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Believe Me (book)
Ah, the memories! Court evangelicals in their natural habitat
Jim Garlow, one of the lesser-known court evangelicals, shared this video today at his public Facebook page. The date was May 3, 2017. I see the following court evangelicals schmoozing with their political savior as the band plays “New York,...
Charismatic prophets at war
In Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, I wrote extensively about the so-called Independent Network Charismatics (INC). According to scholars Brad Christerson and Richard Flory, INC is the fastest-growing Christian movement in both the Western world and global...
Evangelicals and the January 6 insurrection
New York Times religion reporters Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham just published a piece on evangelicals and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday. Here is a taste: Lindsay French, 40, an evangelical Christian from Texas, flew to Washington...
What counts as historical scholarship?
I occasionally interact with assistant professors who teach at research universities. They are often worried about meeting the requirements of tenure. They wonder if their articles have been published in journals that were “prestigious” enough. Will their monographs with university...
Everyone is discovering the court evangelicals!
The conservative pundits are outraged at what happened at Saturday’s Jericho March! David French is worried that too many evangelicals have fallen for conspiracy theories. Rod Dreher says we would be wrong to “blow off” the influence of these evangelicals...
Some last minute thoughts before you head to the polls tomorrow
I know many of you have already voted, but for those who have not, here is a word from the last pages of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump: Where does all of this refection leave us? How […]
Four years that I can’t get back. But the work was necessary
I have spent a lot of time writing about Trump in the past four years. Most of you by now are familiar with my 2018 book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump and my 2018 tour. One Twitter...
Women: Don’t worry about it, Trump will get your husbands back to work and preserve your domestic suburban lifestyle
When I talk about my book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, I often discuss the meaning of the phrase “Make America Great Again.” If Trump can tell me when America was “great,” I can enter the conversation...
“Patriot Churches” call masks “face diapers”
For more than a decade, I have been chronicling how many white evangelicals have a hard time distinguishing between Christianity and nationalism. I wrote a book about this in 2011 and it was a major theme of Believe Me: The...
Evangelicals and Trump: What have we learned?
I published Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump in June 2018. I wrote the book in November and December of 2017 and finished it on New Years Day 2018. Since then, we have learned a lot more about...
“I hope this person believes this. Some days I am not even sure I do.”
Like most people, I sat down early Tuesday evening, November 8, 2016, to watch election returns fully expecting that, by the time I went to bed, Hillary Clinton would be declared the country’s first female president. Instead, I saw my...
What the election of 1800 can teach us about the peaceful transition of power in the United States
There are so many lessons we can learn from the presidential election of 1800. For example, when we claim that we are living through “the most divisive campaign” in history, 1800 offers perspective: The election of 1800 also figured prominently...
What does Donald Trump really think about the court evangelicals?
Earlier this month we did a post about Trump allegedly calling evangelical beliefs “bulls–t.” Many court evangelicals rejected this story because it came from former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, a convicted criminal. But now, thanks to the reporting of McKay...
What Matthew 4 REALLY says about Christians and power
Recently an evangelical pastor who was a college of classmate of mine wrote to me praising Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Amy Coney Barrett as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court. He seemed very excited about the nomination...
Liberty University’s Falkirk Center meets all expectations at its “Get Louder” event
Yesterday, Liberty University’s Falkirk Center, the culture war wing of the largest Christian university in the world, held a 1-day conference titled “Get Louder: Faith Summit 2020.” Evangelical Trump supporters were encouraged to yell and scream more, fight more, and...
The court evangelicals respond to Donald Trump’s RNC convention speech and the aftermath
Last night I thought Franklin Graham offered a good opening prayer to kick-off the last night of the GOP convention. Today he sat for an interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network. At times Graham tried to be...
“Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?” at the Reintegrate Podcast
My old divinity school friend Bob Robinson runs Reintegrate, a ministry that helps Christians integrate faith, life, and vocation. I recently joined Bob and his co-host Brendan Romigh on the Reintegrate podcast to talk about Was America Founded as a...
Photo of the Day
Hanging out with the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: ...
Moral reflection in the doing and teaching of history (part two). Or is *Believe Me* a work of history?
Read part one here. This post is adapted from Why Study History: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past. Here are five suggestions for those who want to pursue Robert Gleason’s idea that the historian should always ask whether or not...