Olasky’s Books For July: Christian Nationalism And Critical Race Theory
Unsplash photo
(ANALYSIS) Official publication date for Caleb Campbell’s “Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor” (IVP) is Tuesday. Campbell quotes numerous over-the-top right-wing statements that turn public policy debates into theological issues. For example, during the recent pandemic: “Refusal to adhere to public health guidelines was portrayed as allegiance to God.”
Campbell then gives a “field guide” that advises non-nationalists to say to nationalists, “I love that you care about this so deeply. Tell me more about why this matters to you.”
Some of the text seems condescending at times, but what Campbell calls “humble subversion” — as Jane Austen advised, “tell it slant” — is an improvement on attack, attack, attack. Regarding King Solomon’s oft-quoted speech in 2 Chronicles about living by God’s statutes, Campbell suggests asking, “Do they apply to us in the same way they applied to ancient Israel?” To gun-rights advocates who argue that Jesus in Luke 22:36 opposed sword control ask, “What does it mean to ‘buy a sword’ today? Why do you think Jesus said this to his disciples?”
READ: Books To Read This Summer On The Church And Public Life
Campbell rightly says a gentle approach is much better than claiming, “People with guns are mentally unstable, bloodthirsty nutjobs.”
Thoughtful Christians do need to speak up. During the late 20th century Marxist-Christian syncretism was a major problem, but Christian nationalism has much more influence within the evangelical world now and is, right now, the greater danger.
In “Untangling Critical Race Theory” (IVP), Ed Uszynski accurately writes, “Too often Christian commentary denounces CRT while making light of the real problems it seeks to address. … Rejecting Marxian theorists without first taking their concerns seriously does more damage to Christian witness than good…. I don’t need most of their solutions, but I do need their observations.” It’s good that CRT advocates “lament broken social life, wondering if it’s beyond repair,” but how do we repair it unless God repairs us?
Uszynski is also accurate in noting, “Christians don’t believe changing those circumstances will remove the angst; only restoring our relationship with God through an encounter with the iving Christ begins addressing the inner hole.” But one problem in just handing someone “Untangling Critical Race Theory” is that Uszynski accepts more from CRT proponents than he should. Example: He heads one section with these boldfaced words, “They expose legitimate problems with Capitalism.” Hmm. Is it capitalism that “commodifies people and forms them into insatiable consumers… and motivates international conflict and war”? Or is it sin to which neither socialists nor capitalists are immune?
“Exile and the Jews,” edited by Nancy Berg and Marc Saperstein (Jewish Publication Society, 2024), is a fascinating collection of 3,500 years of readings. Some of them suggest that both philosemitism — love for Jews — and antisemitism have something supernatural about them. For example, Saul Levi Morteira, who lived within Amsterdam’s Reformed culture from 1616 to 1660, said Christians claim the “savior came from the Jews.
Thus by law and custom, Jews should be considered by the Christians to be the most important and the noblest people conceivable, and Christians should therefore want to cleave to them and marry with them.” Morteira went on, though, to claim that God wanted to preserve Judaism, so He “generated in the hearts of these nations a great unnatural hatred” that would largely stop intermarriage.
Three decades ago some prolife leaders, tired of accusations that they were “anti-women,” resolved to “love them both,” both unborn-children and their often-desperate mothers. Putting that goal into action has sometimes been hard, so we can learn from Monica Klem’s and Madeleine McDowell’s “Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion & Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America” (Encounter, 2023). In the late 19th century, those favoring female voting saw it as a remedy for abortion. Voting power would increase women’s economic rights and eliminate the sexual double standard by forcing on men greater legal responsibility for pregnancy.
The Book of Ruth, a Biblical micro story of one family tucked between stories of macro political decline (Judges) and political revival (I Samuel), shows that God cares about little as well as big. “Reading Ruth” (Paul Dry Books, 2021) is a short, but deep exegesis by Leon Kass (now 85) and Hannah Mandelbaum (his granddaughter).
They miss neither the irony in Ruth’s four chapters — amid famine, Naomi and her family leave Bethlehem, which in Hebrew means “house of bread” — nor the subtle references to past scandals (Lot and his daughters, Judah and Tamar). The Kass/Mandelbaum last sentence is sweet: “The book is named for Ruth because the lovely and self-effacing Naomi would not have had it any other way.”
Marvin Olasky is the author of thirty books, including this year’s Moral Vision and Pivot Points. His foundation awards Zenger Prizes for street-level journalism.