Baptizing America

In the face of a rising threat to both church and democracy, Baptizing America provides an urgent examination and an enlightening critique exposing the dangerous undercurrents of Christian Nationalism. How can Mainline Protestants spot such practices in their own activities? A crucial call to reckon with influences before it's too late. Christian Nationalism presents an existential threat to both Christ’s church and American democracy. Now is the time—before it is too late—to reckon with all the places its pernicious influence arises. On full display in recent elections, Christian Nationalism also exists in sanctuaries where an American flag has been displayed for decades, when we pledge allegiance to one nation “Under God,” or when the U.S. is called a Christian nation. Baptizing America critiques the concept of civil religion, arguing that such expressions are far more dangerous than we realize. Mainline Protestant congregations will likely recognize themselves in the overlooked expressions of Christian Nationalism that pop up in the activities of both church and state.

A Religious News Service writer and rabbi's exposé of the systematic campaign by fundamentalists to establish Christianity as an American national religion and convert all factions of non-Christian society identifies aggressive and well-funded activities taking place in the nation's schools, courts, hospitals, and other institutions.

The Baptizing of America: Politics, Piety, and the Coming Theocracy exposes the systematic campaign by Christian fundamentalists to co-opt and take over every "room" of American society from the bedroom to the school room, hospital room, operating room, courtroom, work room, reading room and newsroom. This book focuses on the aggressive war currently being led by fundamentalist Christians to "baptize America." It is a battle that will determine whether the United States remains a spiritually vital country but without an officially established religion, or whether it will become "Christianized," a "faith-based nation" in which fundamentalist Christianity will be the sole legal dominant religion throughout the land. The war will decide whether America follows the path of many other nations and becomes a theocracy not unlike Iran and the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in Rangoon to preach the gospel. Celebrated in the Protestant press, which ran dramatic accounts of exotic adventures, the attempt to convert the Burmese met with mixed results. Although Burmese Buddhists resisted Christian evangelism, people from minority communities were baptized in large numbers throughout the nineteenth century. American Baptist Christianity was itself transformed in the Buddhist kingdom. Missionaries who were initially horrified by what they saw as the idolatry of Buddha statues found themselves creating tree shrines and their converts hanging colorful Jesus paintings in their churches. Baptizing Burma explores the history of how the American Baptist mission to Burma failed to convert the country yet succeeded in transforming its religious landscape. Alexandra Kaloyanides examines how the Burmese majority positioned Buddhism to counter Christianity, how marginalized groups took on Baptist identities, and how Protestantism was reimagined as a Southeast Asian religion. She considers a series of holy objects to reveal the mechanics of religious practice in a period of entangled empires—British, Burmese, and American. By telling stories of four key things—the sacred book, the school house, the pagoda, and the portrait—this book illuminates the histories of Burma’s last kingdom and the unexpected consequences of America’s first overseas mission.

In The Baptism of Early Virginia, Rebecca Anne Goetz examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians. She finds the seventeenth century a critical time in the development and articulation of racial ideologies—ultimately in the idea of “hereditary heathenism,” the notion that Africans and Indians were incapable of genuine Christian conversion. In Virginia in particular, English settlers initially believed that native people would quickly become Christian and would form a vibrant partnership with English people. After vicious Anglo-Indian violence dashed those hopes, English Virginians used Christian rituals like marriage and baptism to exclude first Indians and then Africans from the privileges enjoyed by English Christians—including freedom. Resistance to hereditary heathenism was not uncommon, however. Enslaved people and many Anglican ministers fought against planters’ racial ideologies, setting the stage for Christian abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using court records, letters, and pamphlets, Goetz suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the deeply entwined relationship between Christianity and race in early America. "Goetz has done an impressive job bringing religion to the center of the historiography on race, and her study is a must-read for all scholars interested in the development of race and the role of Protestantism in the Atlantic world."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "In a compact 173 pages, Goetz links race and religion in colonial Virginia in ways that few other scholars have even attempted."—Journal of American History "This is impressive scholarship grounded in letters, pamphlets, court records, colonial statutes, and a wide array of additional archival and secondary sources . . . It is a book that will find ready readership in graduate seminars, seminaries, and undergraduate classrooms."—Virginia Magazine of History and Biography "Professor Goetz . . . is to be warmly applauded for having produced a work of such methodological scope and intellectual sophistication, a most persuasive work that ranks as a major contribution to the field."—Slavery and Abolition Rebecca Anne Goetz is an associate professor of history at New York University.

In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered as the nation was in the throes of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that both sides "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." He wasn't speaking metaphorically: the Bible was frequently wielded as a weapon in support of both North and South. As James P. Byrd reveals in this insightful narrative, no book was more important to the Civil War than the Bible. From Massachusetts to Mississippi and beyond, the Bible was the nation's most read and respected book. It presented a drama of salvation and damnation, of providence and judgment, of sacred history and sacrifice. When Americans argued over the issues that divided them -- slavery, secession, patriotism, authority, white supremacy, and violence -- the Bible was the book they most often invoked. Soldiers fought the Civil War with Bibles in hand, and both sides called the war just and sacred. In scripture, both Union and Confederate soldiers found inspiration for dying-and for killing-on a scale never before seen in the nation's history. With approximately 750,000 fatalities, the Civil War was the deadliest of the nation's wars, leading many to turn to the Bible not just to fight but to deal with its inevitable trauma. A fascinating overview of religious and military conflict, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood draws on an astonishing array of sources to demonstrate the many ways that Americans enlisted the Bible in the nation's bloodiest, and arguably most biblically-saturated conflict.