History & Hope

Moral Minority

David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Reviewed by Gregory Metzger at ChristianityToday.com:

Swartz has produced a must read not only for those interested in American religion and politics, but also for students of global Christianity. In relatively short order (the book's main text comes in at 266 pages), Swartz gives a richly textured narrative of some of evangelicalism's brightest thinkers, most creative activists, and most controversial provocateurs.

Bartonism and Election 2012

"The Faith (and Doubts) of Our Fathers" (Economist, 17 December 2011) examines the religious views of the founders of the American republic and in so doing spotlights the misinformation purveyed by a theorist whom Republican presidential candidates extol:

...The best-known advocate of the “Christian nation” theory is a Texan, an author and evangelist called David Barton, who has been writing on the subject since the 1980s.

Among his recent claims are that the founding fathers rejected Darwinism (although they pre-dated Charles Darwin), and that they broke away from Britain in order to abolish slavery. In fact the southern states only joined the Revolution on the understanding that slavery would not be questioned. Strange as his views may sound to most scholars, Mr Barton’s philosophy is taken seriously in Republican circles. When Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential

Why the Antichrist Matters in Politics

In a New York Times op-ed piece, historian Matthew Avery Sutton charts the influence of apocalyptic prophecy belief in American politics through the twentieth century, with a view to the 2012 election:

While Depression-era fundamentalists represented only a small voice among the anti-Roosevelt forces of the 1930s, evangelicals have grown ever savvier and now constitute one of the largest interest groups in the Republican Party. In the past, relatively responsible leaders like Mr. Graham, who worked with Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, and even Mr. Falwell, who reined in evangelical excess in exchange for access to the Reagan White House, channeled their evangelical energy.

Not now. A leadership vacuum exists on the evangelical right that some Republicans — Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and even Ron Paul — are exploiting. How tightly their strident anti-statism will connect with evangelical apocalypticism remains to be seen....

New York Times, 25 September 2011.

Sutton is an associate professor of history at Washington State University and author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Rise of Christian America.

Pentecostalism in America

Excerpts from a review by Joseph Williams, Christian Century, 23 Aug. 2011, 37-39:

Pentecostalism in America, by R.G. Robins, provides the best broadly synthetic treatment to date....

The carefully nuanced yet accessible volume situates American Pentecostalism within the broader context of American Christianity and U.S. history as a whole.  Robins expertly interweaves discussions of race, class, education, gender, globalization and other issues.  He is especially adept at highlighting the "zones of convergence" that appeared outside of the formal Pentecostal denominations in the second half of the 20th century and facilitated Pentecostalism's growing influence on more established forms of Christianity in the U.S.  Examples include the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, Oral Roberts University, Aglow International and the Jesus People movement.

 

Michele's Must Read List

The problem with Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's controversial signature to a conservative pledge that included a statement on the relative merits of slavery's impact on black family involves much more than a poor choice of words.  Ryan Lizza's profile of the candidate ("Leap of Faith," New Yorker, 15 August 2011) points to deep convictions about readings of American history championed by authors on the far right of evangelicalism that not only take a benign view of slavery but uphold  slaveholders as exemplars of America as a "Christian nation."

Mark Hatfield - Rebel Republican, Faithful Evangelical

Source: Associated Press, 7 Aug. 2011

Former Sen. Mark Hatfield, an outspoken critic of war whose liberal views often put him at odds with fellow Republicans, died Sunday. He was 89....

One of the first American servicemen to enter the Japanese city of Hiroshima following the atomic bombing, he once said one of his major accomplishments was helping usher through Congress a ban on U.S. nuclear weapons testing in 1987.

“Every president other than Eisenhower has been seduced by the military concept that that is our sole measurement of our national security and the more bombs we build, the more secure we are,” Hatfield said a decade later.

John R.W. Stott (1921-2011)

Nicholas D. Kristoff, "Evangelicals Without Blowhards," NY Times, 30 July 2011:

Mr. Stott didn’t preach fire and brimstone on a Christian television network. He was a humble scholar whose 50-odd books counseled Christians to emulate the life of Jesus — especially his concern for the poor and oppressed — and confront social ills like racial oppression and environmental pollution....

For many evangelicals who winced whenever a televangelist made the headlines, Mr. Stott was an intellectual guru and an inspiration. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, who has worked heroically to combat everything from genocide to climate change, told me: “Against the quackery and anti-intellectualism of our movement, Stott made it possible to say you are ‘evangelical’ and not be apologetic.”...  more

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt

Darren Dochuk's book describes how California became the power center of a new alliance between evangelical conservatism and free-market fundamentalism.  Excerpts from a review article by Chris Lehman at The Nation:

...[F]ormer New Dealers in the evangelical camp retained a strong antibusiness animus that disqualified them as “natural allies for the West Coast’s conservative elite,” Dochuk writes. The challenge for strategists seeking to turn conservatism into a majoritarian force in California, therefore, was to create what Dochuk calls “a new gospel of wealth that identified threats to pristine capitalism in big government.” This doctrine, a “blend of libertarian ideas and new Christian teachings on wealth,” converted the evangelical scene’s ministries into “forums for economic thought while its flourishing churches morphed into informal action committees ready to advance the interests of a conservative movement now breaking through at the state level. On a

"Eternal, Conscious Punishment:" Southern Baptists Spell Out Beliefs About Hell

Report by Adelle M. Banks, c, 2011, Religion News Service, posted on Huffpost, June 16, 2011:

(RNS) Southern Baptists on Wednesday (June 14) called hell an "eternal, conscious punishment" for those who do not accept Jesus, rebutting a controversial book from Michigan pastor Rob Bell that questions traditional views of hell.

Citing Bell's book "Love Wins," the resolution urges Southern Baptists "to proclaim faithfully the depth and gravity of sin against a holy God, the reality of hell, and the salvation of sinners by God's grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, to the glory of God alone."  full report

Can Megachurches Bridge the Racial Divide?

From an article by David Van Biema at Time.com, 11 Jan. 2009:

Above: worshipers at Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago; photo by Matthew Gilson, Time

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared that "11 o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week ... And the Sunday school is still the most segregated school." That largely remains true today. Despite the growing desegregation of most key American institutions, churches are still a glaring exception. Surveys from 2007 show that fewer than 8% of American congregations have a significant racial mix....

But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion's most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity.