

These books share numerous common features: all of them were written by professing Christian scholars with advanced degrees from prestigious universities, all of them address hot-button issues in contemporary culture, and all of them reach conclusions that resonate with left-of-center perspectives.

This list could be expanded to include Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism, Willie James Jennings’s After Whiteness, Sechrest et al’s Can ‘White’ People Be Saved? and Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism. Robert Jones’s White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity was discussed in The New York Times and the author himself is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States earned a treatment in Time magazine. Beth Allison Barr, the author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, was likewise the subject of an NPR interview and a New Yorker article. Kristen Kobes Du Mez was interviewed on NPR about her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation and was featured in a story for The Washington Post. In the past few years, numerous Christian scholars have produced books garnering national attention. Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Fall 2021 issue of Eikon.
