Why Do Evangelicals Outside the U.S. Sound Like the U.S. Reporters at CNN?

Last updated on: February 5, 2016 at 1:13 pm By D. G. Hart

Over at Sojourners (via John Fea) Wes Granburg-Michaelson, the former General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America, reminds us that most evangelicals around the world are closer to Pope Francis than Ted Cruz. He notes that evangelicalism is a global movement made up Christians who are ethnically and racially diverse. Globally, these changes are even more dramatic. Seventy percent of the world’s evangelicals now live in countries of the global “South” — Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Their views... Read more

Why Not Give Up Being Evangelical?

Last updated on: February 4, 2016 at 2:53 pm By D. G. Hart

James Bratt thinks the evangelical brand has lost its usefulness, thanks in part to all the service the word “evangelical” is having to do during the Republic primaries. Go figure that Democrats don’t have to worry about or court born-again Protestants (white ones that is). Bratt proposes a few alternatives: One nominee surely ought to be “Amerikanische Christen,” in memory of those good Germans who soldered the faith so fast to fascist ideology in the 1930s that the church there... Read more

Jerry Falwell’s Support for Donald Trump is Smarter than You Think

Last updated on: January 29, 2016 at 12:35 pm By D. G. Hart

In fact, Falwell’s endorsement of Trump goes in exactly the right direction, as opposed to Michelle Higgins using the platform of InterVarsity’s Urbana conference to endorse Black Lives Matter as “a movement on mission in the truth of God” (is that like saying “doing God’s will”?). This assertion about Falwell looks all the more plausible after reading Derryck Green’s post about evangelicals and Black Lives Matter. Green objects to journalists who say that evangelicals follow Jesus and Paul to support... Read more

What Questions Should Christians ask of Presidential Candidates?

Last updated on: January 27, 2016 at 5:26 pm By D. G. Hart

It was a bit of harmonic convergence that I read in the same day two posts that made such different points about the current plight of the United States. The first stresses a reading of current events taken primarily from the categories of the decalogue: I suspect that 2015, from a Christian perspective, will go down in history as one of the darkest and gloomiest years of human history. The cavalier destruction of human life, in the name of religion,... Read more

Does Academic Freedom Turn All Professors into Theologians?

Last updated on: January 22, 2016 at 1:16 pm By D. G. Hart

I think I can understand Tracey McKenzie’s sense of relief as a Christian historian in his move from a secular public university to an evangelical liberal arts college (here are some other folks to weigh in on Christian higher education and academic freedom): When it came to matters of faith, the university’s unwritten policy was a variation of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It celebrated racial and ethnic diversity relentlessly but was never all that enthusiastic about a genuine diversity of... Read more

Why the Comparisons between Jesus and Trump Make Sense

Last updated on: January 20, 2016 at 6:03 pm By D. G. Hart

Never have I seen a political candidate with the power to change lives as much as what seems to be happening with Donald Trump’s candidacy. Of course, Trump’s catalytic powers turn people against him and even prompt some to question the legitimacy of religion in politics. I’m even convinced that the reason for the outpouring of denunciations of Islamophobia (even when those worries look just a tad plausible — can you say ISIS?) are primarily to disassociate oneself from Trump’s... Read more

If You “Do” Advent, Are You an Evangelical?

Last updated on: January 15, 2016 at 5:42 pm By D. G. Hart

Low church baby-boomers like myself grew up only knowing about the birth and death parts of the liturgical calendar. Now it seems all Protestants do, from high to low. On a recent drive around Chicagoland I heard a broadcast from WMBI (the radio station of Moody Bible Institute) in which the pastor — I believe from Moody Memorial Church — mentioned Advent. My wife and I looked at each other and both nodded to my remark that we would never... Read more

What Happens When You Find What You Thought You Left Behind?

Last updated on: January 13, 2016 at 4:03 pm By D. G. Hart

I can well understand why some mainline Protestants would consider converting to Roman Catholicism. The mainline churches in the U.S. have been afflicted with theological modernism for at least a century and have capitulated on any number of moral teachings since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. And yet, news comes of the latest efforts to achieve a full reconciliation between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic communions: A new milestone in Catholic-Lutheran dialogue was marked in October, when top theologians,... Read more

Should Reading the Bible Feel Like Exercise?

Last updated on: January 8, 2016 at 11:04 am By D. G. Hart

This is not a new thought but it comes up every year when any number of pious bloggers recommend the benefits of reading through the entire Bible in a year. I need to be careful what I say because my dear father followed this routine, probably for the last 25 years of his life. When I started at Patheos a year or so ago I had plans for blogging about the challenges and successes of a year-long reading plan. I... Read more

Does InterVarsity Endorse All of Black Lives Matter

Last updated on: January 5, 2016 at 5:56 pm By D. G. Hart

The news is fairly stale at this point, but the indicators of support for Black Lives Matter at Urbana, the annual meeting of InterVarsity Fellowship, did attract headlines. Here is part of Christian Century‘s coverage: Given that location, as well as InterVarsity’s commitment to both social justice and the diversity of its students (more than a third are ethnic or racial minorities), it was not surprising that there was some mention of racial inequality. But InterVarsity went further. The first... Read more