Saving Faith: How American Christianity Can Reclaim Its Prophetic Voice (Randall Balmer) - A Review
SAVING FAITH: How American Christianity Can Reclaim ItsProphetic Voice. By Randall Balmer. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2023. Xv + 104 pages.
Christian nationalism is on the
rise in the United States, but it isn't just an American issue. We’re seeing
forms of Christian nationalism rise up in many places, especially in Eastern
Europe. There are connections between forms of Christian nationalism in places
like Hungary and Russia and forms found in the United States. Even as Christian
nationalism is gaining strength in certain circles, there are also movements of
resistance, especially among Mainline Protestant Churches. Being that I am a
Disciples of Christ minister, serving on our General Board and a voting
representative to our General Assembly, I can point to a resolution approved at
the 2023 General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that
called for our churches to stand in opposition to Christian Nationalism. Since the
Disciples of Christ is a binational denomination, we took note of Christian
nationalist movements in both the United States and Canada. A growing number of
books have gone to print in recent years addressing this movement. I’ve read
some of these books and there are several others that I am eager to read and
possibly review. Several books have been written addressing this issue, some of
which I've read, others I want to read. It is good that voices are being
raised, voices that offer sound, analytical reflections, calling for Christians
to take a deep look at our susceptibility to such movements.
Among the recent books addressing
this growing phenomenon is Randall Balmer's brief book titled Saving Faith:How American Christianity Can Reclaim Its Prophetic Voice. Despite its
brevity, or perhaps because of its brevity, it offers an effective call to American
Christians, especially evangelical Christians, to reclaim a prophetic voice.
Balmer is a religious historian who teaches American religion at Dartmouth
College, after spending many years teaching at Columbia University. Balmer
writes to a community he once called home (and one I once called home). Like
many of us who find ourselves post-evangelical, Balmer conveys the sense of
loss that he feels due to what he sees happening to contemporary evangelicalism.
That is especially true of white evangelicalism. In many ways this is a word to
the church and Christianity at large, because many Mainline Protestants share
similar beliefs and practices as non-Mainline evangelicals, acknowledging the
decline in our fortunes and the realities of racism in the church and nation.
I must note here that Balmer writes
this book from a Christian perspective. That is, he is a professing Christian
who grew up in the Evangelical Free Church and graduated from an evangelical
college and seminary (Trinity University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity
School). He writes that he grew up in the evangelical subculture, the son of an
Evangelical Free Church pastor. He writes in his preface, "I'll put up my
credentials as an evangelical up against anyone—including Franklin Graham, by
the way, although I concede that his father, Bill Graham, might have been a bit
more famous than mine" (p. xiv). While he has the evangelical credentials,
he has drifted away from that world, largely because he was tired of the
"pitched, vicious, internecine battles over such issues as biblical
inerrancy that I witnessed in seminary" (p. xiv). I probably lasted a bit
longer as I went to Fuller Seminary, where the battles over inerrancy had
largely been set aside, unlike at Trinity. While his current evangelical
identity might be questioned (as is true for me), Balmer insists that he cares
deeply about the Christian faith. It’s for that very reason that he chose to
write Saving Faith. As you might expect, this book is directed at a
community he once called home.
Balmer offers us seven chapters
that lay out his vision for reclaiming Christianity’s prophetic voice. He begins
in Chapter 1 by providing an analysis of the current situation we face in the
United States. He titles the chapter with a rather foreboding question: "How
Bad Is It?" Balmer then closes the book in Chapter 7 by making his case
for reclaiming prophetic Christianity.
In his first chapter, Balmer addresses
the well-documented decline of Christianity in the United States, especially
among Mainline Protestant churches. He gives what he believes are several
reasons for this decline. As a person who is deeply committed to ecumenism, I
was surprised and disappointed that he named ecumenism as a cause of decline.
He also points out that evangelicalism expanded for a number of reasons,
including its head start in the suburbs. Regarding evangelicals, Balmer
suggests that evangelicals moved in the 1970s from spiritual populism to
politics. Interestingly that turn began with the candidacy of Jimmy Carter. Many
evangelicals, including many of my friends who like me, voted for the first
time in the 1976 election, embraced Carter’s candidacy because he spoke rather
openly about his faith. That love affair with Carter’s Christian faith didn’t
last long since many of his evangelical supporters discovered that his politics
were rather liberal, so they abandoned him in 1980. While some make abortion
out to be a big issue, that wasn’t the original driving force of the turn to
politics. Instead, it was racism and the white evangelical defense of racial
segregation, which was exemplified in the rise of Christian schools in the
1960s and 1970s. Much later Donald Trump discovered issues that he could use to
his advantage, which drew on lingering racist tendencies among some white
evangelicals.
In Chapter 2, Balmer offers up what
he calls "Misguided Remedies." One of those misguided remedies was a
nostalgic pining for a return to the world of Mayberry. Balmer points out that during
the entire rune of the Andy Griffith Show, only one black character
appeared. In contrast to that white-washed vision of American life, another
issue emerged in the 1960s that put a scare into the minds of white
evangelicals. That scare was the opening in 1965 of immigration from places
other than Europe. This allowed persons from places like Asia, who had been
barred from entry for nearly a century, to immigrate to the United States,
bringing with them religious traditions other than Christianity. For many Christians, this increase in
religious diversity was seen as a threat to the Christian hegemony. He takes
note of the influence of people like Roger Williams, a Baptist who called for
the separation of Church and State, something another Baptist, Judge Roy Moore,
opposed as he posted the Ten Commandments in his court.
When we turn to Chapter 3, Balmer
directly addresses the burgeoning movement of Christian Nationalism. Although
we hear loud voices declaring that the United States was founded as a Christian
nation, Balmer points out that the only way the United States can be described
as a "Christian Nation" is if we focus on demographics. While the
majority of Americans at the end of the eighteenth century were at least
nominally Christian, there is no evidence that the nation's government was based
on Christian principles. In fact, the founders, including George Washington,
made that clear in the founding documents. Among those documents is the Treaty
with Tripoli, which explicitly declares that the United States is not a
Christian nation. Thus, the foundations of contemporary Christian nationalism
are built on rather flimsy foundations (despite what David Barton and his ilk
would have us believe).
Before Balmer begins making his
case for reclaiming a prophetic faith, in Chapter 4 he addresses several
problematic dimensions of Christian hegemony. These problematic dimensions
included the horrific way Christians treated Native Americans, including the
tragedies of the boarding schools, the evidence of which is even now being
revealed. The old idea that drove relations with indigenous people was captured
by the idea of killing the Indian to save the man. Well, in the process it
appears that many Indians literally died at the hands of Christian overseers.
Then there are the tortured defenses of slavery offered by Christian
theologians such as Robert Louis Dabney and Basil Manly. Of course, there are
also stories of Christian involvement in abolitionism and other efforts at
social reform, but we must acknowledge the underside of our history (despite
what some would have us believe in their anti-woke diatribes). Balmer writes
that “without question, Christians worked to make the world a better place. But
any sober assessment of the influence of Christianity in America must also take
into account some of the less savory chapters in our history” (p. 52). The
point is not to make us feel guilty, but to acknowledge our complicity in these
historical realities, for they have bled into the continuing presence of inequities
in the nation.
Evangelicals claim to be Bible people,
in building his case for reclaiming a prophetic Christianity, he invites his
readers to go “Back to the Bible” in Chapter 5. In this chapter, Balmer bemoans
the fact that while evangelicals claim to be people of the Bible and often aggressively
defend its authority, they seem to neglect what it has to say about many of the
major issues of our day. So, he writes that "if we Christians entertain
any hopes of reviving the faith and making Christianity relevant once again, we
must find a way to reconnect with the Scriptures" (p. 54). It's a view
that resonates with me as I do believe that the Bible can be a norming norm for
Christian life. If we truly reconnect with the Bible then perhaps we will hear
the words of the Hebrew prophets who call for justice and repentance, a message
that Jesus also embodies and proclaims.
Being a historian, Balmer
recognizes the value of lifting up "Worthy Examples." So, in Chapter 6, which carries the title “Worthy
Examples,” Balmer points us to figures like the British parliamentarian William
Wilberforce, who worked to end the slave trade. He mentions numerous others,
people such as Elijah Pilcher, who founded Albion College in Michigan and made
sure that women would be admitted to the college on an equal level with men. He
also mentions people like Theodore Dwight Weld, the Grimke sisters, and Josiah
Grinnell who joined the roster of abolitionists. Another figure he points to is
Beth Moore, the formerly Southern Baptist Bible teacher, who chose to reject
the narrowness of an evangelical message that is tinged with racism and
anti-women perspectives.
Having laid the groundwork for
making his case for reclaiming a prophetic Christianity, Balmer brings Saving Faith to a conclusion in Chapter 7. In this brief chapter Balmer suggests
that by seeking political power evangelicals lost their prophetic voice. He
wants to call them to account and point to a better way. He reminds us that
prophetic Christianity lives on the margins of society and not in the center.
That's not an easy place to exist in but if prophetic Christianity is to rise
again, it will have to move to the margins. With that in mind, Balmer includes
in an appendix the "Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social
Concern," a document created in the 1970s that gave voice to a commitment
to Christian social concern that included addressing racism. He believes that
this document could serve as a starting point for that work of reclaiming a
prophetic calling.
Balmer’s Saving Faith is
only eighty-three pages in length, including the appendix. It is a quick read,
but it offers an important challenge to evangelicals as well as the broader
Christian world, calling on Christians to heed the words of Scripture and
reclaim our prophetic voice. If we do this, Balmer believes we can throw off the
right-wing populism of the moment that has captured a significant portion of
the American church, reject Christian nationalism, and ultimately embrace the
way of Jesus. If we’re Christians, then this seems to be a good idea. As Balmer
writes in the closing paragraphs of the book: “Prophetic Christianity positions
itself at the margins. It calls the powerful to account, and it identifies with
those Jesus called ‘the least of these.’ And that brings us very close to the
gospel, the ‘good news’” (p. 80). Yes, indeed!
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