A month ago on this site, in “The Crisis of the Evangelical Heart” Joey Cochran said he was “flummoxed” by John Fea calling Jesus and John Wayne and The Making of Biblical Womanhood “woefully flat” examples of “evangelical history” in a recent Atlantic article because he had also previously heard Fea praise both authors’ books. Regardless of the fact that Fea also praised these books in his article, something else that caught my attention that I want to try to... Read more
This is a click-bait question, but over the last few weeks it is one that has been on my own mind as I’ve been helping my students contextualize the Adventist denomination within the larger story of Christianity in the United States. What groups we think we are part of matters, and Seventh-day Adventists have managed to spend most of their history talking about evangelicals without really feeling part of that community. Asking “are Seventh-day Adventists evangelicals?” allows us to consider... Read more
I have a literary dilemma. I want to rave about a piece of writing – a short story – that I would claim as a masterpiece. It is also the best argument you will find for Biblical literacy as an essential aspect of Western culture. The problem is that I can’t tell you exactly why that is the case without giving away the key to the plot. I abhor spoilers. So let me tread as delicate a path as I... Read more
If you’ve been following the news this past week, you’ve likely seen something about the “God Bless the USA Bible”– a $60 KJV Bible with United States government documents interlaced throughout, marketed and sold by Donald Trump in what he described as a way to celebrate Holy Week. The problems with launching a Bible associated with and promoted by a political figure (particularly during Holy Week) are hopefully obvious to us all (Esau McCaulley’s piece in the New York Times... Read more
by Janine Giordano Drake When Woodrow Wilson ran for president in 1912, he called himself a “Christian.” The man was a Southern Presbyterian aristocrat, accustomed to a world where wealthy churchgoers had to own expensive suits, dresses, and hats, as well as pay an annual pew rent, in order to attend church regularly. By 1890, the date of the map below, Southern Presbyterians represented some of the wealthiest, most well-connected people in every county in the South. Some Presbyterians contributed... Read more
A passage in the Alexandrian writer Philo casts a curious light on Christian origins, and specifically Easter, and I wish I understood it better. Let me put it out there for discussion. It’s particularly appropriate for precisely today – for Maundy Thursday, as we segue into Good Friday. Philo reports on the violent and confrontational politics of the Egypt of his day, particularly the 30s AD. Alexandria was sharply divided between Jewish and anti-Jewish factions, and rioting was always a... Read more
A couple weeks ago I saw the classic 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for the first time. It made me think of grad school. Before you get too concerned, specifically it made me think of a book I read in my twentieth-century history seminar: The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. First, some background, in case you too are behind on your consumption of Westerns. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—intentionally shot in... Read more
When even the most conservative of American evangelicals started drinking alcohol, they lost their movement’s philosophical foundation for social justice. That’s an overly simplistic statement, but what I mean by that is that the decades-long evangelical campaign against alcohol – a substance that the Bible does not condemn as inherently sinful – schooled evangelicals in the art of weighing the morality of an action not merely by whether it was intrinsically wrong for an individual but by whether it had... Read more
When I was doing the research for my book about Hmong refugee resettlement in the aftermath of the “Secret War” in Laos, I was intrigued and surprised by how frequently missionaries showed up in the archival sources. Missionaries, it seemed, were everywhere. In Laos, they introduced Christianity to Hmong people in both the highland regions and the cities. In Thailand, they provided essential medical care in refugee camps that housed Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong people displaced by genocide, famine, and... Read more
This coming weekend we celebrate Palm Sunday, the dramatic events that mark the beginning of Holy Week. In this blog I will talk about some of the Old Testament passages that very strongly parallel the account as we read it in the gospels, and ask just what those linkages and foreshadowings actually mean. I will also talk about what I believe is the perfect scriptural text for reading and re-reading during the Easter season. Psalms, Messianic and Prophetic Any acquaintance... Read more
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