on religion

The conquering Christ brings peace through the sword, slaying tens of thousands of opposition soldiers who fall dead, “splayed and filleted,” blood bursting “from skin and veins,” entrails gushing to the ground. In acts of unprecedented violence, Christ’s enemies get what they had coming. LaHaye’s Left Behind books have sold more than sixty-five

Among the people streaming into Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church were large numbers of Appalachian transplants. Having left rural America for new opportunities, these blue-collar migrants were searching for new forms of community and identity. They brought with them a culture of militarism (and perhaps also a suspicion of “outsiders”) that some

One by one, conservatives gained control of the denomination’s seminaries, purging faculties of moderate voices. Moderates denounced this “power-crazed authoritarianism, a win-atany-cost ethic and a total disregard for personal values and religious freedom,” but to little avail.

influence of men like Patterson (and, ironically, his wife)

To think about something, you need nothing, just like whoever or whatever created the world, or, as one of my favorite writers once put it, “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.”

Evangelical is a contested term. While I would like to argue that evangelical refers primarily to shared theological beliefs—our focus on the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus as well as our emphasis on conversion and evangelism—I can’t. Evangelical has become an identity (and mostly a white conservative identity), not just a shared set of

we have missed Paul’s bigger purpose. We have reduced his call for oneness into patrolling borders for uniformity; we have traded the “radical character” of Christ’s body for a rigid hierarchy of gender and power.

have found it useful in my work as a historian—what if I am wrong about my conclusions? Am I willing to reconsider the evidence?

Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world. Historically speaking, there is nothing surprising about biblical stories and passages riddled with patriarchal attitudes and actions. What is surprising is how many biblical passages and stories undermine, rather than support, patriarchy.