Back in SoCal

Well, it's been a while since my last post... a long while, and as you will see from my sidebar, I no longer live in Chicago. I moved back to the southern California this past July, and it's been interesting. I really wasn't ready to leave Chicago and I didn't want to come back to L.A. but circumstances didn't permit me to stay in Chicago and L.A. was the only easy place to go, so here I am.


The last time I posted, I did a review of the book, "Jesus and Justice", which was an excellent book. I enjoyed reading it and reference it often however, I don't believe that Sojourners is going bridge the gap between Black / White relations in the Evangelical movement as Heltzel suggests. I believe it's going to take a lot more than any single organization to do that. The fact that after 200 years, there still is a gap suggests that it's going to take something truely transformative to remove the stale attitudes that persist, not just in Evangelicalism, but throughout Christendom...but I have to be honest, I don't know exactly what will. All I know is that these attitudes MUST change because they hurt the body as a whole and they damage people who belong to God, simply because they (we) don't fit the current mold of what a "Christian" should be, according to leaders whose hearts are far from God and have been for a long time.

I believe that Christendom needs a purging of leadship... or rather a shedding of the old and the installation of the new. A new church that genuinely doesn't see race or class or gender as components of spiritual devotion, but deals solely with the heart and the individual's desire to be one with their heavenly father, which is a blood-bought right that was paid for by the blood of Jesus Christ, which every believer has the right to enjoy. Until we understand that this is the essence of our faith, and not what church, race, political organization or socio-economic group we belong to, we will never be able to see His kingdom come or His will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven.

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Book Review: "Jesus & Justice"

Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race and American Politics
by Peter Heltzel
Yale Univ. Press, 2009

Jesus and Justice is a broad overview of the impact of Evangelicalism in American politics. Heltzel discusses how Evangelicalism went from being an "anti-slavery, anti-segregation, anti-racism, reconciliation movement seeking to bear witness for Christ through being a parable of the Kingdom of God” [p. 14] to the divisive, misogynistic, racially charged movement we see today, and attempts to chronicle its progression.

The book starts with the origins Evangelicalism. The term originates with Martin Luther in Germany and has a revivalist background. Evangelicalism calls its members to live out their faith, being active in social and political matters, in an effort to bring the Kingdom of God here on earth.

Heltzel goes on to describe how the culmination of faith and activism caused the revival at Kane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, where a large group of black and white southern Evangelicals came together to repent for the sin of slavery. This is a unified Evangelical meeting which helped to spark the fire of Abolitionism in America. A fire which ultimate spread to provoked the Civil War.

Heltzel also discusses some of the contradictions that existed in early American Evangelicalism and persist to this day. He starts with the rise of a segregated Evangelicalism immediately after the revival at Kane Ridge and how it impacted American culture, particularly in the south. Heltzel goes on to discuss the racial and philosophical tensions that exist between white Evangelicalism, (i.e., Focus on the Family) and modern prophetic Black Christianity, which rose in response Evangelicalism’s segregationist practices. He also discusses why traditional white Evangelicalism and Prophetic Black Christianity have never been able to merge as one unified Evangelicalism, as it was in the beginning.

Heltzel ends the book on an up note, with the rise of Sojourners, a newly branded form of Evangelicalism which seems to shed the racism associated with "traditional" Evangelicalism and focus on reconciling Evangelicalism as one unified group. An Evangelicalism ready for the 21st century.

Evangelicalism historically, has always been a movement of political activism, encouraging its members to put their faith into practice and Heltzel does an excellent job synopsizing it’s influence on American culture. He also causes one to question Evangelicalism’s future, race relations in our nation, and why even with the rise of Sojourners, the following statement is still true:
"The decades before the civil war constitute, thus, not only the most intensely partisan period in American history but also the period in which theology was most directly applied to public issues. The only era that comes close is our own."
- Peter Heltzel
Jesus and Justice,( p. 8)

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