It has been two weeks three weeks (far too long!) since my last newsletter, in which I once again strayed from simple updates about my life into a multi-thousand-word essay. I’m proud of what I wrote there, and I believe—hope—that you will find it, or have found it, rewarding to read.

books.

Jesus and John Wayne

Afraid of my tendency to not finish books, I paged through the acclaimed new release Jesus and John Wayne today as quickly as I could. It serves as a history of fundamentalist evangelicalism, specifically through the lens of our “cult of masculinity.” (The title alludes to how white American evangelicals have seemingly viewed both Jesus and, well, John Wayne, as exemplars of masculinity—it’s also takes its title from a Gaither Vocal Band song.)

Fundamentalism and American Culture; The Book of Jerry Falwell

I’ve put down The Book of Jerry Falwell again, though I’m reminded that I need to pick it up again by the coincidental synchronicity of it having been published 20 years after George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture and 20 years before Jesus and John Wayne.

Fundamentalism and American Culture is another excellent book I didn’t get very far in; this time around I’m listening (through Hoopla) to the surprisingly good audiobook version. I was tempted to put it on 1.25x or 1.50x speed, but—well, I believe I’ve seen it said that to be a good writer, you have to love sentences, and I think that applies to being a good reader too. My ransacking of Jesus and John Wayne aside, I figure I might as well relish Tom Parks’s sonorous narration of Marsden’s work.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

I hope to write more about this book by Jonathan Haidt in the future. For now, I’ll say that I’ve been finding this quite enlightening in its discussion of how seemingly intractable differences of morality arise along the political spectrum. The discussion of how convincing other people of an ideology’s righteousness works dovetails nicely with The Book of Jerry Falwell‘s discussion on what the process of being born-again looks like. My takeaway is: approaching people from the opposite direction always results in collision. You have to tell stories (“testimonies”, if we’re talking religion and not politics), get your unwitting catechumen on board, and implicate them in the story before they realize what’s happened.

people.

John Fea

I purchased Fundamentalism and American Culture in August 2018 at a talk John Fea gave at Hearts and Minds Bookstore. In February of that year, I had sent Dr. Fea an email asking how he could possibly believe evangelicals actually plan on winning “the culture war” (rather than say we’re just putting up a valiant effort we believe is ultimately doomed) when evangelicals are also pretty big proponents of dispensational premillenialism (you know, Rapture stuff): a belief tied pretty inextricably to societal pessimism. He partially agreed: “On paper, these ideas seem incompatible. You are right.” But George Marsden, he said, explained how “historically they came together in American fundamentalism right after World War I” in his book Fundamentalism and American Culture.

Hopefully this all might come together in another large essay in a future edition of this newsletter synthesizing Marsden, Harding, Haidt, and Du Mez. (George Marsden—now 81—did, in fact, provide feedback for at least early drafts of Jesus and John Wayne.)

The process of thinking about this led me to search John Fea’s blog for “George Marsden”, which led me to a blog post about how Dr. Fea—a resident of Pennsylvania—was texting his daughter excitedly when she was studying at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Dr. Marsden, a resident of Grand Rapids, showed up to her volleyball games. I now feel a sort of kindred spirit with Dr. Fea (who is roughly as much younger than Marsden as I am younger than him), given the merely bemused responses I get when I express excitement over realizing a friend or acquaintance has, say, taken a class with Dr. Fea, or eaten dinner with Warren Throckmorton.

(I’ve also just found that John Fea had Kristin Du Mez on his podcast to talk about Jesus and John Wayne, so.)

Shawn Smucker

No one I’ve mentioned this to so far seems as excited about this as I am, so I’ll tell the story once more—last Friday, my housemates checked out several of Lancaster’s excellent art galleries for “First Friday”, but when we stopped for frozen treats we accidentally tried to cut in front of an older couple already in line outside the front door. (We didn’t realize everyone had to wait outside.) I took a look at the gentleman in line and—what are the odds? it was none other than award-winning, Lancaster-based Christian fiction author Shawn Smucker. (I suppose he’s written Christian nonfiction too.) After Kaitlin Ruiz had nothing but praise for his novel Light from Distant Stars, I picked up a copy of it from Hearts & Minds around January and read the first several chapters over a few particularly enjoyable lunch breaks at McDonald’s (where I ate their meal of three hotcakes and one sausage patty, with two pats of butter and a small container of hot syrup on the side, which I probably had with a medium coffee—6 creams, 6 sugars). Alas, I haven’t returned to finish the book yet. But I did get to meet the author extremely briefly on Friday!

what i’ve been working on

At United Way, I’ve finished giving mostly algorithmically generated new names to old image files and have moved on to helping set up the new website! I’m pretty slow and have already made some real rookie mistakes. Fortunately my supervisor is a grandmother with a cookie recipe blog; she’s pretty nice. I’m having fun.

project ideas i probably won’t bring to fruition

• creating Criterion-style DVD cases (with inserts) for movies that don’t actually exist (or for films that just need nicer DVD artwork and extensive analytical essays written about them)
• starting a 24/7 live stream on YouTube comprising of public domain films and other random clips from the Internet Archive
• returning to my zine-style minicomic “Armageddon” for a COVID-themed issue 04
  • if you have any interest in receiving a copy of Armageddon issues 01 through 03, do let me know; I’ll send you a copy just so long as we have an understanding that you owe me a debt of two (2) dollars that I will not necessarily expect to be repaid
• attempting to re-imagine the nonfiction history Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Du Mez as a fictional narrative script in the style of Matthew Pierce — in which exaggerated versions of the evangelical characters historical and fictional, alive and dead, meet in a liminal space (such as The Shack, or an abandoned LifeWay) to battle out their differences with nunchucks and lightsabers.
• Writing a parody book titled Liturgical Liturgies: The Liturgy of Liturgy (a sacramental view of liturgical perspectives on the sacramentality of sacrament and liturgy)
  • I mean, we’ve gotten Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren, The Liturgy of Politics by Kaitlyn Schiess, and James K.A. Smith’s Cultural Liturgies trilogy—I just think it’s about time someone explores the liturgy of liturgy!

I hope you all are well! If you’d like to get in touch, please feel free to reply to this email or call (717) 584-1778.

All best, Benjamin