First Person: Grazing the Green Fields of BAR
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I recently read an Associated Press story about a study being conducted at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs that, according to one of the study directors, sociologist Peter Berger, “explores an ‘evangelical intelligentsia,’ ” which Berger says “is growing and needs to be better understood.”
Evangelicals say they often aren’t well understood beyond their Bible-banging, evolution-hating caricature. Many equate evangelicals with fundamentalists, an evangelical subset that interprets the Bible literally—as in the six calendar days of creation—and is home to ardent evolution opponents. But [Timothy] Shah [the other director of the study] said most evangelical scientists believe in evolution guided by God.
This brought to mind a little ruckus I raised in my recent editor’s response to a letter published in the May/June 2008 issue of BAR. The letter writer, Mitch Payne of Lake St. Louis, Missouri, wondered whether he should cancel his subscription because of an article we ran on the Dead Sea (“The Life of the Dead Sea,” BAR 34:01) that began, “Millions of years ago …” “Does your magazine,” Mr. Payne wanted to know, “hold to a creation view or an evolutionary view?” Mr. Payne made his own belief quite clear: “God created everything in six days.”
I responded, perhaps too flippantly, “You will probably be more comfortable canceling your subscription.”
A handful of other subscribers cancelled their subscriptions in sympathy with Mr. Payne.
It would probably do well if I clarified where BAR stands on this matter.
BAR is absolutely nondenominational. We respect all religious faiths. At some level, none of these faiths is provable by strict laws of reason. Nor can they be attacked by reason. Each person’s religious faith is arrived at individually and as a matter of conscience. We respect this choice. That is why we appeal to people of very diverse faiths among our nearly half-million readers.
At BAR, we deal not so much with faith as with history. Much of this history cannot be proven absolutely. In this, it bears some resemblance to faith. Here, too, is much room for uncertainty, as our subscribers who have followed the many disputes in BAR well know. We may explore what a particular stratum in an excavation tells us, what an artifact means, what an inscription says, whether or not it is a forgery, or what a certain text originally meant or has come to mean. Seldom are we (or our scholar-authors) 100 percent sure of the result.
Sometimes what we or our authors assert may run counter to someone’s religious beliefs. Most of our readers are not offended by this. (That’s one reason why we are so enthusiastically received, for example, by both Christians and Jews.) Some readers may disagree with one author or another, but they often tell us that they nevertheless learn from the article or that they simply ignore that article and turn to something else in the issue that they find more informative and meaningful. As one fundamentalist reader wrote us long ago, he is like a cow grazing in a green field, finding the grass that particularly appeals to him.
Which brings me back to my response to Mr. Payne. I was certainly not saying that there is no room for evangelical subscribers or fundamentalist subscribers in BAR. Indeed, more than half of our subscribers are evangelicals. What I was saying was that if you object to a magazine that prints articles that assume that the earth (more specifically, the Dead Sea) evolved over millions of years, you’re probably not going to be comfortable with BAR.
We would hope, however, that readers 075who do not agree that the earth evolved over millions of years (incidentally, many evangelicals do believe the earth evolved in this way) would simply pass over our article on the Dead Sea and find nourishment elsewhere in the magazine.
Not long after we printed his letter, Mr. Payne gave us to understand that he had changed his mind and would not cancel his subscription. But in the end, he did cancel. This is just to tell him that we respect his belief in a six-day creation, although we and many of our authors believe in evolution. We hope that Mr. Payne would respect a belief contrary to his, as we do his. We still hope that he will change his mind once again and come back. He will find most of the magazine edifying, even if he doesn’t agree with everything. Indeed, nobody agrees with everything in the magazine. Even I don’t.
I recently read an Associated Press story about a study being conducted at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs that, according to one of the study directors, sociologist Peter Berger, “explores an ‘evangelical intelligentsia,’ ” which Berger says “is growing and needs to be better understood.” Evangelicals say they often aren’t well understood beyond their Bible-banging, evolution-hating caricature. Many equate evangelicals with fundamentalists, an evangelical subset that interprets the Bible literally—as in the six calendar days of creation—and is home to ardent evolution opponents. But [Timothy] Shah [the other director of the study] said most evangelical […]
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