Cru, CRT, and the History of American Evangelicalism

Last updated on: June 25, 2021 at 10:25 am By johnturner

“The debate over critical race theory,” reported Christianity Today a few weeks ago, “has landed at Cru, one of the country’s most prominent parachurch ministries.” Cru – formerly Campus Crusade for Christ – is a behemoth in not only the world of American evangelicalism, but around the world. A few statistics suffice. $750 million in annual global revenue (2020). Nearly 20,000 staff members around the world, each relying on a large network of donors. Cru’s former name was misleading. While... Read more

Eucatastrophe in American Evangelicalism

Last updated on: June 23, 2021 at 3:36 am By Andrea L. Turpin

To be honest, I did not think the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting was going to go well. Along with many other evangelical observers, I feared that the representatives from SBC churches (known as “messengers”) would vote last week for leaders and resolutions that split truth and love rather than holding the two together. Some denominations are more at risk of losing truth, but the SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was more at risk of losing... Read more

Americans Should Be Comfortable with Historical Complexity, Not Afraid of It

Last updated on: June 21, 2021 at 8:16 pm By Chris Gehrz

Whether U.S. history involves European encounters with Native Americans or enslavement of Africans, Chris urges Americans to embrace complexity and resist fearful attempts to simplify their national past. Read more

Population Explosions and Religious Revolutions: The Case of Latin America

Last updated on: June 20, 2021 at 6:34 am By Philip Jenkins

I have posted quite a bit on the link between religion and demography. Obviously I don’t want to suggest any kind of mechanistic link here, but the connections are strong. To give an example, let me look at the history of Latin America over the last century or so. And although I touch on other topics, I promise to get back to that core religious theme. If you look at the continent over that time period, then a great many... Read more

Juneteenth: A Holiday “Tailor-Made for History”

Last updated on: June 19, 2021 at 10:12 am By Chris Gehrz

On a holiday that one historian says is "tailor-made for history," Chris suggests some ways you can spend Juneteenth learning more about the African American experience. Read more

How a Climate Disaster Reshaped the World’s Great Religions

Last updated on: June 18, 2021 at 3:20 pm By Philip Jenkins

Throughout history, climate-driven disasters have a driven sudden and revolutionary change in human societies, transforming political, economic and religious orders, and laying a foundation for new structures. Often, these revolutionary epochs have had far reaching religious consequences. I write about this phenomenon at length in my current book, Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval, but here let me offer one of the most intriguing and understudied examples I found in that research. Briefly, did such... Read more

A Sinking Ship or Weathering the Storm: #SBC21 in 21 Tweets

Last updated on: June 17, 2021 at 7:40 am By Kristin Du Mez

This week’s Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting has been widely viewed as a moment of reckoning. With a far-right takeover afoot, with Black pastors threatening to leave the SBC should Mike Stone or Al Mohler be elected president, with Russell Moore’s leaked letters revealing the ugly tactics members of the SBC Executive Committee were accustomed to wielding to consolidate their power and ignore misogyny, abuse, and racism within the SBC, all eyes turned to Nashville. For those of us who... Read more

Northern Baptists (Not Just the Southern Baptist Convention) Define American Evangelicalism

Last updated on: June 15, 2021 at 10:47 pm By Daniel K. Williams

What would American evangelicalism look like if the southernization of American evangelicalism had never happened, and instead the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening had continued in the North and produced an ongoing legacy of New England-centered global evangelism combined with advocacy for egalitarian-minded social justice? This question has taken on increasing importance this week, after the Southern Baptist Convention narrowly averted a further lurch to the cultural right. In the leadup to the SBC’s annual meeting, it was... Read more

The Half-Year in Review

Last updated on: June 13, 2021 at 5:58 pm By Chris Gehrz

Almost halfway through another tumultous year, Chris reveals what's been most popular so far in 2021 with our readers. Read more

The Faiths of Others

Last updated on: May 27, 2021 at 3:01 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

I am very pleased to announce that a book that I have worked on for a quite a while is finally out: The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021). Here is the cover description: The first intellectual history of interreligious dialogue, a relatively new and significant dimension of human religiosity. In recent decades, organizations committed to interreligious or interfaith dialogue have proliferated, both in the Western and non-Western worlds. Why? How so? And what... Read more