Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  An increasingly militant civil rights movement (and the 1965 Watts riot that erupted in the backyard of southern California evangelicals) enhanced the allure of “law and order” politics across the nation, as did the growing disruptions caused by the antiwar movement and the emergence of an unruly counterculture. Nixon won by appealing to his so-called Silent Majority, capitalizing on the political realignment signaled by Goldwater that would come to shape the next half century of American politics. White evangelicals were a significant part of his majority; 69 percent cast their vote for Nixon.22 With Graham’s assistance, Nixon had worked to identify himself with born-again Christianity. Nixon’s faith was shaped by a western strand of Quakerism that bore some similarities to fundamentalism and was not to be confused with the pacifist Quakerism of the East, but there remained a distance to be bridged. Already in the 1950s, Graham had coached Nixon on how to appeal to evangelicals, drafting a speech for Nixon to give to Christian audiences referring to the “new birth” teachings of Quakerism and recounting a childhood marked by Bible reading and prayer. In a 1962 article in Graham’s Decision magazine, written at Graham’s prompting, Nixon described making a personal commitment “to Christ and Christian service” at a revival led by Chicago evangelist Paul Rader. Once in the White House, Nixon continued to solidify this strategic alliance. He instituted Sunday morning church services in the East Room and placed Special Counsel Charles Colson in charge of handpicking politically advantageous guests. Nixon knew how to speak the language of evangelicals and how to appeal to their values through symbol and spectacle. This “ceremonial politics” was on full display at “Honor America Day” on July 4, 1970, an event organized with Graham’s help and staged on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the aim of bolstering Nixon’s agenda. Pat Boone was master of ceremonies. Clad in red, white, and blue, Boone lamented that patriotism had become a bad word. The country wasn’t bad, he insisted: “We’ve had some problems, but we’re beginning to come together under God.” Graham concurred. It was time to wave the flag with pride.23 Connections between the Nixon White House and conservative Christians went beyond ceremony and spectacle. When Nixon came under fire for his secret bombing of Cambodia, Colson tapped the Southern Baptist Convention to pass a resolution endorsing the president’s foreign policy. Graham, too, worked to promote the president’s foreign policy agenda—including the escalation of the war in Vietnam—with talk of patriotism and unity. Nixon’s reelection campaign prompted Graham to step up his support.24 [image "image" file=Image00006.jpg] Billy Graham and Richard Nixon at Graham’s East Tennessee Crusade in Knoxville, May 29, 1970. GETTY IMAGES / BETTMANN . Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, was a former ministry student, son of an evangelical minister, and a deeply religious candidate.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The translator was probably associated with the court of King Ælfred (Alfred) of Wessex: successful military leader against the Vikings and an enthusiast and participant in both English and Latin scholarship in his effort to rebuild his kingdom. [38] Alfred’s military triumph was the basis for uniting the multiple Anglo-Saxon monarchies under the royal house of Wessex by the later Kings Æthelstan and Eadgar (reigned 924–39 and 959–75 respectively). Æthelstan, prompted by Bede’s history, boldly reached back to the lost Roman provinces when he styled himself on his coinage rex totius Britanniae (king of all Britain), but the more realistic title that endured among his successors was kingship of a people now simply called the English, in a realm of ‘England’. [39] This triumph of a national identity was actually reinforced by the wider concept of ‘Christendom’ centred on the Papacy, for the new political unity of the Anglo-Saxon lands had been anticipated for three centuries by the united organization of their Church, fruit of Gregory’s mission in 597. English pride in this alliance of universal and national was expressed in a development unparalleled elsewhere in the contemporary West, a lively vernacular English literature alongside local scholarship in Latin; encouraged by King Alfred, it lent vigour and confidence to efforts to reform Church institutions under royal patronage. The focus of this programme was to press for the adoption of the Benedictine Rule in English monasteries, in imitation of an already expanding programme of monastic renewal to the south across the Channel. The Rule itself was translated from Latin into Old English by the leader among the clerical reformers, Æthelwold. Like many reform-minded Anglo-Saxon clergy, he was in close and admiring contact with the Frankish monastery of Fleury in the Loire valley, perhaps the largest monastery of its era and renowned for possessing the actual body of Benedict (which the monks had hijacked from its original Italian home at Monte Cassino). Indeed, Æthelwold is said to have sent to Fleury to get his copy of the Benedictine Rule. [40] In England, he enjoyed the esteem of both Kings Æthelstan and Eadgar, so that his career climaxed as Bishop in the royal capital of Winchester. From the same circle of energetic ecclesiastical reformers, Eadgar promoted Oswald and Dunstan as Archbishops respectively of York and Canterbury. A junior member of the same group, Ælfheah (Alphege), who likewise went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury, was given the nickname ‘the Bald’, which probably refers to the fact that, as a monk originally professed in Gloucestershire, he displayed a full monastic tonsure, at the time a novelty among senior English clergy. [41] The tenth-century reforms asserted one single form of male power in the Church, with two targets in sight: radically adjusting the role of royal women, and launching an attack on married clergy.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  These leaders had connected Christian manhood to a strong national defense and championed a return to “macho” masculinity, but it was Falwell who most clearly represented the shift toward a more brazen militancy—and militarism. Like Dobson, Falwell had a troubled relationship with his own father, an alcoholic who succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver when Falwell was a teenager. Falwell grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, a town that had never recovered from the economic challenges that beset the region in the wake of the Civil War. His mother sought to raise him as a proper Baptist, taking him to church and having him listen to Charles Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour each week on the radio. (A purveyor of modern evangelicalism, Fuller was neither old-fashioned nor Baptist.) Falwell was a standout athlete, the captain of his high school football team, but he was also a math whiz and class valedictorian. After “getting saved” in high school, he decided to attend a Baptist Bible college to train for the ministry. Upon returning to Lynchburg in 1956, he started his own fundamentalist Baptist church. By that time, thanks to the nascent military-industrial complex, new factories were springing up in the region. Falwell had already imbibed anticommunism in his fundamentalist Baptist circles, but now the business interests of his town—and his new church—were directly linked to Cold War capitalism. Among the people streaming into Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church were large numbers of Appalachian transplants. Having left rural America for new opportunities, these blue-collar migrants were searching for new forms of community and identity. They brought with them a culture of militarism (and perhaps also a suspicion of “outsiders”) that some historians trace back to the rough-and-tumble Scotch-Irish borderlands from which their families originally hailed. Falwell fashioned a Christianity that was well suited to this local context—one that was anticommunist, pro-segregationist, and infused throughout with a militant masculinity. Building a religious empire in Lynchburg, Falwell then exported this politicized faith across the nation through his radio and television ministries.14 In 1979, at the nudging of Goldwater campaign veterans Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie, Falwell launched the Moral Majority, a political organization with the purpose of training, mobilizing, and “electrifying” the Religious Right, but he had been championing Christian nationalism throughout the 1970s. In 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial, he had organized a series of “I Love America” rallies, elaborately choreographed performances staged on the steps of state capitals across the nation. The next year he supported Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly in their “pro-family” campaigns, and then he initiated his own “Clean Up America” campaign. At the end of the decade he returned to his “I Love America” rallies, possibly because he had leftover Bicentennial Bibles to dispense with. Falwell loved patriotic pageantry. One of his musical groups, the Sounds of Liberty, was composed of women wearing “Charlie’s Angels hairdos” who seemed “to snuggle up against their virile-looking male counterparts.”15 In 1980, Falwell published Listen, America!

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  He sat down amid great applause, in which I joined most heartily. So on that day I was admitted to practice law as a full-fledged citizen. Unluckily for me, when I asked the Clerk of the Court for my full papers, he gave me the certificate of my admission to practice law in Lawrence, saying that as this could only be given to a citizen, it in itself was sufficient. Forty odd years later the government of Woodrow Wilson refused to accept this plain proof of my citizenship and thus put me to much trouble by forcing me to get naturalized again! But at the moment in Lawrence I was all cock-a-hoop and forthwith took a room on the same first floor where Barker & Sommerfeld had their offices, and put out my shingle. I have told this story of my examination at great length because I think it shows as in a glass the amenities and deep kindness of the American character. A couple of days later I was again in Philadelphia. Towards the end of this year 1875, I believe, or the beginning of 1876, Smith drew my attention to an announcement that Walt Whitman, the poet, was going to speak in Philadelphia on Thomas Paine, the notorious infidel, who according to Washington had done more to secure the independence of the United States than any other man. Smith determined to go to the meeting and if Whitman could rehabilitate Paine against the venomous attacks of Christian clergymen who had asserted without contradiction that Paine was a notorious drunkard and of the loosest character, he would induce Forney to let him write an exhaustive and forceful defence of Paine in “The Press.” I felt pretty sure that such an article would never appear but I would not pour cold water on Smith’s enthusiasm. The day came, one of those villainous days common enough in Philadelphia in every winter: the temperature was about zero with snow falling whenever the driving wind permitted. In the afternoon Smith finally determined that he must not risk it and asked me to go in his stead. I consented willingly and he spent some hours in reading to me the best of Whitman’s poetry, laying especial stress, I remember, on “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.” He assured me again and again that Whitman and Poe were the two greatest poets these States had ever produced and he hoped I would be very nice to the great man. Nothing could be more depressing than the aspect of the Hall that night: ill-lit and half-heated, with perhaps thirty persons scattered about in a space that would have accommodated a thousand. Such was the reception America accorded to one of its greatest spirits, though that view of the matter did not strike me for many a year.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  To my surprise the court was half full. Judge Stevens even was present, whom I had never seen in court before. About eleven the Judge informed the audience that I had passed a satisfactory examination, had taken out my first papers in due form and unless some lawyer wished first to put questions to me to test my capacity, he proposed to call me within the Bar. To my astonishment Judge Stevens rose: “With the permission of the Court”, he said, “I’d like to put some questions to this candidate who comes to us with high University commendation.” (No one had heard of my expulsion though he knew of it.) He then began a series of questions which soon plumbed the depths of my abysmal ignorance. I didn’t know what an action of account was at old English common law: I don’t know now, nor do I want to. I had read Blackstone carefully and a book on Roman law; Chitty on Evidence, too, and someone on Contracts—half a dozen books and that was all. For the first two hours Judge Stevens just exposed my ignorances: it was a very warm morning and my conceit was rubbed raw when Judge Bassett proposed an adjournment for dinner. Stevens consented and we all rose. To my surprise Barker and Hutchings and half a dozen other lawyers came round to encourage me: “Stevens is just showing off”, said Hutchings, “I myself couldn’t have answered half his questions!” Even Judge Bassett sent for me to his room and practically told me I had nothing to fear, so I returned at two o’clock, resolved to do my best and at all costs to keep smiling. The examination continued in a crowded court till four o’clock and then Judge Stevens sat down. I had done better in this session; but my examiner had caught me in a trap on a moot point in the law of evidence and I could have kicked myself. But Hutchings rose as the senior of my two examiners who had been appointed by the Court, and said simply that now he repeated the opinion he had already had the honor to convey to Judge Bassett, that I was a fit and proper person to practice law in the State of Kansas. “Judge Stevens”, he added, “has shown us how widely read he is in English common law; but some of us knew that before and in any case his erudition should not be made a purgatory to candidates: it looks”, he went on, “as if he wished to punish Mr. Harris for his superiority to all his classmates in the University. “Impartial persons in this audience will admit”, he concluded, “that Mr. Harris has come brilliantly out of an exceedingly severe test and I have the pleasant task of proposing, your Honor, that he now be admitted within the Bar, though he may not be able to practice till he becomes a full citizen two years hence.”

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The Maccabean rebels suffered terribly in fighting him, but they succeeded in returning Judaea to a native dynasty descended from heroes in the liberation struggle; known from an earlier ancestor as the Hasmoneans, they ruled as high priests for the Jerusalem Temple. Though the Hasmonean monarchy proved to be the last Judaean experience of prolonged independence in the ancient world, it was an extraordinary achievement against a great power: a victory to cherish, reinforcing the sense of a unique Judaic destiny and distinctiveness in God’s purpose. The Hasmoneans remained a significant regional force in the eastern Mediterranean for a century until conquered by a new imperial power arriving from far to the west of Judaea’s previous overlords. When the Hasmoneans first encountered the Roman Republic in the second century BCE, Rome was still a far-away city, a potential ally against their threatening neighbours. By 63 BCE, the Roman army’s invasion of Judaea was part of its mopping-up operations around Rome’s real prizes, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. Roman conquest led to a further Jewish Diaspora into the western Mediterranean: the Jewish community in Rome was one of the first to be affected by Christian activism in the first century CE. In 37 BCE, looking for a compliant local ruler for Judaea but finding no convincing Hasmonean candidate, the Romans displaced the last Hasmonean and replaced him with a relative by marriage, who reigned for more than three decades. Their choice, an outsider from the land of Edom (which the Romans called Idumea) south of Judaea, was Herod I, ‘the Great’. Herod rebuilt the Second Temple as one of the largest sacred complexes in the ancient world; its remnants still impress by their monumentality. Yet his subjects gave him little thanks, and self-conscious Judaean upholders of purity in God’s Covenant were angered by Herod’s Greek-style innovations such as public sporting contests (male nudity always a possibility), gladiatorial combats or horse-racing in newly built arenas. [4] After Herod’s death in 4 BCE, his sons divided the extensive territories that the first Roman emperor Augustus had allowed the puppet king to build up. For more than a century thereafter, and during the life of Jesus, Rome experimented with a mixture of indirect rule through various members of the Herodian family and, for parts of Judaea, direct imperial control through a Roman official.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Erasmus deserves credit for discerning the need of the times, and recommending the revival of the practice of preaching and the mission of preachers to the heathen nations. His views were set forth in the Ecclesiastes or Preacher, a work written during the Freiburg period and filling 275 pages,1162 each double the size of the pages of the hardcopy volume. The chief purpose of preaching he defined to be instruction. Every preacher is a herald of Christ, who was himself the great preacher. The office of preaching is superior in dignity to the office of kings. "Among the charisms of the Spirit, none is more noble and efficacious than preaching. To be a dispenser of the celestial philosophy and a messenger of the divine will is excelled by no office in the church." It is quite in accord with Erasmus’ high regard for the teaching function, that he magnifies the instructional element of the sermon. Writing to Sapidus, 1516, he said, "to be a schoolmaster is next to being a king."1163 Of the English pulpit, there is little to say. We hear of preaching at St. Paul’s Cross and at other places, but there is no evidence that preaching was usual. No volumes of English sermons issued from the printing-press. Colet is the only English preacher of the 15th century of historical importance. The churchly counsel given to priests to impart instruction to the people, issued by the Lambeth synod of 1281, stands almost solitary. In 1466, Archbishop Nevill of York did no more than to repeat this legislation. In Scotland the history of the pulpit begins with Knox. Dr. Blaikie remarks that, for the three centuries before the Reformation, scarcely a trace of Christian preaching can be found in Scotland worthy the name. The country had no Wyclif, as it had no Anselm.1164 Hamilton and Wishart, Knox’s immediate forerunners, were laymen.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Prove it?’ said Scalza. ‘Why, I shall prove it by so conclusive an argument that not only you yourself, but this fellow who denies it, will have to admit that I am right. As you are aware, the older the family, the more noble it is, and everyone agreed just now that this was so. Since the Baronci are older than anyone else, they are ipso facto more noble; and if I can prove to you that they really are older than anybody else, I shall have won my case beyond any shadow of a doubt. ‘The fact of the matter is that when the Lord God created the Baronci, He was still learning the rudiments of His craft, whereas He created the rest of mankind after He had mastered it. If you don’t believe me, picture the Baronci to yourselves and compare them to other people; and you will see that whereas everybody else has a well-designed and correctly proportioned face, the Baronci sometimes have a face that is long and narrow, sometimes wide beyond all measure, some of them have very long noses, others have short ones, and there are one or two with chins that stick out and turn up at the end, and with enormous great jaws like those of an ass; moreover, some have one eye bigger than the other, whilst others have one eye lower than the other, so that taken by and large, their faces are just like the ones that are made by children when they are first learning to draw. Hence, as I’ve already said, it is quite obvious that the Lord God created them when He was still learning His craft. They are therefore older than anybody else, and so they are more noble.’ When Piero, the judge, and Neri, who had wagered the supper, and all the others, recalling what the Baronci looked like, had heard Scalza’s ingenious argument, they all began to laugh and to declare that Scalza was right, that he had won the supper, and that without a doubt the Baronci were the most ancient and noble family, not only in Florence, but in the whole wide world. And that is why Panfilo, in wanting to prove the ugliness of Messer Forese, aptly maintained that he would have looked loath-some alongside a Baronci. SEVENTH STORYMadonna Filippa is discovered by her husband with a lover and called before the magistrate, but by a prompt and ingenious answer she secures her acquittal and causes the statute to be amended. Fiammetta had finished speaking, and everyone was still laughing over the novel argument used by Scalza to ennoble the Baronci above all other families, when the queen called upon Filostrato to tell them a story; and so he began:

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Domestic tranquility could be established through the imposition of law and order. It should come as no surprise that a country that embraced Wayne as its favorite movie star (he held the top spot as late as 1995) would also elect a man like Reagan president. White men in particular admired their swagger, their old-school masculine confidence, and their apparent willingness to exercise authority even if it required violence.7 To conservative evangelicals, Reagan was a godsend. In the face of Carter’s “wimp factor,” Reagan projected the rugged, masculine leadership they believed the country so desperately needed. (It was much easier to chalk up Carter’s failures to deficient masculinity than to blame US policy stretching back decades.) Reagan’s irrefutable masculinity also reassured conservatives unsettled by the gay rights movement. It wasn’t lost on conservative Christians that Carter’s own masculinity seemed lacking, even as “the homosexual movement reached its maximum level of influence” under his watch.8 In 1980, the election widely hailed as the moment the Christian Right came into its own, evangelical voters bypassed the candidate who shared their faith tradition in favor of the one whose image and rhetoric more closely aligned with their values and aspirations. Guided by preachers like Robison, Falwell, and LaHaye, 67 percent of white evangelical voters chose Reagan over Carter; just four years earlier, Carter had received 49 percent of the evangelical vote and 56 percent of the white Baptist vote. Although white evangelicals supported Reagan at higher rates than white nonevangelicals, they probably weren’t the deciding factor in the election; Carter’s widespread unpopularity, a stagnant economy, and the drama of the Iran hostage crisis likely would have ensured Reagan’s victory even without the mobilization of evangelical pastors and grassroots activists. The Christian Right may not have swung the election to Reagan, but it did succeed in securing the loyalty of evangelicals to the Republican Party. From Reagan on, no Democrat would again win the majority of white evangelical support, or threaten the same. Evangelicals’ loyalty to the Republican Party would continue to strengthen, and they would use their electoral clout to help define the Republican agenda for the generation to come.9 Reagan benefited from the southern strategy that his Republican predecessors had pursued. Since the 1950s, white southerners had been abandoning the Democratic Party, and Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Acts accelerated this process. Like Nixon, Reagan was adept at using racially coded rhetoric like states’ rights, “law and order,” and “forced busing” to appeal to white voters. Indeed, Reagan had launched his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, praising states’ rights just a few miles down the road from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, and he campaigned at Bob Jones University at a time when the school was a flashpoint for private Christian schools fighting against desegregation mandates.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  To Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, the US soldier in Vietnam remained “a living testimony” to Christianity, and to “old fashioned patriotism.” A defender of “Americanism,” the American soldier was “a champion for Christ.”31 When confronted with undeniable evidence of American brutality, evangelicals could always fall back on the concept of human depravity. With sin lurking in every human heart, violence was inevitable, and only Jesus was the answer. When the young army lieutenant William Calley faced trial for his role in the murder of some five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre, Billy Graham remarked that he had “never heard of a war where innocent people are not killed.” He told, too, of “horrible stories” he’d heard from missionaries of “sadistic murders by the Vietcong,” and he reminded Americans that Vietnamese women and children had planted booby traps that mutilated American soldiers. His moral reflection in the pages of the New York Times was remarkably banal: “We have all had our Mylais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.”32 In 1969, Graham sent a thirteen-page letter to President Nixon—a letter only declassified twenty years later—offering an array of policy scenarios, some of which clearly abandoned Christian just-war theory and the Geneva Conventions. It is unclear what effect Graham’s letter had on Nixon’s strategy, but Graham’s was certainly not a voice of restraint. Even as Graham became increasingly ambivalent about the war, he remained unwavering in his support for Nixon. Meanwhile, conservative evangelicals continued to celebrate American servicemen, and looked to returning soldiers to provide leadership on the home front as well. At a time when evangelical churches needed to take a stand, who better to lead a nation—and its churches—than men who had “carried those concerns through the jungles of Viet Nam”?33 The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness. American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe. Evangelical support for the war seemed to grow in direct relation to escalating doubts among the rest of the public. After the Tet Offensive in the summer of 1968, a poll revealed support for continued bombing and an increase in US military intervention “among 97 percent of Southern Baptists, 91 percent of independent fundamentalists, and 70 percent of Missouri Synod Lutherans; only 2 percent of Southern Baptists and 3 percent of fundamentalists favored a negotiated withdrawal.” Aware of their outlier status, many evangelicals understood themselves to be a faithful remnant, America’s last great hope.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  121 Like the Yellow Emperor, Han rulers would use religious rituals in an attempt to take the bestial savagery out of warfare so that it became humane. At the start of his reign, Liu Bang had commissioned the Confucian ritualists ( ru ) to devise a court ceremonial, and when it was performed for the first time, the emperor exclaimed: “Now I realize the nobility of being a Son of Heaven!” 122 The ru slowly gained ground at court, and as the memory of the Qin trauma faded, there was a growing desire for more solid moral guidance. 123 In 136 BCE the court scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104) suggested to Emperor Wu (r. 140–87) that there were too many competing schools and recommended that the six classical Confucian texts become the official state teaching. The emperor agreed: Confucianism supported the family; its emphasis on cultural history would forge a cultural identity; and state education would create an elite class that could counter the enduring appeal of the old aristocracy. But Wu did not make the mistake of the First Emperor. In the Chinese Empire there would be no sectarian intolerance: the Chinese would continue to see merit in all the schools that could supplement one another. Thus, however diametrically opposed the two schools might be, there would be a Legalist-Confucian coalition: the state still needed Legalist pragmatism, but the ru would temper Fajia despotism. In 124 BCE Wu founded the Imperial Academy, and for over two thousand years all Chinese state officials would be trained in a predominantly Confucian ideology, which presented the rulers as Sons of Heaven governing by moral charisma. This gave the regime spiritual legitimacy and became the ethos of the civil administration. Like all agrarian rulers, however, the Han controlled their empire by systemic and martial violence, exploiting the peasantry, killing rebels, and conquering new territory. The emperors depended on the army ( wu ), and in the newly conquered territories the magistrates summarily expropriated the land, deposed existing landlords, and seized between 50 and 100 percent of the peasants’ surplus. Like any premodern ruler, the emperor had to maintain himself in a state of exception as the “one man” to whom ordinary rules did not apply. At a moment’s notice, therefore, he could order an execution, and nobody dared object. Such irrational and spontaneous acts of violence were an essential part of the mystique that held his subjects in thrall.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  He had two significant tasks: to lead the Friday prayers and to lead the army into battle. The latter was a new departure because the Umayyads had never personally taken the field with the army, so Harun was the first autocratic ghazi-caliph. 71 The Abbasids had given up trying to conquer Constantinople, but every year Harun conducted a raid into Byzantine territory to demonstrate his commitment to the defense of Islam: the Byzantine emperor reciprocated with a token invasion of Islamdom. Court poets praised Harun for his zeal in “exerting himself beyond the exertion [ jihad ] of one who fears God.” They pointed out that Harun was a volunteer who put himself at risk in a task not required of him: “You could, if you liked, resort to some pleasant place, while others endured hardship instead of you.” 72 Harun was deliberately evoking the golden age when every able-bodied man had been expected to ride into battle beside the Prophet. Despite its glorious facade, however, the empire was already in trouble, economically and militarily. 73 The Abbasids’ professional army was expensive, and manpower always a problem. Yet it was imperative to defend the border against the Byzantines, so Harun reached out to committed civilians who, like himself, were ready to volunteer their services. Increasingly, Muslims who lived near the empire’s frontiers began to see “the border” as a symbol of Islamic integrity that had to be defended against a hostile world. Some of the ulema (“learned scholars”) had objected to the Umayyads’ monopoly of the jihad because it clashed with Quranic verses and hadith traditions that made jihad a duty for everybody. 74 Hence, when the Umayyads had besieged Constantinople (717–18), ulema, hadith-collectors, ascetics, and Quran-reciters had assembled on the frontier to support the army with their prayers. Their motivation was pious, but perhaps they were also attracted by the intensity and excitement of the battlefield. Now following Harun’s lead, they gathered again in even greater numbers, not only on the Syrian-Byzantine border but also on the frontiers of Central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. Some of these scholars and ascetics took part in the fighting and in garrison duties, but most supplied spiritual support in the form of prayer, fasting, and study. “Volunteering” ( tatawwa ) would put down deep roots in Islam and resurface powerfully in our own day. During the eighth century, some of these “fighting scholars” started to develop a distinctively jihadi spirituality. Abu Ishaq al-Fazari (d. c. 802) believed he was imitating the Prophet in his life of study and warfare; Ibraham ibn Adham (d. 778), who engaged in extreme fasts and heroic night vigils on the frontier, maintained that there could be no more perfect form of Islam; and Abdullah ibn Mubarak (d. 797) agreed, arguing that the dedication of the early Muslim warriors had been the glue that bonded the early ummah.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  He praised Dabney’s “prophetic” views on the evils of public education and women’s equality, and he found Dabney’s anti-feminism “refreshingly virile.” Phillips skirted around Dabney’s proslavery sentiments, although Phillips, too, diminished the horrors of slavery and denied the genocide of Native Americans. Phillips also revered Theodore Roosevelt, and in 2001 he published The Letters and Lessons of Teddy Roosevelt for His Sons . The next year he published Poems for Patriarchs . He felt a need to explain that, yes, it was a book of poetry, but the poems were “neither fluffy nor frilly, foppish nor foolish, but virile and often savage.” He included poems on God and Christ as warrior kings, and counted Stonewall Jackson among his Christian heroes. He called on men to assume patriarchal leadership “more noble than the valiant deeds of shining knights of yore,” and, quoting Charles Spurgeon, he instructed wives to set aside their own pleasure, to sink their individuality into their husbands, to make the domestic circle their kingdom and husbands their “little world,” their “Paradise,” their “choicest treasure.” Phillips believed that patriarchy and patriotism were inextricably connected, and both were God-given duties. Patriarchy was key to the success of nations, and to be “anti-patriotic” was “to be a spiritual ingrate.”5 Phillips’s Vision Forum thrived in the 2000s, producing an array of materials distributed and promoted at homeschool conferences and online. An All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog contained cowboy costumes, knife and tomahawk sets, slingshots, and an “All-American boy’s crossbow” to train boys in heroic manhood. The Beautiful Girlhood collection, meanwhile, offered books and DVDs promoting “purity and contentment,” “heritage and home,” and products such as “Southern lady doll dresses.” Vision Forum’s gender order was ensconced within a foundational Christian nationalism; the organization led “Faith and Freedom Tours,” and for those who could not attend, they produced an array of books and DVDs celebrating Christian patriotism. By 2011, Vision Forum’s revenues approached $3.4 million. Phillips also sponsored a Christian Filmmakers Academy and a Christian film festival. Kirk Cameron taught at Phillips’s academy and was awarded Best Feature Film at the 2009 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival for his 2008 Fireproof , a film about a heroic but angry firefighter who feels his wife does not show him sufficient respect and turns to a Christian self-help book to save his marriage. Phillips was meeting the growing demands of an expanding homeschool market, but he was also reaching evangelicals beyond that market niche. His dominionist-inspired teachings celebrating a patriotic, militant Christian masculinity resonated with evangelicals awakened to the “problem” of masculinity by the broader evangelical men’s movement, and he found common cause with evangelicals far beyond his immediate circles of influence.6 By the 2000s, Phillips emerged as a leading figure in the Quiverfull movement, a pronatalist movement within conservative Protestantism that was especially popular in homeschool networks. It took its name from Psalm 127:4–5: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The first tells of a single military campaign, probably reflecting some real war of centuries before, in which Greeks besieged and destroyed the (non-Greek) city of Troy in north-west Anatolia (Asia Minor, today Turkey). The Odyssey chronicles journeys home to Ithaka from the siege by one Greek hero, Odysseus, over ten years. The two epics took shape orally in recitation sometime in the eighth or seventh century BCE, attributed to a poet named Homer, of whom we know nothing for certain. They were written down in a form of script that the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians, another coastal Mediterranean people, and refined for their own purposes: the alphabet, ancestor of our own alphabet via its later adaptation by the Romans. The Israelites, neighbours (and frequently fractious neighbours) of the Phoenicians, took the technology of the alphabet in a different direction to record their own Hebrew language and write down their own sacred literature. In both cases, literature reinforced or created self-identification. For the Greeks identity was based on their shared knowledge of Homer’s epics, together with certain religious sites, temples and ceremonies which they saw as common property in Hellas – especially the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi and a shrine and associated pan-Hellenic games held at Olympia in the Peloponnese. It is notable that the Iliad portrays the defeated Trojans as no different in culture from the Greeks besieging them. Greeks loftily told themselves that all non-Greeks were barbaroi, an expressive way of saying that non-Greek languages were as meaningless as a baby’s ‘ba-ba’ babble. In reality they were keenly interested in other sophisticated cultures, particularly in two great empires impinging on their lives: Persia (Iran), which long dominated their eastern flank and actually ruled many of their cities; and Egypt, south across the Mediterranean. While Greeks were impressed by the antiquity of these civilizations, they were not enthused by the political organization of such giant powers, and they showed an emphatic preference for living in and identifying with small city-states. That made perfect geographical sense in the fragmented and mountainous heartlands of Greece and Anatolia, but Greeks deliberately replicated such independent city-states in flatlands when they founded colonies far dispersed round the Mediterranean coast. These colonies affectionately remembered their origins for centuries, and in time of trouble might draw on the link with an ancient Greek founder-city. [2] The outlook that nurtured such long-term relationships reflected this sense that a city-state was the natural Greek way to live. The Greek word for city is polis (pl. poleis) – but Greek is a language where apparently simple words can have as many resonances as ripples from a stone thrown into a still pond, and with polis the resonances are rather like those of the English word ‘home’. A polis was more than the cluster of houses and marketplaces around a temple which was universally its visible embodiment in Hellas.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Across the parking lot stood the World Prayer Center’s global headquarters, a “spiritual NORAD,” and in its atrium stood another bronze warrior angel armed with enormous biceps and packing a sword. The chapel contained computers where visitors entered personal prayers; the center’s staff provided more politically oriented prayers—for a marriage amendment, for the appointment of new justices, and for the president. The center also offered prayers for US foreign policy, for God to “crush [the] demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim Jun II,” and for the forces of good to prevail in Iraq.9 Those at New Life were aware of the strategic position they occupied. Colorado Springs was a battleground, a “spiritual Gettysburg,” explained one man who understood his own role in militarized terms: “I’m a warrior, dude. I’m a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground.” Like the military, New Life employed a rigid chain of command to ensure strict ideological conformity. Male authority and female submission were essential to that hierarchical order. The church also elevated the role of sexual purity, though Haggard insisted that purity didn’t diminish pleasure; evangelicals, he boasted, had “the best sex lives” of anyone. All this came together in a larger mission. Evangelicals who flocked to Colorado Springs shared in a mythical dream “populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses.” Haggard’s New Life Church was a hotbed of militant evangelicalism. Together, Haggard and Dobson worked to spread this militant faith throughout the US military.10 FOR HALF A CENTURY , evangelicals had been working to strengthen the military and imbue it with evangelical values, and they’d been warmly received, particularly by evangelicals already entrenched within the armed forces. By the 2000s, however, some service members began to object to the overt proselytizing and coercive religious atmosphere they encountered within the military. The air force academy in Colorado Springs was ground zero in the battle over religious expression and coercion. The mission to combat an alleged evangelical takeover was led by Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 honor graduate of the academy, former air force officer, and former legal counsel to the Reagan White House. Weinstein and his family were Jewish, and both of his sons attended the academy, where they encountered aggressive Christian proselytizing at times tinged with anti-Semitic undertones. Weinstein began to gather documentation, and his complaints led to an investigation that revealed a “pervasive” religious intolerance at the academy. A number of questionable activities came to light. Johnny A.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Etheldreda did have a continuing usefulness for tenth-century reformers because of her emphatic defence of her virginity through her two marriages. Beyond her was the ultimate example of the divine favour offered to virginity, in Mary. There is previous evidence of the cult of Mary from the seventh century, but that evidence mainly comes from the north and west Midlands, the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia, suggesting that it may have been an overspill from devotion in Irish or Welsh Christianity. A new phase in the tenth century has a different distribution in southern England, with its central energy in Winchester, just at the period and in the area most involved in monastic reform. [44] There was more to Mary than simply a symbol of virginity. Prominent in the lively literature that Marian devotion generated was the theme of Mary as Queen of Heaven, which chimed with the long-standing Anglo-Saxon devotion to queens who were saints. Even if their royal successors had lost much of their actual power in the Church, a turn to Mary was perhaps a way of squaring that rhetorical circle. In the same fashion as the links of the whole monastic reform movement with Francia, English Marian devotion could draw on a century or more of Frankish Marian literature. Such literature had grown increasingly fascinated by Mary’s genealogy that made her Queen of Heaven: she now became the pinnacle of the genealogical line of Jesus set out in Matthew’s Gospel, regardless of the complications of that genealogy which we have already observed as leading not to Mary but to Joseph (above, Chapter 4). The Marian family tree was a development that well suited an age of royal families struggling to retain or reclaim their power. [45] 14. This late fifteenth-century French translation of the Golden Legend puts Mary emphatically at the centre of the family tree back to Jesse, father of David, though the caption below hints at the complications of genealogy in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels. Church reform in England created a second set of victims, this time male. Contemptuous of what remained of the former Anglo-Saxon system of religious foundations organized with families and dynasties in mind, the reformers bitterly attacked the supposed sinfulness and debauchery of clergy living as ‘canons’ of English minsters, whether married or professedly celibate – the distinction was not always clear. Bishop Æthelwold led the way in expelling the existing clerical staff of two adjacent minsters in his cathedral city of Winchester, all with the backing of King Eadgar and the King’s thegns. Such reformers as Æthelwold were reading Bede’s diatribes against those monasteries of which he had disapproved, and behind Bede was the ‘Apostle of the English’ Gregory the Great. Both these venerated authorities reached back to the writings of the mysterious Easterner Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, and they confronted their readers with Dionysios’s resonant identification of true ascetics as angels: remember the investigative journalism of Bede’s angel at Coldingham. [46] Conversely, Bishop Æthelwold (ventriloquizing King Eadgar in a royal charter to the refounded New Minster in Winchester) compared his clerical victims to the angel companions of Satan/Lucifer/the Devil whom God had expelled from Paradise, ‘cast[ing] out the filth of the rebel angels with their puffed-up haughtiness’. The Wessex campaigners for purity were in the same way ‘clearing away the filth of evil deeds’. [47] In the Byzantine world, eunuchs had seized on the image of the angel for their own purposes (above, Chapter 8), but eunuchs hardly impinged on the consciousness of Latin Westerners, and so the angelic metaphor was now left in the sole possession of monks. Nuns rather fell out of this comparison, in keeping with the unexamined assumption that the genderlessness of angels was still vaguely male: as vague as the maleness of a monk should be. Therefore nunneries were not going to share much of the benefit of this literary construction. Nor could a nun celebrate the Eucharist, unlike an ordained monk, who upstaged her virginity by his resemblance to an angel. Prolonged and serious resistance from married clergy no doubt encouraged the violence of the reformers’ rhetoric, who might have had to recognize that in the Atlantic islands, as in the coastal regions of Francia facing England, most clergy were in fact the sons of clergy right into the eleventh century, if not

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  She stood out in the Bible Belt. My parents were from the East Coast, and they’d met in Baltimore, her hometown. When my father took a job in Oklahoma City in the mid-seventies, they didn’t intend the move to be permanent. My mother says she was depressed for the first two years. But they stayed. Eventually they bought a house in Nichols Hills, the ritziest part of town, and sent me to the private prep school nearby. They scoffed at the flat horizon of Oklahoma City, but they also learned how to live with it, how to make the most of it. Oklahoma is known best for being, in the nineteenth century, the place where the US government put Native Americans it had cruelly expelled from other parts of the country. It is also known for its bizarro Land Rush of 1889, when white settlers raced to grab up parcels of Native land; for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same (exclamation-pointed) name; and perhaps less so, for having an oil well on the lawn of the state capitol. In the 1980s, if you told someone from somewhere else that you lived in Oklahoma, they’d ask if you rode a cow to school, and this would seem hilarious to everyone but you. But Oklahoma was also a place of new and flashy wealth, and this was especially true in Nichols Hills, a manicured enclave of oil and gas money and gated mansions that people casually called “houses.” My father was a radiation oncologist in private practice, and I had a childhood of privilege. My mother stayed home until I was twelve, then made her aerobics habit a job. She became a certified personal fitness trainer. My parents clung to vestiges of their old coastal life: progressive politics and a subscription to the Sunday New York Times. We didn’t go to church on Sundays. My father instead spent weekend mornings combing estate sales for silver saltcellars, etched crystal glasses, and glazed ceramics from England and France with lobsters and serpents on the lid. He’d hit up the Chinese supermarket, bring home a haul of slender eggplants and crisp-skinned lacquered duck. My parents bought plane tickets and got me out, took me to see other cities and countries.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Amulets as emblems of magic power were especially associated with pre-Christian female graves in England, but they were succeeded in Christian interments with a new crop of amulets with cross designs, or little bags likely to have contained sacred relics. These graves are another notable feature of Anglo-Saxon Christianity; contrary to the general custom in most Christian societies, richly furnished burials continued after Augustine’s arrival and even revived around 660, and the majority are female. [30] This local individuality overlaps with other special features of the early Anglo-Saxon ‘conversion’ that reflect the reality that Christianity spread through the decisions of Christianized monarchs: having opted for the new religion, they ordered their people to accept it in place of previous polytheistic cults. First came a brief vogue for male royal holiness: some kings deserted their realms to undertake long pilgrimages to Rome from which they did not return. At least four Anglo-Saxon Christian monarchs even voluntarily renounced their thrones and retired to monasteries, beginning with King Sigebert of the East Angles sometime after his accession as king in 630/31. This was a most unusual impulse among the Germanic kingdoms of Europe, and it was accompanied by the promotion of saintly cults for further monarchs who died defending their Christian faith, such as King Oswald of Northumbria, killed in battle against the non-Christian King Penda of Mercia in 642. Associated with particular royal families, these were the first native Christian cults created by the Anglo-Saxons. There may be a connection with local pre-Christian traditions of honouring kings who sacrificially defended their people in battle; later monarchs who died violently, such as young Edmund of East Anglia butchered by non-Christian Danes in 869, also joined the saintly club of royal martyrs. [31] The seventh century nevertheless saw a change of direction for royal activity in the Anglo-Saxon Church. Elsewhere, in both Latin and Byzantine Christianity, when monarchs became monks it was done under duress and was a sign of personal failure. Perhaps with that in mind, and maybe accompanied by a certain restiveness among their subjects at what might be viewed as royal malingering, the Anglo-Saxons swiftly reconfigured their own thoughts on royal holiness. In place of kings becoming ascetics, female members of the various royal dynasties acted on recent precedents that they might have noted among their relatives in northern Francia. Royal ladies founded lavishly funded monastic communities and presided over them as abbesses, ruling over both men and women; over several generations an appropriate female member of the dynasty would then succeed as abbess. The women involved were princesses or queens who were either widowed or had effectively made a decision to declare themselves single, such as the celebrated Æthelthryth, who insisted on guarding her virginity through two royal marriages.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  According to his biographer, “for the better part of sixty years, virtually every newspaper article about Graham commented on his appearance.” Standing six feet two inches tall, he was the “All-American Male” with “Scottish genes and Nordic looks,” a “craggy face, blue eyes, square jaw.”16 Not leaving anything to chance, Graham took pains to bolster his masculine credentials. He jogged, lifted weights, and otherwise kept up a rigorous exercise regime; in preparation for his crusades, he trained “like a prizefighter.” Before his conversion, Graham had “always thought of religion as being more or less ‘sissy,’” something well suited for “old people and girls, but not for a real ‘he man’ with red blood in his veins.” In his own conversion narrative, then, he drew on both athletic and military metaphors to make perfectly clear that his faith did not conflict with his masculinity. Jesus was no sissy—he was a “star athlete” who could “become your life’s hero.” The Christian life was “total war,” and Jesus was “Our Great Commander.” Graham’s Jesus was “a man, every inch a man,” the most physically powerful man who had ever lived.17 In the interest of saving souls, and for the success of his own career, it was incumbent upon Graham to prove that Christianity was wholly compatible with red-blooded masculinity. The Second World War provided an ideal context in which to make this case. Among fundamentalists and evangelicals, any lingering ambivalence toward war was swept away by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The new war was an indisputable battle between good and evil, and this time around they would give no reason to be tarred as unpatriotic. Among Americans more generally, the war rehabilitated a more militant—and militaristic—model of masculinity, and fundamentalists and newly branded evangelicals, many of whom had never entirely abandoned the older muscular Christianity, joined the fray. Tellingly, when it came to the tactics of total war employed by the US military, it was liberal Protestants—many still chastened by the First World War—who expressed reservations. Ockenga, on the other hand, defended the firebombing of German cities in the pages of the New York Times . Evangelicals relished this role reversal, and their newfound patriotism and militarism would help them overcome their reputation as extremists and their marginal status.18 . [image "image" file=Image00002.jpg] Billy Graham speaking at a Youth for Christ rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in September 1947. COURTESY OF THE BILLY GRAHAM CENTER ARCHIVES , WHEATON COLLEGE , WHEATON , ILLINOIS . Even as they supported the war against totalitarianism, many evangelicals nonetheless harbored doubts about the US military. Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, most evangelicals saw the military as a place of moral corruption for young men. Contrary to later myths about “the good war” and “the greatest generation,” the military was known as an institution where drunkenness, vulgarity, gambling, and sexual disease abounded.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  elements on a heathen stock, but the starting point was radically different: Manichaeism being anti-Jewish and dualistic, Mohammedanism, pseudo-Jewish and severely and fanatically monotheistic. First the external history. The origin of Manichaeism is matter of obscure and confused tradition. It is traced to Mani (Manes, Manichaeus),920 a Persian philosopher, astronomer, and painter,921 of the third century (215–277), who came over to Christianity, or rather introduced some Christian elements into the Zoroastrian religion, and thus stirred up an intellectual and moral revolution among his countrymen. According to Arabic Mohammedan sources, he was the son of Fatak (Pavtekio"), a high-born Persian of Hamadan (Ecbatana), who emigrated to Ctesiphon in Babylonia. Here he received a careful education. He belonged originally to the Judaizing Gnostic sect of the Mandaeans or Elkesaites (the Mogtasilah, i.e. Baptists); but in his nineteenth and again in his twenty-fourth year (238) a new religion was divinely revealed to him. In his thirtieth year he began to preach his syncretistic creed, undertook long journeys and sent out disciples. He proclaimed himself to be the last and highest prophet of God and the Paraclete promised by Christ (as Mohammed did six hundred years later). He began his "Epistola Fundamenti," in which he propounded his leading doctrines, with the words: "Mani, the apostle of Jesus Christ, by the providence of God the Father. These are the words of salvation from the eternal and living source." He composed many books in the Persian and Syriac languages and in an alphabet of his own invention but they are all lost.922 At first Mani found favor at the court of the Persian king Shapur I. (Sapor), but stirred up the hatred of the priestly cast of the Magians. He fled to East India and China and became acquainted with Buddhism. Indeed, the name of Buddha is interwoven with the legendary history of the Manichaean system. His disputations with Archelaus in Mesopotamia are a fiction, like the pseudo-Clementine disputations of Simon Magus with Peter, but on a better historic foundation and with an orthodox aim of the writer.923 In the year 270 Mani returned to Persia, and won many followers by his symbolic (pictorial) illustrations of the doctrines, which he pretended had been revealed to him by God. But in a disputation with the Magians, he was convicted of corrupting the old religion, and thereupon was crucified, or flayed alive by order of king Behram I. (Veranes) about 277; his skin was stuffed and hung up for a terror at the gate of the city Djondishapur (or Gundeshapur), since called "the gate of Mani."924 His followers were cruelly persecuted by the king. Soon after Mani’s horrible death his sect spread in Turkistan, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Spain. As it moved westward it assumed a more Christian character, especially in North Africa. It was everywhere persecuted in the Roman empire, first by Diocletian (A. D. 287), and afterwards by the Christian emperors. Nevertheless it flourished till the sixth century and even later.