The ANSWERS Book: A Case Study in How Fundamentalism Works
When I was a young, impressionable child, my parents wanted me to attend a Catholic school because of their academic rigor. Unfortunately, there were no Catholic schools in the area where we lived at the time, mainly because there weren’t many Catholics there to begin with. So instead, they sent me to what they considered the next best thing: a private school run out of the local Church of God.
This is where I first obtained a copy of The ANSWERS Book.
Bear in mind that I was a child, and that I knew that my parents were paying money for me to go to that private school. I had no real reason to question what I was being taught there, because surely nobody would pay money for someone to teach their children things that were false? The curriculum also was very adamant that you do not question authority, especially religious authority. So I assumed, with my limited knowledge of science at the time, that The ANSWERS Book contained the gospel truth (so to speak). I was in college (a Baptist college, I hasten to add!) before I dared question any of it at all.
To explain The ANSWERS Book, it is necessary to explain the fundamentalist playbook. The types of evangelists and holy-rollers who buy and sell books like this are of the opinion that the Bible can only possibly have any value if every story in it is a matter of actual historical record.
Let that sink in for a moment. These are people who teach and presumably believe that, for example, if there was not an actual, worldwide flood from which a Middle-Eastern family and two of every kind of land animal escaped on a wooden ark, then Jesus didn’t really die for your sins. That if an actual serpent did not, as a matter of historical record, tempt the first human woman into eating a forbidden fruit, then there was no resurrection. The concepts of mythology, of allegory, and of metaphor are lost on these people. The only Bible stories that are symbolic, according to them, are those parables for which Jesus actually explained the meaning to his apostles in the book itself.
This is not how Christianity works for the vast majority of Christians worldwide. Indeed, knowing what humanity now knows about history, archaeology, paleontology, genetics, and a host of other topics, it can’t work that way. But this illiterate view of the Bible remains common among fundamentalists, and I’ll tell you why.
If you can sow doubt in people about mainstream scientific theories such as evolution and the history of the universe, then you can convince them of any damn thing you want. If you convince people that the only authorities they can trust are religious ones, then you, as a pastor, become the dictator of their lives, to the tiniest detail. Antivax positions, young-earth creationism, white supremacy, beating your children with wooden spoons, marrying your daughter off at menarche to a grown man—all of these positions have been openly and vigorously advocated for by Christian fundamentalists of some kind at some point in the past 50 years. I have even seen some Christians argue that all fiction—even Christian fiction like the Chronicles of Narnia—is evil because it is not true and is therefore the exact same as lying to your children. I have seen people argue that you should not register the birth of your children with the government in any form, because Social Security numbers are somehow the mark of the Beast. And it all stems from books like The ANSWERS Book.
So I’m going to go through the original 1990 edition point by point, showing exactly how these explanations break down. (There is an updated edition, but I don't exactly want to give these people any more money.) I do this not out of hatred of God or Christianity, but because people deserve to know the truth. As the Bible itself says, “the truth shall set you free.” Knowledge is power.