When the homeschool convention in Cincinnati begins later this week, Ken Ham—of Answers in Genesis (AiG), The Creation Museum, and soon to be Ark Park (built with the aid of Kentucky taxpayers)—won’t be there. He has been uninvited for exhibiting a “proud, ungrateful and divisive spirit.”
Since the decision was announced late last week, there has been a good bit of back and forth including hundreds of comments on Facebook, responses and press releases from the parties involved, and the release, by Ham, of a two-minute clip from a convention talk that he says is at issue.
It seems Ham had been critical of one of the other speakers who is not a young earth creationist, and critical of the convention for allowing him to speak. In fact, it’s this very issue of the alleged convention’s “compromising with compromisers” that led to the kerfuffle. Ham wrote on his blog:
“It is this very compromise that has significantly contributed to the undermining of the authority of the Word of God and the collapse of the Christian worldview in our Western world in this era of history.”
So much of the discussion has focused on whether or not Ham exhibited an unchristian spirit in his campaign against compromise, but I’d like to suggest that another important question arises with regard to the Ark Park. The park is a joint venture between a group of investors that includes AiG, and the state of Kentucky—with the state’s goal being job creation. Once completed, the park will be run by AiG.
When I wrote about the Ark Park here and here, I argued that, despite repeated promises that the park-as-job-creation-project will not discriminate in hiring, it remains hard to understand how, given their expressed views, they can keep this promise.
Ken Ham, founder and CEO of the organization that will run the park, believes that two Christians with different interpretations of Genesis, speaking at the same convention is an intolerable level of “compromise”; He asserts that said compromise is undermining the Word of God and bringing about the collapse of the Christian worldview.
If he can’t appear at the same home schooling convention with this speaker, how in the world can he hire people who don’t believe in his bible, his version of God, or his Christian worldview at all?
