A Review of David P. Gushee’s “Still Christian”
Don’t Stop Believin’
From time to time, I get hateful comments on these reviews — basically people telling me that I’m bound for Hell because I either don’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection or I’m too inclusive of gay people in my faith. Whatever I’ve gone through, though, holds nothing on David P. Gushee. For a time, he was considered America’s favourite evangelical leftist, until he wrote a book that was essentially accepting of gay people. He watched as speaking engagements basically dried up for doing that. (Luckily, he has a day job teaching at a liberal theological school that promotes academic freedom.) So the guy has some marks on his back, and it’s easy for someone like me to sympathize with him.
With his most recent book, Still Christian, which is a memoir of his life as an evangelical Christian, I sympathize with him quite a bit. Having a bit of a scorched earth policy, Gushee lays it all out on the line with this book — the battles he faced, the backstabbing he was asked to partake in as a professor at one theological seminary, and the politicking he was forced into as a pundit. By the end of the book, it turns out he’s not much of an evangelical at all these days. In fact, he and I are not too far removed on the theological spectrum, and, damn, it is so refreshing to read a book finally from someone who thinks like me.
That is to say that Gushee and I don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. He’s a “soft” pro-lifer, whereas I’m a pretty hard pro-choicer, but the fact that Gushee has extremely liberal views on the use of torture and the inclusion of LGBTQ people (even if Gushee drops the Q) and, until recently, considered himself an evangelical (he’s a Southern Baptist who was originally raised as a Catholic — just like me, save the Baptist part!) makes reading his book such a profound relief. Finally, I don’t have to question whether or not a writer is saying something controversial or offensive with their work. Which is to say, I’m sure that Gushee is plenty controversial, but just not really to me.
However, I liked Still Christian more than just for the fact that I agree with Gushee’s brand of religion and politics (since he’s voted Democrat since 1980). This is a very instructive and educational book to read. Interspersed with the bits of memoir comes Gushee’s reading of white evangelical history in the United States since the end of the Second World War. As a newcomer to my faith, there’s a lot I don’t know, such as how did evangelicalism get to be the way it is. Gushee’s book tells you. Basically the term has been co-opted as a friendlier rebranding of the term “fundamentalist”, at least, according to this book and the history that it probes. But that’s a pretty loose summary. The book goes into greater depth.
Even though Still Christian brought me up to speed with how the evangelicals gained political power by forming the Religious Right, infiltrating the Republican Party, and taking control of the Southern Baptist Convention in the late ’70s, this is not a serious, academic tone. It can be read by anyone. While much of it deals with how the political influence of evangelicalism began to seep into academia by the mid-‘80s, this is a fun and entertaining read of a person trying to make sense of how his religious beliefs came to be out of line with the prevailing political climate of the times — on both the conservative and liberal sides of the fence.
The book is also quite sobering. One chapter deals with the political maneuvering at one college that Gushee taught at to remove women from their posts in faculty simply because the prevailing evangelical movement of the time viewed the Bible’s supposed teachings on the limited role of women as true. (Never mind the fact that women played a significant role in the Bible and in the formation of the church.) As someone who has found the greatest wisdom in religion has usually come from women, I found this section of the book painful to read. In the end, Gushee got lucky and was offered a job at another institution before being presented with the opportunity to be fired as a result of his liberal view of ordained women.
It’s interesting to see how the social arguments of the day have been shaped by the fundamentalist movement in the evangelical community, as it pushes forward in the face of growing secularization. Again, the book is educational in charting just how prevalent this movement has become, gaining political control over the decades, culminating in the election of Trump. It’s akin to reading about the rise of fascism, and how its roots go back further in time. This book explicitly lies out why things are the way they are in the non-mainline Protestant church. It is fascinating as much as it is frightening. This wasn’t something that happened overnight. This has been evolving for decades, and the reminder is welcomed.
Still Christian charts the path of a man’s spiritual journey, as well, from convert to student to professor to pundit. The narrative is remarkably crisp and clear, and the tone is friendly and non-combative (well, at least on subjects that don’t involve fundamentalism). There’s not a lot of God talk or Biblical stuff in the book — this is simply a man’s life story in the church that lays down the groundwork for where we are as a Christian community today. It is a revelatory work of the highest order. If you want to be educated on the history of the American Protestant church for most of the last half-century, you absolutely need to read this book with no reservations. Still Christian is a book about how you can find and maintain faith while growing out of a strand of religion, and is all the more ravishing for the story that it unspools and it boasts the beauty of a tale well-told.
David P. Gushee’s Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism will be published by Westminster John Knox Press on September 15, 2017.
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