Yes, this post sits somewhat outside the usual boundaries of what I write about here. The Natural Historian is a place for fossils and tree rings, for radiometric dating and the salt deposits that lie below the Dead Sea, for the slow and patient work of asking what the created order actually tells us about its own history. It is not a place for commentary on presidential politics, and I have no intention of turning it into one. So a post that compares Ken Ham to Donald Trump needs some explanation before we dig in.
What follows is not a claim that these two men are the same, nor that Ken Ham is secretly a politician or that Donald Trump is secretly a creationist (I have little doubt he cares or has ever spent time thinking about the question of origins). It is not an endorsement of anyone, and it is not, I hope, a partisan exercise. I am interested in something narrower and, I think, more illuminating: the strategies by which each man constructs authority and holds an audience, and the striking degree to which those strategies coincide even though the two men could hardly be more different in their convictions.
I became interested in this question for a reason that is a bit uncomfortable to state plainly, but I’ve become convinced it is important to recognize. The people most drawn to Ken Ham are, to a remarkable extent, the same people drawn to Donald Trump.
The white evangelical Christians who form the most reliable base of support for one are, by every measure I am aware of, heavily represented among the followers of the other. If two figures operating in different domains command overlapping loyalty using overlapping techniques, then understanding those techniques is not just a curiosity. It is, for someone who cares about the health of the church and society, a matter of some urgency to explore.
I’ve thought about this for quite some time and what I’m going to present below is my attempt to articulate where drawing a comparison between these two influences on American Christianity holds up and where it breaks down.
Two men who could hardly be more different
Let me start with the differences because it would be a mistake to begin by flattening these two into a single type. They differ in almost every particular that matters. Ken Ham is a teacher and apologist who built an institution from nothing; Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum, and the Ark Encounter exist because he willed them into being and shaped them around a single theological conviction. Donald Trump did not build the Republican Party. He took an existing institution and, over the course of a decade, remade it in his own image. Ham operates within a centuries-old theological tradition that, however narrowly he reads it, still binds him to a text and to the long conversation about how that text should be understood. Trump operates in a political space that imposes no comparable constraint. Ham’s whole posture is one of submission, at least rhetorically, to an authority infinitely greater than himself; he insists, repeatedly, that human beings are fallible and finite and that only God is infallible. Trump’s posture is the opposite. His is a rhetoric of personal dominance, and the closest thing to a creed in it is the line he delivered at the 2016 convention: “I alone can fix it.” Authority begins and ends with him.
These are not small differences. Ham is an ideologue in the precise sense of the word, a man working out the consequences of a coherent philosophical commitment. Trump, as far as I can tell, is an improviser whose commitments shift with the demands of the moment with few long-term convictions. To treat them as interchangeable would be to misunderstand both. And yet.
A shared grammar of black and white
The first thing that struck me, reading these two figures side by side, is how completely each of them has organized the world into pairs. For Ken Ham the master binary is “God’s Word versus man’s word.” Every dispute about the age of the earth, the meaning of the rock record, the descent of living things, is recast as a choice between two and only two starting points: submission to Scripture or capitulation to fallible human reasoning. A fellow Christian who accepts an old earth is not a brother who reads Genesis differently; he is a “compromiser,” someone who has let the word of man sit in judgment over the Word of God. The effect is to remove the middle ground entirely. No middle ground doesn’t quite capture it because it suggests something hallway between – a compromise. Rather, he removes any opportunity to ask if truth may be found outside of his two choices. There is no room, in this grammar, for a faithful believer who has looked carefully at the evidence and reached a different conclusion, because the disagreement has already been redefined as a spiritual failure rather than an interpretive one.
Trump’s grammar works the same way with different nouns. The world divides into the people and the elites, real Americans and the establishment, loyal patriots and enemies of the people (those patriots). The phrase “fake news” functions less as a description of any particular report than as a sorting mechanism: information that flatters the leader is true, and information that does not is, by definition, fabricated. Here too the middle disappears. There is no category for the honest journalist who got something wrong, or the official who disagrees in good faith, because disagreement itself has been reclassified as hostility, as disloyalty, as anti-patriotic.
I do not think the parallel is accidental, and I do not think it is merely a matter of two men happening to talk in absolutes. Binary framing is enormously useful to anyone who wants to hold a crowd. It lowers the cognitive cost of belonging; you do not have to do the hard work of weighing competing considerations if there are only ever two options and one of them is obviously yours. It raises the stakes; a disagreement about the meaning of a Hebrew word becomes a battle for the soul of the church, and a disagreement about election procedure becomes a battle for the survival of the nation. And it makes loyalty feel like virtue. That is a powerful combination, and it is the same combination in both cases.
They create vocabulary that does the thinking for you
Closely related is the way each man has equipped his followers with a specialized vocabulary that does an enormous amount of work invisibly. On the creationist side the key terms are “worldview,” “starting point,” “compromise,” “true Christian,” and the distinction between “observational” and “historical” science (true news vs fake news). The phrase “Were you there?”, which Ham has encouraged children to deploy against their teachers, is the compressed form of the whole system of control. On the political side the terms are “fake news,” “the deep state,” “witch hunt,” and the rest of a now-familiar lexicon.
What these vocabularies share is a function. They allow a follower to dismiss an enormous quantity of contrary evidence without ever having to engage it. A geology presentation documenting the slow accumulation of a salt deposit over a hundred thousand years (hmm, that sounds familiar😊 https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2025/02/25/dead-sea-chronicles-part-xii-salt-seismites-and-scripture-reconciling-the-dead-seas-deep-history/ ) can be set aside the moment it is filed under “historical science,” because that category has been defined in advance as untestable speculation about an unobserved past. A news report can be set aside the moment it is filed under “fake news.” In both cases the label does the thinking. The follower is spared the genuinely difficult labor of weighing the actual evidence and is given instead a single word that makes the evidence disappear. I have spent a good part of my professional life trying to show that the “historical science” distinction does not hold up, that the past leaves real and testable traces in the present, and the deepest frustration of that work is not that people disagree with my reading of the evidence but that the vocabulary has been built precisely so that the evidence never has to be read at all.
What happens when the facts push back
A worldview that organizes itself this way has a characteristic response to contradiction, to facts that don’t fit the narrative, and again the two figures employ remarkably similar strategies. When radiometric dating, ice cores, tree rings, and the whole edifice of physical dating point relentlessly to an earth far older than six thousand years, Answers in Genesis does not concede. It reclassifies. The contrary data becomes “historical science,” and where that will not suffice, the ministry funds projects like the RATE initiative, which concluded, when faced with clear evidence of enormous amounts of radioactive decay, that God must have miraculously accelerated the decay rates during the Flood by something on the order of a billionfold. The evidence is not denied. It is absorbed, reinterpreted, and made to confirm the very conclusion it appeared to threaten.
The political analogue is cruder but structurally identical. When the available facts contradicted a claim about the path of a hurricane, the response was not correction but the production of a sharpie-altered map and pressure on the relevant agency to fall into line. When an election did not go the desired way, the response was not concession but the insistence that the true result lay hidden beneath a corrupted process. I want to be careful here, because I am describing patterns of public rhetoric and not pronouncing on anyone’s interior motives, which I cannot see. But the pattern itself is plain enough, and it is the same pattern: contradiction is not evidence that the claim was wrong. It is evidence that the contradicting source is compromised and can’t be trusted.
This is what makes both systems so difficult to argue with from the outside. They are self-sealing. Within Ham’s framework, revelation as interpreted by his ministry sets the frame, the frame filters the evidence, the filtered evidence confirms the revelation, and any scientist who objects is simply an example of the compromise the framework predicted. Within Trump’s framework, “the people” and “common sense” are said to set the frame, the leader embodies them, contrary institutions become proof of elite corruption, and the leader is reaffirmed. In each case the system has been built so that contrary evidence is always already answered before it speaks.
Who really holds the authority
Here is the structural similarity that I find most revealing, and it is one that neither man I would expect would welcome. While each publicly locates authority in something far larger than himself, each, in practice, becomes the indispensable interpreter of that larger authority.
Ken Ham says, sincerely I believe, that his authority is Scripture and not himself. He insists that he is merely reading the plain sense of the text and submitting to it. But what is actually doing the work, day to day, is not Scripture in the abstract. It is Scripture as interpreted through Answers in Genesis, through its statement of faith, its museum rooms, its conferences and curricula. When other theologians who hold to biblical inerrancy just as firmly as Ham does argue that the Hebrew word translated “day” need not require a young earth, Ham does not treat them as fellow servants of the same text. He treats them as compromisers. The effect, whether intended or not, is to elevate one particular modern interpretation to the status of the text itself.
Trump says that his authority is the people and their common sense. But what is actually doing the work is Trump’s own declaration of what the people think and what common sense requires. He reserves to himself the right to decide what counts as a misquote, a joke, or fake news. The people are sovereign in theory; in practice their will is whatever the leader says it is.
So both men perform submission to an external authority while functioning as that authority’s sole gatekeeper. This is, I think, the deepest point of contact between them. The appeal to something higher is genuine as rhetoric. It is also, in operation, inseparable from the man making the appeal.
Why the same people are drawn to both
I come now to the question that prompted this post in the first place. Why should the same population find both of these figures so compelling? The two men are not selling the same product. One offers salvation and a framework for understanding sacred history; the other offers national restoration and the humbling of one’s enemies. Why the overlap?
The easy answer is that these are simply credulous or ignorant people who will believe anything. I believe that answer is false, and I have spent years arguing that it is false as a generalization (of course all movements contain some credulous and ignorant people). The men and women drawn to young-age creationism are, in my experience, frequently thoughtful, serious, and sincere, and many of them know their Bibles far better than their critics do. The same caution applies on the political side. Whatever explains this overlap, it is not stupidity.
Rather, what the literature suggests, and my observations confirm, is a cluster of human needs that both Ham and Trump are unusually good at meeting. There is the need for cognitive closure, the desire for firm and final answers and a corresponding discomfort with ambiguity, which both a precisely six-thousand-year-old earth and a world neatly divided into patriots and enemies satisfy beautifully. There is the experience of threat, whether the threat of a secular culture that seems to be carrying off one’s children or the threat of a cultural and demographic order that seems to be shifting underfoot.
In addition, there is the deep satisfaction of belonging to an embattled community. The sociologist Christian Smith argued some years ago that American evangelicalism thrives precisely because it feels embattled, that the sense of being a faithful remnant under siege is itself a source of vitality and solidarity. Both of these leaders offer exactly that experience. They tell their followers that they see what the corrupt and the compromised refuse to see, that they belong to the few who have not bent the knee.
I do not say this to belittle anyone. I say it because I recognize the appeal. The hunger for certainty in an uncertain age, the longing to belong to a people who know the truth, the relief of being told that the experts are not as wise as they pretend, these are not contemptible desires. They are human ones, and they live in me as surely as in anyone. That is exactly why the techniques that exploit them deserve our attention rather than our scorn.
Where the comparison misleads
I would be doing the very thing I criticize if I let the parallels harden into an equation. These men are not the same, and the differences are not trivial. Ken Ham wields no coercive power; he cannot rewrite a federal weather forecast or reshape a national institution by decree. His reach into the actual machinery of the state is essentially nil, and the stakes of his project, however much they grieve me, are confined largely to the subculture of conservative Christianity and to local fights over science education. Trump’s tactics, deployed from public office, carry consequences for international relations, for the rule of law, and for the lives of millions. The scale is simply not comparable.
There is a further difference that matters a great deal to me as a Christian. Ham, for all his rigidity, is accountable to something. He is bound, however reluctantly, to a sacred text and to a tradition of interpreting it, and when serious theologians challenge him he is forced to argue on that ground. He performs, and I think to some degree feels, a genuine submission to an authority above himself. Trump operates under no analogous constraint. He answers to no text and no tradition; his authority is, in the end, simply his own making. To collapse the religious figure into the political one is to miss that Ham’s framework, mistaken as I believe it to be, is at least the kind of thing that can in principle be corrected by a fuller and deeper reading of the very text he claims to honor. That is a door left ajar, and one I can hope that followers of Ken Ham will eventually crack open further.
The part that actually worries me
So why write any of this, on a blog about the age of the earth? Because the comparison has clarified something I had felt without quite naming. The problem I have spent so long describing under the heading of bad science and bad theology is, at a deeper level, a problem about a particular appetite for certainty, an appetite that treats the surrender of one’s own judgment as an act of faithfulness. When that appetite is fed, it does not stay neatly within the bounds of origins debates. The same instinct that makes a Christian willing to dismiss the entire testimony of the rocks because a trusted voice has labeled it “historical science” is an instinct that can be turned to other ends by other voices. A habit of mind learned in the pew can be exercised in the voting booth, and a people trained to experience disagreement as betrayal in one arena will tend to experience it that way in every arena.
When a system of thought has been designed so that no evidence can ever count against its conclusions, it becomes, quite precisely, a machine for never being corrected. Which means it is built so that re-evaluation of scriptures or observations from the second book of God’s creation can never be heard if it seems to say anything the interpreter had not already concluded or did not already expect. What troubles me, then, is not finally that Ken Ham arrives at a young earth. Honest people have read Genesis that way, and I do not doubt the sincerity of those who do. What troubles me is that the rhetorical machine he has built, and exported into homeschool curricula and church networks across the world, trains Christians in a habit of mind, certainty insulated from any possibility of correction, that the confessional Christian tradition at its best ought to have inoculated them against. He has taught the church to defend the faith using the very epistemic posture the faith, rightly understood, should make us suspicious of. And when I see that same posture operating in a wholly different arena, with wholly different content, I am reminded that the posture is the portable thing.
Again, I want to insist, this is a Christian apologetic worry rather than a political one. The tradition I belong to has always taught that the effects of sin reach into the mind itself, that none of us reasons from a position of innocence, and that this is precisely why we are commanded to test everything and hold fast to what is good. Semper reformanda, the church always reforming, is not a slogan for reforming other people. It is a confession that our own settled convictions stand perpetually under the judgment of God’s Word and God’s world, both of which written by the same Author. A faith that cannot be questioned is not a stronger faith; it is a more brittle one. And a certainty that requires us to despise everyone who sees differently is not the peace that passes understanding. It is something much smaller and much more anxious wearing a fake exterior of confidence.
I have no tidy quick fixes to offer in response, only the same conviction that has animated everything I write here. We honor God most not by defending a fortress of unquestioned certainties but by examining his Word and general revelation with humility, with patience, and with a willingness to be corrected. That is harder than the binary. It will never hold a crowd the way the binary does. But it has the considerable advantage of being true, and of leaving the door open to the God who is himself the Truth, rather than to any man who would presume to stand in for him.
Blessings,
Joel
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?