Book Reviews

Summary: A religious biography of Jimmy Carter focused on his progressive Evangelicalism and the rise of the religious right.

I have begun to pay more attention to Jimmy Carter since I moved to Georgia 15 years ago. I was able to go to one of the quarterly report meetings of the Carter Center about seven years ago and was duly impressed, not just with the ongoing work of the Carter Center, but with Carter’s sharp takes on current events. The event was a breakfast meeting at 7 AM. It followed an evening conference that Carter had hosted, which did not conclude until 10 PM the previous night. Carter has a murphy bed in his office at the Carter Center, so he would have slept in his office. As part of the question and answer time, Carter cited four different articles from several newspapers that he had read that morning before the breakfast meeting. He had compelling thoughts on questions as diverse as North Korean proliferation, Black Lives Matter organization, protests of police brutality,  environmental issues, and personal practices as a leader.

Part of what is fascinating to me isn’t just Carter’s post Presidental career, but how much of a transitional figure he has been to American politics. As I learned in the book, Carter was the first president born in a hospital. But his family home did not have running water until he was 11 and didn’t have electricity until he was 14. Carter was on the local school board during the integration era after Brown v Board. And he was pressured to join the local White Citizen’s Council, but resisted. He attempted to get his church to accept Black members in the 1960s, but there were only three votes in favor, including his and his wife’s. His church was still segregated when he became President, and the pastor was fired in 1977 for attempting to integrate it. That led to a church split, and for the remaining two years, he alternated between the two churches when attending church at home. He joined the new, integrated church the week after leaving the White House. It is incredible to think that a sitting president, known for his racial activism, was still attending an overtly segregated church.

Jimmy Carter was born in 1924. Which made him was younger than Reagan (1911), who was older than Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon (both born in 1913). George Bush and Jimmy Carter were born the same year, but then George W Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump were all born in 1946, a generation younger.  The changes in the US since Carter’s birth are significant.

Randall Balmer’s primary thesis in Redeemer is well summarized in this quote from early in the book:

In the simplest terms, the brief recrudescence of progressive evangelicalism in the early to mid-1970s gave way to a conservative backlash, a movement known generically as the Religious Right, a loose coalition of politically conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. The leaders of the Religious Right faulted Carter and his administration for enforcing the antidiscrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act in evangelical institutions. They criticized his support for human rights abroad and equal rights for women and for gays and lesbians at home. Having joined the ranks of abortion opponents in 1979, the Religious Right castigated Carter for his refusal to outlaw abortion, despite Carter’s long-standing opposition to abortion and his efforts to limit its incidence. By the time of the 1980 presidential election, evangelical voters overwhelmingly abandoned Carter and threw their support to Reagan, the candidate who, with his faltering grasp of the essentials of evangelical theology and his episodic church attendance, had perhaps the most tenuous claim on the label evangelical.

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Summary: An ethnographic study of an interracial church with context from national church research. 

A friend of mine recommended The Elusive Dream a year or so ago, and since then, I have listened to several interviews with Dr. Korie Edwards as well as most of her podcasts from this year. This allowed me to be familiar with the rough outline and look forward to reading the book. The Elusive Dream is an adaptation of Dr. Edwards’ dissertation. A second edition of the book came out in Oct 2021, but the copy I read was the first edition from 2008.

The Elusive Dream is an ethnographic study of an interracial church at its heart. Most interracial churches are white-led (70% according to recent research by Michael Emerson), and most multiethnic churches (where no racial/ethnic group has more than 80% of the congregation) are still majority white. Dr. Edwards chose a church to study that was Black-led, not a recent church plant, and when she started her research, was still majority white. This means that even among multiethnic/interracial churches (which are 16% of congregations according to Emerson’s research above), Edwards chose a church that was unusual. But during the years of her study, the congregation shifted from majority white to majority Black. That shift is central to the reality of interracial churches. Even with Black leadership, and especially with white leadership, interracial churches tend to center white cultural expressions of church.

As discussed in Myth of Colorblind Christians, many churches in the US have focused on church growth through the Homononous Unit Principle, a concept that advocates churches orient around a single cultural expression for the purpose of better evangelizing people of that culture.  That principle still has some influence in interracial and multiethnic churches because many of these churches tend to not have diverse representations of class, education, or culture, even if they are racially or ethnically diverse. This is how Dr. Edwards describes it early in the book:

However, as I continued to visit interracial churches across the country, I noticed a pattern. Nearly all of the churches, regardless of their specific racial compositions, reminded me of the predominantly white churches I had visited. Generally, the churches were racially diverse at all levels. Whites and racial minorities were in the pews and in leadership. There were sometimes cultural practices and markers that represented racial minorities in these congregations, such as a gospel music selection, a display of flags from various countries around the world, or services translated into Spanish. Yet the diversity did not seem to affect the core culture and practices of the religious organizations. That is, the style of preaching, music, length of services, structure of services, dress codes, political and community activities, missionary interests, and theological emphases tended to be more consistent with those of the predominantly white churches I had observed. These churches exhibited many of the practices and beliefs common to white churches within their same religious affiliation, only with a few additional “ethnic” practices or markers. It was like adding rainbow sprinkles to a dish of ice cream. In the end, you still have a dish of ice cream, only with a little extra color and sweetness.

One of the most important things to state clearly is that segregation of churches was the result historically of white racism. Churches were generally integrated prior to the Civil War, although they were white-controlled. After the Civil War, Black congregants were no longer required to submit to white leadership and began to form new Black-led congregations to fully express their Christian faith. According to Edwards by 1890, it is estimated that 90 percent of Black Christians attended a Black-led congregation. Again, this is not because Black Christians were resistant to worshiping with Christians of other races, but because they were segregated within other churches or excluded from churches completely.

Elusive Dream refers to the dream that Martin Luther King Jr spoke about in his famous speech. That dream remains elusive not just because of differences in worship styles, although there are differences in aggregate between racial groups as a result of historic segregation of worship. That dream remains elusive because culturally, white Christians as the demographically and culturally dominant group within the US leave congregations when the worship and church activities as a whole do not center white comfort.

As part of the ethnography, there is a detail of two white pastors leaving the church relatively close together and the controversy over hiring new associates. Several white families left when the two white pastors left. Additional families left when there was an attempt to hire a Black associate pastor. But most importantly, it appears that white families tended to leave the church when their children hit teen or pre-teen ages. Some white families that were interviewed after leaving left the church preemptively because so many other families left when their children became teens.

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Summary: A follow-up memoir-ish book about what it is like to shift from dealing with the active grief of a cancer diagnosis to an ongoing chronic illness that may at any time be fatal. 

Kate Bowler’s earlier book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I Loved, deserves all the praise it has recieved. I had followed her podcast and story and was aware of her earlier academic book on the history of the American prosperity gospel (I bought it nearly four years ago, but I still haven’t read it yet). I read Everything Happens for a Reason in December 2018. It is such a helpful book for those of us that are around grief and death and illness but are not the one who is the immediate subject of the illness or grief. It details the cliché unhelpful advice that we are so often tempted to give. Or as Adam McHugh says in The Listening Life,

“When we try to help someone in pain, we often end up saying or doing things, subconsciously, to assuage our own anxiety. Let’s be honest: we often want others to be okay so we can feel okay. We want them to feel better and move on so our lives can return to normal. We try to control the conversation as a way of compensating for our anxiety. Our approach to people in pain can amount to self-therapy.”

In the midst of a global pandemic where many people have died, and many others have ongoing illness or harm from the economic or other ramifications of the pandemic, it is important to remember the main message of trying to put a neat Christian bow on suffering and pain. No Cure for Being Human is a follow-up to that. At some point, if you do not die, you have to go back to living life again, albeit often differently. Life feels differently because of the trauma or illness or whatever it is, but others have not had the same experience, and their world has not shifted.

I know I have had experiences when I wanted the whole world to stop because my world changed, 9/11, my father-in-law passing away, the start of covid, even minor things like being on vacation. But we are not the center of the world, and other people’s worlds continue, even if ours has shifted.

Our world is not really designed for human weakness and imperfection. Just-in-time scheduling ensures that if you stop, your work keeps going. If you get sick, bills still have to be paid, kids still have to get fed, and trash still has to be taken out. Kate Bowler may have had stage four cancer that almost no one survives from with debilitating treatments and huge bills and impacts to her life and the lives of those around her, but how does she keep going? Does she keep writing, not just these books, but her academic work as well (spoiler, she did keep writing and published this academic history of Christian Women celebrities in the midst of her cancer.)

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Summary: A Bengali girl tries to find a way to help her family meet their expenses. 

Rickshaw Girl is an elementary-level book about a Bengali girl and her family. It has been recently adapted into a movie done well at several film festivals but has not been widely released yet. The trailer is available here. The trailer has clear adaptations, which is not surprising since the original book is short and intended for early readers.

The original book, published ten years ago, was one of the early novels by Mitali Perkins. I first heard about MItali Perkins in this podcast interview. Since then, I have read three young adult novels and this elementary-level novel. I knew about the book but had not purchased it until I saw that it was on sale for kindle. So last night, I read it after putting my kids to bed. As an adult, it is a short and simple book. But it is right in the level to read alongside my kids. Once we are finished with our current book, I plan to re-read this with my children.

The main character, Naima, is the oldest child. She has completed three years of school and is a talented artist, winning awards for her painting. But she had to leave school because the family could only afford to send one child to school at a time. Her father is a Rickshaw driver and recently took out a loan to buy a new Rickshaw. But his health has been poor, and he is having difficulty earning enough money to support the family and make the payments. Naima’s best friend, a boy who lives next door, who she is being encouraged to no longer spend time with because they are early teens and it is no longer proper, is able to drive his father’s rickshaw part-time to give his father a break and to earn some money. This makes Naima wish that she were a boy so that she might also be able to earn money for the family, but there are no jobs open to her as a girl. This leads her to work through ways that she might be able to earn money for the family, albeit in ways that are not proper to her culture.

Stop here if you do not want to read spoilers for the rest of the story (I recommend the book.)…..

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I have stopped doing traditional ‘best of’  lists the past couple of years. Instead, I have written about what has impacted me in different areas. Below I also give some stats on the diversity of the authors of my reading and the topics of my reading.

Confronting History

History is a significant interest of mine. It is hard to understand our current era without understanding the influences that led to our time. That history matters, whether it is large-scale societal history or smaller stories. The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era told the recent history of Evangelicalism and its adoption of a colorblind approach to dealing with racial issues. It is an excellent follow-up to Color of Compromise, which is a popular introduction to racial issues within the church.

Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith was a surprise. I am not a particular fan of Evangelical Christian Fiction, and I do not read much of it. But using five novels that shaped Evangelical Christian Fiction to tell the story of Evangelical publishing and give context to the recent history of Evangelicalism was very effective. I think there could have been more critique of the quality of the literature, but I came to the book fairly blind and was very pleased with how much I enjoyed it.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith is one of the top handful of books I read. It is a lyrical and powerfully written book. Using the power of place and personal narrative, Smith visited sites of importance to American racial history and told the story of those places in personal terms. I listened to this as an audiobook, and his narration is perfect. With the eye of a historian and a journalistic confrontation of how these places frame racial history to people today, Smith reminds the readers that history is not just in the past but is important to how we tell our story.

Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair by Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson is directly about historical confrontation. Few topics are less popular among White Evangelicals than reparations; according to polling I have seen, between 1 and 3 percent of White Evangelicals support large scale reparations for slavery. But Kwon and Thompson make the historical and theological case for why they think that reparations are an important response to both slavery and the larger reality of racism. Also, they make the case that churches and individual Christians should attempt smaller forms of reparations not just advocate for larger governmental reparations programs.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together is not really history, but sociology or public policy, but I think it fits here best. The central metaphor of the book is the public swimming pool. In the 1920-40s, thousands of public swimming pools were built by local communities. As desegregation slowly occurred in the 1940s-1970s across the country, many communities chose to permanently close public swimming pools, removing a community asset that had already been paid for rather than integrating it. That metaphor shows how racism extracts a cost on the whole of society, not just racial minorities. The book highlights how many White people, especially those of lower economic status, are harmed by policies originally put in place based on racist ideology. Areas as diverse as health care, jobs, housing, voting, and education continue to be impacted by racism. It is irrational to continue to support policies that directly harm ourselves, but it continues to happen.

Other Perspectives

Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle by Dante Stewart, along with How The Word Was Passed, are the two best-written books I read this year. Both show the importance of the craft of writing. Shoutin’ in the Fire is hard to categorize. It is not quite a memoir and not quite a collection of essays, but it is an interesting mix that highlights his skill as a writer to tell his own story and how racism continues to impact the church.

Permission to Be Black: My Journey with Jay-Z and Jesus was not a book written for me. But one of the reasons I want to expand the diversity of authors I read is to overhear stories that expand my world. Primarily this is a book that confronts mental health, generational trauma, and relational health as a Black man. All of these topics are important for many groups, but I think the particularity of this book for Black men can still be helpful for others to overhear.

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Summary: A discussion of the difficulties of being a Black Christian in predominately White Christian institutional spaces. 

I met Edward Gilbreath at a Jude3 conference in August 2019, back in the pre-pandemic get together in-person era of conferences. However, I have known of him for a long time. He was a writer for Christianity Today, their first, and for many years only, Black staff person. And I previously read Gilbreath’s book on Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I also have known his father-in-law and sister-in-law for years (15-20) through work, and I think we both attended the same church for a while, although I am not sure if we were attending at the same time. That somewhat shared experience and roughly similar ages (he is about 3-4 years older than I am) mean that as I was reading Reconciliation Blues, his story of the differences of experience between Black and White Christians was even more tangible for me.

Gilbreath attended Judson College. I attended Wheaton, not far away. Judson is denominationally affiliated with the American Baptists, and I considered going because I grew up American Baptist, many people I know went there. But by the point Gilbreath entered Judson, he was already conversant in White Evangelical because of his teen youth group experience in a White Evangelical church. The era of the experience does matter. Dante Stewart is roughly 20 years younger than Gilbreath, and their college experiences are different. Stewart was at a large state school, and his White Evangelical experience was through para-church college sports ministry. Gilbreath was at a small, predominately White college on the Evangelical edge of a Mainline denomination. But there was also a lot of experiential overlap. The experiences were similar, but I think some of the expectations were different because the era was different.

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Summary: Thoughts after reading this to my children.

I am not going to do a full review of this, but I do want to note a couple of things. I have read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at least four times previously. But you always see a book with new eyes when you are reading it to children. I read this out loud to my 6 and 8-year-old. This was their first real contact with Harry Potter and we watched the movie after the book was finished. I do like the broader stories and I am a big fan of children’s fantasy literature. But there are problems with the books.

Rowling regularly makes fun of or demeans fat people. There is a lot of examples of words like dumb, stupid, ignorant, etc. I modified or skipped a number of them when reading. It is not that I am opposed to all language like this, there is a time and place, but most often these words are used to reduce people as less than. Part of what I try to communicate to my children is that we should not be harming people with our words and I do not want to encourage my children to see others do it.

Another thought is the concept of mixed blood and pure-blood wizards. While it is developed more in later books, it is introduced here. Rowling does condemn it, but I also think the history of these ideas should be explored if she is going to bring it up. I was just reading Stand Your Ground by Kelly Douglas Brown and she explores the history of racial/ethnic purity in the English common law system and culture and there is a lot of problems with it. In Harry Potter, I think the purity of blood is being associated with a WWII German concept but there is a much wider conversation than that.

Dr. Douglas Brown quotes Benjamin Franklin,

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?

Which leads me to add one remark: That the number of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as ar the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so far an opportunity, by excluding all black and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?

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Summary: A series of essays, often biographical, formated as product or experience reviews. 

I am a fan of John Green. We are not much alike, but I have often wondered if we would get along and be friends given the chance. We both love books. He was scheduled to go to the University of Chicago Divinity School right after I graduated from the Divinity School. However, after working as a chaplain at a children’s hospital, he changed his mind about his career path and never started. We are both very earnest introverts close to the same age. We are married with two young kids close to the same age. And most other things are pretty different.

However, the Anthropocene Reviewed does seem designed particularly for me. The Anthropocene is the current geological age. And this series of essays is framed as product reviews from that current geological age. The reviews are a mix of funny, short, long, serious, random, and current event-focused. I have written thousands of reviews. I have reviewed almost every book I have read for the last 12 years, over 1500 of them. And because of those reviews, Amazon contacted me years ago to see if I would like to be one of their product reviewers. I was just outside of being one of their top 500 reviewers at one point in time. I looked, and as of today, I have just under 3000 reviews on Amazon (some written by my wife), and I am the 1075th most popular reviewer on Amazon. A reality that makes me very ambivalent about the idea of product reviews.

But as Green says early in the book, those reviews often reveal more about the author than the product. John Green is well known as a young adult author that deals with mental illness and other heavy topics. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, he is more directly opening up about his struggles with mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, than he can in fiction. And in a format that does not seem to be directly about him, John Green reveals an enormous amount about himself as he pretends to be writing about products or experiences.

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Summary: In 1944, a German rocket hit a Woolworths in South London, killing many. This novel explores what might have been if five of those children had not been killed. 

When encountering fiction, my primary method is to find authors I trust and to read their books without any investigation into the story. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking through a sale at Audible and saw that there was a new novel by Francis Spufford, an author I trust, and I purchased it without reading anything about it.

I started listening, and I was utterly lost and went back and read a little bit about the book to figure out what was going on The opening is a slow-motion description of a V2 rocket blast that killed a large number of people in a crowded Woolworth’s department store. Spufford is writing an alternative history where that rocket never launched, or it failed somehow, and the Woolworths was not destroyed. This book follows the lives of five children from about nine years old until about 70. As readers, we check into their story with short vignettes that create an image of what their life is like, but we do not spend enough time with them to get a deep understanding of them.

I have read alternative history fiction before, which doesn’t follow the typical model of alternative history, so I think Light Perpetual fails in that area. Generally, alternative history has one of two main models. Either unknown people from one time period go to another time through time travel, and either is shocked at the changes in technology and culture or use their knowledge of the future to make the lives of the past better. This story type is usually considered science fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch or Eric Flint’s 1632 series are good examples.

The other model of alternative history is to take some famous event or person and imagine a different reality. In this case, the story plays with the reader’s knowledge of the natural history and the author’s imagination of the alternative history. Stephen Carter’s novel The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln imagines that Lincoln survives his assassination attempt in 1865 and two years later faces impeachment. Light Perpetual does not fit either of these two models. We as readers can know something about the history and cultural changes from 1944 until the early 2000s, but that is not alternative history because nothing has changed; it is just a fictional story set in our regular history. The framing of this novel as a type of alternative history, I don’t think, really makes a lot of sense. The framing as alternative history distracts from the telling of a good story.

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Summary: Short history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

I am a fan of the idea of concise introductory books about big topics that give enough information and context to a subject but do not overwhelm the idea. Several publishers have books like these. For example, the Oxford Very Short Introduction series has over 300 books, including the excellent Very Short Introduction to Protestantism and the awful Very Short Introduction to the Bible or African History. In addition, Christian publishers have the Armchair Theologian series, which I think is equally mixed, on Niebuhr Brothers, John Knox, Aquinas, and John Calvin. The Drama of American History is a similar project with books that are about 100 pages.

I have previously read Eric Foner’s book on the three constitutional amendments that occurred during reconstruction and his more extended overall history of reconstruction and David Blight’s book on the historical memory of the Civil War in the 50 years after. But the movement into Jim Crow is something I have less background on. One of the problems of a short book on a subject area is that it tends to rely on the easy-to-tell story, not the nuanced, more difficult to explain aspects that tend to be less well known. The standard history of reconstruction is a “Lost Cause” narrative. Except for WEB DuBois’ work on reconstruction, the common historical narrative is that it was a failure because of northern incompetence, the poor work ethic and education of the formerly enslaved, and the corruption of carpetbaggers and scallywags. There are still some threads of the Lost Cause in this book, although it is also trying to tell a more accurate story.

The problem with a short book is that there is only so much room in a hundred pages. The book does include the problems of a lack of education for the formerly enslaved and the corruption of Grant’s administration. It also speaks of the rise of the KKK and political terrorism, the lack of political will (as well as the concern about the constitutionality of federal supervision of state perversion of justice). But in a book that primarily focuses on political history, there is a limit to exploring the issues of white superiority within both the North and South, the Democrat and the Republican/Unionist parties. For example, many Northerners favored a number of the Black Codes that stripped Black citizen’s rights, allowed for unjust arrest and re-enslavement through the penal system or through forced adoption or apprenticeship programs, and voting restrictions that also applied to both Black and poor White citizens.

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