A country church burned to the ground last week. Flames billowed over its wooden spires in a scene reminiscent of Notre Dame. But while stone defended the Parisian cathedral, the timber walls of the Church of the Visitation in Westphalia, Texas, didn’t stand a chance. Winds blustered that morning, fanning the fire and ensuring total destruction. I only visited the church once. It was pure chance. My son plays football, and one of games last year was played on a muddy... Read more
How Baptists, Lutherans, Quakers, and other Christians are drawing on American religious history to make the case against Christian nationalism. Read more
Actually seeing a new book in print is a nerve-racking experience. Dare you open it, or will you see a typo? Oh Lord… But with that caveat, I am delighted to announce the appearance of my new book, Rethinking a Nation: The United States in the 21st Century (Macmillan/Red Globe). That’s a wide-ranging history of the US since 2000 – political, cultural, social, economic.As a period in American history, the years since 2000 have been at least comparable to any... Read more
I have been posting about apostasy in a Christian context, and how some believers maintained their secret faith through long periods of persecution, as crypto-Christians, or as Nicodemites. The classic example of this comes from Japan, and I will here adapt and update a column I offered here some years ago. I was describing the Japanese campaign against Christianity, which peaked in the early seventeenth century, and which became famous in recent times with the 2016 film of Silence. That... Read more
All four of the New Testament gospels include the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus. In each gospel, after his final meal with his disciples, Jesus predicts that before the rooster crows (or crows twice, according to the most accepted manuscripts of Mark) Peter will deny him three times. A horrified Peter vows that he will never deny his Lord. Instead, he will die with him. When Jesus is arrested, all of the disciples — according to Mark and Matthew... Read more
Another story from Asia in which evangelicals sing Hallelujah in protest of totalitarian regimes Read more
Guest blogger Emily Wenneborg considers how "old hymns and the history of Christianity can work together to deepen our love for Christ’s church." Read more
Almost anything by Robert Wilken is worth reading. I have benefitted immensely from his The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (Yale University Press, 2003) and The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale University Press, 2012). Wilken does not disappoint in his most recent book, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019). Early on Wilken offers the following quote: “It is only right . . . that every person... Read more
I recently wrote about Nicodemism, the Reformation and Early Modern practice of keeping one’s real religious views secret in an age of potential persecution and violence. As I will explain, that Nicodemite idea was linked to the theme of lost and rediscovered scriptures, real or bogus, which was a major theme of the time. The veracity of documents was a paramount concern in the Renaissance era, and even more so in the Reformation, when scripture supposedly marked the path to... Read more
Today we welcome Monica L. Mercado to the Anxious Bench. Monica is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University, affiliated with Women’s Studies and Museum Studies. She will spend the 2019-2020 academic year in residence at Harvard Divinity School as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and North American Religions in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program. Monica is currently at work on her first book, The Young Catholic: Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism. In the introduction to Brett... Read more
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