“Christ is not the shepherd of wolves”

Reviewed by: Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America by Spencer W. McBride William Harrison Taylor (bio) Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America. By Spencer W. McBride. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. 272. $39.50 cloth; $39.50 ebook) For the past couple years, students of early American religious history, especially those focusing on the Revolutionary era, have been flooded with quality scholarship such as Mark Noll's In the Beginning Was the Word (2016), James Byrd's Sacred Scripture, Sacred War (2013), and Jonathan Den Hartog's Patriotism and Piety (2015). Fortunately, the water has only gotten deeper with the addition of Spencer W. McBride's debut work, Pulpit and Nation. McBride takes on the perpetually contested question of religion's role in revolutionary America, and he makes a compelling argument that religion, Christianity especially, was vitally significant to shaping the era. Specifically, he examines how religion was used in the political sphere, and he contends that through the work of "politicized clergymen" and politicians, who often wielded faith as a convenient tool, Christianity was intimately involved in transformative events of the period, including the war for American independence, ratifying the Constitution, and the first national elections. Their work not only shaped Revolutionaryera political culture, but it also helped lay the foundations for how future generations would struggle over American identity. Christianity, politics, and identity, McBride argues, were inseparable in Revolutionary America. Marshaling a diverse set of sources—letters, diaries, personal papers, local church and ruling-body [End Page 105] records, sermons, newspapers, and pamphlets—to his cause, the author reveals the intended and perceived roles of congressional fast days throughout the period and across the colonies/states, before considering the work of chaplains both on the war front and in Congress in the same light. His examination of the political/ecclesiastical experience of three clergymen, Samuel Seabury, James Madison, and John Joachim Zubly, who took different positions toward the war, illustrates that the fates of these ministers in the new nation depended more on their specific political environment and abilities than their stance toward American independence. This multifaceted use of religion within the political realm, two chapters in particular make clear, was taken on by both "politicized clergymen" and politicians during the constitutional debates as well as the party ferment of the 1790s. McBride concludes his study by exploring "the myth of the Christian president," an exemplary process of the contested, but effective, use of religion to shape the era's, and the subsequent era's, political culture (p. 148). Where, then, does McBride stand on the question of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation? In a sense, we are left with the same answer as Ned Flanders when he asked Reverend Lovejoy whether the destruction of his home was the result of unrepented sin: "Short answer, 'yes' with an 'if.' Long answer, 'no' with a 'but.'" The difficulties in this question, McBride contends, are twofold. First, there are the realities of the era. Instead of portraits of unified and like-minded evangelicals or deists pursuing a common goal of promoting or destroying a Christian nation, the individuals in McBride's study reveal "the interplay of politicized religion and religiously infused politics, as well as the institutional complexity and cultural ambiguity at play in the founding era" (p. 173). Complexity, in other words, was as characteristic of the revolutionary generation as it is of the current generation. The second difficulty, the author rightly notes, is that the roots of the question itself generally lay more in a contest over national identity than in earnest historical inquiry. According to McBride, yes or no will simply not work and efforts to [End Page 106] force the period and people into tidy answers for identity's sake are themselves heirs of the process begun during the Revolutionary era. Pulpit and Nation is an engaging and provocative work and one that is a welcome addition to a crowded field. William Harrison Taylor WILLIAM HARRISON TAYLOR is an associate professor of history at Alabama State University. He is the author of Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the...

Religion can often be very influential in the political system and political actors frequently take advantage of the leverage that it provides. In the Zambian case, Christianity in particular plays a crucial role in politics and policymaking, dating from the pre- to post-colonial era. Around 1880, Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, became a British colony and, at the same time, Christianity was introduced within the context of the European culture. Later, 27 years after independence, Zambia was declared a Christian nation, and all Zambian political leaders have embraced Christianity as the nation’s identity. Thus, Christianity plays a critical function in Zambia’s political sphere. The main aim of this paper is to critically examine how Christianity seeks to direct the political agenda in Zambia’s national politics. It demonstrates the interplay between church and state relations linked to how the state seeks to govern the nation in a Godly manner and the implications on public policymaking in Zambia. This paper explores a multifaceted analysis of the existing literature and the ideas around the politics of the state and religion. It argues that (i) Christianity in Zambia is often used as a political weapon to gain political mileage and (ii) Christianity as a religion has been traditionalised in Zambia. It serves as a “national moral campus”, which compromises the nation’s position as a so-called “democratic” state and suppresses individual freedoms. Thus, it corrupts the very nature of fundamental practices of the religion itself, as it has simply blossomed into more of a norm than a religion. Understanding these dynamics is very crucial, especially in the context of how religion is perceived, experienced and exercised in the political arena to circumvent limited policy options for broader problem solving.

This article draws upon Ubuntu philosophy to reframe and construct a pentecostal constructive theology of hatred. It critiques contemporary manifestations of public hatred within Pentecostalism in Zambia, particularly in relation to the Christian nation clause in the constitution. The article argues that constitutionalizing Christianity perpetuates pentecostal normativity in political public spheres, institutionalizing religious-based political hatred. The exclusive reliance on pentecostal literal exegesis of scriptures fosters hierarchical dynamics, enforces norms, and obstructs dissenting voices and religious pluralistic character of the nation. The article contends Ubuntu constructive spirituality of hatred is essential for developing functional, moral, prophetic leadership and a just democratic nation. It proposes a theology of mutually transformative constructive hatred of evil as a means of countering prevailing destructive hatred in public discourse.

Confronting the evolution and expansion of anti-vaccine activism in the USA in the COVID-19 era

A year after Japan's surrender to the Allied powers, Luther J. Holcomb, a Texas-born Baptist minister, heralded a new era of American supremacy in both world affairs and Christian evangelism. Calling on Christians to seize the postwar moment to bring “the message of Christ, with its transforming power” to “those who are starving for the Bread of Life,” Holcomb, in an article in the popular evangelical magazine Moody Monthly, gave a religious cast to the widely circulating notion that Americans had an obligation to spread their way of life across the world. He stressed that “whatever faith other peoples have in our country must be attributed to the fact that we are a Christian nation and that the ideals for which we strive are those which are consonant with the principles of Christian living.” Holcomb thus imbued American foreign relations with divine purpose. He did not just want to spread the gospel: he wanted to spread an American version of the gospel.1

In view of the current crisis and controversies related to immigration, this article examines views of American evangelicals on the subject. Statements issued by national evangelical leaders and organizations generally call for immigration reform balancing concerns for law and order and border security with a call for the compassionate treatment of immigrants and creation of pathways to citizenship. But a survey of the numerous empirical studies on grassroots evangelical views on immigration reveals several paradoxes. Not only are the opinions of average evangelicals on immigration more restrictive than those expressed in the aforementioned statements, but their attitudes and the manner in which they form their opinions appear inconsistent with evangelical convictions. Compared to all other religious groups, white evangelicals have the most negative views regarding immigration. Underlying factors include the failure of evangelical churches to address the topic of immigration, a separation of personal ethics from views on public policy, lack of interaction between evangelicals and immigrants, Christian nationalism, and other social influences.

In these textbooks, the Middle Ages is a dark period when Christianity was perverted into Catholicism. They read the Reformation backward, showing that the Catholic Church rejected Lutheran theological tenets long before his time. They appreciate the Anglo-Saxons and medieval figures who challenged the Catholic Church as proto-Protestants. They vilify the French as their antithesis. The early English prepare the way for the Reformation and, ultimately, a Christian nation in the New World. The textbooks also use the Middle Ages to initiate some of their economic arguments, connecting early commercial development to incipient Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and then to post-Reformation Protestantism. The Renaissance, however, was an unfortunate flourishing of humanism. These interpretations of the Middle Ages have historical roots in white nationalism and anti-Catholicism, which have characterized American evangelicalism in the past and have become more prominent in recent public discourse.

Reviewed by: Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright April Holm (bio) Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. By Ben Wright. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 253. Cloth, $45.00.) Historians have long connected the rise of the antebellum abolitionist movement with the growth of evangelical Christianity in the early decades of the nineteenth century. However, we more frequently approach the relationship between religion and abolition from the perspective of abolitionists than from within evangelical denominations. In Bonds of Salvation, Ben Wright examines the relationship between evangelical Christianity and abolitionism from the vantage point of the major evangelical denominations. He argues that the ideological approach that made Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists so successful ultimately dictated the contours of American abolitionism and the limits of antislavery action within the churches. Wright takes seriously the priorities of American evangelicals, even as he reveals how those priorities paved the way for denominational schism over the sinfulness of slavery. He begins his book with a question: How could so many white antebellum evangelicals privately condemn slavery and at the same time oppose abolitionism? Wright finds his answer in the millennial dreams of universal salvation through conversion that dominated American evangelicalism in the nineteenth century. While many evangelicals disapproved of slavery, Wright argues, they viewed it as one of a range of social ills that would be remedied by the salvation of the world. [End Page 272] By this logic, the best way to end slavery—and all earthly suffering—was through the conversion of souls to Christianity. Wright calls this ideology “conversionism.” Conversionists, he explains, viewed the United States itself as a divine agent of salvation. They dominated American evangelicalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. Wright is particularly adept at explaining how conversionism intersected with denominational growth and the development of American nationalism. He argues that the focus on salvation within American Christianity accommodated a wide range of antislavery views and helped fuel both the colonization movement, promoted as a way to spread Christianity in Africa, and westward denominational expansion, a mechanism for “continental conversion” (110). Wright makes a compelling point about the role of conversionism in developing American nationalism during the early nineteenth century. Denominational growth, especially in the West, was key to the goal of converting the nation. Conversionism also conveniently allowed white evangelicals to avoid debates over slavery that could threaten the success of these Christian nationalist projects. Wright explains that conversionism as a solution to slavery never went unchallenged. Even as conversionists promoted colonization, westward expansion, and denominational growth, Black Christians and some white allies maintained that the church must be purified of the sin of slavery. Through their unceasing activism, Wright argues, these “purification-ists” helped to spawn the abolitionist movement that created fault lines in American churches and American politics. To counter purificationist demands that the church rid itself of slavery, white southern Christians made the conversionist argument that slavery provided access to the souls of enslaved people. Fearful of dividing the churches, antislavery conversionists retreated into a conservative alliance with proslavery evangelicals. In the 1830s and 1840s, the debate over the sinfulness of slavery divided the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist denominations into separate sectional bodies, both foreboding and hastening the coming of secession and war. Bonds of Salvation offers valuable insight into the limits of conversionism. It is one thing to oppose something on principle and quite another to oppose it with action. Believing that slavery was wrong carried very few consequences for white antebellum evangelicals. Acting on those beliefs, as Wright demonstrates in later chapters, most certainly did. Conversionists opposed slavery but prioritized conversion as “more urgent and its result as more radically transformative” than abolitionism (3). It would save the souls of both the free and the enslaved and potentially bring forth the millennium, which would, among other things, occasion the end of slavery. [End Page 273] Wright shows how, as the century progressed and abolitionists made more demands on their denominations, this passive opposition to slavery faded into a conservative stance aligned with proslavery members of the denomination against abolitionism. Wright’s work engages with a...

Studies of the post-1970s rise of the evangelical Right have long highlighted matters of family and gender. With federal abortion rights presently imperiled, that thesis remains salient. At the same time, the recent prominence of a strident, reactionary type of Christian nationalism points to a broader set of issues that also deserves consideration. Ulrike Elisabeth Stockhausen's fine study of American evangelicals' attitudes toward immigration thus fills an important gap. The story is largely one of the triumph of politics over distinctively evangelical approaches to the public square. Stockhausen explores the response of evangelical organizations (along with grassroots figures) to high-profile cases, beginning with Cuban refugees in the 1960s and stretching through the Vietnamese “boat people” of the 1970s, the Central American Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, and the more recent rise of Trumpian nativism. The pivot, fully apparent by the 1990s, was away from a “theology of hospitality” (p. 3). In biblical terms, the shift was from Hebrews 13, which likens strangers to angels, to Romans 13, which urges submission to governing authorities. The latter passage became a “widely used ‘proof text' for emphasizing legal status over hospitality” (p. 159). An evangelical Left persisted, with varying degrees of media attention, offering an important counterpoint to hard-line attitudes about illegal immigration.

During the decades of the Cold War, belief and power blended in ways that better integrated Protestant evangelicals into the mainstream American political culture. As the nuclear age corresponded with the early Cold War, evangelicals offered an eschatological narrative to help make sense of what appeared to many to be an increasingly dangerous world. At the same time, the post–World War II anticommunism that developed during the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made room for evangelical interpretations that supported their good-versus-evil rhetoric. Evangelist Billy Graham and other evangelical leaders consistently referenced Cold War events and promoted Christian nationalism while at the same time calling on Americans to turn to God and away from sin. Evangelical missionaries, who had long interpreted the world for fellow believers in the pews back home, were agents advocating for American values abroad, but they also weighed in on American foreign policy matters in sometimes unexpected ways. By the time the Cold War world order had fully emerged in the 1950s, cold warriors were fighting the geopolitical battle for influence in part by promoting an “American way of life” that included religion, allowing evangelicals to help shape the Cold War consensus. White evangelicals were more ambivalent about supporting the civil rights movement that challenged the inclusivity of that consensus, even though civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. made the case for civil rights using moral and spiritual arguments that were familiar to evangelicalism. As the long sixties brought divisions within the country over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the women’s rights movement, evangelicals participated in the political discussions that captivated the country and were divided themselves. By the 1970s, conservative evangelicals helped to create the Religious Right, and a small group of liberal evangelicals began to contest it. The Religious Right would be more successful, however, in defining political evangelicalism as the culture wars extended into the 1980s. Conservative evangelicalism matured during the Reagan years and become an important part of the conservative coalition. Even as the Cold War ended, the political networks and organizations that evangelicals formed in the second half of the 20th century, both conservative and progressive, have continued to influence evangelicals’ political participation.

American evangelicalism has often been punctuated by dual commitments to the United States and to God. Those commitments were strongest within politically conservative evangelicalism. Though representing a solid majority among professing evangelicals, conservatives could not speak for the movement as a whole. Politically progressive evangelicals, beginning in the 1960s, formed a dissenting opinion of the post-World War II revival of Christian nationalism. They dared to challenge American action abroad, noticeably during the Vietnam War. Their critique of Christian nationalism and conservative evangelicals’ close ties to the Republican Party led them to seek refuge in either progressive policies or the Democratic Party. A third, underexplored subgroup of evangelicalism rooted in reformed theology becomes important to consider in this regard. These reformed evangelicals sought to contextualize nationalism in biblical rather than partisan or political terms. This goal is championed well by Richard Mouw, resulting in a nuanced look at evangelical Christians’ difficult dual role as both citizens of the Kingdom of God and the United States.

Hijacking History analyzes world history textbooks for high school students produced by the three most important publishers of Christian educational materials—Abeka Books, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education. Initially intended for Christian schools, they now are also widely used for homeschooling. They have already been used by several generations. According to these textbooks, historians, informed by their faith, tell the story of God’s actions interpreted through the Bible. History becomes a weapon to judge and condemn civilizations that did not accept the true God or adopt “biblical” social and political positions. In their treatment of the modern world, these textbooks identify ungodly ideas to be vanquished—evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science among them. These curricula’s judgments, as Hijacking History documents, are rooted in the history of American evangelicals and fundamentalists and the battles they fought with secular culture. These curricula’s use of history has important civic ramifications. They assume that God sanctions their positions on social, political, and economic issues. Thus God’s providential relationship with American Christians entails that America should be a Christian nation advancing evangelical Christianity and capitalism throughout the world; American foreign policy and military interventions are invariably virtuous. Christianity, as these textbooks present it, is proselytizing but intolerant of other religions and Christian groups, hegemonic, and unquestionably anchored to the political right. As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these world histories promote resonate in contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education; reinforce cultural divisions; and challenge civic values of a pluralistic democracy.