American History and the American Church: A Proposal
I spent the weekend in the beautiful beach town of Ocean City, NJ where I was the guest of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church. I spoke in all three Sunday morning services (including an 8am communion...
View ArticleWhat Does Democracy Require of Us?
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln stood before the crowd at the United States capitol building to deliver his second inaugural address. Lincoln was addressing a nation nearing the conclusion of a long...
View ArticleSome Thoughts on Dr. Ben Carson’s Prayer Breakfast Speech
Political conservatives are singing the praises of Dr. Ben Carson’s speech last week at the National Prayer Breakfast. Carson, a Johns Hopkins University pediatric surgeon and an evangelical...
View ArticleWhy Study History
As the Civil War ground to an end in early 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. It was a gracious meditation. He noted that both the North and South read the same...
View ArticleDoing Bad to Do Good: Carter’s Race-Baiting Election of 1970
In 1970 Jimmy Carter ran a sordid campaign for governor of Georgia. Courting the support of segregationist George Wallace, Carter used Wallace’s slogan “our kind of man,” which was a barely veiled...
View ArticleThe American Exceptionalisms of Foner and the Cheneys
I’m pleased to present a guest post by John Wilsey, an assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of the forthcoming...
View ArticleThe Limits of Evangelical Identity Politics
Jimmy Carter’s born-again credentials drew many evangelicals to the polls in 1976. Evangelicals who had never campaigned for a candidate campaigned for Carter. Jerry Falwell, future founder of the...
View ArticleFear No Evil: Christian Witness in a Time of Darkness
A truck plows into crowds at a Berlin Christmas market. Heart-wrenching images from Aleppo disquiet us on a daily basis. A young white man is convicted in the horrific killing of nine African American...
View ArticleIs It Time to Put Away “the Prophetic”?
A few weeks back, evangelical theologian Richard Mouw explained over at Religion News Service why he declined to sign “prophetic” declarations. (You know, the official statements proliferating about...
View ArticleWonder Woman 1984 in 2020: Fear Amid Prosperity, Then and Now
I belong to an all-female super-hero-movie-viewing group. Imagine my delight, then, when the trailer for Wonder Woman 1984 dropped this weekend. I was also thrilled for a second reason: I make a big...
View ArticleBecause We Have Made God Too Small: A Baylor Professor’s Apology to Kaitlin...
The chair scraped next to me. It was 2:30 on Friday afternoon—time for our scheduled break. For three years I have been writing every Friday afternoon with a group of faculty women, blocking our...
View ArticleReflections of a White Christian Germaphobe
This week most major Texas cities implemented ordinances requiring masking in public. My germaphobic Texan heart is happy. Last week, by contrast, huge swaths of my fellow Texans remained unmasked in...
View ArticleDiscipline and Punish: A Guide to Power in American Evangelicalism
“Are you going rogue?” The question startled me. It had come from a professor at another Christian university, someone I hadn’t met before. This was in the months before Jesus and John Wayne published,...
View ArticleA Lenten meditation on the death of Rush Limbaugh
Today we are pleased to welcome former Anxious Bench blogger Tim Gloege back to the blog. I started listening to Rush Limbaugh at the beginning of his national radio career in the late 1980s. I...
View ArticleWhy One Ancient Megachurch Pastor Would Like You to Get the Vaccine
Today’s post is another guest feature from my wife, Nadya Williams, professor of ancient history at the University of West Georgia. Nadya’s current research includes a substantial focus on the ancient...
View ArticleDeeply Good People on Twitter
Lately, social media—particularly Christian social media—has been depressing me. There’s just so much arguing and so much bitterness. Now some things are worth arguing about! But it gets to be a lot,...
View ArticleRecovering Liberal Democratic Norms in Christian Politics: An Interview with...
I have becoming increasingly convinced that the preservation of a functioning democracy in which human rights are respected and civil discourse across the political spectrum is encouraged should be one...
View ArticleHistory, Cancel Culture, and the Desire for Innocence
In the 1980s when I was growing up as a pastor’s daughter in a conservative Christian context, I kept my ear to the ground for the whispers of the adults around me. As a budding scholar of history, I...
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