American Christianity Research Articles

Book review: Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945–1974

Book review: Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945–1974

Community of Christ: An American Progressive Christianity, with Mormonism as an Option

Community of Christ: An American Progressive Christianity, with Mormonism as an Option

The Refugee Status: Political Ethics and Moral Politics

The Refugee Status: Political Ethics and Moral Politics Elena G. Procario‐Foley What does religion have to do with refugees, immigrants, and migrants? What does Catholic Christianity bring to the discussion of the crisis of today's sixty‐five million displaced persons? How would I want my tradition interpreted and understood regarding refugees? What resources of my tradition help to respond to the crisis of so many people in need? These questions guide my contribution in which I want to convey some of the salient points of my tradition explored at the symposium Strangers or Neighbors? Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Perspectives on Refugees. If I were asked what religion brings to addressing the refugee crisis, I would quickly say, “Everything,” because I err on the side of assuming that religion is a “good.” But I also realize that many people accuse religions—for understandable historical and contemporary reasons—of committing evil in the world in the name of their beliefs. Therefore, I return here to a “back‐to‐basics” approach in order to account for the fact that my initial response, “religion brings everything that is good to the refugee situation,” cannot be taken for granted. I engage these questions as a systematic theologian from a decidedly Roman Catholic perspective. Though I am neither an ethicist nor a political theorist, I hope my theological reflections can inform policymakers. A political ethics and moral politics can be based on ideas borrowed from religion and theology. I will begin with a few vivid images before offering three resources from Catholicism that can inform a Catholic response to the refugee crisis. Kneeling players, praying nuns On September 24, 2017, The Washington Post published an opinion editorial by Michael Frost with the headline, “Colin Kaepernick vs. Tim Tebow: A Tale of Two Christians on their Knees.” Frost introduced the family origins of each football player, their commitment to Christian faith, and their significant charitable work. The image of two football players on their knees offers two different ways of how to probe the question of what American Christianity can bring to the refugee crisis: Religion can bring everything good to the conversation or it can be a source of the problem when its adherents hold polarized views about its practice. Frost explains that Kaepernick was born to an interracial couple; his father left before he was born, and his mother gave him up for adoption to a white couple. Tebow, a white man, was born to Christian missionaries. Both men were raised in Protestant denominations. On the field, Tebow's habit of kneeling in prayer between plays as an act of promoting Christian faith garnered wide praise. Kaepernick, also a practicing Christian, knelt on the field during the national anthem as a peaceful protest to promote awareness about unjust acts of deadly violence committed by members of law enforcement against the African American community. Both men's faith commitments inspired them to kneel on the field. Yet, Tebow was lauded as a wholesome role model while Kaepernick was derided as a traitor to his country. Is this because one practice of the faith is considered correct and the other corrupt? Kaepernick's and Tebow's public expressions of faith connote different emphases in their practice of Christianity. When Tebow takes a knee in a game to pray in thanksgiving for his athletic talent, he makes a public display of private piety. When Kaepernick takes a knee in a posture of prayer to remind us of racial and economic injustice, he expresses a prophetic protest for social justice. Prayers of thanksgiving and prayers of lament crying for justice are both part of the Christian tradition. For some people, however, Christian practice emphasizes a personal one‐on‐one relationship with God concerned with an individual's salvation, while for others Christian practice must issue in public acts of communal solidarity. In identifying these differences, Frost points to the current polarization in the churches. Christians seem to fall on the side of personal devotion or social justice; private sin or social structural sin; or, as Frost puts it, of “March for Life” or “Moral Monday protest.” Where does a response to refugees find a home amid these...

Cultivating Christians: North American family cultures and religious identity formation

North American Christian families face many challenges as they try to live faithfully in an intercultural, multi-religious, secularising world, particularly with regard to the formation of religious identity in children. Answering the question of how children become Christian is more complicated today than it was for previous generations because adults cannot assume that the Christian vestiges of a civil religion will be sufficient to help children embrace a robust sense of themselves as God’s beloved and called people in a divinely created world. Thus, this essay explores what social science research and theological reflection might offer religious leaders as frameworks and tools for encouraging family cultures that cultivate young Christians, focusing particularly on strategies for sharing religious language, communicating beliefs and values, modelling spiritual practices, encountering symbolic images, and participating in congregational life.

Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. By Hillary Kaell. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+269. $28.00 (paper).

<i>Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage</i>. By Hillary Kaell. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+269. $28.00 (paper).

“A New Protestantism Has Come”: World War I, Premillennial Dispensationalism, and the Rise of Fundamentalism in Philadelphia

ABSTRACT This article interprets the rise of Protestant fundamentalism through the lens of an influential network of business leaders and theologians based in Philadelphia in the 1910s. This group of business and religious leaders, through institutions such as the Philadelphia School of the Bible and a periodical called Serving and Waiting, popularized the apocalyptic theology of premillennial dispensationalism. As the world careened toward war, Philadelphia's premillennial dispensationalist movement grew more influential, reached a global audience, and cemented the theology's place within American Christianity. However, when the war ended without the anticipated Rapture of believers, the money, politics, and organization behind Philadelphia's dispensationalist movement collapsed, creating a vacuum that was filled by a new movement, fundamentalism. This article reveals the human politics behind the fall of dispensationalism, explores the movement's rebranding as fundamentalism, and highlights Philadelphia's central role in the rise of Protestant fundamentalism.

Infidel Deathbeds: Irreligious Dying and Sincere Disbelief in Nineteenth-Century America

This article inquires into the piecemeal, provisional de-marginalization of American irreligion and analyzes the social stakes and strategies of dis/belief's invocation during the long nineteenth century. It does so by considering the era's corpus of American deathbed narratives. It argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. For much of the nineteenth century, Christian-produced infidel deathbed narratives mapped the mixture and multiplicity of inner irreligion and interrogated the sincerity of disbelief. In response, irreligionists—initially ambivalent about the interpretability of the deathbed—eventually came to invest it with as much power to prove sincerity as had American Christians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, irreligionists developed a nationwide network of irreligious dying and selectively, strategically deployed the deathbed's accrued power to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. By the turn of the century, they had largely neutralized the derisive force of the infidel deathbed genre, leaving disbelief a partially, provisionally less marginal and less multiplex marker in American society, and re-tethering themselves to their Christian detractors in the process.

Integrating Faith-based and Community-based Participatory Research Approaches to Adapt the Korean Parent Training Program

PurposeFaith and community based inquiry approaches are rarely used to develop research interventions. The purpose of this article is to present how a research team worked with six Korean American Christian churches to revise the prototype Korean Parent Training Program (KPTP), based upon the Bright Futures Parenting Program. The collaboration was sought to better integrate and align the KPTP with Korean culture and faith. The KPTP was developed to promote positive parenting practices and decrease mental health disparities of Korean American children. Design and MethodsSixteen church participants completed a Delphi survey, a workshop series, Community Theaters, and focus groups. ResultsThe participants suggested adding Korean traditional parenting virtues, Christian parenting principles, and revising the standardized parent training and program philosophy. ConclusionsRevisions made KPTP sensitive to Korean culture and faith, and promoted program acceptability. ImplicationsThe process demonstrated the importance of working with church volunteers to develop faith-based and community-based health promotion interventions targeting Korean American faith communities. This research presents significant and meaningful implications for working with other faith communities from minority backgrounds.

That All May Enjoy Abundant Life: A Theological Vision of Flourishing from the Margins

At the onset of the twenty-first century, American Christian feminist theologian, Sally McFague, in her book Life Abundant, challenged North Americans to move from a consumer mentality to a planetary theology that glorifies God in and through all of creation. The privileged are urged to shift from affluence and over indulgence to restraint, in order that all people may benefit. McFague points out that there is no single solution to the crisis facing humanity and the cosmos. This article, reflecting on the stories, hopes and struggles of marginalized women in India, offers one response to envision abundant life for all. It presents a theological view of flourishing from the vantage point of the excluded and oppressed. How do marginal voices challenge people at the centre and how can those at the margins be enabled to experience abundant life in relation to God, others and the entire ecosystem?

The Prophetess of Endor: Reception of 1 Samuel 28 in Nineteenth Century Mormon History

AbstractThis article documents one strain of Mormon thought concerning the Woman of Endor narrative in 1 Samuel 28, in which the woman was interpreted as a prophetess enabled to raise the dead through her spiritual gifts. Church leaders eventually condemned this narrative because of its similarities with Spiritualist exegesis and American Christianity’s use of the narrative to condemn Spiritualism as necromancy. Through establishing an orthodox reading of the passage, leaders strengthened the boundaries separating the two faiths – boundaries that many Spiritualists had argued were at best blurry and overlapping.

Phillip Luke Sinitiere. Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity.

Phillip Luke Sinitiere. Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity.

Ethnic identity in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water

The paper analyzes the elements that constitute Native American identity in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993). In the novel, King juxtaposes two ethnic identities, white Christian American, representing the majority in the American society, and Native American, representing a minority. King portrays the struggle of Native Americans in the US and Canada to define their identity given the historically long rift between their native heritage and the white culture. Stigmatized for their ethnicity and race, Native Americans were exposed to marginalization and prejudice and forced to somehow overcome this position. The struggle has been made more difficult by the efforts of the dominant society to assimilate them and at the same time prevent them from claiming full citizenship. King carefully weaves the stories of his characters, who constantly go back and forth between the reservation lands and the outside world, having to find their position in both and usually not belonging to either. By focusing on the world of the reservation, Native American spirituality, tribal tradition of storytelling, and creation myths, King examines different aspects of Native American ethnic identity and, through juxtaposition of the Native American ethnic identity with that of the dominant society, reevaluates the marginalized position of the Native Americans.

Supernaturalism and Peace Activism: Expanding the Boundaries of Peace History

Sherwood Eddy was one of the most influential figures in world Christianity and a major figure in the interwar peace movement, yet he has been neglected by scholars. This essay argues that religion served as the nexus of his radicalization, shaping how he interpreted social reality and imagined social change. The same was true of most other peace activists in the twentieth century; indeed, it is impossible to understand the substance of peace politics in the twentieth‐century United States without reference to religion. By taking religion seriously, we expand the boundaries of peace history and challenge historiographical dichotomies between pacifism and realism, liberal Protestantism and evangelicalism, American Christianity and internationalism, religion and radicalism.

Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity

Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity

Book Review: Salvation with a Smile

Book Review: Salvation with a Smile

For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War

It is a truism that American Christianity has served—and continues to serve—as an ideological prop of U.S. exceptionalism and empire. For God and Globe makes a timely and important intervention in this stale narrative, showing that in the 1920s and 1930s liberal Protestants disentangled Christianity from American nationalism and developed a radical Christian internationalism that stood in opposition to empire, race, and nation. Figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Foster Dulles emerged from this broad movement only to undermine it by aligning Christianity with the Cold War state. In the first part of his book, Michael G. Thompson focuses on the radical Protestants associated with the World Tomorrow magazine and organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Fellowship of Socialist Christians. Historical accounts of these Protestants typically focus on their pacifism and the debates over realism and interventionism that divided them in the late 1930s. But by framing them more broadly as Christian internationalists, Thompson is able to highlight profound continuities throughout the interwar period, such as their antinationalism, antiracism, and anticapitalism. Realism, he asserts, is more properly understood “as a critique, a qualification, emerging from within Christian internationalism—not a neat secession” (p. 9).

Religious reflection in Pakistan: further evidence of integration between Muslim faith and intellect

Religious groups outside the West have displayed a positive correlation between faith and intellect-oriented reflection in contrast to the negative relationship found with American Christians. This study extended the analysis to Pakistani Muslims. University students (N = 180) responded to religious reflection scales along with measures of religious orientation and satisfaction with life. Faith- and intellect-oriented reflection correlated positively, and both displayed direct relationships with religious orientations and satisfaction with life. In multiple regression analyses, both combined to predict the intrinsic religious orientation, but faith-oriented reflection was the only significant predicter of other measures. These data further documented a compatibility between Muslim faith and intellect and supplemented other cross-cultural findings in suggesting that understandings of more conservative religious beliefs may require sensitivity not only to their content, but also to their cultural context.

American Christians for and against Parsifal: Debating the Holy Grail Opera in New York

The appropriateness of Christian themes in the performing arts has often been debated. Defenders have argued that various media, including drama, can serve as instruments of spiritual edification, while critics have contended that such efforts often eventuate in sacrilege and a vulgarising exploitation of the sacred for commercial and entertainment purposes. A heated debate took place in 1903 when Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, which since its première at Bayreuth in 1882 had been hailed as a magnificent representation of redemption and other themes central to Christianity, was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York – its first performance as an opera outside its original venue. Numerous clergymen and lay people in several denominations sought to have the production banned and cautioned fellow Christians against seeing it. Others, generally of a theologically more liberal bent, defended the work. The heated public controversy is placed into historical context and compared with the history of Parsifal in the United Kingdom, where it was widely appreciated without noteworthy opposition.

Flexibility in American religious life: an exploration of loyalty and purity

American social policy decisions are deeply intertwined with the religious lives of its citizens. Here we apply the tiered beliefs described in the Advocacy Coalition Framework to the views of several American Christian communities on social policy questions that involve (religiously defined) notions of sexual purity. We find a surprisingly large amount of variation in the policy beliefs, although this varies by denomination, and for Catholics varies by levels of loyalty to authority as well. We conclude that despite deep core beliefs about the fundamental nature of the world, and a scriptural orientation and notion of loyalty to authority defined by denomination, that there may be more policy flexibility at lower tiers of belief than the conventional wisdom would suggest.

Interfaith relations and the Christian disciple: Living with others in the way of Jesus

People of other faith traditions are our fellow Americans in this religiously-diverse nation. Although some American Christians regrettably are judgmental, suspicious, fearful, or rejecting of the Religious Other in our midst, many do respect and welcome these followers of other spiritual paths and desire to speak of and act toward them in a kind, generous fashion. It is profoundly important that we learn how to live well with our neighbors who are different, not only because such behavior validates the message we preach about love and forgiveness, but also because building personal friendships makes for societal and even global peace. The best role model for how to treat others, including those who are religiously different, is arguably Jesus, who demonstrated in his words and actions why he was rightly called the “Prince of Peace.” If we choose to live with others in the way of Jesus, then at least in our individual “worlds”—and hopefully in the world at large—we will be doing the good work that will bring to reality the astute observation of Hans Küng: “There will be no world peace without peace between the world’s religions.”