Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity
Ebook
Joel Looper offers his fellow evangelicals a theological rationale for resisting Christian nationalism.
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.
So wrote Paul to the Galatians who demanded the circumcision of gentile converts. Such rigid adherence to the old law prioritized one culture over the universal church. Joel Looper hears an urgent message for American Christians today in this biblical controversy. Though evangelicals emphasize fidelity to the gospel above all else, many have fallen in step with “a different gospel”—that of Christian nationalism.
Analyzing Scripture, church history, and current events in the United States and Russia, Looper shows how the nation can supplant the church as Christians’ primary allegiance—and why Jesus calls us to a different kind of community. He also engages directly with Christian nationalist authors, exposing their distortions of theology.
Looper communicates a fresh, insider’s perspective on how this false gospel has colonized American evangelicalism. He also shows us how we can revive the traditional Christian vision of community, drawn together by the Holy Spirit. Thoughtful and balanced, Another Gospel offers readers a way out of the rut of a well-worn argument—and a way forward for the American church.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. A Gospel People?
2. Baptizing the National Body
3. The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart
4. Putin’s Christian Nationalism
5. A Gospel Politics
6. Trump and the Gospel of America
Bibliography
Christianity Today
“That Looper writes in an engaging, informal style accessible to ordinary no less than learned readers does not diminish the sharpness of his central argument: Evangelicals are confronting nothing less than a status confessionis: a condition of crisis wherein a political threat ‘puts serious barriers in the way of preaching the gospel.’ The churches must take a strong public stand on behalf of their central beliefs and thus for the Word of God that they confess.”
“Politicized evangelicals believe themselves to be fighting secularization, but Joel Looper argues that his fellow evangelicals are in fact making it worse: the church is secularizing itself by replacing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with cultural conservatism, and the church with the nation. No wonder people are walking away from the church! Looper calls those who have accepted Donald Trump as their personal lord and savior to return to the Jesus of the Bible.”
—William T. Cavanaugh, DePaul University, author of Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church
“In Another Gospel, Joel Looper provides a formidable and timely critique of the contemporary religious right based in conservative Christian theology. Looper’s book is for those wrestling with the question of how American evangelicalism lost its way politically—those searching for a theological answer to white Christian nationalism and the anti-democratic ideology that has captured so many on the religious right.”
—Scott M. Coley, Mount St. Mary’s University, author of Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right
- Title: Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity
- Author: Joel Looper
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781467468442, 9780802884275, 080288427X, 1467468444
- Resource ID: LLS:9781467468442
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-10T01:04:45Z
Joel Looper teaches at Baylor University and serves as coordinator for Shalom Mission Communities, a network of international Christian communities. He is also the author of Bonhoeffer’s America: A Land without Reformation.