The MAGA agenda marks Make America Great Again as a classic restorationist movement, sharing its most basic assumption with restorationist movements that have appeared over the course of Christian history — the 16th-century Anabaptists, for example, or in America, Baptists,…
The lies my country taught me
When I was 12 years old, growing up in the 1950s, I gathered every Saturday with hundreds of kids my age at the downtown theater in my West Texas town where the silver screen fed us lies that passed for…
The pattern is contempt for the poor
The pattern emerged in the biblical text when the prophet Nathan confronted the king of Israel and said, “Thou art the man.” And in the United States, that very same pattern now has become crystal clear. The pattern is contempt…
A small act of resistance: On teaching while woke
I remember well the day I heard the word “woke” for the very first time. It came from the mouth of a Black scholar addressing a conference on “Public Theology and Racial Justice” at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. It…
The Servant-God, not Trump, is Lord of All
In September 2021, a massive billboard promoting Donald Trump loomed high above Highway 27 in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., with the words of Isaiah 9:6, a biblical text long cherished by Christians, emblazoned over an American flag: “Unto us a son…
How MLK’s questions became my questions too
When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in April 1963, I was a sophomore Bible major at a church-related college in the South, studying to become a preacher. None of my professors suggested that I read…
‘Yes, they are children of Nazis, but we are Christians, and we will stand with those who suffer’
When the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, Gerrit tenZythoff was 17 years old and leading the sort of life that was common for teenage boys even then — a life filled with schoolwork and sports and good friends. And then…
Pledging allegiance to the kingdom of God
It is no small thing to grow up in a religious tradition that claims for itself the title, “the one true church.” To be taught that I alone was right while all my friends were wrong and on the road…
How the oldest American lie sustains our racial malaise
I have spent 50 years teaching college students from coast to coast and points in between, and while much has changed over the course of those 50 years, one thing has remained unchanged: the students’ abysmal ignorance of the negative…
How American exceptionalism is killing America
Many ironies define the United States, but none is more harmful than this: We routinely silence the life-giving voices that can save us and amplify the death-dealing voices that can kill us. The voices that can save us are those…
How slavery still shapes the world of white evangelical Christians
Without meaning to do so, Henry Louis Gates’ two-part series on “The Black Church” dramatically exposed the gaping chasm that divides the way Black Christians and privileged white Christians — especially white evangelicals — understand God, protest and politics. For…
Christian America’s betrayal of the kingdom of God
The storming of the American Capitol on Jan. 6 — with its profusion of Bibles, crosses and other Christian symbols — placed a gigantic exclamation point on the unease American Christians always have felt with the First Amendment to the…