While wrapping up the semester this week, I started thinking about how many of my favorite professional moments over the past few months have happened in the classroom.
I haven’t been doing much teaching the past couple of years. Calvin has generously allowed me to teach as much as I am able, covering my courses when necessary. I thought it was time to get back into the classroom, but I was anxious. I wasn’t sure how I would manage everything. I’d been asked to teach an upper-level course in religious and intellectual history, one I’ve taught once before. The topic varies, and it was my chair who suggested that I teach a course on American evangelicalism: Why don’t you bring what you do out there into the classroom? It would be good for you, and good for our students. I realized she was probably right. I’d long tried to keep some distance between my public-facing work and what I do in the classroom, but this made sense. Besides, many of my students have read Jesus and John Wayne and follow me on social media, so any sort of firewall between my two worlds was feeling increasingly artificial. I took her advice.
The first challenge was selecting readings. There are so many possible iterations a course on the history of evangelicalism could take. I decided to do an opening unit on historiography (it sounds dry, but trust me, it isn’t). Then, I assigned Thomas Kidd’s Who Is an Evangelical? and Isaac Sharp’s The Other Evangelicals.
This presented students with an accessible and well-written “insider” perspective and a more critical “revisionist” history, while covering good swath of the historical narrative. I sprinkled in excerpts and presentations of other books, as well as numerous articles and a documentary. About halfway through the semester, we began making plans for student research projects. We spent a day in Heritage Hall archives exploring connections between Calvin/the CRC and evangelicalism, and I had my students dig around in the Christianity Today archive.
My students also got to read the first 6 chapters of Live Laugh Love—my first outside readers—and we closed with a brief unit on Christian nationalism.
Earlier in the semester, we had the opportunity to talk with Jim Wallis about his time at Explo ‘72, and had the chance to meet Ken Medema there as well.
Just this week, we were able to talk with George Marsden, Nick Wolsterstorff, and Claire Wolterstorff, about their time at Calvin and their observations about contemporary evangelicalism.
We had fun reading from Sharp’s book to remind Nick what he’d once said about evangelicals’ political engagement:
In the same issue of Reformed Journal, another influential evangelical philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff, rendered a similar judgment about the implications of McGovern’s favorability for both evangelical political thought and the broader American scene. For Wolterstorff, both the senator’s willingness to openly discuss the concrete ways his personal Christian faith informed his political views and his divergence from the standard practice of politicians who merely referenced God at the conclusion of speeches to underwrite whatever they just said were a welcome breath of fresh air. There were only two major problems. For one thing, though some evangelicals were breaking ranks by signaling their support for McGovern’s platform, Wolterstorff predicted that most evangelicals would vote the other way. “Confronted with the chance to vote for someone who has heard the radical social message of the prophets, they will have voted for cynical, power-hungry, sanctimonious manipulators who promise to do nothing to disturb American values,” he noted.
We parsed the differences between various strands of our tradition: Van Til, Jellema, Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven, and heard Claire’s memories of helping to found the Evangelical Woman’s Caucus, and how important that space was for the women who joined, how they could be “fully human” there.
The conversation was such a privilege, and we could have easily talked for several more hours. In fact, several students stayed nearly an hour over to keep processing together what they’d heard.
Right now, my students are (probably frantically) finishing their research papers. A sampling of just some of the topics: an exploration of the controvery surrounding anti-lgbtq speaker David Noebel’s visit to Calvin in the 1990s and what that tells us about how the CRC approached the issue differently from mainstream evangelicals; how evangelicals imagined Israel and Palestine in the pages of Christianity Today over the past half century; changes in time with respect to Christian homeschooling in Michigan; evangelicals’ shifting views of the Amish; and a comparison of Christianity Today’s treatment of Mark Driscoll, Rachel Held Evans, and Rob Bell.
For the past 4 months, the highlight of each week has been the hours I’ve spent with these students. They’re bright, curious, diligent, and deeply insightful. They are hands-down the best part of my job, and probably also the reason I haven’t succumbed to cynicism. I’m grateful for the time we could spend together.
After teaching my last class yesterday, I was also honored to receive an award for exemplary scholarship from Calvin. It was another reminder how fortunate I am to have the support of my institution—a Christian university—at a time like this. It’s never something I take for granted.
I’ll enjoy all the good vibes for a day, and then the grading begins…
“Confronted with the chance to vote for someone who has heard the radical social message of the prophets, they (evangelicals) will have voted for cynical, power-hungry, sanctimonious manipulators who promise to do nothing to disturb American values,”
Prophetic words from Wolterstorff and a well deserved award for you...
I too am thankful for Calvin's support of your work.
Congratulations on the (well-deserved) award from Calvin. Would love to have been fly on the wall in your just-fifished Evangelicalism course!