American evangelicalism

Review: The God of Monkey Science

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Cover image of "The God of Monkey Science" by Janet Ray Kellogg.

The God of Monkey Science, Janet Kellogg Ray. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802883193) 2023.

Summary: An evangelical Christian science educator explores anti-science beliefs and being true to both faith and science.

“There she goes again… Janet and her monkey god science” (p. 3)

Janet Kellogg Ray is a science educator. The quote is an edited response from a person who disagreed with her concerning an article about public health and explains the title of this book. This is, sadly, the way evangelicals have dismissed science-based argument, even from other evangelicals. It is an example of the growing anti-science bias of many who identify as evangelical.

It also represents the leading edge of an anti-science playbook, which Kellogg identifies:

  1. The scientific evidence is sketchy, misrepresented, or simply wrong.
  2. Science threatens faith and morality.
  3. Acceptance of science comes at a cost to personal freedoms or personal beliefs.

Kellogg Ray writes as an insider, a member of an evangelical church in which many members would disagree with her views. She’s loves Jesus. And she is also a scientist who would affirm what many in her congregation would deny. God made life in the world through evolutionary processes. God works for good to save lives through vaccine research and public health measures. And God has given insight to climate scientists of how we may care for a rapidly warming world. She also explores why many evangelicals don’t believe and often actively resist these ideas.

It goes back to evolution and a fight that began with the Scopes trial and continues through a number of well-funded organizations that use the playbook identified above, first used by William Jennings Bryan. She shows how the same arguments have been used in the resistance to public health measures and vaccines during the COVID pandemic and in resistance to scientists seeking to warn the public about human induced climate change.

Along the way she explores how the anti-science groups capitalize on “research” that is flawed in methodology and not reproducible, yet presented as credible by figures in lab coats like America’s Frontline Doctors. Not only that, many are dismissive of the work, done consciously to God’s glory, by researchers like Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, the lead NIH researcher behind development of the COVID vaccine, Dr. Francis Collins, who headed the NIH and sequenced the human genome, or Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, an environmental scientist and spouse of an evangelical pastor. Instead of celebrating how these and many other Christians have brought faith and science together, they attack them.

Kellogg Ray shows how opponents not only attack science but arouse fears that constitutional and religious freedoms will be taken away. (The irony is that many leverage social media and freely give away vast amounts of personal information while using technology that is the fruit of sophisticated scientific research!)

So, how then ought people of faith live in the modern scientific world? First of all, she calls for mutually respectful listening and conversation instead of a climate of suspicion and fear. She proposes that we speak to facts with faith. Instead of denying evolution, why not admit what science tells us but explore how Christ offers our lives meaning? How does Christianity call us beyond a “me-first” survivalism? She challenges us to step back and see the damage of science denialism in those leaving evangelical churches and others dismissive of Christianity altogether. Above all, she reminds us that if all truth is God’s truth, we need never fear the findings of science.

This was a hard book to read. It brought to mind the many fine Christians I know working in scientific research who bear wounds from the “friendly fire” of fellow believers. I’m reminded of how troubling I’ve found Christian misrepresentation, and sometimes, outright lies. It is not that others never lie, but this is never warranted by followers of the one who is Truth. I’ve watched students walk away from faith, not because of the science, but because of how their churches have dismissed their questions. It reminded me of online conversations with Christians during COVID where a reading of Constitutional rights took pre-eminence over the love of neighbor.

I have questions about how fruitful Kellogg Ray’s recommendations will be. But her concluding chapter reminds us that our call is to faith and faithfulness. But that may very well mean being the minority even in our own Christian communities. It could also mean finding common ground with non-believing but spiritually seeking people. In reading the gospels, I’m encouraged that this is where we find Jesus.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Speakeasy for review.

Review: Good Book

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Cover image of "Good Book" by Jill Hicks-Eaton.

Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves, Jill Hicks-Eaton. Fortress Press (ISBN: 9781506485850) 2023.

Summary: An argument that evangelicals try to explain away the misogyny and patriarchy that the author finds inherent in the biblical text.

Jill Hicks-Eaton subtitles this book “How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves.” In the interest of full disclosure, I am probably one of those “white evangelicals” the author has in mind. I’m a cisgender, white male, college and seminary educated, and a recently retired collegiate ministry whose career was spent working for a major evangelical campus ministry. I signed yearly, and still agree with, a statement that affirmed the ‘inspiration, authority, and trustworthiness” of the Bible. But I’ve also been sent a copy of the book for review and want to do due diligence with that obligation.

The author writes:

“The goodness of the Good Book is not a given.

The Bible’s goodness is also not an illusion. Better, its goodness is a construct. The Bible’s benevolence, like the Bible itself, is made and remade.”

Her contention is that evangelicals engage in a project to construct what is not a given, a Good Book out of a collection of texts that describe unspeakable violence, sometimes sanctioned by God, as well as misogyny and patriarchy. The latter is not merely described but prescribed. Furthermore, Hicks-Eaton contends that misogyny and patriarchy is evident in the lives and teaching of two major figures of Christianity: Jesus and Paul. But she not only makes this case, which others have made, but that evangelicals have made a concerted, and in her mind, a failed attempt, to distance themselves from these invidious realities. She engages the attempts to “make the Bible good” of apologist Paul Copan, pastor Dan Kimball, theologian Scot McKnight, and historian Beth Allison Barr among others.

She argues that this effort, which she also calls “the Bible benevolence project,” is insidious in upholding structures of misogyny and patriarchy within evangelicalism, either refusing to see the structurally embedded character of these, or justifying them. And women are hurt by this effort to make the Bible “good.”

First of all, her critique is not without warrant. Christians have often glossed over the hard passages. I’ve argued that Christian book banners ought to be careful because the Bible contains accounts of violence, including sexual violence that makes some of the books they want to ban look tame by comparison. I’ve also seen people use the Bible to defend slavery, patriarchy, racial injustice, environmental exploitation, conquest of indigenous peoples, and more. It does beg the question of how a book that can be used to support such things is “good.” With regard to women, I’ve not only seen gifts denied but women endangered and abused.

She raises an important question. The world is a place of violence, misogyny, and patriarchy. It was over the centuries that the Bible was composed. It is now. Is the Bible, as well as our attempts to interpret it, inescapably tainted by these persistent evils? And if it is, wouldn’t we do better to stop trying to justify it as “good”?

This review is not the place to address these questions. Unfortunately, there are problems with this book that make it an inadequate attempt to address these matters as well.

First, while the author would have us believe she is engaging in a fresh reading of the texts, unencumbered by “Bible benevolence,” I found her treatment of texts guilty of eisegesis that would be flagged in any seminary class. One example is her reading of Mark 5 and the story of the woman with the flow of blood. She’s dismissive of interpreters who note Jesus anti-patriarchal actions. He makes a male synagogue leader wait while listening to the woman’s twelve year affliction, he speaks tenderly to her as “daughter” and pronounces her healed. Had she been allowed to slip away, she may have doubted whether something had really happened to heal her. But the author reads all this through a patriarchal lens. No hermeneutic is neutral, but the question I would pose, is our hermeneutic generous or suspicious?

Second, I found her selective in who she chose to engage with, often choosing more popular authors but not addressing the extensive scholarship on the many texts she deals with. On the question of biblical violence, she cites popular apologist Paul Copan, ignoring serious scholars like Peter Craigie and Daniel Hawk who have addressed these questions. This is not a scholarly work, although written by a university professor.

Third, I felt she engaged in a form of chronological snobbery that looked judgmentally on figures like Paul, planting churches in a culturally hostile context. She doesn’t reckon with someone who was nearly murdered several times. Simply believing that Jesus, and not Caesar, was king was radical enough. Paul’s household instructions can be argued to subvert, if not overturn patriarchy. But nothing less than a frontal assault on patriarchy seems sufficient for the author, even though it would have spelled the death of the nascent movement. And Hicks-Eaton doesn’t even consider the popularity of Christianity among women and slaves in the early centuries that may say more about its real character.

Lastly, the author only offers what I would propose is a “hermeneutic of suspicion” in her treatment of the biblical text. She says nothing about how churches, evangelical or otherwise, ought use scripture. From what I can tell, she has engaged in a journey out of Southern evangelicalism. I find myself wondering what she has replaced this with in her own life. Or is this a deconstruction still in process? She mentions “what kinds of reading are promising for tackling the hard parts of the bible without rejecting or dismissing it entirely.” But I did not find that in this book–perhaps the next one!

I’ve been more critical than I usually am in reviews because I had hoped for a better book. The author asks important questions and offers an important critique of at least some of the efforts to try to make the Bible a “good book.” But I would have liked better textual analysis, better scholarly engagement, and constructive proposals for those who do care about the Bible.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Speakeasy for review.

Review: The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory

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The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, Tim Alberta. New York: HarperCollins, 2023.

Summary: A several years-long study of why much of the evangelical movement turned to hard right, nationalist politics, ignoring character and embracing the pursuit of power to enforce its vision of American greatness.

Tim Alberta, a writer for The Atlantic, who had written articles critical of the former president, was stunned in the summer of 2019 when his father, an evangelical pastor outside Detroit, died suddenly of a heart attack. What stunned him even more was that a number of people at his father’s funeral, instead of offering comfort and condolences, took him to task for what he had written. One, a family friend, left him a letter accusing him of being a traitor. Subsequently, conversations with his father’s successor, Chris Winans, told a tale of controversy during COVID over church closures, mask mandates and more. Winans watched many depart for a church down the road preaching a political gospel people wanted to hear instead of the counter-cultural gospel of Jesus Pastor Winans preached.

All this set Alberta on a cross-country quest to understand what was happening in much of American evangelicalism, from a tent church in the South, to the ministry of Robert Jeffress, to the campus of Liberty University. Alberta remains a faithful Christian and this book is not an exvangelical hatchet job. Much of the book allows leaders in their own words to talk about their embrace of an American greatness gospel, motivated by an idea of reclaiming a white vision of America in the 1950’s, even as boomers from that era began to die off and the actual population of the country became far more culturally diverse. He questions the flip-flop from the excoriation of Bill Clinton for his moral failures to the embrace of a president just as flawed, if not more so. He received no good answers, just the justification that the needs of the hour required such a man. Some interviewees expressed quiet reservations not reflected in their subsequent public rhetoric.

He also chronicles the stories of the wounded. Russell Moore was a former leader of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Church, a man of impeccable religious conservatism who nevertheless opposed the former president and also stood up against sexual abuse in the church against its executive leadership. He was forced out and left the denomination. David French, fought for religious liberty cases on university campuses and at one time wrote for the National Review. When he wrote against the former president, the threats became so bad, both he and his wife began carrying firearms. One of the most courageous was a Liberty University professor, popular with students being fired for not obeying the administration. He refused to resign, accept a severance package and sign a non-disclosure agreement. He offers an account of Rachael Denhollander, fighting for anti-abuse policies in the Southern Baptist Church while forced out of her own congregation.

He portrays his own father’s embrace of the culture wars and efforts to reclaim American greatness, and how the seeds that bore fruit in 2015 were sown many years earlier through Falwell’s Moral Majority and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition. Combine that with congregations nourished on talk radio and conservative cable news networks and you had a populace discipled, not by the gospel of Jesus but by the gospel of America. Instead of a vision for a global kingdom of God, what mattered was the kingdom of America. Instead of zeal for the greatness of God, it was zeal for the greatness of America. In short, what Alberta portrays is political idolatry in the guise of Christianity.

What’s troubling to see is people from rural pastors to Jerry Falwell, Jr., using this gospel to build their own kingdoms, drawing off people from other congregations with the lure of their false gospel. For some, there is power and glory in their nearness to earthly political power. And while all this is happening, many Gen Z children are heading for the exits, and many others as well.

Alberta concludes where he began, at the church his father once pastored. He’s heartened to find that, despite all the wounds, Chris Winans has persisted, pursuing a strategy of “pull, don’t push” with his people, offering sound teaching to make them question their own beliefs. The church had replaced its losses and was leaning into a vision of faithful presence in the culture rather than “owning the libs.” He entertains the hope, even as he wonders how this all will work out that this “hidden gospel,” hidden in quiet acts of everyday faithfulness will lead to a new revealing of Christ.

Jesus said we cannot believe in both God and Mammon. This is the kind of choice and the kind of divide that runs through the accounts of this book. I’m increasingly struck through recent reading that the draw of Mammon is the belief that it works. That seems the only justification people offer for embracing a political faith so opposite the teaching of scripture. What is not said is that in so doing we are saying that we don’t believe in the way of Jesus, the way of loving enemies, of expanding the reach of his rule to “sinners,” Samaritans, and even Gentiles, and walking the way of the cross. Are we willing to persist in what is foolish and weak, believing it reflects the power and wisdom of God?

Part of the challenge is that our attention, on social and news media, is on the gospel of Mammon. During his remarks at his father’s funeral, and in a recent interview, Alberta repeatedly offers the challenge that if we claim to place Jesus first, that we spend more time in scripture, in reading nourishing Christian books and taking in podcasts and sermons, than listening to the media of Mammon. Perhaps, in this season of Lent, fasting from this media and feasting on the word of God may be a start. Hopefully, it will remind us whose kingdom, power, and glory we are called to seek.

Review: The Evangelical Imagination

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The Evangelical Imagination. Karen Swallow Prior. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: A consideration of the images, stories, metaphors that constitute the “social imaginary” of what it has meant to be an evangelical.

A number of commentators both within and outside evangelicalism have tried to make sense of the evangelical movement in North America at a time when it is in crisis and many are deserting churches or even the Christian faith associated with that movement. Karen Swallow Prior grew up in this movement, imbibed its culture, and taught at one of its flagship institutions for many years. She writes as an insider who has seen its strengths and flaws and has not given up or departed.

The premise of this book is that every culture has a “social Imaginary,” a term drawn from Charles Taylor, that refers to the shared stories, metaphors, and images by which a culture makes sense of the world and itself. In this work prior unpacks a series of terms and the stories and images evangelicals by which evangelicals have articulated both their own culture and its interaction with the world: awakening, conversion, testimony, improvement, sentimentality, materiality, domesticity, empire, reformation, and rapture. She uses the tools of her academic discipline of English literature to explore these ideas both in literature and in evangelical and wider popular culture.

Each chapter explores the development of the particular term or metaphor. For example, Prior traces the idea of “testimony” in both Dickens Hard Times (with Mr. Gradgrind’s “facts” about a horse a far cry from its meaning) and Scrooge’s “conversion” testimony in A Christmas Carol. She explores how testimony and the literate culture that acompanied it might be traced through Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and on to accounts by Thomas à Kempis, John Newton, Philip Doddridge, and William Wilberforce. And she chronicles the rise of “evangelically speaking” where telling a good story takes precedence over truth and the necessity of being able to tell one.

Part of the power of this book is to show how the distinctive imaginary of evangelicalism is double-edged, having elements that genuinely reflect the work of God as well as toxic distortions of those elements.There is both the awakening of conscience to sin of the great awakenings and the resistance to awakening to the systemic character of our nation’s racial sins in which “woke” becomes pejorative. Conversion reflects a concern that one not be a Christian in name only but be transformed through new birth into abundant and eternal life with Christ and yet becomes truncated if it does not lead to the continuing conversion of being formed into Christlikeness in all of life. Even empire might reflect the aspiration that “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun/does its successive journeys run” that fueled genuine advances of Christianity to many parts of the world, only to be co-opted by the empires of white nations that colonized much of the world, or even the entrpreneurial evangelical ministries that built their own empires, often around human personality.

At the same time, what makes this book a joy to read is Prior’s ability to move between literature, history, and popular culture as she does in her chapter on “sentimentality” in which she ranges English and Scottish philosophy to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to Sallman’s Head of Christ, and to the art and personal habits of Thomas Kinkade. All this is reflected in her intriguing subtitle “Uncle Tom, Sweet Jesus, and Public Urination,” the last part of which I will leave you the fun of discovering.

Prior’s point in this exploration is perhaps articulated best when she writes, “To be a product of a subculture–to inherit unthinkingly, uncritically, and assumingly all its images, metaphors, and stories–is to plagiarize a faith” (p. 218). In her chapter on reformation, she contends that evangelicalism is in a time of reckoning. We cannot unthinkingly parrot the metaphors that have shaped us without being re-formed in the way of Christ, shedding the accreted distortions of the evangelical imagination. Prior points the way toward this in her final chapter on “rapture” where she concludes that we should not focus on being caught up with Christ in some future “rapture” but be “enraptured by him, to be beholden to him, to be taken by him” (p. 258) here and now.

I’ve sometimes wondered if the problem of evangelicalism is a lack of imagination. Prior’s book suggests to me that it may not be a lack of imagination but what we’ve been imagining. Prior takes a critical step back, aided by both literary and cultural interlocutors to help us identify what is often assumed, to question it, and under God’s grace, to give up our feeble imaginations for the robust imagination of Christ and his kingdom.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Testimony

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Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation, Jon Ward. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: A national journalist who grew up in an influential evangelical movement describes his separation from this movement as he witnessed its embrace of control and power, both within churches, and in increasingly authoritarian politics, at the expense of both truth and character.

Jon Ward is a national correspondent with Yahoo News who has covered the White House as well as several presidential campaigns. He is also the child of parents who came to faith in the Jesus Movement revival of the early 1970’s. That caught my attention. The Jesus Movement was significant in the spiritual journeys of both my wife and myself. And the words “the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation” in the subtitle are deeply troubling to me. I’ve written about the spiritual ideals and vision for society of evangelicals of my generation, and am deeply chagrined with how so much of this has unraveled. We failed our children.

Ward was born in 1977, several years after the wave of the Jesus Movement swept through the country. In its wake, a number of independent churches formed, many charismatic, believing in the baptism and gifts of the Spirit and worship expressing ecstatic emotion. He grew up in one such church in the Maryland suburbs of DC. His church, initially called the Gathering of Believers was pastored by C. J. Mahaney and Larry Tomczak. Ward’s father was also a pastor for a time until he was asked to step down, for reasons later found to be suspect.

He describes the Christian culture of the time, the music, personalities like Keith Green, who tragically died young, going to early pro-life rallies, the first connections of pro-life and Republican politics, a mission trip to South America, doing skits and getting people to pray. He describes the growing sense of being in a culture war, books like This Present Darkness that framed things as spiritual warfare. He describes the distrust of the intellect, learning how to feel and what to believe, but not having any understanding of why or any sense of engaging with the culture. It was an enclosed, insular life in church and Christian schools and Christian music. The church became Covenant Life Church. Larry Tomczak was forced out and moved the Cleveland. He describes people being slain in the Spirit and his own experience of being prayed for, feeling nothing, except C.J. Mahaney gently pushing him backward. He went along and fell–and began to wonder. Yet he eagerly wanted to please God and his leaders and around 1998 went on a trip with Mahaney to one of Louie Giglio’s Passion Conferences, being groomed for leadership, along with Josh Harris.

Then Mahaney took a right turn into the New Calvinism. This was also the time of the purity movement and “accountability” groups. By this time, Ward was a student at the University of Maryland and felt he was suffocating. It was time to get out. Teaching for a couple years, he pursued writing, getting a job with the Washington Times. He was a part of Chuck Colson’s Centurions course, and for the first time, was challenged to a faith with intellectual heft. While he left Covenant Life, on its way to becoming Sovereign Grace Ministries, he followed developments in the church of his parents–two streams. One was Mahaney, a thinker, gifted speaker, and increasingly exerting control over the churches within the movement. The other was Lou Engle, a culture warrior, seeing politics and spiritual warfare as conflict, violent if necessary. He describes both the scandals around Mahaney’s use of power, and later, Sovereign Grace’s cover up of sexual abuses, even while sharing the platform with Al Mohler at Together for the Gospel conferences.

By 2013, he is working for Yahoo News as a national correspondent. Because of his background, he covers Republican politics and the deepening alliance between evangelicals focused on abortion and sexuality issues, even as the party turned toward Donald Trump. Meanwhile, he is growing in his awareness of the grievances of Blacks, getting to know the work of Bryan Stephenson and others, and how the racial fault lines of the country were being exploited, giving encouragement to the White Supremacist movements and the tragedy at Charlottesville. He recounts watching people he cared about, even most of his family, become radicalized by this movement. ignoring flaws of character, outright lies, racist rhetoric and more, simply to advance pro-life and pro-American values. He painfully describes his pleas with his father, only grudgingly heard after January 6.

As the book ends, as disheartened as he is by political developments and the failings of the churches in which he grew up, exacerbated by the pandemic, he also describes a deepening Christian life, learning to pursue the way of the cross rather than the way of acclaim or power. He believes this is what the church needs to be about. He decries the attack on truth, and the complicity of those who should believe in truth. He argues, from his experience as a journalism, that we are in desperate need of nuance in a world the reduces things to soundbites. Many of the things we confront are complicated and good solutions are achieved by people who do the hard work of listening, who achieve workable compromises. He believes in the role of evangelicals who have followed neither the C.J. Mahaney’s down theologically precise, narrow roads nor the Lou Engles who frame things as a black and white battle. They are those who forgo dominance for repentance, seek reconciliation rather than race wars with Blacks, and seek to rebuild rather than tear down institutions.

This, for me was a powerful “testimony” in two ways. One was in how it traced the diversion through its weakest elements, of a genuine movement of God through the Jesus Movement. The anti-intellectualism, the framing of the church as a persecuted minority in a spiritual battle created the foundations for the political captivity of evangelicals in the Trump era. While many of us traveled different roads than Jon Ward, we recognize the landscape.

The other is in its call for the remnant who did not bow to these things to Christian faithfulness in this time–to repentance, to the way of the cross, to relational healing and racial justice and reconciliation, and to institutional and intellectual renewal. Only God knows if the tide can be turned–indeed he controls the tides of history. But we cannot sit around and feel sorry for ourselves–there is still work to be done!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Coming Race Wars

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The Coming Race Wars, William Pannell. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.

Summary: A new edition of a book first released in 1993 following riots in Lost Angeles, calling the evangelical church to address the issues of racial justice in the country. The new edition shows the prescience of Pannell’s observations and the even greater urgency of coming to grips with our racial transgressions.

The year 2020 was not unlike 1992 in a number of ways. In 1992 riots broke out in Los Angeles and other cities over the acquittal of officers involved in the beating of Rodney King. In 2020, people took to the streets once more in anger over the police involved death of George Floyd. In 1993, William Pannell, a Black evangelical who taught at Fuller Seminary wrote the first edition of this book as a wake up call to the White evangelical church to deal with the ways it was implicated in the legacy of racism in America. It is a cry of the heart combined with a social analysis of American culture.

This new edition, introduced by Jemar Tisby, a Black Christian leader of this generation, draws the arc between the book’s original publication and the present, noting some of the ways that Pannell’s analysis was prophetic, prescient in identifying both the deepening of our cultural divides around race and the neglect of a prosperous evangelicalism to address these issues. In the first chapter of the book, Pannell extends the arc further back. Evangelicals were largely silent in the years of Dr. King, choosing instead to migrate to the suburbs.

Pannell then discusses the black male, and all the ways black men were excluded from economic progress during the Reagan years. He traces the beginning of Republican efforts to play on discontents of the working class to drive a deep divide between them and Blacks where once there had been shared interest. He describes a multiculturalism that displays diversity without allowing Black evangelical leaders real influence. Against the popular focus on violence in the cities, Pannell decries the psychological violence of the warfare between city and suburb and unequal education systems.

The evangelical church of the 1990’s is a big part of this warfare. Black churches are no less evangelical than their white sisters in the suburbs. He chides Christianity Today as becoming Suburban Christianity Today, reflecting both in the housing patterns of its staff and the network of ministries on which it reports a highly networked suburban evangelicalism far removed from their sister churches in the city. In his original concluding chapter, he asks “where do we go from here?” and in the words of Rodney King, “Why can’t we get along?” He believes that an evangelicalism infatuated with ministry in the countries of the former Eastern bloc ought instead consider its own cities. He calls for reconciliation, and with it a ministry that unflinching speaks against the sins it is politically incorrect to denounce, both personal and social. He calls for a spirituality centered on the development of character. He calls for discipleship.

In his afterword, while not losing hope, acknowledges that white evangelicalism has unraveled in many of the ways he feared, becoming a church that looks for revival in the form of Christian nationalism, where most evangelicals align with “Make America Great” while from across the divide comes the cry “Black Lives Matter.” He leaves open what will become of a race war that already exists in the psychology and structures of the country. What he calls for in the end is the making of disciples. He observes that if we set out to make churches, we may miss making disciples, but if we call people to be the disciples of Jesus who become the “beloved community” Dr. King envisioned, we will be the church, which he believes our only hope.

The striking thing to me about this work is how evangelical it is. It is a call to conversion from affluence and infatuation with the American dream to following Jesus, becoming salt and light. It is Christ and cross centered, a call to a downward journey amid a church infatuated with power and access. It is a call to be shaped by our Bibles and to act in light of them. The most chilling part of the book’s analysis for me was to see his anticipation of what would come to fruition in 2016 and 2020 in the driving of a wedge between the working class and Blacks where once they shared values of both social and economic justice. Pannell also sees through the heady growth of evangelicalism in the 1980’s and 1990’s to its spiritual bankruptcy and questionable strategies of church growth that are now bearing fruit in the unraveling of many of these mega-ministries.

I wonder how Pannell’s words about reconciliation would be received today when the conversation has shifted to reparations, the repairing of the harms done over our four hundred years. Perhaps that is for another conversation. What is striking for me is how much Pannell saw with clarity nearly thirty years ago and how much benefit remains in listening to him today. I’ve seen Pannell compared to Jeremiah. The question is whether we will give him greater attention than the prophet. Let us hope.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.