Recently, I was alerted to a paper that published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion on the historiography of American evangelicalism that discusses Jesus and John Wayne. I was told that it faults the book for not considering British evangelicalism in my discussion of American evangelicalism.

This critique intrigued me.

My first book, A New Gospel for Women, examines transatlantic evangelicalism and late-nineteenth-century evangelical social reform, with a focus on the influence of British evangelical reformer Josephine Butler and her influence on the American reformer and feminist theologian Katherine Bushnell.

When writing Jesus and John Wayne, I initially included a section in the first chapter in the import of nineteenth-century British muscular Christianity, but sadly ended up cutting it due to word count.

My next book, Live Laugh Love, spends considerable time exploring late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Anglo-American connections with particular focus on Keswick holiness networks.

Which is to say, when I write on American evangelicalism, I do not do so oblivious to British and global connections.

I was, then, curious to read the article in question: Thomas E. I. Whittaker’s “British Evangelicalism and the Making and Remaking of American Evangelical Identity.” Here’s the abstract:

This article engages with an ongoing controversy over the coherence of evangelicalism, that is, the question of whether the term corresponds to a coherent movement stretching from the eighteenth century to the present or is a false throughline constructed by modern evangelical historians. This American-focused scholarship has a major lacuna: its failure to reckon with evangelical Christianity outside of the United States. Evangelical Christianity has always been more cogent in Britain than the United States, in large part because of the minority status and unusual institutional cohesion of the evangelical wing of the Church of England since the end of the eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth century, British evangelicalism played a major role in clarifying what it meant to be “evangelical” in the United States. The “evangelical throughline” stretches across the Atlantic. Evangelicalism is neither a twentieth-century invention nor fundamentally American.

Whittaker is responding in part to Matt Sutton’s 2024 article in the same journal, in which Sutton rejects any “multi-century evangelical throughline” from the purported “evangelicalism” of Jonathan Edwards to the “evangelicalism” of Billy Graham. Sutton’s argument has generated considerable debate within the field—a healthy debate, in my opinion.

Then, my name pops up: “Prominent scholars such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020) and Anthea Butler (2021) urge a shift from a “theological” definition of evangelicalism to a “political one.”

The problem with this is that I don’t.

I looked to his citation to see what he was basing this verdict on, and it’s not my book, or any of my writings. It’s a 2023 book on British and Canadian evangelicals that I haven’t read, so I can’t attest to its accuracy or framing. I read on, assuming Whittaker would be bringing more evidence in defense of his assertion. We were, after all, only on page two.

The rest of the article contains much more on Sutton and on a couple dozen other works in the field, but there is no mention of me or Jesus and John Wayne until the conclusion. Here, too, it’s an assertion without documentation:

“A focus on the international dimension of evangelicalism has been shockingly absent amid the efforts to redefine American evangelicalism away from Bebbington’s classic emphases….Scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Matthew Avery Sutton instead prioritize right-wing politics, free-market economics, Christian nationalism, misogyny, and racism and deny any continuity with a period before fundamentalism.”

The claim that I deny any continuity with a period before fundamentalism is a stunning mischaracterization of the entire body of my scholarship.

That said, as a scholar focusing on gender and politics in modern America, I’ll concede to “prioritizing” the above list of things in the book that I wrote on the topic of white evangelical masculinity and militarism. But, I do not define evangelicalism exclusively in those terms. Here I part ways with scholars like Sutton, who wade more boldly into such definitional waters. (More on that in a bit.)

Whittaker goes on:

“Du Mez repudiates Bebbington’s “theological” definition in favor of these “political” emphases but with only limited comment on the global nature of evangelical Protestantism. Du Mez concedes that, defined theologically and internationally, ‘‘evangelicalism’ manifests as a racially diverse and global movement’ (Du Mez 2020, 5). But otherwise, Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne ignores the issue in order to adopt a political definition of the movement. Like Sutton, her only mention of Britain is in the title of Bebbington’s book. The world beyond the United States manifests in geopolitics but rarely in global missions.”

So, the one direct quote from JJW in the article is one he explains away to insist that in fact I “adopt a political definition of the movement,” without, once again, providing evidence.

I do not in fact define evangelicalism politically. Truth be told, I am uninterested in offering a timeless definition of evangelicalism. I think that project is a faulty one.

Instead, I am intent on describing a movement that changes over time, one with roots in the past, yes, even if I do not embrace a direct “throughline.”

Whittaker may not be aware, but I have written and spoken extensively on “the definitional question” of evangelicalism. For example:

Whittaker might be forgiven for missing the many places where I’ve written or spoken about this subject (including national outlets such as Religion News Service, or coverage of a talk I gave at the American Historical Association in The Christian Post.)

But let’s take a closer look at what I do in Jesus and John Wayne.

Whittaker is right to point out that I part ways with the Bebbington definition. As a cultural historian, I think that there’s more to evangelicalism than what can be contained within a theological rubric, and in the introduction to JJW I explain why. I cite studies conducted by evangelicals themselves revealing evangelicals’ theological illiteracy. I also discuss how just 25% of Black Christians who subscribe to all of Bebbington’s “evangelical distinctives” identify as evangelical:

“This is not a simple misunderstanding. Black Christians have long resisted embracing the evangelical label because it is clear to them that there is more to evangelicalism than straightforward statements of belief. Survey data indicate that on nearly every social and political issue, black Protestants apply their faith in ways that run counter to white evangelicalism. The differences may be rooted not just in experience but in the faith itself; in practice, the seemingly neutral “evangelical distinctives” turn out to be culturally and racially specific….” (6).

Then, I move to the heart of my introduction—the part Whittaker ignores entirely:

“White evangelicalism has such an expansive reach in large part because of the culture it has created, the culture that it sells. Over the past half century or so, evangelicals have produced and consumed a vast quantity of religious products: Christian books and magazines, CCM…, Christian radio and television, feature films, ministry conferences, blogs, T-shirts, and home decor. Many evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate even the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular culture. They’ve raised children with the help of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio programs or grown up watching VeggieTales cartoons. They rocked out to Amy Grant or the Newsboys or DC Talk. They learned about purity before they learned about sex, and they have a sliver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion of the Christ, Soul Surfer, or the latest Kirk Cameron film with their youth group. They attended Promise Keepers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in small groups….The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches….Denominational boundaries are easily breached by the flow of religious merchandising. Indeed, one can participate in this religious culture without attending church at all.

Yet this cultural evangelicalism remains intertwined with “establishment evangelicalism.” Denominational organizations and parachurch groups, pastors and theologians, colleges and seminaries, publishing houses and charities generate much of the rligous content that is marketed to an immense congregation of consumers. Evangelical leaders bestow authority upon one another, blurbing each other’s books, defending each other on social media, and determining which up-and-coming writers, pastors, and organizations are worthy of promotion—and which should be shunned….Rather than seeking to distinguish “real” from “supposed” evangelicals, then, it is more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption (7-8).

To make a long story short, I am not trying to define evangelicalism writ large as a timeless category that extends from the seventeenth century to the present. That is simply not a project that interests me. Rather, as a historian of modern American religion, I’m examining key facets of the movement we call evangelicalism today.

Rather than “defining” evangelicalism, I describe the movement as a consumer culture, and in terms of networks and alliances. Within this movement, there is theological and political diversity. Here’s more from the intro to Jesus and John Wayne:

At any given time, numerous creeds have coexisted and competed for influence within evangelicalism. Even today, the evangelical tent includes Calvinists and Pentecostals, “social justice warriors” and prosperity gospel gurus. However, over the past several decades conservatives have consolidated their power within the broader movement. Offering certainty in times of social change, promising security in the face of global threats, and, perhaps most critically, affirming the righteousness of a white Christian America and, by extension, of white Christian Americans, conservative evangelicals succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of large numbers of American Christians. They achieved this dominance not only by crafting a compelling ideology but also by advancing their agenda through strategic organizations and political alliances, on occasion by way of ruthless displays of power, and, critically, by dominating the production and distribution of Christian consumer culture.

Like evanglicalism in general, evangelical popular culture encompasses a broad spectrum of religious and political commitments. The same store might stock books by conservative financial advisor Dave Ramsey and social justice activist Jim Wallis, Christian feminist manifestos penned by Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey, and classic defenses of “traditional womanhood” by Elisabeth Elliot. Yet the power of conservative white evangelicalism is apparent in both the size of its market share and its influence over religious distribution channels. As a diffuse movement, evanglicalism lacks clear institutional authority structures, but the evangelical marketplace itself helps define who is inside and who is outside the fold….

The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology. This is readily apparent in the heroes they celebrate. Establishment evangelicals might count Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield among their eminent forbearers, but evangelical popular culture is teeming with a different ensemble of heroes—men like William Wallace (as brought to life by Mel Gibson), Teddy Roosevelt, the mythic American cowboy, Generals Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton, and the ordinary American soldier. And the actor John Wayne (9-10).

And, finally, the closing paragraph of the intro:

Across two millennia of Christian history—and within the history of evangelicalism itself—there is ample precedent for sexism, racism, xenophobia, violence, and imperial designs. But there are also expressions of the Christian faith—and of evangelical Christianity—that have disrupted the status quo and challenged systems of privilege and power….Contemporary white evangelicalism in America, then, is not the inevitable outworking of ‘biblical literalism,’ nor is it the only possible interpretation of the historic Christian faith….It is, rather, a historical and a cultural movement, forged over time by individuals and organizations with varied motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring order to uncertain times, and for many, to extend their own power (14).

Given my emphasis on networks and alliances in Jesus and John Wayne and elsewhere, it was surprising to see where Whittaker ends up. After faulting “Sutton’s and Du Mez’s interpretive moves,” he suggests instead following the lead of David Hempton:

“we should recognize evangelicalism as an incredibly complex set of transnational networks, nodes, and nuclei whose bounds have been contested over time…A netowrk approach to evangelicalism that takes into consideration shared religious identities…historical trajectories, and the framing work of historians does not necessarily need to replace a theological definition and certainly must take into account the political dimensions raised by Sutton and Du Mez….A network approach helps prevent the kind of provincialism that requires us to arbitrarily define evangelicalism by its contemporary American political affiliations…

I would love for Whittaker to take another look at Jesus and John Wayne—a book I believe Hempton considers largely consistent with his approach based on my own interactions with him—at what it claims to do, and what it does not claim to do.

Even more so, I would love for him to pick up Live Laugh Love when it releases this September. It’s not just about mommy blogs and romance novels and Hallmark movies. It’s also about networks and alliances, and because the book starts in the nineteenth century, it has much more on how British and American networks intersected to create the modern American movement. (In identifying and tracing some of these roots, my work differs in some ways from Sutton’s approach. Matt was kind enough to read my entire manuscript and offer his brilliant feedback, some of which included pushing back on exactly this.)

In Live Laugh Love, I trace largely hidden networks through the twentieth century that helped give rise to the cultural world of white Christian (not just evangelical) women, and that profoundly shaped American and global politics.

None of this contradicts the story I tell in Jesus and John Wayne. Rather, the two complement each other, so to speak.

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What is the proper role of faith in the public square?

Do the escalating culture wars doom us to unproductive conversations and intractable disagreements?

As a historian, my discipline situates me well when it comes to diagnosing problems. Want to know what’s gone wrong? I’m your person. Want to know how to fix it? Not so much.

History offers us lessons, but the present is never exactly like the past. We can recognize patterns, but actions almost always carry unanticipated consequences. Historians like to talk about the “Four Cs”: continuity, change, context, and contingency. Contingency means we can’t ever really predict the future course of events or know what will result from specific actions. History throws curveballs, and we never know what may be right around the corner. (When I’m driven to despair, I take some comfort in this truth.)

Still, in this wildly uncertain time, I find myself wishing I had more to offer. Truth be told, I worry that the diagnosis I bring might actually work at counterpurposes to the cure. Does alerting like-minded people to what we are up against culturally, religiously, and politically, actually play into the hands of those who benefit most from increased polarization? Staying silent, however, also doesn’t seem like a viable option.

That’s why I’m glad when people working in other fields bring their expertise to the table. I’ve been looking in particular to the fields of social psychology, theology, and philosophy for wisdom in this moment.

In this vein, I’ve been eagerly awaiting a new book by John Perry, Parables in Times of Moral Conflict: How to Persuade Your Neighbour as Yourself. Perry teaches Theological Ethics at the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews, where I met John when I visited there this past year. Rather than accept them as inevitable, Perry tackles political and religious impasses head-on, seeking to equip up with better skills with which to disagree and perhaps also to enable us to find common ground.

The good news is that John’s book is incredibly timely. The bad news is that, as an academic title published with Oxford University Press, it’s not exactly priced to sell to individuals. (At $135 a copy, it’s priced for library collections instead.)

However, John has been kind enough to share an excerpt with us here at CONNECTIONS, and he’s also arranged for the first chapter to be available free for readers here for the next month. Links are included at the end of the post, but first, here’s John, with an intro and excerpt:

When I first told friends what this book was about, they kept suggesting I read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. That book isn’t about my fields of study, which are ethics and theology, but I eventually took their advice and soon clued into what they meant. Kahneman (1934-2024) was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who studied errors of judgement. To name some of his examples, people tend to think flying is dangerous, but judging solely by mode of transport, you’re much likelier to die driving to the airport than after you get there. Or consider that twice as many people die of strokes than all accidental deaths combined; almost everyone’s intuitions say that cannot be true, given all the accidents we hear about on the news. Considering surgery? If your doctor tells you the survival rate is 90% you’re much more likely to have it than if she says the mortality rate is 10%, even though they amount to the same thing.

Kahneman’s point is that for reasons explainable by cognitive science, humans are bad at intuitive estimates, and this leads us to unwise choices not only in our personal lives, but in the politics we support. Should we improve air safety or road safety or stroke prevention? That partly depends on which is most dangerous, on which almost everyone is wrong.

Like a marriage counsellor teaching a couple terms like attachment and codependency, Kahneman provides a vocabulary for a kind of intellectual therapy. Naming these mistakes gives you the power to overcome them. Here is an example of an error that he calls substitution. Ask young adults how happy they’ve been lately. Follow up with a question about their dating life. There will be no correlation. Happiness is based on all sorts of things, not especially dating. But ask the same questions in the opposite order and they almost perfectly correlate: lots of dates = happy; few dates = unhappy. Once you start thinking about your dating life, that’s how you measure happiness. You substitute dates for happiness.

Or take the erroneous conclusions people draw from bogus correlations. The counties in the United States with the lowest incidence of kidney disease are all traditionally Republican, a fact from which it is easy to deduce all sorts of nonsense. Did you think it was because of clean Midwestern living, combined with lots of time outdoors? No, it’s just because these counties tend to be more sparsely populated, so that even a few cases here or there drive the statistics to the top or bottom of the pile. For this reason, the counties with the highest incidence of kidney disease are also traditionally Republican.

None of this is very flattering for how humans judge everyday problems. Yet Kahneman’s career-long study of judgement gone wrong has not discouraged him. He maintains a positive spirit, imagining us chatting, calmly and cooly, around the office watercooler. He hopes that with the right practice and habits, we can get better.

Unlike Kahneman, I am discouraged. Who would not be nowadays? It takes an almost prophetic level of optimism (faith, maybe?) to believe that humans—especially Americans, especially American Christians—could get better at judging everyday problems of politics and ethics. Worse than being discouraged, I sense how this feeling of doomscrolling despair pushes us to even worse solutions than we started with.

That’s part of what this book is about: the mediocre solutions that start to appear plausible in times of moral conflict. Feel like you are in a culture war and the fate of civilization is in jeopardy? If so, you need to win at all costs. (Doesn’t work.) Emotions out of control in moral debates? If so, just make your decision mathematically, like a human calculator. (No, doesn’t work either.) And most relevant to this post: are people using and abusing religious authority, say God or the Bible? Just get God out of the picture and reason neutrally without any biases. (That really doesn’t work.)

Take Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump’s latest nonsense about the Bible, which in terms of abusing religious authority, just about takes the cake. I like Pulp Fiction as much as the next 50-year-old white guy, but when Hegseth quotes the film as though it were Scripture, I don’t know who should be more offended: Samuel L. Jackson or the prophet Ezekiel. (The actual Secretary of Defense has a non-ironic tattoo that looks to be from a video game called Crusader Kings II? What a child.)

And after hawking his own autographed Bibles, Trump contributed to an event called “America Reads the Bible,” in which he read a passage from Second Chronicles. This past Sunday, Trump skipped the “National Jubilee of Prayer,” though they played the video of him reading Second Chronicles yet again. Unlike his boss, Hegseth appeared in person to offer a prayer, tattoos and all. Such nonsense deserves to be ignored or perhaps mocked, but there is no debate worth having there. Using the Bible in those ways is a sham. The real problem is Christians who believe such silliness for theological reasons. For example, Hegseth’s pastor, Doug Wilson, known here from Kristin’s previous posts.

Wilson actually does believe his dominionist political theology for theological reasons, and lots and lots of other Christians do too. Even all the way over here in Scotland, I encounter some among my students. (Not many, and always from Tennessee or Idaho, but still some.) I’m tempted to say, “Wilson and the rest are using and abusing religious authority. Just get God out of the picture, then we can use neutral, secular reasons. None of this sectarian garbage.” Yes, that’s exactly how I’m tempted. Previous generations were tempted by the same, and trust me, we don’t want to go there. That is what got us into this mess in the first place. The following is an excerpt from a chapter called, “God Gets in the Way: Why Public Reason Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.” The excerpt tells a story from around the turn of this century about a legendary change-of-mind among academics, featuring, in a leading role, a character that will be known to many from Kristin’s conversation last year. I will return in the final paragraph to relate the story to recent events.

***

1. Bad Idea, Right?

Understanding what this chapter is about is straightforward. When the South Dakota Supreme Court denied custody to a lesbian mother and the chief justice’s only reason was this parenthetical note: “see Leviticus 18:22,” most of us sense that he did something wrong. Maybe morally, politically, or legally wrong. Maybe theologically wrong; certainly exegetically wrong—at any rate, something wrong. When Martin Luther King supported laws like the Civil Rights Act, also citing the Old Testament, most of us sense that he did something right, or at least nothing objectionable.

There is an approach called ‘public reason’ that tries to filter out the South Dakota uses of the Bible but gives a pass to “I Have a Dream.” I’m very much drawn to the approach, but what I am here to tell you is that this solution doesn’t work and never did. It is appealing, even sometimes plausible, but it’s a false solution.

Why? Because it’s based on the mistaken belief that public resentment, of the sort that we all now associate with the culture wars, begins when you offer me a reason that doesn’t fit into my own way of thinking. It demands that you offer me another reason, even if it isn’t your real, deepest reason. No, that’s upside down. Real resentment begins when you are pressured into not giving me your own real reasons. Think of how Christian opponents of divorce or contraception are motivated to gerrymander scientific evidence when, in reality, they would oppose divorce or contraception regardless because of Luke 16:18 or Paul VI. (If you want the deep dive on this point, start here.)

2. “I Wish I Had a Principle”: Richard Rorty’s Change of Mind

Our story begins in 1993 with Stephen Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief, which advocated for a greater public role for religion. In response, Richard Rorty—American philosophy’s great high priest of secular, democratic pragmatism—wrote a harshly critical review, arguing that Carter’s vision threatened the great compromise that lies at the heart of liberalism: religious believers agree to privatize their faith in exchange for being tolerated.

To convey the way in which he saw religion as marginalized and trivialized in American public life, Carter, a Black Christian law professor, had written:

One good way to end a conversation—or to start an argument—is to tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will.

To which Rorty responded:

Saying this is far more likely to end a conversation than to start an argument. The same goes for telling the group “I would never have an abortion” or “Reading pornography is about the only pleasure I get out of life these days.” In these examples, as in Carter’s, the ensuing silence masks the group’s inclination to say: So what? We weren’t discussing your private life; we were discussing public policy. Don’t bother us with matters that are not our concern.

Rorty concludes: “The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper.”

Fast-forward to 2003. Rorty revisited the issue in an exchange with Nicholas Wolterstorff and, as it happened, was convinced to abandon his earlier view. What persuaded him, and the view he came to embrace, captures the current state of debate on this topic.

Wolterstorff asks, is religion really a conversation-stopper? It needn’t be. If someone invokes God’s will or the Quran or the Bible in a political debate, must we simply throw up our hands and abandon the conversation? Of course not. As in any conversation, we use our interlocutor’s statement as a launching point. We might try, “How did you come to see that as God’s will?” Or, “Why should the Quran’s statement be authoritative for law in our country?” Or, “Are you sure that’s what the Bible says? What about this other passage over here?”

To any of these statements, our interlocutor may have better or worse replies, but in most conversations we can move some way to better understanding. Eventually the conversation will stop, but that’s a feature of all conversations, not just ones involving religion. So, religion is not necessarily a conversation-stopper in the way that Rorty claims. In the meantime, everyone should offer whatever reasons they want to offer in public. We may not convince each other, and we may end up disagreeing with each other and putting the matter to a vote—but that’s how disagreements are supposed to be settled in a democracy.

Rorty was not one to change his mind easily, but on this question that is exactly what he did. He writes, Wolterstorff “has convinced me that my response to Carter was hasty and insufficiently thoughtful… So I shall offer a chastened, and more cautious, restatement of my anti-clerical views.”

The first feature of Rorty’s new view is that his real target is not congregational-level religion, but what he calls ecclesiastical organizations:

Our anti-clericalism is aimed at the Catholic bishops, the Mormon General Authorities, the televangelists, and all the other religious professionals who devote themselves not to pastoral care but to promulgating orthodoxy and acquiring economic and political clout. We think that it is mostly religion above the parish level that does the damage… We grant that ecclesiastical organizations have sometimes been on the right side, but we think that the occasional Gustavo Guttierez or Martin Luther King does not compensate for the ubiquitous Joseph Ratzingers and Jerry Falwells.

The second feature of Rorty’s new view is that there can never be a principle or rule to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable uses of the Bible. Rorty concedes that Wolterstorff should be free, if he so chooses, to cite Psalm 72 in support of social welfare legislation. He concedes this because, he says,

I can think of no law or custom that would hinder [Wolterstorff] from doing so that would not hinder me from citing passages in John Stuart Mill in justification of the same legislation. The fact that Psalm 72 belongs to a set of Scriptures … which I regard as politically dangerous is not a good reason to hinder Wolterstorff from citing this Psalm, any more than the fact that many people regard Mill’s utilitarianism as morally dangerous is a good reason to stop me citing On Liberty. Neither law nor custom should stop either of us from bringing our favorite texts with us into the public square.

Thus Rorty abandons his attempt to distinguish allowable and non-allowable religious speech.

What if, rather than advocating universal health coverage, someone supports a law restricting the rights of homosexuals by citing the usual verses from Leviticus or Romans? Rorty responds: “Here I cannot help feeling that, though the law should not forbid someone from citing such texts in support of a political position, custom should forbid it.”

People who quote Leviticus 18:22 with approval should be shunned and despised. Our attitude to them should be the same as that toward people who remark that, though of course Hitler was a bad thing, it cannot be denied that the Jews did kill Christ—or, to vary the example, people who urge that, although the lynch mobs went too far, it is a truly terrible thing for a white woman to have sex with a black man.

Rorty’s position here is so ideologically loaded it is hard to know where to go next. What should guide our public speech? Here comes Rorty’s punch line. Rorty realizes this is ideologically loaded and embraces it. He writes:

It would be nice if I could appeal to a principle which differentiated between citing Psalm 72 in favor of government-financed health insurance and citing Leviticus 18 in opposition to changes in the law that would make life in the U.S. more bearable for gays and lesbians. But I

do not have one. I wholeheartedly believe that religious people should trim their utterances to suit my utilitarian views… But I do not know how to make either of these propositions plausible to them.

That is where Rorty leaves it. It was one of his last published articles; he died four years later in 2007.

3. Burke’s Parlor and Rorty’s Cocktail Party

The impetus behind Rorty’s original idea is a good one. Its goals are to help us foster respect for our neighbors, avoid hostility generated by unfairness, and minimize the influence of political factions, be they religious or secular. But arguments can’t be pigeonholed into this or that box by invoking neutral principles. Does it violate the terms of liberal public reason for me to say, as some abolitionists did, that Africans are made in God’s image and thus may not be enslaved? Or would a more ‘publicly reasonable’ expression be to say that Africans are rational and self-aware such that their autonomy ought not be violated by slavery? The answer must be, “It depends.” Whether one or the other—or neither—of these is good political speech depends on the historical context in which I am arguing, it depends on my audience’s presuppositions, it depends on who I am trying to convince and what action I hope to motivate. So we can’t evaluate a given political claim independent of participating in the conversation.

Recall Rorty’s initial example of unacceptable Christian speech, of reasons that ought not to be allowed.

“Imagine you tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will.” … The ensuing silence masks the group’s inclination to say: So what? We weren’t discussing your private life; we were discussing public policy. Don’t bother us with matters that are not our concern.

We can read between the lines easily enough: the thinly veiled subtext is that this is some naïve, uneducated Christian who sidles up to a group of intellectuals at a cocktail party where she really does not belong—wherever the New York Times editors go for Friday martinis, say. Now contrast Rorty’s image with the following, offered by the literary theorist Kenneth Burke:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you… However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion vigorously in progress.

The difference between Burke’s parlor and Rorty’s cocktail party is stark. The ‘well-educated professionals’ of Rorty’s example know in advance what they will allow in their conversation and what they won’t. And the newcomer hasn’t bothered to listen for long enough to find her footing. This captures both what is wrong with Rorty’s exclusion of religious reasons and what is wrong with so much Christian political discourse: the arrogant assumption by some that they have been there from the beginning and therefore control the terms of discussion, as well as the foolishness of the newcomer who doesn’t wait and listen long enough to hear what the argument is about.

***

Since I first wrote these pages, the problem cases have shifted. The folks who still stick to Rorty’s original public reason view are now on their backfoot, and the Doug Wilsons of the world are emboldened: Hegseth, Robert Jeffress, Mike Johnson, Larry Arnn. Are we then fated to accept the nonsense of their Christian nationalist logic? By no means. Far better that they give us their real reasons. If so, we can rebut them head on. (Or, if they aren’t interested in a real conversation anyway, we can ignore them, which judging by some of their interviews is probable.)

One lesson here for Christians: Much of the reason that we have been ignored in elite intellectual circles is the fault of Christians themselves. It was never a grand atheistic conspiracy. No, for the most part, the responsibility for never meeting this challenge in a persuasive way lies with Christian thinkers, including theologians; that is, people that do what I do for a living. We’ve often been foolish newcomers who don’t listen long enough to hear what the argument is about. “You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.”

• The book is already out in hardcopy in some countries, including the UK, but for North America it releases in July.

• However, it’s available online everywhere for institutional/university libraries. That is, if your library subscribes to OUP Academic, librarians can add it and might have already done so. Users of those libraries can access it here.

• For everyone else, to access the free chapter from now until June 21, click below. No registration, sign-up, or subscription required.

  Read Chapter 1

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The best thing—the almost magical thing—is when readers find in the book exactly what you put into it. When they see the things you deciphered in your research and tried to convey with the best words possible, and they see—and feel—exactly why they matter.

With Jesus and John Wayne, this didn’t happen until after the book published. Live Laugh Love is a little different. Although we’re still more than three months out from publication, there are advance reading copy (ARC) giveaways on Goodreads, and some can access the manuscript through NetGalley. That means I’m already hearing back from early readers, and to my great delight (and always a little relief), the book is landing exactly as I’d hoped.

Here’s SarahO, on Goodreads:

“The was suppose to be the fun book.” Only the second paragraph in and I knew I was in for a ride. When I read a book like this I always feel compelled to give my credentials: I was homeschooled, I spent most of my life in a southern baptist church (the rest in presby-churches), and I live in the Bible Belt. Though I’ve read Jesus and John Wayne, I felt like someone on the outside looking in, recognizing things but never quite feeling like they touched my life in any drastic way. This book hit a lot closer to home and really shocked me at times (it is very hard to shock me anymore), I confess letting out a few expletives.

Something pervasive throughout this history was the influence of New Thought: a movement that pushed the idea of “right-thinking” that can heal, bless, and change a persons life for the better. Now we may call it “Word of Faith” or “Prosperity Gospel.” Out of that came books like the Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, the Power of the Positive Woman by Phyllis Schlafly, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie just to name a few. The thinking was that if you just gave up and submitted to God (or to those above you who “represented” God) and thought positively, you would be healthy, wealthy and wise. Finally living the promised happy life. If you weren’t blessed with the desires of your heart, well, it was your fault for being lazy and negative.

This book covers many more pieces of history like Christian marketing of books and TV shows (Janet Oke novels and Little House on the Prairie), Contemporary Christian Music artists (Amy Grant, Stacie Orrico, Etc), Multi-Level Marketing schemes, Hallmark, and Christian women influencers like Elisabeth Elliot, who was “as close as one could come to evangelical sainthood.” Through recent biographies of Elliot, we find that much of her work came out during her third marriage to an abusive and controlling man. Even when her family tried to help her, Elliot stayed with her husband. Believing that “submission to her husband was obedience to God.” This wasn’t just Elliot’s message. Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, and Hannah Whitall Smith all preached a similar message to their ladies. Although is was much easier to preach submission than to live it as Bryant found out. Her husband/manager, pastor, marriage councilor, and all-male board, tried to control her money, engagements and events. When she fought them they threatened her. Bryant finally divorced her husband and the world she built came tumbling down around her. A woman who didn’t follow the rules couldn’t be trusted.

My kindle says that I highlighted 353 passages in this book. It was such a fascinating and horrifying history that, had I read a hard copy, the whole book may now be highlighted. In my opinion, like with Jesus and John Wayne, this is a must read for the church.

From Elisa Forshey, who accessed the book on NetGalley:

I’m reading an ARC of Kristin DuMez’ upcoming new book “Live Laugh Love”, and contrary to the title, it is full of the dark dusty moldy corners of recent evangelical history. I’m sickened. Listen, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the ENTIRETY of the history of Christendom proves that whenever Christians get mixed up in political power it goes VERY VERY VERY BADLY. Love for and service to the outcast, the disenfranchised, the immigrant, the poor— THAT is the place for religion. Stay the eff out of the halls of power. I feel like there’s been enough fantasy fiction written about this we ought to know better by now! Tolkien must be rolling over in his grave…

Google Paul Popenoe if you want to know what triggered this post.

And, from Ellie Moon on Goodreads:

For me and many others “Jesus and John Wayne” was an important and influential book, but “Live Laugh Love” somehow manages to outdo it. Kristin Kobes du Mez dives deep into the history and impact of holiness theology and the philosophy of New Thought on modern day evangelicalism. Along the way, she highlights the ideals of “the fascinating women,” the role of MLMs, purity culture, and the intertwined nature of capitalism and evangelical womanhood.

This is an incredibly well researched piece of work that manages to be utterly engaging and enraging all at the same time. The analysis of how totalising systems, the theology of holiness, and the seven mountains mandate have led to the present day strength of Christian nationalism is illuminating. The book provides a satisfying level of depth and new information even for those of us with a deep personal and academic knowledge of evangelicalism.

I can’t recommend this book more whole-heartedly!

Thanks to Jesus and John Wayne blazing the trail, Live Laugh Love is also garnering some interest in the publishing industry. I learned recently that it has been selected as one of Publishers Marketplace’s “Buzz Books” for the fall/winter season.

This means, among other things, that I get to participate in an online conversation with my editor, and with other author/editor pairs—including Eric Idle, which I can only assume will be a tough act to follow. Trying to look on the bright side, though.

• ​Eric Idle with Austin Ross on IDLE IN PROVENCE (Harper Select, September 8th)

• ​Kristin Kobes Du Mez with Dan Gerstle on LIVE LAUGH LOVE (Liveright, September 15th)

• ​Radha Agrawal with Ariel Curry on HOW TO MAKE A FRIEND (Sourcebooks, October 6th)

• ​Soyica Diggs Colbert with Elias Altman on FREEDOM’S GATE (Norton, October 13th)

• ​Tarajia Morrell with Kathleen Harris on DESIRE FEEDS THE FEAST (Zibby, November 3rd)

• ​Anna Lembke, MD with Jill Schwartzman on RADICAL SURRENDER (Dutton, November 10th)

Register for Buzz Books panel

That’s right—you have an opportunity to listen to a brief conversation between me and my editor, Dan Gerstle—the same editor who helped me wrangle Jesus and John Wayne down to size and sharpen my analysis while still somehow allowing me to keep “Holy Balls” as a chapter title. As a writer friend commented when I mentioned this, “Not all heroes wear capes.” His contributions to LLL were equally significant, and if it weren’t for his patience, trust, and nudges over the past several years, this book would not exist in this form and probably wouldn’t exist at all. What will we be talking about? I have no idea, but the virtual event is open to the public and you’re welcome to listen in!

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The lineup is an impressive one: Speaker Mike Johnson, the devotee of David Barton who has long argued that the separation of church and state is a myth. (I gave an extended interview to Politico on this topic upon his appointment as Speaker.)

There’s our steel-jawed crusader-in-chief, Pete Hegseth. (More on how he likes to take God’s name in vain here.)

And of course Franklin Graham, the rebel child who has finally come into his own as a MAGA/Christian nationalist firebrand.

We’ve got a couple of MAGA bishops, Timothy Dolan and Robert Barron, and Jonathan Falwell, the last one standing of the Falwell boys.

There’s Sadie Robertson Huff—more on her coming soon in Live Laugh Love. And let’s not forget the opportunistic Eric Metaxas, who once pretended to be a Christian intellectual but now finds his true identity in being a MAGA shill.

It looks like we even have Jesus himself.

Other Christian celebrities who will be making an appearance include worship artist Chris Tomlin, Marco Rubio, Paula White-Cain, and Robert Jeffress. (Sean Feucht and Mark Driscoll are participating in a pre-event today.) Nearly all of the faith leaders are Christian, and most are evangelical, according to Religion News Service.

Here’s how RNS describes “Rededicate 250”:

Advertised as a “rededication of our country as One Nation Under God” and a “once in a lifetime national moment,” the Sunday event is intended to reflect on the faith of America’s founders and to appeal to God to bless and guide the nation. It’s an initiative of Freedom 250, a White House-backed, public-private campaign staging patriotic events to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday (not to be confused with the bipartisan America 250 efforts). Supporters welcome the event as a tribute to America’s roots, while critics say the Christian-saturated, MAGA-heavy festival casts an exclusionary vision of America’s past and present. Americans United for Separation of Church and State suggested the event advances Christian nationalism rather than religious freedom.

The problem here isn’t that Christians want to pray for the country or thank God for our country. That’s a perfectly legitimate thing for any Christian to want to do. The problem becomes when Christianity confuses faithfulness for selfishness, and when Christians fuse their preferred version of Christian identity with the nation itself.

As an alternative, some of my friends are hosting a counter-event, “Redirect 250.” It will be streaming all day tomorrow on YouTube.

Taking a clear stand, they call Christian nationalism “a heresy—an abuse of Christianity that uses religion for power and domination.”

The favorite verse of Christian nationalists is 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

The organizers of “Redirect 250” instead cite the warning from the prophet Isaiah: “These people draw near with their ouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me” (Isaiah 29:13).

Rather than pagaentry boasting that God is on their side, Redirect 250 offers “a vision that redirects the country toward what is loving, just, and good for all,” and remind us that “our deepest moral and faith traditions teach us to practice faith, hope, and love in the public square.”

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I want to offer one additional alternative.

This one comes from Maia Peterson, one of the students who took my class “Reading for Resistance” with me this past semester. The final project was whatever the students wanted it to be: photographic essays, zines, traditional essays, a video montage of contemporary politicians and scenes from Andor, an analysis of the film Zone of Interest, and many other fabulous projects. The only requirement I had was that each project, regardless of the medium, draw deeply on course readings.

Maia decided to write a liturgy. It’s stunningly beautiful. At the end, I’ve added her description of how course readings shaped this liturgy—that, too, is well worth your time. And at the very end, she includes a Spotify playlist of the songs she included in the liturgy.

It will be easy to feel discouraged when you watch tomorrow’s circus. Might I recommend reading Maia’s words instead? They are filled with truth, beauty, and hope.

ORDER OF WORSHIP

Gathering

Music: Gather us In (Haugen)

Call to Worship: Psalm 33

Prayer of Invocation

We praise you, Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, for your works of great love. In the beginning, you spoke the wild and wonderful world into being and said, “it is good.” In your incarnation, you once again said through your body, “though it is broken, it is good.” And when you come again, you will say forevermore, newly, “it is good.”

You are the God of glorious tensions. You are holy yet you stepped down to bring heaven to the unholy. You shout the good news to the universe through a particular family in the tiny town of Bethlehem. You call your church to be one even as we are many. You dare us to believe than the greatest joy is found in suffering and that your greatest triumph was found in defeat.

We lift up our hearts in thanksgiving to the One whose peace, goodness, power, and love will always surpass our understanding. People of God, Praise the Lord!

Song of Praise: Sing Praise to the Lord, You People of Grace (Leckebusch, Lim)

Call to Confession: Amos 5:7-24

Song: Put Not Your Hope in the Nation (Kimbrough)

Prayer of Confession (responsive: leader will read the regular type, while congregants will read the italicized type)

In your love, you have given us life and hope. Yet as individuals and communities we cling to the sin the enslaves us.

We are people who desire to belong.

Forgive us for finding twisted belonging in communities of triumphal hate and exclusion instead of at your table of welcome and love, for finding our identity in who we fight against rather than the One we live for.

We are people who form our lives around stories.

Forgive us for making our stories too small: for closing our eyes and our ears to the story of our hurting neighbor; for limiting our understanding of the world’s joy and pains to those that we have experienced, and for forgetting that the stories of our lives are each a verse and chapter in the story only you can write.

We have made idols of our reason, our progress, and our priorities.

Forgive us and teach us that we cannot bring your kingdom by our efforts; for believing that our way of worship and life is what will save the world instead of your work.

We are individuals who shape institutions in our likeness instead of forming our hearts around your love.

Forgive us for using your church as a justification for our inaction. Forgive us for believing we can follow you without tracing your steps of suffering, without acting to liberate the oppressed and give hope to the captive, without a sacrificial and practical resistance to the darkness in the world.

We long for understanding and order.

Forgive us when our misguided search for certainty becomes an instrument of domination, when a thirst for simplicity leads to silencing voices and enforcing uniformity in the name of unity.

We are afraid.

But you have told us, do not fear. Forgive us for cowering from the responsibility you have placed upon us and for believing that the downfall of a cultural order is equivalent with the defeat of your kingdom. Forgive us for the fear that leads to despair, the despair that leads to inaction, and the inaction that numbs our soul to what pains yours and enables injustice to thrive.

We are broken.

Forgive us for withholding the forgiveness that we have received and usurping your authority as the only true and faithful judge.

All: In your mercy, heal our hearts, renew our minds, and quicken our hands to live out the new hope we have received. Amen.

Assurance of pardon: Romans 5:1-11

Passing of the peace: Because Jesus has reconciled us through reaching out a hand of welcome before we could reach out to him, let us turn to each other and freely welcome each other into this community.

Music: Lord, You Were Rich Beyond All Splendor (Houghton)

Word

Prayer for illumination

You have given us your Word that we may know your heart, follow you, and live in hope. Open our minds and hearts to your Word that we may humbly listen, believe, and live.

Reading of the Word

John 17

Music: They’ll Know We Are Christians by our Love (Scholtes)

Revelation 5:9-14, 21:1-5

Music: I Am Making All Things New (Kimbrough)

Intercessory prayer (responsive)

Though you have broken into our world of darkness and defeated the powers of evil, there are still places shadowed by grief and injustice. We pray that you shine your light on the individuals, communities, and governments throughout your beloved world.

You are a God who sees every one of us in our uniqueness.

Grant that we each draw from our relationship to you, our most faithful guide and friend, to live in obedience and faithful response to your love for us. Comfort the broken-hearted as one whose heart was broken for us; rejoice with the joyous as one whose heart sings at the innumerable beauties of this world, which you have called good. Give courage to those sinking in despair; give faith to those who doubt; give peaceful gratitude to the anxious.

You are a God who calls us together into a church.

Heal the divisions that wound those called to be your hands and feet on earth. Give us the grace to hold tension: silence and speech, solitude and community, suffering and joy, surrender and freedom, beauty and pain. Remind us that we serve a God who turns upside-down our ideas of order, who calls forth wonder from what seems like contradiction, and whose greatest act of love was also the greatest act of suffering. Give strength to those who lead your people in preaching and service; let them know that they are seen and that their labor is not in vain. Shine your light through your people, that others may see us and glorify you. Let the church be a place of true fellowship, broken barriers, and transcendent welcome. Demolish our idolatry that put faith in human creations and rebuild your church’s hope in the kingdom that will never end.

You are a God who calls us to be faithful citizens of your kingdom even as we are citizens of our earthly nation. You have redeemed the whole world in your act of salvation.

We pray that our structures be fashioned to bring justice and that our leaders lead with love and humility for the good of those they are responsible for. Guide both those who follow you and those who do not to see goodness in each other and find common ground in projects that serve all of society. Send your peace to countries at war; grant restoration to destroyed ecosystems; be present in at summits and town halls, in cities and villages, in families and nations. Send out your light and your truth.

Amen.

Music: O God of Every Nation (Reid)

Communion and Sending

Scripture: Philippians 2:1-11

Prayer of Thanksgiving (read together)

In wonder and awe, in memory and hope, in humility and commitment, we give thanks for your work on the cross to redeem the world from sin and reconcile it to yourself. We remember your faithfulness to your people through the prophets throughout the ages and give thanks that their watchful labor was not in vain. Today, we rejoice that the life you won for us frees us to live in joyful forgiveness even now. We live in gratitude that your work is not done but is unfolding throughout history and will come to a glorious fulfillment when you return at the final fulfillment of the redemption you have already accomplished.

Music: Jesus Shall Reign (Watts); The Day of the Lord (Kimbrough)

Prayer of Offering and Commitment (responsive)

You love us as we are and call us to who we will be.

May we live out the faith we have received, knowing that following you is a journey. In this memory, remind us of the victory that you won and the fulfillment that is still to come.

May we live as people responsible for history,

discerning wisely the consequences of both our action and our inaction.

May we be people of forgiveness,

Extending mercy to even our enemies, remembering that the line dividing good and evil runs through the heart of every person, so that our actions may overcome and not enable sin and reflect your call to new life.

May we live in gratitude and hope,

Taking each day as if it were our last and yet living it faithfully and responsibly as if there were yet to be a great future. May we dare to practice a hope deeper and stronger than optimism.

May we live in a present informed by the past and future,

Living neither in short-sighted nostalgia or seeking utopia at the cost of justice now, but proclaiming love, trust, and solidarity.

May our efforts towards justice never be a simple mirror of the methods of injustice;

Let us meet lies with truth and violence with love, holding fast to principles in a world consumed with power.

May we be careful and generous with our attention,

Refusing both turning away from and being distracted by the news; showing love and care by taking the time to listen to the individuals you place in our paths.

May we have wisdom with our emotions,

Practicing empathy, honesty, and reflection.

May we stand firm in the face of resistance,

stepping out in bravery, using the resources we have been given, and embracing the uncomfortable.

May our communities be places of diversity and discernment,

Sorting the truth from its twisted counterpart, speaking words that affirm life and dignity, and knowing each other deeply as beloved friends on a journey together. May we remember that we are the broken body of Christ and refuse to let idealized, exclusive community threaten true fellowship. May we value different gifts as equally important to the body of Christ.

Even in the midst of pain, injustice, and fear,

May we guard joy, seek the beautiful, cultivate peace, and practice beautifully unreasonable hope.

May we learn to wait for your justice,

Watching for and participating in your work through history by standing where you stood—in the darkness, with the oppressed, marginalized, and weak.

Send us out now in courage and humility, to spread justice, love, and light. Let us never forget that you go before and behind us, and that we belong to you. Amen.

Music: Song for Rachel (McCracken)

Scripture of Blessing and Charge: Isaiah 65:17-25

Sending song: Instrument of Peace (The Porter’s Gate)

This project was loosely inspired by the ideas in de Kock’s essay that emphasized how words and practices in our political life shape us and are often unconscious “liturgies” that influence our attitudes and actions. (His critique of our tendency towards order and purity that can easily turn into oppression also inspired one of the confessional call-and-responses.) Through multiple classes, professors, and books, I’ve been interested by the idea of how our communal liturgies as the church can also form us, reminding us of our hope in Christ, and sending us out into the world. I also chose this project because I’ve been involved with worship music and love that part of living as a church.

I incorporated Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, Reichel, Havel, and Thurman into my liturgy by weaving themes from their writings into my written prayers. From Bonhoeffer (mostly “After 10 Years”), I took the ideas of our responsibility to live actively and wisely as people who shape history; to cultivate hope as opposed to blind optimism; the importance of a personal faith in God; sharing in Christ’s suffering as an integral part of our witness; and the call to live in the present with hope for the future. Bonhoeffer was one of the few almost direct quotes I incorporated into my prayer (“Taking each day as if it were our last and yet living it faithfully and responsibly as if there were yet to be a great future” (page 17, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Fortress Press 2015, Translated by Isabel Best et al). I’m including the citation here to not clutter up the liturgy. (The one other quote I used wasn’t from a reading in class, but a slight adaptation of the quote from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago…“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

Niebuhr’s emphasis of rejecting both triumphalism and cynicism and realizing the depths of human sin were integrated into the prayer of confession. Havel’s analysis of living well in time—not in nostalgia or in a utopia at the expense of “living in the truth” today—was a key part of my prayer of commitment. His emphasis on rejecting the simple and truth-obscuring nature of ideology inspired part of the first prayer (praising a “God of tensions”). His view (which was also reflected in many of our readings this semester) of ideology as a twisted religion informed the section of the confessional prayer about our tendency to find belonging in the wrong places. I also appreciated his determination that the methods of resistance never mirror the injustice and violence that they are trying to overturn.

This is reflected in Thurman’s idea of refusing to abandon our moral principles even in the face of deep corruption, which informed one of the lines in the prayer of commitment about meeting lies with truth and hate with love. I also appreciated his vision of forgiveness, as loving people who they are and as where they “will to be.”

Reichel’s book, with its emphasis on the practical outworkings of these beliefs, significantly played into the final prayer of commitment. I especially emphasized the themes of careful attention to both world events and other people; listening to yet testing our emotions; standing firmly and bravely in the face of fear and resistance; seeking joy in the midst of it all, and working with a diverse community. Their emphasis on tensions—between knowing when to speak and stay silent, valuing both community and solitude—as well as the final section of the book that talked about destroying idols and transforming our hope, was incorporated into the intercessory prayer. The structure of the book also informed the general structure of my liturgy; the most obvious difference from a traditional church service was that there wasn’t a section for celebrating the communion table; however, I drew the more general idea of communion as “become what you have received” from Reichel’s book.

Also, I had a hard time choosing the songs for the liturgy, so I made a playlist of both the ones that I chose and all of the “finalists” that I didn’t quite have room for:

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One of the favorite things I heard about Jesus and John Wayne was how many parents and children were reading and discussing the book together. One thing I’ll say for Live Laugh Love is that it is absolutely made for this, especially if you grew up in or raised your children in the world of Little House on the Prairie and Love Comes Softly, Sandi Patty and Passion & Purity. Don’t worry, parents—it’s not all bad. While the book is a critical history, it is above all a deeply illuminating history: What did we live through? Who made these things? What did we do with them? What did they do to us, and for us? (Also, some of the women I profile in the book hold up extremely well, even under critical scrutiny.)

My favorite local bookstore, Schuler Books, is making it possible to preorder signed and personalized copies of Live Laugh Love.

Any preorder received before Sept 10 will be signed and personalized by me and then shipped out so you have it when the book releases, on Sept 15! (Obviously it won’t arrive by Mother’s Day, but think of it as an anticipatory gift.) :)_

Simply click below and enter the name of the person you’d like to have the book signed for (including yourself!) and any brief message you’d like me to include.

Preorder personalized LLL

Also, for those who’d like a sneak peak into some of the “secrets” in the book, I’ll be speaking in Toronto next Tuesday at a conference on Courageous Faith in a Time of Fear. Registration is still open for in-person attendees, but for $25CAD you can gain access to the livestream of my talk—and my conversation with Joash Thomas and Angela Bick—which will be available to you for 10 days. (The price covers the cost of livestreaming. If this isn’t in your budget, have no fear—when we’re a little closer to publication, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to hear more on the contents of the book!) Click below, and toggle to the bottom under “REGISTRATION TYPE.”

Register for livestream

It’s a beautiful spring day here, and I have three more final exams to grade before heading off to Calvin’s commencement.

It’s always a bittersweet time of the year, but perhaps especially this year. I’m saying goodbye to the research assistant who worked for the past 3 1/2 years with me on Live Laugh Love, and I’m also wrapping up one of the most transformative classes I’ve taught in all my years of teaching.

My students were among the smartest, wisest, and most thoughtful I’ve ever encountered. Although for many it was an elective course and for a good portion of the class it was also their last semester in college, without exception they threw themselves into course readings: Bonhoeffer, Havel, Niebuhr, Thurman, and many others. As one student said in our last week, “This was both the darkest course I’ve taken, and somehow also the most hopeful.”

Another wrote in his exam that he remembered me saying at the beginning of the class that I hoped some of the readings would haunt them, as they have me. At the time, he didn’t think it was likely, but by the end of the semester, he thought differently: ‘Well, this whole class haunts me now. Not in a bad way…but I will never see the world the same way again.”

This is the beauty of teaching, the beauty of learning—rigorous reading in community, seeking truth, grappling with complexity, and growing in clarity and courage, together.

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What is a launch team, you ask?

It’s just a group of people who are excited about Live Laugh Love and want to help spread the word.

Who is invited to join?

Anyone who is excited about Live Laugh Love.

Are there any requirements to join?

Nope.

What will the launch team entail?

Stickers! Maybe other merch!

Occasional (optional) Zoom meetings where we hang out, maybe I’ll read a passage or two, and we’ll chat about whatever you’d like.

I’ll also share social media assets—things you can share on your own social media pages if you’d like. Or you can make your own and share them with the group to inspire us.

If you’ve been in another launch team before, I promise you this one will be more chill. No requirements to preorder. No requirements to post. No games or contests. Just do what you feel like doing to help launch this book into the world.

Also, I promise that it will be a very fun space to meet other kindred spirits.

Because it’s easiest to run a group like this on Facebook, that’s where I’ve set things up. If you’re not on FB and still want to be part of the Zoom meetings etc., message me and I’ll build a small email list for non-FB team members.

Join the launch team!

In other exciting news, my galleys have just arrived!

Members of the media or podcasters interested in featuring the book, contact my publicist, Peter Miller, at pmiller@wwnorton.com. (Please share your media affiliation and/or name of podcast and approximate audience reach.)

Thanks so much for joining this ride…

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On May 13-14, I’ll be participating in a conference hosted by Knox College’s Ministry Forum and the Institute for Christian Studies’ Free to Be Faithful initiative: Courageous Faith in a Time of Fear. The conference is open to everyone—to clergy and laypeople, with both pastoral leadership and community tracks.

The gathering will involve keynotes by me and Joash Thomas, author of the beautiful book The Justice of Jesus and Instructor in Public Theology, Peace & Justice at St. Stephen’s University. It will also involve roundtables and workshops—spaces to learn and build community.

Workshops in the pastoral track include: Reformed Witness in the 21st Century: Journeying Together in Courage; When Silence Feels Safer: The Risk and Responsibility of Speaking; Holding the Big Tent: Leading Across Ideological Difference. Workshops in the community track include: Taking a Stand Without Tearing the Church Apart; From Private Concern to Collective Action; You Are Not Alone: Supporting Clergy and Strengthening Congregations.

The conference will close with a session on Capacity for Courage: Building Faith Communities for the Long Haul.

There are several registration options, including an online option giving you access to keynote livestreams:

Move From Fear To Hope

Join scholars, pastors, ministry leaders, and engaged citizens for two days of reflection, learning, and practical imagination.

May 13–14, 2026 Toronto, ON

Register Here

On May 13, I’ll also be giving Knox College’s commencement address. This event is open only to graduates and their families. Is a profound honor to bless these graduates and help send them on their way.

Between now and then, I’ll also be heading out to Toronto for an event next week honoring my former Notre Dame professor Doris Bergen. Doris took a position at the University of Toronto as I was finishing my PhD. A professor of Holocaust Studies, she is the author of books such as Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich and War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. I had the privilege of serving as Doris’s research assistant and teaching assistant while at Notre Dame, and her work (and mentoring) influenced my own trajectory in ways I never could have imagined at the time.

While the event itself is open only to Doris’s colleagues and friends, I’ll be sharing some of my reflections on her work here in the days ahead.

Finally, an event that may be of interest to a small number of you. On the evening of May 12, I’ll be speaking at a dinner for donors to the Institute for Christian Studies and their Free to Be Faithful movement.

Just the other day, I was talking to a reporter who remembered that the first time she met me, she was trying to peg me as either conservative or liberal, evangelical, exvangelical, or something else entirely. I laughed as I remembered that initial conversation. I wasn’t being cagey, but I come from a different tradition: the social justice, shalom-seeking strand of Dutch Calvinism perhaps best embodied by the Institute for Christian Studies.

When I was an undergraduate at Dordt University, I regularly heard speakers from ICS and read many of their professors’ books and essays. A few years ago, I was invited to join ICS’s academic senate. I’ve since been appointed Distinguished Associate, and I’ve been working together with them over the past couple of years to build the Free to Be Faithful movement. If you read scholars of authoritarianism and resistance, you know the importance of strengthening and defending institutions:

Because of their courageous work, the Institute of Christian Studies is one of the institutions I’ve committed to building up, now and in the days ahead.

If this sounds like something you’d like to support financially, I’d love to chat with you—either over Zoom, or over dinner if you’ll be in the Toronto area for the Courageous Faith in the Time of Fear conference. I’ll share in more dtail why I’m investing in this particular institution and community—message me and I’ll put you in touch with folks who can make this happen.

One way or another, I’m looking forward to seeing many Canadian friends in the next couple of weeks!

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I still vividly recall the first time we met face-to-face, over Zoom. It was before Jesus and John Wayne came out in paperback, which was scheduled for around the same time his own White Too Long was also releasing in paperback.

As my publisher was working on publicity plans, they asked if there was any author I’d like to be in conversation with. I suggested Robby, and although I didn’t really know him except for on social media, I said I’d reach out. Robby responded with an instant yes, and we set up a Zoom meeting to discuss the details. This is where things got memorable. I was there, Robby was there, Robby’s staff members were there, Robby’s communications team was there…and after an awkward pause, Robby tactfully asked me if we were waiting on any of my people.

There was no bluffing.

I had no people.

I knew then that I was in way over my head.

“Nope.”

I died inside a little bit.

But it was no problem, we went ahead with things, and if you know Robby, you’ll know how gracious he is.

Since Robby writes books faster than I do, he released his beautiful Hidden Roots of White Supremacy a couple years later. It is a book that finds hope in the darkness, one that is honest about the past but that also charts out possibilities for a new way forward. Now, we’ve both finished our next books, which are set to release within a week of each other. This time, we’re planning ahead—stay tuned for what we hope will be a joint event in Washington DC the week his releases, and the week before mine comes out.

Because Robby is Robby, he just published this beautiful post on Live Laugh Love—so beautiful that I had a hard time getting through it. (Seriously—I had to put it down a couple times. Even though we’ve become close friends over the years, there’s a part of me that still thinks of him as the distinguished and intimidating Robert P. Jones…as in, the Robert P. Jones that was just last week elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.)

I love that I’m now in a position to return the favor. I had the honor of endorsing Robby’s next book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. As I was reading the manuscript, I was taking notes as I was trying to capture its essence. Some of the words I jotted down were: “Bracing.” “Unflinching.” “Timely,” although “timely” didn’t begin to describe its urgency and relevance.

I know Robby wrapped up this book in the shadow of escalating threats, with members of the administration labeling anything deemed “anti-Christian” or “anti-American” as “domestic terrorism,” by which they mean, I think it’s safe to say, anything anti-their-favorite-kind-of-Christianity and anti-their-version-of-America. Which is to say, people like Robby and me.

Did Robby decide to pull his punches?

Nope.

If anything, the stakes became even clearer for him.

No punches pulled. Just bracing clarity.

Joy Reid calls Backslide “an urgent call to save our democracy—and the Christian faith—from the scourge of religious nationalism,” one that calls for a faith “that prioritizes brotherhood over separation, and care for the least of these over selfishness and hate.”

Eddie Glaude calls Robby “one of the most important Christian voices in our time,” and the book “a powerful jeremiad for these dark days and clarion call for us all!”

And here’s my endorsement:

“With history as a guide, Robert P. Jones issues a clarion call to American Christians: choose either the way of Christ or complicity with a movement that preys on the vulnerable and privileges the few. Every American Christian should read this book and take its message to heart. This is our 1933.”
―Kristin Du Mez, New York Times best-selling author of Live, Laugh, Love and Jesus and John Wayne

Here’s what Robby has to say about it:

This book is my effort to speak into this perilous moment in American history; to reckon with the moral collapse among white Christians—two thirds of whom supported Donald Trump for a third consecutive time at the ballot box in 2024; and to issue an urgent call to protect American democracy. The stark jacket cover—with its upside down American flag (an appropriate display, according to the U.S flag code, “in instances of extreme danger”)—signals the gravity of our time.

As we’ve witnessed the indefensible willingness of conservative white Christians to shed their core values like inconvenient loads along the road to supporting Donald Trump, I’ve been brought back to two words from my evangelical upbringing: backslide and apostasy. It’s notable that political scientists are also now using the term “democratic backsliding” to describe the process by which a democracy— including democracy in the U.S.—slips into authoritarianism. These powerful terms help us describe our situation succinctly: We are now living in a democratically backslidden nation, abetted by an apostate white Christianity.

In the new book, through reflections on history, my upbringing in the white evangelical South, and decades of social science research, I lay bare the roots of this collapse and the dangers it poses for our future. I take readers inside a faith tradition marked by an impoverished relationship to the Bible, a rejection of a genuine search for truth, and an upside-down world where empathy is considered a vice. Yet amid the wreckage, I also find hope in growing efforts to resist the backsliding, to remake our national holiday rituals, and to recover a Christianity that remains committed to a pluralistic democracy.

This book will speak particularly to those like me who grew up part of white Christian churches, but it is also for anyone who wants to understand how we got here, with so many white Christians trading faith for power and democracy for dominion. This book is for all who are unwilling to surrender the soul of religion or the promise of democracy. And it is a reminder that the time is short for deciding which Christianity, and which America, will prevail.

If you’d like to preorder a copy and give the book an important pre-publication boost, here’s how to do it:

Buy from Bookshop

Buy from Amazon

Buy SIGNED from People's Book

And, if you’re in the DC area, stay tuned for an event the week of Sept. 7. Our people are busy working out the details. :)

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A couple months ago, I celebrated turning in my manuscript and returning back to the classroom. I looked forward to having a little free time. I was even thinking of taking up a new hobby.

A couple days ago, I found myself wondering: How is it that, now that I’m not working 10+ hours a day on my manuscript, I’m still somehow busy every day? Not stressed-busy, but very steadily busy.

And then I realized there was an obvious reason. Trump. Every time he does something absurd that is religion-related, the calls and emails start coming. Something tends to pop up every couple of weeks, but the last couple of weeks, there were a lot of things.

There’s of course Pete Hegseth’s holy war, and all that entails. I shared a bit on that in my post a few days ago, with an excerpt from The Guardian.

I also talked with Sara Gabler of Truthout on Christian nationalism and the war in Iran. Here’s just a bit from that:

The phrase “Christ is King” isn’t new — it’s sometimes used by Christians to refer to the belief that Jesus’s divine rule goes beyond that of earthly leaders. But the phrase has recently become “a kind of rallying cry for Christian supremacy,” historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez told Truthout.

…Christian nationalists like Hegseth, Hagee, and Ogles have fashioned a messiah to look like the kind of earthly leader they desire, one who will uphold what Du Mez calls their ideology of “militant masculinity.” It’s a paradigm that “enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad,” she writes in Jesus and John Wayne.

Du Mez says: “Christian nationalists tend not to talk about Jesus very much. They’ll talk about biblical law, righteousness, or social issues. But if you really start talking about Jesus in the Bible, then you get into things that arguably undercut many of their core values.”

Christian nationalists conveniently ignore the passages where Jesus commands his followers to serve the poor and love thy neighbor. Instead, figures like the disgraced evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll promote militant masculinity through podcasts streams like “Built for War” and an Instagram account full of bull-wrestling cowboys…

“It’s tied to empire building,” says Du Mez. Whether these men fashion themselves as crusaders or cowboys, they imagine that they’re protecting their families and their country from threats, foreign and domestic. From Cold War imperialism to the rise of Islamophobia following September 11, “the language of perpetual threat against America and American Christians was used to justify preemptive violence. I think that’s key to understanding a lot of evangelical preferences when it comes to foreign policy. In the Iraq War we saw that evangelicals were far more likely than other Americans to support war and preemptive war in general.”

…As Du Mez writes, “In the age of the War on Terror, pastors weren’t necessarily the most effective purveyors of Christian manhood. The military was where boys became men, and where men matured in the Christian faith. Military men, then, could serve as guides for civilian men, and for the church as a whole.”

…Du Mez also warns that Christians’ sense of embattlement is what’s behind their support of “preemptive” war. “With somebody like Hegseth, who in his own books, talks about setting aside the rules of warfare because that’s only for weak men. This kind of preemptive attack, aggression is always justified, because they’re going to come for you, so you need to get out in front of that,” says Du Mez. In their worldview, they’re the victims, not the civilians in Iran whom the U.S. and Israel are bombing, or the Palestinians whose genocide is funded by the U.S. government.

I also talked to a lot of outlets about the outrage over that AI image Trump posted, the one where he was Jesus or rather a doctor or something.

If you remember, this happened just hours after Trump called the pope “weak on crime” and told him how to do his job.

For several days, then, I fielded calls about the Iran crusade, Trump and the pope, Trump and AI Jesus, and all of them together.

I talked with the AFP (French AP), the French La Presse, Finnish Broadcasting Co, The Guardian (again), Religion News Service, and several others. At a certain point, I lost track.

I was often asked if his Christian supporters cared about his blasphemy (many did, or at least claimed to—but I suggested that for his most prominent Christian supporters, and probably for most of his less prominent ones as well—the pushback was largely performative.) I was also asked if his Protestant supporters were bothered by him attacking the pope. That was an easy one: Nope.

I was also frequently asked if any of this was likely to be a turning point. Here’s what I told AFP:

Kristin du Mez, a historian at Calvin University, doesn’t see the support among his die-hard fans wavering.

His conservative Christian supporters “are keeping their distance from what would clearly count as blasphemy,” she said.

“But I also see a lot of dodging. Yes, blasphemy is bad, this is inappropriate, he should take this down,” du Mez told AFP. “What I’m not seeing is in any way suggesting that they’re not going to continue supporting the man.”

And here’s what I told Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian:

“He did seem to cross a line for some of his Christian supporters,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor at Calvin University and an expert on white American evangelicals. She noted that Trump’s supporters have been prepared to put up with plenty of other things.

“Really, from day one, with him bragging on camera that he assaulted women in the Access Hollywood tape to, even just very recently, threatening to annihilate an entire civilization. He is also detaining children, and there are allegations right now related to the Epstein files.

“There is a lot out there that arguably should concern Christian supporters, and the fact that it was this AI-generated image that sparked this outcry is worth pondering. I think it felt like it crossed the line for some because it was just so blatant.”

Yet Du Mez said not all the outrage may have been sincere.

“I sense that there was this kind of performative aspect that enough Christian leaders knew that they needed to be on record saying: ‘We don’t approve of this. But again, that’s something very different from them actually withdrawing their support from him,” she said.

In the middle of this, I also talked with an international outlet on Christian nationalist efforts to repeal the 19th Amendment, and with Religion News Service on PRRI’s new data out on shifting views on abortion. (This one had me poring over spread sheets to make sense of small but significant shifts.)

I also enjoyed this radio interview with The Foreign Desk (UK):

And I always love chatting with Ken Harbaugh at Meidas Touch:

But my favorite interview from the past couple of weeks wasn’t mine. It was my friend’s, Father Bryan Massingale.

In the midst of the moral absurdity (and just plain absurdity) of this news cycle, watch this:

I’ve watched it several times now, simply for the good of hearing it. I’m heartened to see that it’s garnered more than 400k views, just on YouTube alone. Goodness and truth matter.

I think I’m sharing this flurry of interviews in part to justify to myself that I haven’t been as unproductive as it feels!

When I first published Jesus and John Wayne, I dreaded the thought of giving these kinds of interviews. The whole idea was terrifying, frankly: the responsibility of conveying complex ideas accurately, succincly, and for hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people. Now, it’s just normal. I can’t say it’s my favorite part of my job, but it is a regular part of my job. Or rather, my “job”—because I do this all on the side. On weeks like these, being available to the media means I’m much less available to do other things. (I managed to juggle things successfully these past few days, but I did need to let my students out 15 minutes early from class one day to jump on a radio interview—they didn’t seem to mind.)

The other reason I’m sharing these today is because in the midst of all of this, I was acutely aware of the fact that I couldn’t do this without you—without those of you who have chosen to support my work as paid subscribers here on Substack. This is that work. That support has allowed me to reduce my course load for years now to be available in this way, and the result is hundreds of interviews just like these in outlets around the world. Watching Father Massingale’s interview, was a good reminder to me that there is value in testifying to what is taking place.

So, thank you.

And now, I’m hoping for a quiet weekend. I’ve just submitted my proofs (early!) and I’m taking the weekend completely off to celebrate my birthday. It’s officially tomorrow, but the festivities are already about to commence. (This afternoon, my husband and youngest went out to get me something for my birthday. They came back with their surprise—they’d picked my dad up at the airport, who flew out to surprise me! I haven’t had a surprise birthday party since fifth grade.) 😊

P.S. One more word of thanks. Several friends shared with me this lovely banner last week from Bookshop.org. ❤️

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When I was finishing Jesus and John Wayne, a scholar I respect very much questioned my inclusion of Wilson: “Who is this guy? I’ve never heard of him, and I don’t think he’s that important.” Wilson’s Amazon sales numbers at the time seemed to suggest the same. But I knew Wilson wasn’t selling his books on Amazon, and I’d heard too many people attest to his influence to dismiss him. I kept my sections on Wilson in Jesus and John Wayne.

I added more in Live Laugh Love, where I also share the perspectives of women caught up in his orbit. More on that in September, but here’s a taste: “…fitting within no established tradition, Wilson started his own school, college, publishing house, and eventually his own denomination. (Wilson never attended seminary and was not traditionally ordained; placing himself at the top of the chain of command, he wielded authority but answered to no one.)”

Remember that part—we’ll come back to it.

First, though, back to the horror.

I’ve given so many interviews on Hegseth and Wilson in the past couple of weeks that I lost track of them. Here’s an excerpt from a deep-dive from The Guardian’s Julia Wong on Pete Hegseth’s “holy war”:

But where Wilson’s ideas were once on the fringe of rightwing evangelicalism in the US, recent decades have seen a change.

In the aftermath of the second world war, a culture of militant masculinity developed among white evangelicals in the US, according to historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. A professor at Calvin University who frequently comments on Hegseth, Du Mez traced the emergence of this strain of evangelicalism in her 2020 book Jesus and John Wayne.

Whereas in the 19th century, the ideal of “Christian manhood” would have been focused on virtues such as honor, dignity and gentlemanliness, by the early 21st century, the ideal evangelical man had morphed into something that looks a lot more like Hegseth.

“You could not get a better embodiment of that ideology, that particularly militaristic conception of Christianity and ends-justifies-the-means mentality that baptizes violence and cruelty in the name of righteousness” than Hegseth, said Du Mez.

Du Mez argues that the transformation of the evangelical masculine ideal grew out of a sense of embattlement. Facing threats to their status from feminism, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, and broad economic shifts, evangelicals invested psychically in a kind of chauvinistic religiosity that allowed them to reassert their dominance, at the very least within the home. Cheerleading the cold war and post-9/11 wars in the Middle East provided another realm to act out these fantasies of domination, usually without needing to get their own hands dirty. “Any enemies of America – foreign or domestic – and any enemies of their particular agenda are also enemies of God,” Du Mez said.

The perverse moral consequences of combining militant masculinity with religious certainty can be seen in the way this movement consistently supported the most questionable uses of American military power. During the second world war, Du Mez writes, white evangelicals defended the firebombing of German cities. During the Vietnam war, they rallied behind the perpetrators of the Mỹ Lai massacre. And during the global “war on terror”, they were the Americans most likely to support the torture of prisoners.

As evangelicalism’s culture shifted in his direction, Wilson became less of a pariah. He built ties with more respectable leaders and showed a knack for generating attention and publicity. In the past few years, he’s been featured on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and shared a stage with the Southern Baptist Convention leader Albert Mohler.

Wilson’s greatest coup has been the recruitment of Hegseth by way of Potteiger. The attention has expanded Wilson’s access to megaphones such as the New York Times, and he appears intent on maintaining influence: since Hegseth was named secretary of defense, Wilson has announced that Potteiger will move to Washington DC to establish a new CREC church for Hegseth to attend.

Wilson does not seem particularly interested in the day-to-day minutiae of governance or war-fighting. When he was invited to preach at the Pentagon on 17 February, his sermon largely stayed above the fray, though he mused about whether the invitation itself could be a sign of “a black swan reformation” – an unexpected revival of Christianity in the US.

For his part, Hegseth has shown an unprecedented willingness to incorporate his personal beliefs into the official workings of the Department of Defense.

To Du Mez, Hegseth’s role atop the Pentagon – and apparent enthusiasm for starting conflicts – is alarming.

“For a long time, a lot of this seemed like bluster,” said Du Mez, noting that the leading lights of the militant masculinity movement, such as Billy Graham, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, tended not to have actually served in the US military themselves. But with Hegseth, “you have the bluster, you have the rhetoric, you have that underlying ideology, and he’s been handed the reins of power,” Du Mez said. “What we’re living through now is seeing what happens when this ideology becomes national policy.”

With Hegseth, that doesn’t just mean waging war abroad, much as he seems to enjoy it. It means attempting to fulfil Wilson’s vision of a world governed by biblical law, a global Christendom. For that, the first step is establishing Christendom at home.

Scary stuff. But remember what I said before, about Wilson building his own little empire? That’s right. Accountable to no one, he surrounded himself with yes men. And he made sure women kept their mouths shut. The king of the hill, the ruler of his little fiefdoms. Which means, he’s spent decades of his life preaching to the choir. He publishes his own books, builds his own platforms, schools, magazines, networks, denominations.

As much as I disliked seeing Wilson move into the spotlight, I confess it has also been somewhat entertaining. Because every time he steps onto the national stage, I watch him stumble. Even when he is interviewed by friendly hosts. When he made his big Tucker Carlson debut, I could see he was off his rhythm. He is accustomed to controlling the conversation. And he’s used to yes men.

His interview with Ross Douthat in The New York Times felt the same way, as did moments in his widely-viewed CNN interview. Wilson is a diminished man when he doesn’t control the script and when he isn’t surrounded by deferential acolytes who laugh at his jokes and affirm his theological nonsense.

Don’t bother watching the CNN one right now, though. An even better example of this phenomenon released today, on Piers Morgan Uncensored.

This one is excruciating to watch. His nonsense, theological and otherwise, is on full display. His bluster doesn’t work without yes men telling him he’s right.

The emperor has no clothes, and it’s not a pretty sight. It is pretty dang funny, though, if you’ve followed Wilson over the years.

This is who he is. This is all he is. How on earth did he end up getting profiled on CNN and featured in The New York Times? The same way Trump became president. Wielding power, abusing power, convincing others that he’d wield power on their behalf and that they could get a little bit of that power for themselves. Power over others. Power to do harm, and call it righteous. Or, he’d use that power against him.

Watch this video. The Wilson section starts at 16:15. Watch it to the end, if you have time. It’s not pretty, but do it anyway.

If you don’t have the time or the stomach for it, here are a couple clips:

Piers Morgan calling him out on his dissembling rambling:

This, when Wilson complains about them attacking him, a “faith leader,” Wajahat Ali stands his ground:

Kudos to Wajahat Ali and Tim Miller for their role in this. I’m not sure that Miller was even all that familiar with Wilson before this interview, and that turned out to be a good thing. Watching his face is priceless. Wilson’s weak jokes fall flat. (In the immortal words of Kathleen Spinnenweber on X, “Wilson’s little joke about Jesus and socialism landed like a deflating balloon issuing its flatulent sigh.”) In his trademark fashion, Wilson speaks out of both sides of his mouth. He rambles. He delivers what he expects to be mic drops but nothing lands because, again, nonsense. Sometimes it’s so nonsensical that everyone just goes quiet. They don’t even know what to do with the guy. And then Miller stops calling him “pastor.” Because he’s nothing like Jesus.

“Let me bring a banger from the Bible,” Wajahat offers. “‘Beware of false prophets, who inwardly are ravening wolves.’ That’s for you, Pastor Wilson.”

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This is the question of the hour, isn’t it?

American Dominion, a new book by Keri Ladner, tackles the question head-on by teasing out the thread of dominionism—“a radical strain of evangelical Christianity that frames political authority as a biblical mandate and treats democracy less as a safeguard than as an obstacle to overcome.”

Here’s an overview:

“Ladner argues that the alliance between Donald Trump and the evangelical right cannot be explained by political expediency alone. Dominionist pastors were among Trump's earliest allies in the 2016 Republican primaries, and after his 2024 election the movement has gained extraordinary influence within the party and the state, including direct proximity to national leaders at the highest levels.

Rooted in an intense, literalized reading of Scripture, dominionism is animated by spiritual warfare: demons are not metaphors but actors, and demonization becomes both a theology and a tool of political mobilization. In this worldview, conspiracy cultures such as QAnon find ready spiritual reinforcement, deepening polarization and accelerating radicalization within the modern Republican coalition.

Moving from the early twentieth-century Pentecostal-charismatic revival movement to today's networked megachurches, Ladner shows how a once-obscure religious fringe built durable institutions and mass appeal through dramatic healing revivals, disciplined teaching, and a steady drumbeat of “chosen nation” rhetoric. She maps the formation of a religious counterculture-often presented as conventional conservatism-shaped by curricula that traveled from homeschooling into wider educational spaces. The result is a vibrant, fast-growing religious movement that promises spiritual power and national renewal, even as it places America's democratic norms under increasing strain.”

Keri was kind enough to offer an excerpt of her book, and she selected a portion on a figure familiar to many of us: Sean Feucht.

Read on:

Sean Feucht had gone on numerous mission trips from the time he was a preteen. With Burn 24-7, he traveled all over the world to lead worship in some of the most dangerous locations for Christians – Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, to name just a few. These experiences of gathering with Christians who knew that they could be killed for their faith led him to develop a concept of what Christian persecution is, as well as a resolve to show what he called “brazen faith” in the midst of it.

So when the covid pandemic led to global shutdowns in the spring of 2020, he thought that he knew what he was dealing with. California Governor Gavin Newsom implemented strict lockdowns to help slow the spread of the virus, and one thing these lockdowns meant was that church services had to transition from in-person to online. Feucht figured that this move was fine for the first couple of months. After all, he had just lost a primary election that he was so certain God would cause him to win. This defeat had led him into a state of depression as he questioned everything about God and faith. Taking a break and staying home with his wife and four children came like a reprieve.

Then came the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, and lockdowns meant nothing as cities across the country erupted into rioting and sometimes violence. Instead of staying home, people took to the street to protest police brutality and racist policies that have led to countless deaths of African Americans. Where was the church? Feucht wondered. As the country descended into the chaos of racial unrest during the covid summer of 2020, while churches were unable to hold in-person services, he reached the boiling point.

In July, Governor Newsom issued an order that churches that had begun meeting again could not sing. To Feucht, this order meant that Christians could no longer worship. He had smuggled Bibles into difficult-to-access countries, and now an American government was preventing Christians from worshiping together – at least worshiping as Feucht understood it. “So when we break the law overseas because foreign governments condemn Christian worship and evangelization, what are we to do when the laws of our own nation forbid the same practices?” he wrote in his second memoir, published in 2022. “Then, as tighter and tighter restrictions closed in around us in California, I started getting texts from connections I had made in those dangerous places overseas, asking me things like, ‘What’s going on with your government? I thought you had religious freedom, and they’re saying that you can’t gather, you can’t preach without a mask, and now that you can’t sing?” And then the ultimate question, a challenge really: “What are you going to do, brother?”

What he was going to do is use the greatest weapon that God had given to the church to tear down the strongholds that were gripping the country.

He was going to worship.

A few days after Governor Newsom’s order, Feucht gathered a crowd at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. He saw prophetic significance in the location, as “one of the gates in Jerusalem that leads to the Temple Mount is called the Golden Gate, and it was through this that Jesus entered Jerusalem.” Through the worship that he would lead on July 9, 2020, he would open up the “Golden Gate” to the West for Christ. Hundreds of people came. In Feucht’s telling, police officers who patrol the bridge for suicide jumpers thanked him. This event marked the first event in his “Let Us Worship” tour, a cross-country series of massive worship rallies that defied covid lockdowns and called on the church to wage spiritual warfare against a government that was trying to silence it.

With his guitar, he had what America needed at this critical hour. “Bold worship is like fervent prayer,” he wrote of the tour’s impact. “It is like the army marching tirelessly… It shouts and declares God’s faithfulness in the face of enemy fortifications. It forces the walls of the enemy to absorb the roar of victory before the victory becomes a reality.”

But then the question becomes,

Who is the enemy?

From Latter Rain to Columbine to the 7 Mountains Mandate, from homeschoolers and Tea Party activists to J6, Mike Johnson, and Project 2025, this book pulls together the disparate pieces that have combined to bring us to where we are now.

You can pick up a copy of American Dominion at your favorite local bookstore, or here at Bookshop.org.

***

Regular Convocation listeners, have no fear! We’re returning from our two-week hiatus with a live episode today at 5pm ET.

Bring your questions, and we’ll share all the things we’ve been up to.

Register for TCU+LIVE

With Hegseth’s crusade against Iran, Trump’s battle against the pope, and Trump/Jesus/doctor post, we have a lot of catching up to do.

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I have to say, I was entirely unprepared for the enthusiasm that greeted my announcement that Live Laugh Love is finally almost here.

When you write a book, it’s a long and mostly lonely process. Or rather, a mostly solitary process. (Lonely makes it sound like a bad thing, but most of us writers enjoy losing ourselves in our manuscripts for months if not years at a time.) If all goes well, you fall in love with your project, which exists in your head at first and then gradually takes shape in a Word document. Then comes the daunting moment when you release it into the world and it becomes not just yours, but everybody’s. We’re not quite there yet, but this past week I caught a glimpse of what that will be like.

As you all know, I’ve been working on the book for a long time. This was one of my favorite exchanges:

Five years is kind of a long time to keep readers waiting between books, so I’m appreciative of every single one of you who stuck around, and to everyone of you who preordered the book without a moment’s hesitation. You’ve already helped give the book an incredible initial boost. Within hours, the book was a “Best Seller” on Amazon. Even more remarkably, it still is.

For an impressive stretch it was in the top 200 books on Amazon. That’s a feat Jesus and John Wayne only accomplished a couple times—and certainly not when it was first available for preorder, nor in fact on its release day! (To all who prefer preordering at independent bookstores, please do! We just don’t have any data to share on that front yet, and Amazon preorders are actually especially helpful because many local bookstores also peg their preorders on Amazon’s numbers—so at the preorder stage, this actually helps get books into local bookstores for the long haul. But requesting from your local bookstore also does the trick!) But here’s a preorder link with several sites to choose from:

Preorder LLL

More gratifying than the number of preorders were the comments from so many of you—comments that made clear to me that this book is going to be exactly what many of you are hoping it will be, but perhaps even more than you realize.

Here are a few examples:

“J&JW was the first crack in the wall that eventually brought me out of the patriarchal evangelical cult I was raised in. I’ve been waiting for THIS book ever since.”

This book won’t just be more of the same. It will show with much more precision how that “patriarchal evangelical cult” was constructed and why so many people use the word “cult” to describe what they’ve participated in. There is a reason for that, and that’s part of “the secret.”

“Jesus & John Wayne wrecked my heart and my brain. Is it weird to look forward to more wreckage?”

I totally get this, and I loved this response from another reader who blogs at Testimonies of a Crone here on Substack:

“I’m rereading Jesus and John Wayne right now. I wonder if seeing the “wreckage” and allowing the wreckage…is the beginning of healing and transformation? My first read of J&JW was holy cow! I was caught up in a movement, a subsystem that I could not see. I thought I was living in the truth. This gave me compassion for myself and others who were also caught. We were trying to be good parents, good Christians. But once we see it, we are responsible for noticing it. Not looking away. Not getting caught in it. And naming it aloud, whether others believe us or not. We become stronger, more resilient, and more discerning, hopefully. To me it’s the Light being shone upon places we thought were good and lit places only to discover the deception there. We need this uncovering and we see this happening all around us…”

Testimonies of a Crone, if I could quote you in the book, I would. This sums up so well my hope for Live Laugh Love. It’s a work of critical history, and the purpose of the book wasn’t to create more wreckage but to figure out why millions feel like they’re caught up in the wreckage. What is it that millions of people have been participating in? How it was fashioned, to what ends, by whom, and what it has meant for those caught up in these systems? And, why is it so hard to leave these spaces, these systems?

This is the story of the book.

As these comments reveal, I found that many participants have special insight into what they experienced. That’s why Live Laugh Love is filled with voices of ordinary people—ordinary people who have extraordinary insights that are perceptive, nuanced, empathetic, and also critical. Live Laugh Love benefits from the clarity and wisdom of many of these first-hand witnesses, and I’m indebted to all those who agreed to let me use their words.

Of course, it wasn’t all love for Live Laugh Love this past week. I shared the announcement post here on Substack and on various social media platforms on Tuesday morning, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that it occurred to me that I should probably share the post on X. I left X more than a year ago, but because Jesus and John Wayne lived on X during its early years I thought it would be worth sharing the sequel there. X did not dissapoint.

Back in the day, Jesus and John Wayne benefitted enormously from theobros hate-posting about the book. As my publicist says, all publicity is good publicity. These not-so-thoughtful critics gave the book an incredible boost at a time when I had virtually no platform of my own. It was glorious. I thought they might have gained some wisdom about the dynamics of social media in ensuing years, but it seems wisdom is not their strong suit. (Special thanks to the Christian nationalist types who took the trouble to quote-tweet my announcement, which has received around 115k impressions.) Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of love for Live Laugh Love on X as well, and I’m glad I could share it with the brave souls who have stayed on that platform. But there was also plenty of this sort of thing:

I promise that I did not sit on this book for years just so I could drop it before the midterms. My editor will vouch for this. :)

Another favorite, from Greg the “Christian Nationalist with kind eyes," had this astute response:

“Imagine stealing the title of your book from decorations at Dollar General.”

Greg the Christian Nationalist is going to love it, I can already tell.

The guy who had this to say has “Christ is King” in his bio:

“Have you ever taken a hard look at yourself in the mirror and asked whether or not you’re doing the devil’s bidding?

Here’s the thing, Mr. Christ-is-King. While it might seem like Live Laugh Love is just a book about white Christian women or Dollar General decor, it’s also about you. It’s about exactly this rhetoric and these tactics. It’s about demonizing and shunning and the systems of control devised inside Christian spaces.

With the book announcement and a two-paragraph synopsis provoking this kind of response, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what the reaction to the actual book will be.

At the end of the day, however, it’s an incredible privilege to have the words that I write find their way into the hands of those who most need them—whether they like them or not. It’s a privilege I never take for granted. Thank you to every one of you helping to make that happen.

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I knew exactly what it would be called: Live Laugh Love.

And now, after five long years, it’s here! Or rather, almost here…

Isn’t it beautiful?

It will be available September 15, and if you preorder now, the book will be delivered to your door (usually first thing in the morning) that day.

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Live Laugh Love is about exactly what you think it is. It is about prairie fiction and Amish romance, Amy Grant, Jen Hatmaker, and Joanna Gaines. It is about multilevel marketing (from Amway and Mary Kay to R+F and LuLaRoe). It is about Christian bookstores and Hobby Lobby and Altar’d State, about beauty and bloggers, about purity culture (of course) and about Elisabeth Elliot—but not exactly the Elliot you might expect. (Elliot became one of my favorite people in the book—not the missionary Elliot or the Passion & Purity Elliot, but the woman she was in between.)

The book is also about power. It is about systems of manipulation and control. (That’s partly where the “secret” in the subtitle comes in.) For people who have been immersed in these worlds and for those who have left or tried to leave, it will make so much sense of so many things. I had no idea…

Unlike Jesus and John Wayne, this book isn’t just about evangelicals. If you think about influencers and MLMs and Hallmark movies, you know that this goes beyond evangelicalism. It is about evangelicals but also about charismatic, mainline, Mormon, and secular women. And it’s about the philosophy of positive thinking: Change your attitude and you can change your life!

Since writing Jesus and John Wayne, I’ve received thousands of messages from readers. People often assume I get a ton of hate mail, but I don’t. Hardly any, actually. But almost every day, to this day, I receive letters from readers saying “thank you.” Almost all of them convey some version of the same: This is the story of my life. But I never understood how all these pieces fit together.

Live Laugh Love does the same, but this time there are more pieces, and by the end, the picture that emerges is even darker than where we arrive at the end of Jesus and John Wayne. (Yes, it features Erika Kirk and Karoline Leavitt and Kristi Noem, and that Thomas Kinkade-inspired DHS propaganda.)

In so many ways, Live Laugh Love is a bigger book than Jesus and John Wayne. It is also a more disruptive one. (I know, I know…this should be fun…)

It’s probably the most important book I’ve written. Once you see how all of these pieces fit together, you won’t be able to unsee it.

So many of you have followed me for years now, offering more encouragement than any person deserves. Thank you! Many of you have asked what else you can do to support me and my work, and as any author will tell you, the single most important thing you can do is preorder the book if you feel so inclined.

(If you followed me back in the day, you might remember that Jesus and John Wayne sold out multiple times in its first months. By pre-ordering, you not only make sure you have a copy on the day it releases, but you also send a message to retailers to order enough of them ahead of time and also to feature the book prominently when it releases.)

I’ll have more to share soon about my book tour—there’s a good chance I’m coming to a city near you. In the coming weeks, I’ll also share an invitation here to join a launch team. I promise you it will be the most chill launch team that ever was. But there will be swag. (The first item on our agenda will be deciding what kind of swag.)

For reporters and podcasters interested in booking an interview or featuring the book in some way, please contact my Liveright publicist, Peter Miller: pmiller@wwnorton.com.

Thank you, all, for following on this journey, and I hope you love Live Laugh Love as much as I do.❤️

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These words appear in the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. The author, Milton Mayer—an American Jew of German descent—interviewed ten ordinary Germans after the Second World War to gain insights into how regular people aided and abetted genocide perpetrated against their neighbors. It’s a chilling read.

Mayer goes on:

“So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier…”

“It is actual resistance which worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point which the tyrant must always approach and never pass. If his calculation is too far behind the people’s temper, he faces a palace Putsch; if it is too far ahead, a popular revolution” (56).

“…The German community…had nothing to do except not to interfere. Absolutely nothing was expected of them except to go on as they had, paying their taxes, reading their local paper, and listening to the radio” (57).

“…The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at that time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to?…Who but an ardent Christian, of the sort that takes Matthew 5 seriously, would undertake the risk of inquiring; who, if injustice were to be discovered by inquiry, would undertake the penalty of protesting? I am sorry to say that none of my friends was that ardent a Christian” (126-27).

When my students read these words this week, many drew direct connections to their own lives—specifically, to their own acknowledged inactivity with respect to the actions of Border Patrol and ICE, to the building of detainment camps, to the deportations and disappearances.

I think many of us can relate. Our lives are busy enough as it is. It’s all so complicated. Do we even know what is happening, or what will happen next? It really doesn’t affect us, after all. Besides, what can any one of us do?

But history teaches us that accommodating smaller injustices leads to accommodating bigger injustices—atrocities, even.

With this warning in mind, I want to share with you two opportunities to cultivate your ability to see, making it more difficult to look away, to not notice, to not interfere.

The first is a wonderful new documentary short (around 30 minutes) produced by Jemar Tisby, Jesus Was a Migrant.

Jemar asks:

If Jesus was a migrant, why are so many of his followers celebrating turning them away?

What is the Christian responsibility toward the stranger and the foreigner?

What is currently happening to the people stranded at the U.S.-Mexico border?

I was with Jemar a couple of weeks ago in Washington DC, where I was able to participate in an advanced screening. It is a beautiful and compelling film.

See for yourself:

If you are in the LA area, Jemar would love to invite you to attend the first public screening. There will be music, food, a panel conversation about the film, and information on how to support immigrants.

• April 9 at 8 pm PT @ Lumiere Theater in Los Angeles

• Get your tickets HERE.

If you’re not in the LA area, have no fear. This film was designed to be viewed in community—in your community. You can bring this conversation to your church, campus, or community.

As Jemar attests, if we want a different story to spread, we have to carry it ourselves. It’s also a great way to bring members of your community together with those in the community already working with immigrants.

• Screening Interest Form

Also, please share the trailer on your own social media to help spread the word.

*************

Another good friend of mine, Melissa Borja, also has a new project out. Melissa is the author of the beautiful (and award-winning) book, Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change. I had the honor of endorsing that book a couple years back, and here’s what I had to say about it: “A fascinating, deeply perceptive, and highly readable study of the Hmong experience in America. Borja’s pathbreaking book will appeal to a broad readership in religion and cultural studies, refugee resettlement and humanitarian aid, and church-state relations, as well as to the Hmong community itself. An exemplary model of careful scholarship with far-reaching significance.”

She has just released a brand-new podcast, “One Million Neighbors.”

Listen to the trailer

Here’s Melissa’s description of the project:

“One Million Neighbors,” a limited podcast series that tells the powerful story of how faith communities across the United States mobilized to do what many thought was impossible—resettling more than one million Southeast Asian refugees in the face of widespread hostility toward migrants. This story is centered in the Twin Cities, so in many ways it’s the pre-history to the inspiring and robust forms of resistance we’ve witnessed there over the last three months. It draws on research that I share in my book, Follow the New Way, as well as new research about the experiences of Southeast Asian refugees and the people of faith involved in resettlement.

I can’t imagine a more important time to share this story. At a moment when conversations about immigration are often defined by fear and division, this series offers a different narrative—one grounded in solidarity, courage, and collective action.

With Bradley Onishi and the team at Axis Mundi Media, I’m so proud to have created something that showcases the courage, resilience, and love that both the refugees and their sponsors demonstrated throughout the process.

I hope that you’ll give the show a listen and a follow! It would mean a great deal if you could help us spread the word. A post on social media, a mention in a newsletter, or sharing with your professional networks would go a long way in helping this story reach a wider audience.

Finally, I created this show in 2025, as our nation took a horrifying turn in how it treats immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. It has been a dark time, but I believe that, through stories, we can change hearts and minds. To that end, this podcast is designed to be useful for teaching, whether it’s in a K-12 classroom, a university classroom, or a Sunday school classroom. We’ll be sharing supplementary educational materials soon. I’m also happy to do media appearances and guest speaking on this topic, which is very close to my heart.

(You can contact Melissa here.)

There’s plenty of talk these days about what Christians are doing wrong, and rightly so. Melissa’s podcast provides an inspirational—and convicting—counterpoint: There was a time when many American Christians stood against bigotry and worked on behalf of refugees and immigrants. I know; my own community and church denomination were part of this movement.

We know that mass violence happens when people learn to dehumanize “the other,” and when good people decide they can’t be bothered to do anything. There may be a time when it is dangerous to resist, but right now it isn’t. Instead, it is the perfect time to educate yourself and run interference on behalf of those targeted.

******

On this Easter weekend, I also wanted to share with you a post on Easter Vigil—my favorite day of the liturgical year. The darkness feels overwhelming, but there is the tiniest glimmer of dawn breaking through. We know that daylight is coming. But not yet.

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But I’m here to tell you that he’s a man of great courage.

First, a bit of background.

Hegseth is nothing if not consistent, at least when it come to his militant Christianity. This is the guy who has a “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”) tattoo on his biceps, the rallying cry of medieval Crusaders whose purportedly God-ordained jaunts into the Holy Land resulted in the slaughter of millions.

He rechristened the Department of Defense the Department of War, and to be honest, I’m surprised he’s ok being called a secretary. It feels a little too feminine, if you ask me.

He has organized “calls to prayer in the Pentagon press room” and voluntary worship services in the Pentagon auditorium. His buddy Franklin Graham showed up last September at one such service to share this little gem: “We know that God loves. But did you know that God also hates?”…“Do you know that God also is a God of war?”

Back in 2021, Hegseth published the book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free. In this case, I think you can safely judge the book by its cover.

Here’s what Jason Wilson at the Guardian has to say about it:

“Hegseth…depicts Islam as a natural, historic enemy of the west; presents distorted versions of Muslim doctrine in “great replacement”-style racist conspiracy theories; treats leftists and Muslims as bound together in their efforts to subvert the US; and idolises medieval crusaders.

Experts say that Hegseth’s view of Islam is riven with falsehoods, misconceptions and far-right conspiracy theories….[I]n his 2020 book Hegseth calls for an “American Crusade”, targeting both “internal” or “domestic enemies” and the enemies of Israel.

…In a chapter entitled Make the Crusade Great Again, Hegseth writes: “By the eleventh century, Christianity in the Mediterranean region, including the holy sites in Jerusalem, was so besieged by Islam that Christians had a stark choice: to wage defensive war or continue to allow Islam’s expansion and face existential war at home in Europe,” adding: “The leftists of today would have argued for ‘diplomacy’ … We know how that would have turned out.”…“Enjoy Western civilization? Freedom? Equal justice under the law? Thank a crusader.”

It’s worth noting that Matthew Gabriele, pofessor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech, and the author, with David Perry, of Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, contests Hegseth’s interpretation of events:

“There were absolutely no incursions into mainland Europe”…“If anything, Islam was kind of on the retreat in Iberia and other places as well. So there was no large geopolitical shift or any kind of immediate threat of Islam taking over Europe.”

On Hegseth’s presentation of the crusades as a victory for the west against Islam, Gabriele said: “The Crusaders lost. They lost everything. The idea that they kind of like emerged victorious is absolutely false.”

“This narrative of the crusades as a defensive war, where if the Christians didn’t launch this offensive towards Jerusalem that Europe would be overrun has been a bog-standard narrative on the right: it’s something that was espoused by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, in 2011 and by the Christchurch shooter a few years ago.”

On Hegseth drawing a direct line between the crusaders and the modern west, Gabriele said: “It’s the worst kind of simplistic thinking,” adding: “Anybody who tells you these simple stories is selling something.”

For a guy who loves the Crusades as much as Hegseth does, his historical knowledge of the Crusades is profoundly lacking.

How about his theology?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations with journalists on this topic. Invariably, I’m asked a question along these lines: “So I’m not a Christian myself, but I’ve read the New Testament and I don’t understand what’s Christian about his views of war and violence. Can you help me understand?”

I’m always careful in how I answer this one because there are two ways to define Christian: descriptively and normatively. As a historian of American Christianity, it’s not up to me to pick and choose true Christians from among those who self-identify as Christian. Even if I personally think Hegseth’s theology is misguided, his views in fact represent a fairly large swath of American Christians. Moreover, I’m a practicing Christian but I’m not a theologian or biblical scholar—so why take my opinion over his? (Obviously I think you should, but my authority in the public sphere is as a historian, not as a theologian or biblical scholar.)

What I can do is explain his strand of theological interpretation. I can talk about Christian nationalism and presuppositionalism and dominionism and how these guys tend to love the Jesus of Revelation (arguably a misappropriation of the Jesus of Revelation) but blow off the Jesus of the Gospels who tells us to love our enemies and our neighbors and to turn the other cheek, and all of that rather effeminate stuff.

At a recent Pentegon worship service, we got more of the same from Hegseth. He prayed a prayer borrowed from the chaplain who prayed these words over US soldiers leading the Maduro raid:

“Almighty God who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle. You who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell. Behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous. Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans, and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger let the evil perish. Let their bulls go down to slaughter, for their day has come, the time of their punishment. Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things, and blow them away like chaff before the wind.

Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield to protect the innocent and blameless in their midst. Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.

Give them wisdom in every decision. Endurance for the trial ahead. Unbreakable unity and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them. For the wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, King over all kings and amen.”

This Sunday, while listening to the Scriptures being read, it suddenly struck me: Pete Hegseth is a brave man.

“Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things, and blow them away like the chaff before the wind.”

“Behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous. Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans, and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger let the evil perish.”

This is a man, who, if we take him at his word, believes in a God of wrath. A God who strikes out against evil, who frustrates the plans of the wicked.

And yet, in his own words, he approaches this God “with bold confidence”—confidence that he, Pete Hegseth, represents God’s righteousness, that he, Pete Hegseth, is God’s chosen instrument of wrath, that he, Pete Hegseth, is not in fact a sinner who should approach this God of wrath with fear and trembling.

It was while reading our Palm Sunday readings from Matthew 26 this past Sunday that I was struck by this realization. The passage recounts the plot against Jesus in the week before the Crucifixion, and here’s the part about Judas’s betrayal and Jesus’s arrest:

⁴⁷ While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people. ⁴⁸ Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.” ⁴⁹ Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him.

⁵⁰ Jesus replied, “Do what you came for, friend.”

Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. ⁵¹ With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear.

⁵² “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. ⁵³ Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? ⁵⁴

Put your sword away.

All who draw the sword will die by the sword.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Turn the other cheek.

Just this week, I happened to be reading the Barmen Declaration—the document drawn up by Karl Barth and others in 1934 around wich the Confessing Church rallied.

“We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.

“We reject the false doctrine that, apart from this ministry, the Church could, and could have permission to, give itself or allow itself to be given special leaders [Führer] vested with ruling authority….

“We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the Church should and could take on the nature, tasks and dignity which belong to the State and thus become itself an organ of the State….

“We reject the false doctrine that with human vainglory the Church could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of self-chosen desires, purposes and plans….

If Hegseth genuinely believes in a God of wrath, he is a courageous man, one bold enough to presume not only that he represents the omnipotent God’s interests but that he can safely ignore the direct teachings of Jesus in order to carry out what he deems to be God’s will on earth, supremely confident that God’s will aligns entirely with his own.

That takes a kind of courage I don’t have.

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Laura is a wife, mother, and registered nurse who lives here in Michigan. Her book isn’t about the churn of the daily news cycle. It’s about how her family opened their home to refugee foster children. Our Family Is Not a Tree: Stories of God’s Faithfulness on Our Journey as Refugee Foster Parents just released this week. Laura told me about this book a few months ago, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting its publication. She has generously allowed me to publish some excerpts, and I think you’ll find that her words, and her example, bring clarity and encouragement.

Reading Our Family Is Not a Tree also reminded me that reading books amid the daily churn is important. A book takes you away from the moment-by-moment chaos and fills you with something more substantive and enduring, so that when you return to the daily news cycle you’re more grounded. Where the news cycle overwhelms, reading good books cultivates wisdom, discernment, and resilience.

Here’s a glimpse of Laura’s story:

Whenever we received a new refugee foster placement, it usually began with a phone call… In 2023, we were waiting for a new child to be placed in our home. Our boys were twelve and fourteen years old, and we had already been in the routine of welcoming kids into our home for several years. We had received the initial call asking if we were willing to be a home for a teenage girl. Per our household routine, we spoke together as a family and all voted. We only said yes to a new placement if everyone in the family was ready. After we all gave an affirmative, I called the caseworker back and let her know.

Late that night, she called me back. “Sofia will arrive tomorrow around noon. A transporter will drop her off, and then her caseworker will come by later in the afternoon to do the initial paperwork.”

I walked back into the boys’ bedroom, where we had been reading a book together before I tucked them in for the night, and told them the news. I sat down between my sons and asked, “How are you guys feeling?”

“Better now,” my son Simon answered. “It always feels easier when I know their name.”

When we think of a “refugee” as a theoretical idea, it is easy to build up false ideas and fears about who they are. But once you know someone’s name, hear their story, get to know them as a person, your whole perspective can change. In her book We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World, Malala Yousafzai shares, “It seems that too many people don’t understand that refugees are ordinary people. All that differentiates them is that they got caught in the middle of a conflict that forced them to leave their homes, their loved ones, and the only lives they had known.”

Every time a new child arrives, we prepare as best we can. And every single time, there is something unknown or unexpected that requires flexibility. A change in arrival schedule. A child who is a different age than we were previously told. Unknown trauma, unknown history, unknown needs.

*******************

One day while I was walking through the grocery store with a full cart, my phone rang. I saw the number from our foster agency on the caller ID so I answered it.

Standing next to the milk cooler, I heard our placement coordinator saying, “I have a six- and eleven-year-old brother and sister from Honduras. Are you willing to care for them?” I knew that was all the information I would get at this moment, and Phil and our kids had already given me the green light to say yes to another child, so I did…

María and Miguel arrived a few days later.

María was six years old when she came to stay with us. She and her brother came to our house from the southern US border, where they had arrived with a stranger and then had been placed in federal custody while their asylum claim was processed. Before arriving at the US border, they had traveled over a thousand miles with a stranger from their home in Central America. I used to wonder what kind of mother could send her children alone so far away, but after several years of hearing personal stories of some of the dangers facing families in certain parts of the world, I no longer wonder. I can only imagine that if my own children were facing similar dangers, including kidnapping, rape, gang violence, or hunger, I too would do whatever I could to keep them safe.

In the first week, we were astonished to see just how much food a tiny six-year-old could eat. No matter what we put in front of her—beans and rice, lasagna, roasted vegetables, soup, and fresh bread—she ate two or three adult-size portions. It felt like we were feeding a tiny teenager.

We soon learned why. When she and her brother were placed in the immigration holding facility, they were separated and placed in different male and female detention housing areas while their asylum claim was processed. We had heard from other, older children, what these facilities were like: an open, cement-floor room separated into smaller holding cells by chain-link fences. In the children’s enclosure, older children are sometimes asked to care for and comfort younger children as the adults have been separated to a different cell. The temperature is kept very low, earning them the nickname “la hielera” or “the icebox.” Detainees are given a foil blanket as their only shelter from the cold and expected to sleep on the hard floor. Day and night are indistinguishable under the permanent glare of bright ceiling lights. Upon finding herself alone in this place, little María protested in the only way she still had the power to. She went on a food strike. She had lost all hope.

Because we had two approved bedrooms, Miguel and María were able to be placed together in our home and were finally reunited after this traumatic separation. When we became licensed for foster care, we were asked how many rooms we had and how many children we could accept. We had only ever planned to welcome one child at a time. However, knowing the deep love and comfort our own boys provided each other, we also knew that we would do whatever we could to offer a safe space for siblings to stay together if possible. Years before, while the boys and I were framing, drywalling, painting, and wiring, it never occurred to me that God might use this extra room to reunite a pair of siblings who, if not for the second separate foster bedroom, would not have been able to come to stay with us. I was seeing again how God would use our yes to whisper his hope.

*************

The commencement speaker at my husband’s 2006 graduation from Calvin College was the philosopher and theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff. His address had me spellbound and still comes back to me frequently today.

He spoke of a conversation he had with an obstetrician while he was working at the Free University of Amsterdam. He had asked them how they taught prospective nurses to care for mothers who had lost their infant.

“I tell them, that when you go into the room, you need two eyes,” he said. “With one eye you have to check the IV; with the other, you must cry. I tell them one eye is not enough. You need two eyes.”

He went on to explain that the first eye is that of knowledge and discernment, and the second eye is of the heart. The first eye asks questions to do the work skillfully, engaging critically in the work that is being done. The second eye recognizes the fallenness in the world and weeps for it.

Dr. Wolterstorff’s words have come back to me again and again as we walked with children through difficult circumstances. You need two eyes. One eye to discern the need and address it skillfully and the other to cry at the injustice of it all.

In her poem “Home,” Warsan Shire gives voice to refugees everywhere, saying, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark […]; you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.” As we have cared for children who have fled their home and country, or who have been sent by parents with no better option, we have heard countless stories that have broken our hearts. We have known children who were abducted in their hometown or who became a target of local gangs. Children who have been raised by family members after their own parents were forced to leave home due to safety concerns or instabilities. Children who were kidnapped for ransom, robbed, raped. Children who lost parents to illness due to poor availability of medical care, and those whose mothers were taken by gangs right in front of them and never seen again. Children who were trafficked. Children who spent weeks traveling, often with strangers and sometimes going days without food, to try to get to safety. Children who crossed dangerous rivers on inflatable tubes or rode on the tops of trains, sometimes witnessing others who were not able to complete the journey safely. And after all of this, each of these children was separated from any adult they traveled with and spent time locked in a cement-floored, chain-link-fenced pen in a detention facility with US border patrol.

These devastating stories would slowly trickle out over our time together. A young child would be carving pumpkins with my son, grinning as she scooped out gloppy handfuls of seeds, when she would recall something about her journey and share it. We would drive past a river, and the kids would exclaim from the back seat of the car, “Look! It’s the Rio Grande!” and share a terrifying story about their crossing. A midnight snack with a teen might turn into a confession of the guilt they still held over a parent’s crimes, afraid that the sins of their parents would stain them also.

We learned quickly that we needed two eyes. One eye to discern the need and provide care. To carefully observe to discover what kind of foods each child liked to eat, to provide clothing and help with schoolwork, to read bedtime stories and arrange doctor’s appointments. And a second eye to grieve with them as they processed the difficult circumstances surrounding their pursuit of refuge. An eye to see the injustice, and to recognize that this is not how God meant the world to be.

Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. (Romans 12:15)

Two eyes.

Every day, the news overwhelms. The war. ICE. Inflation. Corruption. Hate. Injustice.

It is too much, but we also feel an obligation not to look away.

I think Laura’s words—and her example—show a way forward. We can’t solve all the things, but each of us can do something tangible, in our own communities. There are organizations in every community working to reach the most vulnerable. They need volunteers. And funds. Plugging in locally not only helps people in direct and practical ways, but it will also ground you amid the churn of the daily news cycle.

And Laura reminds us of Nick Wolterstorff’s wisdom. We need two eyes. One that tracks all the things, or if not all the things, some of the things. We cannot retreat from all the news, all the time. As citizens, it is our obligation to pay enough attention to act responsibly. But we also need to keep feeling. To stay human by refusing to dehumanize others. We need the eye of discernment—we need to see what is happening, and sometimes, we need to do something. We also need the eye that sees the injustice of it all, one that weeps with those who weep.

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Essentially, I designed the course around all the things I’ve been wanting to read or re-read. Or, rather, some of the things. I had a hard time narrowing down my choices.

Here’s the book list:

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

Hanna Reichel, For Such a Time as This

I’m also assigning a few articles—mostly primary sources by people like Reinhold Niebuhr and a smattering of secondary sources such as one on the East German Stasi.

For Thursday, we’re staring with On Tyranny.

I have an even better idea, though. If the idea of taking a class sounds fun, we have two courses about to start at the Institute for Christian Studies.

The first starts this week Wednesday, but you still have time to sign up. It is by award-winning scholar Matthew Taylor. You may be familiar with him from his book The Violent Take It by Force, an essential guide to the New Apostolic Reformation and charismatic revival movement. You may have heard him on his fabulous podcast, Charismatic Revival Fury: The New Apostolic Reformation. He holds a PhD in religious studies and Muslim-Christian relations from Georgetown University and an MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. He has held faculty appointments at Georgetown University and George Washington University, and served as a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.

Now, he’s offering an online course through the Institute for Christian Studies:

THE CHRISTIAN-JEWISH QUESTION TODAY: ANTISEMITISM, CHRISTIAN ZIONISM, AND ISRAEL

Christianity and Judaism have been entangled in a complex and often painful
relationship since the earliest days of the church. Today, rising antisemitism
within some Christian communities collides with the political theology of
Christian Zionism and debates over Christian support for the modern state of
Israel. This course situates these tensions in historical and theological
context, examining how Christians have understood Jews and Judaism across
time—and how contemporary conflicts echo older patterns. We will also
explore the possibilities and obstacles for Jewish-Christian dialogue in the
present moment.

The course meets weekly on Wednesdays (6:30pm ET) starting March 18. Tuition is $400 CAD, but you can also take the course for credit for $1500 CAD. (The fees cover the cost of the courses; if money is a barrier for you, know that we are working to secure funding for scholarships for future courses—we’re just not there yet!)

Register here

And, back by popular demand, Karen Swallow Prior is teaching another course for ICS:

THE EVANGELICAL IMAGINATION: HOW STORIES, IMAGES, AND METAPHORS CREATED A CRISIS

This course will be centered on the book, The Evangelical Imagination: How
Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen
Swallow Prior. Readings and discussions will cover Charles Taylor’s
definition of social imaginaries and explore central elements of the
evangelical social imaginary, including awakening, conversion, testimony,
improvement, sentimentality, and empire. As part of these explorations, the
course will consider the metaphorical nature of language, along with the
power and limitations metaphors have to communicate truth.

Karen’s course starts March 19 and meets Thursdays at 6:30pm ET.

Register here

Both of these courses are taught by instructors who are at the top of their fields—they are the leading experts in these areas, and they are both dynamic teachers. But the classes entail much more than the content you’ll encounter—at a most basic level, they are about community. These aren’t pre-packaged, asynchronous courses. These are weekly conversations where you’ll meet Karen and Matthew and other smart, curious, and interesting people.

Karen taught for ICS last fall, and her students were effusive—not just about Karen, and not just about the course material, but about the community they developed over the course of the class. So, if you wanted a more structured (but still relaxed) learning experience, each of these offers an excellent opportunity.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the classroom, and I know it will be good to be back. (I’m teaching a two-hour course that only meets the second half of the semester, which enabled me to focus on finishing the book.) It’s a course in Calvin’s Honors program, and given the choice to teach whatever I wanted, I threw a course together organized around all of the things I most wanted to read or re-read right now. I called the class “Readings for Resistance.” It’s not about political resistance exactly, but the readings are drawn from the history of twentieth-century authoritarianism and address things like how to resist the erosion of truth and the forces of dehumanization that are always a part of authoritarian regimes.

I’ll write occasionally about some of the readings here, so later this week I’ll post a reading list in case you’d like to read along.

I had hoped to give an update from Scotland, but unfortunately I had a hard time connecting to Substack there. I’ll share a few pictures here, though. It was a perfect trip, all around.

Things started off well, with an on-time arrival into Newark. I confess I got a little choked up seeing the statue of liberty (on the far right in the distance).

I four-hour layover in Newark might not sound ideal, but I had this beautiful document in my inbox to admire:

This is honestly my favorite stage of publishing. Holding the book in my hands is fine, but there’s nothing quite like seeing the words that have lived in my brain and then in Word documents for years suddenly take on the appearance of a proper book. (And Liveright’s books are always stunning.)

Arriving in St Andrews, I went for a stroll along the coastal path with a friend I’d met the last time I was out. It was easily one of the highlights of the trip:

My official duties there involved meeting with female students in the Divinity School and speaking on Live Laugh Love. I also met up with several faculty members, and I ate. A lot. I ate Scottish game pies and cullen skink (not as scary as it sounds) and I also managed to grab a full Scottish breakfast.

I spent my last night in Dundee, where it was beautiful and windy. By windy, I mean there were white caps on a reflecting pool.

Due to the jetstream, we took a northern flight route back and had stunning views of Iceland and Greenland. Somehow I managed to snag an exit row to myself both there and back on otherwise full flights.

I landed at Dulles in DC just minutes before the full ground stop shut down all flights in and out of the entire DC region, for hours. I arrived just in time for the opening dinner for PRRI’s Senior Democracy Fellows. We put in a solid weekend of work, but there are really no other people I’d rather be doing the work with.

I arrived home this afternoon to a frantically happy dog. I’ll try to sleep past 3am tonight, and then wake up to copy edits, which should be in my inbox tomorrow morning.

Now that I’m back at home, I’ll be picking up regular routines once more—including having more time to write about daily events here.

All of which is to say, more soon…

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Ebel’s words struck me as profoundly true that evening. If you follow the news or spend any time on social media, things look bleak. And sure, things are pretty bleak. The corruption, the cruelty, the dehumanization, the wars that aren’t really wars except when our Secretary of War likes to call them wars, but they totally aren’t wars how dare you call them that?

And yet…

Here we were, a room packed with students and faculty and members of the community on a Tuesday evening in February. Some had driven two hours to listen to an academic talk. I’d spent the day meeting with fabulous students, learning of their research, touring the campus (and their incredible library), and hearing of the university’s community-based work and service. It made this Midwesterner proud—and grateful to see a public institution of higher education flourishing despite obvious headwinds. (Side note: the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Religion Department offers fully-funded master’s degrees—a rare thing these days.)

After the talk, as always, I stayed around to meet with members of the audience. At every single event, I am moved by the stories I hear—personal testimonies, really. I love seeing people’s well-thumbed copies of Jesus and John Wayne and hearing how the book has become part of people’s faith and life journeys in remarkable ways. This never gets old, and I always stay until the last person is through the line. (I’d like to give a special shoutout to the caterer who noticed that I wasn’t partaking of the lavish reception spread, slipped me a glass of ice water, and then a glass of wine, and then handed me a takeout box of the delicious treats for a late-night snack. I never go hungry on these trips, but it really was the kindest gesture.)

Then, I drove on to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, taking special care not to be diverted by signs pointing the other way to Bloomington, Illinois. There, too, I spent two days participating in another wonderful academic community. Every conversation was engrossing (and so much fun). I learned about Liza Black’s forthcoming book, How Settlers Get Away with Murder (Beacon, 2026), on violence against indigenous women, and we compared notes on the rigors of legal review. I also learned about John Nieto-Phillips’ new Substack that I think will be of interest to many of you. John writes on Spanish, Hispanic, and transnational fascism, past and present.

Then, I drove back home, did a load of laundry, proved to my ecstatic dog that I hadn’t died (he sinks into depression when I’m gone and cannot contain his excitement when I return), and flew out the next morning for Providence, Rhode Island. I’d never been to Providence before, and it is such a gorgeous city. My hotel was conveniently situated on the waterfront right next to a local brewery, and that evening, I spoke at Central Congregational Church—a thriving faith community on the edge of Brown’s campus. Once again, it was inspiring to meet people from the church, from Brown, and those who had driven in from hours away. Late that night, I had an opportunity to hang out with about a dozen people with Calvin and Christian Reformed connections. I love that at every talk I give now, there is a small contingent of CRC or former CRC members—even when I speak outside the Dutch CRC enclaves. With the denomination splintering, it’s a special joy to stay connected with members of my tradition. The next morning, I attended church and heard a beautiful sermon from Rev. Patrick Faulhaber. The mainline hasn’t gotten a lot of respect in recent decades, I think it’s fair to say, but mainline churches and clergy members are shining in this moment. (Many have been quietly doing good work in their communities for decades, often with little fanfare, but it shows.)

I’m providing this little travelogue to share with you a glimpse of the good things that persist in the midst of everything else. Everywhere I go—every church, university, or community organization—I meet genuinely good people doing all sorts of beautiful things. What troubles me is that we don’t have more effective ways to connect with each other—to know that we’re not alone, to encourage each other—to quite literally draw courage from one another. I keep trying to figure out what it might look like to find ways to connect more deeply.

In the meantime, I wanted to point you to two upcoming events. The first: this afternoon, at 5pm ET, The Convocation Unscripted will be holding our monthly live podcast. You can register here:

Register for TCU+LIVE

If you haven’t joined us live before, check us out—we leave the chat on and it’s a wonderful way our listeners connect with each other as well as with us. We take your questions in real time—it’s even more unscripted than our usual unscripted shows are.

Finally, for any UK-based friends, next week I’ll be heading to Scotland where I’ll be giving the Smith Lecture at the University of St Andrews. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday, March 11, from 4-6pm. I’ll also be meeting with students, faculty, and community members while in town. Here’s all the information you need if you’re looking for an excuse to visit the gorgeous St Andrews. (Here are a couple photos from my last visit there, if you need any convincing.)

Then, keep me in your prayers as I return to the US for two days of meetings in Washington, DC, before heading back home to start teaching again. The turnaround is a bit daunting, but it will be good to be back in the classroom again.

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After reporting her sexual abuse at the hands of a highly-respected faculty member at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—something she did simply to protect other vulnerable women under his power—Jen faced a barrage of lies aimed at destroying her credibility. It was an expertly orchestrated smear campaign that falsely depicted her abuse as a consensual affair.

In 2022, in the middle of these attacks that Jen reached out to me. I described our conversation in last summer’s post:

She had deleted her social media as a way of coping with, as she put it, “this current round of Jennifer the lying whore.” She was “seriously broken” and fighting back panic, but she was “still sane and strategic enough” to be cognizant of what was being done to her. She was also aware of, as she put it, her “inability to take more.” She wanted my perspective. She wanted to know if I thought people believed the lies being spewed about her, lies coming primarily from a “journalist” with a massive platform.

She told me she could rest in the knowledge of “knowing two things without a doubt: I have not lied at any time in any place about anything related to my case and I have honored any/all legal agreements of which I’ve been party…” But she needed to know: How powerful were the lies being told about her? Did people believe them? “Please do me the solid of not pulling a punch of truth,” she added. In other words, she wanted an outside perspective on how damaging to her reputation these lies were, especially the lies spewed by this purported journalist.

She wrote me at 1am. I happened to be unable to sleep that night, and I responded to her at 3am.

I told her that she had been caught up in a propaganda machine. I told her that sadly, there was a group who would believe whatever was said about her no matter what. “It’s not about truth, it’s about power. And re-inventing the narrative is power.”

But I also told her that a number of men were defending her publicly, including some not known for speaking out on issues like this. (To those men, thank you. Your voices did not go unnoticed.) Having closely tracked her story, I also told her that I found her words trustworthy, and that I had reasons for that: “My sense of your honesty comes from seeing your consistency, attention to detail, and determination, over and over again, to set the record straight…Yes, I’m prone to be sympathetic to you for a variety of reasons, but because of my work I’m also careful, and don’t jump on stories that are iffy or not well vetted.” I assured her that I found her words true, and that I understood what was being said about her was false.

And then I told her this:

“They are trying to destroy you. You mean nothing to them, but you get in the way of their narrative. If I can offer you anything, it’s that this is not about you. Your story, everything that happened to you, it has now been subsumed in something much bigger. But no less evil—a word I use sparingly but deliberately. There are bigger things unfolding on a national and even global stage right now and your story got swept up in that. It comes for people who stick their necks out. We might not win this, to be honest. I think of myself as testifying to truth, whatever the outcome. You’ve done the same.

But remember: outside of what you are to them—something to be crushed for strategy and sport—there is a bigger world. The number of people who have followed your story and watched this latest attack unfold outside of SBC circles is very small. It probably feels like the whole world to you, because it’s your world. But you can step out of that world. It’s not my world. I move in and out as an observer. But when I’m outside that world, it’s obvious how small that world really is. Most people have no clue what goes on there, nor do they care. Keep in mind you can choose to leave, locking the door behind you. Others will fight for you, and can do so because of the strength of your words and witness, but in all likelihood your attackers will quickly move on to new targets.

But you can just walk away. Trust me, you can. You’ve been at the heart of an incredibly toxic system, but there are other worlds to explore.”

I wish she could have walked away from that world, forever. I wish it had not destroyed her. But she knew that it would.

More recently, we learned that Meg Basham, one of the people most responsible for smearing Jen’s name and presenting her as an immoral woman rather than as a victim of sexual assault, was at the very same time consulting with David Sills, Jen’s alleged perpetrator. According to the Baptist News:

In June 2022, Basham launched a full-force assault against Lyell’s credibility with an article titled “Southern Baptists’ #MeToo Moment” published on the first day of the SBC annual meeting. Basham said whatever number of actual abuse cases may be found in the SBC, they represent such a small percentage as to be anything but a “crisis.”

In an email to Sills, Basham shared that her own father, a lay leader of her church’s young adult ministry, had “had an affair with a woman in that group” and that she had a half-sister as a result of that relationship. Here are portions of that email:

I knew the woman well. She was like a part of our family and often babysat my siblings and I. She was a close friend of my mother and went on many vacations with us, and I frequently spent weekends shopping and having outings with her. Looking back, l don’t know if she insinuated herself into our family or if the situation developed naturally, but certainly she became very entangled in all our lives.

You can imagine how the affair upended our family when it became public knowledge….This was in the early nineties, so though my father was a leader in the church, it was (I believe rightly) characterized as a consensual adulterous relationship. But my dad and I have often talked in the last few years about how his sin might have been described if he had committed it today. We’ve talked about how he most certainly would be characterized as an abuser today and how that would have impacted my mom, my siblings and I.

I believe that a movement that tells adult women they have been abused when they participate willingly in sexual sins is unbiblical. It keeps them in a state of unrepentance and creates incentives for dishonesty, even in one’s own mind. In short, I believe the “believe all women” narrative of the MeToo movement is godless and the church undermines its power to cleanse souls and change lives by capitulating to it.

But Basham’s wasn’t the only email that caught my interest.

Having traced the SBC’s pushback to MeToo quite closely, I was intrigued by a particular set of emails released as part of the Epstein files a few weeks back.

On February 24, 2018, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein were emailing back and forth about how to stave off “times up”—an arm of the broader #MeToo movement.

Epstein raises the question of whether their opposition should have “a christian component.” Bannon responds that it should: “Populist/Nationalist first,” “Conservative Christians (catholic/evangelical) next,” which would enable them to “Reverse alabama,” presumably alluding to the case of Roy Moore, the Alabama senate candidate defeated amid allegations that he preyed on young women. Moore was a hero of the Christian Right. As I describe in Jesus and John Wayne, he had contributed a chapter to one of Doug Phillips’ homeschool textbooks (this was before Phillips himself would be embroiled in a sexual abuse scandal of his own), and none other than James Dobson endorsed him as “a man of proven character and integrity” who would “govern the nation with biblical wisdom.”

Watching the shameful way members of the Christian Right have responded to sexual abuse in their own midst, I think it is right to interrogate the theology, the hierarchies of power, and the systems of control. The Epstein/Bannon emails suggest that we should also look beneath the surface to nefarious political motivations as well.

(Interestingly, Basham herself has appeared on Bannon’s podcast, The War Room.)

All of this brings us back to Jen Lyell and the hell-on-earth she experienced once she came forward to report her abuse—again, something she only did to protect other women at risk.

Just this week, a new podcast has released covering Jen’s story—one that includes interviews with Jen herself. Better than any other source, The Silenced Truth Podcast presents the true story of what happened to Jen—before and after she reported.

Here’s an intro, from Carolyn McCulley:

Tracing the Throughline

Introducing The Silenced Truth Podcast

Some callings simply hijack you, refusing to let you go. That’s how I feel about the launch this week of the Safe to Speak Initiative and its storytelling engine, The Silenced Truth documentary podcast. I can look back at the arc of my life and see how it was nearly inevitable that I would end up working on behalf of sexual abuse survivors. The survivor…

Listen now

4 months ago · 15 likes · 6 comments · Carolyn McCulley

I have heard the same thing from survivors as Carolyn has: the abuse that happens after the abuse is more damaging—emotionally, spiritually, and physically—than the abuse itself.

Let that sink in.

Please listen here, to Jen’s episode:

And listen, too, to the podcast’s first episode, Tiffany Thigpen’s story. (Tiffany was featured in my film For Our Daughters—you will want to hear the fuller narrative of what she experienced and endured.)

Once you hear Jen’s and Tiffany’s stories, in their own words, think back to that email exchange between Bannon and Epstein. Think about why these two men might think they could bring “conservative Christians” into their scheme, and why so many appeared so eager and willing to comply. (The truth is, of course, abuse and cover-ups in conservative churches long predates this email exchange.)

And think about how successful they’ve been.

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