Randall Balmer
When evangelicals change with the culture
The closing of the doors of Exodus International earlier this summer doesn’t just signal a sea change in evangelical thinking about homosexuality. It also highlights some evangelicals’ dubious claims of adherence to immutable convictions.
Israel’s Protestant friends
The Six-Day War, as Caitlin Carenen argues, represented a turning point in American Protestant views of Israel.
Evangelicals and the redemptive symmetry of immigration reform
The scene at the Church of the Reformation several weeks ago—just a couple blocks from the U. S. Capitol—was a mixture of resolve and celebration, equal parts political rally and family reunion. People milled about on the front steps posing for photographs, greeting old friends and making new acquaintances.
Going Clear, by Lawrence Wright
I’m sure it’s only a coincidence, but nearly every time I’ve shoehorned a brief lecture on Scientology into my survey of religion in North America course—brief because I’m not at all sure it merits...
Learning from the anti-dueling movement
Alexander Hamilton’s 1804 death in a duel galvanized popular opposition. We need a similar campaign around gun violence.
C. Everett Koop and the religious right
It requires only modest exaggeration to say that C....
American Talmud
The American Bible, Stephen Prothero’s latest assault on the best-seller lists, is a compendium of writings that, Prothero insists, together define Americans as a nation....
Embattled Ecumenism, by Jill K. Gill
Jill Gill has produced a remarkable account of the declining influence of mainline Protestantism and the NCC in the 1960s and 70s.
The Spiritual-Industrial Complex and God-Fearing and Free
For those of us who spent our grammar school days diving beneath school desks in the civil defense drills of the 1950s, the link between faith and the cold war was pretty obvious....
Right-wing roots
The scholarly quest for the roots of the religious right has already passed through several iterations. Darren Dochuk's impressive book builds on this work and pushes the narrative back another generation or two.
A review of Liberalism Without Illusions
While I was writing this review, I came across a statement from the managing editor of Christianity Today, who wrote that his magazine offers "independent journalism about an important nic...
A review of God of Liberty
Students of American religious history have long been aware that, at least until recently, the field has been riddled with four yawning gaps—eras that cried out for solid synthetic treatments. Those gaps are (in reverse chronological order) religion during the Great Depression, religion and the Civil War, religion during the Revolutionary era and religion during the Great Awakening.
Ex-fundamentalist
In the late 1980s, while I was writing Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, someone named Richard Yao was all the ...
