Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Donald Trump

  • SUPERSTITION

    How an Old Distinction between Religion and Superstition Speaks to Today SUPERSTITION I’ve been thinking lately about superstition. Not the funky 1972 Stevie Wonder hit, although it would make a great soundtrack for this piece: Very superstitious/Writing’s on the wallVery superstitious/Ladder’s ‘bout to fall Got the beat in your head? Hum it as you read.…

  • THOUGHT CONTROL

    THE PERILS OF BEING TALKED ABOUT It was an introductory Bible and Theology class at a small Christian college—a required course at the time. The students, mostly freshmen, many with Christian school educations, were bored before they arrived in class. I remembered taking the same class when I was a freshman and finding it almost…

  • POLITICS AND KOREA: A PALM SUNDAY MEDITATION

    The question was how Christians should respond to political developments. It came, as such questions often do, from deep anxiety about what was happening in her country. How should she be involved? Should she join a demonstration? Should she be shouting across the street at those who opposed what she stood for? What in these…

  • A Totalitarian Bent of Mind: Peter Thiel, Carl Schmitt, and “Political Theology”

    “Seeking God . . . in Silicon Valley.” In my last post I promised to turn next to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), an idea at the heart of evangelical theology and, I’ll argue, at the heart of evangelical politics. I will address PSA soon; I had every intention to do so in this post. But…

  • BAD THEOLOGY 3: THE THEOLOGY OF POWER

    BAD THEOLOGY, PART THREE I began this series of posts with a question: How has it happened that evangelical Christianity has so enthusiastically embraced Donald Trump. At first glance, this would not seem an alliance made in heaven—or anywhere else. In his book, The Violent Take It by Force (Fortress, 2024, Kindle Edition), a book I’ll come…

  • BAD THEOLOGY, PART TWO: AN APOCALYPTIC HABIT OF MIND

    In my last post—a short introduction to this series of blogs I’m calling Bad Theology—I asked why evangelical Christians seemed so susceptible to the blandishments of Donald Trump and his allies. Why in the face of his numerous lies, his business and personal failures, his many violations of basic Christian ethics, and his lack of any apparent allegiance…

  • BAD THEOLOGY

    Tim Alberta opens his bestselling book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins 2023), by recounting a February 2021interview with Chris Winans, the pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brighton, Michigan. At the time of the interview, it had not been going well for Winans. People were leaving…

  • LIVING SMALL

    Sadness settled over many of us like a Bellingham fog. We were gathered with friends last Tuesday when the votes began to come in from the eastern part of the US. It quickly became apparent that disaster was in the making. We talked a while about what it meant, about why people voted the way…

  • CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM

    “What keeps gnawing at me,” he writes, “is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” (Letters and Papers from Prison, Kindle edition, page 353). Compared to what Bonhoeffer was going through in April of 1944, for those of living in the US or Canada these are easy times. True,…