Black visions of the Holy Land

This survey of the relationships between US Black Churches with Israel and Palestine has just been published. Thank you Roger Baumann !

Based on 4 case studies, the author describes a very dominant African-American Christian Zionism, but with specific accents.

The relationship of the Black Churches with the land of Israel is placed under the sign of Civil Rights for the oppressed. This line distinguishes them from ultra-Zionist circles (John Hagee), & colors their Zionism with a more attentive listening to the injustices suffered by the Palestinians.

Link

Exhibiting Evangelicalism (Devin Manzullo-Thomas)

Exhibiting Evangelicalism provides the first account of the growth and development of historical museums created by white evangelical Christians in the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Exploring the histories of the Museum of the Bible, the Billy Graham Center Museum, the Billy Sunday Home, and Park Street Church, Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas illustrates how these sites enabled religious leaders to develop a coherent identity for their fractious religious movement and to claim the centrality of evangelicalism to American history.

Link

Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow, International Baptist Theological Study Centre. 

Surveying global politics and modern history, he analyzes in Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies how "Christians have discarded their commitment to democracy and bought into authoritarianism". David Gushee urges his readers to fight back by reviving their "hard-won traditions of congregational democracy, dissident Black Christian politics, and covenantal theology". 

This very important book has been motivated by the shocking events in the U.S. that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. A must-read !

Link.

Missionaries and US Diplomacy in the Nineteenth Century

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East.

Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?

To know more, read Emily Conroy-Krutz ,Missionary Diplomacy Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Congrats Emily!

Link

 

Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood

There are not that many authors who publish significant History books over a period of more than 25 years. Professor Douglas Carl Abrams is one of them.

I remember having reviewed in 2001, for the "Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions", a very good book released by this Historian of contemporary Evangelicalism in USA. It was Selling the Old-Time Religion. American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2001 (link).

In this year 2023, this lover of France has released another very valuable piece of research related to the same fields (mass culture and US Evangelicalism). It is Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Race, Gender, and Spirituality on the Big Screen (Springer, Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).

Congrats and thank you Douglas Carl Abrams.

Link

Christianity's American Fate

Christianity’s American Fate (2022) situates the ascendancy of conservative Evangelicalism within the broader transformation of American religion.

"How did American Christianity become synonymous with conservative white evangelicalism? This nuanced and informative work by a leading historian of modern America traces the rise of the evangelical movement and the decline of mainline Protestantism’s influence on American life.

In Christianity’s American Fate, David Hollinger shows how the Protestant establishment, adopting progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, empire, and divinity, liberalized too quickly for some and not quickly enough for others. After 1960, mainline Protestantism lost members from both camps―conservatives to evangelicalism and progressives to secular activism".

This book may be also taken as a contribution to the polarization thesis defended, in France, by Philippe Portier, Jean-Paul Willaime and Alain Dieckhoff.

A must-read.

Black is a church ?

Black Is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life

The title of this new Josef Sorett's book may be questionable. However, the content is largely worth reading.

"Across four chapters that proceed as chronologically organized episodes, Black is a Church maps the ways in which black American culture and identity has been animated by a particular set of, often unmarked, Protestant logics. In doing so, the book charts the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity constitutive of the content and forms of blackness."

Link

World Vision: God's Internationalists

As the amount of research on Christian Nationalism is growing rapidly (for good reasons), let's not forget that Evangelicalism per se can't be simply coined as a whole as "nationalist". A very robust internationalist and transnational trend can be noticed all over its contemporary history, including on the US ground.

Time to remind readers of this highly valuable piece of research published by David P. King in 2019 on one of the World's biggest humanitarian NGO today : World Vision.

"Chronicling the evolution of World Vision's practices, theology, rhetoric, and organizational structure, King demonstrates how the organization rearticulated and retained its Christian identity even as it expanded beyond a narrow American evangelical subculture". 

Link

Harry Belafonte (1927-2023)

"You can cage the singer but not the song"

Harry Belafonte (1927-2023)

White US Evangelicals and Politics: a documentary to watch

From the Cold War to the present day, the rise of white Evangelical Christianity in America has brought religion clearly into the public sphere. A must-watch: this three-part documentary (from ARTE Channel) on how the politico-religious machine of US white evangelicalism is determined to reshape USA.... and the world (with the participation of the sociologist Philippe Gonzalez).

Christian nationalism : PRRI 2023 survey

According to the PRRI, "The rising influence of Christian nationalism in some segments of American politics" may pose "a major threat to the health of our democracy. Increasingly, the major battle lines of the culture war are being drawn between a right animated by a Christian nationalist worldview and Americans who embrace the country’s growing racial and religious diversity".

To check this PRRI survey about Christian Nationalism (2023), click here

 

'Fundamentalism and American Culture', third edition updated

'Fundamentalism and American Culture' (Marsden) has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.

In the twenty-first century, militantly conservative white evangelicals have become more prominent than ever in American life. Marsden's volume, which now takes the history through the end of the Trump administration, remains the essential starting point for understanding the degree to which that militancy has been shaped by the fundamentalist heritage of the twentieth century. 

To read more about this third and updated edition, click here (link)

A separate Canaan

Why so many postcolonial churches today? One reason may be that the "universalism of the Gospel" taught by Europeans did not always translate/lead into a redefinition of social, economic, status boundaries.

Result: enslaved or colonized people remained both "connected and separated by the Christian faith".

A "separate Canaan"....

Without challenging systemic injustice and economic exploitation.

To bring light on this issue from a Colonial North-American perspective, let's remind this brilliant book published in 1998 by John Sensbach:

"Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals".

Link

Aimee Semple McPherson

Within my current researches on Prosperity Gospel, I am in the process of reading Matthew Avery Sutton's book:   

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, Harvard University Press (May 31, 2009)

"Her life marked the beginning of Pentecostalism's advance from the margins of Protestantism to the mainstream of American culture. Indeed, from her location in Hollywood, McPherson's integration of politics with faith set precedents for the religious right, while her celebrity status, use of spectacle, and mass media savvy came to define modern evangelicalism".

A remarkable book about one of the most influential women in contemporary Christian america.

Link

Evangelical belonging and Migrant experience (USA)

In the Hands of God: How Evangelical Belonging Transforms Migrant Experience in the United States

Johanna Bard Richlin

Why do migrants become more deeply evangelical in the United States and how does this religious identity alter their self-understanding? In the Hands of God examines this question through a unique lens, foregrounding the ways that churches transform what migrants feel.

Drawing from her extensive fieldwork among Brazilian migrants in the Washington, DC, area, Johanna Bard Richlin shows that affective experience is key to comprehending migrants' turn toward intense religiosity, and their resulting evangelical commitment.

Link

Madeleine Albright (1937-2022)

Former secretary of State (USA), Madeleine Albright (1937- 2022)i s gone.

She left a mixed legacy of strong committment to Democracy worldwide, but also of ambiguous global interventionism (including strong support for embargo on Irak, indirectly leading to DAESH's birth).

Smart and well-trained, interested by the role of Faith on Geopolitics, she published a significant book in 2006.

Its title : The Mighty and the Almighty. Introduced by President Bill Clinton. 

In that book, she argued that politics and religious values can work together to promote peace. In her seventeenth chapter about Africa, she pleaded for a better training for diplomats, who should take faith seriously. A good lesson that applies to French diplomats too.

Link.

How Christian Communities React to Right-Wing Populism

A Religious Vaccination? 

Right-wing populists across Western democracies have markedly increased references to Christianity in recent years. While there is much debate about how and why they have done so, less attention has been paid to how Christian communities react to this development. The present study addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of Christian responses to right-wing populist politics in Germany, France and the US.

Read more (link)

Why the world is becoming more French

From industrial policy and nuclear power to "strategic autonomy" and the 35-hour week, the 2020s are popularising many French instincts about world affairs and the state.

Thank you Jeremy Cliffe for this stimulating analysis (NewStatesman)

"Evangelicalism & Religious Experience in Black Women’s Activism"

This article centers Black religious women’s activist memoirs, including Mamie Till Mobley’s Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (2003) and Rep. Lucia Kay McBath’s Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith over Gun Violence: A Mother’s Story (2018), to refocus the narrative of American Evangelicalism and politics around Black women’s authoritative narratives of religious experience, expression, mourning, and activism.

Available in full access here (link)

Nationalism, American evangelicals, and conservatism

Historians Anthea Butler and Heather J. Sharkey (picture) and political scientist Michele Margolis share their thoughts on the history of American evangelicals in politics, Trump’s appeal, and what it means for the future of the GOP.

Thank you University of Pennsylvania for sharing these bright analysis.

 

Link.

Did Church-State separation REALLY slow down Slavery Abolition?

Joseph Prud'homme (Ph.D. Princeton) is the Burton Family Chair in Religion, Politics, and Culture and the Director of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College in Chestertown, MD, USA.

He just released a very interesting piece of research, "Separation of Church and State, American Exceptionalism, and the Contemporary Social Moment: Viewing Church–State Separation from the Priority of Slavery"

 His main point is this :

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power.

A very much needed scholarly book to put in historical perspective White Evangelical's contemporary positioning.

Link.

Evangelicals in Brazil and in USA : a comparative study

Debates do NER is a Brazilian biannual journal, created in 1997 on the initiative of the Center for the Study of Religion (NER), of the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

Debates do NER is currently one of the most important vehicles for disseminating research related to the Social Sciences of Religion in Mercosur. Thanks to my Brazilian colleagues Marcelo Camurça and Emerson Giumbelli, whom I warmly thank, I had the opportunity to publish in 2020 a comparative historical study on Evangelicalism, USA vs Brazil.

French documentaries on Billy Graham

Billy Graham, "America's pastor", is a global figure. The example of France is revealing. Although France can't claim more than 3% of protestants (including 1 million of Evangelicals), Billy Graham has strongly impacted the country. 

This is why the French National TV Network "France 2" has devoted a very detailed documentary to Billy Graham. The first part has been released last sunday and can still be viewed for free here : 

Link

Current debates within the "Black Church", USA: a needed book

In USA, what we use to define as "Black theology" has emphasized the role of Christian faith in addressing racism and other forms of oppression, arguing that Jesus urged his disciples to seek the freedom of all peoples.

Meanwhile, the  so-called "Black church", even when focused on social concerns, has often emphasized personal piety rather than social protest. With the rising influence of white Evangelicalism, biblical fundamentalism, and the prosperity gospel, the divide has become even more pronounced.

In The Divided Mind of the Black Church (2020), Raphael G. Warnock, Senior Pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helps us to understand the current debates within Black Protestants (mostly Evangelicals) in USA.

Link.

A prominent US Evangelical becomes Catholic

Hot news !

Mark Galli, highly respected figure of US evangelicalism, converts to Catholicism (link).

Until January 2020, Mark Galli edited the world's largest evangelical monthly, Christianity Today (with a circulation of 120,000 copies). Presbyterian, then Anglican, he eventually joined the Catholic Church in Rome.

St Louis (USA): Jean ROUAULT's religious paintings revealed again

In the middle of the XXth Century, French catholic painter Jean Rouault was received in the US as one of the major contemporary painters. Not anymore. Will an exhibition in St Louis reverse the trend?

From RNS : "ST. LOUIS (RNS) What can a nearly forgotten set of 58 masterful etchings by a man once called one of the great artists of the 20^th century tell us about the state of religious art in America?

At a rare showing of “Miserere et Guerre” (“Mercy and War”), a bleak but compelling series by the idiosyncratic French modernist Georges Rouault, the pious and the curious will have a chance to judge for themselves".

To read more, click here (link)

A major comparative book on immigrant faith (Phillip Connor)

It is more than likely that the majority of religious attenders in the Paris area today do come from an immigrant background. Immigrant faith? It's not a footnote. It is a major aspect of contemporary religion!

Thanks to Phillip Connor, Immigrant Faith (NYU Press, 2014) is providing new comparative insights on this major topic.

It examines trends and patterns relating to religion in the lives of immigrants. The volume moves beyond specific studies of particular faiths in particular immigrant destinations to present the religious lives of immigrants in the United States, Canada, and Europe on a broad scale.

Religion is not merely one aspect among many in immigrant lives. Immigrant faith affects daily interactions, shapes the future of immigrants in their destination society, and influences society beyond the immigrants themselves. In other words, to understand immigrants, one must understand their faith.

Read more here (link).

Norway best place to live, France 8th, USA 13th (2009)

The annual United Nations Human Development Index has been released today (Monday 5th of October).

According to this index, based on such criteria as life expectancy, literacy, school enrolment and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, Norway is the best place to live in.

 

Click to continue

 

United States of... France?

Did you think that since the Iraqi war, France and the US had nothing in common anymore?

Far from that.

Click to continue