We believe in the divine personhood of Jesus Christ, his salvific work on the cross, the necessity of repentance and faith, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the obligation to fulfill the Great Commission in Matthew 28 by taking the saving message of Christ to “Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.”
Now, as far as I know, French, and even Brooks, may still be happy to cosign the more theologically grounded definition of evangelicals that I am about to consider sadly, their increasingly common fixation on presenting and critiquing a cartoonish caricature of evangelicals as political bad guys makes that, shall we say, less than crystal clear.Įvangelicals are nothing more or less (if we draw our lines rightly) than orthodox Protestant Christians. The word “evangelical” simply comes from the Greek word “euangelion,” which means “good news” or “gospel.” Thus, evangelicals, far from being primarily a sociological grouping, are first and foremost defined by a theological claim about the person and message of Jesus Christ.
Noted historian Iain Murray in his work Evangelicalism Divided pegs the origins of the term from all the way back in 1525, when it coincided with the phrase “gospellers.” And historically that’s what the term, and association, has meant. Thankfully, it’s not within the sole jurisdiction of Acela corridor-dwelling creatures like French and Brooks to define evangelicalism. According to these gentlemen, evangelicals are a folk in desperate need of saving by a band of dissenters so bold as to be featured in a multi-page New York Times spread or, if they are of the white variety, they are a people so hopelessly hostage to increasingly extreme political beliefs that their theological commitments are rendered meaningless. Who counts as an evangelical these days? Well, I guess that depends on which David you ask (French or Brooks), and on which day of the week you ask him (I wouldn’t recommend Sundays). This hard-nosed reality is underscored by the fact that, even as I bring them up, there is need to do some definitional spade work. And as he struggles to reason how skulls could be used to represent the good guys, he eventually verbalizes the horrifying question: “ Are we the baddies?”Įvangelicals are a funny bunch. He notices that their caps have skulls on them. As the officers are manning the ramparts, preparing to fight the Russians, one of them has a sort of existential crisis sparked by a moment of dawning comprehension. There’s a funny skit involving two German officers in Hitler’s Nazi army, a “crack SS division” at that.
Her writing has appeared in a number of outlets including The Washington Post, and she regularly blogs at Patheos’ Anxious Bench.“We have to see this: The point of books like Jesus and John Wayne isn’t really to prompt introspection, it’s to induce paralysis.” WILLIAM WOLFE She is also the author of A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford 2015). Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor in the history department at Calvin University. The result is a book that covers a century of cultural and intellectual development, and gives us a sense of how Trump turned out to be the right man for the job of winning the Evangelical vote. The book traces a century of Evangelical ideas around masculinity, gender, family and identity, and how these ideas became intertwined with ideas around nationalism, militarism, foreign policy and race. This is the argument my guest today, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, makes in her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation(Liveright 2020).
However, some would argue that the Evangelical support of Trump makes total sense given that, in spite of his supposed moral failings, he was just the sort of man they were looking for. The fact that a thrice-married reality-TV star has been able to hold onto the ‘moral majority’ through thick and thin the last few years seems to many to be a sort of cultural contradiction. One of the most perplexing elements of Donald Trumps’s 2016 electoral victory was the overwhelming support he received from white Evangelicals, a demographic that has stubbornly clung to him in the face of everything he has done.
0 kommentar(er)
