CFH Biennial Conference | Jemar Tisby Plenary Session

Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire. These believers blurred and pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a saint or sinner from the first to the fifth centuries CE, and their stories provide the opportunity to get to know the regular people in the early churches. At the same time, their stories provide a fresh perspective for considering the difficult timeless questions that stubbornly persist in our own world and churches: when is it a sin to eat or not eat a particular food? Are women inherently more sinful than men? And why is Christian nationalism a problem and, at times, a sin? Ultimately, recognizing that cultural sins were always a part of the story of the church and its people is a message that is both a source of comfort and a call to action in our pursuit of sanctification today.Enjoy a book talk with Dr. Nadya Williams on her book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan, 2023). This conversation was moderated by Dr. John Wilsey, Associate Professor of Church History and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. “Socialism,” he wrote, “has become a distinct substitute” for the church. He was not wrong.In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded an expanded local, state and federal infrastructure which supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter work-days, and an array of municipal services. Protestant clergy worried that if the labor movement kept growing in momentum and cultural influence, socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. Even worse, they feared that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century.In The Gospel of Church, Janine Giordano Drake carefully traces the relationships which Protestant ministers built with labor unions and working class communities. She finds that Protestant ministers worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities. Moreover, they rarely supported the most important demands of labor, including freedom of speech and the right to collective bargaining. Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers’ efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers’ efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States.Enjoy a book talk with Dr. Janine Giordano Drake on her book, The Gospel of Church (Oxford University Press, 2023). This conversation is moderated by Dr. Mark Edwards, Professor of US History and Politics at Spring Arbor University.

In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches’ doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.Enjoy this book talk with Dr. Brendan Payne on his book, Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow (Louisiana State University Press, 2022). This conversation was moderated by Dr. Paul Thompson, Dean of the College of Humanities and Science at North Greenville University.

What has been the history of the Conference on Faith and History? What have been the high points, the difficult points, and what have we learned as an organization that seeks to explore the relationship between the Christian faith and history? And what would one generation of historians wish to pass on to the next generation of historians?Listen in as the Western Regional President of CFH, David McFarland, moderates a panel of longtime members of CFH, which include: Shirley Mullin, Barry Hankins, Rick Kennedy, and Bill Trollinger.

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia’s Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians’ location between Hindus and Muslims. Mallampalli begins with a discussion of South India’s ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia’s Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He then underscores efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavours, but rarely succeeded at yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of post-colonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.Enjoy this book talk with Dr. Chandra Mallampalli on his book, South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim (OUP, 2023). This conversation was moderated by Dr. Paul Grant, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Christians need to pause once in a while to get their bearings. For perspective on our own times and how we got here, it helps to listen to wise guides from other eras. In An Infinite Fountain of Light (IVP Academic, 2023), the renowned American historian George Marsden illuminates the landscape with wisdom from one such mentor: Jonathan Edwards.Drawing on his deep expertise on Edwards and American culture, Marsden explains where Edwards stood within his historical context and sets forth key points of his complex thought. By also considering Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield, two of Edwards’s most influential contemporaries, Marsden unpacks the competing cultural and religious impulses that have shaped our times. In contrast, Edwards offered us an exhilarating view of the centrality of God’s beauty and love. Christians’ love for God, he taught, can be the guiding love of our lives, opening us to transformative joy and orienting all our lesser loves.“There is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God, a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty, and of infinite happiness,” wrote Edwards. “This infinite fountain of light should, diffusing its excellent fullness, pour forth light all around.” With Marsden’s guidance, readers will discover how Edwards’s insights can renew our own vision of the divine, of creation, and of ourselves.Enjoy a conversation about Marsden’s book moderated by Dr. Joey Cochran with panelists Dr. Rachel Wheeler, Dr. John Lowe, and Dr. Ken Minkema, as well as respondent, Dr. George Marsden.

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) is one of the most widely known Christians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. After the death of her husband, Jim, and four other missionaries at the hands of Waorani tribesmen in Ecuador, Elliot famously returned to live among the same people who had killed her husband. Her legacy, however, extends far beyond these events. In the years that followed, Elliot became a prolific writer and speaker, touching the lives of countless people around the world.In Elisabeth Elliot: A life (Crossway, 2023), Lucy S. R. Austen takes readers on an in-depth journey through the life of Elisabeth Elliot—her birth to missionary parents, her courtship and marriage to Jim Elliot, her missions work in Ecuador, and her private life and public work after she returned to the United States. Through Elliot’s example of love for God and obedience to his commands, readers will ponder what it means to follow Jesus.Enjoy our panel on Lucy S. R. Austen’s recent biography of Elisabeth Elliot: A life, with panelists Dr. Kristin Du Mez and Dr. Kathryn Long, with response from Lucy S. R. Austen.

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His “Today and Tomorrow” columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American political philosophy and media studies. Lippmann coined or popularized several keywords of the twentieth century, including “stereotype,” the “Cold War,” and the “Great Society.” Sought out by U.S. Presidents and by America’s allies and rivals around the world, Lippmann remained one of liberalism’s most faithful proponents and harshest critics.Yet few people then or since encountered the “real” Walter Lippmann. That was because he kept crucial parts of himself hiding in plain sight. His extensive commentary on politics and diplomacy was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality in a “post-Christian” era. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western Christian intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage.Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor considers the role of religions in Lippmann’s life and thought, prioritizing his affirmation and rejection of Christian nationalisms of the left and right. It also yields fresh insights into the philosophical origins of modern American liberalism, including liberalism’s blind spots in the areas of sex, race, and class. But most importantly, this biography highlights the constructive power of doubt. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to recognize the dangers yet also necessity of a civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be. In the end, Lippmann manufactured himself as the prophet of limitation for an extravagant American Century.Enjoy this conversation between Dr. Joey Cochran and Dr. Mark Edwards about his book, Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor (OUP, 2023).

Since the shootings in Buffalo, Laguna Woods, and Uvalde, the AACC (Asian American Christian Collaborative) has been a crucial Christian organization that is actively pursuing advocacy and policy efforts to address gun violence in the United States. During April of 2023, the Anxious Bench proudly partnered with the AACC to raise awareness about the long and terrible history of gun violence in the United States.You may find the series of Anxious Bench articles below, if you wish to read themafter listening to this virtual coffee.Borja | “On God and Guns: Scenes from the 2023 NRA Annual Meeting in Indianapolis”Cochran | “Second Amendment Rights is About Protecting White Supremacy”Foley | “Keep Hope Alive”Quiros | “Christ or Moloch?: A Reflection on Nonviolence and the Civil Rights Movement”Enjoy listening to this discussion of the history of gun violence in the U.S. moderated by the President of AACC, Ray Chang, and with a panel of columnists from the Anxious Bench, which include: Ansley Quiros, Melissa Borja, Malcolm Foley, and Joey Cochran. 

Though born into slavery, Sojourner Truth would defy the limits placed upon her as a Black woman to become one of the nineteenth century’s most renowned female preachers and civil rights advocates. In We Will Be Free, Nancy Koester chronicles her spiritual journey as an enslaved woman, a working mother, and an itinerant preacher and activist.  On Pentecost in 1827, the course of Sojourner Truth’s life was changed forever when she had a vision of Jesus calling her to preach. Though women could not be trained as ministers at the time, her persuasive speaking, powerful singing, and quick wit converted many to her social causes. During the Civil War, Truth campaigned for the Union to abolish slavery throughout the United States, and she personally recruited Black troops for the effort. Her activism carried her to Washington, DC, where she met Abraham Lincoln and ministered to refugees of Southern slavery. Truth’s faith-driven action continued throughout Reconstruction, as she aided freed people, campaigned for reparations, advocated for women’s rights, and defied segregation on public transportation.   Sojourner Truth’s powerful voice once echoed in the streets of Washington and New York. Her passion rings out again in Nancy Koester’s vivid writing. As the legacy of slavery and segregation still looms over the United States today, students of American history, Christians, and all interested readers will find inspiration and illumination in Truth’s story.Enjoy this conversation between Dr. Alicia Jackson and Dr. Nancy Koester on her book, We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth