Doing Bad to Do Good: Carter’s Race-Baiting Election of 1970

Last updated on: May 12, 2015 at 8:59 pm By David Swartz

In 1970 Jimmy Carter ran a sordid campaign for governor of Georgia. Courting the support of segregationist George Wallace, Carter used Wallace’s slogan “our kind of man,” which was a barely veiled appeal to the laboring classes who opposed integration. Carter’s campaign workers, who called themselves the “stink tank,” found a photograph showing Carter’s liberal opponent Carl Sanders (who was part owner of the Atlanta Hawks) celebrating with the black members of the team after winning a championship. The photograph... Read more

Do You Love Theology More Than Jesus?

Last updated on: May 11, 2015 at 4:26 am By Thomas Kidd

In a recent blog post lamenting Southern Baptists’ decision to disinvite Ben Carson from speaking at the SBC Pastors’ Conference, Pastor Perry Noble said that the disinviters “love theology more than Jesus.” Although Noble conceded that theology played an important role in the Christian faith, he could see no legitimate reason why Ben Carson’s theology should raise any concerns. There’s a lot to unpack in this short statement contrasting theology and Jesus. I am sure that Pastor Noble and his church... Read more

Gaudium et Spes for Mother’s Day

Last updated on: May 10, 2015 at 7:23 am By Agnes Howard

Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) was one of the remarkable documents of the Second Vatican Council, whose closing fifty years ago we currently commemorate. Perhaps an unexpected source for Mother’s Day tidings, this Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965) gives winsome, concise statement of Catholic teaching on the family. For instance, this: By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children, and find... Read more

Outliers and Iconoclasts

Last updated on: May 7, 2015 at 1:17 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been writing about mainstream and fringe scholarship, and defending the sometimes unpopular idea of mainstream orthodoxy, or the scholarly consensus. Blogging on any religious topic invites wacky comments and responses. As one example of many, I had a commenter not long ago who asserted that most of what Christians believed about their origins was utterly wrong. Way back in the third century BC, he said, the cult of the Egyptian god Serapis prefigured most features of Christianity, including... Read more

Corporate Evangelicalism

Last updated on: May 7, 2015 at 1:08 am By johnturner

Recently, Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God has generated considerable attention for its claims about the way that the 1930s and post-WWII alliance between politically conservative businessmen and evangelicals created modern ideas about “Christian America.” According to the book’s self-description, Kruse “reveals how the unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.” One Nation Under God is high on my summer reading list. First, though,... Read more

The Limits of Free Speech?

Last updated on: May 6, 2015 at 3:03 am By Miles Mullin

The moment you limit free speech it’s not free speech. ~Salman Rushdie In the wake of the recent near attacks on the satirical cartoon contest sponsored by the American Defense Freedom Initiative self-appointed pundits have begun to talk about the “limits of free speech,” asking questions such as: is some speech so provocative that it should be limited? So have respectable news outlets. McClatchy, a news source whose reporting I appreciate, recently posed the question this way: “If free speech is... Read more

“Theological Police”? Paleo Evangelicals and Ben Carson

Last updated on: May 5, 2015 at 4:10 am By Thomas Kidd

In the week since my Washington Post piece on Baptists and Ben Carson, some critics have accused the Southern Baptist Convention of a new kind of fundamentalism. Baptists unduly rescinded the offer to Carson to speak at the Pastors’ Conference because of (what the critics see as) irrelevant theological differences between evangelicals and Seventh-Day Adventists (Carson’s denomination). Megachurch pastor Perry Noble called those who asked the SBC to retract the invitation “theological police” who “love theology more than Jesus.” The... Read more

I Want to Believe

Last updated on: May 4, 2015 at 11:48 am By Philip Jenkins

Last year, Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson published an impressively dreadful book called The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’s Marriage to Mary the Magdalene. The Lost Gospel made much of an ancient novel called Joseph and Aseneth, claiming (on no vaguely convincing grounds) that the characters in it were coded or disguised references to Jesus and the Magdalene, and that on the basis of the text, you could reconstruct the “true” history of Jesus and his... Read more

The Seekers and the Sought

Last updated on: April 30, 2015 at 2:38 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been writing about the English Non-Juror movement. About 1710, these dissident High Church figures were looking around for a major institution in which to ground themselves, and they tried to affiliate with the Orthodox Churches of the East. That effort came to nothing, but it did have an ironic aftermath. In the early eighteenth century, the Non-Jurors were looking for orthodox and catholic (small-o, small-c) allies beyond the seas. At the end of the century, though, Britain’s Non-Jurors... Read more

Alexander Hamilton’s “Christian Constitutional Society”

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 11:37 pm By johnturner

Today’s guest post comes from Jonathan Den Hartog, associate professor of history at the University of Northwestern in St. Paul, Minnesota. The University of Virginia Press recently released his Politics & Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation. Den Hartog’s book illustrates that intense political conflicts over the relationship between Christianity and the American government are nothing new. In his book, Den Hartog argues that the religious dimension of Federalism (often lost in discussions of banking... Read more