Page 1077 – Christianity Today (2024)

On September 22, 1914, the French writer Henri Alban Fournier, who went by the demi-pseudonyme Alain-Fournier, was reported missing in action near Verdun. He had published, barely a year before, a successful first novel, Le Grand Meaulnes. In 1959, translator Frank Davison chose to present Le Grand Meaulnes as The Lost Domain, a version Oxford has reissued in a centenary edition to commemorate the novel's publication and to mark the death of yet another promising writer lost to the Great War.

The novel begins ominously:

He appeared at our house on a Sunday in November 189…

I still say 'our' house though it is ours no longer; nearly fifteen years have passed since we left the neighbourhood, and we shall not be going back to it.

The narrator is François Seurel, a solitary 15-year-old who lives in a village schoolhouse. His father teaches the older boys, while his mother has the children in the "lower form." Born with a bad knee, François is quite content to spend his free time reading novels, until the day "he" appears. This mysterious visitor is just a country boarder, the 17-year-old Augustin Meaulnes, come to finish off his schooling.

Upon arrival, Augustin takes the liberty of rummaging about the attic. He finds some fireworks left over from Bastille Day celebrations and invites François to help set them off in the courtyard, with no regard for parental oversight:

Coming out of doors with Madame Meaulnes—terms of pension having been discussed and agreed upon—my mother saw two great bouquets of red and white stars soar up from the ground with a hiss. And for the space of a second she could see me stand in a magical glow, holding the tall newcomer by the hand, and not flinching.

From that point, François' life is changed, as Augustin introduces a rebellious spirit to the setting of his new friend's happy but rather dull childhood.

This passage summarizes what makes the novel so engaging and yet at times too predictable. A simple happening—the arrival of a rough and ready boarder at an isolated village school—takes on the proportions of a climactic, world-changing event. While Alain-Fournier marvelously transforms the everyday into something greater, he also has the tendency of overplaying his hand by pointing out an event's "magical glow" and the related "no going back" to the marvels of childhood past.

In the first part of the novel, Augustin quickly becomes the school's leader until he has a life-changing experience of his own. He gets lost in the countryside and stumbles upon a "strange fête," a splendid wedding party held at a country manor. Augustin dons a silk waistcoat, joins in on the feasting and even gambols hither and thither. He then stumbles upon the ravishing quietness of the "young lady of the house." They cross paths, they chat, and he says: "You are beautiful." She runs off but finally gives her name, Mademoiselle Yvonne de Galais. In this manor house and through this young woman, Augustin finds for a brief moment complete happiness, a physical and emotional "lost domain" that he tries to recover right until the novel's end.

In her able introduction to this edition, Hermione Lee offers an elegant spoiler alert: "Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to read the Introduction after the novel." And readers should prefer to finish the story on their own, for one of the novel's great delights is the uncovering of Augustin's adventure. Allow me to stress, however, that for Alain-Fournier the magical comes from an unexpected perspective, from experiencing things slant. At the same time, the novel's poetic quality also derives from its mix of genres, where a schoolyard adventure turns into a full-blown romantic quest with, admittedly, a number of unbelievable plot twists and plodding sections along the way.

Successful at its publication, the novel gained greater notoriety with Alain-Fournier's untimely death. Adding to the cultlike appeal of the book was a fascination with the links between Le Grand Meaulnes and the author's biography. Born in 1886, Alain-Fournier grew up as the son of two schoolteachers in La Chapelle-Anglillon, a village near the Cher river some 130 miles due south of Paris. When he was five, his parents took up another teaching position in nearby Epineuil-le-Fleuriel. The family lived and worked there in a two-classroom schoolhouse. Later, as a young student in Paris, Alain-Fournier saw outside the Grand Palais a beautiful young woman. He followed her and told her, "You are beautiful." She gave her name, Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, and left without a trace. While he made a name for himself as a literary journalist, Alain-Fournier would pine over Yvonne for the next eight years—and channel his unrequited love and childhood memories into Le Grand Meaulnes.

Such biographical details suggest that François Seurel, the narrator, and Augustin Meaulnes, the adventurer, express different aspects of Alain-Fournier's at once bookish and extravagant character. Contemporary critics will probably wish to examine in greater detail the "bromance" between François and (le grand) Meaulnes, which is often cited as an inspiration for Fitzgerald's narrative pairing of Nick Caraway and (the great) Gatsby. And if you are looking for an excuse to visit France, Le Grand Meaulnes offers an itinerary for a pleasant literary pilgrimage to the French countryside.

It is difficult, however, to place the novel in the literary landscape of the past hundred years. Le Grand Meaulnes was published within months of Proust's Du Côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of the French novel to end all novels, A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). As Hermione Lee summarizes, Alain-Fournier's novel can be viewed either in the context of the modernist movement or as the last vestige of "a lost domain, the domain of nostalgic rural writing, romantic yearning, and childlike purity." Perhaps there is an easier answer to this question: the book appeared at a literary crossroad, where a 19th-century romantic quest and a 20th-century reflection on lost love could meet.

While in France recently, I asked two Parisian friends, both retired high school teachers, what they thought of Le Grand Meaulnes. They brushed aside my question with a shrug, a wave of the hand, and a dismissive assessment: "old-fashioned" and "something my father would have called a good book." Then one friend reconsidered, promising to read it again this year.

Such is the value of a centenary edition or any commemoration of a classic. A new generation has the chance to discover a book, and older generations are asked to reassess their opinion. It's a shame the publisher did not commission a new translation of the Le Grand Meaulnes. Davison's translation is good, if you are content with a readable 1950s British version of a French novel. That considerable quibble aside, Alain-Fournier's Lost Domain is well worth visiting or revisiting.

Otto Selles is professor of French at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In September 1905, a Chinese revolutionary armed with a bomb hid in Peking's train station. His target was a delegation formed by the dowager empress Cixi, which was beginning its journey to the capitals of Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Russia, and Italy. Its brief was to study these countries' governments and return with suggestions on how to reform the crumbling Qing dynasty.

The young man set off for the station determined to thwart an attempt to resuscitate an empire that he wanted dead. He was not, however, an expert with explosives. As the delegation's train left the station he detonated his device, denting the train and killing himself. Two of the dignitaries were injured, and it was four more months before the party set out again. They returned with proposals that were quickly implemented by a desperate court. But Qing China fell anyway six years later, in a revolution that ended more than two millennia of imperial control.

It did not take a trained eye to see that China was on the brink of upheaval in the early 20th century. Its navy had been destroyed by the Japanese in 1895, its army pummeled by the United States, Japan, and all the major European powers in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The country still flew its own flag, but other countries claimed large swathes of its territory as spheres of influence. Students from wealthy families went to study in America, Europe, and Japan. There, they dreamed that China would one day be like these societies, and took to politics. They talked and wrote about the future, about a republican China, a constitutional China, a socialist China, above all, a strong China that would retake its position in world affairs. Small cells of would-be revolutionaries assembled in cities both in China and overseas, taking grim satisfaction at their leaders' woes.

For some, the future of a strong China lay in its embrace of social reforms fueled by the women's movement in the West. Westernized Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Jin Tianhe called for greater access to education and opportunities for employment for women, as well as an end to debilitating practices such as foot-binding. Their hope was that these reforms would enable China to take its place alongside prosperous Western nations. Yet other Chinese reformers disagreed about the path to Chinese women's true liberation. For these thinkers, steeped in the Marxist, socialist, and anarchist revolutionary zeal of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women's empowerment—and therefore, China's empowerment—could only emerge from a radical remaking of China itself.

Among these more radical thinkers, He-Yin Zhen was arguably the most articulate and intellectually formidable. Yet before the publication of this volume her voice was little known outside China. Born in 1884, exiled in Tokyo, she co-founded the Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights and its journal, Natural Justice, which became a leading distributor of radical thought in the first decade of the 20th century. He-Yin's writings provide compelling insight into the birth of a Chinese feminism acutely aware of the origins of women's oppression in China and the West and conversant with radical contemporary political and social theories. Her work both demonstrates global connections in feminist thought and prefigures gender theories of today. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory collects her writings together for the first time in English, and makes an invaluable contribution to anyone interested in Chinese intellectual history or the history of feminism across nations and across time periods.

What motivates He-Yin's argument is her contention that male Chinese feminists such as Liang and Jin do not go nearly far enough in eradicating the sources of women's disempowerment. Indeed, He-Yin pushes beyond what many other contemporary feminists were arguing, either in China or in the West. She maintains that unequal distribution of wealth, private property, religious institutions, the legal system, indeed the state itself, all contribute to women's bondage and must all be remade for women to gain social equality. Thus, He-Yin maintains that any feminism based on Western goals and practices—for example, those movements advocating for the vote, education, and jobs for women—are misguided, as they ultimately reinforce the social and political slavery inherent in those systems. After all, she argues, voting rights only give women the opportunity to vote into power the privileged elite and reinforce the status quo. Professional advancement merely increases women's opportunities to participate in a capitalist regime that enslaves women and men. One can imagine that she would not have been impressed with Cheryl Sandberg's injunction for women to "lean in": for He-Yin, leaning in to capitalism and therefore the continuation of economic inequality doesn't free women, rather it only further enslaves them.

Instead of advancement in employment or universal suffrage or better education, He-Yin insists that women's liberation has to be accompanied by a radical remaking of the foundations of society. No less than the complete abolition of government is required, along with its class-based hierarchies created by the unequal distribution of wealth. Economic and political freedom for all women and men would follow the abolition of government which has always, by necessity, run on a structure of haves and have nots organized by class and gender. Readers today are unlikely to share her desire for the end of the state, but the vigor of her critique is provocative.

Two terms central to He-Yin's theories of social life—nannü and shengji—get at what is unique in her work. Nannü—a combination of forms of the Chinese terms for "man" and "woman"—is a concept like the modern Western notion of gender. But unlike that framework, nannü is also inextricably involved in the process of class-making. That is, He-Yin does not conceive of gender apart from the class structures in which gender is enacted and understood. Crafting her gender theories against classical Confucianism (rather than explicitly in response to Western gender models), He-Yin crucially argues that class inequalities are informed by and formative of gender ideas. These are the originary categories from which all other social realities emerge. Further, her idea of nannü—perhaps something like class-gender—also motivates her sense that women will not fully be free until all men and women of all classes are equally empowered.

Secondly, shengji, or "livelihood," extends this class-gender category with a critique of capitalism, imperialism, private property, and, eventually, the state itself, all institutions that necessarily and inherently perpetuate the disenfranchisem*nt of women as the fundamental modes of their operation. These two terms—nannü and shengji—radically rethink the nature of gender, its implication in class, and the institutions that maintain those inequalities.

It is in part because of their refusal to address these class inequalities or to see those inequalities as fundamental to the state (their ignorance of nannü and shengji) that He-Yin is especially critical of her male feminist contemporaries. The editors of the book make this critique explicit by including Liang Qichao and Jin Tianhe's writings in the final sections of the book. He-Yin's critique in fact suggests that Chinese male feminists actually work to extend women's bondage despite appearing to make them more free. She maintains that their feminism, based on Euro-American forerunners, is fueled by Chinese men's desire for recognition and then self-promotion on the world stage, which she calls "men's pursuit of self-distinction in the name of women's liberation." He-Yin insists that Chinese women were educated in order to alleviate men's financial burden, to capitalize on women's labor, and to free up men's time for personal enjoyment.

When she turns from her knowledge of the women's movement in America and Europe and details the origins of women's oppression in Chinese economic and social history, He-Yin's work takes on the feel of an intellectual tour de force. For example, her essay "On the Revenge of Women" traces women's oppression in China across millennia, from the historical rise of patriarchy, expressed in marriage and funerary rites, to the language and writing system that connects characters associated with women to those for servant, broom, and harem. And He-Yin challenges traditional Confucian wisdom literature as underwriting much of the misogyny latent in Chinese thought and practice. While she is equally at home critiquing the causes, methods, and effects of the women's movements in the West, her exhaustive and detailed knowledge of the fundamentals of Chinese culture makes for powerful reading.

While He-Yin's writing is uniquely Chinese and historically specific, her ideas about gender and the role of class in gender formation have some striking echoes in Western feminist theories of the 1980s and '90s. For example, her sense that gender is constructed by external forces like history and politics (rather than innate) seems to anticipate modern gender theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. And further, her understanding of gender as class-gender (gender as inseparable from class) has a modern-day equivalent in critical race theory's claim that identity is constructed at the complex intersection of gender, class, and race. Thus, while presenting a distinctive voice in the birth of Chinese feminist thought, He-Yin's work also draws East and West, past and present, into surprisingly vibrant conversation about both gender construction and the sources of women's oppression.

He-Yin wrote and died before the Communist tragedies of the 20th century, so we do not know what she would have thought or said about them. Would she have advocated the speedy implementation of communism in China, or would she have joined those who urged restraint on Mao Zedong? The latter seems likely: her concern for individual, working women and her internationalism would have sat uneasily with the Great Leap Forward, for example. Violent revolution does not hold the central place in He-Yin's thought that it does in that of Marx and Engels, and making that distinction is important if we are to listen to her vigorous critique of certain social structures that are depressingly similar today.

This volume introduces English readers to a powerful Chinese feminist voice, providing historical and cultural context to her thought while also making clear her relevance for contemporary feminist theory. If you read nothing else, read the brilliant and eminently readable 20 pages of "On the Liberation of Women." For originality and sheer intellectual heft, He-Yin takes her place alongside the greatest feminists of her day. This book will help give her the audience she deserves.

Jamie Friedman is assistant professor of English at Westmont College. Alister Chapman is associate professor of history at Westmont College.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

"Hedgehog Inadvertently Plays a Respectable Measure of Jazz Just By Walking Atop Piano Keys."

How could I not click on that headline in my Facebook feed? Upon pressing the play arrow, I was delighted with six seconds of prickly pudge waddling over keys in a minor progression. I clicked several more times and even shared the link to my wall, still spending less than 40 seconds of my day.

I'm a poet and woman of faith, I tell myself. I don't succumb to the shiny objects of digital distraction. I can meditate on God's graces and the smallest details of ordinary, headline-free life.

In reality, I rarely do. I don't notice old men cutting sandwiches, women browsing greeting cards, and rusty coffee cans at estate sales. But in his collection Splitting an Order, Ted Kooser makes these mundanities worthy opponents to today's flashy interruptions. No, he makes them victors.

Kooser, author of several poetry collections (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Delights & Shadows), nonfiction works, and children's books, was US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Well known as a "people's poet," he continues to advocate for the art through his weekly column, American Life in Poetry. Although appreciated for its plainspoken language, Kooser's work should never be mistaken as plain. His is a fierce imagination that envisions planetary topographies in a shabby baseball and describes a spinach seed as "a tiny brown leather valise / packed with green scarves." Splitting an Order, like the celebrated Delights & Shadows, reveals the truths found in moments and objects—a single spinach seed—that routinely escape our vision. But with almost a decade between volumes, the more recent book resonates with the melancholy wisdom found in older age.

Like a hedgehog on a keyboard, life passes in a moment, that moment rich with unfathomable echoes and chords. The approach of death only intensifies the insistence of life, and Kooser, 75, writes on the edge of that paradox. In "A Backyard Fish Pool," a boy pulls apart the "coverlet" of leaves from the surface of a pond and "peer[s] down / into a black like none other, / cold and solemn as the past, / a lens atop the other autumns / that had come and gone." The silent, "layered years" hold all the secrets seemingly done in and done for, until the boy, now the "I," agitates them with a stick: they become "a swirling cloud / that surfaced with a mortal smell." Our pasts lie dormant yet very much alive beneath the surface, the old pulse quickening with merely a gentle stir. But Kooser rarely slips into the sentimentality of memory, reminding us of the "mortal smell" preserved in every layered year.

And Kooser keeps on stirring. Dead bats come to life. Old homes become crime scenes. Dreams swim away like minnows. And a father, six or seven decades ago, opens a window whose breeze never stops sweeping the smell of honeysuckle over the bed.

Probably my favorite poem in the book, "110th Birthday" brings the life/death collision to a poignant head. The occasion of celebrating 110 years is not as mundane an event as Kooser's typical subjects, but he still treats it with the dignity he lavishes on everyday life—that is, the eye for precision. The celebrant, Helen Setter, rides to her party in a wheelchair, her hair "white and light as milkweed down," her eyelids "thin as old lace curtains," and her feet in "fuschia bedroom slippers." He invites us to be fully present with this woman who—let's face it—many of us have forgotten is a woman. She is an artifact, a record, a symbol of death's teetering presence. We want to celebrate her, hoping for that kind of longevity for ourselves, but we also want to look away. Then, in a moment of "secret pleasure," "she bunches her toes / the way a girl would, barefoot in sand / along the Niobrara, just a century ago." For a moment, the irony of those last four words make us smile—until we glance at our baby's brand-new Christmas picture, taken 12 years ago, and realize that "just" is pretty spot on.

Kooser is at his best when he allows his poems to breathe and resound with their sensory details. Occasionally a poem reads as if the speaker were puppeteering a meaning from it, such as "Swinging from Parents," which ends with the vague image of a child "swinging her feet out over the world," or "Potatoes," which closes with "I was / never sure of the world." And perhaps because these lines demand us to abstract in such a way, to somehow take hold of the whole world, they lose their power. It is Kooser's precision that makes his subjects so universal. I can't feel the world under my feet, but I can surely bunch my toes in the sand.

It may be trite these days to say that poetry forces us to slow down and carpe our diem. But I can't help it: spending time with Kooser's book these past weeks has helped me take notice. Sure, I'm still clicking on many of those hedgehogian temptations, but I'm also letting my eyes wander out the window to wonder on the crumbling styrofoam rose cones, the neighbor's ladder buried in leaves. And, I'm sure, if Kooser were to write a poem about a hedgehog, the animal wouldn't have to run across the piano to capture my attention. He could just sit there and snuffle the grass. Be himself. Live.

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry," was published in 2014.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Editor's Note: This is a guest column by Peter T. Chattaway, who has seen more "biblical films" than anyone I know—more, possibly, than anyone else on the planet.

Early on in Exodus: Gods and Kings, there's a scene in which Moses (Christian Bale), who is still an Egyptian prince oblivious to his Hebrew heritage, confronts an Egyptian viceroy named Hegep (Ben Mendelsohn), who is supposed to be building a new city for the Pharaoh but seems to have diverted some of the funds to support his own luxurious lifestyle. Hegep tries to deflect Moses' attention by pointing to the troublesome Hebrew slaves, claiming that he needs more resources to deal with them. As proof of how rebellious these Hebrews are, Hegep says, "Do you know what 'Israelite' means in their own language? 'He who fights with God.' " An annoyed Moses replies, " 'He who wrestles with God.' There's a difference."

It's a key distinction, and one that applies just as much to Ridley Scott's film. Scott, whose self-identification over the years has wavered between "agnostic" and "atheist"—and whose dim view of religion in general has been made abundantly clear in the way he has promoted films like Prometheus and Kingdom of Heaven[1]—doesn't reject the concept or even goodness of God altogether, at least not within this particular story. But he's troubled by God. He's troubled by how God could let people like the Israelites suffer for centuries. And he's troubled by the violence that follows when God does decide to intervene on behalf of the oppressed. And so he wrestles with God, as does the Moses of his film.

That struggle makes Exodus: Gods and Kings interesting in ways that the viewer might not have expected. Indeed, the opening title cards—which past Scott-directed epics have used to establish that their stories take place in a pre-modern world clouded by superstition—are strikingly direct in their claim that "God has not forgotten" the Israelites. This is followed by a scene in which the Pharaoh Seti (John Turturro) consults a soothsayer (Indira Varma) before sending his army into battle—and while Moses and Ramses (Joel Edgerton) both scoff at her prophecy, it does come true in the end.[2] Later, Moses tells Seti that he respects the Pharaoh's faith even though he does not share it; and then, after he has gone into exile and married the shepherd girl Zipporah (Maria Valverde), Moses and his wife disagree about the proper beliefs with which to raise their son.

But the wrestling really begins in earnest when Moses meets God himself, or at least a boy named Malak (played by 11-year-old Isaac Andrews) who speaks as though he were God. Many critics of the film were offended by this unusual bit of casting, but it is actually one of the few ways in which this film sticks closer to the text than most other adaptations of Exodus. The Moses of the Bible witnessed not just a burning bush but an angel who spoke to him there,[3] and the biblical ambiguity surrounding the "Angel of the Lord"—who sometimes seems to be distinct from God but is also sometimes identified with God himself—is reflected in the film, where Malak uses the divine name "I Am" to describe himself in one scene and is then called a "messenger" by Moses in another.[4] What's more, the arguments between Moses and Malak—including Moses' pleas for mercy—are reminiscent of passages like Exodus 32:9-14 and Numbers 14:10-25, where God becomes so angry with the Israelites that he threatens to destroy them all, until Moses talks him out of it.

Sometimes, though, Scott allows the wrestling to get in the way of the story. Unlike the God of the Bible, who gave Moses a detailed set of instructions, Malak doesn't tell Moses just how to go about setting the Hebrews free, so Moses improvises and begins a guerrilla warfare campaign, which only invites reprisals from the Egyptians. Finally Malak shows up, makes a snarky comment about Moses' tactics "failing," and tells Moses to "watch" as the plagues unfold. At no point during the plagues does Moses act as God's representative—the one time he warns Ramses of a plague in person, he does so because he wants "no part" of the disaster that God has planned—and at one point Moses even shouts that God's terrifying displays of power will not "humble" him, which is an odd thing to hear from the person described in Numbers 12:3 as the most humble man on the face of the earth.

Beyond that, the script is peppered with lines that seem to reflect Scott's skepticism more than that of the characters: When Nun (Ben Kingsley), a Hebrew elder and the father of Joshua (Aaron Paul), tells Moses the story of how his birth-mother left him in a basket for the Pharaoh's daughter to find, Moses says dismissively that "it's not even that good a story." Later, when the plague of the firstborn takes Ramses' own son, the grieving Pharaoh asks Moses, "Is this your God? A killer of children? What kind of fanatics worship such a God?" This question is particularly remarkable because, just a few scenes earlier, Ramses had declared his own godhood, as well as his intention to drown all of the Hebrew children.

But then, these are not the only anachronisms in the film. One is struck by how unthinkingly, discordantly modern the dialogue is. Moses tells Zipporah he wants their son to grow up "believing in himself." Zipporah replies that their son can choose his own beliefs some day. Moses tells Ramses the Hebrews should have the same "rights" as Egyptians. Ramses replies that he cannot set the Hebrews free because it would be problematic "from an economic standpoint alone." And throughout the film, Moses refers to God simply as, well, "God," even when addressing the polytheistic Egyptians. Not "I Am That I Am," not "the God of the Hebrews," just plain "God."

These weaknesses in adaptation are compounded by weaknesses in the overall script—not least, the underdeveloped characters. Say what you will about The Ten Commandments, but for all its dated theatricality, it was full of commanding figures who articulated the film's themes in compelling ways. In Exodus, on the other hand, one is constantly distracted by the way significant supporting characters—some of them played by major actors—keep popping up for one or two scenes, only to vanish afterward.

The film isn't an entire loss, however, and what strengths it does have, artistically and theologically, come together at the climax. Moses, having taken the Israelites down an unfamiliar route to the Red Sea in the hope that it will slow Pharaoh's pursuing chariots, resigns himself and the Hebrews to their fate when he sees that the water is deeper than he expected, and he goes to sleep that night confessing to God that he has let everyone down. The next morning he wakes up to find that the water is receding, and he realizes that God is intervening on behalf of the Hebrews once again—and this time, God is intervening in a positive way that will allow the Hebrews to escape the Egyptians for good, rather than in a way that necessarily causes death and destruction (though the water will return in the form of a giant tsunami, and Pharaoh's chariots will be in the way of it when it does).

Moses, moved by this discovery, turns to the Israelites and professes his faith with a deeper conviction than we have seen from him before, and the music swells triumphantly as they follow him across the wet seabed. After two hours plus of wrestling with God, the film finally turns on a moment of answered prayer.You get the feeling that Scott, for all his professions of disbelief, can imagine what it would be like to find out, to his surprise, that God was looking out for him all along—and that is no small thing. Too bad this one scene can't compensate for all the poorly executed scenes that preceded it.

—Peter T. Chattaway

1. Indeed, Scott first revealed that he was making a movie about Moses mere seconds after he declared, in a June 2012 interview promoting Prometheus, that "the biggest source of evil is of course religion" (http://www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/spitznagel/ridley?-scott-prometheus-interview-9423167).

2. Some Christians might object to the film showing a glimmer of truth in the pagan Egyptian religion, but the book of Exodus does say that the Egyptian magicians were able to replicate some of the miracles performed by Moses.

3. Exodus 3:2; cf. Acts 7:30-37. "Malak" is a Semitic word that means both "messenger" and "angel."

4. See, e.g., Genesis 16:7-13, Judges 13:3-22, etc.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

One surprise for Wendy and me when we moved from Pasadena to Wheaton 20 years ago was the strong Catholic presence here—not surprising, really, despite all we'd heard about this "evangelical hub," given the town's proximity to Chicago and the history of immigration to the Midwest. In downtown Wheaton there's a store serving the Catholic population: "religious supply," books, icons, and so on. Wendy and I often dropped in there for one reason or another, and at some point we encountered a devotional magazine called Magnificat. It was small (like a paperback book) and beautifully produced. (Each issue is devoted to a single month; there are special seasonal issues as well.) I picked up a copy.

Neither Wendy nor I had ever practiced the "liturgy of the hours," though Wendy had used a daily devotional for years. We were attracted to this format, and we began using it every day, praying and reading Scripture (and reading some of the essays and meditations in each issue, including the piece on the cover illustration). Eventually we subscribed to the magazine. We liked it very much—why hadn't we started this much earlier?—but after a couple of years, the emphasis on Marian devotion became too heavy for us. We had routinely skipped certain prayers from the outset, but there was a sense of disjunction, even as we were nourished by truths that all Christians, in all streams of the faith, share in common.

Around this time, Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours was published. The three volumes covered the span of the year, with prayers and readings adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and other sources. We took this up with gratefulness (and we have since given many copies as wedding gifts). We have never done anything like the full course; we do the morning reading and compline, and occasionally one of the others. For some years we kept this up very faithfully; in recent years, our practice has been much more sporadic, and we are currently in a phase of trying to return to consistent daily observance.

I thought about this personal history when Wendy & I were in San Antonio between Christmas Day and New Year's Day and again at the end of January and the beginning of February spending time with our daughter Mary (third of our four children), son-in-law, John, and our five grandchildren: Theresa (nine years old); Gus (Augustine, that is; seven), Clare (five), Johnny (about to turn three), and Edith (named after Edith Stein; one in May).

Of all our kids, Mary was by far the most spiritually inclined, the most devout, as was evident from a very early age. To say that is to risk giving a false impression, of a child who was set apart in some way, or perhaps an awful "goody-goody." Mary wasn't like that at all. But by the time she was starting high school (she was ready to begin 8th grade when we moved to the Midwest), friends at our church—Faith Evangelical Covenant in Wheaton—were asking if Mary might be interested in going into the ministry.

As it happened, she wasn't. At Wheaton College, she majored in philosophy, and in a seminar on Kant's Critique of Pure Judgment, taught by Steve Lake (thank you, Steve!), she met her husband-to-be, John Puryear, a double major in philosophy and math (now working as an engineer), homeschooled in his native Texas as the middle of seven children. A couple of months after Mary's graduation in 2003, they were married, and very soon after that, they told us of their decision to begin rcia classes and enter the Catholic Church, into which they were received on Easter of 2004.

In one respect, this decision came as a surprise to us: we hadn't known they were thinking along those lines. In another respect, it wasn't surprising at all. For instance, I had loaned Mary several books by Cardinal Ratzinger as well as a book of conversations between the future pope and the German journalist Peter Seewald, and she greatly enjoyed them. Also, she was drawn to the devotional life of the Catholic Church. John in particular, but Mary too, had been very critical of a perceived flabbiness in evangelical thinking, prompted by a desire to be seen as "respectable" (the opposite of the complaint so often heard from secular observers, who cast evangelicals as fearsome zealots acting in lockstep—"Christofascists," as Chris Hedges and others put it). Mary and John were both intense, morally serious, in a way that many adult converts are.

For Wendy & me it has been a joy to see Mary & John grow in faith and devotion, raising their children in the same spirit. We have often worshipped with them (not least, on occasions when John & Mary have been on trips, to Israel or to Germany, and we have been taking care of the grandkids). Several years ago, we began giving them a subscription to Magnificat as a Christmas present. I read in the February issue when we were with them a few days ago. God works in mysterious ways. Alas, we cannot share in the Eucharist when we go to mass with them, but someday, we hope, all of us will be sitting around the table for the Great Feast.

Oh young woman at Starbucks, bending over your laptop in your hoodie, your hair charmingly askew, I saw you while I was waiting to order an ice-grandé whole-milk latté. There was a double cd of Leonard Cohen on sale, and the conjunction made me want to break into song. Wisely, I refrained. But I did offer a silent prayer of thankfulness for the moment.

In this issue, reviewing Matthew Avery Sutton's American Apocalypse and Kathryn Gin Lum's Damned Nation, John Turner asks, "[H]ow is it that most American Christians believe in hell and the Second Coming (with its associated judgments) but rarely discuss them?" John's question made me think about heaven—the same is true for that subject—which in turn made me think about a certain tendency in theology today (both popular and academic). Many writers (including some whom I greatly admire) assert with no evident fear of contradiction that "evangelicals" are talking about "heaven" all the time in a way which is, first, distracting attention from what God wants us to attend to here and now and which, more generally, misconstrues the eschatological vision of Scripture.

I find this fascinating and a bit puzzling. The evangelicals I'm in frequent contact with are emphatically NOT talking about "heaven" all the time. In fact, they rarely mention the subject (in marked contrast to the evangelical circles in which I was raised). Of course, as Mark Noll observes in this issue—he too takes up Matt Sutton's American Apocalypse, along with Grant Wacker on Billy Graham, America's Pastor—"no one … has ever precisely defined what makes someone an 'evangelical.' "

Also striking in this tendency I have in mind are certain dogmatic emphases about the nature of the New Heaven and the New Earth and how we will be occupied therein. To me it seems that all our conceptions of these matters must be filed under "Seen Through a Glass, Darkly." The hope is fundamental; the details are not. But here are X and Y and Z, estimable interpreters of Scripture and tradition, telling us that in heaven we will be very BUSY. The underlying tone reminds me of a corporate pep-talk. Whereas, when Wendy & I returned from San Antonio and I was able to soak in our own bathtub, book in hand, for the first time in more than a week, I thought: "This is what heaven will be like." And who knows? Maybe sometimes (whatever "sometimes" will mean in that setting), it will.

On p. 31 of this issue (where Alan Jacobs is writing about The Complete Cosmicomics of Italo Calvino), there is a list of some coming attractions in Books & Culture. We continue working toward our goal of securing funding for 2015-18. When I look at what's ahead—Scot McKnight on Richard Hays' Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, Sarah Ruden on Augustine, Alan Jacobs on Coleridge, Philip Jenkins on James Hogg, Lauren Winner on Step-Families in Early America, Alissa Wilkinson on David Foster Wallace, and much more—I'm thankful all over again for your support. And of course we're particularly looking forward to our September/October 20th Anniversary Issue.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

1/

retracing our steps
snowflakes not waiting
for warmer days

2/

humming for her grandson
tunes before any of us were
alive

3/

gram's funeral
spring's wild flowers showing
their colors

4/

melting thru
colors fallen leaves show
the first snow

5/

crossing paths
puddles the rain can't make
deeper

6/

gaps
in the cloud cover
the ball kicked out of bounds

7/

light-years wider
vines keeping the squash
within reach

—Gary Hotham

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Because he was born April 19, 1923, and reached retirement age in the last century, he is best known to America’s senior church leaders. Schaller outlived many of those whom he most influenced, dying on March 18, 2015, at the age of 91.

Lyle certainly was a major influence in my life and ministry. And a long time personal friend. When he was at the peak of his career we led conferences together, co-authored an audiobook for Abingdon Press (The Best Is Yet to Come: For Churches Ready To Change) and made the dedication pages of each others’ books. After his retirement, we exchanged letters (he wasn’t much into computers) and every year Charleen and I went to visit Lyle and Agnes in their Naperville, Illinois, and Oklahoma City homes. We wanted them to know that they were important to us long after the spotlight of fame moved to others on different stages.

The road to national influence started in Lime Ridge, Wisconsin, where Lyle was the youngest child of dairy farmers. He married Agnes Woods Peterson in 1946—she became his lifelong partner, typist, editor, and stay-at-home wife while he consulted with thousands of churches across the nation. His journey to church consulting and writing began in the planning office of the City of Madison, Wisconsin’s capital. His understanding of demographics and analysis of urban structures gave him a sociologist’s view of human interaction that he brought to churches and denominations.

The switch from urban planning to parish ministry came in his decision to enroll at Garrett Theological Seminary on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In keeping with his Methodist roots and education, he was ordained and became the pastor of a three- point circuit. Looking back, it’s good to know that he once preached weekly sermons and met with church committees, but that wasn’t what he was wired to do best.

Lyle moved to the Regional Planning Office in Cleveland, Ohio, and then from 1968-1971 directed the Center for Parish Development at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Naperville, Illinois. The Schallers’ modest home on Brainard Street became the base for a national consulting ministry and the pilgrimage destination of a long list of prominent church leaders who came to visit their mentor. For 22 years his roles overlapped as he gave joint leadership to the Yokefellow Institute in Richmond, Indiana.

Few of those he influenced identified him with the institutions that claimed his leadership. Many knew him as the consultant who came to their towns and churches to listen and recommend—averaging about 150 on-site church consultations per year. I don’t know if the Guinness Book of World Records includes an award for the most parishes consulted, but Lyle Schaller would no doubt hold the record with thousands and thousands of visits to local congregations. At these churches, he took a repeated approach of gathering statistics and interviewing church leaders, youth, ministers’ spouses, non-leader congregants, and pastors from nearby churches. At the end of each consultation, he reported his 360-degree view, analysis and list of practical suggestions for congregational health and growth. Along the way, he pretty much avoided conflicted churches, at least he declined those obviously in a fight; he identified himself as a consultant and not as a conflict mediator.

Tens of thousands of interviews in churches ranging from mainline to independent and liberal to conservative gave him a mental data base to write, co-author, or edit almost 100 books selling over two million copies. Add his monthly monographs of “The Parish Paper” reaching 200,000 subscribers and we’re talking about penning millions of words about and to the churches of America. His writing style was distinctively his own with long, long sentences including long, long lists.

In one sentence or certainly in one paragraph he covered a wide swath. There weren’t a lot of footnotes because most of what he wrote about were his own experiences, observations, and analyses. This might give the mistaken impression that he was not a serious sociological and theological researcher—the truth is that he was a stalwart at the Naperville library and had one of the biggest residential mailboxes you would ever see on a private home. Inside the Schaller house was like walking through an overcrowded bookstore—books and magazines across the living room, up the stairs and crowded into the downstairs bathroom. The conversational consequence was that guests needed to be careful when guessing the number of live-births in 1944 or the doctrinal distinctives of the Evangelical Covenant denomination. Talking to Lyle was like conversation with a pre-Internet human Wikipedia.

As a child of the Great Depression, he was consistently frugal. His wardrobe was mostly T-Shirts with art and slogans (like "87% of Statistics Are Made-Up On The Spur of the Moment"), his travel expenses were minimal, and his consulting fees could be embarrassingly inexpensive. He didn’t charge much and he didn’t spend much.

As a novice pastor of a 100+ congregation along the Front Range in Colorado, I borrowed a Schaller book from the Denver Seminary Library and became quickly addicted. During one discouraging chapter in early pastoral ministry, I read Lyle’s observation that the best years for most effective churches is during the seventh, eighth, or ninth years of the senior minister’s tenure. He explained that too many pastors leave before the best years begin. It was one of the influences that kept me at Wooddale Church for 35 years as senior pastor.

When church leaders kept hearing me quote Lyle Schaller, one of them suggested that we bring him in as a consultant. I thought this would be like a Catholic church asking the Pope to stop by for a weekend homily—very little chance of it happening. But, urged by lay leadership, I wrote and invited the author I had never met and he immediately said yes. I remember picking him up at the Minneapolis airport and asking about his flight. It turned out that he was driven there from another consultation to save us some expense. Over the next few days he examined, questioned, probed and pushed. It was the beginning of decades of learning from the master consultant.

Lyle didn’t talk much about doctrine in his books or consultations. Perhaps this was a boundary he established while working with broad ecclesiastical diversity. But I do remember a profoundly theological conversation he and I shared under the big tree next to his Naperville home. It was in the midst of a health crisis. Lyle comes from a family with longevity, his mother lived to 81 and his father to 91. But he took a bumpy road to longevity with chronic asthma, colon cancer, and a list of other threatening maladies along the way. Under the big tree he told me that there are many Christian doctrines and many theological views on most of them, but there is one doctrine that he held with total conviction and complete faith—the Resurrection. He declared without doubt and with force that as Jesus rose from the dead so shall Jesus’ disciples also be resurrected to eternal life.

Leith Anderson is the President of the National Association of Evangelicals in Washington, DC, and Pastor Emeritus of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

Israel’s election wasn’t easy on its Arab Christian citizens.

From one direction, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rallied his base by warning, “The Arabs are flocking to the polls in droves.” From the other, Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian-Israeli politician from Haifa, led an unprecedented but disjointed coalition of Arab secularists, communists, and Islamists, and received the endorsem*nt of Hamas.

The tension illustrates the struggle of Arab Israeli Christians to craft a national identity between the increasing clamor of Zionism and Islamism. The result, according to evangelical leaders: a “ghetto mentality” among Christians and fewer opportunities for public witness and ministry.

Netanyahu’s Likud emerged victorious over its left-of-center rivals, the Zionist Union, buoyed by promises to abandon prospects for a Palestinian state. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a Likud ally, told Odeh during campaigning, “You’re not wanted here.”

As voter turnout surged, however, so did Arab participation. Odeh’s “Joint List” placed No. 3 among the 10 parties that captured seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “I’m very wanted in my homeland,” Odeh replied.

But where is this homeland for Arab Christians? The answer is quite contested.

“The level of comfort in identifying as an Israeli is not very high,” said Botrus Mansour, general director of Nazareth Baptist School. “Israel doesn’t help in that.”

A contributing factor is the implosion of regional secular Arab nationalism amid an increasing emphasis on Islamic identity.

“They [Arab Christians in Israel] see what is happening with Christians in the Arab world,” said Mansour, mentioning Iraq, Syria, and Egypt specifically. “Despite the fact that they are second-class citizens in Israel, they feel they live in reasonable conditions economically, and with reasonable freedom of expression that other Christian Arabs in the Middle East do not enjoy.

“Therefore, the Israeli card trumps the game.”

Israel’s Arab population is roughly 20 percent of the Jewish state’s 7.9 million people. Of these, only 157,100 are Christian, according to the latest statistics (gathered in 2012) from the Israeli Census Bureau.

But new research on the roughly 5,000 evangelical Arab Christians in Israel paints a different picture. According to Nazareth Evangelical Theological Seminary (NETS), 75 percent of Baptist leaders surveyed last summer called themselves “Arab Israeli Christians,” deemphasizing their Palestinian identity.

“Our research asks people who they are,” said Duane Alexander Miller, lecturer in church history and theology and co-author of the study with NETS president Azar Ajaj. “There is not a huge aversion to being called Israeli, which is somewhat surprising.”

Baptist churches make up the majority of the Convention of Evangelical Churches in Israel, which is seeking official recognition from the government. Partners include the Assemblies of God, Brethren, Nazarene, and Christian Missionary Alliance churches, totaling 35 congregations.

But there is a newer, fledgling movement of ethnic identity that also identifies strongly with Israel. In September 2014, approximately 20,000 Christians became eligible to have their national ID cards identify them as “Aramean,” rather than “Arab.”

Critics say the movement, endorsed personally and energetically by Netanyahu, is meant to divide Arab Christians against Muslims. CT has reported previously on Christian rejection of Israel’s efforts to legally divide Arab Muslims and Christians into separate minority categories, as well as efforts to enlist Arab Christians into the Israeli military while bypassing Muslim citizens. Meanwhile, a draft law passed by the cabinet in November separates the Jewish and democratic natures of the state, and delists Arabic as a national language.

Mansour calls the Aramean effort a “hoax.” Shadi Khalloul, head of the Christian Aramean Association in Israel, advertises only 250 families have applied for the change.

But according to a poll conducted by Israeli Channel 10, Arabs in Israel as a whole prefer life under the Israeli government, versus under the Palestinian Authority. More than three-quarters (77%) agree, despite only 9 percent saying they enjoy equality with Jewish Israelis and nearly all experiencing racism to some degree.

“We are really very confused, we don’t have any more trust in identities,” said Elias Said, a house church pastor in Haifa with an Assemblies background. “Israel is not doing a favor for anyone, this is for sure. But we look around and say, ‘It is better to live here.’”

Israel’s Christians from traditional Catholic or Orthodox backgrounds display more variance in their identity than evangelicals, but follow a similar pattern. Sammy Smooha of the University of Haifa surveyed 700 Muslims, Christians, and Druze, and confirmed that 47 percent of Christians identified as Israeli/non-Palestinian.

Yet a full 24 percent called themselves Palestinian/non-Israelis, near-denying their nation of citizenship. (The remainder, 29 percent, said they were both.)

Smooha presented his research at a January conference on Palestinian Christian Identity in Israel, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was co-hosted by Musalaha, an influential reconciliation ministry headed by Salim Munayer of Bethlehem Bible College.

Munayer recognizes there is a deemphasizing of the political aspects of Palestinian identity due to the Islamist takeover of their struggle. But Christians also feel excluded from the other direction by the rise of Jewish nationalism.

About 1 in 5 Israeli Jews (21%) identify with the “national-religious” sector, otherwise known as religious Zionism, according to research released in January by the Israel Democracy Institute. An additional 23 percent identify slightly. While this leaves a narrow majority (53%) of Israelis not belonging at all, the institute stated previous estimates put the national-religious camp at no more than 10 percent.

The result, according to Munayer’s research (co-authored with Gabriel Horenczyk of the Hebrew University and published in the October 2014 edition of the International Journal of Psychology), is that Christian youth are rejecting affiliation with both Jews and Muslims.

In 1998, the predominant attitude of over 200 Arab Christian adolescents surveyed was of integration with Israeli Jewish culture. By contrast, the attitude toward Arab Muslim culture was one of separation.

But 10 years later, adolescents exhibited a primary posture of increasing separation toward both.

“In Israel, Muslims and Jews are moving from a nationalist ideology to a religious-nationalist ideology,” Munayer said. “The more we see this trend focus on religion, the more minorities feel isolated. Palestinian Israeli Christians are developing a ghetto mentality as a result.

“This is sad because in separating ourselves from these two communities, we have fewer opportunities for witness and ministry. We see an increase in exclusive Christian clubs, and a lack of welcome for others who are different.”

And the statistics confirm their increasing religiosity. Smooha’s research also shows 48 percent of Christians rank religion as their primary identification marker, in preference over Palestinian or Israeli, nearly identical to Muslim trends.

So while evangelical pastors rejoice as church attendance increases, many Christians are torn and wearied of the simplest, but most crucial of questions: Who am I?

“There are competing sub-identities,” said Mansour, who voted for the Joint List despite reservations. “Emphasizing one comes at the expense of the other.

“Unfortunately, we as Palestinian Israeli Christians are the guinea pigs. But we must empathize with our disadvantaged people who the Lord put us among and called us to serve.”

The Presbyterian Church (USA) will now define marriage as a "unique commitment between two people," rather than a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman as an act of Christian discipleship.

Last June, the PC(USA) general assembly voted to change the language in its Book of Order, the denomination’s governing constitution. Following the vote, a majority of the PC(USA)’s 171 presbyteries also had to approve the measure for it to go into effect. On Tuesday, this number (86) was reached.

The conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee (PLC) criticized the denomination’s shift.

“In terms of the PCUSA’s witness to the world, this vote demonstrates a complete accommodation to the prevailing winds of our culture,” said Carmen Fowler LaBerge, PLC president, in a statement. “Any prophetic voice that the denomination may have once had to speak truth and call people to repentance is now lost."

The Book of Order's new definition of marriage reads:

Marriage is a gift God has given to all humankind for the well-being of the entire human family. Marriage involves a unique commitment between two people, traditionally a man and a woman, to love and support each other for the rest of their lives. The sacrificial love that unites the couple sustains them as faithful and responsible members of the church and the wider community.

The same paragraph in the old definition reads:

Marriage is a gift God has given to all humankind for the well-being of the entire human family. Marriage is a civil contract between a woman and a man. Christian marriage is a covenant through which a man and a woman are called to live out together before God their lives of discipleship. In a service of Christian marriage a lifelong commitment is made by a woman and a man to each other, publicly witnessed and acknowledged by the community of faith.

The amendment provides an exemption for PC(USA) teaching elders who believe that officiating a same-sex marriage would violate their “discernment of the Holy Spirit and their understanding of the Word of God.” Local congregations can also deny the use of church property for same-sex ceremonies.

As of Tuesday, 41 presbyteries had voted against the amendment, which will go into effect on June 21. About 40 presbyteries have upcoming votes.

LaBerge also noted the effects of the departure of conservative churches with large votes at presbytery meetings and a significant number of small member churches.

"We’re going to continue to see diminished vote totals and swings in presbyteries where the constituency is now almost exclusively progressive because so many conservatives have left," she said in a statement.

In a letter to churches, PC(USA) leaders said they hope the vote would not end the denomination’s conversation about marriage and family. “We hope that such ‘up/down’ voting does not mark the end, but the continuation of our desire to live in community; a partnership that requires prayer, the study of Scripture, listening to and with one another, and a dedication to partnership in the midst of our diversity of opinion,” said Heath K. Rada and the Rev. Larissa Kwong Abazia, the moderator and vice-moderator of the General Assembly.

The PC(USA) has 1.7 million members but has lost more than 25 percent of its membership in recent decades. In 2013, membership declined by 5 percent as 148 congregations left for other denominations—the largest annual membership loss in nearly 50 years.

Today the denomination is the 10th largest in the US. Its almost 2 million members are dwarfed by Southern Baptists, the largest US Protestant denomination with nearly 16 million members. The Mormon church and Assemblies of God denominations also have higher membership numbers than the PC(USA).

In 2012, conservative Presbyterians launched the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO), saying the PC(USA) was "too consumed by internal conflicts and bureaucracy to nurture healthy congregations."

CT has reported on membership drops in the PC(USA), including the decision of John Ortberg's church to leave for the ECO, renewal group strategies, and other stories about Presbyterians.

When I was growing up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, we listened to the news every evening on WHBL. But first we had to listen to the sponsor’s theme song, “Solidarity Forever,” Ralph Chaplin’s revolutionary 1915 union anthem. The melody was familiar: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

During my elementary-school years, the United Auto Workers struggled with Kohler, the local manufacturer of toilets, sinks, and bathtubs. For six years, Kohler had refused the strikers’ demands and ignored judgments by courts and the National Labor Relations Board. The union waged a campaign of violence and intimidation against nonunion employees who showed up for work, bribing public officials to look away. Those years forever tainted the way I hear “The Battle Hymn.”

Like “Solidarity Forever,” the Civil War anthem was adapted in the service of a cause. The tune was sung in frontier camp meetings with the words, “Oh! Brothers will you meet me on Canaan’s happy shore?” In 1861, a band of Union soldiers from Massachusetts used the tune to pay tribute to abolitionist John Brown, who had perished two years earlier trying to spark a slave rebellion.

Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist poet who later founded woman suffrage organizations, heard a Wisconsin regiment sing about Brown. She wrote “Battle Hymn” in one night, calling Union forces to “die to make men free” in imitation of Jesus, who “died to make men holy.”

Many other sacred songs have been co-opted by social causes, often losing or watering down their religious content. In 1931, striking coal miners in West Virginia transformed the hymn “I Shall Not Be Moved” into “We Shall Not Be Moved.” The chorus, with its echoes of the Psalms, stayed substantially the same. But verses like “Jesus is my captain, I shall not be moved” became “The union is behind us, we shall not be moved.” The civil rights movement adapted the song and, in Selma, Alabama, sang: “Tell Governor Wallace, we shall not be moved.”

Likewise, the Southern holiness song “The Gospel Plow” (“Keep your hand on the plow, hold on”—which echoes Luke 9:62) became the civil rights anthem “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” In 1956, when Alice Wine reworked it into a protest song, she retained some biblical references while adding secular verses that spoke to the current struggle.

Hardly anyone remembers the church roots of the most prominent civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” It was not an anonymous folk song popularized by Pete Seeger and other folkies. We Shall Overcome: Sacred Song on the Devil’s Tongue, by music-industry veteran Isaias Gamboa, reconstructs the story of Louise Shropshire’s original song, “If My Jesus Wills (I’ll Overcome),” first published in 1942 and copyrighted in 1954.

Shropshire was a talented African American who often collaborated with gospel music great Thomas A. Dorsey, author of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” She was close to pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, who was to Birmingham what Martin Luther King Jr. was to Montgomery, Alabama. King stayed in Shropshire’s home whenever he visited Cincinnati.

I’m saddened at the way social movements have secularized music that has given God’s people courage to deal with hardship and injustice.

The melodies of “If My Jesus Wills” and “We Shall Overcome” diverge, but the harmonic structure and lyrics are close. One musicologist says you can use Shropshire’s song as backup vocals for Seeger’s, they are that similar. (Check out the Azusa Pacific University Gospel Choir’s recording on YouTube.)

Gamboa is angry that the folk movement pirated the works of amateur singers in churches, bars, prisons, and fields. And I’m saddened at the way social movements have secularized music that has given God’s people courage to deal with hardship and injustice.

Evangelicalism has always been a song factory. The tunes I listed arose within its most populist forms—which were also a seedbed for abolitionism, the temperance movement, urban ministry, and one vital stream of woman suffrage. It was only natural that populist movements with secular goals would draw on the tunes of ordinary folk who wanted change.

The secular versions of these songs have often served a wonderful purpose, but they have also obscured the faith roots of resisting evil. They work, I suppose, as secular people experience righteous anger at oppression. Faith, however, guides and sustains righteous anger, channeling it away from the spiral of vengeance into nonviolent, loving action.

David Neff is the former editor in chief of Christianity Today.