evangelicals

The senator’s reasonable concern—that Muslims and people of all religions be treated equally—led to an unreasonable demand.

My temptation to spurn the evangelical preacher slipped away when I opened this volume.

When I learned that white evangelical women are drawing and painting all over their Bibles, I was caught between judging and celebrating the phenomenon.

When an anthropologist wants to understand a culture, he or she studies its gods.

The "traditional family" used to provide stability and comfort. Was it all an illusion?

To lionize the missionary’s courage, Muslims were cast as implacable adversaries and served as the quintessential foil.

Last week, God’s Not Dead 2 hit the nation’s movie screens. The sequel to the 2014 sleeper hit tells the story of Grace Wesley, a high school teacher dragged into court for talking about Jesus in her classroom. The movie imagines a hostile government bent on rooting out any trace of religion in public life. As the prosecuting attorney threatens, “We’re going to prove once and for all that God is dead.”

The timing of this film’s release may have been intentional.

Trump does well among those who identify as evangelical—but lack deep formation in faith. Formation fixes people’s eyes on higher things.

Historically, black people and those deemed “homosexual” have been marginalized and silenced on many faith-based campuses. My Then & Now post from December notes the increasing acceptance of black Christians at Christian schools. However, such acceptance has not been extended to LGBTQ Christians.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk intertwines “the problem of the twentieth century” color line with LGBTQ resistance in the 21^st century.

British Columbia's church attendance rate is lower than Canada's, and Vancouver's is lower still. Yet vibrant things are happening in the city.

When we think of religious conservatism, we likely think in terms of slogging through the trenches of the great American culture war. But does the culture war serve as a useful paradigm for understanding religious conservatism?

“Is there a back door out of hell?” I asked the students seated across the table from me. The question hung there for a minute as they considered it. If they said yes, what would that mean about how they had always thought about hell? If they said no, what would that mean about how they had always thought about God?

In fall 2014, I had the opportunity to teach Contemporary Religious Thought.

Joseph Bottum contends that the decline of mainline churches has created a moral vacuum that conservative Catholics and evangelicals have been unable to fill.

The anticipated publication on Thursday of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, has American conservative Protestants up in arms. Firmly grounded in Catholic teachings on social justice, the encyclical is the culmination of half a century of Catholic thinking on the environment. Why then do American conservative evangelicals so adamantly oppose environmentalism?

Since the environmental movement’s peak in the 1970s, evangelicals have pilloried environmentalists and cast doubt on problems like global warming.

Mark Achtemeier and I once faced off at General Assembly over gay ordination. Sixteen years later, he preached at my ordination.

A recent meeting of the Conference on Faith and History featured a paper session titled “20th century evangelicalism.” Surprisingly, all three papers focused on conservative Protestant gender ideologies in the years since World War II. 

Just a few years ago, I would have expected studies of evangelicalism to emphasize political influence. Is gender the hot new topic?

Why do most white evangelicals vote Republican? How has this affected Republican politics? Matthew Sutton gives us our first good account of how and why evangelical political views developed the way they did. Three elements were crucial—premillennial eschatology, World War I, and the Puritan heritage. 

Let it be said at once: this is the best book ever written about Billy Graham. I found this an absolutely captivating book and have read every word, including the footnotes.

Last week college economics professor David Brat trounced House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia's seventh congressional district. Prognosticators thought that Brat, a favorite of Tea Party supporters, was a long shot. How could he win? Hadn’t the Tea Party been on the wane? Now, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson warns, the Tea Party “should no longer be thought of as just a faction of the GOP. It’s calling the shots.” 

What's clear is that Tea Party voters turn out in droves and care passionately about politics. Many of those Teapublicans are also fervent Christians of the evangelical stripe.

Last week, evangelical congregations across America began screening a documentary called The Stranger: Immigration, Scripture and the American Dream, produced by a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table. Among EIT's advocates are a host of uncommon bedfellows: Mathew Staver of the Liberty University School of Law and Jim Wallis of Sojourners, Leith Anderson of the National Association of Evangelicals and Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and popular pastors Max Lucado and Wilfredo de Jesús.

Immigration reform has attracted such a spectrum of advocates that it shows how it is a fortuitous issue for American Protestants.