Showing results for "Gospel" in Sociology

"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here," declared Martin Luther King, Jr. He had come to that city of racist terror convinced that massive protest could topple Jim Crow. But the insurgency faltered. To revive it, King made a sacrificial act on Good Friday, April 12, 1963: he was arrested. Alone in his cell, reading a newspaper, he found a statement from eight "moderate" clergymen who branded the protests extremist and "untimely." King drafted a furious rebuttal that emerged as the "Letter from Birmingham Jail".

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction.

Here is living proof that White and Black Christians can live together. When Spencer Perkins was 16 years old, he visited his bloodied and swollen father (Pastor John Perkins) in jail. Police had beaten the Black activist severely, and Spencer never forgot the moment. He couldn't imagine living in community with a White person after that. But his plans were changed.

Power. Fear. Violence. These three idols of Christian nationalism are corrupting American Christianity. Andrew Whitehead is a leading scholar on Christian nationalism in America and speaks widely on its effects within Christian communities. In this book, he shares his journey and reveals how Christian nationalism threatens the spiritual lives of American Christians and the church.

A journey through the fault lines of contemporary religious wars US-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many of us might be unaware. This book tells the story of Americans’ colossal mobilization to proclaim Christianity “to the ends of the Earth,” a...