Today we welcome David Nanninga to the Anxious Bench. David is a first year Masters student in the Baylor History department. He is interested in post-WWII political history, specifically 1970s politics and the Carter administrations relationship to white evangelicals. I had the privilege of teaching David in my Women’s History and Theory Seminar in Fall 2021, and he wrote this blog post as one of our seminar assignments. Sacagawea is the face of the $1-dollar coin. She is the only... Read more
“Boycott China’s Winter Olympics?”, asked a Christianity Today headline last week. “Many American Christians Agree.” Well, kinda. CT was reporting on a Pew survey from January 10-17, on American responses to the U.S. diplomatic boycott of the Winter games currently taking place in Beijing, China. True enough, 62% of white evangelicals who had heard anything about the boycott for once agreed (34% strongly) with something the Biden Administration did. But that’s basically identical to the 63% of all respondents who... Read more
Migration is a principal force driving religious change and growth, and I have posted on this theme on several occasions at this site. The basic point about migration is totally uncontroversial, but I want to stress the role of empires in driving and directing that migration. How Imperial Subjects Came Home For Americans, the role of migration in making religion is obvious. All Christian churches on the continent owe their origins to migration, from the fifteenth century onward, and the... Read more
A guest post today from a rising scholar whom I admire, namely João Chaves. Here is a short sketch of his background: João B. Chaves, Ph.D., is Assistant Director for Programming at the Hispanic Theological Initiative, housed at Princeton Theological Seminary. João is the author of several peer-reviewed articles and three books, including Migrational Religion: Context and Creativity in the Latinx Diaspora (Baylor University Press, 2021). His forthcoming books include, The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South (Mercer University Press, May 2022), Baptists and... Read more
Empires shape religions, whether by spreading faiths, or particular forms of belief and practice. Much of that critical work occurs in the great cities that empires usually (not always) develop. Empires generally need capitals, seats of royal authority, and hubs of military and bureaucratic power. Those cities quite rapidly become very populous, and economically critical. We think of Babylon and Baghdad, London and Paris. Often too, empires develop very sizable and powerful cities that are great regional capitals. In each... Read more
On the radical roots of WWJD Read more
Many conservative white evangelicals are now embracing social justice causes that are often associated with the progressive side of the political spectrum. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, concern for the environment (what many dubbed “creation care”) and the vision of ending human trafficking captured the imagination of many young evangelicals. In the last decade, some evangelicals – even centrist evangelicals at institutions such as Christianity Today – have advocated for the rights of immigrants. And recently, racial... Read more
The United States has made real progress in aiding the approximately 80,000 Afghans evacuated from Kabul in late summer. To date, around 90% of the evacuees have left the military bases where they were initially housed, and with the help of energetic efforts by government, voluntary agencies, civic organizations, and religious groups, Afghan families are being resettled in communities across the country. But the story is far from over. In fact, it’s only just begun. For many refugees,... Read more
In the coming months, we are going to be hearing a great deal about the next appointment of a Justice to the US Supreme Court. Some of that discussion revolves around just how representative the Justices should be, in reflecting the makeup and diversity of the larger population. In practical terms, what does it mean to say that the Court, and its nominees, should “look like America”? These are some thoughts about how principles of representation and inclusion might work... Read more
Empires draw the maps of great religions. In the case of Christianity, so much is obvious if we map the major centers of population around the world. We see the ghosts of the British world, in Canada and Australia, and across so much of Africa and the Caribbean. The French, Belgian, and Portuguese empires account for other states that during this century, will become home to tens or even hundreds of millions of Christians. The Spanish and Portuguese empires drew... Read more
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