My research into the history of the KKK in the rural county of my youth

Conversation
1

… surprised me. I learned that my grandfather’s peers in the 1920’s in that agricultural community were literally “card-carrying” Ku Klux Klan members at a rate of 28% according to historians. That is, 28% of the adult men of that county were KKK members.

I also found that these were some of their principal declarations:

(1) They promoted a “100% Americanism” ideology based on WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) supremacy.

(2) This meant open hostility to Catholics, Jews, and ESPECIALLY immigrants.

(3) There was much talk of traditional American values.

(4) They hated Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and wanted to ban it from public schools. [However, I don’t think they had a lot to worry about because most of the schools and the textbooks ignored it anyway. I’ve not studied this rigorously but that is my general impression. Perhaps the schools in the larger cities of Indiana at that time had different textbooks and different types of teachers.]

(5) Without necessarily using the phrase “Young Earth Creationism”, they wanted it emphasized in the schools.

I’m posting these observations just as a general FYI as I take note of the fact that these views from a century ago sound so familiar today. Many of my grandfather’s contemporaries were probably big fans of deportation of non-WASPs.

I’m feeling like I’m in a frightening time warp.

POSTSCRIPT: This “spectacle lynching” took place in 1930 not all that many miles from my grandfather’s farm. Of course, this is what lack of due process under law can mean:

Now, some good news. My research also revealed that after shocking events like the aforementioned lynching and all sorts of outrageous scandals involving KKK leadership who were simply predators feeding off of member dues, there was what I would call an “uprising” of good citizens—many of them WASPs with strong Christian-convictions and what they called “real American values”—loudly denounced the Klan and made it difficult for them to parade or even meet. It soon became bad for one’s position in the community to be known as a Klan member. I found that the particular religious traditions of northern Indiana seemed to play a role in aggressively trying to put down the KKK movement. There was a lot of “we’ve had enough of this” in the newspapers of the time. It seemed like in just a few years time many counties went from having community leaders who proudly wore Klan robes to leaders who wanted nothing to do with the KKK (because voters would thrown them out at the ballot box.)

I mention this just to show that sometimes people do rise up to turn a tide. I’m still trying to learn more of why that region of the country seemed to quell the Klan at a time in the 1930’s when many others saw a resurgence of the KKK in response to the hardships of the Great Depression.

3 Likes
2

That doesn’t surprise me – I vaguely remember reading that the KKK was strong in the Mid West, but that there it was associated with the Republican Party, unlike the South (where it was associated with the Democratic Party).

I would be surprised however if creationist efforts in that period, outside of Seventh Day Adventism, were YEC rather than OEC.

3 Likes
3

I think at that time Old Earth Creationism was more of the trend with the most educated, not among the average Indiana farmer, shop keeper, et al of 1920’s Indiana.

Even in my very early years—before Whitcomb & Morris brought what was basically “Seventh Day Adventism creationism” to a Christian readership—people still had “family Bibles” passed down for generations that included timeline illustrations of Bishop Ussher’s 4004 BC creation (i.e., the 6000 year old earth concept.)

My grandfather DEFINITELY assumed an Ussher chronology of a 6000 year old earth. I doubt if he ever heard of “creation science” before he died, which was around the time The Genesis Flood was just beginning to get a bigger readership. (Perhaps I asked my grandfather about it after my uncle loaned me the book to read, but I have no recollection of that.) My grandfather didn’t have enough science background to really give much thought to challenging his assumptions based upon his readings of the Bible’s genealogies.

Even in the 1960’s in northern Indiana I rarely heard an Old Earth Creationism perspective. (From reading, I did know of it.) I certainly never heard OEC in the churches. Ussher’s view or something similar prevailed. Once I got to college and was exposed to more mainline churches and their members, that’s when I became aware that not all Christians assumed a young earth.

By the way, one of the reasons why The Genesis Flood gained more and more traction is that all the readers I knew already had assumed a 6000 year old earth based upon the Genesis genealogies and the Ussher’s chronology emphasis in many study Bibles. My uncle, who was a big enthusiast of The Genesis Flood, even took me to see Whitcomb speak at a local church, probably around 1965 or so. (And I had no idea at the time that I would get to know Whitcomb about a decade later when I started publishing with one of his faculty colleagues. I even lived down the street from John Whitcomb for about a year. Interesting fellow. However, as he aged he grew more and more rigid and “fundamentalist” to where he even declared his fundamentalist colleagues and the seminary where he had worked for years as something akin to “liberal.” He even started a sort of “break-away” denomination and founded a school to train pastors “the right way” for that new “fellowship of churches.”)

4 Likes
4

I should also add in an effort to better understand John Whitcomb Jr. (the co-author of The Genesis Flood with Henry Morris) a few personal observations about what happened with him in the years after I knew him:

As he aged, he grew more and more theologically rigid and “fundamentalist” to where he even declared his fundamentalist colleagues and the seminary where he had worked for years as sort of akin to “liberal.” (I don’t know that he ever actually used that word but it was not hard to catch his meaning/insinuation.) Whitcomb even started a sort of “break-away” denomination (more accurately “a fellowship of churches”) and founded a new school of theology in Indianapolis (?) to train pastors “the right way” for that new fellowship of churches and anybody else who wanted to learn to study the Bible “the right way.”

I should emphasize that I liked John Whitcomb and enjoyed our conversations. I was a young scholar (still at that time a very lowly university lecturer, not yet a professor of computer science, and some years away from becoming a seminary professor) but he always treated me quite well. I am certain that he was shocked at my having a beard, because that was still associated with being a “hippie” or “campus radical” at that time by most fundamentalists. A good Christian simply didn’t have a beard in those days and John was very traditional. So I’m sure he didn’t like it. Even so, at a time when there was another professor of that same academic department faculty who would be rude to me, Whitcomb never was. I think he was a decent and good-hearted man. And he was much loved by his students.

For those interested in the history of “creation science” and how founders like John Whitcomb Jr. even played a role in the evolution (sorry) of Answers in Genesis, I’ll post an AIG link below. But first this excerpt by Ken Ham:

In 2000, we held a dedication service for the land where the Creation Museum was to be built (near Cincinnati, in Petersburg, Kentucky). Dr. John Whitcomb, coauthor of The Genesis Flood, was present and he prayed that the Lord would greatly bless the project.

Twelve years later, AiG held a dedication service on 800 acres of land in Williamstown, Kentucky, for the future life-size Ark. Once again, Dr. Whitcomb was present, and he gave the prayer of dedication and presented a powerful message on the importance of believing God’s Word in Genesis concerning Creation, the Flood, and so on.

1 Like
5

One of my grandfathers was probably a member of the KKK. There has a “Men’s Bible Study” that was very popular for a time, an open secret that is was actually a KKK meeting. As a farmer and businessman in a small community it would have been difficult for him not to be a member. (No white robes in the house though, I explored everywhere as a kid.)

My other grandfather was a newspaper editor, and once published an anti-Klan editorial. The local Klan bought the newspaper so they could fire him.

I’m certainly not proud of some of that first part, but it would be worse to forget about it, as if it never happened.

3 Likes
6

Yes, the denomination he broke away from (Grace Brethren) is the one I was raised in. I didn’t learn that until after I left YEC.

3 Likes
7

Wow! That helps me understand your background because I was/am very familiar with the Grace Brethren. They (and many of my ancestors) were “descended” from the Dunkard’s, and had retained the Dunkard doctrine that a baptism must consist of three dunks, one for each member of the Trinity.

My co-author in my early years was a Greek/NT professor at their seminary (as was John Whitcomb a professor in the Hebrew/OT department) and I remember every student at that seminary (no matter their denominational background) had to take a course on “Grace Brethren Doctrines” (or something like that.) It was kind of an open joke about the fact that despite their emphasis on scripture, they would privately admit that triple-immersion wasn’t really a Biblical concept—but one HAD to embrace it to be a member of the faculty there. Of course, it is a tradition going all the way back to Switzerland during the Reformation era and even in those days “Dunkard” was basically making fun of them as “triple dunkers.”

I share that simply as interesting background and not to criticize them. I had many wonderful Grace Brethren friends and I have great respect for many of their pastors and missionaries. Fine people. (I have no idea if MAGA-ism has overtaken those churches today. I no longer know Indiana culture as I did long ago but I assume many of them have fallen into the MAGA-ism culture of their surroundings.)

One more story which comes to mind: I know of someone that was going to become a member of one of the largest of the Grace Brethren churches. They told her that she needed to be baptized again. She asked, “Why? I was baptized at age 12.” Their response: “But you said it was not a Grace Brethren pastor so we assume you were only immersed once, not three times. So you need to be baptized again.” She then said, “Well, by your logic, I should only get dunked twice to bring the total to three, not three more times for a total of four.” She told me that they didn’t see any humor in that—and I think she continued to participate in that church but never became a member, simply because she thought the re-baptism requirement was silly.

@misterme987, you took me on yet another drive down memory lane.

4 Likes
8

I’m not sure about Indiana, since I’m in Ohio, but the church I attend hasn’t been overtaken by MAGA-ism. We certainly have some MAGA types, along with some liberals. But I think among the leadership the most common view is the traditional Christian one, which doesn’t fit well into the American political spectrum — for example, equally pro-immigrant as anti-abortion.

1 Like
9

In my view, any more than three dips and the donut just melts into my coffee. :doughnut: :hot_beverage:

1 Like
10

I remember a great story from my Church History professor in the mid-1970’s telling about a church council of bishops and cardinals which took place even as the enemy was besieging the city and about to crash through the walls. (I can’t remember the century, the city, or the specific enemy. See below.) But he said that they were entirely focused on a question which was some kind of arcane quasi-theological topic which was not far from “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

He said their many days of debate was on the question of “What happens if a priest drops consecrated bread crumbs on the floor of the church during Mass—and that night the mice come out and eat the crumbs? Do the mice thereby become consecrated and somehow qualify for a ‘special grace’ of some sort?”

In recent years I have tried to find the specifics of the occasion he was talking about but I’ve come up with zero. I’ve even asked Gemini Advanced AI the question of what ecclesiastical meetings were held in cities while they were under siege from eastern invaders and it basically said, “That would be a very long list of sieges. There was so many church councils of various sorts and so many cities were repeatedly under siege. Even Constantinople alone experienced so many sieges during which church councils were likely meeting.”

When teaching, I’m hesitant to repeat the story without sufficient verification. Did my professor succumb to a popular myth? Or is my memory flawed?

Even so, it is not hard to imagine that this actually happened.

1 Like
11

Yeah, that was a question that was legitimately considered by medieval theologians. Aquinas weighs in at Summa Theologiae III.80.3. Not far off from “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,” but I guess it’s a serious question if you believe in transsubstantiation.

(Speaking of which, in Trump’s America, transsubstantiation is off the table. Is it because of the “trans” or purely to spite Biden’s Catholicism? We may never know.)

1 Like
12

Yes, Aquinas certainly dealt with the question. But my primary point is that some church conclave or whatever was obsessed with the question even while the city was under siege. One would think that greater priorities would be (1) the defense of the city, and/or (2) ways to seek a truce or resolution, and/or (3) providing “pastoral care” to help the terrified people, tending to the wounded, or feeding those who couldn’t afford the inflated prices which commonly occurred during ta siege.

So I’ve never been able to identify the name, place, and date to verify the story.

Makes me think of the apparent confusion that TRANSGENIC mouse research involved making mice TRANSGENDER.

After plenty of mocking laughter from everyone, the White House pushed back and tried to verify that Trump’s “making mice transgender” claim was accurate, their press release would probably fool those with poor reading comprehension:

Many would assume that any study involving sex hormones and observing their effects would surely mean they were trying to change their gender. Of course, if they actually read their own citations, that is not the case.

All of this reminds me of the Golden Fleece Award of long ago which also played off of people’s ignorance (including the very real ignorance of Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin, 1975-1988.)

1 Like
13

Here’s a good trivia question: what is the most important scientific study ever to win the Golden Fleece? (No, I don’t know the answer.)

1 Like
14

That’s a very good question.

If I had to guess, I would nominate the Golden Fleece Award (or was it multiple awards for multiple studies?) that I remember best, which when I first heard Senator Proxmire announce it, I thought, “What an idiot. Is it not OBVIOUS why 'studying the sex life of an insect” could be extremely important to eradicating or limiting an agricultural pest’s damage? I remember thinking at the time, “He CAN’T be that stupid. He’s clearly just grandstanding for the idiots who will laugh at the idea of studying an insect’s reproduction.” Indeed, I assume he used the phrase “sex life” instead of “reproduction” just to make it sound sillier, obviosly.

I don’t remember if was some kind of weevil or parasitic fly. And I think the research study I recall actually got funded long before Proxmire but that didn’t stop him from naming it. Or his complaint may have been prompted by the fact in the years after the original study demonstrated that you could use properly timed (and dosaged) irradiation on males of a species to make them sterile, additional federal grants paid for a factory that produced huge quantities of the sterile males so that they could be airdropped on entire regions.

I think that was originally done in Florida as a test and then they used airdrops to create a “wall” along the Mexican border so that the pest (which attacked American cattle) could be kept out of the country. When it was successful, I think they then decided to deploy them on the Mexican southern border because it was not as wide and thereby cheaper to create that “wall.” Eventually they moved the airdrops to the narrowest part of Panama so that ALL of Central and North America could be protected.

The last I heard was that the USA and many other affected countries were funding just one factory in Panama that churns out those sterile males 24/7. Very cost-effective and saving many millions of dollars in all of the countries north of the barrier. (Hmmm, I wonder if DOGE already killed the US funding of it.)

Again, there are probably multiple government funded “insect sex life” studies which got panned—as well as the follow-up funding that kept the airdrops going.

Anyway, that’s my nomination. I just don’t remember many of the other Golden Fleece Award winners.

By the way, in response there also used to be a Golden Goose Award which was used to publicize the fact that so-called “silly studies” involving basic research resulted in huge benefits to taxpayers.

Oh, I don’t know if this one won a Golden Goose but a study of Gila monster venom led to GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic. One could easily imagine somebody making fun of taxpayer money studying Gila monsters but, obviously, anybody who understands that scientific research can lead to all sorts of unexpected benefits. (I used to appreciate the British TV series, Connections, hosted by James Burke in the late 1970’s. He explained how all sorts of modern inventions had the beginnings in “chains” of discovery which started centuries ago. I remember connections like a vacuum type Thermos bottle led to liquid fuel booster rockets of the Apollo program.)

1 Like
15

Yes. My understanding of the history of Creationism is largely formed from Numbers’ The Creationists, and I had failed to factor in the likely divergence between elite and folk traditions on this. Mea culpa.

I suppose, short of spending considerable time interviewing people about their memories of their parents’ and grandparents’ views, it is actually rather hard to document the folk history of creationism, which is why the elite history tends to predominate.

This in turn leads me to reassess a paper a read a few months back about the history of creationism in New Zealand. It revolved considerably around resistance to it in my alma mater (in those days a staunchly Presbyterian institution). I must admit, I have no direct knowledge of what the sheep farmers in rural Otago would have believed. As most would have been recent immigrants, I suspect that they would not have had time to develop a uniquely New Zealand viewpoint, and would have the viewpoints they brought with them from Scotland, England and Ireland.

16

True indeed. The average John Q. Citizen—especially out in rural America—doesn’t do a lot of publishing. (However, it wasn’t hard for me to know what my grandfather believed in the 1920 about the age of the earth, because my parents and most of my neighbors in the 1960 held essentially the same Bishop Ussher views. So I didn’t even have to ask any grandparents in the area.)

For more rigorous research into what people believed back then, I suppose some of the “general knowledge” could be judged by what appeared in almanacs, rural school textbooks, and even small town newspapers. (Even out in the frontier I’ve always been amazed at how many pioneers had access to a weekly newspaper. And ideas get passed around.) And even in the 1920s it was very common for newspapers to publish local Sunday sermons in their Tuesday edition. So that’s another reason we don’t have to ask grandparents et al.

[By the way, that brings to mind what I discovered in researching what many (certainly not all) American pastors thought about Charles Darwin when he died. Sermon eulogies published in newspapers that week praised him as a great man—not so much about his scientific achievements but as an anti-slavery humanitarian. He and his extended family had sponsored so much abolitionist activity by American ministers as well as anti-slavery tract publishing. It has been claimed that most of the book royalties from The Origin of Species were spent on tract publishing. Of course, that doesn’t mean that most Christian laymen praised Charles Darwin. But many educated preachers in the bigger cities did, apparently.]

Ya know, the young earth topic brings up a similar question I have had about the often explained “Did you know…?” articles and Youtube videos which describe how even the ancients by 500 BCE or so understood that the earth was a sphere. But I’ve always wondered what the average person through the centuries since then thought about it. For example, basically all educated Romans of the 1st century AD would have known that the earth was spherical. But did the average butcher in Rome know that? My hunch is that he probably did if he lived in Rome—but a butcher out in the provinces probably didn’t. Certainly the Germanic tribes of that era wouldn’t have known it.

Now by the Middle Ages (500 AD to 1500AD) I think much of Europe was accepting the spherical earth concept because the Romans had spheres (in statues, inscriptions, etc. etc) representing earth because it had been a way to portray Roman dominance over the world and the Christian Church and kingdoms “inherited” that same notion. Thus, Christian art and even the Globus Cruciger of the Pope conveyed even to the illiterate that the earth was spherical. Even so, not everybody in Europe had been exposed to such. Nevertheless, I think the spherical earth concept spread widely fairly early on, certainly gradually.

That said, I can’t begin to definitely answer questions like “When did the majority of average Europeans understand that the earth is a sphere?”

Interesting topic.

One can also wonder about the “reversal of knowledge.” During the Revolutionary War there was a lot of skepticism about vaccinations. By the time I got my polio vaccination in a sugar cube in 1961, it seemed like EVERYBODY understood that vaccines certainly could have risks but I don’t remember anybody being against them. Now I know lots of people who not only oppose vaccinations, they consider them evil and a “liberal plot to take away our freedoms.” So, knowing what the average uneducated (or even educated) person thinks about something can be hard to pin down.

1 Like
17

Hate to mess with a good story, but if you check the Wikipedia entry you will see that the insect (screwfly) sex award is apocryphal.

1 Like
18

I actually saw that a while ago. But what I recall—and what I saw in other articles—was that (1) the Golden Fleece wasn’t always an “official” award with a particular winner. (2) Even Senator Proxmire—and many others who copied him—started using the “Golden Fleece Award” as sort of a generic label to apply as needed to anything they didn’t like. One source claimed there were “multiple insect sex life studies” that got panned by the award and others said none. And another said that Proxmire applied the term to that worm study even though the actual RESEARCH was privately funded until much later—and that taxpayer money came into play more with the “scaling up” of production. (And there were still people which hated it because they thought other countries were getting too much benefit.)

I remember the Golden Fleece evolving into something akin to the Darwin Awards, which some people actually do believe are officially announced periodically for people who “voluntarily” take themselves out the gene pool. Likewise, politicians would sometime refer to an alleged Golden Fleece Award winner that had nothing to do with Proxmire. I even recall PASTORS who would complain about Golden Fleece Award winners in their sermons to illustrate the stupidity of the government. (Sound familiar?)

Anyway, those are my memories of the phenomenon. I suppose most younger generations don’t know of it today.

19

IIRC the reason that many sets of royal regalia contained an orb with a cross atop was that it represented the church’s dominance over the world.

1 Like
20

Yes, exactly. That was the Globus Cruciger I described. The Church carried out that same Roman tradition of proudly displaying the earth (via a sphere) in order to communicate that “the cross” ruled the world.