By trade, Bonnie Kristian is a writer and editor, currently employed a deputy editor at Christianity Today, easily the most journalistically credible publication written within the framework of American evangelicalism. But in her role as author of the just-released In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers, she plays the role of a skilled defense attorney in the court of public opinion with evangelicalism itself on trial.

As such an “attorney,” she offers the “jury” a point-by-point rebuttal of the points made by journalists, academics and others who for at least the past dozen years have made the case that evangelicalism is irrelevant at best, broken or harmful at worst. Kristian knows being persuasive will be uphill battle, for surveys have found evangelism to be a religion with one of the highest disapproval ratings in the country. Of course, this negative image is inextricably linked to Christian nationalism and the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA-ism.

Kristian — and it must be stated from the outset that she is a devoted evangelical who has been critical of Trump and his political movement from the beginning — organizes her book and argument into rebuttals of five beliefs or positions common among critics of evangelicals. Those positions are:

🟪 Evangelicals are more about cultural and political identity than they are about religious beliefs.

🟪 Even to the extent that evangelicals are about religious beliefs, those religious beliefs are harmful.

🟪 Even to the extent that evangelicals’ beliefs are positive, they don’t behave in the way they supposedly believe. In other words, they are hypocrites.

🟪 Like all Americans, evangelicals free to hold whatever religious beliefs they want. But they shouldn’t bring what should be private religious beliefs into the public, secular square.

🟪 Evangelicals are dominated by Christian nationalists, who by definition want to turn the United States into a church-run state that would, among other things, take away rights from people with religious beliefs that aren’t evangelicalism.

Kristian has sound, well-reasoned rebuttals against all those positions, but before she addresses them she struggles with what may be the most important question of the book: What is an evangelical? As she attempts to answer the question, it’s clear that there isn’t an answer everyone will agree on, no checklist that can be indisputably designed to separate evangelical Christians from other types of Christians. And simply determining how many people define themselves as evangelicals doesn’t help: A surprising number of people, even some Jews, Hindus, atheists and others who have no connection with evangelicalism as traditionally understood1, identify themselves as evangelicals in recent surveys.

Kristian ends up with this partial definition:

Evangelicalism isn’t an institution or organization but a movement, a tradition, a manner of worshiping Christ. It’s a culture of enthusiasm, a way of life shaped around intimacy with God. It’s the maintenance of a deep sense of personal responsibility to the truth and to the world. It’s the branch of Christianity that never tires of repeating that Jesus died for you. As the kids say, it’s a vibe.

And as a vibe, evangelicalism has no central office or official creed. There’s no pope, no membership rubric for who’s in and who’s out. The reality is that evangelism has some fuzzy boundaries.

In the end, that’s about the most of a definition that Kristian can give, except to add that evangelism as she uses the term necessarily refers to Christians. Explicitly trying to avoid the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, Kristian says it makes more sense to talk about those who are more or less evangelical rather han saying that some on the edges aren’t evangelical at all. An example of someone she sees as less evangelical is Doug Wilson, an Idaho pastor who has been described as a spiritual mentor to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and who would bring an end to woman’s suffrage. As Kristian puts it: “Wilson would have to be included in American evangelicalism by any is or isn’t measure. But if we think about more or less, Wilson is undeniably less. ... Historian George Marsden famously quipped that ‘an evangelical is someone who likes Billy Graham.’ No one would define an evangelical as someone who likes Doug Wilson.’”

This struggle with defining exactly what evangelicalism is — a struggle that is far from unique to Kristian — ends up being the biggest weakness of her book, for she often claims that the worst of evangelicalism comes from its fringes or is otherwise atypical of evangelicalism as a whole. The rebuttals she makes to the anti-evangelical positions — such as the reality that individual evangelicals tend to be charitable and evangelical worship services nearly always focus on matters of salvation rather than on politics — are sound, but it seems there are always exceptions.

To her credit, Kristian doesn’t absolve evangelicalism of its shortcomings. In fact, in some ways, there are times that she verges on being as critical of certain aspects of evangelicalism as its detractors are. And she explicitly argues against the belief that some evangelicals have that they are being persecuted for their faith.

A book evangelicals will cheer

I suspect that most traditional evangelicals, both those who voted for Trump and those who can’t stomach him, who read this book would be willing to give it a five-star rating, appreciating the way how Kristian sees the good in evangelicalism that isn’t always seen in mainstream media or a wide array of cultural influencers.

But I can’t be quite so enthusiastic about the book, even though I recommend it. And that isn’t because I find my self in sharp disagreement with most of her arguments. I agree with her that some of the worst problems with evangelicals come from the fringes of evangelical belief and culture. I agree with her that evangelicals are often held to a higher standard than are adherents of other faiths. I agree with her that most evangelicals seek to love their neighbors. I agree with her that evangelicals have made great strides in overcoming prejudice within their ranks. There really is much positive that can be said about evangelicals!

But somehow, the sum total of Kristian’s arguments aren’t enough. I still see a religious movement whose most influential leaders have been complicit, maybe worse, in the U.S. government’s policies of cruelty toward immigrants and others that the Christian faith has referred to as “the least of these.” I see some of the politicians most complicit in that trend — I’ll use U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson as an example — as coming from mainstream evangelicalism, not its wacko fringe. I fail to see many of evangelicalism’s most prominent leaders (although there are exceptions) pushing back against cultural coarseness with any of the fervor that they used when such coarseness could be blamed on Hollywood or Democrats. The prophets of the Bible, particularly those of the pre-Christian era, had a reputation for challenging authority, but I don’t hear much of that kind of prophetic voice today in evangelicalism.2

Maybe I’m unfairly faulting Kristian here for trying to do the impossible. Maybe she is like the attorney trying to defend an obviously guilty client — somebody has to do it.

All that said, I can’t help but agree with some of Kristian’s final words. Writing to evangelicals, she says:

We must live up to the evangelical name, and any credible criticism will point us to the same reform. Be more serious. More studious of Scripture. More often in church. More faithful in prayer and diligent in service and capable of clear-eyed explanation for why we act and believe as we do. Be more evangelical, not less.

Amen.

It would have been easy for the directors of Death of the Pastor’s Wife, currently the No. 1 TV series being watched by Netflix subscribers, to sensationalize the sexual abuse that appears to have led to the event of the title. And it would have been easy for them to go into even more detail than what they did about the pastor’s troubled legal history. A case might be made that the series actually downplayed the troubling aspects of Pastor John-Paul “JP” Miller’s ministry as it told the story of his wife, Mica Miller, who died by suicide in April 2024.

What was most striking to me as I watched the three-part series was how ordinary so many of the documentary scenes were, particularly those of Mica singing with the congregation of the Solid Rock Church of Myrtle Beach, S.C., as a worship leader and of JP preaching his sermons. But all was not as it seemed.

The series’ story begins when Mica moved with her family to Myrtle Beach at the age of 13. She met JP, 15 years her senior, as a teenager and babysat for him and his wife, the parents of five. At the age of 18, Mica married another member of the congregation, but the marriage didn’t last, in part became Mica and JP started having an affair when she was 20 — or at least everyone involved seemed to treat the relationship as an affair even though describing it as abuse undoubtedly would have been more appropriate considering the ages and power differential between the two. They eventually divorced their spouses and married each other — but in an autonomous church such as Solid Rock without denominational oversight, that wasn’t enough for JP to be defrocked.

The film sympathetically tells Mica’s story largely through interviews with her friends and relatives. But the most damage to JP’s image comes from clips of sermons in which he advises wives that they face an obligation under Biblical teaching to give their husbands what they want in terms of sex — and we learn through what Mica told her friends that JP was demanding sex multiple times per day.

And his sermons all seem so ordinary.

You see, JP’s words echoed what was often uttered by many church leaders during the “purity culture” days of the 1990s and beyond. It was a culture that told Christian teenage girls and unmarried women that they needed to dress conservatively to keep men from being tempted sexually, but that after they were married they were expected to give everything sexual they had to their husbands. Women, the message was, are responsible for the sexual lives of their men.

Of course, JP was the kind to freely quote verses such as Ephesians 5:22, which directs wives to “submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”1

And lest you think that turning Ephesians into a command to submit sexually to such a degree is out of the ordinary, keep in mind that there is a part of the evangelical subculture — practiced by not all evangelicals by any means, and not even most — that sees it that way. In some evangelical stores as well as via Amazon, you can still find supposedly Bible-based books such as 2004’s Created to Be His Help Meet: Discover How God Can Make Your Marriage Glorious by Debi Pearl, in which she writes: “God has clearly told us that not having regular sex is giving Satan an opportunity to tempt married couples. Wife, it is your God-ordained ministry to your husband to be his totally enthusiastic sex partner, ready to enjoy him at all times.”

The story of Mica, who filed for divorce before her death, isn’t over. As the series comes to a close in the present day, JP is facing federal charges related to stalking, and he has married for a third time and continues to lead a diminished ministry. Meanwhile, friends and relatives of Mica are pushing for legislation called “Mica’s law” in South Carolina that would expand the definition of domestic abuse.

Part of me would have liked to see the directors of Death of the Pastor’s Wife more directly point to the red flags that might have helped Mica avoid her marriage or her friends and relatives to see the threat she was facing. But on further reflection, I’m thinking that maybe they were right to avoid portraying JP and his church as more obviously sinister than they did. After all, the fact that the pressures on Mica came from a supposedly God-endorsed pastor and organization is what put her at so much risk of being abused.

If you’re looking for evidence that Christian nationalism poses an existential threat to American democracy, you need not look beyond recent history. So says U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman in his just-published book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism, which he opens with an account of his memories from Jan. 6, 2021.

He was hoping it to be routine day for a member of Congress, or at least as routine as a day could be when the main item on the agenda was certifying the results of a presidential election. He did know there was the possibility of a day that wouldn’t be routine, since he couldn’t ignore a gathering of Donald Trump supporters whose “rhetoric was luring and violence: extreme even by Trumpian standards,” a gathering akin to a megachurch revival meeting where “the religion dial was cranked to eleven.” And while he says most members of Congress didn’t notice or care about the role religion played in the event, his interest was more than piqued because of his interest in religious matters. He had grown up a devout Christian but left the faith as a young adult, he writes, publicly identifying himself in 2017 as a Humanist1, making him the only member of Congress, then and now, to publicly acknowledge that he doesn’t believe in God.

As Huffman saw it, those behind the insurrection of Jan. 6 weren’t so much involved in a political movement as the term is usually used as but in a religious crusade. He introduces the book’s thesis like this:

No Prophets argues that extreme Christian nationalism is now America’s most dangerous political movement. Its theocratic, authoritarian ringleaders, once dismissed as fringe, now wield mainstream power, and they’ve using it to dismantle secular democracy from within. From a frontline perspective, I’ll show how this threat has advanced much further than most people realize. Indeed, it will be hard at this point to stop it from turning America into something unthinkable for most of us — something our Enlightenment-era founders fought against and built Constitutional walls to protect us from. But I wouldn’t write this book if the fight wasn’t still winnable.

For me, the most interesting part of Huffman’s book, the part that offered me the most new information, was his account of how the Congressional committee that prepared a report on the Jan. 6 insurrection intentionally left out all but a tiny, passing mention of the role that Christian nationalism2 played in the event. He writes that “scrubbing Christian nationalism wasn’t just a lapse in candor an courage; it was a major security blunder that left our country more vulnerable to what has now become America’s most dangerous political movement.”

And Huffman places the blame directly on what he calls the stubborn insistence of Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. He says that Cheney knew the committee’s report would have credibility only with her support, and she feared that if blame was placed on Christian nationalism that would detract from Trump’s culpability for the event. She feared that a focus on Christian nationalism also would alienate millions of Christians, and that the report as well as Cheney’s reputation might be perceived as anti-Christian.

Although not new to me, what also may be interesting to many readers is how the bulk of extreme Christian nationalism is made up of three distinct factions — and they don’t all agree with each other, neither theologically nor politically:

🟪 The New Apostolic Reformation, a largely decentralized movement of charismatic or Pentecostal churches3 that place an emphasis on spiritual warfare, miracles and prophetic visions. Leaders in the movement include self-declared prophets. As a prelude to the Second Coming, the movement advocates for Christians to take control of the “seven mountains” of cultural influence: religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. Opponents to their efforts are often seen as demonic in nature. This is the largest faction of extreme Christian nationalism.

🟪 The Reconstructionist movement exemplified by the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, sometimes known as the Theo Bros, founded by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. The movement advocates for Biblical literalism, strict patriarchal authority and nationalist identity as the cornerstones for a Christian takeover of government. Ultimately, as Reconstructionists see it, church and state will become one to herald in the Second Coming. This is the version of Christianity that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is affiliated with.

🟪 The Rad Trads, what Huffman calls the barely organized movement of Catholic traditionalist extremists who have been around since at least the 1920s and have opposed modernization of the Catholic Church while also supporting political causes such as anti-communism. Huffman sees Rad Trad influence on the Supreme Court as well as in some extremist influencers such as political commentator Nick Fuentes.

The power of these groups and their threat to democracy can’t be underestimated. Fortunately, Huffman offers hope to accompany his analysis. Much of that hope comes from those Christians, including evangelicals, who don’t agree with the agenda of the nationalists, and much of it comes from the growing number of “nones,” those without religious affiliation. Huffman describes a way forward for Christians and secularists such as himself to work together to support democracy despite the immense theological gap between them. Huffman’s book is the rare book capable of inspiring both the religious and nonreligious to pursue each others’ interests in creating a better future.

Vice President JD Vance's second book1, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is primarily a spiritual account, once that focuses on his conversion from the sort of unsophisticiated evangelical Christianity that he inherited as a child from his dysfunctional family to a self-styled atheism to a thoughtful Roman Catholicism. But it’s difficult to read his about his faith journey without thinking about its political implications — and they aren't what you might suspect if all you know about him is the unavoidably restrained vice presidential role he has played as one of President Donald Trump's key supporters.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the book was written before Vance became Trump's running mate in 2024, and it includes very few details of his short career as a U.S. senator before that. So it’s hard to know how, or even if, he reconciles his faith with his current political life, which includes support for policies, such as harsh anti-immigration action, that contradict Catholic social doctrine. But in the time period covered by the book, Vance comes across as sincere, searching and anxious to find ways in which his new faith can provide answers to problems facing American culture as well as personal meaning in light of his troubled upbringing.

Vance suggests that he sees himself in many ways as a Christian in general more than a Catholic per se, but that his choice of Catholicism came about in part because of its distinctives, which include a historical richness that ties the faith to a stable tradition.

Vance’s love for Christianity comes about in part because of what Christians often call its fruits: From Vance's perspective, although he does not see the United States as a Christian nation in some sort of legal sense, he sees its accomplishments as coming a legal system and culture based originally on Christian principles. Christianity, he writes, has been responsible from providing a framework for flourishing in the United States and elsewhere. “It's not a surprise that virtually all the modern theories of government arose in Christian societies,” he writes.

More to the point, he says:

I'm not demanding that you become a Christian, though I'd welcome it. I’m proposing that we have now run an experiment of replacing a Christian culture with something else for decades. And the fruit of that experiment includes rising racial strife, a gender gap among our young people, falling rates of love and partnership, and a society with a declining population.

In one of the most telling comments with political implications, one in which he splits from part of the MAGA political base, he criticizes Republicans and Democrats alike. Republicans, he says, frequently worship the economic markets and assume that they lead to good — when in fact they may lead to negative consequences such as business leaders taking jobs away from honest American workers and shifting them to Asian sweatshops. Several times, he even praises labor unions as helping shift some balance away from businesses and toward the workers. Vance displays a type of populism, one different than Trump’s version of populism.

Of course, Democrats come under fire too: They, he writes, “are far too willing to idolize the self and assume that everything done in the name of self-discovery is good.”

Vance's most entertaining observations in the book are those involving the nation’s culture of elite, of which he of course he has been a part of as a Yale law graduate since well before becoming a senator. His disillusionment with that culture is part of what led him to begin studying Christianity. And, as he tells it, his family life, which includes having three children with his wife, Usha, means far more to him than his social status possibly could. What he implies near the end of his book is even clearer: He cares more about becoming a good father than he does about being a good politician.

That idea comes across in another way as well: Traditional political issues don't seem to capture Vance’s interest in the way that does his concern over young adults living in a culture that fails to value friendship and the kind of connection that leads to the formation of families. Vance may have his views on tariffs and tax policies, but he appears to care far more whether young adults find love.

Where will that lead to in terms of Vance's future as a political leader? It's hard to say. But while the constraints of the office he holds limit his ability to focus on the issues he seems to care about the most, the book suggests that it may well be that a Vance unleashed would be, for better or worse, a surprising kind of politician in terms of the issues he would prioritize.

Life is difficult growing up gay when your family is steeped in a religion that condemns homosexuality as sinful.

And it may be even more difficult growing up as a adolescent music star with an abusive parent w…

Read more

Not all that many years ago, to be an evangelical was to have certain theological beliefs, such as basing personal salvation on accepting Jesus Christ as savior and seeing the Christian Bible as an infallible source of eternal truth.

But the evangelicalism of, say, the 1970s and the 1980s is no m…

Read more

God’s Stories as Told by God’s Children is a children’s Bible storybook like no other.

It may not have even really been written for children, who may find much of it beyond their reading level and miss many of the points the writers are trying to make in the same way that children of…

Read more

Set in the early days of World War II in Nazi Germany, the new Angel Studios film Truth & Treason has its share of shocking, brutal scenes1. But one of its most shocking scenes, which takes place near the b…

Read more

A new type of American Protestantism could be emerging — and a book by the pastor of one its churches shows both its promises and a potential weakness.

The movement has no name yet, although it might be called something like exvangelical Christianity, for it is made up largely…

Read more

Few writers have more accurately explained the current state of American religion, at least its most visible aspects, than has university professor Neil Postman.

What passes for American Christianity on television, he wrote, “is not anything like the Sermon on the…

Read more

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism and the victim of assassination in 1844, is one of the most polarizing figures of 19th-century American history. For some, he was little more than a con man, while for others he was a literal prophet of God.

Smith is portrayed as something of the former i…

Read more

The big problem with much of Christian apologetics is that while it can reinforce belief among those who are already committed to the faith, it is seldom convincing to the skeptic. Often that is because apologists tend to come from the fundamentalist, or at least very conservative, wing of the faith who tend to …

Read more

The better Biblical epic films and TV shows frequently take one of two approaches to flesh out a story that may be derived from only a chapter or two of scriptural text. One is to serve as something like a Bible commentary, offering i…

Read more

If Pete Hegseth’s nomination as President Trump’s secretary of Defense falters, it most likely will be because of concerns over his alcohol use and/or findings related to a 2017 rape allegation. But Hegseth’s socio-religious views, which might best des…

Read more

(Note about possible spoilers: This review takes the form of reflections on the dialogue of a film; those planning to see the movie may want to consider reading this review after seeing the film. T…

Read more

Conservative influencer Allie Beth Stuckey isn’t wrong when she writes in the introduction to her new book that empathy alone is a terrible guide to political decision-making, partly because it is susceptible to manipulation. And as the title of the book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Comp…

Read more

Richard B. Hays may not have written the book about the New Testament's perspective on homosexuality, but he did write the chapter.

The highly acclaimed theologian, former dean of the Duke Divinity School and a theologically conservative ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, wrote in his 1…

Read more

It has been about a year since I read Lucy S.R. Austin’s voluminous biography of Elisabeth Elliott, but of the dozens of books I’ve read in the past few years, it’s the one that most often causes me to ponder.

Strangely enough, of the biographies I’ve read, it’s the one I read starting out with the least knowledge of the subjec…

Read more

In their new book on the connections between American Christianity and racism, sociologists Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey recall a private discussion they had at an academic conference with a white man in his 50s who was a relatively rec…

Read more

I began reading Nancy French’s memoir, Ghosted: An American Story, knowing almost nothing about her life story. I knew mainly that she is the wife of David French, the prolific New York Times columnist known best as a conservative evangelical1 who was one of the earliest Republican critics of Donald Trump…

Read more