Search for "reconstruction"

Where Were They Radicalized? No Answer is Complete Without Addressing Evangelical Churches and Schooling

By Chrissy Stroop

…or and the author of Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, to weigh in both on what’s wrong with the 1776 Report, and on why the report, issued in the final days of the Trump administration, matters at all. In response to the first question, Ingersoll observed, “It’s hard to get past the very beginning, with its complete whitewashing of native Americans and then its unfathomable treatment of slavery,” adding, “The r…

Dominion Theology, Christian Reconstructionism, and the New Apostolic Reformation

By Julie Ingersoll

…sts who fail to properly contextualize dominionists’ activities. Christian Reconstructionism is the older of the two movements (though the NAR has its roots in Pentecostalism that pre-dates both). There are two of the core aspects of Christian Reconstructionism that are relevant here. First is the view that the Kingdom of God was established at the resurrection, that its establishment is progressive through history and Jesus will return at its cul…

GLBT Activists and the Black Church: Can We Talk?

By Jonathan L. Walton

…bed a politics of sexual respectability in public space dating back to the Reconstruction era in order to deflect hyper-sexualized characterizations of the black male and female body in the dominant American imagination. The sadness and sickness of this longstanding tradition, however, is that black faith communities have not made the connection between the ways both racism and heterosexism substantiate systems of oppression. Both seek to define a…

The Forgotten History of Black Calvinism and the Haunting of American Folk Music

By Joshua Guthman

…g new about African Americans, Calvinism’s complex fate, and the religious reconstruction of the post-Civil War South. It has long been a given among historians of religion in the South that Calvinism had little, if any, purchase among the enslaved or their descendants, that the doctrines of predestination were invariably arms of the status quo, and that a sin-obsessed Calvinism was simply inimical to the emancipationist energies coursing through…

Gun Ownership: ‘An Obligation to God’

By Julie Ingersoll and Sarah Posner

…uncil for National Policy, and is a longtime homeschooling advocate from a Reconstructionist perspective. In 1996 he was the running mate of conservative icon (and Christian Reconstructionist) Howard Phillips for the far-right US Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party) whose platform included the restoration of “American jurisprudence to its biblical premises” and, notably, opposition to every gun law in the United States. Now a lawyer…

As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort

By Robert P. Jones

…icant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.” So far so good. But here are the next two sentences: Examples of theories that distort historical events and are inconsistent with SBE-approved standards include the denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory,…

America’s ‘Jesus Problem’ is Making Progressive Christians Complicit in Christian Supremacy

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…Jesus Do)? Even with centuries of historical criticism and attempts at the reconstruction of a historical Jesus, the notion of Jesus possessing the flaws of human perception isn’t seriously engaged in favor of the belief in Jesus as Christ, an essentially flawless human rather than simply a sinless human being. The circular logic employed requires followers to regard any action or utterance attributed to Jesus in the Gospels as beyond criticism be…

Hey Hey, Ho Ho White Jesus Has to Go… But The Issue is More Complicated Than You Think

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…“historical Jesus” with the “Christ of faith.” The historical Jesus is the reconstruction of the life and teachings of Jesus based on a critical historical method which also considers the historical and cultural contexts in which Jesus lived. In other words this is the attempt to reconstruct the life of Jesus of Galilee as a living human being. The “Christ of faith,” on the other hand, is a theological construction which is concerned with reconcil…

The Pundits and the Dominionists

By Julie Ingersoll

…n. Far more interesting, I think, is to look at the influence of Christian Reconstruction; how has it impacted the style of the conservative Christianity that makes up the religious right—which is not to say that if I can show influence that that means that the leaders of the religious right really embrace every aspect of it. Clearly we all seek to shape society along lines we think is best. Reconstructionists themselves hold a view of knowledge…

RD10Q: MLK and the Rhetoric of Freedom

By Gary Selby

…better book than I ever could have produced (for example Kirt Wilson’s The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870-1875. What an amazing period in U.S. history!) But on the other hand, the work I’ve already done has opened me to more projects than I have years left to do them in. What’s your next book? Wow — that’s a hard one. It’ll be something that continues the elements that this one…