The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation

Daniel G. Hummel (Author), Mark A. Noll (Foreword)

400 pages

$21.99

Seven years later, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley kicked off her campaign with a speech prefaced by televangelist, author, and activist John Hagee. Opening with a prayer, he praised Haley, who’s seeking to be commander-in-chief of the United States, as a “defender of Israel.”

And around the same time, I was working on an article about American evangelicals’ skepticism of human-caused climate change. The inevitable question I had to address: Do evangelicals think it’s okay to abuse the earth because we’re all just waiting around for the Rapture? As Fox News host Sean Hannity said in 2022, “If [the world] really [is] gonna end in 12 years, to hell with it all! Let’s have one big party for the last 10 years, and then we’ll all go home and see Jesus.”

The link between these three vignettes is the subject of Daniel G. Hummel’s astute new history, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Dispensationalism is commonly characterized as an eschatology, but as Hummel demonstrates in his two-century survey of its ecclesial, scholarly, political, and cultural development, “the end times are just one dimension of the theology of dispensationalism and its wider legacy.”

The ”plain meaning” model of biblical interpretation my father invoked, Hagee’s assumption that support for the state of Israel is a key qualification for the American presidency, and the widespread perception that evangelicals don’t care about a planet we expect to burn—if anything like that is familiar, Hummel says, “then you’ve seen patterns of thinking that have been deeply shaped by dispensationalism.”

Rise and Fall’s claim is ambitious: Hummel contends that dispensationalism shaped not just American fundamentalism or evangelicalism but the United States as a whole. To this day, he writes, dispensationalism remains “one of America’s most resilient and popular religious traditions, one that taught Christians to wait with anticipation for a coming kingdom of God that would wipe away the warring kingdoms of men, but not just yet.”

But it has also moved well outside church walls—so much so that “Americans of many backgrounds” have “an essentially premillennial vision of the future,” a secularized expectation of “declining social cohesion and rising existential threats that [will] end in era-defining catastrophe.” As a formal school of theology, dispensationalism has sharply declined in the last 50 years. But as a cultural and political force, its influence is stronger than ever. In that sense, we’re all dispensationalists now.

Five pieces

Rise and Fall is detailed but not difficult. Hummel writes in clear prose accessible to lay readers, and his interest in dispensationalism isn’t merely academic. Raised in a family whose theology shelves were stocked with dispensationalist authors, he now works for a Christian academic organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published here at CT.

Though not without authorial perspective, then, this is not a polemical work. Nor does it take the tone of the cultured anthropologist braving the fundamentalist hinterlands. Hummel is never contemptuous toward his subjects, but he makes no attempt to salvage ideas from ties to dispensationalism that their adherents might find embarrassing. Rise and Fall is a workmanlike book, and its “great contribution,” as Scandal of the Evangelical Mind author Mark A. Noll writes in a glowing foreword, “is to take a story that ‘everyone knows’ and show that what ‘everyone knows’ has barely scratched the surface.”

That story begins by delineating the scope of dispensationalism as a theology. In Hummel’s sketch, it includes five big pieces, with its distinct eschatological timeline—rapture, tribulation, antichrist, divine preservation of a remnant of Israel, the Second Coming, Armageddon, the binding of Satan, Christ’s 1,000-year reign from Jerusalem, a second defeat of Satan, the final judgment, and a blessed eternity with God—only the flashiest.

What are the other pieces? Dispensationalism takes its name from the piece that has proven least influential in American culture writ large: its theory of time, which divides human history into “a series of dispensations that inevitably ended with the failure of humans to fulfill their obligations to God.” (In most tellings, there are seven dispensations total, and we’re at the bottom of the sixth.) Closely linked to that is the system’s theory of humanity, which is strictly divided into God’s two peoples—the church and Israel, their respective heavenly and earthly purposes forever distinct—and “the nations,” who are everyone else.

Dispensationalism includes, too, “a unique biblical hermeneutic.” However, this evolved over time, from early investment “in symbolical, allegorical, and typological readings of Scripture” to an insistence on “plain,” “commonsense,” or “literal” readings of the 20th and 21st centuries that tend “to equate nonliteral readings of prophetic passages with a rejection of inerrancy.”

And dispensationalism has a distinct theory of salvation, the piece that alone may rival its eschatology in how it dominates popular conceptions of evangelicalism. This “free grace” model calls to mind praying a one-time “sinner’s prayer” or “accepting Jesus into your heart” at the revivalist’s feet. As Hummel explains, it “lowered the bar of salvation to little more than a onetime mental assent to the proposition that Jesus is Savior,” and it overwhelmed “broader American understandings of being ‘born again.’”

With this description in place, Hummel turns to his history proper. He traces the development of dispensationalism from Plymouth Brethren preachers like John Nelson Darby in rural Ireland through institutional churches like Chicago’s Moody complex in the Reconstruction Era and the Gilded Age to fundamentalist-liberal controversies of the early-20th century and the mid-century rise of what we now call evangelicalism. (CT has a few cameos, and CT founder Billy Graham makes an extended appearance.)

The latter half of this timeline, from around 1920 onward, will likely be of greatest interest to most readers, or at least to those approaching the book as observers of evangelicalism today. Stocked with many characters still actively shaping the nation, it’s a devastating account of dispensationalism’s commercialization. The popularized dispensationalism most Americans now know was fashioned, Hummel argues, “not by theologians but by the theologically uninterested or illiterate,” with deleterious effects for the evangelical movement and American society as a whole.

Dispensationalism’s political consistency across decades is particularly striking. The very term conservative as a preferred political and theological label, long since part of the furniture, has dispensationalist roots. The concept of the “world system”—an older generation of dispensationalists’ term for “the interlocking institutions, organizations, and structural powers helmed by elites that ran the world”—has gone a hundred years unchanged. Evangelist Billy Sunday’s 1918 insistence that “no man can be true to his God without being true to his country” would slide neatly into many Republican stump speeches in 2024. Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson beat the God’s Not Dead franchise to the punch in 1923 with a sermon entitled “Trial of the Modern Liberalist College Professor versus the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Even the latest vogue in right-wing conspiracism—You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. You will eat the bugs. You will live in the pod.—was prefigured by Left Behind author Tim LaHaye in 1983, who charged that the goal of “the Illuminati, Bilderbergers, Council on Foreign Relations, and, more recently, the Trilateral Commission” was “to reduce the standard of living in our country so that someday the citizens of America will voluntarily merge with the Soviet Union.” Pop dispensationalism gave “cosmic meaning to the mobilization of Christian voters” in prior generations, Hummel observes, and does the same today.

Three questions

Hummel’s concluding chapters bring his account into very recent memory, and they left me with three big questions: one he raised and two I wish he’d at least briefly addressed.

First in the latter category is a matter of history. Hummel makes clear that the question of theological precedent has long been a point of contention around dispensationalism generally and the doctrine of the Rapture specifically. From the very beginning, Darby “insisted [his innovations] were recoveries rather than novelties,” and into the late-20th century, dispensationalists and their critics alike “charged the other with lacking premodern precedents … with both sides claiming support in the early fathers.”

As Hummel notes, the late Christian reconstructionist Gary North promoted research “attempting to discredit the origins of the rapture by tracing them to a mentally unstable teenage girl, Margaret MacDonald, who saw visions in 1830, and from whom John Nelson Darby purportedly stole the idea of an imminent rapture.” Hummel labels that origin story a “conspiracy theory [that] nonpartial experts found … unlikely,” but he doesn’t clarify how Darby hit on the idea of the Rapture or to what extent claims of its long theological pedigree have merit.

Second, Hummel documents how past political upheavals played a role in shifting the dominant American perspective on the end times. For example, the “days of postmillennial consensus [among American Christians] ended in the 1860s,” he writes, as “many evangelicals who experienced the [Civil War] and its aftermath” decided that “correcting modern social ills [was] too difficult an endeavor and, in any case, a secondary task to evangelization.” Conversely, some in the early Religious Right, believing political victory was within reach, “rejected an imminent rapture and future kingdom as antithetical to urgent political organizing.”

But Hummel doesn’t explore whether some comparable shift may be looming as Christian nationalism and other illiberal mindsets gain currency. If you have new hope of establishing explicitly Christian governance, if you believe (as former President Donald Trump said in March) the next presidential election is “the final battle” for America, if you sincerely expect to “take back” your country, is there room for the Rapture in your 10-year plan? Sociologist Samuel Perry has speculated on Twitter that “we could see an increase in post-millennialism in Christian Right circles as post-mil provides better rationale for Christian nationalist goals than the dominant pre-mil view.” Hummel’s perspective would be a valuable contribution to that discussion. [Author’s note: I was able to speak with both Perry and Hummel for a CT column on this subject after writing this review but before its publication.]

Finally, Rise and Fall ends with a challenging observation:

In the wake of [scholastic] dispensationalism’s collapse, the eschatological sight of the American church has blurred. “Good!” skeptical readers might exclaim—better a vague vision than a false one. And yet the story of dispensationalism does not allow for such an easy judgment.

The theological void left by dispensationalism—one of only a few sustained attempts to create a fundamentalist theological system in the twentieth century—has not remained empty. Evangelicals, and Americans more broadly, have only multiplied doomsday speculation since the collapse of dispensational theology in the 1990s. Its remnants in pop dispensationalism have been thrust into an ocean of raging American apocalypticisms that includes doomsayers of the Anthropocene, Replacement Theory extremists, QAnon trolls, techno pessimists, and neo-Malthusians.

For all the problems that theological apocalypticism posed in the twentieth century, it is likely that irreligious apocalypticism in the twenty-first will prove to be even more disruptive.

As one of those skeptical readers, this is the question I’ll have to mull: Are American Christians better off after dispensationalism’s fall than before it?

That is, have we moved on to a faithfully, productively vague vision of the end times, or did we plunge into a multiplicity of false visions instead? And do we sincerely look forward to Christ’s return, however the timeline may run? Whatever their faults, the dispensationalists never failed to say with fervor, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Bonnie Kristian is editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today. She is the author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community.

The post The Surprising Staying Power of Dispensationalism appeared first on Christianity Today.

Comparisons between the two can be overwrought. But tracking how evangelicals (and especially American evangelicals) responded to these crises 50 years apart—how our reactions changed, but also what stayed the same—is revealing. Evangelicals are paying closer attention to the Middle East now than we were then, and we’re doing so from a wider range of perspectives.

Just days into the conflict, we’ve already seen prominent, public evangelical responses to Hamas’s unprecedented acts of violence and hostage-taking. CT’s own Russell Moore called for Christians to “stand with Israel under attack,” and the National Association of Evangelicals’ statement condemned violence on both sides.

Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, declared on Twitter/X, “Hamas is the new ISIS and must be stopped!” Shane Claiborne, the evangelical pacifist and activist, criticized both Israel and Hamas for “doing things that do not lead to peace.” Greg Laurie, pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in California, speculated that the attack by Hamas was prophetically significant.

These responses are unsurprising. Today, we take it almost as a given that dozens, if not hundreds, of evangelical associations, parachurch organizations, churches, and leaders will weigh in on this tragic situation, and that those statements will vary in their stances.

American Christians Should Stand with Israel under Attack

Russell Moore

But that wasn’t always the case—and certainly not before the Yom Kippur War. Over the last 50 years, a veritable ecosystem of ministries and lobby groups has grown around Israeli-Palestinian relations, including some with explicitly Christian Zionist and pro-Palestinian commitments.

Of course, missions agencies dedicated to the Middle East have been around for more than two centuries. The same goes with evangelical leadership and support for humanitarian efforts in the region amid numerous wars in the modern era. But the single-issue advocacy devoted to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a more recent historical development in the evangelical world than many realize.

This phenomenon reflects a confluence of trends and factors unique to evangelicals—as well as the way evangelical attitudes have been shaped by our wider political and geopolitical context.

In 1973, a relatively small circle of leaders commanded most of the institutional and media influence when it came to speaking for “evangelicals” on the Middle East. That media environment centered on a small and fledgling Christian Zionist network forged in the early years of Israeli statehood. This network grew in prominence after the seismic Six-Day War in June 1967, wherein Israel decisively defeated its Arab neighbors.

Many of these spokesmen had one or two degrees of separation from CT founder Billy Graham, the proverbial sun around which much of postwar evangelical-Jewish relations orbited. Graham played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in October 1973 (during the Yom Kippur War), encouraging President Nixon to greenlight the largest airlift in US history to aid Israel.

And outside of Graham, the evangelical responses in 1973 represented a much narrower band of opinions than we see today. American evangelicals quickly and consistently came to Israel’s defense. Arnold T. Olson, a then-recent president of the NAE and longtime president of the Evangelical Free Churches of America, described the attack on Israel as “further evidence of the depths to which the human mind can fall.”

G. Douglas Young, the Canadian founder of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies (now Jerusalem University College), a graduate school in Jerusalem, compared the wartime challenges Israel faced to Jews in Germany in the 1930s, alleging that the relative silence by Christians in the second week of the war was reminiscent of the silence of the churches during the Holocaust.

For all his work with Nixon, Graham’s Christianity Today had probably the least passionate analysis, denouncing the invasion but acknowledging that an “unwillingness to let go of any substantial part of its Six-Day acquisitions” meant Israel had “left behind the seeds of another conflict.”

In the following decade, an entire class of Christian Zionist organizations would emerge and eclipse, at least in numbers, those evangelical authorities of 1973. The movement started by figures like Olson and Young, who were relatively closely aligned with Graham, would soon be displaced by a new crop of fundamentalist and Pentecostal-run organizations.

These were more ideologically (and eschatologically) driven conservatives who commanded far more resources and members than Olson’s denomination and Young’s grad school. Not only that, but their alignments would extend beyond theological stances—and prescriptions for US policy regarding Israel—to support emerging right-wing Israeli politicians like Menachem Begin.

Jerry Falwell Sr., Pat Robertson, and a young John Hagee engaged in dedicated pro-Israel activism beginning in the late 1970s. In 2006, Hagee founded Christians United for Israel, a lobbying organization, with Falwell serving on the board of directors.

By then, American Christian Zionists, most of them evangelicals, were ready for a single-issue umbrella organization to speak for them as a voting bloc. Today, Hagee’s organization claims more than 10 million members.

While the advent of organized Christian Zionism is a defining development in how evangelicals now engage with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is not the whole story. A parallel, if smaller, movement also emerged after the 1973 war, giving voice to the fledgling evangelical Left’s critique of Christian Zionism and identification with Palestinian Christians.

Magazines like The Post-American (now Sojourners) began to critique the theological and political motives of pro-Israel evangelicals. And by the 1980s, international figures like John Stott encouraged—through the Lausanne Movement and elsewhere—evangelical organizations to combat Christian Zionism and forge relationships with Palestinian Christians.

Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding formed in 1986, and Sabeel, a theology center headquartered in the West Bank, was founded in 1989 by Palestinian Anglican liberation theologian Naim Ateek. In recent years, Bethlehem Bible College, the related Christ at the Checkpoint conference, and a growing network of pro-Palestinian organizations have also emerged.

Today, the balance between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian advocacy is nowhere near equal—Christian Zionists have never been more organized and unified than in the last decade and a half. They indisputably contributed to former president Donald Trump’s move of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in 2018, a long-held Christian Zionist goal.

After this month’s Hamas terrorist attacks, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a Jewish-led organization supported primarily by evangelical Christians, immediately pledged $5 million in relief. Hagee’s Christians United for Israel also promised to “confront and overcome any elected official in Washington who would try to undermine Israel’s ability to defend herself” in the war with Hamas.

And yet, it seems younger evangelicals are either more sympathetic to Palestinian political arguments (which does not mean support of Hamas) or disengaged entirely from the issue. Pro-Israel organizations like Passages—inspired by the popular Birthright Israel tours for American Jewish students—seek to halt this shift, but polling results continue to show a generational gap. The landscape has shifted significantly in 50 years.

Some of that has less to do with the situation in the Middle East than with political changes here in the US. Partisan realignment on foreign policy is a major part of this story, as is the growth of domestic lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Support for Israel, while still broadly bipartisan among most Americans, has increasingly become a culture war skirmish, pitting conservatives against progressives and young against old.

The introduction of the internet and social media, meanwhile, means American evangelicals are more aware of the daily lives of both Israelis and Palestinians than ever before. Of course, what we know is shaped by the filters of the organizations and outlets we follow. A faithful viewer of the Christian Broadcasting Network (consistently pro-Israel with a dedicated Israel broadcast) will have a strikingly different understanding of current events than a fellow Christian who gets updates from Sabeel or B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based peace organization.

Levels of evangelical tourism to Israel have remained high, giving thousands of visitors firsthand (if not necessarily representative) experiences of life in Israel and the disputed territories. In addition, the growth of Pentecostal leadership in conservative evangelical circles—from Hagee to Messianic Jewish activist Mike Evans to popular author Joel Rosenberg—has paved the way for Christian Zionism to grow beyond America and into a global movement.

But changes in the Middle East matter too. This includes the long-term political presence of Israeli prime minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu (a Christian Zionist favorite), the widening footprint of Jewish settlements in disputed Palestinian territories, the rising regional influence of Iran, and the violent and despotic acts of Hamas and ISIS, among other bad actors in the region.

This first week of fresh conflict in Israel has made indisputably clear how much evangelicals’ Israeli-Palestinian conversation has changed since 1973—and how it has come to command far more of our attention. The present Israel-Hamas war may well see it evolve further still.

Daniel G. Hummel works at Upper House, a Christian study center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations.

Amid Israel-Hamas War, Local Christians Seek Righteous Anger and Gospel Hope

Jayson Casper

The post The Little-Known History of Evangelicals’ Changing Israel Views appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America

Matthew Bowman (Author)

288 pages

$26.23

You can lose your cool in the terminal, but what power does any single employee really hold? You can curse the universe, but alas, it is not moved. If you are a Christian, you can utter a prayer for mercy—I’ve petitioned for such travel miracles but never experienced one myself. It all makes your jaw clench and your stomach turn.

Americans today seem to be in a similar situation as the stranded passenger, directing our rage both in focused and indiscriminate ways across our society, which many see as falling apart.

Since the 1960s, public trust in all types of institutions has plummeted. Since Gallup started tracking survey results, faith in the US Congress has dropped to 8 percent, with newspapers rating at 18 percent, banks at 26 percent, and organized religious institutions at 32 percent. According to these metrics, most institutions have bottomed out in the last two years. Overall, American confidence in institutions has fallen from 48 percent in 1979 to 26 percent in 2023.

Explanations are many and varied. To make sense of the collapsing trust in government, we often cite events like the Watergate scandal and trends of party polarization. Loss of trust in business is often attributed to scandals like Enron and the 2008 banking crisis. Cratering trust in religious institutions is blamed on moral failures, including revelations of systemic sexual abuse. Recent commentators have offered many theories for what historian Matthew Bowman calls “the cynicism and conspiratorialism of American life today.”

Bowman’s new book, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America, offers a new way to frame the problem in human as well as institutional terms. The results are surprising and welcome.

Bowman uses what has been characterized as the original blueprint for the modern UFO-encounter trope—the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in rural New Hampshire on September 19, 1961—to explore the cynicism in American society that began in the 1960s and continues today. The book manages to recast big trends in American life through a story that is smaller in scope and more intimate in detail.

A historian at Claremont Graduate University who has written on Mormonism, evangelicalism, and religion and US politics, Bowman is well equipped to tell the Hills’ story. In his account, both the couple’s abduction narrative and its broader reception were deeply influenced by the surrounding social context, which combined the height of American civil religion, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and the authoritative scientific pronouncements of credentialed experts and government officials.

The Hills’ UFO encounter not only reflected this world but, over time, chipped away at it. They were rejected by military and scientific authorities, and they were simultaneously embraced by competing authorities in the realms of religion, spirituality, and pseudoscience. Their story pried open cultural fissures resembling those in our world today: widespread distrust in both public and private institutions, skepticism toward institutional leaders, dismissiveness toward expertise we don’t already agree with, and the conspiracy thinking at work in many parts of public life.

The encounter

On the night of their claimed abduction, when Betty and Barney Hill witnessed a mysterious “flying saucer” overhead while driving home from Montreal, they were living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Betty, 42 years old at the time, was a white social worker and a New Hampshire native. Barney, 39 years old, was an African American postal worker and civil rights activist from Philadelphia. Married in May 1960, they were a rare interracial couple in New England.

The Hills were also Unitarians who attended South Church in Portsmouth. The ethos and assumptions of Unitarianism—and by extension Protestant civil religion—pervaded the Hills’ New England culture. In the 1950s and early 1960s, this meant a progressive theological and political optimism, rooted in a trust of human reason and the American dream, that defined Unitarian beliefs and teachings.

More specifically, in 1961 this meant a seamless religious and social embrace of the civil rights movement. Though the Unitarian denomination was predominantly white, its leaders were notably active in promoting civil rights. The South Church minister installed just six months before the Hills’ fateful September night was a liberal civil rights minister named John Papandrew. His sermons and efforts at community organizing came from a place of deep hope in the capacity of American institutions to reform, and from a confidence that those institutions could effectively better the lives of common people. This faith set up the Hills for repeated disappointments and disillusionment.

Enter the event that made Betty and Barney believe that they had encountered an extraterrestrial UFO. Bowman does not evaluate, as many investigations have before, the veracity of the Hills’ account. He believes their testimony was sincere, but he is guarded in giving it credence. Part of the problem is that the Hills’ narrative evolved over time, with Betty and Barney remembering more details and discovering more memories through hypnosis.

The Hills, channeling their Unitarian optimism in human reason, believed (contra the consensus among professional psychologists) that hypnosis helped to recover accurate but repressed memories. In their case, these included vivid descriptions of an invasive abduction involving small grey aliens with large eyes, a needle that penetrated Betty’s womb, and dozens of medical tests performed on Barney.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

As respectable, progressive members of their community, the Hills looked for validation in the best ways they knew how. They contacted the Air Force and a knowledgeable civilian organization, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), met repeatedly with an esteemed psychologist, and eventually invited journalists to document their story.

At each turn, however, they faced increasing scrutiny. The Air Force dutifully received the Hills’ story but did not take it seriously. Psychologist Benjamin Simon, who led both Betty and Barney in multiple sessions of hypnosis, interpreted the findings as evidence of suppressed racial anxieties rather than any external reality. And journalists grew both skeptical and bombastic in recounting the story.

The Hills were active participants in spinning their experiences out of their own control. They actively sought attention and recognition in Portsmouth and beyond, growing increasingly convinced that a conspiracy of suppression was underfoot. With enough national notice, they believed, their narrative would be vindicated.

Resistance and disillusionment

Of course, as Bowman’s subtitle makes clear, this all took place not in a vacuum but in a roiling social and political climate defined by increasing polarization around civil rights. Papandrew, a very public supporter of Betty and Barney, left his South Church pastorate in late 1963 because his sermons and activism had failed to sway the congregation. The people “did not want him to preach things that made them uncomfortable,” Bowman concludes.

Betty and especially Barney began to see their own story falling victim to similar forces. By 1966 the first full journalistic accounts of their abduction were hitting bookshelves. But the increased attention did not provide the breakthrough the Hills were seeking. It mostly made things worse. The couple ditched their psychologist and began to consult with a local psychic, an antiestablishment scientist of parapsychology at Duke University, and a UFO enthusiast who also dabbled in the occult, among others.

These alternative authorities supplied the Hills with a vast array of intellectual and spiritual tools for making sense of their experiences. In describing the spiritual “New Age” that the Hills were entering, Bowman uses the term bricolage to capture the mixing and matching of ideas from the occult, Kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, and the like.

Establishment resistance led to disillusionment across the board. Even as the Civil Rights Act became law, Barney “was beginning to worry that his trust in the power of the state to change minds was unjustified.” This happened locally in Portsmouth as white residents dragged their feet—from the barber shop that refused to integrate to the lawyer that took the barber’s case.

Bowman mentions that Barney never joined the more radical Nation of Islam or embraced the ideology of Black power, which harbored a deep skepticism that American institutions could integrate at all. Yet Barney and the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, shared a fascination with UFOs and a faith that “science would reveal the bankruptcy of white America.”

Moreover, Barney interpreted backlash from the scientific establishment and civil rights activism “to be expressions of the same bigotry.” In less than a decade, a cynicism foreign to Unitarian progressivism had captured Betty and Barney—and many Americans besides.

Barney died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1969, while Betty lived until 2004. The divergent lifespans meant that while Barney remained largely stuck in a place of disillusionment, Betty continued to grapple with her own story in new and increasingly creative ways. Her version of what happened in 1961 continued to develop, and she reported further encounters with UFOs. By the 1970s, she claimed to have witnessed hundreds of visitations.

Her fame increased with a 1975 film starring James Earl Jones as Barney, and her infamy grew when a large portion of one of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos episodes in 1980 was dedicated to debunking the Hills’ story, employing the memorable phrase, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The establishment, in Betty’s mind, was at it again.

Betty remained a household name among UFO enthusiasts but ultimately lived a life of struggle with the very authorities from whom she sought validation. As Bowman writes, establishment skepticism “frustrated the Hills because it implied to them that their own reasons and perceptions could not be trusted.” Moreover, he concludes, “It seemed catastrophic to them, not only because of their experience but because it implied the nation was run not by its citizens but by a dominant and trained elite.”

In 21st-century parlance, you could call it the “deep state,” the “swamp,” or simply “the elite.” Bowman’s insightful and compelling analysis of the Hills shows their resemblance to many Americans today who trust their own ability to determine the truth while doubting the motives of those who wield expertise and institutional power.

Believing rightly

The Hills’ story helps illustrate that this state of affairs has a deeply personal and experiential component that can’t be captured by invoking either discrete events (like Watergate) or broader patterns (like polarization). The collapse of trust in institutions can’t be pinned exclusively on either a conservative or liberal cast of characters. Nor is it definitively populist or establishmentarian in origin.

The “establishment” began to alienate the Hills through encounters with individual scientists, psychologists, military representatives, and journalists. And Barney’s loss of civil rights optimism occurred not primarily because of white resistance to integration nationally but because of events in Portsmouth.

In other words, individual organizations and entities, including churches and other ministries, have the heavy burden of representing a much larger institutional type in their day-to-day interactions, whether they like it or not. None of us have been mistreated by “the church” or “the state” in some absolute definition of those terms. Yet thousands of us have been mistreated by specific churches, authority structures, and government agencies—by certain manifestations of systemic forces and particular structures of injustice.

This way of reframing the cynicism and conspiratorialism of American life today affects Christians in at least two ways. First, it bears repeating that the Hills were active agents in their own alienation. They misunderstood the purpose and effects of hypnosis, they routinely obfuscated or changed their story, and they resorted to authority sources that were specious at best.

They acted in ways they understood to be consistent with their Unitarian faith—which was not “anti-science” or antiestablishment—and many others in their community spurred them on. Regardless of the details of the Hills’ experience, there were telltale signs that their story was not true or, at best, incomplete and subject to scrutiny. When the truth is obscured in this way, it reflects failures of discipleship, community support, and individual character.

At the same time, the Hills were subject to larger forces that treated them, time and again, as less than fully human. Many people looked to instrumentalize the Hills, and many others looked to suppress, exaggerate, or twist the couple’s experience for their own ends. In Bowman’s telling, very few people who entered the Hills’ life after 1961 regarded them as humans first. Rather, they quickly became pawns in various games of authority, control, or careerism. Bowman’s book is a heartbreaking portrait of the all-too-common American experience of institutional life. No wonder it breeds cynicism.

Some years ago, Dallas Willard observed that “we live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes.” That insight drove those (like the Hills) who doubted the establishment as much as it drives those today who doubt the ability of others to reason toward truths on their own.

Willard’s charge is not to believe indiscriminately but to believe rightly. He concludes the above quote by observing that “the fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.” If cynicism has become the problem in the way Bowman documents, then genuine thinking and living seem the most effective recourses we can summon.

Daniel G. Hummel directs The Lumen Center, a scholarly collective of Christian writers, researchers, and educators on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.

The post Close Encounters of the Elite Institutional Kind appeared first on Christianity Today.

Si presiono de nuevo sobre el texto, puedo subrayar la frase. Puedo resaltarla, e incluso recortarla y guardarla en otro archivo para reflexionar sobre ella en otro momento, aislada de su contexto. En mi aplicación de la Biblia, también hay un pequeño recuadro gris que parece una burbuja de diálogo de un cómic, y si lo toco, se abre para mostrarme una referencia: Isaías 8:14. No tiene un hipervínculo que dirija a ese versículo, así que en lugar de saltar al profeta, la tecnología que tengo en la mano me anima a cerrar el recuadro y seguir leyendo 1 Pedro: «Tropiezan al desobedecer la palabra».

A medida que entramos en la tercera década de lo que el crítico literario Sven Birkerts ha llamado «leer en una era electrónica» y la alfabetización bíblica alcanza nuevas cifras bajas [enlaces en inglés], ¿qué impacto tiene esta herramienta en nuestra práctica de lectura de la Biblia? ¿Cómo influye en nuestras interpretaciones de las Escrituras?

Existe un largo debate sobre la interpretación correcta de la sola Scriptura. Pero ningún heredero de la Reforma la ha interpretado en el sentido de que debamos leer las Escrituras sin ninguna ayuda externa. Los protestantes, de hecho, han adoptado innovaciones a lo largo de la historia que han buscado aumentar la interacción con las Escrituras, así como la comprensión de las mismas, que van desde traducciones en lenguaje cotidiano hasta Biblias de estudio, comentarios, ediciones ilustradas y compendios, por no mencionar las aplicaciones de teléfonos inteligentes.

Sin embargo, no hace falta albergar sospechas profundas con respecto al progreso para cuestionarse si las herramientas que utilizamos para leer la Biblia podrían, de alguna manera, modificar nuestra forma de leer. Y si afirmamos que produce un cambio, ¿es para bien o para mal?

Mi propia investigación sobre la historia del dispensacionalismo sugiere que, en ocasiones, nuestras herramientas de lectura de la Biblia han llegado a cambiar nuestra lectura hasta tal punto que incluso han cambiado lo que significa leer la Biblia literalmente.

Ha habido una variedad de puntos de vista cristianos que intentan describir cómo sería tomar un enfoque literal de las Escrituras. Literal puede referirse a un énfasis en la inerrancia de la Biblia, a creencias sobre la historicidad de ciertos pasajes, a una comprensión particular del cumplimiento de las profecías (que no sería precisamente literal, sino simbólico), o bien, a la opinión de que un pasaje debe ser leído de la forma más clara posible y por eso es importante entender los géneros [literarios] y la forma en que el texto fue recibido originalmente. Para los dispensacionalistas, la lectura literal se basaba en las «cadenas de palabras», es decir, en conectar los versículos a través de «eslabones» del uso de las palabras y darle a las palabras clave —tales como piedra en el versículo mencionado anteriormente— el mismo tratamiento en cualquier pasaje de la Biblia donde sean usadas. Esta forma de abordar el texto no se habría popularizado sin el desarrollo de las concordancias.

Si nos remitimos a la historia, las concordancias bíblicas se remontan al siglo XIII, cuando 300 monjes dominicos bajo la dirección de Hugo de Saint-Cher elaboraron un índice alfabético que seleccionaba las palabras que consideraban más importantes de la Biblia Vulgata en latín. Aunque fue una poderosa herramienta de lectura para los biblistas, su concordancia era rudimentaria en comparación con los estándares actuales. Las concordancias medievales que se publicaron posteriormente enumeraron cada aparición de una mayor cantidad de palabras.

Con la Reforma, surgió la demanda de obras similares en lenguas vernáculas. La primera concordancia del Nuevo Testamento en lengua inglesa apareció en la década de 1530, aunque no fue muy útil antes de que la publicación de la Biblia del rey Jacobo (King James Version o KJV, por sus siglas en inglés) en la década de 1600 hiciera que las Escrituras estuvieran ampliamente disponibles.

Lo más peligroso que hizo Lutero

Ben Witherington III

La KJV obtuvo una excelente concordancia en 1737, cuando Alexander Cruden, librero y erudito que tendía a recluirse, terminó de catalogar más de 77 000 palabras. Esta tarea le llevó 26 años y varias visitas a una institución psiquiátrica, pero finalmente terminó y publicó su exhaustiva obra maestra: la Concordancia de Cruden, misma que se sigue imprimiendo hasta la fecha.

La herramienta de Cruden para la lectura de la Biblia a menudo era usada a la par de otras nuevas herramientas, como la Biblia Políglota de Bagster, que ofrecía a los lectores 60 000 referencias cruzadas en varios idiomas impresas una al lado de la otra, y nuevos comentarios, como el Comentario a la Biblia Completa de Thomas Scott. Con todo esto, para el siglo XIX los lectores de la KJV disponían de un sinnúmero de herramientas que les ayudaban a entender la Biblia de maneras nuevas.

La aparición de estas nuevas y poderosas herramientas hizo posible que los lectores habituales pudieran, por primera vez, hacer referencias cruzadas con cualquier palabra de la Biblia. La piedra de 1 Pedro podía relacionarse con la que Moisés golpeó en Éxodo 17:6, la que Daniel describió como cortada «no por manos humanas» (NTV) en Daniel 2:34, y la que Jesús menciona que haría polvo a aquel sobre el que caiga en Mateo 21:44 (NVI). Las referencias cruzadas crearon un nuevo contexto interpretativo, que podía ser muy personal o comunitario, dependiendo de cómo se utilizaran esas herramientas de lectura.

En Estados Unidos, este enfoque de las Escrituras llegó a denominarse «Método de Lectura de la Biblia». Extendió al público más amplio lo que normalmente era el área de estudio de eruditos o pastores bien formados. Los lectores podían seleccionar una palabra clave en inglés para estudiarla y luego examinar todos los usos de esa palabra, y extrapolar el significado de un texto a partir de los ejemplos recopilados.

A menudo, la gente estudiaba de esta forma en grupos, lo cual fomentaba un estudio bíblico intensivo que alimentaba las reflexiones teológicas. Por ejemplo, un grupo podía examinar la palabra esperar en el Salmo 27:14 (NTV), y relacionarla con la súplica de Jacob en Génesis 49:18, luego conectarla con la esperanza escatológica de Pablo en Romanos 8:19, donde «la creación espera» (NTV); y después discutir sobre cómo esperar la liberación de Dios es un tema profundo que recorre la Biblia de principio a fin. El contexto y la narración bíblicos podían determinar quién está siendo liberado por Dios en cada pasaje, y qué características tenía esa liberación, pero al mismo tiempo, estas interpretaciones estaban condicionadas por las circunstancias personales de los lectores y sus propias presuposiciones culturales.

La Biblia de Referencia Scofield fue un pilar fundamental para millones de cristianos inmersos en el Método de Lectura de la Biblia. Esta versión fue muy popular y se distribuyó ampliamente entre algunos cristianos. Cyrus I. Scofield, ministro estrechamente relacionado con Dwight L. Moody, incluyó en su Biblia de referencia extensas notas a pie de página en las que explicaba su teología, que se basaba en un intrincado sistema de referencias cruzadas y concordancias que ocupaban una columna en el centro de cada página de la Biblia. La editorial Oxford University Press publicó la Biblia de Scofield por primera vez en 1909, y sigue imprimiéndose en la actualidad. Además de los comentarios en cada página, Scofield incluyó un índice de concordancias de más de 150 páginas e instrucciones para enseñar a los lectores a construir cadenas de palabras. Explicaba que las cadenas de palabras «conducirían al lector desde la primera mención clara de una gran verdad hasta la última». Y en caso de que el lector no lo entendiera, un resumen de Scofield consolidaría el significado en esa última referencia.

En su aplicación más sofisticada, la lectura de la Biblia con la ayuda de concordancias permitía a la gente experimentar la unidad de las Escrituras. Como explicó otro escritor dispensacionalista de principios del siglo XX, Isaac Massey Haldeman, «un estudio inteligente y satisfactorio de la Biblia» requiere una concordancia para percatarse de la «unidad de diseño» que insufla a los 66 libros. Las concordancias permitían a los lectores laicos experimentar la unidad de las Escrituras, aun cuando restaran importancia o dejaran de lado el contexto histórico, la autoría humana, las lenguas originales, los detalles lingüísticos y, a menudo, la narrativa misma.

Algunos cristianos conservadores, como R. A. Torrey, colega de Moody, llamaron al Método de Lectura de la Biblia el enfoque «científico» de las Escrituras. Haldeman describió las concordancias y las referencias cruzadas como «instrumentos» y «herramientas» que, si se utilizaban correctamente, producían resultados repetibles.

¿Es hora de dejar atrás el ‘tiempo devocional’?

Dru Johnson y Celina Durgin

Hoy en día no es común pensar que los autodenominados fundamentalistas pregonen la ciencia, pero los estadounidenses de principios del siglo XX abrazaban la ciencia como el árbitro definitivo de la verdad en todas las áreas de la vida. A medida que la creciente crítica de la bíblica parecía socavar la autoridad de las Escrituras en el mundo académico, este marco interpretativo basado en la concordancia se desplegó para apuntalarla científicamente.

Uno podría haber esperado que los fundamentalistas que buscaban leer la Biblia de forma literal se enfocaran más en cómo los primeros cristianos recibieron y aprendieron las Escrituras en su contexto; sin embargo, la herramienta que utilizaron para su lectura de la Biblia los empujó, en cambio, en esta otra dirección «científica».

También preparó el terreno para un nuevo movimiento teológico que llegó a conocerse como «dispensacionalismo». Este se desarrolló a partir de las enseñanzas de los Hermanos Exclusivistas, en concreto del líder angloirlandés John Nelson Darby, quien enseñaba que la humanidad estaba dividida en tres partes: Israel, la iglesia y las naciones. Las naciones no tenían un pacto con Dios, pero la iglesia e Israel sí, por lo que las Escrituras debían «dividirse correctamente» en las partes que se dirigen a Israel y las partes que se dirigen a los cristianos.

Para Darby, lo que hacía que «cada pasaje bíblico encajara en su lugar» era la «comprensión espiritual recibida por parte del Espíritu Santo de las cosas del cielo y nuestra conexión con ellas, y de las cosas de la tierra y nuestra separación de ellas».

Ese enfoque de la Biblia se centraba a menudo en la profecía, un género de las Escrituras que Darby no creía que estuviera dirigido a sus lectores originales, sino que estaba orientado al futuro, y que predecía acontecimientos que aún no habían sucedido en la historia humana, en su mayoría relacionados con Israel. Según este enfoque, para entender las Escrituras es necesario saber cómo una piedra puede ser un cimiento (Efesios 2:20), una piedra de tropiezo (Romanos 9:32-33) y algo que caería sobre la gente y la haría polvo (Mateo 21:44), y cómo todo eso se refería tanto a Jesús, como a una secuencia de acontecimientos (literales o simbólicos) que le iban a suceder a Israel.

Darby promovió las concordancias, pero era muy estricto a la hora de mantener separado el significado «terrenal» del «celestial» de determinados versículos. Esto complicaba el Método de Lectura de la Biblia que estaba en boga entre los cristianos estadounidenses más deseosos de adoptar las enseñanzas de Darby.

Los estadounidenses que no estaban inmersos en los mismos supuestos de los Hermanos Exclusivistas insistían en que las distinciones de Darby podían descubrirse a partir del propio Método de Lectura de la Biblia. Tal como James Brooks, uno de los divulgadores estadounidenses más importantes de Darby, quien aseguró a los lectores: «El lenguaje usado en la profecía es tan simple y tan fácil de entender como cualquier otra parte de las Escrituras». Las concordancias, que catalogaban palabras y no significados, contribuían a hacer que eso pareciera cierto.

La subsiguiente historia del desarrollo del dispensacionalismo —en gran parte desarrollada en el contexto estadounidense— muestra cómo los lectores posteriores intentaron basar las enseñanzas de Darby en una lectura simple del texto para alinearlas más con el Método de Lectura de la Biblia. Pero la lectura «simple» no parece tan simple, por supuesto, sin la tecnología que animó a la gente a leer de esa manera.

Después de varias generaciones de eruditos externos que fueron minando el dispensacionalismo, y de que el dispensacionalismo popular —como las novelas de la serie Dejados atrás— haya socavado su credibilidad, ese forma de estudiar la Biblia ha ido perdiendo aprobación. El dispensacionalismo está en declive, y el Método de Lectura de la Biblia actualmente no suele enseñarse en seminarios o universidades cristianas.

Sin embargo, los instintos de lectura popularizados por el Método de Lectura de la Biblia aún persisten, y tienen un poderoso efecto en quienes los practican. Todavía hace que los lectores sientan como si las Escrituras se abrieran, como si vieran por primera vez en las oscuridades de la Biblia y no hubiera necesidad de lenguaje especializado ni de una formación histórica. Con un poco de práctica y una concordancia, cualquier lector puede hacerlo por sí mismo, e incluso puede afirmar que esta es la forma de leer la Biblia literalmente.

Y las concordancias todavía existen, por supuesto. Son herramientas valiosas que a menudo damos por sentadas. Pueden ser increíblemente útiles para leer la Biblia cuando se usan correctamente. Han sido sustituidas en gran medida por herramientas más eficaces para los lectores habituales de la Biblia. Puedo hacer una búsqueda de palabras en mi aplicación o tal vez hacer clic en un enlace que me lleva de una parte de la Biblia a otra.

Esta forma de concebir la Biblia —como un texto que contiene hipervínculos— entusiasma al popular psicólogo canadiense Jordan Peterson. En una de sus conferencias sobre la Biblia en YouTube, compartió un gráfico creado por el científico informático Chris Harrison que mostraba las más de 65 000 referencias cruzadas de las Escrituras. Peterson se maravillaba de que, si uno siguiera cada una de esas referencias, «viajaría a través de ellas para siempre. Nunca llegaría al final». Sin embargo, las ideas e interpretaciones derivadas de ese viaje dependerán por completo del camino que uno elija tomar. Esta variedad infinita es atractiva para Peterson, pero debería resultar menos atrayente para los cristianos comprometidos con la unidad y la coherencia de las Escrituras.

En este tiempo de herramientas digitales ilimitadas para extraer nuevos significados de las Escrituras, deberíamos ser cautos sobre la forma en que nuestra tecnología de lectura moldea y da nueva forma al contexto del texto. Ciertamente no leemos el texto de las Escrituras por sí solo, y las herramientas que elegimos como acompañamiento pueden moldear y deformar nuestra lectura de la Biblia. Pueden hacernos creer que estamos leyendo de forma sencilla y literal cuando en realidad, con un poco de distancia crítica, más bien se trata de un proceso por medio del cual rompemos y rehacemos los contextos para adaptarlos a nuestros sistemas.

No creo que eso sea lo que ocurre cuando abro mi aplicación de la Biblia. La tecnología parece más neutral que eso. Pero la historia sugiere que es algo por lo que deberíamos preocuparnos.

Daniel G. Hummel es autor de The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans).

Traducción por Sofía Castillo.

Edición en español por Livia Giselle Seidel.

Juan 3:16 no siempre debe parecernos tan familiar

Jarvis J. Williams

Cómo leerte a ti mismo en Génesis

Julien Smith

The post Cuando la mejor herramienta de lectura bíblica empeoró la lectura de la Biblia appeared first on Christianity Today en español | Cristianismo hoy.

Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution

Rainn Wilson (Author)

304 pages

$13.07

Where Dwight was a latecomer to the merits of monotheism, Rainn Wilson has made promoting it a major part of his life’s calling, bending his significant celebrity and resources to projects that promote human spirituality in media, entertainment, and social activism. Soul Boom is his latest effort and, despite its shortcomings, is one of the most compelling non-Christian apologetical works I have read.

Anticipating shared values

Wilson is a member of the Baha’i faith, a religion introduced in the 19th century by Baháʼu'lláh (1817–1892), who claimed to receive a new revelation that, roughly speaking, placed him in the genealogy of “Manifestations of God” stretching back to Abraham and including Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Muhammad. The religion now claims around six million followers globally.

The teachings of Baháʼu'lláh, as well as his son and grandson and the Universal House of Justice, the faith’s governing body since 1963, are quite ecumenical. For starters, they draw widely from world religions to form the basis of their teachings. In addition—and more provocatively, at least from this Christian’s perspective—the faith rejects the exclusivist claims of world religious leaders, making figures like Jesus far less consequential than he appears in any historic Christian creed.

All that said, Soul Boom, which calls for a worldwide spiritual revolution along the lines of “an ever-advancing civilization” and “collective” spiritual maturity, is a powerful presentation of the Baha’i faith’s perspective on spirituality. After putting down the book, readers will likely appreciate the Baha’i faith’s amiability and think highly of Wilson’s character, whatever they think of his views.

The book is funny, irenic, and regularly revealing. At one point Wilson describes how his attempts to develop a television show exploring spiritual themes met rejection in Hollywood because God was deemed “too controversial.” As Wilson observes, the depths of depravity, violence, and voyeurism on television go deeper every year, but somehow God is a “four-letter word.” Someone so familiar with elite cultural production brings a potent and trenchant critique of its aversion to anything overtly spiritual.

Like all good apologetical works, Wilson’s book starts by anticipating shared values and then moves toward claims that might be a harder sell for outsiders. The second half of the book suggests (in somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion but seriously enough) that we need to create a “new religion” called SoulBoom that will help usher Wilson’s real interest—a global spiritual revolution advancing spiritual progress and cosmic unity. This religion looks a lot like the Baha’i faith, which includes no clergy and promotes practices of prayer and meditation. In making his case, he diagnoses many problems Christians would also highlight in American society: consumerism, loneliness, violence, and partisanship. His solutions, however, are harder to swallow.

Soul Boom failed to make a convert out of me (among other reasons because following his religion would make one a … Boomer?). Even so, the book is valuable for its contribution to a broader spiritual dialogue and as a skillful apologetic for the Baha’i faith. Wilson wishes his readers to embrace a spirituality that adheres to some key precepts drawn from his faith tradition. Christians, who in many contexts today might find themselves with only slightly more cultural resonance than someone from the Baha’i faith, can take note of the way Soul Boom searches for cultural common ground and offers its distinctive prescriptions to the uninitiated.

Key to Wilson’s winsomeness is that Soul Boom is laced with popular culture metaphors. In the dominant one introduced in the first pages, Wilson describes the “twofold path” of spirituality through two television shows: Kung Fu and Star Trek. The former represents the personal, internal journey toward mental wellness and self-mastery, while the latter represents what Wilson calls the “spiritual evolution of a species [humanity].” Both pathways, in Wilson’s telling, are needed, even as spirituality in 21st-century America has largely focused on the themes of Kung Fu. But to quote Star Trek’s Captain Picard, “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” Wilson is keen on getting readers interested in the social potential of spirituality.

I work at a Christian study center serving a large public university, so the trends of “nones” and the “spiritual but not religious” are present every day. Wilson should be lauded for breaking down the artificial “privatization” of spirituality that reduces faith to an individualistic pursuit of self-actualization or a distant set of dogmas. To the extent that SoulBoom’s spirituality fosters values that make it possible for people to become more Christlike, Christian readers can affirm the value of Soul Boom’s intervention.

At the same time, Wilson treats Christianity like Star Trek does religion. Star Trek is often as condescending to religion as any of the Hollywood shows Wilson critiques, a lesson I learned while becoming a Trekkie as a missionary kid in the ’90s. In describing one species’ development, for example, Captain Picard remarks, “Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural … the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear.”

So, while Wilson is friendly to world-religious figures like Jesus, his compliments smell like they could have come from Picard. Jesus taught the Golden Rule and called for justice. He also claimed to be the Jewish Messiah, to be the only way to God, to be the king of an unseen kingdom. He died and rose again, which, if true, would be the hinge point of all history. It is no surprise that these teachings, which are present even in the parts of the Gospels that SoulBoom acknowledges, are completely absent from Soul Boom.

Human and divine agency

I read Soul Boom right after another book, Biblical Critical Theory by Christian scholar Christopher Watkin. Among the merits of Watkin’s biblical approach to critical theory is teasing out what makes the biblical understanding of the world distinct. Two overriding Christian commitments are that the God of the Bible is a personal God and that the biblical worldview is “emplotted” in a storyline of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that shapes everything the Bible talks about and teaches.

These two features of the biblical portrayal of reality oppose SoulBoom at a fundamental level. In the first case, the God of SoulBoom, like the God of the Baha’i faith, is something far different than the God of the Bible. In the second case, SoulBoom, like the Baha’i faith, has a very different (if equally clear) story line: The world is moving toward a unity of spirit and matter, with human spirituality as the driving force.

Here’s the rub: Wilson’s “emplottment” of Jesus into the story line of SoulBoom conscripts Jesus and the Bible into a narrative—and an entire worldview—the biblical authors wanted nothing to do with.

The God of SoulBoom is distant and elusive—a “Big Guy/Gal/Force/God/Creator thingy,” in Wilson’s words—that mostly just has “our best interests in mind.” Although Wilson’s theism moves beyond a vapid “spirituality” and includes a public, rather than simply private, dimension of faith, it does not do enough to differentiate itself from what sociologist Christian Smith has termed “moralistic therapeutic deism.” In contrast, the God of the Bible is engaged and relational, constantly drawing close to his creation and expressing love, concern, anger, and sacrifice toward humans, who reflect God’s own image.

The story of SoulBoom concerns a humanity that must essentially save itself by living up to and evolving its own spiritual potential. If so, writes Wilson, humanity will “mature and collectively make increasingly moral, compassionate choices” to achieve cosmic unity and “arise from the individual to the whole.” The story of the Bible goes in the opposite direction. It tells of a good creation dashed by rebellion and sin and the king of that order working to make things right, with salvation that is for us but not because of us, culminating not in humans ascending into unity with God but in God’s descending and dwelling with his creation.

The agency of the story in SoulBoom lies with humanity. As Wilson states, it is people who must change, through “recognizing that we are, in fact, spiritual beings having a collective human experience” who can be open to “the soul-level transformations we’re going to need to make.” The agency of the biblical story is God’s. It begins with God creating and ends with God dwelling; we work as co-stewards and God works through us, but we are never the stars of the show.

Further contrasts only reinforce the point that the biblical story chafes within the boundaries of SoulBoom and thus in the prescriptions for Wilson’s spiritual revolution. Like in the Baha’i faith, SoulBoom’s reduction of Christian truth to humanistic moral insights that align with other world religions makes the original appeal of Christianity problematic and the remaining appeal little more than one of taste.

An oasis, not a destination

Even so, Christians can affirm some ideas that Wilson advances, none more than the truth that answering the question of “Who am I?” must begin outside oneself. Every force in our culture pushes in the opposite direction, from debates over identity politics to our culture’s commodification of personal identity. In the Bible’s understanding, the question of “Who am I?” transforms (in Watkin’s phrasing) into “Whose am I?”—an interrogation that launches us on the road to Jesus. As with Augustine in his Confessions, it ushers us deeper and deeper into the paradox of losing oneself for the sake of the gospel in order to find our true identities in Christ.

Wilson affirms a generalized version of this basic truth that, if widely adopted by his nonreligious readers, would be progress indeed. His aim is to “advance a conversation about the importance of the divine dimension of existence and how it can influence our lives and our futures, collectively and individually.” This echoes C. S. Lewis’s self-diagnosis that he possessed “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Lewis called this “joy,” an emotion that Wilson also affirms as the antidote to the world’s cynicism. There is more, though no less, to this world than what our senses apprehend.

In a Western world devastated by disenchantment, disillusionment, and cynicism—functionally materialist in its institutions—a more robust recognition of a spiritual dimension to reality can be an oasis. The value of Soul Boom is not so much the new religion of SoulBoom but Wilson’s apologetic for monotheism in a culture increasingly averse to organized religion. Even if Wilson’s view falls far short of the beauty of the Christian witness, Christians can accept Wilson as an ally in holding forth for a deeper and wider sense of reality that includes the supernatural.

Yet while Wilson’s contribution might lead us to an oasis, it is hardly the destination. If I do the reverse of Wilson and “emplot” SoulBoom into the biblical story line, we realize quickly that it cannot contain the mysteries of the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Second Coming. It cannot make sense of one modern hymn’s contemplation of the ancient mystery, “Yet not I, but through Christ in me.”

On its own terms, SoulBoom does resemble Star Trek. Implicitly, SoulBoom treats those things that make Christianity unique as remnants of Captain Picard’s “superstition and ignorance and fear.” In fact, Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was an avowed atheist and opposed organized religion in all its forms. Yet not all writers for Star Trek were quite as hostile. In a later series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, produced after Roddenberry’s death, a devout religious character named Kira is confronted with the idea that all cultures should believe in each other’s gods for the sake of self-fulfillment and galactic peace. Rather than assent to this pragmatic approach to religion, she instead points out, “There’s just one thing—we can’t both be right.”

It is only from this vantage point of unbridgeable difference, paradoxically, that a truly openminded exploration of spirituality can begin—one that takes the various traditions on their own terms rather than presuming they fit together into some harmonious spiritual whole. Using Wilson’s categories, SoulBoom remains stuck in the frame of Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek, when what we need in our cultural conversation about spirituality is a dose of Deep Space Nine that moves us toward, rather than away from, the biblical story.

The apostle Peter understood early on who Jesus is. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” he says in Matthew 16:16. Any true spiritual revolution will seek not to diminish this bold claim but rather to understand its vast implications. And it will center the question that prompted Peter’s reply and on which a true grasp of Jesus’ nature depends: “Who do you say I am?”

Daniel G. Hummel is a historian and the director for university engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.

The post Rainn Wilson’s Spiritual Revolution Gets Spirituality Partly Right and Jesus Mostly Wrong appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

Walter Russell Mead (Author)

672 pages

$37.00

The first—and by far the most common—is to be passive unless it intimately affects day-to-day life. The second clause of Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” works as the credo of many Americans: “God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and insight to know the one from the other.” Trade relations between the United States and China or US proposals for Middle East peace are things most Americans cannot help.

But two other approaches have their followings. For “realists,” US foreign relations is fraught with centuries of mistakes, either by design or by ignorance. The best the United States can do, whether to protect its own interests or those of the rest of the world, is to remove any sense of transcendent values from foreign policy. In international-relations circles, realists are known for their so-called realistic assessment of the world and the base interests that govern nations.

For “idealists,” foreign policy is unavoidably bound up with moral questions. They believe the way America conducts itself on the international stage implicates its moral standing, whether as a sign of greatness and exceptionalism (including divine favor) or as an expression of deep-seated injustices at the heart of the American experiment. In international-relations circles, idealists are known for their principled assessment of the United States and its global commitments.

Translating Neibuhr’s prayer into foreign-policy categories, we might apply the first clause to idealists (who insist we can change the world for the better), the second clause to most Americans (who find it easier to assume we can’t), and the third clause to realists (who claim the mantle of clear-eyed discernment). Though Christians can be found in all three camps, they might be best known as idealists, for either criticizing or justifying American conduct in the world.

Perhaps no foreign-policy issue raises the hackles of idealists and realists like the relationship between the United States and Israel. Designated by many as a “special relationship” matched only by the relationship between America and Great Britain, the US-Israel bond appears constantly in our headlines. It is debated on college campuses, on cable news, and in op-ed columns. Even minor policy issues, such as changing the location of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, become the subject of presidential campaign promises.

A lot of people have tried to explain the American fascination with a country more than 6,000 miles away with roughly the size and population of New Jersey. Walter Russell Mead, the well-known columnist and author of such books as God and Gold and Special Providence, has produced a new and clarifying answer in The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. In the cottage industry of books purporting to explain the “special relationship,” Mead’s is a singular achievement. The sweeping history, spanning from the 18th century to the present, could have come only from a first-class writer, storyteller, and generalist like Mead.

Driving forces

Clocking in at more than 580 pages of narrative text, The Arc of a Covenant, by its structure and insistence on taking seriously both national interests and values, offers something of a bridge between realist and idealist explanations of the US-Israel relationship. The book examines the role of religious communities and values in forming foreign policy, touching on vast slices of world history that intersect with this story. There are long passages on 19th-century immigration to the United States, on the decline of European empires before World War I, and on the rise of the Sunbelt in the American South (among other topics). There is essentially a book within a book (over 100 pages) on the presidency of Harry Truman, whose time in office saw the US government grapple with the aftermath of the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the deepening of the Arab-Israeli conflict. If it weren’t so well written, the book might be criticized as overly long. As it stands, it is an achievement that will be hard to replicate, in either its breadth or its balanced arguments.

The title gives away the book’s recurring focus on religion and faith. Mead’s deepest insight is one idealists and realists share: that Zionism of one sort or another has been present since the beginning of American history. Even before the organized Zionist movement led by Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century, interest in Jews and the nation of Israel was pervasive in American political culture. “The driving forces behind Americans’ fascination with Israel,” Mead writes, “originate outside the American Jewish community and are among the most powerful forces in American life.” Those forces include religion, but they are too broad (and diffuse) to narrowly identify with one interest group or worldview.

Mead’s telling of this religious story—which begins in the Reformation and includes themes of prophecy, conversion, humanitarianism, and antisemitism—builds on earlier studies. Other historians, including Caitlin Carenen, Shalom Goldman, and Samuel Goldman, have excavated parts of this story. And scholars like Yaakov Ariel, Walker Robins, and Melani McAlister have pondered the puzzle of how conservative evangelicals emerged in the second half of the 20th century to become Israel’s most committed American supporters.

Mead also interacts with a wave of “Israel lobby” analysis that broke into the open with The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a 2007 volume written by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The book, along with others of its ilk, applies a realist perspective, acknowledging the role of religious values but finding them deeply troubling.

In sorting through this maze of claims and counterclaims, Mead resists any single, simple interpretation of how the US-Israel relationship developed. Instead, he offers multiple explanations, sometimes half a dozen at once.

To take one example, consider the famous Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government in 1917, which supported “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” US responses to this declaration, Mead shows, are incomprehensible without considering multiple factors: division within the American Jewish community over the desirability of a “national home” outside the United States; anti-immigrant legislation that imposed severe restrictions to Eastern European Jews; the encouragement of national self-determination, by influential figures like Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, as a way to expand American commerce and economic activity; wartime passions, led by President Woodrow Wilson, to establish minority rights in once-imperial holdings like Palestine; and a history of American Christian declarations similar to the Balfour Declaration dating back to the Blackstone Memorial in 1891, named after Methodist preacher and businessman William E. Blackstone, an early popularizer of dispensational theology and Christian Zionism.

By holding these strands together, Mead explains a history without simplistic answers. There is no use in isolating one explanation to the exclusion of others. In fact, doing so will distort reality. For some readers this might be discomforting. Yet the loss of concise explanatory power or obvious policy implications is more than worth the gain in capturing the complex range of historical actors, motivations, and forces at work in defining US-Israel relations.

The truest insights

What, if anything, are Christians today called to do in the foreign-policy world? Mead, a Christian himself, offers no religious instruction as such. But he does offer a framework that clears away simplistic and conspiratorial thinking in favor of the complexity of the past. Mead is especially critical of realist arguments that attribute the US-Israel relationship to the influence of a nefarious set of actors. He is particularly dismissive of “Israel lobby” theories, which blame Jewish American organizations for exercising an outsized influence on bending US policy in favor of Israeli interest. And he attends to the ways such arguments play on historic tropes of antisemitism.

Mead compares Israel-lobby advocates to the scientists who searched for Planet Vulcan, a celestial body proposed by 19th-century astronomers to account for irregularities in Mercury’s orbit. Scientists compiled evidence, even visual proof, of Vulcan’s existence—but of course the irregularities were due to their own flawed theories. Einstein’s theory of relativity explained that the sun’s gravity warped space-time in the exact ways observed by scientists on Earth. This did away with the supposed irregularities and thus the need for Vulcan. Similarly, Mead does a good job depicting “the lobby” as a mythical body invented to account for forces better explained through more comprehensive analysis.

Most Christians, when it comes to foreign policy, oscillate between idealism and detachment—between yearning to change the world and accepting that, in most cases, we can’t. Mead is a rare observer in the Niebuhrian tradition of Christian realism who insists, in keeping with the Serenity Prayer’s third petition, that we should focus on better understanding where change is possible and where it isn’t. As a realist, Mead admittedly prefers a “good” foreign policy to a “Christian” foreign policy. As he remarked in a 2018 speech, “just because something is made in a church or made with love doesn’t mean it is any good.”

But as a Christian, Mead has mined that tradition’s values—psychological, theological, social, cultural—and is convinced that Christianity offers the truest insights to promote human flourishing, as well as the only real antidote to human fallenness. And he appreciates the extent to which Christians have deeply shaped the institutions, structures, and practices of international relations for centuries. From the emergence of human rights and international law to the origins of many NGOs and global charities, Christians have played an integral role in shaping the current world order.

If Christian wisdom bridges the idealist-realist divide, it should finally push Christians back toward Niebuhr’s first petition, which exhorts us to change what must be altered. Certain biblical injunctions come into play: God’s command to grieve for other people’s pain (James 2:15–17) and to be peacemakers (Matt. 5:9). How we live these out can vary, but they are not exclusive to a professional diplomatic class.

There are also theological tools that the Christian tradition bestows. In a recent interview, Mead reflected on the importance of “a religious faith, connected to one of the great historical traditions” including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, for becoming an effective observer and actor in international relations. Such a grounding “gives you a degree of insight and potential for self-criticism that are absolutely crucial to foreign affairs.”

More than any specific policy solution, Mead concludes The Arc of a Covenant by encouraging Americans to better appreciate the connections between how they think and act in the world. In this sense, the US-Israel relationship is no different than any other domain of human existence and far less special than it first appears.

Daniel G. Hummel is a religious historian and the director for university engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His forthcoming book is The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.

The post Christian Influence Is Only One Explanation for America’s ‘Special Relationship’ with Israel appeared first on Christianity Today.

With another tap I can underline the sentence if I want. Highlight it. Snip and save it into another file to reflect on, sans context, at some later date. In my Bible app, there’s also a little gray box that looks like a speech bubble from a comic strip, and if I tap on that, it opens up to show me a reference: Isaiah 8:14. It’s not hyperlinked to that verse, so instead of jumping to the prophet, I’m encouraged by the tech in my hand to close the box and keep reading 1 Peter: “They stumble because they disobey the message.”

As we enter into a third decade of what literary critic Sven Birkerts has called “reading in an electronic age” and biblical literacy reaches new lows, what impact does this tool have on Bible reading? How does it shape our interpretations?

There is a long debate about the correct understanding of sola scriptura. But no heir of the Reformation has ever taken it to mean we should read Scripture without any outside help. Protestants, in fact, have historically embraced innovations that might increase engagement and comprehension, from common-language translations to study Bibles, commentaries, illustrated editions, and abridgments, not to mention smartphone apps.

You don’t have to harbor deep suspicions of progress, though, to wonder if the tools we use to read the Bible might, in some way, reshape how we read. And if so, do they reshape it for the better, or the worse?

My own research on the history of dispensationalism suggests that our Bible-reading tools have, at times, changed our reading to such an extent they have even changed what it means to read the Bible literally.

There have been a variety of Christian views on what a literalist approach to Scripture should look like. Literal can refer to an emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible; beliefs about the historicity of certain passages; a particular understanding of the fulfillment of prophecy (which would not be literally literal, but symbolic); or the view that a passage should be read in the plainest way possible and that’s why it’s important to understand genres and original reception. For dispensationalists, literal reading relied on “word chains”—connecting verses through the “links” of word usage and treating keywords like stone the same wherever they were found in the Bible. That approach to the text wouldn’t have become popular without the development of concordances.

Let me back up: Bible concordances date to the 13th century, when 300 Dominican monks under the leadership of Hugh of Saint-Cher produced a selective alphabetized index of the words they considered most important in the Latin-language Vulgate Bible. While it was a powerful reading tool for biblical scholars, the St. Jacques Concordance was rudimentary by today’s standards. Later Medieval concordances listed every occurrence of many, many more words.

With the Reformation came demand for similar works in vernacular languages. The first English-language New Testament concordance appeared in the 1530s, though it wasn’t very useful before the publication of the King James Bible in the 1600s made Scripture widely available.

The KJV got an excellent concordance in 1737 when Alexander Cruden, a bookseller and reclusive scholar, finished cataloging more than 77,000 words. It took him 26 years and several trips to a mental institution, but he finally finished and published his exhaustive masterpiece: Cruden’s Concordance. It remains in print today.

Cruden’s tool for Bible reading was often paired with other new aids, such as Bagster’s Polyglot Bible, which offered readers 60,000 cross-references in multiple languages printed side by side, and new commentaries such as Thomas Scott’s Commentary on the Whole Bible. All told, by the 19th century KJV readers had a lifetime’s worth of tools to help them understand the Bible in new ways.

These powerful new tools meant that regular readers could, for the first time, cross-reference any word in the Bible. The stone in 1 Peter could be connected with the one Moses struck in Exodus 17:6, the one Daniel described as being cut “not by human hands” in Daniel 2:34, and the one Jesus talks about falling on people and crushing them in Matthew 21:44. The cross-references created a new interpretive context, one that could be highly personal or communal, depending on how the tools were used.

In the United States, this approach to Scripture came to be called the Bible Reading Method. It democratized what was usually the purview of scholars or well-trained pastors. Readers could now select an English keyword to study and then examine all the uses of that word, extrapolating the meaning of a text from the compiled examples.

Bible Apps Are the New Printing Press

John Dyer

People often did this in groups, encouraging intensive Bible study that fed into theological reflections. A group might look at the word wait in Psalm 27:14, for example; connect it to Jacob’s plea in Genesis 49:18; cross-reference that with Paul’s eschatological hope in Romans 8:19, where “creation waits”; and then talk about how God’s deliverance is a deep theme running through the Bible from beginning to end. Who God was delivering and what that deliverance looked like could be shaped by the biblical context and narrative, but it was just as often conditioned by readers’ personal circumstances and their particular cultural assumptions.

The Scofield Reference Bible was a mainstay for millions of Christians steeped in the Bible Reading Method. It was very popular and widely distributed among some Christians. Cyrus I. Scofield, a minister closely associated with Dwight L. Moody, included in his reference Bible extensive footnotes explaining his theology, which relied on an intricate cross-reference and concordance system running down the middle of every page of the Bible. Oxford University Press published Scofield’s Bible for the first time in 1909, and it remains in print today. In addition to the on-page helps, Scofield included a 150-plus-page concordance index and instructions to train readers to build word chains. He explained that word chains would “lead the reader from the first clear mention of a great truth to the last.” And in case the reader didn’t get it, a Scofield summary would solidify the meaning at that last reference.

In its more sophisticated implementation, reading the Bible with the help of concordances allowed people to experience the unity of Scripture. As another dispensationalist writer in the early 20th century, Isaac Massey Haldeman, explained, “an intelligent and satisfactory study of the Bible” required a concordance to realize that a “unity of design” animated the 66 books. Concordances allowed lay readers to experience Scripture’s unity, even as they downplayed or set aside historical context, human authorship, the original languages, linguistic details, and often the actual narrative.

Some conservative Christians, such as Moody’s colleague R. A. Torrey, called the Bible Reading Method the “scientific” approach to Scripture. Haldeman described concordances and cross-references as “implements” and “tools” which, if used properly, produced repeatable results.

It’s unusual, today, to think of self-described fundamentalists touting science, but Americans at the turn of the 20th century were embracing science as the ultimate arbiter of truth across all sectors of life. As biblical higher criticism seemed to undermine the authority of Scripture in academia, this concordance-based interpretive frame was deployed to shore it up, scientifically.

We might expect fundamentalists who wanted to read the Bible literally to care more about how the first Christians received Scripture. But the tool they were using for their Bible reading pushed them in this other, “scientific” direction instead.

It also prepared the ground for a new theological movement, which came to be called “dispensationalism.” This developed out of the teachings espoused by the Exclusive Brethren—specifically the Anglo-Irish leader John Nelson Darby. He taught that humanity was divided into three parts: Israel, the church, and the nations. The nations didn’t have a covenant with God, but the church and Israel both did, so Scripture needed to be “rightly divided” into the parts that spoke to Israel and the parts that spoke to Christians.

For Darby, what made “every scripture fall into place” was a Christian reader’s “spiritual understanding by the Holy Ghost of things in heaven and our connection with them, and things in earth and our separateness from them.”

That approach to the Bible often focused on prophecy, a genre of Scripture Darby didn’t think was aimed at its original recipients, but future-oriented, predicting events that had not happened yet in human history, mostly having to do with Israel. To understand Scripture, then, you would want to know how a stone could be a foundation (Eph. 2:20), a stumbling block (Rom. 9:32–33), and something that would fall on people and crush them (Matt. 21:44), and how all of those were both actually Jesus and a sequence of events that was going to happen (literally/symbolically) to Israel.

Darby promoted concordances, but he was a stickler for keeping separate “earthly” and “heavenly” meanings of particular verses. This complicated the Bible Reading Method that was in vogue among the American Christians most eager to adopt Darby’s teachings.

Americans not steeped in the same Brethren assumptions insisted that Darby’s distinctions could be discovered from the Bible Reading Method itself. As James Brooks, one of Darby’s most important American popularizers, assured readers, “the language in which prophecy is written is as simple and as easy to understand as any other part of Scripture.” Concordances, which catalogued words and not meanings, were part of what made that seem true.

The largely American story of dispensationalism’s development after Darby shows how later readers tried to base his teachings in a plain reading of the text to bring them more in line with the Bible Reading Method. But the “plain” reading doesn’t appear so plain, of course, without the technology that encouraged people to read that way.

After several generations of outside scholars chipping away at dispensationalism, and popular dispensationalism like the Left Behind novels undercutting its credibility, that approach to the Bible has largely fallen out of favor. Dispensationalism is in decline, and the Bible Reading Method is not often taught in seminaries or Christian colleges.

Yet the reading instincts popularized by the Bible Reading Method persist. The practice continues to have a powerful effect on people. It still makes readers feel as if Scripture is opening up, as if they see into the obscurities of the Bible for the first time and there’s no need for specialized language or historical training. With a little practice and a concordance, every reader can do it themselves, and they can even claim this is the way to read the Bible literally.

And concordances still exist, of course. They’re valuable tools that we often take for granted. They can be amazingly helpful to reading the Bible when used properly. They’ve largely been replaced by more efficient tools for regular Bible readers. I can do a word search on my app or, perhaps, click on a link that jumps me from one part of the Bible to another.

That way of thinking about the Bible—as a hyperlinked text—really excites the popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. In one of his YouTube lectures on the Bible, he shared a graphic created by computer scientist Chris Harrison, showing the more than 65,000 cross-references in Scripture. Peterson marveled that if you followed each one, “You’d just journey through that forever. You’d never, ever get to the end of it.” What insights that journey would produce, however, would be entirely dependent on the path one chose to take. This endless variety is appealing to Peterson, but it should be less compelling to Christians committed to the unity and coherence of Scripture.

In an age of limitless digital tools to derive new meanings from Scripture, we should be cautious about how our reading technology shapes and reshapes the context of the text. We do not read Scripture solo, to be sure, but the tools we choose can shape and misshape our reading of the Bible. They can lead us to believe we’re reading simply and literally when, with a little critical distance, it certainly looks like a process of breaking and remaking contexts to fit our systems.

I don’t think that’s what happens when I tap open my Bible app. The technology feels more neutral than that. But history would suggest it is something to worry about.

Daniel G. Hummel is the author of the forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans).

The post When the Best Bible-Reading Tool Made Bible Reading Worse appeared first on Christianity Today.

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Gene Zubovich (Author)

408 pages

$69.95

Does any of this sound familiar?

You might think this scenario describes the growing fault lines in American evangelicalism since 2016. It does, of course. But it also describes, with even greater accuracy, the state of affairs in liberal Protestantism 50 years ago, as documented in an excellent new work of scholarship, Gene Zubovich’s Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States.

A professor of history at the University at Buffalo, Zubovich shines light on a dim corner of recent American history: the integral role that liberal, ecumenical Protestant leaders played in American liberalism in the mid-20th century, along with the underappreciated ways they helped drive the polarization that broke apart the mainline, opened the way for the Religious Right, and shaped our present moment.

Cracks in the edifice

The book’s subtitle mentions polarization, which implies a period of greater unity sometime in the past. Claiming, as Zubovich does, that such a period occurred in the 1920s might appear counterintuitive. The decade of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and the onset of the Great Depression was not, on the surface, conducive to the ascendancy of a new generation of Protestant elite. And yet this is precisely what Zubovich establishes in the first half of Before the Religious Right, which charts the rise of “Protestant globalism” among a “power elite” in ecumenical Protestantism and the Federal Council of Churches (later called the National Council of Churches or NCC) that shaped US policy during the New Deal, World War II, and the early Cold War.

Protestant globalism, with its heyday in the 1930s–1960s, entailed a certain view of the world and the church’s role in it that is at once familiar and foreign. It had a distinct sociological profile (wealthy, educated, white, male) and a particular style (procedural, consensus-driven, institutional). It assumed Protestant superiority in matters of ethics and morality, and it was uncritically committed to the project of ecumenism, or ecclesial unity, through which it would exercise its power.

Encouraged by social gospel teachings and a renewed sense of American-led global influence after World War I, a young generation of Protestant leaders applied the liberal theological tradition to three areas of social engagement: social welfare policy, racial desegregation, and international relations. In each case, the budding Protestant globalists displayed an almost unquestioned certainty that Christianity, and the ecumenically fueled church, possessed the resources—theological, moral, financial—to meet the challenges of global economic injustice, racism, nationalism, war, and decolonization.

The generation included ecumenical leaders G. Bromley Oxnam (a Methodist bishop) and Henry Pitney van Dusen (professor at and later president of Union Theological Seminary), along with names once familiar and now largely forgotten, including William Ernest Hocking, John C. Bennett, and Edmund Soper. As a cohort, they toured the world and leaned on advances in academic disciplines to develop a more sophisticated understanding of American society and its shortcomings. Their political prescriptions resembled those of Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party: enhancing social programs, implementing progressive taxation, and maintaining a close alignment between religious and political leadership. The alignment was so close, writes Zubovich, that “the ecumenical Protestant establishment” and “the liberal political establishment in the United States” display near “parallel” histories.

Over the 1940s, both establishments grew increasingly adamant in their calls for racial desegregation. Zubovich pinpoints a change in the language employed by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). Gradually, the organization shifted from denouncing “race prejudice” (which implied a need to overcome racist attitudes) to advocating “desegregation” (which implied a need for systemic and political reforms). In 1946, the FCC became the first major white Protestant organization to call for racial desegregation. In 1948, it published a statement on human rights that took particular aim at segregation.

Today, appeals to antiracism aren’t commonly framed in the language of human rights—a difference that points to how Protestant globalism is the product of an earlier era. While Americans tend to see racial justice as a domestic issue and human rights as an international issue, the division made no sense to ecumenical Protestants. Instead, argues Zubovich, “human rights became the vehicle through which the new structural and global understanding of racism was delivered to the American public.” Consciousness of racism as a global problem emerged through numerous developments in the 1940s: the “World Order Movement” for global government, decolonization, and increasing knowledge of how race relations in such places as the Soviet Union and Brazil compared with race relations in America.

Protestant globalism enjoyed immense prestige and influence in the 1940s and 1950s. Some of its champions—Reinhold Niebuhr and John Foster Dulles—were household names. Arguably, FDR and Harry Truman were fellow travelers while in the Oval Office. Yet even at the movement’s apotheosis, there were cracks in the edifice. The FCC’s 1948 statement on desegregation drew concerted critiques from moderate white Protestants. As secretary of state, Dulles pursued not a world government but US Cold War interests. And Niebuhr, for his part, articulated a “Christian realism” in both domestic and foreign policy that dismissed the social gospel as naive.

Moreover, Protestant globalism failed to move beyond its small circle of leaders. It was a largely elite, white, and male endeavor, though it also included key figures like Thelma Stevens, a Methodist organizer for world government during World War II, and George E. Haynes, an African American educator who was executive secretary of the FCC’s Department of Race Relations. Yet liberal Protestants were reluctant to overhaul their own institutional hierarchies. They added few nonwhite or women leaders, and they largely neglected the class or cultural divides between themselves and the millions they claimed to represent. The pursuit of “one world” brought about its own undoing beginning in the 1960s, as Protestants divided along the fault lines that had been drawn in earlier decades.

The clergy-laity gap

The success of Protestant globalism produced a backlash that created the lines of polarization we see today. Yet while most historians have traced that backlash to actors outside the ecumenical camp—to the longer history of fundamentalist political activism and the mobilization of evangelicals later in the 20th century—Zubovich points to the liberal churches themselves.

Though it’s only one episode in the much larger story Zubovich tells, the origins of Christianity Today are a case in point. While the magazine was conceived by Billy Graham and featured evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry as its first editor in chief, its launch was funded by oil magnate J. Howard Pew. A Presbyterian active in the National Council of Churches, Pew attempted to gain control of the NCC through its National Lay Committee to blunt the organization’s leftward drift, especially on economic issues. When he failed, and the committee died in 1955, Pew turned to evangelicals, who he believed would speak the same conservative values on theology and economics without the institutional baggage of the NCC.

Pew’s hopes were largely realized. CT quickly outgrew its liberal competitor The Christian Century, helping Pew continue by other means his struggle against liberal Protestants. His money also informed CT’s editorial line, which may have otherwise been less beholden to his arch-conservative views. Henry, who became famous for his critiques of fundamentalism as too politically reactionary, had called for Christians to address social justice as part of the gospel. Christianity Today reflected little of this attitude in its early years, and Henry’s departure in 1968 was due to these differences. The destinies of both ecumenical and evangelical Protestantism, and the polarization between them, were just one byproduct of the “clergy-laity gap” sparked by Protestant globalism.

As the book’s title implies, the Religious Right hovers over this entire history of ecumenical Protestantism. Zubovich urges readers to understand that the narrative of “mainline decline” misses “the political work ecumenical Protestants have done—and continue to do—that shapes our world today.” The progressive politics of figures like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he suggests, are rooted in the Protestant globalist vision forged in the 1920s. Yet it is hard not to see, beginning in Zubovich’s earliest pages, institutional decline as the likely outcome for an elite so ambitious and so self-confident.

No easy solutions

A striking aspect of Protestant globalism, as Zubovich describes it, is how little theology mattered to its leaders. There was implied theology at every turn, but the language of creedal confession itself was subsumed under sociology, politics, and other more modernist vocabularies. As the “clergy-laity gap” widened in the 1960s and 1970s—over social welfare and economics, the Vietnam War, and desegregation—the once-shared theological language of the elites and laypeople grew even more dissimilar, and neither side seemed interested in ceding rhetorical ground to the other.

This aspect of polarization should sound familiar to us today. A survey from 2018 (conducted, fittingly, by Pew Research) found that nearly four out of five respondents agreed that “voters cannot agree on basic facts” of issues. While misinformation and disinformation play a role in such a gap, another problem is that sociologically distinct groups—including evangelical clergy, professors and public intellectuals on the one hand, and regular churchgoers on the other—barely share a vocabulary to describe the world or the gospel. On any given Sunday morning, a centrist pastor might preach on biblical “justice,” and a conservative congregant chooses to hear an apology for secular “social justice.” Or a conservative pastor might invoke a “culture of life,” and a progressive congregant is convinced that life is just a code word for control.

There are no easy solutions to this problem—it flows from deeper trends in media consumption and spiritual formation, as well as a host of challenges that have existed since the first Christians moved beyond the confines of Jerusalem. A small—possibly too small—solution might be found in work by biblical scholars themselves, who spend their days bridging gaps between the language and ideas of the first and 21st centuries, which are far wider than anything related to today’s polarization.

All other things being equal, what would an institutional and intellectual project like Protestant globalism look like if undertaken by evangelicals? In some ways (and this remains far outside Zubovich’s purview) it was already attempted. We’re living in its aftermath. It looked like World Vision and Lausanne, like International Justice Mission and the National Association of Evangelicals, like Fuller Seminary and, yes, Christianity Today. And yet this movement, too—launching during World War II and helping to create, in historian Steven P. Miller’s phrase, “America’s born-again years”—now suffers from a lack of grassroots appeal in the US and, in recent years, a widening language gap between its leaders and the people in the pews. Many of its flagbearers no longer want to be associated with evangelicalism at all.

Before the Religious Right provides us with a version of how this history has unfolded for others and how the future may very well unfold for evangelicals. In an irony that Niebuhr would have appreciated, it falls to entities like CT to shape how, on the far side of white evangelicalism’s heyday in the halls of power, its clergy and laity will stand together or fall apart.

Daniel G. Hummel is a religious historian and the director for university engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His forthcoming book is The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.

The post A Religious Movement Divided Against Itself (Probably) Cannot Stand appeared first on Christianity Today.

After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division (Radical Conservatisms)

Samuel Goldman (Author)

University of Pennsylvania Press

160 pages

$14.20

After Nationalismis a gripping, fast-paced, and probing study into how American political leaders and thinkers—ranging from John Jay to Abraham Lincoln to Fredrick Douglass to Dwight Eisenhower—have debated the essence of American identity and what binds the nation together. Goldman, a political scientist at George Washington University, tells a history of repeated failed attempts by these American elites to sustain compelling “narratives of belonging.” He offers three symbols, or myths, of American identity that progress chronologically: covenant, crucible, and creed. Drawing inspiration from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), which identified fundamentally different conceptions of virtue “in which people mean different things by the same words,” After Nationalism points to a similar ambiguity surrounding the word nationalism.

Like MacIntrye, Goldman does not just describe a situation but also suggests a path forward. Instead of endorsing another attempt to define a single American nationalism, Goldman calls for embracing pluralism and strengthening the “institutions of disagreement” that can lead to compromise between communities.

This is an ambitious, possibly unfeasible proposition. Yet it charts a path forward for a polarized American society and, though it is not Goldman’s focus or concern, an equally polarized American Christianity. When Christians are confronted with a surging Christian nationalist movement that assures their centrality to American identity, a sober look at past projects of nationalism can spoil the allure, dampen the zeal, and spark the Christian imagination toward different, and better, narratives of belonging that honor the gospel.

Covenant, crucible, and creed

Any singular “origin story” of American national identity is flawed. The 1619 Project has recently been at the center of academic and popular debate in part because it posits that traditional nationalist motifs of pilgrims and yeoman farmers are incomplete without slaves, indentured servants, and displaced Native Americans. The myths of nationalism that Goldman catalogs and explores fail for many reasons, but one consistent bug is that none manages to acknowledge this complexity.

The elites of the American Revolution and early republic, many of whom envisioned a broader citizenry in the future but framed the nation for white male property owners, based their earliest attempts at nation-building on the shared mythology of New England Puritanism. Seventeenth-century New Englanders had propounded the classic Calvinist conception of a covenantal relationship between obedient humans and God’s favor. After the American Revolution, the covenantal ideal was revived by some founders as the basis for defining the new American nation.

This attempt, one of many in the early republic, was a mixed success at best. Covenantalism originated in the ethnically and religiously homogenous communities of New England, which were governed in cooperation with church authorities. The concept was a poor fit for a new nation that spanned 13 former colonies, contained diverse ethnic and religious communities, encompassed slave and free states, and pursued a federal separation of church and state. Yet a critical mass of New England founding fathers, especially John Adams and John Jay, and supportive New England intellectuals such as Yale president Timothy Dwight and lexicographer Noah Webster, took the “New England origin myth” of American greatness and tried to shoehorn it into the new nation.

Grading on a curve, covenantal nationalism was more coherent than what came later. But even by the early 19th century it had failed to solve the problem of national identity, address the sin of chattel slavery, or anticipate looming demographic changes. The republic was becoming far more theologically diverse (if still overwhelmingly Protestant), and New England no longer dominated its culture. Waves of European immigrants made the country less ethnically homogenous and geographically confined, and the symbol of a crucible (or a melting pot; Goldman uses the two terms interchangeably) to describe American identity emerged to accommodate this new reality for the next century.

The idea of a crucible, writes Goldman, was “optimistic” and “open-ended,” which made the symbol “a very different image of American origin and purpose to the New English covenant.” Where the covenant had rooted itself in patriarchs who established a sacred community, the crucible looked to the future, to a new type of human and a new type of nation, to something far more innately good and innocent than a Calvinist would allow.

A crucible is intrinsically violent to the things you throw into it, and the American crucible was no exception. The increasing diversity of the nation’s population led to ethnic strife, urban mobs, and actual wars, including the Civil War, as more immigrants from more parts of the globe (still mostly Europe, but now including eastern and southern Europe as well as East Asia) joined the body politic. Many did so only partially, with enclaves like the “German Triangle” between Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis maintaining significant autonomy until the xenophobia of World War I led to its demise.

Both chattel slavery and the rise of Jim Crow segregation overlapped with the height of crucible nationalism. The durability of anti-Black racism and the predominant feeling among white elites, from politicians to intellectuals to new social scientists, that African Americans were prototypical “unmeltables,” prompted observers, Fredrick A. Douglass chief among them, to hammer on the shortcomings of the melting-pot ideal. Douglass emerges as one of Goldman’s favorite thinkers for his insights into the limits of American identity based on ethnic, religious, and cultural fusion. Douglass saw earlier than most that anything less than “perfect civil equality to the peoples of all races and of all creeds” would leave African Americans out.

Douglass uttered these words in 1869. Nothing close to “perfect civil equality” was on the horizon until the mid-20th century and the rise of a new metaphor for national identity: the creed. The line from Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., who perfected the call for white Americans to finally fulfill their creedal destiny, was anything but foreordained. Creedal nationalism arose in response to new pressures, to a unique moment in and around World War II that fostered a vision of national unity among ever-increasing pluralism. As the US absorbed great numbers of European immigrants into a de-ethnicized whiteness while emerging as the primary global challenger against fascism and communism, Americans increasingly articulated a shared identity supposedly unencumbered by, and unrelated to, racial, ethnic, religious, geographical, or cultural difference.

This attempt at a creedal identity failed, too. Racial tensions, including expanded immigration from the Global South, white resistance to desegregation, and urban violence, dismantled the creedal vision that King and many other Americans endorsed. The Vietnam War shattered any semblance of creedal consensus. In its place was a “new tribalism” that rejected the melting pot, exposed the failed promises of unlimited growth and mobility, and called into question the basic values on which the American creed supposedly rested.

Christianity and national identity

In Goldman’s telling, we live on the other side of creedal nationalism with no clear successor. Historians have experimented with new formulations, including systemic critiques of the American project like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States(which Goldman notes could better be titled A Peoples’ History …). Zinn’s work is just one element of a much wider contemporary debate over public school curricula. Conservatives, including many evangelicals, have responded with their own interpretations of American history that often include covenantal, crucible, and creedal tropes. Still others have not given up on the creedal dream. Jill Lepore’s recent volume, These Truths, is a valiant effort, in Goldman’s estimation, to update the consensus creedalism of the mid-20th century, even if he believes it fails, in its more than 900 pages, to navigate the tensions between unity and inclusivity.

When Biden delivered his victory speech in November 2020, he recycled some of the classic tools of covenantal, crucible, and creedal nationalism. He called Americans to join him in “embark[ing] on the work that God and history have called us to do.” He appealed to the promise of America “for everybody, no matter their race, their ethnicity, their faith, their identity, or their disability.” He fixed the nation’s goodness on “the slow, yet steady widening of opportunity.” Biden made these gestures in an era of waning nationalism, but his faith seemed undaunted.

The rhetoric of American nationalism has always featured a Christian edge. Biden, a Catholic born in 1942, grew up at the height of Judeo-Christian civic religion and creedal nationalism, the very pressures that produced an exceptional, if incomplete, expansion in religious pluralism and racial equality. His maintenance of a type of creedal exceptionalism—that “at our best America is a beacon for the globe”—has been one popular response to forestalling the absolute collapse of American nationalism.

Another response has been the hard-edged Christian nationalism that evokes many of the same nationalist myths and tropes but in the service of a narrower identity that seeks to circumscribe rather than embrace pluralism. There have been many thoughtful theological critiques of Christian nationalism, in CT and elsewhere, and many of them do more than rebut ethnocentrism. They raise the uncomfortable question of how Christians should then understand their relationship to national identity. Should Christians cheer the end of nationalism or seek to revive it on their preferred terms? Should they go local, fixing their identity to their neighborhoods and congregations? Or should they go international, seeing themselves foremost as members of the global church?

Goldman spends frustratingly little time on prescriptions. Even so, there is something enduring about Fredrick Douglass’s “composite” ideal that demands neither homogeneity nor separation and warns against “the almost inevitable concomitants of general conformity” when sameness is the sought end.

Goldman’s final suggestion to embrace difference as the driving characteristic of American society, and to strengthen institutions of disagreement that allow for mediated compromise between communities, is one Christians can consider. Christians should contemplate the limits of a covenantalism that applies biblical promises intended for ancient Israel and the church to a modern nation, a crucible-ism that invests the nation with vast coercive powers over diverse communities, and a creedalism that sees a particular nation, and even a particular historical moment in a nation’s life, as revelatory of God’s ultimate ways. As the Catholic historian Carlton Hayes wrote almost 100 years ago, in the wake of the First World War, nationalism taken to its logical conclusion becomes a religion of its own. When it does, “it represents a reaction against historic Christianity, against the universal mission of Christ.” This should be the first acknowledgment in any Christian attempt at grappling with American identity “after nationalism.”

Which is not to discount that Christians have obligations to their fellow citizens and to their nations. Goldman claims for himself the word “patriot” as a way to acknowledge “that this country is, if imperfect, worthy of loyalty, celebration, and, when necessary, defense.” The difference between a nationalist and a patriot is often one of semantics, but Goldman insists there is an important distinction. “If there is a difference,” he writes, “it lies in whether one treats ‘we, the people’ as generated and sustained by our interactions under specific institutions in a particular place [nationalism], or bases the legitimacy of our institutions on an independent and previously existing communities [patriotism].”

As people who confess along with the psalmist that all the nations are God’s inheritance and under God’s judgment (82:8), this distinction is vital. In times of competing nationalist religions, just as in times when nationalist myths are ascendant, Christians will be tempted to conflate the tropes of the nation with the tenets of their faith. Wisdom may be the difficult task of untangling both without discarding either.

Daniel G. Hummel is a religious historian and the director for university engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations.

The post America Has Tried Three ‘Narratives of Belonging.’ None Worked as Planned. appeared first on Christianity Today.

“We had just had one of the largest marches in state history for racial justice,” Anderson said, “and I was hearing from church leaders: ‘What do we do now?’ ”

Jemar Tisby’s history of racism in the American church, published by Zondervan, came as the perfect answer. Anderson organized a group of 27 ministers from 19 congregations to read the book and discuss ways to channel “the pent-up energy around racial justice into our congregations and our community in tangible ways.”

Sales numbers show that the Madison church leaders weren’t the only ones turning to Tisby in 2020. The first-time author’s year-old book landed on The New York Times Best Seller list that June and cracked the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s 100,000-sales mark in October.

That’s an incredible feat—even more remarkable considering that Tisby is only the fifth Black author to make it onto the evangelical bestseller list and his is the only book about racism to ever win the 100,000-sales award.

Publishers including Zondervan, Baker, Moody, Multnomah, Thomas Nelson, Whitaker, WaterBrook, B&H, The Good Book Company, and InterVarsity Press have a long list of authors of color that they have published over the past two decades. They have also produced a long list of books on racial justice. But none of them became bestsellers until Tisby in 2020.

According to industry insiders, this lightning-strike success is the result of a generation of preparation. “We had been moving in this direction for many years to bring in more voices of color,” said Stan Jantz, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association. “I’ve seen really strong and consistent progress.”

But the narrative that publishers paved the way for American evangelicals to focus on racism doesn’t tell the whole story. Neither does focusing solely on the events of 2020. To understand whether this is a historic fluke or a real reckoning moment requires a longer view.

E

vangelical Christian publishing has historically catered to white evangelicals. The industry grew up with the expansion of the suburbs in the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s, which disproportionately benefited white, middle-class families. The few publishers who tried to serve Black evangelicals, such as Urban Ministries Inc., struggled financially to reach a large enough market.

But successful Christian publishers regularly worked with authors of color, including Tom Skinner, John Perkins, and Howard O. Jones, to produce books challenging white evangelicals to engage issues of racial justice, reconciliation, and equity. Many of these were critical, even groundbreaking works, with bold messages. Some of the titles would still be challenging for a lot of Americans today. In 1970, for example, InterVarsity Press came out with Columbus Salley and Ronald Behm’s Your God Is Too White.

IVP Books senior editor Al Hsu said the hope is always that a title like that will have a powerful impact, finding a reader who is thinking, “I know something is wrong. My church, our categories, our theology are insufficient to acknowledge and help the pain of our Black brothers and sisters in this moment.” Reading a Black Christian’s perspective can change a reader, displacing their experience with a different narrative, a different history, and a new understanding.

As potentially life changing as these books were, few of them sold many copies. The market was dominated more by the sales of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth than John Perkins’s Let Justice Roll Down, more by Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life than William Pannell’s The Coming Race Wars? A Cry for Reconciliation.

“Books about social issues have always been hard to sell to the public,” Steve Laube, an agent specializing in evangelical markets, told Publishers Weekly. “Despite that, Christian publishers have been proactive for quite some time by pursuing and publishing these thoughtful books because the issues should not be ignored.”

Even if publishers didn’t see immediate financial success with books by authors of color, there were economic reasons to keep trying. They hoped to expand the market for their books, and there was always the possibility that Black authors could open the doors to Black Christian book buyers.

As historian Daniel Vaca explains, this is part of the larger economic story of “market segmentation.” Publishers, like other businesses in the 20th century, innovated by targeting specific customers and defining consumers by demographic categories. “White evangelicals” was a good segment. “Black Christians” was a promising one.

The Business of Evangelical Book Publishing Is Business

Daniel Silliman

This is not to say it was all motivated by money. In Christian publishing, ministry motivations and personal relationships play a major role in deciding what gets produced and promoted.

Zondervan increased its list of Black authors after Stan Gundry joined as senior vice president in 1981. Early in his tenure, Gundry met Matthew Parker, then a professor at William Tyndale College and later founder of the Institute for Black Family Development. Parker coedited two books for Zondervan, but just as importantly, he connected Gundry to Black authors such as Pannell.

That personal connection made it possible for Zondervan to put out a book with the title The Coming Race Wars? just a year after the nation was shaken by riots in Los Angeles following the police beating of a Black man named Rodney King.

Market segmentation doesn’t tell the whole story of how Gundry published that book challenging white evangelicals to think more critically about race and racism, but its logic helped him make the case for forging into new publishing territory.

A glance at the bestseller lists for the past 15 years shows that the Black Christian authors who have sold the most books are Priscilla Shirer, T. D. Jakes, Tony Evans, and former football coach Tony Dungy. Their books appeal to white evangelicals without getting caught up in controversial contemporary issues, while also expanding the traditional market to include Black Christians.

Commercially, books on racism were never the best bet, but publishers kept steadily producing them anyway.

O

ne popular approach to raising the issue of racism over the years was the Black-white author duo. These books put personal relationships at the center of the questions about race. They reinforced a widely held evangelical conviction, as historian Seth Dowland has written, that “racial reconciliation ran through the transformation of individual lives rather than through systemic changes.”

InterVarsity, for example, published More Than Equals in 1993, coauthored by Chris Rice and Spencer Perkins (son of John Perkins). The duo was touted as a model for the hope of reconciliation. The same format was replicated by Moody Press with Breaking Down Walls, coauthored by Raleigh Washington and Glen Kehrein (and coforwarded by Billy Graham and John Perkins), and by Baker with Letters Across the Divide, written by David Anderson and Brent Zuercher.

That vision of racial reconciliation declined in Christian publishing in the early 2000s because of concerns about whether it worked. Scholars such as Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith articulated sociological limits of focusing on individualistic and relational solutions to racism, while writers such as Willie J. Jennings, Lisa Sharon Harper, and Brenda Salter McNeil started to argue against the approach theologically.

By 2006, evangelical books on racism were more likely to take the approach of Edward Gilbreath’s Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity. Gilbreath, now a vice president at Christianity Today, argued that individual and relational responses to racism were important but not sufficient. Christians would also need to address the social and structural realities.

The most recent wave of Christian publishing on race and justice, including The Color of Compromise, has followed Gilbreath’s trajectory. These books focus on structural issues in evangelical theology, the church, and American society writ large.

In 2018, for example, titles included I’m Still Here, by Austin Channing Brown; Insider Outsider, by Bryan Loritts; Dear White Christians, by Jennifer Harvey; Woke Church, by Eric Mason; and Be the Bridge, by Latasha Morrison.

This isn’t an accident. Christian publishers have been intentional about pursuing these projects.

“We often talk about evangelicalism as a river, with a left bank and right bank. We try to be in the middle and be a broker of ideas,” said Ryan Pazdur, editor of The Color of Compromise at Zondervan. “We focus on diversity and cultural issues, race, justice, history.”

So why was Tisby’s book the one that met the need of evangelicals grappling with racial injustice in 2020?

W

hen Tisby began to shop his book proposal in 2017, a half dozen publishers were interested. Zondervan offered a significant advance.

“To me, this indicated two things,” Tisby said. “One, their resources. And two, their confidence in me and the book.”

For a new Black author in particular, this confidence was essential. In order for the book to be taken seriously, Tisby thought, a publisher would have to put some institutional weight behind it. He wanted to write about the failure of white Christianity to reckon with race and deal directly with the history of violence, compromise, and cowardice. He knew many would rather look away.

“The story is worse than most imagine,” Tisby said. “I was very honest with the team at Zondervan about speaking forthrightly about race, about knowing from personal experience how people push back against these conversations.”

For Zondervan, this challenge came at just the right time. The large Christian publisher had recently launched a new imprint, Zondervan Reflective, designed to make room for “tough questions,” Pazdur said. The publisher also wanted the imprint to expand its base of authors, adding some diversity and hopefully reaching new markets of readers.

Tisby’s proposal, originally titled “Courageous Christianity,” ticked all the boxes.

Tisby had his own institutional support, a “Black Christian Collective” called The Witness. He and a few collaborators started the organization as the Reformed African American Network in 2012 and rebranded as The Witness in 2019. The nonprofit media company gave Tisby some additional support and raised his visibility as an author.

When the country shut down in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tisby saw his speaking engagements in support of the book dry up, and he and his publisher expected The Color of Compromise to fade from public consciousness.

“Everything was canceled,” Tisby said, “and I told myself, ‘Well, it was a good run.’ ” He planned to return to his PhD work.

But then May 2020 became one of the most catalyzing months of racial tension in recent American history. News and video of the killings of unarmed Black people rocked the country. First came viral footage of three white men shooting Ahmaud Arbery to death in Georgia. Two weeks later, the FBI opened an investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. And at the end of the month, video surfaced of a Minneapolis policeman kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the ground until he was unconscious and then continuing to kneel on him until he died from lack of oxygen.

Jemar Tisby: Three Words Should Guide Our Pursuit of Racial Justice

Interview by Myles Werntz

The summer of 2020 was also the height of state-mandated lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. Stuck inside or at home, millions of Americans turned to books to fill the time. After an initial drop in the early weeks of the pandemic, book sales increased throughout the spring and summer, according to marketing research firm NPD Group, and by August had recouped the year’s losses. By the end of the year, the book industry had recorded its best sales in a decade.

Many churches—with in-person gatherings paused—also launched book groups meeting on virtual video platforms. When those groups looked for something good to read together, a lot of them found The Color of Compromise.

“I got the sense that churches were ready to learn and to understand a perspective other than one they had been raised with,” Pazdur said.

“I do think the pandemic actually forced people to give sustained attention to racial justice in ways that they might not have had they not been confined to their homes and very small areas,” Tisby said. “People had to pay attention to what was going on in the news politically and socially, and that all coincided with the interest in my book.”

Still, a satisfyingly complete account of what made Tisby’s book the blockbuster of the summer remains elusive, even for Tisby. “I was completely flabbergasted,” he said.

T

he success of The Color of Compromise might be a watershed: the inflection point when swaths of white evangelicals start to take racism, and Christian complicity and compromise with racism, seriously.

“You never know how long a moment is going to last,” editor David Bratt told Publishers Weekly, “but this one seems to have staying power. … There is a real sense from people that they want to do what is right and didn’t realize until now their compliancy in this system.”

Tisby isn’t so sure. “I don’t want to make too much of it,” he said. “It’s a similar issue we find in church congregations where we celebrate the presence of racial and ethnic minorities without critically examining equity and inclusion…. It is not a negative, but more work needs to be done.”

In fact, The Color of Compromise could be a “costly success,” according to Vincent Bacote, professor of theology at Wheaton College.

“The book engendered strong reactions in some sections of white evangelicalism,” he said. Not everyone is ready to reckon with “the long shadow of Christian racism.”

In the past year, other evangelical titles have been showing people the way forward, next steps, and tangible alternatives. Some have received awards. Some have received rave reviews. None has been received with the same urgency or sales, though.

The Color of Compromise’s long-term significance hinges on whether the institutions that pushed for this conversation about race will continue to do so, and whether white evangelicals will remain open, as they were in 2020. The history of Christian publishing indicates that lasting change will require individuals and institutions both.

Daniel G. Hummel is a religious historian and the director for university engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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The post Is Jemar Tisby’s Bestselling Book About Racism a Fluke? appeared first on Christianity Today.