Category: Shameless Selves Promotion

Almost All Old Princeton All the Time

Published on by D. G. Hart242 Comments

The new issue of Credo Magazine is out and it is dedicated almost entirely to the bi-centennial of Princeton Theological Seminary. Here’s an excerpt from Christopher Cooper:

While the Princeton theologians did not oppose the possibility of revival and welcomed them on occasion, they believed that it was neither the common, best, nor desirable mode available for the advancement of the Christian religion. Princeton’s Charles Hodge, for instance, pointed out several problems with revival. First, revivals tend to produce pastors and lay people who envision conversion as always sudden and sensible. Such revivalists take it for granted that children grow up unconverted and in need of the drama of a revival experience in order to enter the Christian fold. According to Hodge, such a scheme does not allow for the more regular, scriptural, and desirable method of Christian nurture. Under this system, parents immerse their children in prayers, catechesis, and Christian encouragement, so that they may be quietly, although no less supernaturally, converted without the pomp and circumstance of revival.

Second, Hodge argued that revivals generate an unscriptural form of piety that makes the exercise of strong emotions essential to true religion and worship. Such an opinion produces unstable Christians whose religious stability is gauged by their emotional state. This approach also demeans the ordinary means of grace that are given by God not to foster great emotional highs that are inevitably followed by lows, but to serve as a more constant encouragement to Christian pilgrims.

Hodge pointed out that revivals are, by their very nature, extraordinary occasions and are not meant to be relied upon by pastors and laypersons to whom God has given the task of parental nurture and pastoral ministry. Likewise, pastors today ought not to rely upon revival or the vestiges of revivalism, but would do well to instill within themselves confidence in the ordinary means of pastoral ministry and into their congregants a sense of responsibility for the nurture and edification of their children.

And in case readers are wondering, Old Lifers do make an appearance in this issue.

Are Reformation Studies Over?

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Mark Noll with Carolyn Nystrom raised a bit of a kerfuffle some years back with a book that explored the ways that the cause of Protestantism has declined in the face of fewer and fewer differences among evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Yesterday, I learned that scholars who study the Reformation at colleges, universities, and seminaries also worry that Reformation studies are on the decline.

The occasion was a pleasant seminar sponsored by the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, which brought together scholars from the region to discuss the prospects for Reformation studies and to become better acquainted. No matter how much I may lament the loss of the CRC from the ranks of militantly Reformed Protestants, I continue to be impressed by the scholarly resources the denomination and its constituency are willing to sponsor. The Meeter Center provides scholarships and stipends for scholars and studentds access to their wonderful holdings and collection. A lot of “evangelical” colleges may talk about the life of the mind, but Calvin does embody it in some important ways.

Be that as it may, the mood was generally despondent yesterday as professors and graduate students pined for a day when history and religion departments regularly designated one slot for a historian of the Reformation. Now, Reformation scholars cannot be certain that if they leave or retire the department and administration will not appoint someone to study East Asia or depictions of animals in movies from the 1920s. One comment did put this problem in perspective. As the history and culture of the West declined as a topic that gave coherence to the humanities and social sciences — to be replaced by world history — the import of the Reformation became less obvious. At the same time, at schools like Hillsdale College where a course on Western Heritage is still required of all students, undergraduates have more of an appetite for studying the Reformation. Some are even taking a seminar on Calvin’s Institutes this semester.

I had trouble but I did avoid the temptation yesterday to promote a book I wrote over a decade ago about the place of religion in American higher education. This books goes some way in explaining the difficulties today’s Reformation historians face. Rather than simply blaming the status of Reformation studies on secularization or multi-culturalism, just as significant was the way by which religion itself became an academic discipline. It did so in the United States at a time when the nation was in the early stages of a Cold War and when recovering the religious and cultural roots of the West seemed to be much more important. It didn’t hurt that mainline Protestants were ready with scholars trained at university divinity schools to staff the new departments. Here is an excerpt from the book (self-promotion alert!):

. . . the teaching and study of religion emerged from the efforts of mainstream Protestant ministers and educators who wanted to retain a religious influence in American higher education. In the first phase of those efforts, from roughly 1900 to 1935, Protestants worked mainly through such extracurricular agencies as the Student Volunteer Movement, the YMCA, and campus chaplains. They also saw that courses in religion, especially the Bible, would be crucial to gaining academic credibility. Consequently, the churches founded Bible chairs at the same time that individuals independent of the churches Protestant set up agencies and schools of religion that would teach students what they needed to know about the Bible and Christianity. This instruction was designed to insure religious literacy and to provide spiritual guidance to the sons and daughters of the church.

In the second phase of religious studies, from 1935 to 1965, a variety of circumstances made Protestant efforts more successful. America’s involvement in international politics, both in World War II and the Cold War, underscored the need for understanding and preserving Western culture at the nation’s colleges and universities. No longer did scientific and technological developments hold the promise they had during the first fifty years of the research university’s dominance of American higher education. Instead, through a renewed interest in liberal or general education the humanities recovered a certain measure of importance in the academy and the culture more generally. Religious studies fit well with the mood propelling the humanities’ resurgence. Not only was Christianity important to European history and likewise Protestantism to the development of the United States, but many educators regarded religion as an important ingredient in the West’s stand for liberal democracy against the tyranny of fascism on the right and communism on the left. The recognition of religion’s importance gave Protestants significant leverage in establishing programs and departments that taught the Bible, theology, and church history, all with the understanding that such instruction contributed to the well-being of students and American society, and fit with the university’s mission of preserving Western civilization.

In the most recent period, after 1965, religion faculty and administrators discovered that the older spiritual and cultural reasons for teaching and studying religion were inadequate in a climate where America’s religious and political ideals were, to put it mildly, contested. . . . Once the close fit between Protestantism and liberal democracy became debatable, religious studies had to find another rationale, one more academic and less dependent on the mainline Protestant churches or the political and economic order that they supported. Religion professors were no longer able to count on the cache of Western civilization, affinities to the humanities or the prestige of the Protestant establishment.

If scholars are worried about the future of Reformation studies just as conservative Protestants are worried about evangelicals’ declining allegiance to the Reformation, perhaps the reason is that both the academy and churches are suffering the side effects of a culture that in the name of tolerance, equality, and open markets has lost its bearings and does not know or care about its heritage.

Speaking of Conferences

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

That tears it! John Muether and I have co-authored three separate books, one on the history of the OPC, one on worship, and one on the history of American Presbyterianism. We have at least one more book in the works, a defense of Protestantism against Roman Catholicism. And we have plans for many more. We even thought about a series of books on Presbyterian eldership, entitled Ruling Elders Rule! Sequels include How Ruling Elders Rule! Where Ruling Elders Rule! When Ruling Elders Rule! You get the point.

But now I see that Mr. Muether has turned on his old friend. Last week I spotted a new book by James McGoldrick, Presbyterian and Reformed Churches: A Global History (published by Reformation Heritage Books). This was a shock and horror to someone who has just completed a first draft of a global history of Calvinism. I had thought that I had a corner on the market.

And to make matters worse, Mr. Muether has endorsed the book. He calls it a “remarkable achievement.” He should have written, “don’t bother with this book since Hart’s forthcoming volume is a remarkable achievement.”

I’ll be seeing Muether this week at OPC Christian Education Committee meetings and I’m not planning on buying him a drink. No matter that I cannot remember the last time I picked up a check.

Charles Hodge's Warning to Celebrity (and Rich) Pastors

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

I am (all about me) in the home stretch of a paper for the upcoming Bicentennial Conference at Princeton Seminary on the Princeton faculty’s coverage and estimate of the 1843 Disruption in the Church of Scotland. So far, the Princetonians were impressive in their knowledge of Scottish developments and their sympathies for the Free Church leaders. One of the articles upon which I draw was a review by Charles Hodge of Thomas Chalmers’ An Earnest Appeal to the Free Church of Scotland, on the Subject of Economics (1847). In the course of his agreement with Chalmers, Hodge writes the following which is a further wrinkle in the slovenly attire of an ecclesiastical system that rewards fame and entrepreneurialism:

Our present system is unjust, first, to the people. Here are a handful of Christians surrounded by an increasing mass of the ignorant, the erroneous and the wicked. No one will deny that it is of the last importance that the gospel should be regularly administered among them. This is demanded not only for the benefit of those few Christians, but for the instruction and conversion of the surround population. Now is it just, that the burden of supporting the ministry under these circumstances, should be thrown exclusively on that small and feeble company of believers? Are they alone interested in the support and extension of the kingdom of Christ among them and those around them? It is obvious that on all scriptural principle, and all principles of justice this is a burden to be borne by the whole church, by all on whom the duty rests to uphold and propagate the gospel of Christ. Our present system is unjust, in the second place, towards our ministers. It is not just that one man should be supported in affluence, and another equally devoted to the service of the church, left to struggle for the necessaries of life. As before stated we do not contend for anything so chimerical as equal salaries to all ministers. Even if all received from the church as a whole the same sum, the people would claim and exercise the right to give in addition what they pleased to their own pastor. We can no more make salaries equal, than we can make church edifices of the same size and cost. But while this equality is neither desirable nor practicable, it is obviously unjust that the present inordinate inequality should be allowed to continue. (Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, July 1847, 370)

Doubting God

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

I passed a milestone today that may be worthy of comment. John Calvin (1509-1564), Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), and J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) — the three Johns — did not live to see their fifty-sixth birthday. In fact, Calvin and Edwards both died just short of their fifty-fifth birthday. I, on the other hand, made it to the beginning of my fifty-seventh year today, thus meaning that I share the same birthday as Michael Jordan (which is about the only thing we have in common despite my slow, white man attempts at basketball).

All of this leads me to wonder if God knows what he is doing. Okay, I’m no fan of Edwards but perhaps if had lived longer he could have straightened out the Connecticut River Valley and prevented the rise of Hopkinsianism, Taylorism, and the New Measures. And surely, Calvin and Machen could have accomplished a lot more if they had lived into their seventies. Yet, God in his infinite wisdom takes superior churchmen and theologians in their prime and allows also rans to meander on.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. (And if anyone attempts to reply with birthday greetings, to borrow a line from Karl Hungus, I’ll cut off their johnson comment).

My (all about me) Latest Man Crush

Published on by D. G. Hart17 Comments

Last week my better half and I went out for two first run movies. Descendants, which stars George Clooney, was satisfying and opened up the history of Hawaii and its European settlement in ways that many Americans who (like myself) know only about Pearl Harbor should find enlightening. But the real gem of the holiday week was seeing My Week with Marilyn. As a heterosexual male who has never figured out the appeal of platinum colored hair, I was not so keen on seeing a movie about Marilyn Monroe as I was to see Kenneth Branagh play the role of Sir Laurence Olivier. The film is about the making of a 1956 movie in which Olivier and Monroe were co-stars. Talk about discordant divergence. And yet the 2011 movie was thoroughly enjoyable both as a vehicle for the remarkable talent of Branagh and as a charming story of an unlikely encounter between celebrities from opposite sides of the Atlantic and opposite brows of the culture. Two vigorous thumbs up for My (not about me) Week with Marilyn.

Speaking of Hollywood, the Mrs. and I were also in range of cable television last week and so had access to a documentary on Woody Allen that aired on PBS. I understand that many film goers may have grown tired with Woody’s recent productions (not to mention his love life), though his using European cities as opposed to his beloved Manhattan seems to have energized the seventy-five year old. But what younger viewers don’t understand — myself included — is how remarkable his career has been. For my wife and I, Annie Hall and Manhattan were the beginning of a new era in American cinematography, analogous to what micro-breweries did for beer in the United States. But what I had not realized was how Woody had a different career for twenty years before working on films. He started as a joke writer, eventually working on the “Sid Caesar Show.” Working as a stand up comic came later and with much reluctance from Allen. And that happened largely at the cajoling of Woody’s handlers, Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe. One of the most memorable old clips from the documentary was from the Perry Como Show which featured Woody doing a song and dance number with leggy, busty dancers. Woody was dressed in top hat and tails and hamming it up with the best of variety show schmalzt. It was the kind of television that Woody would later ridicule over and over again in his film directing and writing.

Woody Allen’s career as a movie maker only came at the end of these other phases. No one would have ever predicted that he would wind up as a cinematographer and make (arguably) more movies than even Ingmar Bergman and Frederico Fellini. It’s as if Jerry Seinfeld had gone from doing stand-up to his situation comedy and then decided he wanted to get in to the film business. And that does not even begin to describe Allen because Woody did not use Hollywood as a stepping stone to another form of entertainment — say an HBO series or two. Instead, Woody found the medium in which he would thrive and sometimes only survive. averaging one film per year for four decades (and still counting). But to think of American cinema without putting Woody Allen high on the list of American screenplay writers, directors, and actors is impossible.

Even so, I’d rather watch Kenneth Branagh on the big screen.

Speaking of Moral Ambiguity

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I have been reading The New Republic since grad school days. It is not as good now as it was in the days when Andrew Sullivan was editor (and I don’t say this to pay him back for a mention of my book). Back then it was provocative, funny, and well written. Stephen Glass likely accounts for some of the magazine’s dullness these days. But the “back of the book,” the arts and book review section, continues to be one of the best. Where else can you read a put down like the following of Harold Bloom?

Bloom and I were once employed by the same academic department. I hasten to add, lest there be a question of bias, that my decade at Yale left me feeling little toward him one way or the other. I never even met the man. Having fulfilled the dream of academics everywhere by renouncing as many obligations toward his home department as practicably possible—meetings, committee assignments, duties in the graduate program, every responsibility except undergraduate teaching—Bloom had long since become, as he likes to put it, “a department of one.” I think I only saw him about three times.

Which is not to say he wasn’t sometimes on my mind. At a certain point during my sojourn at the institution, I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz. (Marlow, broken by his African ordeal, was any number of my senior colleagues, their souls crushed by the tenure process. The “pilgrims”—that pack of hopeful fools who set off into the jungle in pursuit of a chimerical fortune—were the graduate students.)

Since I have of late been defending celebrity academics (or their athletic coaches) from easy put downs, let me explain that the appeal of this depiction is what it says about American higher education. If folks believe that Division One athletics is a problem, they may also want to consider a system that employs professors not to assume normal faculty responsibilities.

But the point of this post is to call attention to the wonderful description of the moral perplexities that confronted the United Kingdom at the time of the Civil War in the United States. The following from a review of Amanda Foreman’s book, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random House, 2011), proves to this 2k equivocator that people in power seldom have an easy time determining the “right” thing to do:

FREEDOM is a rangy, broad-shouldered value, capable of heavy rhetorical lifting. Liberals had coalesced around another form of freedom: free trade, the bedrock of British industrialization. Abolitionism had taken root in the partly protectionist, largely rural soil of late eighteenth-century Britain. Now panting, shrieking trains ripped through a land studded by smokestacks and mines; conurbations crawled over hillsides like great black snakes. Touring the factory towns spawned by late industrialization, Friedrich Engels described the socially deadening grind of workers who toiled interminable shifts at the steam-powered looms, trudged home to fetid slums, supped on potato parings, and nursed their babies on gin.

Engels likened factory labor to enslavement, but Lancashire textile workers in fact owed their livelihood to American slaves. Rhymed Punch:

Though with the North we sympathize,

It must not be forgotten,

That with the South we’ve stronger ties,

Which are composed of cotton.

Textiles were Britain’s biggest business, and cotton from the deep South was its biggest source. The Union blockade of Southern ports snipped the supply line to millions of Britons reliant on the industry. The resulting “cotton famine” hit hard and fast: within a year, 400,000 British workers were unemployed or nearly so, putting their 1.5 million dependents at risk. State welfare cases quadrupled in months. Even the staunchest abolitionists, Prime Minister Palmerston included, had to see the crisis in Lancashire as a more pressing humanitarian problem for the government than the plight of far-off slaves. Recognizing the Confederacy, or at least evading the blockade, could restore the cotton supply, while joining the Union might deepen and prolong the suffering at home.

Then there was the political freedom that Liberals championed abroad: the freedom of people to govern themselves. Palmerston—whose “attitudes,” Foreman nicely observes, “had been formed in the age when wigs and rouge were worn by men as well as women”—had made his reputation as a defender of national self-determination, in Belgium, Greece, Italy, and Hungary. (Never mind that he also sent in gunboats to assert British power in the Middle East and China.) Why not the Confederate States of America? “The South fight for independence; what do the North fight for except to gratify passion or pride?” asked the home secretary. The rising Liberal star William Ewart Gladstone fancied he saw shades of Garibaldi in Jefferson Davis. “We may have our own opinions about slavery,” Gladstone declared the day after the Emancipation Proclamation ran in the Times, “we may be for or against the South, but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders … have made a nation.” (Gladstone, later revered as the “People’s William,” had delivered his maiden speech defending his plantation-owning father’s treatment of slaves.) Give the Confederacy political freedom, these men assumed, and freedom from slavery would follow.

What's the Difference between a Modernist and a Fundamentalist?

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For those with stomachs to read, a revealing discussion is going on over at the Gospel Coalition and at Mere Orthodoxy about the debate between Al Mohler and Jim Wallis over social justice. What is striking in the original post which summarizes the debate, and in reactions from people who would appear to be evangelical, is how many born-again Protestants refer to social justice with a straight face. One reason someone might say “social justice” with a raised eyebrow is that critics of the Enlightenment, like Alisdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice, Which Rationality, suggested long ago that ideas like justice are a lot more complicated and owe a lot more to social settings like Enlightened Europe than the are abstract truths that everyone knows for sure and can readily implement.

An additional wrinkle in this discussion is how some evangelicals bend and twist in order to attach works to faith, sanctification to justification, word to deed, in order to add social justice to the proclamation of the gospel. Not to sound like Glenn Beck, but social justice is not only threatening the United States, but it’s also doing a number on evangelical Protestantism (and so many thought born-again Protestants were conservative; have I got a book for them?)

So to add a little clarity (as our mid-western correspondent reminded me this morning), I bring to mind the views of the modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick and the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan on the task of the church (and the problem of doctrinal divisions) in alleviating social problems. Important to see is that both sides want a relevant faith and castigate denominational or theological differences. I don’t know how born-again infatuation with social justice will work out any differently for evangelicals than it did for their grandparents in mainline Protestantism. Another bad ending to a religious story.

Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” (1922)

The second element which is needed if we are to reach a happy solution of this problem is a clear insight into the main issues of modern Christianity and a sense of penitent shame that the Christian Church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great needs. If, during the war, when the nations were wrestling upon the very brink of hell and at times all seemed lost, you chanced to hear two men in an altercation about some minor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could you restrain your indignation? You said, “What can you do with folks like this who, in the face of colossal issues, play with the tiddledywinks and peccadillos of religion?” So, now, when from the terrific questions of this generation one is called away by the noise of this Fundamentalist controversy, he thinks it almost unforgivable that men should tithe mint and anise and cummin, and quarrel over them, when the world is perishing for the lack of the weightier matters of the law, justice, and mercy, and faith. . . .

The present world situation smells to heaven! And now, in the presence of colossal problems, which must be solved in Christ’s name and for Christ’s sake, the Fundamentalists propose to drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly!

William Jennings Bryan, “Freedom of Religion and the Ku Klux Klan” (1924)

The world is coming out of the war, the bloodiest ever known. Thirty millions of human lives were lost, three hundred billions of property was destroyed, and the debts of the world are more than six times as greate as they were when the first fun was fired.

My friends, how are you going to stop war? . . . There is only one thing that can bring peace to the world, and that is the Prince of Peace. That is, my friends, the One who, when He came upon the earth, the angels said, “On earth, good will toward men. . . . Is it possible that now, when Jesus is more needed, I say the hope of the world — is it possible that at this time, in this great land, we are to have a religious discussion and a religious warfare? Are you going my friends, to start a blaze that may cause you innumerable lives, sacrificed on the altar of religious liberty? I cannot believe it.

(P.S. Bryan’s speech was to the Democratic National Convention and in response to a report that proposed to exclude the KKK. The double irony is that the Democratic Party was a place where Christian appeals prevailed, and that such a faith as Bryan’s “conservative Presbyterianism” could embrace white supremacists for the sake of a civil religion that sought to apply Christ to social problems. In which case, it’s another proof of the errors both religious and secular that follow when you mix faith and politics — you get social gospel.)

Hearing (all about) Me Speak

Published on by D. G. Hart38 Comments

As Zrim has already indicated, pronunciations matter. If you say the word evangelical with a long e in the first syllable, as in “egads,” then according to popular wisdom you are one, that is, a born-again Protestant. If you pronounce it with the short e in “whatever,” then you aren’t ehvangelical.

The same goes for conservatism. If you slip in an extra syllable, as in “conservativism,” then you are likely unfamiliar with the discussions about what it means to be a conservative. But if you say the real word, “conservatism,” then you’re in the ball park of knowing something about the American Right even if you are not a card-carrier.

A twist on correct pronunciation came for me as my wife and I were driving to Washington, D.C. last week for the Round Table on the future of evangelical politics hosted by Brian Lee and the saints at Christ Reformed Church (URC). Scanning the dial in hopes of finding a voice different from Sean’s, we stumbled upon the local affiliate of the EWTN radio network which broadcasts the Al Kresta show weekdays at 4:00. This particular day found the host away at a conference and the show re-airing the “best of” Al Kresta. Imagine my (all about me) surprise when my wife and I heard Al introduce the hour-long interview I did about From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin on September 20, live in the Ann Arbor studio. Imagine my (all about me) further surprise to hear me babble on like a surfer dude. Which raises the question, if you sound goofy, can you really call yourself a confessional Protestant or a political conservative?

But misgivings about my voice and diction did not prevent a thoroughly enjoyable event with Michael Gerson and Terry Eastland thanks to the great hospitality and event planning of Brian and Sara Lee. The audio for the event is here (though you will need Quick Time to listen). Future events still include David VanDrunen this Thursday night (October 20), and Dave Coffin preaching(Sunday, October 23).

I believe the biggest difference to surface between Mike Gerson and me was his willingness to appeal to higher law (justice and human dignity) in thinking about a Christian understanding of politics and my reluctance to jump over existing laws, institutions, and powers for the sake of a higher good. I also believe this is one of the most profound difference between evangelicals and confessional Protestants in the sphere of religion, and between evangelicals and conservatives in matters political.

Consider, for instance, the willingness of revivalists to circumvent ordained clergy in order to bring the gospel to people (some of whom are already church members). George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent did this. The Gospel Coalition is still doing it. Think too of the way that evangelicals will appeal to the Bible to circumvent the authority of creeds or confessions with Scripture functioning as a higher law above man-made doctrines.

In politics evangelicals will appeal to Christian morality usually without considering such matters of state sovereignty. This happens when evangelicals look to the federal government to implement laws that state or local governments have not adopted, or when born-again Protestants seek to intervene internationally without doing justice to the existing governments in place. I know, I know, these matters are difficult and the complexity of the situation can lead to pacifism or even indifference. I also concede that folks like Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., neither of whom used a long e when saying the word evangelical, also appealed to the higher law for the Declaration of Independence and Civil Rights. Still, evangelicals appear to me to be largely indifferent to existing governmental structures and laws when political forms get in the way of eternal truths. And every conservative (both religious and political) knows that this is a recipe for revolution.

This is not to say that Gerson espouses such radicalism, but only to point out that implicit in the appeal to a higher law is an impulse that makes evangelicals insufficiently aware of the restraint and stability that conservatives hope to preserve.

Now Maybe Billy Graham Will Run

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

Those shrieks you hear this morning are coming from Michigan where in the burgs of Grand Rapids and Hillsdale, author and editors are bemoaning the news that Sarah Palin is not going to run for the presidency. One of the first reviews of From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin at Amazon asserts that the book does not even mention Sarah Palin, as if her insertion in the title were merely a ploy to increase sales. In point of fact, the introduction discusses at some length Palin’s performance as Vice-Presidential nominee during the 2008 elections. But a Palin bid for the GOP nomination in 2011-2012 would have perhaps given more visibility to books with Sarah’s name in the title.

Truth be told, the book devotes a lot more attention to evangelical reflection about the United States and its government than to electoral politics. In fact, one of my frustrations with the interviews I have been doing — most of them pleasant and welcome — is that I have yet to talk about any of the figures in the narrative, such as Richard Mouw, Carl Henry, Ralph Reed, Jim Skillen, or Michael Gerson. I understand the appeal of talking about a race. That’s why people go to the track and play the ponies. But the problem for evangelicals is not simply the possible thinness of the political candidates they produce, but the way that even the smartest evangelicals reflect on American politics, which is a combination of biblicism and moral idealism.

In which case, Sarah’s decision may actually help out the long term sales of the book since she will continue to be a voice that illustrates the weaknesses of the evangelical mind and From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin will be a guide to those defects.