How Evangelicals Turned from a Born-Again Christian to a Divorced Hollywood Actor

May 25, 2016 By David Swartz

Many evangelicals became deeply disillusioned with Carter’s presidency. The sharp decline in ticket-splitting from 1976 to 1980—that is, voting for Carter at the top of the ticket and then for Republicans elsewhere on their ballots—suggested that support for Carter in 1976 was in fact an anomaly rooted in evangelical identity. What happened between 1976 and 1980 that flipped evangelicals away from Carter? First, many evangelicals reshuffled their priorities. In the mid-1970s the SBC had adopted resolutions supporting many of Carter’s... Read more

Martin Luther King and the History of Religious Extremism

May 24, 2016 By Thomas Kidd

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would make it on my list of must-reads for American cultural literacy. Written as he awaited release from a Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1963, King explained why the non-violent protests couldn’t “wait” any longer, as some moderate white Christians asked him to do. “When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro,” King wrote, “living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what... Read more

New Thought

May 20, 2016 By Philip Jenkins

In my last column, I mentioned the New Thought movement of the early twentieth century, less for its own intrinsic significance, than for the astonishing importance that observers attached to it. Many educated people saw it as the coming world religion, most notably William James. Today, there is a more basic question: what on earth was it? The story begins with the Mind Cure movements of nineteenth century New England, which had their best known representative in Mary Baker Eddy... Read more

Banning the Bible: Did It Really Happen in the Medieval World?

May 18, 2016 By Beth Allison Barr

Yes, it did. But not the way you were taught in Sunday School. Let me explain. As I established in my previous post, vernacular translations of the Bible existed in England long before the Reformation. Moreover, they were used by clergy and laity alike. I venture that many late medieval English folk were just as well versed in scripture as many of their Reformation counterparts (although it is certainly true that the sections of scripture they knew would have... Read more

Reassessing the Boston Tea Party

May 17, 2016 By Thomas Kidd

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was the most provocative Patriot action before the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775. Most Americans vaguely know that the Tea Partiers pitched tea into Boston Harbor, because they were angry about taxes. But what actually provoked the Tea Party? The key instigator was Samuel Adams, a devout Christian. Should Christians look back on the Tea Party as a courageous act, or an unwarranted, if understandable, overreaction? The crisis that led to the... Read more

Calvin, Calvinism, and the Institutes

May 16, 2016 By johnturner

“The whole of sacred doctrine consists of two parts,” wrote John Calvin at the outset of his 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion, “knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Likewise, in his expanded 1559 edition of the Institutes, Calvin repeated that human wisdom “consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Calvin’s opening paragraph in his final edition of the Institutes is beautiful. Even a quick survey of human endowments should convince us that they... Read more

Which Spiritual Unrest?

May 16, 2016 By Philip Jenkins

I wrote last time about the failings of prophecy in predicting religious futures. Here is a case-study. In his day, Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946) was an enormously respected writer and journalist, and a highly intelligent observer of American life. He was a mainstay of the muckraking movement and a leading Progressive, who was close to Woodrow Wilson. His 1908 book Following the Color Line was a pioneering exploration of American racial conditions. In 1910, he published a survey of contemporary... Read more

Histories of the Future

May 13, 2016 By Philip Jenkins

Has anyone ever collected predictions of the future of religion, whether in a book or a website? The most famous are those that predict the vast growth or decline of some faith, projections that prove to be hilariously inaccurate – eg Thomas Jefferson’s view from 1822 that Unitarians would become the dominant religion in the new United States: I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings... Read more

The Rise of “Abrahamic Religions”

May 12, 2016 By johnturner

Most semesters, I teach a course my university titled “Religions of the West.” Given my own background of research and writing, I at first considered pretending that the “West” meant the “American West” and having my students discuss Native American spirituality, Spanish missions, and Mormonism. Alas, “Religions of the West” meant the broader histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Sigh. Lots of work. But that’s why humanities professors get paid the big bucks. Now, several years in, I’ve at least... Read more

The Limits of Evangelical Identity Politics

May 11, 2016 By David Swartz

Jimmy Carter’s born-again credentials drew many evangelicals to the polls in 1976. Evangelicals who had never campaigned for a candidate campaigned for Carter. Jerry Falwell, future founder of the Moral Majority, encouraged evangelicals to vote for the Democratic candidate. Pat Robertson, who claimed credit for Carter’s win in the Pennsylvania primary, hosted the candidate on his “700 Club” television show. Decades later he would say that “Carter was the one who activated me and a lot of others. We had... Read more