Page 1037 – Christianity Today (2025)

In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, the poet LeRoi Jones left his wife, Hettie Cohen, and their two daughters to start the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem. He cut ties with his white friends, many of them poets he had published as editor of the small literary magazines Yugen and Floating Bear and of Totem Press. He also changed his name, first to Imamu (Spiritual Leader) Ameer Baraka (Blessed Prince), later shortening it to Amiri Baraka, and would go on to become known for his zealous Marxism and occasional incendiary remarks. When a white woman once asked him how she could help the black cause, Baraka replied: "You can help by dying. You are a cancer." And in his 1996 poem "Forensic Report," he wrote that white people "cd / be killed / in the right / Situation."

How serious he was in such remarks is unclear. Baraka recounted in a 2008 speech that after he had left his wife, a fellow poet supposedly rushed to Frank O'Hara to tell him that "LeRoi … wants to kill all white people." O'Hara responded, Jones told the audience, "probably without putting down his drink": "Well, he won't start with us!" Yet, he still turned away from his friends, many of them progressives, and came to disdain the left and right alike. Why? Put another way, how did LeRoi Jones become Amiri Baraka?

Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, which gathers the correspondence of the two poets between 1959 and 1965, offers a partial answer—the transformation was fueled by pride, an increasingly simplistic (and inflexible) reasoning, and a real desire to do something meaningful. The letters also show Baraka to be an occasionally insightful critic, a good friend, and a virtuoso prose stylist.

Baraka and Dorn started writing when Baraka asked the latter for some poems for Yugen. The two poets met after Dorn made the long and, for him, expensive trip to New York from Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1961, which would cement their friendship, at least for the next five years.

Many of the letters deal with the difficulty of getting published. Anyone, Baraka wrote, who says they don't care about publishing after writing is "full of shit": "It's like jumping in the English channel and then claiming to be a tourist." The poets discussed reading for Elsa Dorfman's short-lived Paterson Society, sending poems to The Nation and Poetry, publishing (or not publishing) a volume with Grove Press, applying for a Whitney Fellowship and a Guggenheim, and teaching at Buffalo. Regarding the latter, Baraka jokingly warned Dorn that it was "a working proposition": "That's a five day week they got going."

While Dorn rarely discussed his relationship with his wife, Baraka would tell Dorn about his spats with Hettie, his regular womanizing, and his struggles with alcohol and drugs. In 1961, Jones wrote Dorn: "Hettie & I are splitting. And I'm really sort of lost. Can't do anything but drag ass & get drunk …. Nothing seems as bright or fixed anymore. No point of reference." The two would get back together, but the relationship was always strained, and would end in 1965, as noted above, when Jones replaced Hettie as his "point of reference" with politics.

Jones is disarmingly honest in these letters, which might come as a surprise to people familiar with his later work. In 1963, after a drug overdose, Jones tells Dorn: "So today, sitting in front of the desk … I said to myself, Wow, I'm really a good guy, haven't had any shit in a couple of weeks. And for two or three seconds I actually believed it! Huh. What do you make of that buddy?" That same year, Jones writes in a telling aside: "risk is something I need. It is as traceable as distortion, which I stand by too, that is I don't expect to be right, but it does profit my energies when I am. Moreover it's the swing itself I dig."

On the topic of other writers, Baraka is also the most outspoken. He thought James Baldwin was an untalented sellout, but he loved Jean Toomer. W. S. Merwin is a "really great cat"; William Burroughs, "a fink." Neither poet cared for Gil Sorrentino, and Baraka could not stand Denise Levertov. At one point he disgustingly joked that being "raped by Peter Orlovsky every Tuesday for a year" would help to "cool her out."

The letters are most interesting when the two poets turn to politics. Baraka had visited Cuba in 1960, which was a life-changing experience for him. Cuba had shown him his hypocrisy. The slave trade marked the beginning of capitalism, Jones came to believe, following Marx, but here he was in 1960, the grandson of a shop owner, contributing to a system built on the bloodied backs of his ancestors. He had to do something, he told Dorn, but he wasn't sure if he was willing to make the sacrifices needed:

I'm getting to be a bigtime politico. Uptown (harlem) speaking on streets, getting arrested. Even made Senator Eastland's list, which is some distinction. "Beatnik poet, radical leftist racist agitator," to quote that dear man. Have a trial coming up next month (after 3 adjournments) for "resisting arrest; inciting riot; disorderly conduct." All true as hell. My only bitch is that I only got in one good swing before they popped me (but good). What is it all about? Who knows? It's just that I've got to do something. I dunno. I'm picked. What I wanted (& want) was soft music and good stuffy purity (of intent, of purpose) elegance, even (of the mind). And now I'm fighting in the streets and the cops think I'm dangerous. But what is heavy on my head is … Do I owe these people that much? Negroes, I mean. I realize that I am, literally, the only person around who can set them straight. I mean straight … not only as to what their struggle is about, but what form it ought to take! I meet these shabby headed "black nationalists" or quasi intellectual opportunities [sic], who have never read a fucking book that was worth anything in their damned lives … and shudder that any kind of movement, or feeling shd come down to the "people" thru their fingers.

The self-doubt mixed with pride ("I realize that I am, literally, the only person around who can set them straight") slowly evaporated and became only pride. The letters also show that Jones became increasingly frustrated with liberalism's shortcomings and hypocrisies while remaining blind to his own. The left, he wrote to Dorn, "is completely bourgeois." The unions "are like the mafia" and the left's "so called intellectuals and poets" address a working class that "HAS NOT EXISTED FOR TWENTY YEARS." While some American avant-garde poets talk a big game, Baraka complained, they don't want things to change, "believing, even, finally in Art for X's Sake." "I do not believe in all this relative shit," he told Dorn, "There is a right and a wrong. A good and a bad. And it's up to me, you, all of the so called minds, to find out."

The solution for Jones was that the country had to be exploded, and he was the one to do it. "I am so tired," he would write in 1964, "of mediocre error, and that shitty little string of gradual compromise." "The bombs yes?" he writes Dorn in 1962. "I certainly wanted that (and still want it For Real, and not as a mere thought) but my idea is more complex, and, I trust, more interesting than simple terrorism." Baraka wanted a cultural revolution along with the bombs.

Dorn's response to Jones on this score is insightful. He warns Jones of the breathtaking pride needed to proclaim oneself a revolutionary and of the fact that Jones cannot so easily remove himself from the middle class to attack it:

Certainly, as I said, terrorism is an act of birth, ie, in birth's hands, and you as several other people have an innate right to that. I think it must be true then that what they say about the "opportunity" factor of say revolutionaries and such, activists of all kinds I suppose, ie, that the time has to be right. The question then becomes when do you know when the time is right? After all, wow, pretentious, AFTER ALL there are one or two revs for every, not even every, generation that numbers in the billions, now. So ok, by birth you are an activist, but culturally you're not. Now wait a minute boy! Culturally you're really not. Now I don't give a shit what color you are you got the same culture I got. I've talked to you. You got other things sure, of course that's true, but we understand each other very well I think, and I think it's because you came from a lower middle class liberal background and I came from a lower class conservative background. I mean right here that sociological reality, the lines of dispensation of, cutting across the whole middle patch, name your terms and the connections can be come up with … Perhaps I'm wrong. But I take your anger, insofar as it can be localized, is poetic, and I am very aware that adjective is in bad odor, but I am pronouncing it here to describe the fact that you ain't cut out for the shit.

Dorn was right. Jones was not a revolutionary, and Jones's unwillingness to accept this and instead allow himself to believe that he was set apart—destined to turn the country upside down—ruined much of his talent.

Claudia Moreno Pisano provides detailed notes to the letters throughout the volume, and while not all of these notes are necessary (some tell us little more than the letters themselves), and a few fall back on stock generalizations about the period, many provide important historical and personal details needed to understand the correspondence. All in all, the collection provides a fascinating look not only into the lives of these two poets but also into a turbulent time in American culture that is both very different from and sadly still very similar to our own.

Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This is a guest column by John Fea, who teaches history at Messiah College. His new book, The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society, will appear in May 2016 with Oxford University Press. Fea blogs daily at www.philipvickersfithian.com

On March 23, 2015, Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas and the darling of the Tea Party movement, announced that he would be running for President of the United States. The announcement was made at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, a school founded by the late culture warrior and fundamentalist Jerry Falwell. The Texas senator used his speech to expound upon the Christian roots of America, the "mischiefs of government," American exceptionalism, economic growth, and religious liberty. Anyone who reads or listens to his speech would conclude that Cruz believes these ideas all stem directly from the pages of the Bible.

As Princeton historian Kevin Kruse reminds us in his new book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Cruz's message of faith, freedom, and free enterprise has a long 20th-century history. According to Kruse, the belief that the United States is a Christian nation—an idea that continues to hold weight among Republican politicians and many ordinary evangelicals—can be traced back to the "Christian libertarians" of the 1930s who opposed FDR's New Deal. Whenever and wherever Christian nationalism thrived in modern America, businessmen and other advocates of free markets and limited government were there. As his subtitle suggests, Kruse sets out to show "how corporate America invented Christian America."

Kruse tells the story of Christian nationalism in the United States from the Great Depression to the Nixon Era. In the process he introduces us to characters who seldom find their way into the traditional narrative of 20th-century American religious history. For example, in 1935 James Fifield, the pastor of the lavish First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, founded an organization called Spiritual Mobilization for the purpose of spreading the belief that Christianity and capitalism were inseparable. Fifield recruited corporate leaders from General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, and Mutual Life to his cause by convincing them that FDR's welfare state was sinful because it threatened individual liberty and the God-ordained free market. By the 1940s and 1950s, Spiritual Mobilization was leading "Freedom Under God" celebrations throughout the country and promoting "Independence Sunday" events in local Protestant churches.

Fifield's Christian libertarian vision would find an ally in Billy Graham. Kruse downplays Graham's staunch anti-communist sermons, focusing instead on his pro-business and anti-labor rhetoric. Such an emphasis is part of Kruse's larger thesis about the roots of the religious revival sweeping the United States in the immediate wake of World War II. Conventional wisdom suggests that this revival, and especially the various manifestations of civil religion that accompanied it, can be explained by Americans' desire to distinguish themselves from the godless communism of the Soviet Union. For Kruse, the attempt to make America "one nation under God" had its roots not in the Cold War, but in attempts by Christian libertarians like Fifield and Graham to defeat a more imposing danger than the Soviets—the state power brought about by the New Deal.

The Christian libertarianism of the 1930s was co-opted in the 1950s by Dwight D. Eisenhower. A deeply religious man with roots in River Brethren Anabaptism, Ike believed that the United States government was based on Christian principles, but he was no libertarian. In fact, he believed that religion was needed to strengthen the state rather than tear it down. It was under his administration that the Cold War replaced the New Deal as the primary enemy of Christian nationalists. Though Christian businessmen and those Protestants aligned with the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party wished that Eisenhower would talk more about the relationship between Christianity and free markets, and perhaps even roll back the welfare state, they were happy that the President was willing to bring businessmen into his cabinet and religion into the halls of American power.

According to Kruse, America became a Christian nation for the first time during the Eisenhower administration. When in 1953 the National Association of Evangelicals issued its "Statement of Seven Divine Freedoms," a decree that basically declared that the United States was founded on biblical principles, Eisenhower was the first to sign it. By 1960, the phrase "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase "In God We Trust" was printed for the first time on paper currency. Both initiatives had overwhelming bipartisan support.

In corporate America, Walt Disney embraced Eisenhower's God and country vision and added Christian nationalist features to his theme park in Anaheim. The Advertising Council launched a "Religion in American Life" campaign that featured advertisements encouraging Americans to attend religious services. And Cecil B. DeMille, a harsh critic of the New Deal and supporter of Fifield's Spiritual Mobilization, used his movie The Ten Commandments (1956) as a means of displaying the religious roots of resistance (Moses and the Hebrew God) against government tyranny (Ramses II).

Eisenhower's vision of a Christian America met some major setbacks in the 1960s. Kruse's chapters on the Engle v. Vitale case (1962) that ended prayer in public schools, and the Abington v. Schempp case (1963) that ended mandatory Bible reading, are excellent. He also shows how Richard Nixon, a president not normally championed by the Christian Right today, used Graham to help him bring the corporate world and the Christian world together. Nixon held regular services in the White House to which he invited corporate leaders with religious sensibilities. Graham was often the guest preacher at these services.

In the end, Kruse advances our knowledge of the contests over the separation of church and state in 20th-century America in two major ways. First, he calls attention to the important role that the opposition to the New Deal played in the development of Christian nationalism. Second, he shows that figures like David Barton and Ted Cruz, to the extent that they believe America needs to "return" to its Christian roots, are nostalgic not for the era of the American founding—few of them want to go back to wearing tri-cornered hats and wigs—but for what they perceive to be the golden age of the Eisenhower era.

Anyone familiar with contemporary attempts by Cruz and others to conflate economic liberty and Christian nationalism will find a lot that is familiar in Kruse's book. Fifield, for example, anticipated Glenn Beck when he railed against the welfare state and preached a version of Christianity that celebrated individual salvation over collectivism and the gospel of social justice. Well before the heyday of Falwell and Barton, Eisenhower talked endlessly about Thomas Jefferson's assertion in the Declaration of Independence that individual rights stemmed from "the Creator" and boldly proclaimed that "without God, there could be no American form of Government, nor an American way of life."

Those of us who have taken a longer view of the ways that Americans have seen themselves as belonging to a Christian nation will question Kruse's definitive claim that Christian nationalism did not emerge in the United States until the 1930s. He fails to recognize the ubiquitous presence of this idea in American culture well before Christian libertarians got upset with FDR's welfare state. Americans believed that they were living in a Christian nation as early as the first decades of the 19th century, when they experienced massive evangelical revivals and supported benevolent societies intent upon forging a Protestant country. Many of these benevolent societies were founded and run by Christian businessmen. Of course Christian businessmen in the 1830s did not worry about the free market in the same way Christian businessmen did a century later, but they used their wealth and prominent place in local Protestant life to foster a Christian nation.

In the end, Kruse should be careful about claiming too much. Did Fifield, Eisenhower, Graham, and Nixon set out to unite businessmen and religious leaders for the purpose of creating a Christian nation? Yes. In this regard Kruse has made an important and singular contribution to our understanding of religion and politics in the 20th century. But was this the first time in American history that such an attempt to forge a Christian nation was made, as Kruse seems to imply throughout the course of the book? No.—John Fea

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In Pasadena in the late 1980s, there was a science-fiction bookstore with the pleasing name Planet Ten. The shop wasn’t large, and you couldn’t expect exotic finds, but it was well stocked. I stopped by every few weeks, and I never left without buying at least one book, sometimes two or three, always paperbacks.

I can remember some of those books—in fact, I still have some of them, ranging from then-new releases to reissues of the classics. Our son Andrew (born in 1978) was the perfect age for Robert Heinlein’s juveniles (which include some of RAH’s best work), and we accumulated a small shelf of those. (Our mutual favorite was Citizen of the Galaxy.) Sometimes I’d buy a book chiefly for the cover-art. But I also did a lot of browsing, just to see what people were doing. I dipped into many books that way, noticing what kind of stories were being told, in what voices.

Along with other trends of the day—cyberpunk, for instance—those years saw a vogue for tales featuring a repressive religious regime (inspired in part by the triumph of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale). This predated by some years the Great Theocracy Scare. (You remember that, don’t you? All those books and magazine articles and screeds online a few years back, warning that the US was in imminent danger of takeover by evangelical zealots, conservative Catholics, and other assorted “Christo-fascists,” as Chris Hedges liked to say.) And speaking of “theocracy,” don’t miss Doug Wilson’s piece on Rousas Rushdoony and Christian Reconstruction (p. 17 in this issue).

In the unlikely event that anyone reading this remembers Planet Ten, I’d love to hear from you. Perhaps we were even in the store at the same time, saying “excuse me” as we changed places in the aisle somewhere between Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin.

While working on the issue that you now have in hand, I’ve been looking ahead to celebrating our 20th anniversary with the September/October 2015 issue—and looking back as well, to our first issue, September/October 1995. Re-reading that issue has been a treat. (It has also been very strange: 1995 seems not so long ago and—at the same time!—hauntingly distant.) Here, for instance, are the concluding two paragraphs of the cover-story, Mark Noll’s essay-review on “The Struggle for Lincoln’s Soul”:

“So, what was Lincoln’s religion? It was genuine, but only partially Christian. Its exact shape cannot be specified further until someone carries out broad, painstaking, conceptually sophisticated research comparable to that which Burlingame devoted to Lincoln’s marriage. Certainly a start has been made in tracing Lincoln’s private religion—for example, his reactions to early Calvinist preaching and to the deaths of his children—as a basis of his presidential theology. Yet only when researchers are able to extricate themselves from the partisanship of ‘Lincoln the Pious’ or ‘Lincoln the Infidel’ and take up the challenge of messy historical reality will it be possible to come closer to the truth of Lincoln’s religion.

“Why should such historical questions matter? They matter because the truth matters. God, whom believers worship as the author of truth, can accept what his creatures do and are, even on questions of great depth and immense complexity, like the question of Abraham Lincoln’s faith. If God does not shy from the truth, neither should we.”

This wouldn’t make a bad explanation for why Books & Culture was started in the first place—and why we think its continuing existence matters.

Of course, once I’ve started quoting, it’s hard to stop. I don’t want to leave out Rich Mouw on the Branch Davidians (“Waco Logic”) or Philip Yancey on Annie Dillard, George Marsden’s “new Dialogue from Olympus” or Larry Woiwode on John Gardner, Gerald Early on Albert Raboteau’s account of African American religious history or David Neff’s interview with the poet Li-Young Lee … but I have to stop before I list the contents in full (with profuse apologies to those not yet mentioned). If you’re a subscriber, you have access to the issue (and all the subsequent issues) on our website. Some of you, like me, might be unrepentant savers of back issues: maybe you still have your copy of our first issue. But I have to quote one more bit—the beginning of Frederica Mathewes-Green’s piece on icons (“Through a Glass More Clearly”):

“Jesus is lying on his side on my dining room floor, leaning against the radiator, balanced on one finger and one toe like a gymnast. He is flattened, just a sheet of painted plywood, and from pointed toe to the tip of his halo he is about four-and-a-half feet tall. For protection, for storage, Jesus is swathed in a blue tablecloth that has been knotted around his ankles and pulled up over his head. When I push the cloth aside, I can see his form, a crucified body without a cross. He floats in misery, head sunk toward one shoulder, eyes tightly shut, face brimming cupful of pain.

“His arms are spread like gull-wings; he flies like Superman to save us. But Superman flew twinklebright with punchy fists out front, and our Jesus floats, wide-armed, fistless, hands open and drilled useless with holes. He comes to save us, broken, hobbled, and swathed here on my dining-room floor. It is the only way he can save us; it is the only way we can be saved.”

It was in the very early years of B&C that I first met Phyllis Tickle, who was the keynote speaker at a small gathering of Christian editors in Nashville. Later, Phyllis became a dear friend, and my wife, Wendy, and I have read many of her books over the years. We are especially in debt to her—as I mentioned in this space in the March/April issue—for putting together The Divine Hours, three volumes covering the span of the church calendar, with prayers and readings adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and other sources.

Late in May of this year, in a profile for Religion News Service, David Gibson reported that Phyllis has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She is characteristically resolute, Gibson tell us:

“I am no more afraid of dying than I am of, I don’t know, drinking this coffee,” she continues, pointing to her mug. (It’s actually filled with Postum since she’s had to give up caffeine. She remains thankful, though, that she can still drink a nightly whiskey. “Jack Daniels, of course!” she says, shocked at the suggestion that a Tennessee native would drink anything else.)

B&C readers will be familiar with Jon M. Sweeney, author of many books and a significant figure in the publishing world. Jon will be writing a biography of Phyllis. He’s seeking correspondence (email and otherwise) from writers, church leaders, journalists, publishing people, readers, and anyone who has had significant or meaningful contact with Phyllis over the course of her long and productive life. You can contact him at jonmsweeney@gmail.com

On p. 10 of this issue there is a list of some coming attractions in B&C, including Timothy Larsen on British converts to Islam, 1850-1950, D. L. Mayfield on Runaway Radical, David Bebbington on Baptists in America, Mark Noll on the United Church of Canada, Lauren Winner on why she reads poetry, and Houghton College’s Shirley Mullen interviewed by Todd C. Ream. That’s just a small sample of what’s ahead (the September/October issue, for instance, will feature Rachel Marie Stone on Laura Ingalls Wilder).

Last year, supplementing the print magazine, we launched a biweekly digital edition of B&C that you can read on your tablet. If you haven’t checked this out yet, you should give it a look. (See the ad on p. 6 for more information.) Our art director, Jennifer McGuire, has created a very handsome and user-friendly design, as I think you’ll agree. The digital biweekly also features some extras. If you subscribe to our free weekly e-newsletter, you already know that we regularly publish web exclusives, pieces that appear only on the B&C website, not in print. But over the years I’ve discovered that many faithful readers of the magazine are not aware of these web exclusives. To introduce such readers (you, for instance?), occasional installments of the digital biweekly gather such pieces.

We continue working toward our goal of securing funding for 2015-18. If you believe in what B&C is doing, and if you have the resources to help, please consider pitching in. When I look at what’s ahead, I’m thankful all over again for your support.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Such a burden of beasts
and rainbows, sulfur and emeralds
leaking from his knapsack
as John hunches in a cave down there,
picking at a skeleton of fish.

The body resists exile.
Even the smallest burrowing mite
is enough to make John claw his skin,
saltwater stiffening his hair
like the driftwood he tries to burn.

Any sort of trance is impossible
to achieve when shifting on rocks,
the fabric of your robe sticking
in your crack. But with time,
the Spirit will come.

The angel doodles dragons
in the air. He circles like a plane on hold
and waits for the one twilight
John will sigh, lift his chapped hands,
and receive his words like wounds.

—Tania Runyan

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I am sitting on my mother's lap.
In all the villages and towns, counties
And states and nations of the world, in all
The universe, it is the only safe.
You're there, white tinged with blue like watered milk.
The ink seed planted in your brain in life
Has flowered, stem looping above your head
And the blossom, like a peony, arched
Open, soon to shatter into pieces.
Father's ranting against the feral world
That took you from us, world where he will not
Kneel for authority, where he will not
Bow to anything until the body
Is bent and soul flings off like an arrow.
You have blossomed. You understand the thing
We cannot. Safe in arms, I dream just this:
To nestle in the flower on the stem
That snakes in arabesques above your mind.

—Marly Youmans

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

For Greg Spencer on his 60th birthday

Ignore the one toxic critic
online. Read the five, instead,
who find you necessary to their lives.

Take a walk, instead,
attentive to the agitation of the snails,
the dog's arthritic limp. At the fork
of broad and narrow ways,
go right, toward life.

Though hurt, be innocent,
Unhurt in spirit; champion
that fleeting kind.

And where you are,
there be, and what you are
be inside out; give courage back
its single heart.

Don't gaze ahead
yet know the path, before, behind,
the cottage door, the sainted shrine.
Among the palmers, by the hour,
walk along;

admire the flower,
no, more, when lightning crack
and thunder wrack precipitate
the daily shower, genuflect.
It is the Lord's own way.

Go not another, even unto death,
but in his mercy's bowl hold all your hope.
And so

may you be full,
and fully free,
generous in mind and hand;
may you be of that noble band.

You see, I've read your book—
marveling to find
that it quite
read me.

Check here if you've found this review
helpful.

—Randall J. VanderMey

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Episode 11: “Rise Up”

NBC

The penultimate episode of A.D. The Bible Continues is called “Rise Up,” which refers to two things: the fact that the Zealots are preparing an uprising, to protect the Temple from desecration by Caligula's statue; and the fact that Tabitha, who was flogged by the Romans for converting to Christianity last week, dies from her wounds and is brought back to life by Peter this week. (He actually tells Tabitha to "Get up," rather than "Rise up," but hey.)

Along the way, the episode also finally depicts the meeting of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. This would have happened three weeks ago if the series was telling these stories in order, but that's okay: the Luke-Acts tradition doesn't always narrate its events in chronological order either. (Case in point: Luke 3 doesn't mention the baptism of Jesus until after it mentions the arrest and imprisonment of John the Baptist.)

The first half of this episode is mostly concerned with fictitious political maneuvering.

Caiaphas rallies the Jews and calls for unity in defense of the Temple. James the Just seizes the opportunity to negotiate with Caiaphas for an end to the persecution of the Church.

Meanwhile, the Zealots rally their own supporters and nearly kill Reuben, the head of Caiaphas's Temple guards, for spying on them. Reuben escapes and tells Caiaphas and Leah about the Zealot threat, and about the Ethiopian eunuch's involvement with it.

NBC

Caiaphas, on hearing about the Zealots' plans, refuses to tell Pilate, afraid that it will make him look like a Roman collaborator at the very moment that he is trying to lead his people in protest against Rome. So Leah goes behind his back and tells Pilate herself, and the Ethiopian eunuch is stripped of his belongings and sent back home in disgrace by the Romans.

Oh, and somewhere in there, Pilate forces his wife to watch as Cornelius strangles Joanna to death for being a Christian. Pilate does this to teach his wife that empathy is a form of weakness, but Joanna, just before the strangling, forgives Cornelius in Jesus' name, and something about this experience prompts Cornelius to break down and cry. His heart finally broken, Cornelius, it seems, is ready to be converted himself in next week's finale.

It is only after all these other scenes that we finally get a few scenes taken straight from the book of Acts. Bringing the book of Acts to life was supposed to be this series' raison d'être; in theory, biblical scenes like these—of Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch and Peter raising Tabitha from the dead—should be the whole point of this episode. But instead, they feel tacked on.

In fairness, it can't be easy to make a dramatic series out of the stories in Acts, which sometimes hop from one person or location to another without a lot of narrative material to connect them. And you do have to give A.D. credit for including the bit where Philip vanishes right after baptizing the eunuch; if there's one thing this series doesn't shy away from, it's the supernatural. (The vanishing in question is right there in Acts 8:39, if you want to take a look.)

NBC

But it's telling that the writers of A.D. are far more interested in the political machinations of the Roman and Jewish authorities than they are in, say, what Philip was up to before and after his encounter with the eunuch. It's also telling that they have focused on the violence of this period to the point where it no longer simply provides context for the book of Acts, but has distorted their take on Acts itself.

Again, look at the show's treatment of Tabitha and Cornelius. Both of them are introduced in the book of Acts (in 9:36ff and 10:1ff, respectively) as people who believed in God and gave to the poor. Tabitha, in Acts, becomes sick one day and dies, while Cornelius is visited by an angel who tells him, in effect, that God is going to reward him for his prayers and his generosity to the poor.

This episode of A.D. hints at Tabitha's generosity, at least, when she prepares to give a few alms to a beggar at the Temple. But it can't just let her become sick and die: she has to become sick as a result of the wounds she got in the last episode. And who wounded her? Cornelius, who also kills Joanna in this episode, and who, even now, has still shown no sign of devotion to the Jewish God or to the poor or to anyone else but his Roman superiors.

NBC

In the book of Acts, the conversion of Cornelius represented, in part, a recognition that the Jewish believers in Jesus could not exclude the righteous Gentiles who, although they did not have the Law, did by nature the things required by the Law (to steal a few words from Romans 2).

But A.D. doesn't have much interest in righteous Gentiles. Between Cornelius's violence and the Ethiopian eunuch's support for the Zealots (including their attempt to assassinate Reuben), the show seems to be operating on the principle that anyone of significance who converts to Christianity must first have a sordid history of terrible deeds that needs to be repented of.

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There is certainly a place for that kind of conversion story—just look at Saul!—but not every story in the Bible conforms to that formula. And after a while, you begin to wonder why the filmmakers are so insistent on that formula, and why they cannot imagine goodness as easily as they imagine evil.

Peter T. Chattaway writes about films in general, and Bible films in particular, at FilmChat.

Extremism in the defense of LGBT liberty is no vice.” That seems to be the Goldwateresque mantra of many well-meaning Americans today. But it has unfortunately created a rather ugly atmosphere.

The latest flash point is Indiana’s original RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act), which was signed into law in April. It was designed, in part, to protect individuals and businesses from being compelled to use their creative services to celebrate, honor, or extol behavior they find morally objectionable. The presenting issue is gay marriage, and specific examples include the Christian photographer in New Mexico who was asked to photograph a gay commitment event. The courts ruled that she could not refuse to provide such services.

The current challenge to liberty of conscience is serious, and it is likely things will get worse before they get better. But we are cautiously optimistic.

We believe that Christian business owners should offer ordinary services to anyone who seeks them. But like just causes taken up during other eras of American history, some extreme partisans of a fundamentally good cause (equal treatment for LGBT people) are now discriminating against others.

The current challenge to liberty of conscience is serious, and it is likely things will get worse before they get better. But we are cautiously optimistic. Time and again in American history, wiser heads, committed to living in a just and pluralistic democracy, have prevailed at such times (from the Salem Witch Trials to the McCarthy era). More important, the church has weathered worse crises in more dire circumstances here and abroad, and by God’s grace, Christ’s church still stands. May Christians be among the calmer heads who work steadily and stubbornly to create laws that protect the rights and consciences of all who live in this land.

Here are four ways we can do so amid the storm:

1. We can remind people on all sides what is at stake: not just our but also their liberty of conscience if the logic of these cases against Christian conscience gets applied broadly. Imagine a gay baker being required to decorate a cake with an antigay message, like “God Hates Gays.” Depending on a state’s laws, stores may not specifically refuse to inscribe cakes that identify buyers as Baptist (that would be religious discrimination). But, writes UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, “nothing in the law bans discrimination based on ideology more broadly.” This baker could justifiably refuse to decorate that cake because it articulates a point of view he adamantly opposes. That’s the liberty of conscience we cherish, whether it protects gay people, agnostics, Mormons, Muslims, or whomever.

2. As the example above suggests, we can continue to insist that the law make distinctions. While we believe basic goods and services should be offered to all customers, we also believe Christian business owners should be able to act on conscience when customers ask them to celebrate or implicitly endorse behaviors or points of view that go against their conscience. This is not a contradiction; rather, it’s the difference between selling your neighbor a doughnut and catering your neighbor’s wedding. Of course, laws that make such distinctions are not easy to write, but it is the business of law to make important distinctions, even if gray areas remain.

3. We might moderate demanding our rights. Today, many believe we’re masking mere self-interest when we wrap our cause in the flag of religious freedom and First Amendment rights. Such language is appropriate and necessary in the courts, but we may also want to frame our concern in terms of freedom of conscience as a way to find common ground with the religious and nonreligious.

4. Regardless of what happens in courts, we can continue to reach out to our gay and lesbian neighbors in friendship. Many of our LGBT neighbors believe we are no different from the vile racists of the civil rights era. One way to show them otherwise is modeled by Palau Association president Kevin Palau, Chick-fil-A’s Dan Cathy, and others: Sitting down with our LGBT neighbors and getting to know them. That led Palau, for example, to work with the mayor of Portland, Oregon, on citywide projects and to support him during a personal crisis.

These four suggestions may not instantly quell the controversy, and each may bring its own complications. There is no magic formula when distrust and hate is in the air—only patience, perseverance, and hope. “If it is possible,” writes Paul, “as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Rom. 12:18). That biblical command is still possible to live out, even in our day.

Mark Galli is editor of Christianity Today.

Disney/Pixar

I’m probably as stubbornly seated at the end of Inside Out as many are about giving the film a standing ovation—but I am clapping, moderately. I both enjoyed and esteemed the latest Pixar installment. But I’m not ready to give away the farm, quiet yet.

Then again, I know that makers of animated films are confronted with a nearly impossible task these days, with an audience that includes distractable toddlers, bored parents, and those who are neither. And since everyone can rewatch the films endlessly once they're released for home viewing, the movies have to hold up to intense scrutiny—nearly frame by frame. There’s no such thing as a throwaway gag any more. Lyrics for Frozen were endlessly dissected, dialogue was parsed, images of a family in a sauna put under the microscope.

So in such a landscape, the near universal praise for Inside Out is more remarkable than any curmudgeonly sighs coming from a few critics who aren’t as enthused. And part of me really wants to just join in with the choir of enthusiasts, rather than singing my own song. If it’s not quite out of tune, I sense I am not getting the harmonies right.

But for a film boasting about the importance of the imagination in the human brain, the film is pretty formulaic. Like Toy Story, it tells a generic but pathos-laden story of adolescent trauma from the viewpoint of animated creatures whose existence is tied to and parallels the aforementioned adolescent. The major characters are not living toys but emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). They live in the brain of Riley, a precocious Minnesota girl who likes hockey but gets hauled to San Francisco when her dad’s work precipitates a family move.

Although the conceit works better than just about any other film attempts at allegory, it’s still a little disappointing to see the tired metaphor of the human brain symbolized in mechanical terms. Riley has core memories that support elements of her personality. When those memories, along with Joy and Sadness, are displaced, Riley starts acting out—yelling at her parents and stealing from her mom’s purse. The inside of her head is creatively rendered, but the world-building is sketchy. As Joy and Sadness make their fantastic voyage back to the control center, they hitch a ride on a train of thought, run through a dangerous zone of abstraction, stop at dream production, get locked in a subconscious dungeon, and risk falling into a chasm of permanent forgetfulness.

Most allegories and metaphors break down if you push them too far. I’m not sure why the brain would treat emotions and memories the same, or why a spaceship that has been forgotten could be used to escape a chasm of forgetfulness.

Disney/Pixar

Obviously that’s not a deal-breaker, but it is a sign of poor storytelling. And this is the result: the middle act of Inside Out is the weakest because we’re not really sure what the rules are in this universe. So when the action gets funneled into a narrative tight spot, the solution is to drop in a new element: an imaginary friend. That friend lives in the corridors of long-term memory and knows the way around (despite having not read the manual). Then there’s the chute that goes straight to the control center that’s found at a convenient moment, and there’s a train of thought’s track that is destroyed but doesn’t appear to halt all thoughts. The pacing is off in the middle as well. It feels like filler, and it drags.

But the writing gets much stronger when the payoff arrives. As soon as Joy draws a tight circle around Sadness and tells her to stay in it, Inside Out lets us know it isn’t comfortable with Riley’s mom telling her they need to “keep smiling” (regardless of what they actually feel) for dad’s sake. The film leans a tad feminist by underscoring the way we assume some emotions are more acceptable for different genders—in a brief glimpse into the parents’ heads, we see mom ruled by Sadness and dad by Anger. And it’s culturally subversive in daring to question the idea that our highest good comes from pursuing happiness.

It’s also refreshing to see parents who are mostly both loving and attentive. Inside Out is one of the few movies I can think of where a child’s distress is a natural consequence of growing up, rather than as precipitated by some unreasonable maternal expectation or careless paternal blunder.

Disney/Pixar

One more note: at one point early in their journey, Joy and Sadness are nearly destroyed by wandering into a zone of abstract thought. Abstraction leads to deconstruction, you see, and deconstruction (we are told) destroys everything in its path.

This makes no sense. The imagination needs abstract thought as much as emotion to run. So maybe this episode was just a poke at critics, like the Ebersisk in Willow. Maybe it was just an excuse to render the animated characters in a cubist style to give the art historians a chuckle. But if nothing else, it was a classic example of the reader-response concept of a work instructing you how to read it.

So here is what it seems to say: don’t think too much, and give your brain over to your emotions. Follow the second half of those instructions, and you should like the film as much as I did. Follow the first half, and you may like it even more.

Caveat Spectator

Inside Out is rated PG. The MPAA lists “mild thematic elements,” most probably dealing with Riley’s aborted attempt to run away from home. Riley sees a dead mouse when she first enters her San Francisco home. There is plenty of cartoon peril for Joy and Sadness—falling from heights, being chased by an angry clown, being locked in a gloomy dungeon. In a flashback to Riley as a baby, her bare bottom is shown running out of (or away from) bath time. Later, during a dream, Riley imagines the other kids laughing at her because she is at school with no pants on. The film doesn’t show anything immodest in that scene—it is a point-of-view shot from Riley seeing others laughing at her. Still, the film’s mild fixation on the generic embarrassment of being naked in a public place seemed a bit odd in today’s hyper-sensitive as well as hyper-sexed culture. Anger has a reoccurring joke about the amount of swear words he knows, but when he says one, it is inaudible.

Kenneth R. Morefield (@kenmorefield) is an associate professor of English at Campbell University. He is the editor of Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volumes I, II, & III, and the founder of 1More Film Blog.

Editor's Note: Books & Culture is hosting a symposium on the historical Adam, which Karl Giberson and I organized. Karl's student assistant at Stonehill College, Olivia S. Peterson, played an indispensable part in rounding up the pieces and preparing them for posting. There will be eight participants, representing a range of views: Peter Enns, Karl Giberson, Denis Lamoureux, Hans Madueme, Harry "Hal" Lee Poe, John Schneider, William VanDoodewaard, and John Walton. After the first round, each participant will have an opportunity to respond. Posting will be in alphabetical order. Following the second round, I will post a wrap-up, and the symposium will conclude.

"Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved."—G. K. Chesterton

Most arguments for the historicity of Adam are little more than wishful thinking. Do we not all wish for a world that makes sense, as it once made sense before Copernicus uprooted the earth prompting the great poet John Donne to declare that the "new philosophy casts all in doubt" to such a degree that a once cozy cosmos was "now in pieces, all coherence gone"? If we project our longings and fears onto the cosmos, we have to admit that it would be more comforting if the earth were fixed at the center of the universe, if the earth and all its inhabitants were created about the same time as humans, if the stars were not unimaginably far away, forever out of our reach. It would be comforting if humans were more distinct from animals, if there was a convenient explanation for suffering and death. Science, however, has raised troubling questions about who we are, how we should live, why we are here, and where we came from.

In Four Views on the Historical Adam, William Barrick writes that "Denial of the historicity of Adam … destroys the foundations of the Christian Faith." So what are we to do when science threatens our sacred cows or, as the case may be, our sacred stories? We cannot turn away. We must always be prepared for new knowledge to overturn ancient ideas. No received wisdom from the past—in sacred texts, confessions, creeds, statements of faith, or anywhere else—should be immune to challenge from the advancing knowledge of the present.

I want to suggest however, that the science that has driven Adam to extinction does not, in fact, destroy the foundations of the Christian faith, but simply provides more powerful insights into human nature.

In the Christian tradition, the human problem is referred to as sin, blamed on Adam, and said to be present in us all through the inheritance of original sin. Scientific advances have made such a viewpoint no longer tenable, and we must learn to get along without the notion that we inherited sin from Adam. There is no original sin, and there was no original sinner.

But we must not forget that the Christian tradition's long conversation about sin was primarily a conversation about what was wrong with us, and only secondarily about how we got to be that way. Augustine was more interested in his own sin than that of Adam. Regardless of how it originated, or whether it even had an origin, something appropriately called "sin" remains a deeply rooted part of human nature and, given that we are born this way, "original sin" is not a bad name for it. G. K. Chesterton called original sin "the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved."

The Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, an atheist with no investment in Christian doctrine, has written a provocative book titled Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity. De Duve tips his hat to the sacred writers, who, he says, "perceived the presence in human nature of a fatal flaw." He is quick to dismiss original sin as the flaw, but quite insistent that the flaw is real, serious, and threatening to our species.

De Duve's culprit is the process of natural selection that shaped our species over the long course of evolution. This selection process, unfortunately, privileged gene traits that were "immediately favorable to the survival and proliferation of our ancestors … with no regard for later consequences." Such traits include "selfishness, greed, cunning, aggressiveness, and any other property that ensured immediate personal gain, regardless of later cost to oneself or to others."

The serious problems we face today arise from this deeply rooted, deeply troubling, and ineradicable part of our evolved human nature. And yet, many propose to solve these problems with trivial rearrangements of the social order. At the moment the world is recovering from the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. Major banks are paying billion-dollar fines for their role in the collapse of the economy. And yet one listens in vain for any suggestion that uncontrollable greed on the part of bankers may have caused the collapse. The news is filled with unhappy stories about growing wealth inequality, but nobody seems to think that greedy self-interest might be part of the problem.

In the Middle East, ISIS slaughters innocent civilians and publically beheads non-combatants. The intensity of their campaign is rooted in the ancient tribalism that took up residence in our genes when defending one's tribe had survival value. We forget that Western Christians waged similar campaigns a few short centuries ago, and it was only in the last century that Hitler was murdering Jews. Setting aside tribal differences requires more effort than economic sanctions or high-brow political conversations at Camp David.

Jimmy Carter writes passionately in A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power about the global exploitation of women that occurs in every nation, a natural consequence of social structures where powerful men are in control. In the United States, young girls develop eating disorders as they strive to look like artificially enhanced versions of what men find attractive. Evolution has programmed men with unhealthy attitudes toward women; when not checked, these attitudes express themselves in tragic ways.

Climate scientists try in vain to awaken the world to gradual changes that are ruining the planet. Natural resources are getting used up. But we are programmed by natural selection to care only about the short term. Thinking about people who will be born in the next century seems like a fantasy. How can we possibly owe them anything? Why should we restrain our lifestyles to enhance theirs?

For centuries we understood ourselves as fallen, sinful creatures—an understanding that served as a caution by illuminating our dark behaviors. We still find ourselves in need of salvation, however, and yet strangely lost in our search for solutions. The original sinner has indeed gone extinct, but he didn't take original sin with him.

(Adapted from the conclusion to Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible's First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World, published by Beacon Press, June 2015)

This article is part of our Symposium on the Historical Adam:

Karl Giberson is Scholar-in-Residence in science and religion at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He publishes broadly in science and religion and has authored or co-authored ten books, including Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible's First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World.

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