#380: Grant Swank

Joseph Grant Swank jr. is a creationist: “I believe, first of all, evolution is a crock. It takes a lot of faith to believe that I came from an ameba. A lot of faith! So evolution should be taught in Faith Class [lo, the power of inference], otherwise known in parochial schools as Religion Class. It's a crazy world we live in. Crazier every day. But one of the craziest notions that ever came down the pike is evolution. Who in his right mind would ever believe that the complicated homo sapien derived from a speck? That's getting the larger from the smaller.” You can read the whole brilliant piece of reasoning here (it is discussed here). Swank is also a proponent of the rather silly urban legend/wishful thinking that Darwin recanted on his deathbed.

His day job is being a pastor at New Hope Church in Windham, Maine, and he is the author of five books and plenty of articles that have appeared in various Protestant and Catholic publications. He also writes for RenewAmerica, an organization providing grassroots support for Alan Keyes' MSNBC TV show “Alan Keyes Is Making Sense” (yes, they had to put it in the title; otherwise no one would ever have suspected. We’ve already covered plenty of their contributors in our Encyclopedia).

Swank has also argued that the swine flu outbreak is a result of God's anger at Barack Obama for being a Muslim. That is not the first time he’s pointed out the Muslim connection to the White House, however. In 2008 he asserted: “I believe there presently is a divine curse on the White House. Why? Because President George W. Bush placed the Koran in that house's library. […] Taking biblical data into consideration, one can conclude that God was very angry at that move. […] God cannot tolerate those who place other gods alongside Him.”

Diagnosis: The shrill, angry howls of garbled insanity, the incoherence of it all, the constant lapses into unrelated Bible verses, the arguments by intuitive association between phenomena; it adds up to something repugnantly fascinating – it’s terrible, but you can’t really stop watching either.