D. James Kennedy - Apologetics and Views

Apologetics and Views

In Christian apologetics, Kennedy contended for Christianity as a reasonable faith and wrote several books, Why I Believe, Skeptics Answered, and Solving Bible Mysteries, to make the case for Christian faith from history, science, and logic. “Skeptics are welcome,” he wrote in his book, Skeptics Answered: “Christianity has answers that are not only satisfying for the soul but also satisfying for the mind.... Throughout the ages, many skeptics have looked at Christianity’s historicity and have ended up coming to faith in Christ. The evidence is there. It just needs to be looked at with an open mind.” Kennedy also offered a “cultural apologetic” in which he argued for the earthly benefits brought by the influence of Christ and the Bible. His books, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born and What If the Bible Had Never Been Written, seek to document the positive impact of Christianity and the Bible in education, law, civil liberty, science, economics, the family, medicine, and the arts.

Many of his public messages focused on American history and the faith of the Founding Fathers of the United States in relation to a Christian worldview. For instance, Kennedy cited John Quincy Adams’ claim that Christianity is “indissolubly linked” to the founding of America. Kennedy wrote the forward to the 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers authored by law professor John Eidsmoe. Kennedy was a founding member of the board of Moral Majority, a political movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Kennedy, in opposition to same-sex marriage, called for a constitutional "Firewall" to protect the nation from "counterfeit marriage."

The Constitution Restoration Act was a bill promoted during the 2005 Confronting the Judicial War on Faith conference that sought to authorize Congress to impeach judges who fail to acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government" and to limit the power of the federal judiciary to rule in religious liberty cases. Kennedy was a co-signer of the "Land Letter" sent to President George W. Bush in October 2002 which outlined a "just war" rationale for the military invasion of Iraq. Kennedy sought to "reclaim America for Christ", a project he said, to “bring this nation back to God, back to decency, back to morality, back to those things that we wish America was like again.”

In creation-evolution debates, Kennedy would defend the general tenets of a special creation by God and the possibility of a supernatural view offered by young earth creationists as well as proponents of intelligent design and he advocated for the freedom of speech of those expressing it. Kennedy rejected the concept of a specie transition offered by the general theory of evolution and charged, “The two most notorious and blood-soaked political movements of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism, both rejected God and were animated by the idea of evolution.” According to Kennedy, “if one believes that evolution is true, then we are simply the product of time and chance and there is no morality and no intrinsic worth to human life.” That theme is reflected in Coral Ridge's 2006 documentary Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which includes an interview with Richard Weikart, professor of modern European history at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of the 2004 book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany. Weikart, who lived for five years in Germany, one of which was on a Fulbright Scholarship, is also author of the 2009 book, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute is the hub of the intelligent design movement, and the Institute's Fellows are infrequent Coral Ridge Ministries guest speakers. Phillip E. Johnson, considered the father of the movement, was a featured speaker at Coral Ridge Ministries' 1999 Reclaiming America for Christ Conference. There he gave a speech called How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won which was widely promoted by the Ministries' Truths that Transform.

Kennedy emerged as a leading debater of individuals from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS, "Americans United" or simply AU) which criticized Kennedy's founding of Center for Reclaiming America for being "just another Religious Right outfit obsessed with opposing legal abortion and gay rights and bashing public education." AUSCS also says that "Kennedy's ministry has always promoted right-wing politics," and "it isn't uncommon to tune in to 'The Coral Ridge Hour' and hear him preach against legal abortion, anti-discrimination protections for gays or the teaching of evolution in public schools." AUSCS also criticized Kennedy and his ministry for that it "frequently sends out fund-raising appeals," saying, "One recent letter asked for funds to stop PBS stations from airing a 'homosexual-propaganda program' called It's Elementary."

"Coral Ministries is considered by many religious scholars to be affiliated with Christian Reconstructionists, who take the radical view that Jesus Christ will not return to earth until Christians have taken over all forms of government, among other things." Though Kennedy has hosted Christian Reconstructionists Rousas John Rushdoony and Gary North on his program in the 1980s, he has rejected attempts to link him to Reconstructionist or Dominionism movements. “I am not advocating a theocracy,” Kennedy states in How Would Jesus Vote: A Christian Perspective on the Issues. “I would not have America reinstitute the Old Testament civil and legal systems to replace our governmental legislation.” He denounced in the late 1980s any attempts to link him to Reconstructionist or Dominionism movement as a McCarthyist technique of guilt by association, and said he does not approve of their theology. Critic Frederick Clarkson argues that despite his denial, Kennedy meets Clarkson's criteria for being a dominionist. In an interview with NPR's Terry Gross, host of the program "Fresh Air", Kennedy cast his objectives within a democratic framework. Asked whether he wanted all public office holders to be Christians, Kennedy answered, "We have people who are secular and humanist and unbelievers who are constantly supporting in every way possible other people who share those views. And I don't object to that. That's their privilege. And I think that Christians should be allowed the same privilege to vote for people whom they believe share their views about life and government. And that's all I'm talking about."

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a press release in 2006 strongly criticizing Darwin's Deadly Legacy, a neo-creationist documentary produced by the Coral Ridge Ministries, which attempts to link evolution to Adolf Hitler:

This is an outrageous and shoddy attempt by D. James Kennedy to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people. Trivializing the Holocaust comes from either ignorance at best or, at worst, a mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war on the backs of six million Jewish victims and others who died at the hands of the Nazis.

The ADL further denounced Kennedy as "a leader among the distinct group of 'Christian Supremacists' who seek to 'reclaim America for Christ' and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law." The ADL's response also quotes Christian geneticist Francis Collins, who was interviewed for the program, repudiating it, saying he was "absolutely appalled by what Coral Ridge Ministries is doing. I had NO knowledge that Coral Ridge Ministries was planning a TV special on Darwin and Hitler, and I find the thesis of Dr. Kennedy's program utterly misguided and inflammatory".

Coral Ridge Ministries answered the ADL's criticisms in an August 22, 2006 press release, stating that “ADL National Director Abe Foxman, who has not viewed our television program ... ignores the historical fact that Adolf Hitler was an evolutionist.”

"The fox always remains the fox. The goose always remains the goose. The tiger shall always have the attributes of a tiger."

"And further they ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to his own image."

"Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his denomination, to see that he is not constantly talking about the Will of god merely from the lips but in the actual fact he fulfills the will of god and does not allow God's handiwork to be debased. For it was by the will of god that men were made of a certain bodily shape,were given their natures and faculties. Whoever destroys his work wages war against God's Creation and God's will:"

"This planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men"

The release cited three sources for the assertion of a Darwin-Hitler connection. First, historian Richard Weikart, who said,

Among German historians, there’s really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist. He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas.

In fact Social Darwinism is a distortion of evolutionary theory. It, like eugenics advocates artificial selection, not natural selection.

The release also cited a Hitler contemporary, Scottish anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, who wrote in the 1940s,

The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist. He has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution. (In the next sentence, Keith says "He has failed, not because evolution is false, but because he has made three fatal errors in its application". In this context, Keith is acknowledging Hitler's abuse of evolutionary biology, that Hitler misused evolutionary theory as a justification for his crimes.)

Finally, the release claimed that evolutionist Niles Eldredge “freely admits the link between Darwin and Hitler.” The release quote mined Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, who wrote:

social Darwinism has given us the eugenics movement and some of its darker outgrowths, such as the genocidal practices of the Nazis in World War II — where eugenics was invoked as a scientific rationale to go along with whatever other "reasons" Hitler and his fellow Nazis had for the Holocaust.

As stated above, eugenics and social Darwinism deal are artificially selectional, not naturally selectional.

In a second release, Coral Ridge Ministries rejected the statement attributed to Francis Collins that he was misled and had "NO knowledge that Coral Ridge Ministries was planning a TV special on Darwin and Hitler":

A producer told Dr. Collins in person before the interview began that he was being interviewed for a program that would address the adverse social consequences of Darwin. In addition, he was asked specifically, during the interview, about the Darwin-Hitler connection and responded on tape that he did not agree with that view.

According to the Coral Ridge press release, Collins had signed a "talent release", giving "Coral Ridge Ministries the right to use his interview 'without limitation in all perpetuity.'"