Tag Archives | Mark Edwards

Edwards, Mark “‘Christian Nationalism in the United States’—Ebook Introduction” Religions (9 May 2017) 1-2. doi:10.3390/rel8050093

Abstract: America’s allegedly “Christian” founding and culture remains a subject of substantial debate among scholars, as well as the general public. Many persons associate conflicts over the civil religious nature of America with the rise of evangelical conservativism during the 1970s and 1980s. However, the intellectual tradition of Christian nationalism is much older and messier—as studies by historians such as Robert Handy and Frank Lambert, and newer work by Kevin Kruse, Steven Green, and Matthew Sutton, have demonstrated. Their scholarship teaches us several lessons. First, we should avoid “decline and revival” narratives and understand Christian nationalism as a construction (if not fiction) that has arisen at various times in various places to accomplish a myriad of work. Second, Christian nationalism has been advanced by a diversity of persons and groups favorable and hostile to the idea, not just by evangelical Protestants. Third, Christian nationalism can be operational even when its keywords “Christian nation” and “Christian America” are absent. Finally, and most importantly, “Christian nationalism” like “secularism” is a discursive site where politics and history meet—where assertions of identity and power are conjoined.

Edwards, Mark T. “Cold War Transgressions: Christian Realism, Conservative Socialism, and the Longer 1960s.” Religions 6, no. 1 (2015): 266-285.  doi:10.3390/rel6010266

Abstract: This essay examines the convergence of the Protestant left and traditionalist right during the 1950s. Reinhold Niebuhr and the World Council of Churches challenged Cold War liberalism from within. As they did, they anticipated and even applauded the anti-liberalism of early Cold War conservatives. While exploring intellectual precursors of the New Left, this essay forefronts one forgotten byproduct of the political realignments following World War II: The transgressive politics of “conservative socialism.” Furthermore, this work contributes to growing awareness of ecumenical Christian impact within American life.

Edwards, Mark. “Can Christianity Save Civilisation?: Liberal Protestant Anti-Secularism in Interwar America.” Journal of Religious History. Advance online publication (2014). doi: 10.1111/1467-9809.12126

Abstract: This article explores the geopolitics of liberal evangelicalism, Christian Realism, and the ecumenical movement as collective responses to the rise of “secularism” after World War I. Alternatively, it considers how liberal Protestants looked to Roman Catholicism for support in their defence of the Christian identity of the United States and the West more generally. The long history of Christian anti-secularism in America complicates familiar portraits of liberal Protestants as agents of secularisation.

Edwards, Mark. “Evangelical Catholicism: The Past, Present, and Future of Christian Reunion.” Historically Speaking 14, no. 4 (2013): 26–27.

Abstract: In 1933 Francis Pickens Miller announced that a “third great period” of Christian history was at hand. In this new epoch, he predicted, Protestants and Catholics would “pool spiritual resources” and become “united in one community.” That might seem a surprising claim coming from a lifelong southern Presbyterian. But Miller made that statement while serving as chairman of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), an interdenominational ecumenical movement whose implicit mission was to replicate and ultimately replace Catholicism’s planetary presence. For Miller, the geopolitical times now demanded that Rome and Geneva repent of their historic habits. Vatican centralism and Protestant individualism had both become hindrances to the advance of a world Christian civilization. Each had to give way to the formation of a new borderless Christendom. It would still take thirty more years and the reforms of Vatican II for Miller to see his way fully toward the reunion of Christianity’s classical combatants. “If John XXIII’s goals can continue to be realized,” Miller concluded in his 1971 autobiography, “the Roman church will resume its traditional leadership of Christendom and the Church Universal which will then emerge—including the Roman, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions—will constitute the best hope of mankind.”

Miller’s remarkable confessions were manifestations of “Evangelical Catholicism.” Because of historians’ relative inattention to Protestants of Miller’s liberal, ecumenical persuasion, Evangelical Catholicism is being touted today as the wave of the future. In the past few years, there has been an explosion of websites dedicated to discussing and tracking the Evangelical Catholic crusade from within Catholicism. Perhaps nothing is bringing more attention to the trend than George Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church (Basic Books, 2013). Conservative evangelicals, one of Weigel’s non-Catholic constituencies, have a strong recent history of interest in Catholic theology and practice. Although Evangelicals and Catholics Together lost momentum after its 1994 declaration, signatories have continued to champion evangelical-Catholic cooperation into the new century—including Weigel, the late Richard John Neuhaus and Charles Colson, and those affiliated with the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology. Leading evangelical and Catholic conservatives remain partners in defense of nuclear family values, while younger Catholics and evangelicals appear more and more comfortable trading spaces out of a common quest for authentic, non-politicized faith.