Over creationism and other issues, hardline evangelicals began reasserting supremacy in the more conservative evangelical denominations. The most hidebound of the big Lutheran branches, the Missouri Synod, recommitted to the dogma that everything in the Bible is factually true. At its 1965 convention, over the objections of a reasonable president, it declared its “conviction that the events recorded in the book of Jonah did occur,” that Jonah was a “real man” swallowed by a “real whale” until his prayers convinced God to make the whale spit him out. The head of its most prestigious seminary
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