Thomas Kidd

On July 3, 2015 By Thomas Kidd In Politics Like

The Top Five Forgotten Founders

When Americans speak of the “Founding Fathers,” they usually have a group of about six men in mind: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams, for sure, and maybe Alexander Hamilton or Samuel Adams. These Founders are endlessly fascinating, but if all we do is focus on this short list, we get a skewed view of the Revolution.

I recently contributed an essay on Patrick Henry to Mark David Hall and Gary Gregg’s America’s Forgotten Founders (now in its 2nd edition, from ISI Books), which introduces readers to some of the lesser-known Founding Fathers. As I also discuss in my biography, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, Henry is probably one the best known of those forgotten Founders, but he is not quite in the top tier of those we remember. Perhaps Henry has lost some fame because of his bitter political rivalry with Madison and Jefferson in the 1780s, which culminated in Henry’s opposition to the Constitution. Some Americans have a hard time understanding how the great Patriot Henry could have become an Antifederalist.

In any case, in honor of the Fourth of July, here’s my personal list of the top five forgotten Founding Fathers, leaders I wish more Americans knew. Since I’ve already discussed him, I’ll leave Henry off, even though he’s my personal favorite. Anyone who participated in politics or the military during the Revolution could be on the list.

John Witherspoon: a Scots Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton, and teacher of James Madison, Witherspoon was elected to serve in the Continental Congress, and signed the Declaration of Independence (the only clergyman to do so). The best book on Witherspoon is Jeffry Morrison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic.

Lemuel Haynes: born in Connecticut to a white mother and black father, Haynes worked as an indentured servant prior to enlisting in theMassachusetts militia, and then the Continental Army. Haynes also experienced evangelical conversion and came under the tutelage of local Calvinist pastors. Shortly after the Declaration of Independence, Haynes wrote “Liberty Further Extended,” possibly the most powerful argument against slavery from the Revolutionary era. In the 1780s, Haynes began a thirty year pastoral career in Vermont, and was likely the first African American to pastor a largely white congregation. The standard biography of Haynes is John Saillant’s Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes.

Roger Sherman: another devout evangelical from Connecticut, Sherman was the only Patriot to sign all four of the great American founding documents: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Mark David Hall has a major new book on Sherman coming out this fall, Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic.

David Avery: converted under George Whitefield’s preaching, Avery worked as a pastor in Vermont until the outbreak of the Revolution, when he became one of George Washington’s key chaplains. He prayed over American troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and crossed the Delaware with Washington on Christmas night of 1776. I discuss Avery at length in God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution.

John Zubly: the wildcard of the list, this Swiss Presbyterian pastor of Savannah, Georgia, became perhaps the most fascinating American Loyalist of the Revolution. Zubly led Georgia’s protests against British taxes, and represented the colony in the Second Continental Congress, but as a matter of principle, he balked at the prospect of violent revolution. He left the Congress, lost his church, and for a time hid out in South Carolina’s Black Swamp before becoming Georgia’s most active Loyalist writer. The standard introduction to Zubly and his writings is Randall Miller, ed., A Warm and Zealous Spirit: John J. Zubly and the American Revolution, A Selection of His Writings.

Who would you include on the list of Forgotten Founders? Happy Fourth of July!

By Thomas Kidd

(Originally published at Patheos)

On January 21, 2015 By Thomas Kidd In Books Like

The Church and Robert Nisbet’s Quest for Community

I recently read Robert Nisbet’s classic work The Quest for Community (1953), a challenging and far-sighted book that attributes much of modernity’s unease to the collapse of the mediating institutions – village, church, and family – that traditionally stood between the individual and the state. It is a work that has inspired generations of reflection on the ongoing importance of local associations and “social capital” for the well-being of people and communities. Although Nisbet’s wide-ranging and philosophically ambitious book will be demanding for many readers, it is well worth the effort, if only to get a sense for his overarching argument. It seems as relevant as ever.

I was particularly struck by Nisbet’s comments on Protestantism and its tendency to weaken institutional religion. I might not go as far as Nisbet, for it seems to me that strong Protestant churches have had, if anything, a stronger sense of belonging and familial support than many Catholic and Orthodox congregations. Highly liturgical churches can have their own tendencies toward a superficial fellowship based on familiar rituals, but not vital relationships. Nevertheless, Nisbet’s cautions about the weaknesses of modern religion warrant attention:

The desire for religious freedom can be no greater than the desire for religious order. Lacking a clear sense of religion as a way of life, as an area of articulate membership, of status and collective meaning, man is not likely to to care for long whether he is free or not free in religious pursuits. In any event, despots have never worried about religion that is confined mutely to individual minds. It is religion as community, or rather as a plurality of communities, that has always bestirred the reprisals of rulers engaged in the work of political tyranny.

These comments cast light on the ongoing persecution of Christian churches in the Middle East, China, and elsewhere – churches with a compelling sense of collective identity, entirely separate from the state, are invariably perceived as threats by Communist and dictatorial governments of various kinds.

In America, we still enjoy substantial religious freedom, regardless of the worrying trends reflected in recent government intrusions on the sphere of religious liberty. But Nisbet is right that religious freedom cannot be an end unto itself – robust Christian community, worshiping God in spirit and truth, is the end of religious freedom. Individualized, privatized religion is unlikely to maintain orthodoxy or orthopraxy in the long haul. When the individual conscience rules, you get Henry David Thoreau, Rob Bell, and empty pews.

Individual choice and autonomy can entail an even more pernicious threat than simple liberalism, however. Indeed, it is one of the most besetting problems of all American denominations – the problem of the uncommitted, occasional attendee. These are the folks for whom life in the body of Christ is anything but “a way of life.” Their religion is a matter of supplementation and personal convenience. These are the folks who might come every few Sundays or so, but they don’t commit, don’t join, don’t invest, don’t give, and don’t serve. I don’t know that this is a uniquely Protestant problem, but it is a problem of individualized, private, voluntary religion – a hallmark of American faith since the Revolution.

Not that we would want to return to an established church or legally mandated church attendance as a solution. But church leaders can set expectations that the Christianity practiced in their congregation – for those “working the program” – is not just a matter of entertaining programming or even of reliable teaching. It is an all-encompassing way of life, where “normal Christianity” means joining the church, committing to a fellowship group, bringing your family into the rhythms of church life (rather than, say, bowing to the rhythms of sports-team schedules), giving financially, and serving in at least one ministry area. Such mobilized congregations will have the kind of fully-orbed, loving social dynamic that the Bible anticipates and the early church certainly practiced. They might also serve as the kind of mediating institution which Nisbet and others have realized that contemporary Americans so desperately need.

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Originally posted at Patheos<>

On July 3, 2014 By Thomas Kidd In Politics Like

The Top Five Forgotten Founders

By Contributing Scholar, Dr. Thomas Kidd

When Americans speak of the “Founding Fathers,” they usually have a group of about six men in mind: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams, for sure, and maybe Alexander Hamilton or Samuel Adams. These Founders are endlessly fascinating, but if all we do is focus on this short list, we get a skewed view of the Revolution.

I recently contributed an essay on Patrick Henry to Mark David Hall and Gary Gregg’sAmerica’s Forgotten Founders (now in its 2nd edition, from ISI Books), which introduces readers to some of the lesser-known Founding Fathers. As I also discuss in my biography, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, Henry is probably one the best known of those forgotten Founders, but he is not quite in the top tier of those we remember. Perhaps Henry has lost some fame because of his bitter political rivalry with Madison and Jefferson in the 1780s, which culminated in Henry’s opposition to the Constitution. Some Americans have a hard time understanding how the great Patriot Henry could have become an Antifederalist.

In any case, in honor of the Fourth of July, here’s my personal list of the top five forgotten Founding Fathers, leaders I wish more Americans knew. Since I’ve already discussed him, I’ll leave Henry off, even though he’s my personal favorite. Anyone who participated in politics or the military during the Revolution could be on the list.

John Witherspoon: a Scots Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton, and teacher of James Madison, Witherspoon was elected to serve in the Continental Congress, and signed the Declaration of Independence (the only clergyman to do so). The best book on Witherspoon is Jeffry Morrison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic.

Lemuel Haynes: born in Connecticut to a white mother and black father, Haynes worked as an indentured servant prior to enlisting in theMassachusetts militia, and then the Continental Army. Haynes also experienced evangelical conversion and came under the tutelage of local Calvinist pastors. Shortly after the Declaration of Independence, Haynes wrote “Liberty Further Extended,” possibly the most powerful argument against slavery from the Revolutionary era. In the 1780s, Haynes began a thirty year pastoral career in Vermont, and was likely the first African American to pastor a largely white congregation. The standard biography of Haynes is John Saillant’sBlack Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes.

Roger Sherman: another devout evangelical from Connecticut, Sherman was the only Patriot to sign all four of the great American founding documents: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Mark David Hall has a major new book on Sherman coming out this fall,Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic.

David Avery: converted under George Whitefield’s preaching, Avery worked as a pastor in Vermont until the outbreak of the Revolution, when he became one of George Washington’s key chaplains. He prayed over American troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and crossed the Delaware with Washington on Christmas night of 1776. I discuss Avery at length in God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution.

John Zubly: the wildcard of the list, this Swiss Presbyterian pastor of Savannah, Georgia, became perhaps the most fascinating American Loyalist of the Revolution. Zubly led Georgia’s protests against British taxes, and represented the colony in the Second Continental Congress, but as a matter of principle, he balked at the prospect of violent revolution. He left the Congress, lost his church, and for a time hid out in South Carolina’s Black Swamp before becoming Georgia’s most active Loyalist writer. The standard introduction to Zubly and his writings is Randall Miller, ed., A Warm and Zealous Spirit: John J. Zubly and the American Revolution, A Selection of His Writings.

Who would you include on the list of Forgotten Founders? Happy Fourth of July!

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On May 29, 2014 By Thomas Kidd In Politics Like

Patrick Henry, Homeschooler

By Contributing Scholar, Dr. Thomas Kidd

Patrick Henry, the greatest orator of the American Revolution, was homeschooled. Born in 1736 as the second of eleven children, he attended a small common school until he was 10. After that, his father took primary responsibility for his education. He read classics of Greek and Roman antiquity (sometimes in the original languages), ancient and modern history, and of course, the Bible. He also worked on his family’s farm, hunted, and learned to play the flute and the violin. As a young man, Henry taught himself law in order to pass the bar exam, and in 1765 he burst onto the national scene when, as a freshman legislator in Virginia, he penned the colony’s resolves against the Stamp Act and fulminated against the act on the floor of Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

His upbringing prepared him to become the “First among Patriots,” as the title of my new biography of Henry puts it. Henry’s experience wasn’t unique among the Founders, of course. George Washington and Ben Franklin also had little formal schooling. John Marshall, the future chief justice of the Supreme Court, was born in a log cabin in Virginia and had only a bit of education outside the home prior to his admission to the bar in 1780. Despite their lack of technical training, these American Patriots became part of the greatest assemblage of political talent the nation has ever known.

In the 18th century, American schooling like Henry’s was informal but purposeful. It was not designed to enhance a boy’s self-esteem, or even to train him for a vocation (Henry’s vocational training came in his daily chores on the farm). It was intended primarily to inculcate the wisdom and ethics one needed to function as a responsible citizen of his county and colony. From his parents’ tutoring, and from the great books of the British and Western traditions, Henry came to understand the importance of virtue, the fragility of liberty, and the bedrock principles of the Christian faith.

The Founders’ upbringings stand in stark contrast against those of many children today. Today, serious work for children is often deferred until the post-college years (if not longer). Public education, moreover, has largely lost its moral vision. Most people only agree today that schools should train students in “math and science” so America can remain “competitive.” But is America’s declining competitiveness mostly a matter of the failed transference of knowledge (which, admittedly, is also a problem in our schools)?

The Founding generation would suspect that, to the extent that America is in moral and economic decline, our problem is one of character and virtue. These were the primary issues that Henry’s kind of education addressed. As I wrote in an earlier review of Anthony Esolen’s brilliant Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, even highly motivated parents today seem mostly concerned with their children’s “success,” often defined by getting high test scores and admission to elite colleges and universities (schools that then offer little more than a smorgasbord of nihilism to students). Why should we wonder at revelations such as the SAT cheating scandal that has recently rocked Long Island, New York’s Gold Coast? These students are simply doing what they are told; they are trying to achieve the new American dream of amoral achievement.

In today’s terms, Henry was actually not much of a success as a young man—his first farm failed, as did two shops he tried to open. But he wasn’t a man to move back in with his parents. So he began to read in the law, and there he found his calling. In 1775 he challenged Virginians to take defensive measures against the most powerful military on the face of the earth. In words framed by classical texts and the Bible, he thundered that “an appeal to arms and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us!” With this, he lifted his arms and proclaimed, Joshua-like, “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” It was the most dramatic moment of the American Revolution, and a role Henry’s upbringing had perfectly prepared him to perform.

Originally published at Patheos.<>

On May 13, 2014 By Thomas Kidd In Family and Children Like

Should Christians Date Online?

Our friend (and one of the fabulous Baylor history Ph.D. students) Paul Putz has a fascinating piece over at the Religion and Politics blog on the deep history of Christian matchmaking in America. After discussing the intriguing “matrimonial bureau” of Omaha pastor Charles Savidge in the early 20th century, Putz reflects on the contemporary relevance and challenges of online dating sites such as ChristianMingle. Putz says that

Given the reality of our increasingly online, increasingly digital world, Christian niche dating sites serve as an easily identifiable online companion to more traditional offline means used by evangelicals to find a spouse. They allow evangelicals to adopt the broader cultural turn towards individualism in the selection of romantic partners while still remaining true to conservative evangelical insistence on intrafaith marriage. “We want Christians to marry Christians,” Moorcroft said. “We don’t want Christians to marry nominal Christians or nonbelievers at all.” And once their customers are married, Christian dating sites claim to provide help on another account: they supposedly facilitate more compatible matches, which, according toChristianCafe.com’s Fred Moesker, will help “to decrease divorce rates.” Moesker’s claim may seem dubious, but it does have at least the modest support of initial research from John T. Cacioppo and others for the National Academy of the Sciences. They conducted a recent study showing that marriages that began online were slightly less likely to end in divorce and were “associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction” than marriages that began offline.

Of course, not all evangelicals view Christian online dating in a positive light. In 2011, Christianity Today ran an opinion roundtable with the headline, “Is Online Dating for Christians?” Answers ranged from “With Gusto!” to “With Caution” to “No; Trust God.” More recently, Jonathan Merritt, a senior columnist at Religion News Service, wondered if online dating websites actually served to undermine Christian values, concerns that were echoed from another corner of the evangelical world by the Gospel Coalition. For wary evangelicals, the turn to online matchmaking could carry the potential for further detachment from involvement in local church bodies at a time when more and more Americans are willing to shun affiliation with formal religious organizations.

I am no Luddite about technology, or about newfangled ways to connect with people. For full disclosure, I met my wonderful wife through common friends, not through the internet, but we were a several-hour drive away from one another when we started courting, and e-mail did play an important role in starting our relationship. Therefore I can fully appreciate circumstances which warrant looking outside one’s own town, and one’s own congregation, for a good match, and using technology to do so.

But there may well be a price to pay for a highly individualized, digital method of dating. Yes, online dating can help singles find “like-minded” believers more readily, and evangelicals should unapologetically affirm that marrying a spouse who’s within the evangelical (or at least orthodox Christian) fold is a must. But I wonder if our approach to dating in evangelical circles implies that if you can just find the right match, wedded bliss will follow, with no thought toward the struggles or suffering that inevitably come via changing circumstances, family problems, or the garden-variety consequences of sin. Spiritual compatibility matters, but a focus on compatibility can also obscure the difficulties and gracious compromises that any healthy marriage will pass through.

The right balance, for those not called to singleness and celibacy, is to look for someone of spiritual compatibility, but to understand from the start that this is someone with whom you will share hardship and struggles as much as the much-advertised (literally) delights of Christian marriage. Instead of the quest for Mr. or Ms. Perfect, those called to marriage should pursue someone of shared values regarding family and church, but realize that for all its goodness, even the best Christian marriage only unites two sinners who are at some incomplete stage of sanctification. No matter how perfect the match, this is going to require some work.

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On October 18, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Politics Like

Evangelical Christians, Deists and America’s Founding

By Thomas Kidd

On New Year’s Day of 1802, the Baptist evangelist John Leland delivered a remarkable gift to the White House: a 1,235 lb. block of cheese. Newspapers called it the “mammoth cheese.” It came from Leland’s village of Cheshire, Massachusetts, sent by evangelical Baptists of New England, to honor their beloved president, Thomas Jefferson. For those familiar with Jefferson’s religious beliefs, the mammoth cheese is both a prodigy and a puzzle: why would devout Christians love this deistic skeptic so much?

The answer to the puzzle of the mammoth cheese goes a long way toward explaining the role of faith in the era of the American Revolution. Americans incessantly debate the place of religion in their nation’s founding. The controversy has resulted from court decisions that have progressively lessened expressions of faith from American public life and schools. Conservative Christians often argue that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that secularization betrays the country’s roots and the intentions of the Founders. Secularists, conversely, argue that most of the leading Founders were Enlightenment-influenced rationalists, and that faith played no formative role in American independence from Britain.

As I show in my book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, the relationship between John Leland and Thomas Jefferson offers a more accurate picture than does the polarized choice of either a wholly devout or wholly secular American Founding. There was real spiritual diversity among Americans in 1776; not as much as one sees today, to be sure, but there was a significant range of beliefs. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find more sharply different faiths than those of Leland and Jefferson. Leland was an evangelical preacher of incredible endurance and commitment, who traveled America’s byways telling thousands of listeners to put their faith in Jesus, the Son of God. Jefferson, by contrast, tried to keep his skepticism private, but in his retirement it became abundantly clear that Jefferson saw Jesus not as the Messiah, but only as a great moral teacher. For Jefferson, Jesus was not divine, and he did not rise from the dead. Jefferson even produced an edition of the Christian Gospels to this effect, with the miracles and resurrection of Christ literally snipped out with scissors.

Given today’s political and religious climate in America, you might assume that Leland and Jefferson would have loathed one another, but herein lies the surprise of the mammoth cheese: Leland and many evangelicals adored Jefferson, in spite of the president’s reputed skepticism. They did so because Jefferson was, along with James Madison, America’s greatest champion of religious liberty, writing Virginia’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, adopted in 1786 as a critical precedent to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion and ban on a national established church. Many evangelicals, Baptists in particular, had suffered persecution during the colonial era under the established denominations; nowhere had they suffered more than in Virginia, where even in the early 1770s some Baptist preachers remained in jail for illegal preaching. Jefferson and Madison deplored this sort of persecution, and they agitated for religious liberty, with the support of many evangelicals. The cause of religious freedom made allies of deists and evangelicals.

Did Jefferson envision a secular public sphere, as his liberal admirers might imagine today? Clues to Jefferson’s intentions came the weekend that Leland delivered the mammoth cheese, a weekend, as it turns out, that was one of the most significant in America’s history with regard to church-state relations. For this was when Jefferson sent his famous “wall of separation” letter to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, an evangelical group of Baptists who, like Leland, admired Jefferson. In his letter, Jefferson reminded them of their common commitment to the principles enshrined in the First Amendment, which built a “wall of separation” between church and state.

The evangelical New Englanders did not interpret “wall of separation” to mean rigid secularism, and indeed, neither did Jefferson. That Sunday, Jefferson attended a church service in the House of Representatives chambers, with John Leland giving the sermon. Whatever “wall of separation” meant to Jefferson, it could include holding church services in government buildings, a practice which Jefferson routinely allowed as president. This does not mean that Jefferson was personally devout, but that Jefferson was generously appreciative of the significance of faith in American public life.

So yes, the leading Founding Fathers were a diverse lot with regard to faith, and some of them, including Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were deists. Franklin actually spoke of himself as a deist, yet he also urged the Constitutional Convention to open its meetings with prayer in 1787. So even the deists were not hostile to the supportive role of faith in America. That openness to religion helped forge the alliance between deists and evangelicals, an alliance that helped secure both the new American nation, and America’s steadfast commitment to religious liberty.

Originally published here.<>

On August 27, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Culture Like

Duck Dynasty’s Cultural Christianity

I hesitate to add my two cents about “Duck Dynasty,” at the risk of revealing just how lowbrow I am, and at the risk of commenting on a show that probably has “jumped the shark,” as they say. (I cannot imagine that this season’s premiere will not be the high point of the show’s popularity.) But as recent articles by our friend Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Religion News Service have indicated, the show’s appeal raises questions about the popularity – and value – of its wholesome portrayal of Louisiana good ol’ boys, their follies, and their cultural Christianity.

First, the good things about the show: it is fun, family-friendly, and frequently hilarious. Uncle Si’s philosophical riffs about his time in ‘Nam, his views on food (and anything else) are gut-busting, as are daddy Phil’s ruminations about his ‘preppy’ sons and his suspiciously fancy grandkids. I knew people like the Robertsons growing up in South Carolina and other southern locales. I know some in Waco. They’re real, or at least as real as you can be when your family and business are being filmed.

The Robertsons are also settled on the good things in life: marriage, children, honest work, the pleasures of place and the outdoors. Spouses constantly roll their eyes at one another, but their love and commitment (on-screen, and hopefully off) is never in question. Sure, you could ask a number of questions about the South (race, poverty, etc.) outside the confines of “Robertson Land” – a delightful term used for the home place – but within, all is right with the world.

That sense of settledness is confirmed when daddy Phil prays at the end of each episode, often over meat caught or shot during the show. He thanks the Good Lord for another day on planet earth, reviews a couple details from that show, acknowledging God’s blessings with thanks, and concludes with an “A-men.” The prayer is not directed to anyone more specific than the generic God, and not usually [UPDATE: see Bobby Ross’s helpful piece on this] offered in Jesus’s name. In many other off-screen appearances, including a May 2013 NASCAR race, the Robertsons pray to and even preach about Jesus. The on-screen Jesus-less prayers are apparently a compromise with the show’s producers to reach a broader audience, and father Phil has reportedly insisted that without some kind of prayers, he wouldn’t do the show.

Here’s the dilemma – what the show presents is a good life, but it is not in any specific way the Christian life. It is cultural Christianity of the kind that still characterizes much of the South. As Hank Williams, Jr. once described country boys, “We say grace, we say ma’am, if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn.” It’s southern culture, and it’s heavily informed by Christian tradition and themes. Many Christians fit into that culture, but the culture does not equate with Christianity per se: being a good ol’ boy who thanks a vague deity at dinner doesn’t get you to heaven. From what I know of the “real life” Robertsons, they also know that generic southern theism is not, in substance, Christianity. And they use “Duck Dynasty” as a means to reveal their (Church of Christ inflected) full gospel off-camera, to very large audiences.

That’s a bargain I won’t question. But I do wonder how many of my fellow southerners figure that they’re Christians because they grew up in the South, their momma took them to church, they try to do right, and God knows there are many people worse than them. The specifics of historic Christian faith don’t enter into their thinking, and neither do they appear on-camera in Duck Dynasty.

Find out more about faith and Duck Dynasty in Joe Carter’s “9 Things You Should Know about Duck Dynasty“ and “9 (More) Things You Should Know About Duck Dynasty“

First Published at Patheos<>

On August 20, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Books Like

Book Review: Rod Dreher’s Little Way of Ruthie Leming

I recently read Rod Dreher’s remarkable book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. My expectations for the book were extremely high, as the near-universal praise of reviewers has been effusive, and Dreher is one of my favorite bloggers and writers. Reading his earlier book Crunchy Cons was uncanny: it explained a great deal of me to myself (why do my wife and I – evangelicals, Baptists, and conservatives – belong to a community-supported agriculture co-op??). The Little Way is a very different book, in which Rod Dreher explains Rod Dreher to himself. But it did not disappoint. Before I say anything else, let me get to the crux of my review: read this book as soon as you can. I have not read a more compelling, thought-provoking (contemporary) book in some time.

Some of you may know the Dreher family’s story from his blog or from other reviews, such as one at Patheos by Amy Lepine Peterson: as Dreher and his family endured the tragic death of his beloved sister Ruthie from cancer, they decided to move back to Rod’s hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana. It was a move for community and love of family. They wanted to help raise Ruthie’s daughters in her absence, and to help take care of Rod’s aging parents. They wanted to dwell among the remarkable family and friends who rose up to bless and honor Ruthie as her health declined. Although they had made friends in the big cities of Dallas and Philadelphia, they had found no community like St. Francisville.

Not that Dreher paints a rose-colored picture of his hometown, or even his relationship with his sister, which was loving but fraught with classic tensions between the carefree, self-sacrificing sister who devoted her life to that hometown, and the bookish, angst-ridden brother who could not wait to get out. That tension is one of the critical themes of the book: our culture celebrates the global, the technological, the place-less. But life in community – the kind that brings comfort when you’re dying of cancer – requires place, history, family, and settledness. Settledness that sticks even in the midst of frustration and despair.

This is the first main lesson of The Little Way: the importance of making decisions for place and community. I have now lived in Waco, Texas, for eleven years, and it is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere (we moved a lot when I was growing up). We’re just starting to feel like we’ve got a few roots here. Reading this book made me appreciate the value of having been in a church for eleven years, a house for eleven years. It’s made me think about the prospect of my children growing up in the same place their whole childhood, and having a place that is, without question, their “hometown.”

The second main lesson is the purposefulness of suffering. Ruthie’s death was shocking and incredibly painful – spiritually, emotionally, and of course physically – and Dreher does not hold back in his depictions of how his family grieved through her travail. (I defy anyone to read this book without weeping repeatedly.) But good things came out of her death, including charity, blessing, and reconciliation, that would not have happened otherwise. If you, like me, have experienced unexpected death in your family, you will find this book phenomenally helpful and redemptive.

I hesitate to raise any critical questions about the book, but I do think that some readers will find aspects of The Little Way unsatisfying. Most notably, the church, and the specifics of Christian belief, are very much in the background, and in a book on death, that is a little troubling. Perhaps the tension has to do with me being an evangelical, Rod being Orthodox (an adult convert), and Ruthie being United Methodist. Nevertheless, some Christians reading the book may realize that while they do not live in their hometown or have a tight-knit kin network, they have found true community, perhaps the most authentic community of all, in the ekklesia, among the called-out ones of the church.

I think of wandering Abraham, who left his home and lived in tents in the promised land because “he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” [Heb. 11:10] That’s the permanent hometown. Any place can feel like home if you have a good church. But this is not a either/or proposition – being rooted in your church and your broader earthly community are hardly exclusive.

Also, while remarkable spiritual experiences and divine manifestations populate the book (again, some Protestant readers might get nervous!), Dreher almost celebrates the non-theological, practical orientation of Ruthie’s faith (a faith which was clearly substantial and marked by spiritual fruit in the form of relentless acts of mercy, service, and charity). Some will wince when Rod describes her convictions this way: Ruthie “believed God existed, and loved us, and wanted the best life for us, though not necessarily the easiest life. That was all Ruthie knew about God, and all she wanted to know.” I suspect this is not literally true – did she read the Bible, or know and believe the Apostles’ Creed? God has made himself known to us, through the Word and the incarnation of Jesus. Not wanting to know more about God, then, is a bad thing. Doctrine and practice are not at odds in biblical Christianity.

But I quibble. Read this book – read it with a friend or family member. You’ll want to live differently when you do.

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On August 6, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Books Like

Do Christian Kids Need Christian Education?

There’s nothing like having school-age children to get you thinking about education. Yes, I went to college for eleven straight years (from B.A. to Ph.D.), and yes, I have taught at the college level for eleven years, too. But I had never thought so much about education — specifically, what kind of education is best for kids in Christian families — until the last few years, as we have been homeschooling our children. (We are part of a Classical Conversations homeschooling community.)

I recently reviewed David Dockery’s book Faith and Learning: A Handbook for Christian Higher Education for The Gospel Coalition. Although this excellent book is focused primarily on collegiate education, it helped me reflect on broader issues in Christian education generally. In the review I asked,

How badly do Christians need Christian education? And what exactly does Christian education entail? The answers are not always obvious. Even among evangelicals, there is no consensus about whether to put children in Christian schools, or at what level. If parents send their children to a Christian school, it is most likely to be at the collegiate level. Students often make key decisions about their faith in college, an unparalleled time of intellectual formation. Many figure that the extra expense of a private Christian college is worth it. Still, factors such as financial resources and children’s personalities weigh in the decision, made for the most part without official pressure from churches (excepting some Anabaptist and Reformed traditions).

With all due deference to people’s judgments about their own children, and to their financial circumstances, I wonder whether churches should prod Christians more directly to consider Christian education, even when public schools are not openly hostile to the faith. (Doing so would require churches to help make Christian schooling more feasible in cost and accessibility, and to make sure that the Christian schools they sponsor or recommend are truly worthy options. Just because a school is called Christian does not make it a good school.)

As I noted in the Dockery review, some very thoughtful writers have argued that Christian education is essential:

Prophetic voices throughout the past century as varied as J. Gresham Machen, Christopher Dawson, Douglas Wilson, and Anthony Esolen have insisted that placing children in state-backed, secular schools at any level is unlikely to produce Christian adults capable of proper thinking. Even if secular education is not overtly anti-Christian, these critics say, it tends to produce people who are vocationally trained rather than seriously educated. As Dawson provocatively wrote in 1961, state schools seek to create functionaries for bureaucratic and industrial systems; they form “worker ants in an insect society.” If these prophets are right, then some formal Christian education is extremely important for training intellectually adroit Christians.

Some Christians will argue that withdrawing Christian children from public schools also withdraws their Christian witness. And I know a number of Christian families who have given serious thought to educating their kids, and for a variety of reasons have settled on public school. But I suspect that many other Christian families have simply given little thought to the question. This may especially be the case in places like Waco, Texas, my current home, where parents can pretty reasonably assume that Christian students at public schools will not be harassed for their faith, at least not by teachers. But still, do the values of public education, even in towns relatively friendly to faith, accord with those of Christian education? (The question of the quality of public education is, of course, a related concern. And please note that I am a product of public schools from 1st grade through my M.A. degree.)

Public education, and private secular education, is floundering to identify any purpose these days, other than perhaps “math and science” training, and the ever-popular “critical thinking skills.” (Excellent standardized test scores and successful football teams are also good.) The modern public school system was originally intended to form citizens for democratic citizenship; perhaps that purpose lingers in some public schools today. But Christians should be wary even of education for democratic citizenship, which can easily shade into nationalism and cloud a child’s understanding that her ultimate citizenship is in the city of God.

What we know for sure, of course, is that whatever combination of public, private, or home education a child receives, the parents’ influence on a child’s mind is preeminent. But I still think that evangelicals and other Christians need to think hard about what education for their children should accomplish. This deliberation should occur as early as possible. Two great books with which to start thinking are Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Western Education and Anthony Esolen’s satirical Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, a book I reviewed at Patheos.

Representatives of the state will tell us that public education is the only normal option, and that only public schools provide the proper “socialization” of children. But Christian parents know better than to automatically defer to the wishes of the state for their children.

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Originally posted at Patheos<>google реклама на

On July 30, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Theology Like

Bible Wars and the Origins of the Term “Inerrancy”

Over at The Gospel Coalition, Andrew Wilson recently wrote a piece called “Why I Don’t Hate the Word ‘Inerrancy’.” He explains that

when asked the street-level question, “Does the Bible contain mistakes?” I always answer, “When interpreted properly, no.” That first clause is important; after all, an awful lot of people in history have thought that the Bible says the earth is at the center of the universe, flat, and built on pillars. There is also a plethora of texts whose literal meaning cannot be their original meaning—ranging from the obviously poetic (“your breasts are clumps of dates”) to the obviously symbolic (“then I saw a beast coming out of the sea”) and the obviously hyperbolic (“cut your eye out and throw it away”)—as well as a group of other texts whose literal meaning may or may not be their original meaning…

I agree with Wilson that while facile interpretations of inerrancy can back us into some unfortunate corners, it is still a good word to use. To regular evangelicals, it connotes that which is true: the Scriptures are the fully inspired, authoritative Word of God. But I think there’s an additional reason to not use inerrancy as a bludgeon, and that is the relatively recent advent of the term’s use. Indeed, the history of the word “inerrant” is a fascinating case study in the history of language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the words “inerrant” and “inerrancy” did not come into common use in English until the 19th century. Until the 1880s, their use in religious writing almost always concerned the authority of the pope (“inerrant” was employed by critics of the pope to describe his power).

This pattern abruptly changed in the 1880s, when higher critics of the Bible began to assail the doctrine of “inerrancy,” a term which higher critics themselves popularized. For instance, A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield’s seminal 1881 article “Inspiration” did not use the word “inerrant.” (It used “inspired or “inspiration” some 94 times, and “errorless” or “without error” 11 times.) The key figure in the inerrancy debate was Charles Augustus Briggs, a Presbyterian pastor and seminarian who was ultimately tried and convicted by the Presbyterian Church for his heterodox views of Scripture. The provocative Briggs argued that the theory that the Bible is inerrant was “the ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.” The Briggs trial was one of the opening shots in what became the great Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy of the early 20th century.

The problem with Briggs – and much of the inerrantist backlash against critics like him – is that he insisted on interpreting Scripture through a very narrow lens: the lens of the late nineteenth century scientific mindset. Thus, he wrote, “we are obliged to admit that there are scientific errors in the Bible, errors of astronomy, of geology, of zoology, of botany, and of anthropology.” The Bible, to Briggs, had to be judged by contemporary scientific trends. Some fundamentalists went right along with this game, saying that the Bible would be vindicated – on the exclusive grounds of the modernist scientific worldview.

We’re on safer territory – and orthodox territory – when we affirm that the Bible, every verse of it, is true in all that it claims. We, of course, may not always completely understand what it is claiming, because we do not fathom all of God’s ways, nor is it always entirely clear, as Wilson says above, whether to interpret a passage literally, poetically, symbolically, or hyperbolically. We all struggle, moreover, to remove our blinders of time and culture when reading the Scripture. This is one of the reasons church history is so important. As I once wrote with reference to Rob Bell, “when anyone claims to discover a new biblical truth, one that almost no stalwarts of the faith have believed for 2000 years, it’s a good bet they’re wrong.”

But our caveats regarding interpretation should focus on our limitations as fallen readers of Scripture, not on the supposed imperfections of Scripture itself. As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”

Originally Posted at The Anxious Bench<>online games mobi