After five and a half years on the Anxious Bench, the time has come to say goodbye.
Given my other writing commitments during the coming year (including regularly posting on my Substack and writing more frequently for Christianity Today and other venues), I decided that it was time to step away from the Anxious Bench, so this will be my last regular Anxious Bench post.
I’m leaving with a lot of gratitude for the Anxious Bench and its administrators over the past few years. I’m thankful for what the Anxious Bench gave me as a historian and writer, and I continue to be very grateful to Chris Gehrz and the other members of the Anxious Bench in 2020 for welcoming me to the Anxious Bench at that moment.
At the time, I was just beginning to think about writing more for the public. In June 2020, when I submitted my first monthly Anxious Bench post, I had just turned in the final version of my manuscript for The Politics of the Cross, my first book written primarily for a nonacademic audience. And I had written a few pieces for online magazines, newspapers, and blogs. But my regular Anxious Bench writing schedule prompted me to spend a lot more time each month thinking about how to reach the larger public with my writing. And that was a transformative experience.
My first year of blogging for the Anxious Bench (2020-2021) coincided with an enormously polarizing time in our national life – a time of protests over race, division over COVID protocols, clashes over the removal of historical monuments, and a divisive presidential election that ended with the January 6 invasion of the Capitol. I used my Anxious Bench pieces to draw on my knowledge of modern American political and religious history to situate some of these developments in a larger historical context, which I would never have had the opportunity to do had it not been for the Anxious Bench. The act of writing about contemporary topics from a historical angle – and then reflecting on the feedback I received in the comments on my posts – helped me sharpen my thinking and refine my own perspective on the events I was living through.
In early 2022, as the Supreme Court considered the landmark case that would overturn Roe v. Wade, I began writing regularly about abortion policy for the Anxious Bench, which was a natural turn, considering my own scholarship on the subject. If it had not been for the Anxious Bench, I might have still had an occasional opportunity to write short editorials on abortion for a few different venues, but I would not have had the chance to write longer pieces exploring historical connections in greater depth.
One of the pieces I wrote in early 2022 explored the possibility that Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, may have drawn on the concepts of liberal Protestantism in framing the abortion rights decision. That became the basis for a conference paper and also served as the initial impetus for the book that I published this year with the University of Notre Dame Press titled Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of “Roe v. Wade.” Had it not been for the Anxious Bench, perhaps I never would have explored the concept that led to that book.
The abortion pieces that I wrote for the Anxious Bench in 2022 also led to regular writing opportunities for Christianity Today, since a CT editor who read those pieces reached out to me to ask if she could repost a couple of them on CT’s website – and that, in turn, led to an offer to continue writing for the magazine.
So, the opportunity to write for the Anxious Bench led me to broaden my reach as both an academic and public writer.
But in addition, the Anxious Bench gave me an opportunity to pursue small-scale research and writing projects that I never would have pursued if I not been writing for this forum. I’m a researcher at heart, so I relish opportunities to ask questions that require gathering information from multiple sources and sifting through it to arrive at new conclusions. So, my favorite posts for the Anxious Bench were those that involved tackling a new question and spending a couple weeks looking for information that would help me answer it. Most of those small-scale research ventures never led to a larger book project or academic article, but the Anxious Bench gave me an opportunity to present my findings to the public.
Some of these projects included a reflection on Dr. Seuss’s liberal Protestant modes of thinking, the historical context of Jonathan Edwards’s views on slavery, the regional divisions in American evangelicalism, the effect that the demise of the temperance movement had on evangelicals’ political attitudes, and the things I learned from my West Georgia students’ family histories. I really appreciated the freedom that the Anxious Bench gave me to write about whatever I wanted – and to write pieces that were as long as I wanted. When I began writing for the Anxious Bench, I didn’t have that same freedom at any other venue, and I found it enormously liberating.
But the Anxious Bench is not merely an individual writing platform; it’s also a community. As a result of writing for the Anxious Bench (and reading the posts of other Anxious Bench writers), I got to know Chris Gehrz and then later, Joey Cochran. I developed a closer tie with other historians I had known before but whom I now had an opportunity to interact with more regularly – people such as Andrea Turpin, Paul Thompson, David Swartz, and John Turner. And I got to know the work of a new generation of Anxious Bench writers who joined the forum a little after I did – people such as Ansley Quiros, Janine Giordano Drake, and others whose posts on the Anxious Bench led me to read their books and then collaborate with them on conference panels.
I really value the academic friendships and connections that have come as a result of my work on the Anxious Bench. It’s hard to overstate how instrumental the Anxious Bench has been in shaping me as a writer and historian.
But the time has come to say goodbye. I plan to continue writing the same type of pieces for my Substack as I have written for the Anxious Bench, so my departure from the Anxious Bench won’t mean the end of public writing for me in any way. Nor will it mean the end of my connection to some of the members of the Anxious Bench community, since I’m sure that I’ll still find many ways to collaborate with some of them on future conference panels.
But it will mean the end of a relationship with a forum that has done more to shape me as a writer and thinker than perhaps any other online forum has. When a group of Christian historians that included Tommy Kidd, John Fea, Philip Jenkins, and John Turner launched the Anxious Bench in 2012, they did something really valuable for the profession and for the public: They created a space where Christian historians could explore the implications of their own faith-based historical research for questions of public interest and could make their findings available to the public in real time, as they were thinking through ideas. I consider it a real privilege to have been part of that project for five of those thirteen years.
Although I’m stepping away from my role as an Anxious Bench blogger, I still have enormous respect for this project. As I reflect this Christmas season on my blessings during the past year, the opportunity I’ve had to share my ideas on the Anxious Bench is certainly one of those causes for gratitude.
And as I think about the future of the Anxious Bench, I’m glad that it has a wide array of regular writers who will be able to take this project to its next stage while remaining committed to the project’s original vision of taking faith-based historical scholarly reflections to a larger public audience.
The Anxious Bench blog will continue to thrive as its writers continue to change, and for that we can all be thankful.
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