Dispatches from three outposts of the evangelical world: Arkansas, Montana and Pennsylvania.
The first item arrived from a friend in Arkansas, where Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running for governor. The bullet point (an appropriate designation, as you’ll see) that caught my attention read: “Protect our God-given Second Amendment rights.”
As a historian, I believe context is crucial. Let’s look first at the Second Amendment. No, no mention of God, but consider the text: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” How curious that in all the news accounts of the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, no one has yet identified the names of the killers’ militias.
I’ve been reading the Bible for most of my life, and somehow I missed the fact that God had bestowed the right to bear arms. O wait, here it is — in pica type following Genesis 1. Turns out that after God created Adam and Eve, the Almighty furnished them with AR-15s.
God-given Second Amendment rights. Who knew?
Finally, on to Grove City College in Pennsylvania. In October 2020, Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
The petitioners demanded that the school’s Council on Diversity be disbanded and that the school reject critical race theory “as unbiblical and inconsistent with the founding principles of the college and that any faculty members promoting it will be directed to stop.”
Several investigatory committees were formed, and the matter found its way to the board of trustees, which issued a statement condemning CRT and quoted (apparently with approval) administrators who said that “inviting Mr. Tisby to speak in chapel was a mistake.” The board disbanded the Council on Diversity and called for the president to exercise greater scrutiny of people invited to appear in chapel.
Jemar Tisby’s response, an open letter to the board of Grove City College, was a model of grace, clarity and understatement.
“I write to you with a heavy heart and with hope,” the letter began. His task, Tisby said, was to address “supposed ‘mission drift’ at the school because of racial justice education.” He noted that the report used the word “conservative” 19 times and the word “Christian” only 10 times.
Tisby summoned board members to what he called “courageous Christianity,” which, he said, “does not compromise with racism, it confronts it.”
But Tisby’s most powerful statement was what he did not say. He simply included a photograph of the school’s trustees. I probably don’t need to tell you that among those 29 smiling faces, not a single one was a person of color.
Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.