The Relevance of Religious History for Today
About a decade ago, the historian David Chappell wrote a thoughtful book about religion and the civil rights movement, titled A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Among other ideas, Chappell presents the argument that the supporters of civil rights, ultimately, had religion on their side. In other words, while [...]
I’ve recently cracked open Matthew Hedstrom’s recently published The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom’s book is providing me with an opportunity to reconfigure my thinking and teaching on the respective trajectories of twentieth-century (and beyond) Protestant liberalism and evangelicalism. In recent decades pundits and some scholars have made much of the post-WWII evangelical resurgence, coupled [...]
Guest post from Miles S. Mullin II, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s J. Dalton Havard School for Theological Studies: John Fea’s recent Anxious Bench post, “Where Are the Studies of Twentieth-Century Black Evangelicalism?” raised an excellent question, one that confronted me over a decade ago as a graduate student in Dennis Dickerson’s Religion and the Civil Rights [...]
This week’s big religious headline was a Pew Report that documented (among other trends) the rapid rise of religiously non-affiliated Americans (“nones,” colloquially). The ranks of the unaffiliated (comprised of atheists, agnostics, and those with “nothing in particular”) rose from 15.3% of the U.S. population in 2007 to 19.6% in 2012. Although Pew carefully notes [...]
From an important post from Patheos Director of Content, Timothy Dalrymple, in which he envisions the future of the Evangelical Portal at Patheos: Evangelicals are neither loved nor respected in the American public square. This is due in part to our enduring and principled commitment to truths and values the rest of mainstream society rejects, [...]
For many Americans, Joel Osteen is the public face of evangelical Christianity. For many evangelical Christians, Osteen is not an evangelical Christian. Despite what follows, I have never taken much of an interest in such debates. Arguing over whether or not someone is an “evangelical” is rarely fruitful or uplifting. In fact, when I watch [...]
Others at the Anxious Bench know far more about the subject than I do, but I enjoyed reading Jonathan Yeager’s Books & Culture review of Vincent Caretta’s new biography of Phillis Wheatley (A Genius in Bondage reads the subtitle). I’ve always wanted to know more about Wheatley, especially after becoming somewhat familiar with Atlantic World [...]
We are rapidly approaching the fortieth anniversary of a paradigmatic event in the history of American evangelicalism. Beginning on June 12, 1972, around 85,000 young Americans (mostly high schoolers and collegians) assembled in Dallas, Texas, for what became known as Explo ’72 (short for “spiritual explosion”). Historians in recent years have paid a surprising amount [...]
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