Caroline Winterer
Appearances
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And then eventually it begins to refer to the black people who work the land there.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
It's a leap, but they are up against a growing number of northerners and former enslaved people themselves saying slavery is unjust. It is a human rights violation and we need to get rid of slavery. We know these people as the abolitionists and southern planters are grasping at straws. Any argument that is going to justify slavery. the existence of four million slaves below the Mason-Dixon line.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And so if God made an ancient ocean and wants Black people to work the land on that ancient ocean, so be it. They form part of what's called the pro-slavery argument. And it is preached from every pulpit in the South.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
pulpit of deep time. Yeah, you have to kind of simultaneously, you know, believe that the Genesis myth is maybe sort of true. I mean, they're all, you know, Bible reading people. But now alongside the Genesis story, there is the deep time story. So that's, it is fascinating how we can carry multiple and in fact, contradictory stories in our heads at the same time.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
By the end of the Civil War era, there are a growing number of evangelical Protestants who begin to push back against what they see as the sidelining of the Genesis story of creation. So many, many Protestants say, yeah, I can do both, right? I can read the Genesis story on Sunday and then go out and dig for really ancient fossils on Monday and Fine.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
I have no problem with that because, you know, science, right? But there are a growing number who today are known as the young earth creationists who begin to craft the first modern objection to deep time and they hang on. to Archbishop Usher's 4004 BC creation date, and they begin to form a sort of onslaught against deep time.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
By the early 1900s, they have a new Bible called the Schofield Bible, which begins with Genesis, but then it has the date, 4004 BC, above it. saying, you know, this is our date, right? This is not mythological. This is not just a story that was told long ago. This is true. And they begin to craft a whole school curricula and textbooks that say, yeah, you know, there's dinosaurs.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
We have no problem with dinosaurs, but they're not ancient. They're less than 6,000 years old. Today, you can visit the Creation Museum outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, which is enormous. It's very well attended. Millions of people go there every year. It's run by a group called Answers in Genesis, and they deny the antiquity of the Earth. They deny the deep time revolution.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
So they've built an ark recently where there are dinosaurs aboard. So it's interesting. Yeah, they track science. in order to absorb it and reject it. It's very interesting.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Yes. And, you know, the deep time revolution carries all that with it, that as you're absorbing deep time, you're absorbing what, you know, at the time were believed to be the God given gifts of the industrial revolution, trains, fossil fuels, which actually is a term coined in the 1820s, along with natural resources and energy.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
You know, at that time, natural resources was meant to imply that long ago, God had planted these first baby forests on the baby earth as gifts for us modern people. So they're super optimistic about the discovery of sources of heat and light, you know, because for thousands of years, humans, you know, it had been dark and they were always tired.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
You know, we forget how hard life was before the Industrial Revolution. And suddenly they found a solution and they directed their energies toward using science and engineering to dig up the fossil forest. But then also on Sundays, giving thanks to the God who implanted those forests long ago. It's quite extraordinary.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Louis Agassiz is the greatest scientist you have never heard of. You know, he's been completely eclipsed by Charles Darwin. But Louis Agassiz, a Swiss scientist who is a Sikh French accent, comes to the United States in 1848 and he becomes this nationally famous figure. He goes out on the lecture circuit and everyone thinks he's handsome and he has a million students.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
But he believes in deep time, but he does not believe in Charles Darwin's idea that deep time is the container for species evolution. He says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. God created each layer of life in a sequence of creation and destruction and creation and destruction over many, many millions of years. So what you're seeing in the fossil record
American History Hit
How Old is America?
over deep time is the constant workings of the benevolent creator god not some weird idea that says that god is not necessary yes but god you know natural selection basically says well you know maybe god is out there but we don't need god for natural selection it can happen just according to nature Nature is a kind of way of talking about God without talking about God.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And so Darwin is very, very threatening when The Origin of Species is published in 1859. And Agassiz is just jumping up and down in rage. He can't stand The Origin of Species, and he becomes the chief American philosopher. opponent to this kind of heretical idea that somehow the long story of life can be told without reference to the creator God.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And because he sort of lost the battle with Charles Darwin, we've forgotten about him. But he had many ideas up his sleeve. He's the guy who invented the idea of the ice age that, you know, long ago, at some point, the earth was encased in a layer of ice, it was a snowball earth. And that the reason that the United States is so flat from the Appalachians all the way to...
American History Hit
How Old is America?
The Rocky Mountains is because an enormous blanket of ice, not that long ago, crushed the whole American landscape. And who was behind the icy blanket? None other than God himself, preparing America for the great fertile plains that we farm today. So he called the Ice Age that great agent, you know, capital G, capital A.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
by which he saw the hand of God in the great geological workings of the world. So different from his contemporary, Charles Darwin, who sees maybe God, but maybe not God in the workings of deep time. It's very extraordinary.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Deep time is at the heart of American exceptionalism because what it is saying to Americans is that, well, you know, God may have been crafting the entirety of the planet, but he was lavishing special attention on North America. And we can tell because this is such a fertile land.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
All of the geological processes extending from millions of years to the present have yielded the fossil forests that are fueling the Industrial Revolution, the Cretaceous lands of the South that are fueling the cotton boom that makes the U.S. the largest cotton exporter in the world before the Civil War. It is creating the great fertility of the North American plains.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
So, of course, even though the United States is still so new, Americans are at pains to constantly say, yes, yes, yes, we are new. But that is just a sign of God's special benediction, special mission for the United States.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Deep time is the idea that emerges in the 19th century that the Earth is not, in fact, 6,000 years old as a literal reading of Genesis and the rest of the Bible will tell you, but in fact, millions, if not billions of years old. And that idea emerges quite rapidly in our very modern history.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
That's right. Yeah, they had definitely found fossils of scary creatures before. And the word fossil simply means coming out of the ground. It doesn't mean particularly ancient. So you could imagine that, for example, the dinosaurs had been around, swimming around the waters of Noah's Ark, for example. So you didn't need deep time for dinosaurs.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
You need intellectual revolution to begin to imagine an enormous expanse of time in which the history of the Earth plays out instead of a tiny expanse of time in which the history of the Earth plays out.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Well, as you mentioned, the Industrial Revolution, and in fact, that momentous revolution is accompanied by the Deep Time Revolution. They are completely related to one another. One would not have happened without the other. So as Americans and Europeans in Europe begin
American History Hit
How Old is America?
digging for, for example, fossil fuels in the ancient coal forests that lie under North America, they begin to ask themselves, huh, I wonder what rocks lie underneath this. I wonder what rocks lie above that. And that's an economic question, right? How deeply do I have to dig into the earth in order to get to the fossil forest layered where the coal is, for example.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
But they begin to see, wow, this is, you know, it It probably took a really long time for these various deposits of earth to lie on top of these ancient coal forests. They're pretty deep down there. I'm looking at the processes around me, and I'm having a hard time imagining that this could have happened in 6000 years. years. So probably it happened much longer.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Same thing happens with the fertility of the cotton plantations in the South. They begin to sort of dig around, like which parts of the South are most fertile. Ah, oh, here's a layer way down deep that we're digging. probably was not deposited in 6,000 years, because as I'm looking at the weather and erosion around me, it's not happening very fast.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
So they begin to hit upon this concept that today is called uniformitarianism, which is a fancy way of saying that the processes that we observe around us today are also occurring probably in the past. And that's crucial for the idea of deep time, that things happened long ago, the way they are happening now.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And it flies absolutely directly in the face of catastrophic myths like the Noah flood story, which a flood is a catastrophe, right? And biblical history imagined many of these catastrophes happening to explain the modern world.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
But by the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of slavery into the Cotton South and, you know, a series of other economic and industrial transformations are bringing to Americans' attention that it's possible, actually, that the Earth's history happened not only in a very different way, but in a much, much longer way.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
People actually aren't really worried about the age of the Earth until the 17th century, when Europeans begin to be confronted with alternative chronologies from other places that they're visiting, like China. And so that's why they actually become obsessed with this 6,000 year number, which didn't really exist before that time. It's Europeans saying, well,
American History Hit
How Old is America?
You know, we want the Bible to be not just the unique history of the Hebrew people. We want the Bible to be the history of the whole world. So we're going to run the numbers on the Bible, right? We're going to get our calculators or our abacuses, you know, whatever, sheets of paper. And we're going to add up all of the generations and the begats and whatever dates we can find.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And we're going to come up with this number. And 4004 B.C., in fact, it's October 23rd, 4004 B.C. on a Saturday night. is determined by James Usher, an Irish archbishop, to be the age of the earth as he declares it in 1660. So this is sort of floating around for a couple hundred years as authoritative science, right?
American History Hit
How Old is America?
It's religion, but it's also science at a time that people didn't see a conflict between the two countries. But it's only in the course of the 19th century when people are intensively coming into contact with the ground underneath their feet because of the Industrial Revolution. And over the course of various digging programs, you know, trying to find fertile soil in New
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Calcium carbonate in rich soil because they've exhausted the soil after 200 years of colonization. Again, the fossil fuels of the coal forests, stratum that is today called the carboniferous era. It's very, very long ago. They begin to be just confronted from all sides. with the fact that this could really not have happened super quickly without a critical thing, which is a miracle.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And they are now also in the business of denying miracles, right? They're starting to imagine that the earth is disenchanted, that maybe God put the earth into motion, but he's certainly not reaching into our daily lives, you know, saying, here's a comet, here's a flood. He's, you know, as they might've imagined before. And so that's why,
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Uniformitarianism, this idea of slow, boring, non-catastrophic changes becomes a substitute for catastrophic flood stories like the story of Noah.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Oh, that was so real. Americans enter the American Revolution with this terminal inferiority complex relative to Europe because, you know, boom, 1776. Yeah, they're a young republic, but there's no evidence that this is going to last very long. So they're this untried new revolution. Democratic Republic and versus the ancient monarchies of Europe who are always threatening to reinvade them.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
So, you know, and they come into the 19th century still with this chip on their shoulder. We're such a young nation. We have so much to prove at any moment. The Brits are going to reinvade or maybe France will. So they start casting about for a different foundation on which to build their nationalism. And they end up kind of hitting on this beautiful solution.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
They say, well, yes, you know, we are the youngest nation politically. So we are fresh. We are like the atom among nations, you know, in this Garden of Eden that is the new United States. But we are also simultaneously the oldest world of all. when you start thinking in terms of the age of the rocks that lie beneath us.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And so behind our story of manifest destiny that God is watching over our land, there's now this really deep backstory. God, at the very beginning of Earth's history, pulled North America out of the oceans and said, this is my country, this is my land.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And Americans feel so strongly about this that by the late 19th century, they consecrate the first national parks, Yellowstone, Yosemite, all of these quote, national parks, they're like natural cathedrals. They're where Americans go to say, this is where I see God in the antiquity of American nature. No other nation in the world has the same concept at that time. It's a very American idea.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
That's right. You know, Europe has what Americans do not have. It has the Greco Roman ruins, which Americans are terminally envious about. And it also has the remnants of castles and cathedrals, you know, and they just love going there to see these ruins and all of this kind of remnants of high culture.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And they look around and they say, we have none of this in the United States, but we actually have something better. They convinced themselves over the course of the 19th century. We have something even older. We have cathedrals of nature. We have glacial flanks in Yosemite Valley that are millions of years old.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
We have geysers spewing out of Yellowstone that are testament to underground volcanoes. And only a power as majestic and overwhelming as the Christian God could have endowed the United States with this level of super grandeur. So take that old world, you know. Right. We're the new world, but we're even older than you are.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
That's right. As Americans begin to excavate in essentially the Nebraska territory after the Civil War, they encounter numerous peoples, the plains tribes of Indians. And underneath them, they also find the remnants of dinosaurs. And so they begin to craft a new argument and say, okay, the native peoples of the Americas, all right, they may have been the first peoples in the Americas, but
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Gosh, that's not very old because many layers underneath, we're finding the first animals that were in North America. There's the huge first mammals like the Brontotherium and other crazy huge mammals of the era that was called the Miocene. But even underneath those, my goodness, we're finding Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex. They give these mega muscular names to these animals and say,
American History Hit
How Old is America?
Well, these were here before the Indians and we are finding them. So they are ours and the land is ours. And the native peoples really have no claim. And they also don't understand deep time. So we can safely take this land from them. So that's the argument that they make.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
That's exactly right. As white Americans move into the lands that we call the Cotton South, so Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, in the decades after 1800, they have to encounter the question, how do we get this soil to be fertile? So again, they start digging, and they uncover this very rich layer of what is called the Cretaceous. It just means chalky, right? It's very rich in minerals.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
And they say, ah, this is a great fertile place on which to build cotton plantations. And it must mean that long ago, God prepared the southern states of America for chattel slavery, because there used to be an ancient ocean here, which we're finding in the Cretaceous, where, you know, we find these giant sea monsters, and they're like amazing creatures.
American History Hit
How Old is America?
but now they've all formed this very rich layer of soil on which we can create cotton plantations. It's obvious that God would not have created this soil if he did not want us to use black people to work that soil. That's where we get the term black belt for the layers of the lower south. First, it refers to the black soil that is exceptionally rich,
American History Hit
Romans in America
Und wir spielen am 12.6. im Kino am Olympiasee. Sagt man am Olympiasee?
American History Hit
Romans in America
Oh, das wär geil, so eine Tretbootshow. Und wir spielen am 12.6. am Kino im Olympiasee.
American History Hit
Romans in America
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee in Zusammenarbeit mit unserem Partner Backmarket eine Liveshow, unser allererstes Open Air.
American History Hit
Romans in America
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee in Zusammenarbeit mit unserem Partner Backmarket eine Live-Show, unser allererstes Open Air.
American History Hit
Romans in America
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee. Sagt man am Olympiasee? Oder im Olympiasee?
American History Hit
Romans in America
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee. Sagt man am Olympiasee? Oder im Olympiasee?
American History Hit
Romans in America
Oh, das wär geil, so eine Tretbootshow. Und wir spielen am 12.06. am Kino im Olympiasee.
American History Hit
Romans in America
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee in Zusammenarbeit mit unserem Partner Backmarket eine Liveshow, unser allererstes Open Air.