Review: The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism In An American Family by Andrew Himes

We build our lives on stories...the stories told to us about who we are as individual people, about our country, and our family's history. This idea...that so much of our identity and understanding is wrapped up in the stories we believe about ourselves and our origins is something that is becoming more and more interesting to me. I've always enjoyed history in the broadest sense of the word, but it's not until recent years, even months, that I've considered just how profoundly "history' affects us. So much about how we think and act can be attributed to forces and events we aren't aware of in the slightest, which always makes learning more about the past an exciting and sometimes even jarring experience.

My personal history is this: I was raised in an evangelical Christian home, my father was a pastor, and I have two older siblings. My parents were both first generation Christians, though their families later converted and had religious understanding and background in their lives.

All of this affected of course, who I became as a person and what I believed growing up. My family was church-going obviously, so I was raised to believe in God. I was raised in an evangelical family, so I always believed God was someone I could talk to, who had a personal interest in even the details of my life. I say this to explain that from a young age, I tried to communicate with God and understand what He wanted from me and my life. I have many memories of praying and reading the Bible and genuinely trying to build a relationship and also believing I had a connection with God throughout my growing up years. Additionally, I was taught to value the basic moral system in the Bible.

Christianity has been around for a long time, though. It's a faith system with a huge history, even bigger when you consider its roots in Judaism. It's one thing to grow up fully immersed in it, it's another to understand how the kind of Christianity I lived and breathed came to be. Understanding its origins, past conflicts, its history, helps me to be understand its present state, where it might go, and yes most especially to also better understand myself.

And...that's where I get to the actual review part. I was really interested in reading this book, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family, because there is a very long religious history in this country, my own faith history stems from it, and I know little about it. While the family focused on is the John R. Rice who was an influential fundamentalist, it begins all the way back in the very immigration to this country. This is a very comprehensive and insightful history.

I was riveted by it. I was so surprised by how much there was that I had never bothered to think about, and at the same time how much sense it all made. Himes writes in a very easy relateable way, but this is quite a dense read, which is to say there is A LOT of history to absorb. It's never dry, though, and in many ways is a page turner.

Since Himes's family was fundamentalist, he has firsthand experience of many people in the movement, and a life story of how he dealt with his own personal history. He weaves his own story into the text, beginning chapters with anecdotes and scenes from his own life and then going into more history. This is very effective, because it creates a sense of curiosity about the immediate story of Himes the man, while all along you are reading the history that was the foundation of the influences in his life.

Reading The Sword of the Lord then, with its history of fundamentalist Christianity, (including how that term went out of fashion for many evangelicals) was like turning a light on a shadowed corner of my life. Seriously, I have no way of explaining it, other than to say it was a bit like unearthing and seeing some of the roots of your life for the first time. I was fascinated by the history, by the very popular use of the Bible in extremely heated ways to support ideas on both sides of The Civil War, of the different ways faith manifested itself in the lives of people, what they valued and how that continued to shape each generation.

Himes spares no punches. Which is to say he is extremely forthright about the consequences as he sees them of the kind of faith practiced. Having said that I very much feel this book is written with a great deal of respect for the people it is about. While he may not agree with how they perceived God and what it meant to follow him, I never felt like he was condemning them either. Simply trying to paint the most accurate picture he could, a fully fleshed out messy portrait of messy humanity.

I loved The Sword of the Lord and I really feel that I recommend it to anyone at all who has an interest in the history of evangelical Christianity. I think even just history in the United States might be enough as that's a huge part of it.

Rating: 4.5/5
Source of Book: Received from author for review

Review: The Sacredness of Questioning Everything by David Dark

But if we feel deep affection only for people who tell us we’re right and only give high fives to the like-minded, all we’ve done is joined a club. We risk becoming incapable of the give-and-take of genuine conversation. If all our friends and news sources require of us is a “Ditto” and “I think what you think,” we might be in danger of becoming impenetrable to wisdom, immunized against the sensation of sympathy, resistant to the pleasure of being amused by our own ignorance, and closed to the joy of being wrong.

Sometimes books find us just when they're meant to (and other times they don't which is a sad story) and that feeling can be one of the best. An old blogging friend of mine has talked this book up as much as one possibly could, but I didn't get around to acquiring the book until the start of this year. It's so strange, because I loved the title, I was interested in the content, and I trust this friend's judgement pretty much implicitly, but I just didn't read it. I feel I now know why I put it off. I was meant to read it now.

That sounds so dramatic and over the top, but I really do think it's so.

I feel completely unable to review this book as it raised so many things for me to think about and challenged the way I live my life. It's funny, because on a theoretical level I already agreed with the premise of the book. As I started reading, I thought well, yes this is what I think, this is how I want to live my life. But the gold was in taking me through all the different areas of my life where asking questions applies, where living that examined life matters. I was convicted (to use the old Christianese) of the ways in which I've been lazy, I've fallen back on old ways of living and thinking and I've gone along with the easier accepted standards of my culture and subculture. But I don't want to be that person who has glimpses of revelation and refuses to act on them. And this book was a revelation.

But all of this personal stuff probably doesn't help YOU know whether or not this is something you'd like to read. So let me tell you about it.

I'm going to borrow the back cover copy to give you a synopsis of the book, though I'm not entirely satisfied with it:

The freedom to question is an indispensable and sacred practice that is absolutely vital to the health of our communities.

According to author David Dark, when religion won’t tolerate questions, objections, or differences of opinion, and when it only brings to the table threats of excommunication, violence, and hellfire, it obstructs our ability to think, empathize, and live lives of authenticity and genuine engagement.

The God of the Bible not only encourages questions; the God of the Bible demands them. If that were not so, we wouldn’t live in a world of such rich, God-given complexity in which wide-eyed wonder is part and parcel of the human condition. The possibility of redemption and revolution depends on the questions we ask of God, governments, media, and everyday economies.

It is by way of the questions that we resist the conformity that deadens and come alive to visions that redeem.

ME AGAIN: The thing is that the stories we hear, the things we've been taught are so deeply ingrained in us that they form our identity in many ways. Which is why questioning everything can be so hard. And why sometimes, we haven't even thought to question them.

The manner of writing in the book is very engaging, Dark uses a lot of references to pop culture and art which is always a win for me (and in fact his stance on the importance of such things wins with me too) but two specific mentions thrilled me. It's not unusual to find references to the classic and accepted art, but when he quoted Shannon Hale, I couldn't help but grin. Additionally, a mention of Jane Siberry won me over forever. (Don't worry there's plenty of reference to Cormac McCarthy, Ursula K LeGuin, Martin Luther King, and Bono to up the coolness and credibility) Additionally, his tone is never condescending, always encouraging and engaging and even a bit self-depracating at times. I could have easily rushed through it, but instead I read it in chunks, one chapter a day so that I gave myself time to process it and mull it over. Even so, I will probably reread the book in not too long a time frame.

Reading history yields the realization that deeply sincere people have gone to houses of worship, looked after their families, and prayed intensely while also participating in unthinkable atrocities. (from chapter 8, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere)
One chapter that especially hit home to me was the chapter on history. I felt like this chapter did an especially excellent job of peeling back our defenses so that we can truly become more loving people, people who recognize the sacredness of all human life. It's hard, because yes I'm an American. I've been shown and taught from an early age to love my country and regard it as good. I first started learning it wasn't necessarily so good when I was in high school, but I really struggled even so not to associate the casual remarks about Americans that flew out of the mouths of my fellow ex-pats when I lived in Japan to be about me. At one point, when he describes the sort of knee jerk defensiveness as a self-justifying impulse that you come across when you begin to address these ideas, I was just thinking...YES. Because I recognize it in myself, but I also recognize it in others, when I introduce how my thinking has changed. Why do we do this? Why are we so resistant to change our perspectives on the way things have been? Changing our mind, changing our perspective to ways that value all human life equally--Dark calls it repentance. (I love that)

But the most personal part of this chapter to me, was a bit from a letter he included from Flannery O'Connor. I cannot explain to you what I felt when I read this single line, "You are not your history." For some reason, I have never heard it put quite this way and it felt like the final step in a healing process in my life that has taken eight years. It is also incredibly liberating in so many areas of social justice...we don't have to let the guilt of our forefathers and even our own voting records and buying decisions keep us from making right loving choices for people today. We are humans...constantly growing, we never have it all together, the important thing is that we are consistently working to love others that we are good rememberers of the past so that we can bring redemption to the present and future.

We bear witness. Or more soberingly, we attempt to assume responsibility for the witness we already bear by way of our governments. We listen closely for the witness of others, thinking hard about the reality of other people, perhaps especially the nameless ones often on the receiving end of the raw, unchecked power exercised on them and funded by people like us. We mustn't allow governments to decide who our enemies are or to dictate policies whereby some lives are more sacred, more worthy of our attentiveness, than others.... We're responsible for what's done in our names. (from Chapter 9, We Do What We're Told)

I'm really just scraping the surface of what this book is and what it meant to me. I read a review on one of the social reading sites where the reviewer said they abandoned the book because they didn't need permission to question the Bible. I find that to be an oversimplification of what Dark tries to acheive through his words....it's not just permission to question the Bible but to question EVERYTHING. And only by consistently questioning our lives, questioning the media, questioning the government, questioning our language, interpretations, our offendedness, and whatever religion we cling to, questioning our history and our future can we hope to live lives that bear faithful witness. Challenging? Yes, incredibly challenging. Hard to do, painful at times to strip away those things we don't even realize we've built into us as absolute certainty. But more than anything this message brought hope to me in an incredible new way. I simply can't recommend it enough.

Rating: 5/5
Things You Might Want to Know: While I would say this book is intended for Christians, I really think it can be enjoyed by people of other faith persuasions. But that might just be my perspective.
Source of Book: Bought it
Publisher: Zondervan