Please welcome back guest blogger and all-around cool person, K.C. Boyd. You might remember her from an earlier post, So which is it, GOP? Open contempt for marriage equality or “outreach”? “Inquiring upchuckers want to know.”

Daily Upchuck

Warning: Due to the seriousness of this post, there will be no mini-pukes today.

John Hagee, the pasty, corpulent human dinosaur that he is, has entered the amusement-church fray.  Not content to peddle the coming End Times glory over the Christian airwaves and in church on Sundays, the Cornerstone mega-pastor decided to further his market on dumbing down San Antonio’s youth.

Tiptoeing in the footsteps of the smarmy Ken Hamm, whose $27 million Northern Kentucky Creation Idiocracy “Museum” far overshadows Cornerstone’s hovel of a $5 million Noah’s Ark Children’s Building , they both spew the same errantly biblical pablum, Hagee ‘s ark opened last week to an astonishing 28,000 visitors.

In and of itself, it is unsurprising that so many people lined up for this piece of biblical theater when, after all, the latest Gallup Poll showed that 46% of Americans today believe in Creationism. (GRAND UPCHUCK) What astonishes and disturbs is that the Scopes trial did so little to eliminate the mythical thinking and teaching that continues to delude yet another generation of children nearly ninety years later. Of the ark, Matthew Hagee, the heir-in-waiting to his father’s multi-million dollar empire said, “There is no greater investment that can be made than that of building a foundation in the life of a child that will keep them the rest of their days,” Foundation, exclaims this upchucker! A foundation guaranteed to leave unsuspecting children far behind their science-believing peers, peers who have already left them so far behind in the dust that they can never hope to catch up – that kind of foundation?

Therein lies the heartbreak. It is one thing for an adult to choose religious belief over science but it is another entirely for a pastor to actively promote a generation of stupidity, all for the glory of his ego. For that is exactly what’s on show here – - an oversized, manipulative man, prideful enough to hawk his particular faith over science, intellect and knowledge and to do so to the lifelong detriment of his followers. Faith may have its place in society – that’s a topic for another day – but it has no right to compromise the future of that society’s children. 

Hamm, Hagee and the rest of the creationist charlatans must prove to their audiences that Genesis took place exactly as is written for if not, the rest of the Bible falls apart. Without Genesis as Truth, Hagee is left with parables and lessons of morality and then the whole thing, including his End Times ecstasies fall apart. No, far better than that, he chooses to delude and promise, to lie and to cheat, to steal and to rob an entire generation and beyond.

Not very Christian of him, I’d say.

Novelist K.C. Boyd is the author of Being Christian: A Novel. According to Mikey Weinstein, President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, “Boyd created a story so riveting that not only could I not put it down, but upon finishing it, I found myself, like an addict, craving more.