer an Evangelical, most of my friends will assume I’ve walked away from my faith. And that’s not the message I want to send.

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hi Language of God listeners. Here at BioLogos we think that asking questions is a worthwhile part of any faith journey. We hope this podcast helps you to think through long held questions and consider new ones but you probably have other questions we haven’t covered yet. That’s why we want to take this quick break to tell you about the common questions page on our website. You’ll find questions like “How could humans have evolved and still be in the image of God?” “How should we interpret the Genesis flood account?” and “What created God?” Each with thoughtful and in depth answers written in collaboration by scientists, biblical scholars and other experts. Just go to biologos.org and click the common questions tab at the top of the page. Back to the show!

Stump: 

You also did an explainer video on race, which came out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, walking through the concept of institutional racism, the laws that were put into place with the specific intent of disadvantaging people of color. Did you get pushback on that? 

Vischer:

Oh, no, no, no, everybody loved it.

Stump: 

Everybody loves it, huh?

Vischer:

Because race isn’t an issue that generates any controversy in America. The initial feedback was good. Then people said, Oh, this is such a clear explanation of the history of race in America, I’m going to forward it to all my friends. Then their friends are like, oh, yeah, this is good, I’m going to forward it to all my friends. But, sooner or later, you bump into friends of friends that aren’t quite on the same page on race.

Stump: 

They aren’t as friendly as you get further down the line.

Vischer:

Yeah. And then all of a sudden… I remember I put that video out on a Tuesday and by Thursday it had been viewed half a million times. Then by the next week, it had been viewed 2 million times and it has been viewed like 7 million times now. So it just went viral as a simple explainer of race, the history of race in America. In the first week, somebody said, “Hey, Phil’s woke.” But it was an African American person, and they meant it as a compliment. Then about three weeks later, because this is in the middle of the George Floyd stuff, and early on in the George Floyd demonstrations, the general attitude of the country was, “yeah, that was a terrible thing. That was a terrible thing that happened. I don’t blame them for demonstrating.” And then it suddenly got pol—It was like masks, it suddenly got politicized. People started lining up and saying they are disobeying the law. It wasn’t that big a deal, because he was a bad guy. And everything got politicized. Suddenly, people started saying, “Hey, Phil Vischer is woke” and they were white people, and they didn’t mean it as a compliment. What just happened? What just happened? I was just complimented with that word two weeks ago, and now I’m being insulted with the same word. What’s going on? Then someone said for the first time, “you’re promoting CRT, aren’t you?” And I said, “what’s CRT? I’ve never heard of it.” It was amazing, about a six month period to see what was considered a very even-handed, non-partisan presentation of the history of race in America suddenly bring out knives and banners and war chants of “we must disprove your video because you’re a woke Marxist.” What just happened here?

Stump: 

Well, you’ve not shied away from controversy. And I appreciate that you’re willing to stick your nose in it when it needs to be there. Let’s talk about another topic in which you’ve done that, something that happened as a result of your evangelicalism video where at the end, you talked about some characteristics of Evangelicals today.

Vischer:

Of fundamentalists.

Stump: 

Of fundamentalists, and that many deny mainstream science and a visual to go along with that which was a picture of Ken Ham. What happened as a result of that? What could possibly go wrong?

Vischer:  

It’s like. I’m not even going to compare it to anything there. I have interact because we’ve had you know, we’ve had John Walton talking about Genesis 1 on our podcast, you know, six or seven times over the last 10 years. So our core audience for our podcast very much knows that we respect other ways to read Genesis 1 than the Ken Ham, YEC, Creation Magazine, Creation Museum way. So when I make the video, I’m kind of thinking this is for our fans, I’m making this for our fans, but then it gets shared and then it gets shared. So of course, Ken Ham saw it. And that turned into a big mess with some, you know, podcast episodes back and forth to say, “wait a minute, that’s not what I said. Here’s what I said.” It went for about, I don’t know, three or four months and then finally petered out.

Stump: 

I might be fanning the flames here again. I listened to the podcast that you did and thought it was really interesting about this, where you kind of walked through some of the history of young earth creationism. What did you learn in the process of researching all of that?

Vischer: 

Well, you can spin it one of two ways. You could spin it, that, you know, young earth creationism is what everybody thought up until Darwin showed up. And you can actually build that case with selective quotes from certain people. But I think a more accurate way to look at it is, people really had no idea how old the Earth was. It just didn’t occur to them to spend a whole lot of time thinking about it, until they started seeing evidence for more age than they previously thought. Initially, there were some geologists, as they’re starting to look at the geological column, saying, Wow, this looks like layers laid down layers layers for a long, long time and different animals in different layers and different creatures. They get simpler as you go down deeper into the layers. There was the notion that these layers must have been laid down in floods, and the Bible talks about a flood. So for quite a while, quite a few geologists believed the fossil record was laid down by cataclysms, a series of cataclysms, and the one described in the Bible is the last of them, and the only one that occurred while humans were alive, so it’s the only one we remember. So the Genesis flood is the last of the world-forming cataclysms. In the 19th century, that started to slowly go out of fashion, towards just gradual depositing of debris over eons and eons of time. There was one small group of British Christian geologists that were hanging on to flood geology a little longer, but then they petered out in the middle of the 19th century. That’s why when we get to 1910, with the publishing of the Fundamentals, a series of pamphlets that detail the fundamentals of Christianity in the big war against the modernists who were throwing out baby Jesus with the bathwater. The Fundamentals did not take a position on the age of the Earth. Because the editor, R.A. Torrey, was one of the two editors of the fundamentals, he was an old earth, he was a day-age guy. Everyone was generally fine with that, because it was promoted by the Scofield Study Bible. Everyone was looking in their Scofield study Bibles who didn’t have a problem with an old earth and in fact, said the earth was old. Even the most conservative Christians in the early 20th century believed the Earth was old.

Stump: 

There was even one of the fundamentalists back then who had evolution as an option that was okay if I’m remembering all this correctly.

Vischer:

Yes. You have to remember that fundamentalist Christians in the fundamentalist modernist controversy weren’t necessarily the most conservative Christians. They were the Christians that didn’t want to give up on the idea of divine inspiration of Scripture. They were Christians that were maintaining a high view of Scripture. When we think of fundamentalists, we tend to think of intellectual backwater Christians. And this wasn’t the case, this was, half the staff of Princeton seminary wanted to hang on to the fundamentals. That’s why they left all at once and started Westminster Seminary as a protest and split the denomination in half. So there were a lot of Northern fundamentalist Christians in the sense that they weren’t in places like Harvard and Yale and Princeton, in the sense that they weren’t ready to abandon a high view of Scripture, because we decide it’s not modern to believe in miracles. That wasn’t the issue as much, though. That’s why there were very few. The notion of a young earth came back into circulation through Seventh Day Adventism, primarily through the one of the founders of, the woman who was one of the founders of Seventh Day Adventism had a series of visions, and one of her visions was a vision of the creation of the earth and the burying of the fossil record, under a volcanic outflow and oil. That’s where all the oil came from. So it’s basically a young earth vision of the earth that then became doctrine for the Seventh Day Adventists because her visions were considered canonical; they were words from God. And that led to you know, the writing of one key book and, Price, I think is his name, A New Geology… 

Stump: 

George McCready Price. 

Vischer: 

Yes, George McCready Price led to the writing of A New Geology, which really didn’t affect a whole lot of people until the 1960s, when it showed up, recast in the Genesis flood the book by those guys whose names you’ll say now— 

Stump: 

Henry Morris and John Whitcomb.

Vischer:

Yes. So Billy Graham had no problem with evolution. But that freaks people out. Billy Graham.

Stump: 

We have quotes to that effect on our website that people often stumble across and are surprised by.

Vischer:

The figurehead of Neoevangelicalism, and the most famous evangelical Christian of the 20th century, had no problem with evolution and an old earth. Why? Because he was too old. He wasn’t raised in that culture war. Young earth creationism is really a culture war outcome since 1960.

Stump: 

So in this podcast of yours that I listened to yesterday, your co host, Skye Jethani, is that his name? 

Vischer:

Yeah, Jethani.

Stump: 

Jethani, he said something really interesting. He said to you, after you explained all of this, he said, if you’re right, things are more complicated. Then he went on to say, and Answers in Genesis is selling simplicity. I’m not trying to get into a fight with Answers in Genesis, but I’m really interested in that view, and wondering why conservative Christians are so attracted to simplicity. You have any answers to that?

Vischer:

Most of the people of Earth are attracted to simplicity. I’m not gonna pin that on them. I don’t know how many atheists you’ve engaged with; not the really profound thinkers, not the Christopher Hitchens of atheism, but just common everyday atheists who will tell you why all religion is evil, and every war was created by religion. You realize, wow, that’s such an oversimplification that you’re effectively a fundamentalist, that there’s fundamentalism on all sides. There’s liberal fundamentalism, there’s conservative fundamentalism, there’s Hindu fundamentalism, there is Muslim fundamentalism, and one of the drivers of fundamentalism is certainty. We want to know that we’re right. We want to know we’re right for sure. And the easiest way to find certainty on complex issues is to deny their complexity. When we read the Bible, I mean, the saying “the Bible says it, and I believe it, then that settles it.” How many times have we heard the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it? That assumes that your face reading of that particular passage of the Bible, which is an English translation, of a Greek or Hebrew original thought, that was written, initially conceived, the wording was conceived by someone who is so far from you, the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament were closer in thought to the ancient Mesopotamians, to the ancient Babylonians, than they are to modern Americans. That’s why the work—some of my clashes with young earth creationists because I’m good friends with John Walton and really enjoy his scholarly work on this–is them trying to undermine John Walton by saying he’s gnostic. He has found hidden information and you can only understand the Bible according to John Walton if you have his secret hidden information and that’s gnosticism, and that’s bad. So you got to get rid of John Walton. It’s like, well, no, actually, that’s not Gnosticism, that’s scholarship. It’s how we know every time we interpret a Hebrew verse, or a Greek verse and try to turn it into modern English, we have to look for scholarly references on what that word meant at the time, that’s scholarship. It’s not looking for hidden knowledge, secret knowledge, it’s just doing the homework. It’s hard to do homework; we want the Bible to be simple. That was one of the outcomes of fundamentalism and to a certain extent the Protestant Reformation, where we said, No, we don’t need the church, we don’t need the infrastructure, we don’t need the priesthood to tell us what the Bible means. We can read it for ourselves, we can read it for ourselves. IJust me and the Bible is all I need to figure out everything in my life. That leads to cults, it leads to heresy, it leads to all sorts of, leads to prosperity gospel. If everyone can say the Bible means what it means to them when they read it last Tuesday, it’s absolute exegetical chaos. So then you want simplicity. So you find your favorite podcast, or your favorite Bible preacher and say they are the ones who know what the Bible means. And that’s a mess. 

Stump: 

This brings up another really interesting point, I think. You say toward the end of that podcast, and here I think I’m quoting you, “I’m not saying that young earth creationism is wrong. I’m saying that young earth creationism as the only way to read the Bible is wrong.”  That’s a big step forward for a lot of people to be sure. And from our perspective at BioLogos, to simply have our position included among those that are acceptable for Bible-believing Christ following people, that’s wonderful. But I guess I’m hoping for more than that at some point. So you just gave a very nice little speech there about expertise and the value of expertise. What’s it going to take for evangelical Christians to respect the expertise of scientists when they’re talking about scientific matters? I’m not asking to give scientists carte blanche, and whatever they say about any topic is correct. But when scientists so overwhelmingly say something like no, the Earth is not 6000 years old, what’s it gonna take for evangelicals to say, okay, it’s not just that one of the acceptable positions might be that the earth is older than that, but this is really the truth. This is really the truth.

Vischer: 

Truth, oh my that’s a strong statement. So let’s take out the age of the earth, and put in the coronavirus vaccine. What’s it going to take for conservative Christians to believe scientists when they say they should get vaccinated against the coronavirus? And that’s opening a big historical can of worms of when did conservative Christians lose faith in expertise? That will take you all the way back to Darwinism, to the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, to the anti-evolution leagues to you. Unfortunately, guys like Richard Dawkins did not help. 

Stump: 

Right. Totally.

Vischer:

When scientists say “this is my scientific conclusion, and also by the way, this means there is no God,” now you’ve put 90% of the world’s inhabitants on the defensive. And when you put people on the defensive, keep in mind that fundamentalist Christians have felt under attack since about 1910. A very long history of “they’re out to get us. They’re out to get us!” and who’s out to get us? Well, in the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, it was Northern Ivy League theologians. So if you’re from the North, if unfortunately, the fact that you know the modernists were mostly Northern and the fundamentalists were mostly Southern, also fits into Southern narratives that have been around since the Civil War, which is, the North is messing with our stuff. The North is destroying, these Ivy League, highfalutin experts, quote unquote, want to destroy our way of life. So when Washington DC passes a—or the Supreme Court says you can’t pray in schools, well, there it is again, Northern aggression. Destroying our way of life. When they say you have to integrate your schools, even if you don’t want to, there it is again, Northern aggression, destroying our way of life. When they say you need to use the pronouns that are appropriate to the person who says what their pronouns are, oh, you’re destroying our way of life. And you need to wear a mask when you go to the grocery store, oh, I’m gonna somehow fit that into the same narrative that you’re destroying our way of life. So it’s much bigger, you can’t just pick one thing, unfortunately. Like, let’s talk about the age of the earth. And why don’t you trust experts? Because the mistrust of experts is five, six generations inherited at this point. So it’s very hard to—and I admire John Walton, for all the work he’s done on this to wade into the Bible, with a reading on his part that is more informed by history, that is more informed by archaeology and scholarship, but goes against the one that we’ve been defending against attacks from liberal elites. And so it’s very hard when you’re in the middle of a culture war, it’s very hard to just stop fighting, because you assume that means that you’re going to give up your ground.

Stump: 

So we’ve had several conversations with John Walton, here, too. And often, just like I was an impersonator of Mr. Lunt in VeggieTales in one former life, I’m also often an impersonator of John Walton and his view on Scripture. I think some people respond to that with “Oh, great. That means, in order for me to really understand the Bible, I have to go get a PhD in Old Testament,” and I’ve started to develop a response to that, which I wonder if it helps for some of these other areas of expertise, which is, “no, you don’t have to go get a PhD yourself. But I hope somebody in your community that you trust does, and that that person is somebody that can help you understand the Bible, can help you read it better.” I think we can all benefit by reading the Bible. It’s living and active right? But there are experts within a certain area of expertise that can help us read it better. Can we do the same kind of thing with science? We can all make some decisions, we can all understand some ways that the world works, but I hope there are people within our communities that we trust that can help us do that better, too, that can help us understand the data on mask efficacy and vaccines that maybe my Facebook friends don’t all read completely correctly. Does that just not have enough traction you think with evangelicals?

Vischer:

Here’s a twist on that which might work even better. Every time you read your Bible, friend, you are relying on the expertise of PhDs. Without those PhDs, guys like John Walton, who helps translate the Bible, you would have to read in the original language, and you don’t have that ability. You’re relying on expertise from highly trained PhDs every time you crack open your Bible. So the question is, as you interpret the Bible, shouldn’t you listen to some of those same guys, who are doing all that work and doing all the research? There was a shepherd, a guy who raised sheep, who did a book, a very famous little book exploring the 23rd Psalm from the point of view of a shepherd. And because he was a shepherd, he had insight into some of the things that were really illuminating. It sold millions of copies and people loved it. That’s what John Walton is looking for. Let’s go read the writings of the people that lived in the same time in the same area and see how they thought about creation. When they told stories about creation, what questions were they asking that their stories were trying to answer, because that’s how people thought at the time. When you explain it like that, it helps. It’s way easier to read Paul’s letter to the Ephesians if you have some sense of what was going on in Ephesus at the time Paul wrote it. It’s way easier because the Letter to the Ephesians wasn’t written to you, the Bible wasn’t written to you, it was written for you. Genesis one wasn’t written to you, it was written for you. Ephesians wasn’t written to you, but it was written for you. You can learn from it. But the best way to learn from it is to figure out the people it was actually written to, how would they have accepted it? What did they think Paul meant when he said, men should never pray without their heads covered? Does it really mean with their heads uncovered, women should never go to church and have their heads covered? Uncovered? Sorry I did that completely backwards.

Stump: 

Sounds like you need an expert to help you.

Vischer:  

Guys, you can’t pray in a ballcap. It’s against the law. Wives, you can’t go to church without a hat on. That’s also against the law. What was going on in the Roman Empire that would have made Paul say that? That’s what John Walton is doing when he looks at Genesis 1, which is incredibly helpful, as helpful as having an actual real shepherd give you his impression of Psalm 23.

Stump: 

Our time is winding down here. Where is evangelicalism in America headed? How good of a prognosticator are you? Do you see trends or topics that you think are most important to continue covering and talking about?

Vischer: 

Peter Wehner just wrote a piece in The Atlantic on the fracturing of evangelicalism that he thinks it’s breaking apart. So that’s kind of what we talk about every week on the podcast is, where’s this headed? And how can we be part of the solution and not not just part of the problem? It is hard to say. I think the Russell Moore, Beth Moore, David French, Peter Wehner, and then non-white evangelical voices Esau McCaulley, Theon Hill, Jemar Tisby. There are voices— Charlie Dates—there are voices that are kind of coalescing around the idea of no, we don’t want to abandon Evangelical. The history of that phrase, that term, we want to redeem it. I think that will be a movement. I think it will be a minority of you know, quote unquote, of self-described evangelicalism, but it will be faithful, it’ll be a remnant that hopefully can create a new vision of evangelicalism going forward. And maybe it ends up with a new name to differentiate it from the evangelicalism that has become part of the political machinery of America.

Stump: 

Any advice for Christians who want to stay informed and engaged with culture more broadly, and hold on to these distinctions?

Vischer: 

Listen to the Holy Post podcast! That’s what we’re doing every week. Yeah, and love your neighbor, and love your neighbor and consider when you hear an issue, okay, here’s another one another piece of advice. Never watch cable news, especially in primetime. This discipling impact of conservative and liberal of partisan media, it disciples people more effectively than our churches do. So just get out of it, read very broadly, scan hundreds of headlines. That’s what I do every week to make sure I’m not getting just one side or the other because the biblical position isn’t right or left, it’s Biblical. So you kind of have to ignore the voices on the right or left that are saying the left has found utopia and that’s probably the Christian solution and the right has saying that they’ve just found the biblical position on everything, and they’re both wrong. They’re both wrong. They’re driven by special interests. Stop watching cable news. Scan lots of headlines with your Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. So you can find the biblical position, not the conservative or the liberal position.

Stump: 

I’ll end by asking you for any hopes and fears you might have about the future of Christianity in America?

Vischer:

I think the future of Christianity in America isn’t really what we should be fearful or hopeful about. Because God’s Church has already won the victory. That, and the church is global. We get too myopically obsessed with the American church, thinking that it represents the Church. The average Christian today is in the Southern Hemisphere and does not have light, European features. We may become less and less an influence on global Christianity, just due to infighting and political idolatry, but the Church will carry on and God’s will will be done. The victory has already been won, so no need to fear.

Stump: 

Amen to that. Well, thanks so much, Phil Vischer, for talking to us.

Vischer:

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me. 

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and by individual donors who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.