Mainstream Christian Research Articles

A Complete History of Early Christianity: Taking the “Heretics” Seriously1

The heterodox have been treated unfairly within the histories of mainstream Christian tradition, whether by their ecclesiastical opponents or by recent and current scholarship. This article outlines the place of Christian Gnostic belief and practices in the processes of self‐definition and institutionalization that took place within the early history of Christianity and makes a plea to reinstate the “heretics” to their rightful place in any academic discussion of the history and beliefs of Christianity.

Beyond Sacrifice: Gloria Naylor Rewrites the Passion

We need a god who bleeds now a god whose wounds are not some small male vengeance some pitiful concession to humility a desert swept with dryin marrow in honor of the lord --Ntozake Shange According to contemporary feminist theory, the process of rewriting and reinventing cultural texts is a liberatory practice. The challenge is to rewrite the established, influential texts of dominant culture in such a way as to explode the myths and symbols that support oppressive ideology. (1) Contemporary black women writers participate in this process in order to critique both racist and patriarchal power structures. I argue that by focusing the rereading and rewriting process on the text most central to Western culture, the Bible, successfully challenges dominant ideology. Contemporary African American women writers are part of a long tradition of black writers who have focused their practice of rewriting on the language and narrative of Christianity. The early slave spirituals are examples of this discursive practice where Christian stories and symbolism were recuperated to protest slavery and sometimes to pass information and thwart the white masters. Slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs' challenge Christian definitions of sin and purity in order to argue against slavery in general and the fugitive slave laws in particular. Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston identify the struggles of African American people with those of the Israelites in Egypt, as does Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speeches. And Malcolm X challenges white images of Christ with the notion that Christ was a black man. Renita Weems asserts the importance of such a project: It has proved the task and responsibility of marginalized readers today, both female and male, to restore the voice of the oppressed in the kingdom of God. In order to do this, they have had to be able as much as possible to read and hear the text for themselves, with their own eyes and with their own ears. And in the final analysis, they have had to be prepared ... to resist those elements of the tradition that have sought, even in the name of revelation, to diminish their humanity. (77) There is power in this practice, particularly as the focus is on reenvisioning the Christian myths central to maintaining existing power structures. Continuing this practice, while at the same time transforming it, contemporary black women writers make more extensive critiques of Christianity and the biblical text from both feminist and antiracist positions. Gloria uses biblical allusion to critique foundational myths of Western, and specifically American, culture. She aims a pointed critique at the central New Testament myth--the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ--questioning in particular the concept of sacrifice and its relationship to systems of oppression. As part of this critique, Naylor recasts female sexuality as shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition in which the virgin/whore dichotomy is inescapable (Alexander 92) and argues for the celebration of female sexuality as necessary for spirituality. Like Shange's poem quoted in the epigraph, envisions a religion based on female sexuality and its role in the creation of life, and focused on salvation from the racist and sexist oppression supported by traditional Christian theology. includes biblical intertextuality to extend her critique to the whole of the biblical narrative as it is most often interpreted by mainstream Christianity. In Bailer's Cain, she constructs a cast of characters who closely parallel the biblical characters who prefigure Christ's birth and death. These characters serve to set up George Andrews as a Christ figure. In Mama Day, George's own early death parallels Christ's crucifixion and ultimately calls into question the necessity of such a sacrifice. In most Catholic and Protestant doctrines, interpretive focus is placed on the crucifixion as emblematic of salvation. …

IS A MESSIANIC POLITICAL ETHIC POSSIBLE? Recent Work by and about John Howard Yoder

In his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially Preface to Theology, in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder's proposal for a renewed Jewish–Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics.

Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England (review)

Reviewed by: Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England Virginia H. Blain Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England, by Cynthia Scheinberg. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Gillian Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 275 pp. $55.00. This is a very timely publication. There has been a huge revival of interest in Victorian women's poetry in the last ten years, and it has led to a major reconfiguration of the English poetic landscape of the nineteenth century. Many of those feminist critics engaged in the recovery work of lost female voices from this period have had agendas far removed from the religious sphere. Yet religion and religious devotion were one of the major motivations driving many women poets towards publication of their work at a time when self-display of this kind was severely frowned on for women. Cynthia Scheinberg's excellent volume clearly demonstrates the importance of the religious element in the work of some of the most well-known of female poets, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, where these elements have not been so much overlooked by earlier critics as perhaps, too homogeneously interpreted. For the angle introduced by Scheinberg is that of Jewish identity within Christian cultural formations in the Victorian period. She has chosen two poets from the mainstream Christian [End Page 152] (Protestant) culture to compare with each other, and with two Anglo-Jewish poets, Amy Levy and Grace Aguilar. Her readings bring to light some unexpected and highly illuminating insights, and cast a different interpretation on some aspects that have previously been too quickly assimilated into a "normative" Christian reading. Scheinberg's research has taken her beyond the more obvious figures in the new canon of women poets; her chapter on the remarkable Jewish poet Amy Levy, and one on the less well-known Grace Aguilar, show an impressive breadth of research. Her work on Aguilar is particularly valuable as she is so little known—and less understood, as an openly Jewish writer occupying space within a Christian tradition—and I found the discussion of Aguilar's poetic project judicious and illuminating, having only known her previously through her best-selling Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (1847). Amy Levy's remarkably fine poetry has been taken up with avidity by critics anxious both to pay tribute to its understated intelligence, depth of feeling, and musicality and to decode the evidence of same-sex desires in pre-twentieth-century verse. Scheinberg accepts this evidence, but her extensive and finely tuned readings help to inflect the poetry towards another of its deeper interests, that of Jewish identity and its meaning for a young woman with a more problematic relation to her own Jewishness than Aguilar's, a relation which has often been traced in her novels—especially the remarkable Reuben Sachs (1888)—but seldom in her poetry—until now. Both Aguilar and Levy, of course, were grappling not only with issues of Jewish identity in a Christian culture, but also with an often openly expressed and virulent antisemitism which pervaded mid-Victorian British culture. "Run to Earth" is an early Levy poem (not noted by Scheinberg) that might well repay a reading of this kind, dealing as it does with the horrific hunting down and destruction of a gypsy woman and her baby by a pack of stag-hunting aristocrats, starved for their usual prey on a day out in the forest. Of its kind, it is a chilling study of the roots of racism. Scheinberg's tracing of the multiple explorations by non-Jewish women poets of the archetypal Jewish figure of Miriam, prophetic singer of womanhood, is especially interesting. She shows the different inflections given to this figure by the Christian poets, arguing that there was a tendency to project upon the Jewish woman an erotic and public power of performance denied to "the angel in the house." Here I wish Scheinberg had been able to include a discussion of the extraordinary Adah Isaacs Menken, Jewish convert, actress and poet, whose one volume of poems Infelicia (1867) makes some unusually powerful indictments of Christian women's culture, seen as complicit with...

Wrestling the Angel of contradiction: Queer Christian identities

This ethnographically based article is about the ways in which individuals who choose to remain in mainstream Christian denominations while being out about their sexuality make sense of and manage the presumed discontinuity of homosexuality and Christianity. In this article I focus specifically on the processes whereby lesbian and gay Christians forge an integration of Christian doctrine, spirituality and sexuality. My central interpretive claim is that this integrative struggle is experienced by lesbian and gay Christians as a raison d'être. Wrestling this contradiction has given rise to a particular expression of queer Christian identity. Among the many implications of these expressions of queer Christian identity is their impact on mainstream Christian congregations and Christian ideologies and practices.

The Whore of Babylon and the Abomination of Abominations: Nineteenth-Century Catholic and Mormon Mutual Perceptions and Religious Identity

In 1846, Oran Brownson, the older brother of the famed Catholic convert Orestes A. Brownson, penned a letter to his brother recounting a dream Orestes had shared with him much earlier. In the dream, Orestes, Oran, and a third brother, Daniel, were “traveling a road together.” “You first left the road then myself and it remains to be seen whether Daniel will turn out of the road (change his opinion),” Oran wrote. At approximately the same period in which Orestes converted to Catholicism “because no other church possessed proper authority,” Oran joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he believed that “proper authority rests among the Mormons.” Indeed, in an era characterized by denominational proliferation, democratization, and competition, Catholic and Mormon claims to divine authority proved appealing to some Americans, like the Brownsons, wearied by the diversity and disunity of the Protestant world. Oran cautioned Orestes to not trust polemical literature against Mormonism, but to “get your information from friends and not enemies.” Orestes could have repeated the same warning about Catholicism, given the number and intensity of nineteenth-century attacks on both Catholics and Mormons. Leaving mainstream Christianity to join the most despised religions in nineteenth-century America, the Brownson brothers embarked on spiritual quests that few contemporary Americans would have understood, much less approved.

Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel (review)

Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 257 pp. $29.95 For decades North American Jews have known intuitively that the Christian Churches have been pro-Palestinian. They have to read the daily newspaper or listen to the news to discern Christian attitudes towards Israel. Paul Charles Merkley, history professor emeritus of Carlton University, set out to examine these attitudes terms of their causes and implications. Merkley makes it clear that Jews should not paint Christian attitudes toward with a wide brush. His analysis begins with the basic premise that early the post-World War II period Western nations recognized that the establishment of a Jewish state was more appealing than the alternative: the absorption of several hundred thousand homeless Jews into their own lands (pp. 4, 139-40, 162). Later, that demonstrated sufficient strength and determination to survive amidst overwhelmingly hostile forces seemed to be a major motivating factor the attitudinal change mainstream Christianity (pp. 38, 162-63). Another motivating factor had to do with the Christian missionary effort. Whereas Christian missionaries failed to convert Jews the Holy Land, their far greater success proselytizing among the Arabs led mainstream Churches to their first commitment to friends and clients the world, some instances refusing even to acknowledge the existence of the State of (p. 55, 196). A third motivating factor is the anti-establishment perspective of the Eastern Churches. is seen as a symbol of Western capitalist imperialism. For the Middle Eastern Churches the delegitimation of is a delegitimation of the capitalistic imperialism of the West itself (p. 121). The motive for the Middle Eastern Churches' anti-Zionism, Merkley suggests, is two-fold: a Judaeophobia that goes back to the pre-Islamic period, when both Jews and Oriental Christians lived submission under Byzantium Christians; and the theology fundamental to both Orthodox and Oriental Churches of supersessionism, which the Church is heir to all promises God made to Abraham. These, along with the argument that Palestinians are the aboriginal inhabitants, make for an airtight case against the legitimacy of the State of Israel (p. 120). As a result, when North American bishops, moderators, and Christian leaders rerum from in-depth tours led by the MECC, they report on the wickedness of the Zionists and their sinful oppression of Christians and Muslims the Holy Land (p. 121). Why, asks Merkley, does the question of legitimacy occur only respect to Israel, never with respect to the scores of other nations that have come into the world since 1948 (p. 217)? Why does the UN Human Rights Commission, almost every session, denounce violations of human rights Israel, never ongoing human rights violations countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan? In his informative chapter on the Merkley examines the name and the early history of the land now called Israel. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as a term conventionally used as a name for the territory which, the Old Testament, is claimed as the of the pre-exilic Jews... It was understood the deliberations leading up to the Balfour Declaration that a Jewish homeland would be in some part of what has always been defined as that part of the world where Jews once had their inheritance (italics the original, p. 94). Palestinians, until the 1960s, generally meant the Jewish residents of Palestine; none of the other communities the area were called or called themselves Palestinians. They were Arabs. In the 1940s and 1950s the various opposing lobbies spoke to the Arab rights Palestine (p. 95). Selecting the name to replace Judaea and Samaria was an ancient Roman attempt to insult the Jews by memorializing the long-vanished Philistines. …

Episcopal Lineage: A Theological Reflection on Blake v Associated Newspapers Ltd

Mathew's varied ecclesiastical progress presents a fascinating case study of an episcopate detached from a main-stream Christian community and alerts us to the danger of solely considering ‘episcopal lineage‘ as the litmus test for apostolicity. Mathew was born in France in 1852 and baptised a Roman Catholic; due to his mother's scruples he was soon re-baptised in the Anglican Church. He studied for the ministry in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, but sought baptism again in the Church of Rome, into which he was ordained as a priest in Glasgow in 1877. He became a Dominican in 1878, but only persevered a year, moving around a number of Catholic dioceses: Newcastle, Plymouth, Nottingham and Clifton. Here he came across immorality, and became a Unitarian. He next turned to the Church of England and the Diocese of London, but was soon in trouble for officiating without a licence. In 1890 he put forward his claim to Garter King of Arms for the title of 4th Earl of Llandaff of Thomastown, Co. Tipperary. He renounced the Church of England in 1899 because of vice. After founding a zoo in Brighton, which went bankrupt, he appeared in court in connection with a charge of embezzlement. He then became a Roman Catholic again, now as a layman.

The Transmission of a Religious Heritage to Younger Members of Small Ethnic Communities in a Pluralist Society: The Perceptions of Young Australian Copts

Contemporary Australia has clearly become a multi-faith and multi-cultural society. Even within the mainstream Christian religions there are many new arrivals whose countries of origin are non Euro-centric, and they have brought with them a wide variety of cultural practices that are different from the Anglo-Saxon/Celtic culture that has dominated Christian practice in this country. Consequently, the 'face' of Australian Christians has been slowly changing. In particular, young Australians have been exposed to a wide range of cultural and religious practices through both community interaction and a highly influential media. Within this framework, the Copts are a small growing ethnic community who are focused on handing on their cultural and religious heritage to their younger members. This paper will explore the transmission of the Coptic religious heritage, and discuss what some school-going Copts say about the various influences on their religiosity and spirituality.

Healing in the christian tradition

AbstractThis paper is based on the a concurrent session workshop at the Fifth International Conference on Spirituality & Health, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, 9–11th April, 2003. The New Testament of the Christian Bible contains many references to the healing ministry of Jesus of Nazareth that provided signs of his divine authority. The ability to heal the sick was a gift that he conferred upon his disciples to support their proclamation of the Gospel, and it was widely manifest in the apostolic era. Since the introduction of a biomedically‐based National Health Service the healing ministry of the Church has commonly been reduced to prayers of intercession. More recently, however, there has been some resurgence of interest in healing ministry within mainstream Christianity, evidenced by the publication of ‘A Time to Heal’1. Furthermore, personal experience within and beyond my diocese has revealed considerable potential for further expansion in the application of Christian Spirituality to health and healing, although this is constrained in many areas by lack of familiarity with what constitutes good practice. Consequently, I have been exploring the Biblical basis and practical utility of various aspects of Christian approaches to healing: confession and absolution, meditation, contemplation, attention, companionship and stress relief (relaxation), laying‐on‐of hands, anointing and Holy Communion. In the present paper I shall provide brief expositions of a selection of pertinent texts2 to introduce various authentic approaches. These will be integrated within a biopsychospiritual model of healing and the concept of healing into death. It is important to emphasise from the outset that the word healing is not being used to refer to miracle cures, although this sometimes happens3, but to processes involved in achieving a healthier state of being. Copyright © 2003 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Reincarnation Belief and the Christian Churches

Reincarnation has never been part of mainstream Christian theology. This is true in spite of periodic speculations by Christian theologians, and in spite of the fact that reincarnation believers sometimes wrongly impute belief in reincarnation to prominent Christian thinkers. Even so, in 1984 Paul Badham was able to point to statistics which indicated that as many Anglicans believed in reincarnation as believed in heaven and hell. This paper is based on the responses of the many Christians who were among informants in an interview study we conducted in 1997 in the south-west of England; our purpose was to investigate European Values Survey (EVS) statistics which suggest that around a quarter of all British people and, indeed, of Europeans more generally, believe in reincarnation.

In Mozambique, Social Diversity within Church Congregations Encourages Contraceptive Use

Contraceptive adoption and fertility change are probably affected by social interactions among women. It is noted that church activities are among the situations in which such interactions may take place. However the impact of religious involvement on an individuals attitudes toward and knowledge about contraception is difficult to analyze because religions have divergent views on contraception and fertility and types of social interaction may differ among religious groups. Hence to explore this issue a sociologist studied qualitative and quantitative data collected in Mozambique. Overall the study showed that social interaction within religious congregations appears to have had a strong impact on the adoption of contraceptive use in Mozambique. An analysis of 1997 Demographic and Health Survey data for large cities and rural areas indicates that city women who belong to less diverse and more socially isolated denominations or have no religious affiliation are less likely than mainstream Christian women to have ever practiced contraception or to have discussed it with friends or relatives.

The New Jersey churchscape: encountering eighteenth- and nineteenth-century churches

Although best known as the Garden State, New Jersey could also be called the Church State. The state boasts thousands of houses of worship, with more than one thousand still standing that were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Frank L. Greenagel has photographed more than six hundred. He has selected over two hundred of these historic landmarks for an examination of why they are sited where they are and why they look the way they do. Greenagel has sought out and included images of not only mainstream Christian churches, but also Jewish synagogues, as well as the places of worship of religious groups such as the Moravians, the Church of the Brethren, and the Seventh Day Baptists. The photographs are arranged chronologically within sections on three major early settlement regions of the state - the Hudson River, the Delaware River, and the Raritan Valley. For each building, Greenagel details the date of construction, the cultural, historic, and religious influences that shaped it, the architectural details that distinguish it, and what purpose it currently serves.

From Invisible Christians to Gothic Theatre

This paper is a history and textual critique of the anthropology of millennial, pentecostal, and charismatic Christianity in Melanesia located in relation to interpretations of indigenous religiosities worldwide, particularly mainstream Christianity but including cargo cults and millenarianism generally. An important subtext is the correlation between anthropological scholarship and the empirical settings of fieldwork, historicizing ethnographic texts in terms of indigenous actions and desires which subtly helped mould particular representations. Anthropologys major national traditions have been pervasively secular, romantic, and ahistoric. In Melanesia anthropologists essentialized exotic, traditional ritual complexes and mostly elided the less dramatic, mobile religious practices and experiences of the evergrowing majority of Melanesians who appropriated varieties of Christianity to their own ends. Only recently has mainstream Melanesian Christianity become a proper topic for ethnography, often in conju...

Folk for Whom? Tourist Guidebooks, Local Color, and the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans

Abstract The transformation of local culture into local color at the hands of the tourism industry is a global phenomenon. Tourist guidebooks, as markers of tourist "sights," play a major role in this process, and thereby help to construct the tourist gaze and the tourist experience itself. In New Orleans, guidebooks from the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s to commercial publications of the 1990s have included the Spiritual churches as local color. The descriptions of the churches in the guidebooks emphasize their link to Louisiana folk culture, especially voodoo. What is ignored is the complexity of the religion and the extent to which the churches’ beliefs, rituals, and organization resemble mainstream Christian denominations. The perpetuation of this image of the Spiritual churches in the guidebooks is necessary, however, because markers have to point somewhere in their descriptions of Voodoo as a part of the local culture.

Folk for Whom? Tourist Guidebooks, Local Color, and the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans

The transformation of local culture into local color at the hands of the tourism industry is a global phenomenon. Tourist guidebooks, as markers of tourist sights, play a major role in this process, and thereby help to construct the tourist gaze and the tourist experi- ence itself. In New Orleans, guidebooks from the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s to commercial publications of the 1990s have included the Spiritual churches as local color. The descriptions of the churches in the guidebooks emphasize their link to Louisi- ana folk culture, especially voodoo. What is ignored is the complexity of the religion and the extent to which the churches' beliefs, rituals, and organization resemble mainstream Christian denominations. The perpetuation of this image of the Spiritual churches in the guidebooks is necessary, however, because markers have to point somewhere in their de- scriptions of Voodoo as a part of the local culture. A Short History of Tourist Guidebooks AMONG TOURIST DESTINATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, Louisiana has long been a favorite. While the state as a whole has unique attractions, New Orleans has been the drawing card. Visitors stroll the streets of the French Quarter and Garden District, dine in Cre- ole restaurants, listen to traditional jazz, ride on streetcars along St. Charles Avenue, and visit the tomb of the area's most famous 19th-century voodoo practitioner, Marie Laveau. These are among the city's most popular attractions and constitute the core of the typical tourist experience. In contrast, city residents have access to places and events that can be described as the (Goffman 1959). This is the local culture that visitors seldom see but sometimes witness as staged performances or read about in magazines and tourist literature. Among the backstage events in New Orleans, un- doubtedly the best known are the second-line parades organized by a variety of African American social clubs and benevolent societies. 1 In a recent analysis of second-line pa- rades as local culture, Helen Regis describes them as celebratory occasions that trans- form urban space creating an alternative social order that private clubs actualize by 'taking it to the streets' in those very neighborhoods ordinarily dominated by the quotidian

From Invisible Christians to Gothic Theatre: The Romance of the Millennial in Melanesian Anthropology

This paper is a history and textual critique of the anthropology of millennial, pentecostal, and charismatic Christianity in Melanesia located in relation to interpretations of indigenous religiosities worldwide, particularly mainstream Christianity but including cargo cults and millenarianism generally. An important subtext is the correlation between anthropological scholarship and the empirical settings of fieldwork, historicizing ethnographic texts in terms of indigenous actions and desires which subtly helped mould particular representations. Anthropologys major national traditions have been pervasively secular, romantic, and ahistoric. In Melanesia anthropologists essentialized exotic, traditional ritual complexes and mostly elided the less dramatic, mobile religious practices and experiences of the evergrowing majority of Melanesians who appropriated varieties of Christianity to their own ends. Only recently has mainstream Melanesian Christianity become a proper topic for ethnography, often in conjunction with a prolific literature on the politics of tradition. Emblematic of the extent to which anthropologists are shifting Christianity from outside to within Melanesian religiosity is an emergent ethnographic focus on burgeoning pentecostal, charismatic, and millennial Christianity. Such movements may better cater to the disciplines expertise in exotic ritualizing than the seeming mundanity of mainstream Christian practices, but there is also powerful indigenous impetus in anthropologys romance with the millennial.

Christ, Nature, Sociality: Dietrich Bonhoeffer for an Ecological Age

Two general tendencies can be detected in theological enquiries on nature, ecology and the environment. The first tendency stresses the inadequacy of ‘traditional’ or mainstream Christianity to engage with the crisis in human relations with non-human nature. The positions under this tendency draw on other resources—process thought, the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, the ‘common creation story’ of the natural sciences—to construct anew the Christian contribution to the healing of our relations with damaged nature. For this tendency, standard Christian responses such as reinterpretations of dominion as stewardship presuppose the distinction of humanity from non-human nature. Such unrevised constructs thereby remain part of the problem rather than part of the resolution.

CBQ REVIEW ESSAY: The Media and Religion: A Decade of Print and Electronic Publications

Despite its great significance throughout much of the world, religion has often been removed from day-to-day media coverage. This has been particularly true in the United States where media coverage of religion has for the most part been relegated to special sections of newspapers and popular magazines and to isolated viewing hours on television, the largely Sunday morning religious ghetto. Indeed, for decades religion's significance in the lives of many Americans has been virtually ignored by the media and often left to the specialized religious papers, newsletters, and periodicals. In recent years, however, there has been a growing and noticeable change in media coverage of religion. This is most evident in the increasing numbers of newspapers and television stations and networks (although the latter is still small) that have hired reporters to cover specifically religious beats. Readers can now find new or greatly expanded religion or faith and values sections in their local newspaper. These new several-page sections replace or supplement what was once almost exclusively church-type bulletins and announcements and they often include thoughtful columns and analyses covering many religions along with serious commentary. Entire cable television networks are devoted solely or in part to religion. Another significant change is broadening coverage that now includes religions beyond mainstream Christianity. In addition to Judaism and Islam, media coverage is now likely to include non-Western and alternative religions.

The Politics of the ‘Last Days’: Bolshevism, Zionism and ‘the Jews’

This article examines the use of apocalyptic imagery and the role ascribed to ‘the Jews’ in religious and secular discourses in First World War Britain. After 1917, the relationship between Christianity and Judaism began to be articulated in political terms, as the themes of apocalypse, Antichrist and crucifixion entered into secular discourse in relation to political events. This article traces the development of secular apocalyptic in Britain, from the Bolshevik revolution and the Palestine campaign into the post-war years, and compares this with mainstream and marginal Christian theological writing. In secular writing, two apocalyptic themes became dominant: the appearance of the Antichrist and the return of the Jews to the Promised Land. I explore these themes through press portrayals of ‘Bolshevik Jews’ as the enemies of the Christian nation, and the Balfour Declaration and Jewish battalions as heralding the prophesied restoration of Israel. I then argue that the ‘Zionism’ of the British government was perceived by some of its supporters as a conversionist drive, prompted by practical and political concerns, the aim of which was to convert the Jews not to Christianity but to nationhood.