Make Harvard Religious Again

February 12, 2024 By Tom Whittaker

Commentators often bemoan the attention that’s paid to Harvard in our cultural discourse. Harvard, it’s sometimes said, educates a tiny fraction of American students and its significance is drastically overstated. Surely, this line of argument runs, we should be paying more attention to the places that educate the vast majority of students: non-selective colleges and universities, most of them public, whose policies help determine the shape of the American citizenry and workforce far more than Harvard’s ever could. The rejoinder,... Read more

Branding and the Death of the Baptist University

January 28, 2024 By Tom Whittaker

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My family was recently near the campus of UT Dallas and decided to go for a walk. It’s not going to make a list of the most beautiful colleges in America, but it has rows of magnolias overlooking a line of fountains that made it a nice place for young kids to run around. I couldn’t help but notice a couple things on the campus: the automated food delivery robots parked by some of the buildings (sadly I didn’t get... Read more

Perry Glanzer’s Christian College Guide: In Need of Revision

January 12, 2024 By Tom Whittaker

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Perry Glanzer is one of the foremost scholars of Christian higher education, and, as I understand it, a bit of a thorn in the side of the Baylor administration, pushing for the university to lean into its Christian identity. In November, along with a Baylor postdoc (Theodore Cockle) and PhD student (Jessica Martin) he put out a new guide to Christian higher ed called Christian Higher Education: An Empirical Guide, published by ACU Press. I was intrigued to read it... Read more

Is Church Planting Always a Good Thing?

November 30, 2023 By Tom Whittaker

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Church planting has long been in the evangelical DNA. In early America, frontier expansion went hand in hand with a vigorous campaign of church multiplication. Ever since, migration, conversion, and population growth have created receptive audiences religious entrepreneurs to forge new Christian communities. Since the colonial period, Americans have never had much patience for the idea that a “churched” area could be left to the work of existing congregations. The preferred vocabulary nowadays is that of the “life cycle”: churches... Read more

How the Pilgrims Secularized Thanksgiving

November 23, 2023 By Tom Whittaker

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Thanksgiving may well be your favorite holiday. For a lot of Americans, it exudes a kind of a warm, sentimental glow, fueled by the twin coals of food and family. I’m not in that category: I was born in England, and moving to the US at age 8, I was only partially inducted into the cult of Thanksgiving. The strange sweet-savory food combinations (sweet potato casserole with streusel topping and marshmallows, weird jello “salads”) combined with my general aversion to... Read more

LGBT Inclusion and Evangelical Identity: A Transatlantic Comparison

November 18, 2023 By Tom Whittaker

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Same-Sex Blessings in the Church of England Unlike many other Anglican churches in the western world (the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, and so on) the Church of England has not, up to this point, embraced same-sex marriage, the ministry of non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy (at least officially), or (until very recently) church blessings for gay couples. Despite being the established church in a nation that embraced gay marriage over a decade ago and where only 13%... Read more

Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Sort of an Evangelical Catholic

November 11, 2023 By Tom Whittaker

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I’m teaching a class on Catholicism this semester, and, in an effort to jazz things up a little bit, we watch a video or two at the beginning of every class. A lot of those videos have come from the twin online stars of American Catholicism, Fr. Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron. Both speak in a Christocentric, biblical manner that is appealing to many evangelical Protestants, my students included. Bishop Joseph Strickland seemed to me to have less of... Read more

Postsecular East Texas: Two Years Behind the Pine Curtain

November 6, 2023 By Tom Whittaker

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I want to welcome you to my new column, The Postsecular West. My name is Tom Whittaker, and I teach history at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, about two hours east of Dallas. The title of the blog is a reflection of my aspiration here: to explore and think seriously about the place of religion, especially Christianity, in our modern world. In much of the West, secularization has turned the Christian church from a dominant force into a moribund institution.... Read more