A weather vane in an ill wind
My essay today at The New York Times, plus: Some other recent work and an update coming next week
Hi there. It’s been a minute. October was a whirlwind of travel and interviews for the release of Untrustworthy, plus cramming a little writing into the spaces in between, and I feel like I’m still catching my breath.
Today, however, I have an essay up at The New York Times, this one on increasing Anabaptist forays into politics, which I find both fascinating and troubling:
This piece went through careful edits to hit the right balance: On the one hand, many Anabaptists (both groups and individually) have not completely abstained from politics in decades past. And yet I (and others) see a legitimately new and accelerating plunge into the political realm.
And I mean “politics” as in “seeking to wield power” much more than “thinking or talking about policies, events, etc.” We live in a country where the state asks for our opinions about what it should do, and I have no qualms about answering that question. But power is another thing ...
Now, I'm (obviously) not Amish or Old Order, but as many of you know, Anabaptism has played an incredibly important role in my own faith. I’ve never felt older than I did when, in the middle of reading a book about American politics and Christianity several years ago, I suddenly realized: The author was too young to personally remember the Bush years.
I do remember. I remember the debate that rippled through my Christian high school when we learned that our new civics teacher was a Democrat and, therefore, not voting for then-President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. I remember the evangelical movement’s fervor for Bush; the way we backed what was already becoming an unpopular war in Iraq; the way many congregations displayed American flags, covered issues like abortion and gay marriage from the pulpit, and distributed voter guides which all but said God is a Republican. I remember how a single Minnesota megachurch pastor (Greg Boyd, who wrote the foreword to my first book) bucking those trends in 2004 was unusual enough to get a writeup in the Times—and to prompt 1,000 of his 5,000 congregants to leave his church.1
It was precisely my discomfort with that entwining of faith and politics, of church and state, which led me to a Mennonite church as a young adult. And it’s that history which would make me so sorry to see Anabaptism lose this distinctive commitment. As I wrote in the Times piece:
[T]he looming potential for the end of Amish and Mennonite wariness of politics, the disintegration of this tradition, looks to me like a weather vane in an ill wind. As American partisanship becomes more desperate and vicious, even Christians once adamant that our faith puts real constraints on pursuit of power are now inclined to shake off those strictures.
Yet however much I rue it, I can’t deny this is where many Anabaptists are moving. A recent issue of Lancaster Farming ran an Amish PAC ad alongside a passionate letter to the editor headlined, “We Can’t Vote.” Two issues later, the vehement rejoinder came in a new letter: “You Can Vote.”
All of which is to say: This topic is dear to me, and I hope you'll read the piece!
Other recent articles
Practicing truth together (an adapted excerpt of Untrustworthy) | Catalyst
It’s okay to cram before Election Day | Christianity Today
You’ll be just fine if Twitter dies | The Daily Beast
MAGA is no Tea Party | The UnPopulist
Why our public school culture wars will never end | The Daily Beast
Herschel Walker and the platform of cheap grace | Christianity Today
Untrustworthy interviews and reviews
Trust, truth, and the knowledge crisis (live event recording) | Trinity Forum
Webinar with Grace Olmstead (live event recording)
Finding Holy (podcast)
Getting past the solipsistic self (review) | Law & Liberty
The leavening effect of seeking the truth (review) | Front Porch Republic
Review: Untrustworthy | Current
Five stunning books … on sale now (review, sorta) | Hearts & Minds Books
Coming next week
I’ve promised a Q&A book club for subscribers here, but I’ve only got a couple questions so far. I’ll answer those in my next email, which I’m scheduling for next week. It’s not too late to send in more queries as you’re getting into Untrustworthy, though I’m also happy to simply assume my writing was so good it answered every possible question already 😉
Best,
Bonnie
At the event I did for Untrustworthy in Chicago with David French and Russell Moore, one of the audience questions was, basically, “But why do evangelical pastors not simply tell their congregants to stop believing lies and dabbling in conspiracism and doing politics in such a bad way?” And this story, though—of course—I didn’t think to recount it at the time, is the exemplification of the answer I gave, part of which was that, depending on the congregation, the result may well be that the pastor is not the pastor anymore. The Times report from the time is worth a reread 16 years later.