Citizen Christians

With emancipation, a long battle for equal citizenship began. Bringing together the histories of religion, race, and the South, Elizabeth L. Jemison shows how southerners, black and white, drew on biblical narratives as the basis for very different political imaginaries during and after Reconstruction. Focusing on everyday Protestants in the Mississippi River Valley, Jemison scours their biblical thinking and religious attitudes toward race. She argues that the evangelical groups that dominated this portion of the South shaped contesting visions of black and white rights. Black evangelicals saw the argument for their identities as Christians and as fully endowed citizens supported by their readings of both the Bible and U.S. law. The Bible, as they saw it, prohibited racial hierarchy, and Amendments 13, 14, and 15 advanced equal rights. Countering this, white evangelicals continued to emphasize a hierarchical paternalistic order that, shorn of earlier justifications for placing whites in charge of blacks, now fell into the defense of an increasingly violent white supremacist social order. They defined aspects of Christian identity so as to suppress black equality—even praying, as Jemison documents, for wisdom in how to deny voting rights to blacks. This religious culture has played into remarkably long-lasting patterns of inequality and segregation.

In Church, State, and Citizen , Sandra F. Joireman has gathered political scientists to examine the relationship between religion and politics as seen from within seven Christian traditions: Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Anglican, Evangelical and Pentecostal. In each chapter the historical and theological foundations of the tradition are described along with the beliefs regarding the appropriate role of the state and citizen. --from publisher description

What does it mean to be a Christian citizen of the United States today? This book challenges the argument that the United States is a Christian nation, and that the American founding and the American Constitution can be linked to a Christian understanding of the state and society. Vincent Rougeau argues that the United States has become an economic empire of consumer citizens, led by elites who seek to secure American political and economic dominance around the world. Freedom and democracy for the oppressed are the public themes put forward to justify this dominance, but the driving force behind American hegemony is the need to sustain economic growth and maintain social peace in the United States. This state of affairs raises important questions for Christians. In recent times, religious voices in American politics have taken on a moralistic stridency. Individual issues like abortion and same-sex marriage have been used to "guilt" many Christians into voting Republican or to discourage them from voting at all. Using Catholic social teaching as a point of departure, Rougeau argues that conservative American politics is driven by views of the individual and the state that are inconsistent with mainstream Catholic social thought. Without thinking more broadly about their religious traditions and how those traditions should inform their engagement with the modern world, it is unwise for Christians to think that pressing single issues is an appropriate way to actualize their faith commitments in the public realm. Rougeau offers concerned Christians new tools for a critical assessment of legal, political and social questions. He proceeds from the fundamental Christian premise of the God-given dignity of the human person, a dignity that can only be realized fully in community with others. This means that the Christian cannot simply focus on individual empowerment as 'freedom' but must also seek to nurture community participation and solidarity for all citizens. Rougeau demonstrates what happens when these ideas are applied to a variety of specific contemporary issues involving the family, economics, and race. He concludes by offering a new model of public engagement for Christians in the American Empire.

For decades, American popular media have instructed audiences about their roles and significance in the public sphere. In The Faithful Citizen, rhetorical critic Kristy Maddux argues that popular Christian media not only communicate avenues for civic engagement but do so in profoundly gendered terms. Her detailed interrogation of popular Christian movies, books, and television shows--the Left Behind series, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, Amazing Grace, 7th Heaven, and the blockbuster The Da Vinci Code--exposes five competing models of how Christians should behave in the civic sphere as their gendered selves. What emerges is a typology that insightfully reveals how these varying faith-based models of engagement uniquely shape public discourse and influence the larger picture of contemporary politics.

"The Book of Funnels is one of the strangest and most beautiful first books of poetry I have read in a long time."--John Ashbery Christian Hawkey constructs a visionary world rich with fantastic imagery. In blurring the line of reality versus imagination, this turbulent dreamscape calls into question the frightening and surprising nature of the actual world. Christian Hawkey's The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004) received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hawkey is co-founder of the international poetry journal jubilat, and he teaches at Pratt Institute.