Evangelicals Took Faith Too Seriously

August 22, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Mark Lilla’s new book, The Once and Future Liberal, is gaining some attention as one of the most sustained critiques of the politics of identity. Those identitarian politics, some think, are also responsible for the election of the worst POTUS in history, for two reasons. Democrats catered to minority groups on the basis of personal loyalties rather than policies that might benefit a wider segment of society. And President Trump appealed to white male Americans who grew tired of having... Read more

Forget about 81%, Think about 1997

August 17, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Two decades ago, Christine Leigh Heyrman won the Bancroft Prize (the prestigious annual book award by the Columbia University Libraries) for Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. To read her epilogue is to be amazed at how fast times change. Back then, Heyrman’s description of a suburban Baptist church in Delaware gave the impression that racial tensions were a thing of the past: Every Sunday morning two worship services draw big audiences composed largely of middle-class families; whites... Read more

Look How Tim Keller and Donald Trump Agree

August 15, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Are Americans more prone to believe that Keller or Trump is sincere? And are Christians any more skeptical of the authenticity of either condemnation? Read more

Giving Your Testimony is what Protestants Do (even when they become Roman Catholic)

August 11, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Last month we (some of us) read about Elizabeth Bruenig’s conversion from Protestantism to Rome. For her Roman Catholicism represented a place within which to resist the modern world: As a Protestant, I had learned that commentaries on Scripture were just that: the ephemeral striving of mere mortals, bereft of meaning in their own right, useful only insofar as they happened to be correct according to one’s own judgment. But more and more I was convinced I could not carry... Read more

From Charles Finney to Lena Dunham: The Oberlin Factor

August 8, 2017 By D. G. Hart

News has circulated about Lena Dunham’s out-tweeting of American Airlines’ staff who while discussing transgender people allegedly used the word, “gross.” Here is Conor Friedersdorf’s account: On Wednesday, Lena Dunham, the director, writer, and actor best known for the HBO series Girls, used her celebrity to draw attention to an exchange that offended her. In her telling, she was in the terminal at JFK airport in New York City, when she overheard two uniformed flight attendants engaging in a private... Read more

How Skeptics View Christianity

August 4, 2017 By D. G. Hart

J. Gresham Machen was by most accounts a fundamentalist. In 1923 he wrote, Christianity and Liberalism, a book that held historic Christianity and liberal Protestants were two different religions. In 1929 he founded Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia after a reorganization of Princeton Seminary, where he taught since 1906, resulted in conservative Presbyterians losing control. H. L. Mencken was a columnist and literary editor who made a career out of ridiculing most things American, including the chief expression of the nation’s... Read more

Why You Can’t Get Out of Evangelicalism

August 2, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Protestants are converting to Rome because evangelicals won’t pony up with structures and norms and forms and boundaries. Read more

Protestants Learned to “Do” Politics from Roman Catholics

July 28, 2017 By D. G. Hart

If Christians had to argue about politics without riding the high horse of Christian norms, they’d have to walk. Read more

Politics is What White (and many Black) Protestants Do

July 26, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Why is this so hard? Historians who study religion are falling all over themselves to explain that evangelical Protestantism is not inherently political. One factor is discomfort with the number 81 — the number of white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump. Another is Frances Fitzgerald’s new book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. Barry Hankins started it off when he reviewed Fitzgerald for The Gospel Coalition: It seems to be part of FitzGerald’s subtle thesis that the Christian... Read more

Calvinists and Muslims Together

July 21, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Since first visiting Turkey six years ago and thinking about the relationship between Islam and the West, I have become aware of certain parallels between Reformed Protestantism and Islam. Take, for instance, the Ottomans’ recognition of Calvinist ministers in sixteenth-century Hungary as a better set of Christian pastors with which to cooperate in relating to the local population than Roman Catholic priests. Thanks to Maureen Mularkey’s recent piece on Islam’s growing presence in Europe, I can now identify another attribute... Read more