Interview with Joel Looper on Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity
Author Q&A
The author talks Scripture, owning the libs, and MAGA’s hold on Evangelical Christians.
As Election Day looms, have you pondered why Donald Trump so strongly appeals to Evangelical Christians and the far Right in America? Well, so has Joel Looper. In his new book, Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity, he traces the roots of evangelicalism to colonial America, revealing how the movement’s cultural identity became enmeshed in national politics. Looper also examines the Christian mandate as modeled by the early church, arguing that, at its core, the Gospel is about witnessing Jesus Christ through the way we live our lives. An adjunct professor at Baylor University and coordinator for Shalom Mission Communities, a network of international Christian communities, Looper is also the author of Bonhoeffer’s America: A Land Without Reformation.
What personal experiences did you draw on while writing Another Gospel, and how did these shape the themes you explored?
I’m a Christian who continues to cling white-knuckled to the label “evangelical.” Whether I should or not is another matter, of course. One of the reasons I do is that the term evangelical actually means “gospel” or, better, “gospel-oriented person.” However, many people outside the movement, Christians and non-Christians, look at conservative evangelicals and at the Jesus of the New Testament, and they say, “Huh? How did you get here from there?”
I’ve had similar moments with evangelicals. One guy I know well — an extraordinarily generous man who would take an undocumented person into his home if he knew them and that they were in trouble. This same guy trumpets Trump’s nonsense claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets and worries aloud that immigrants are ruining the country. He’s hardly unique, obviously. I know dozens of others like him.
During the pandemic, many evangelicals like this man were terrified by lockdowns and mandatory masking, fearful that their….Read the full interview at Washington Independent Review of Books
This article was written with support from the DC Arts Writing Fellowship, a project of the non-profit Day Eight.
