Revolution of Values

I have read Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's book Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (excellent book) and was really looking forward to reading this book. I was not disappointed and found it to be a stimulating and challenging book.

This book offers a detailed look at how American slaveholder religion has a menacing grip on the church and poltics in the United States. In reading this we are being asked is the God we claim to serve greater than racism? The answer to this question will require a transformation of slaveholder religious values to the values of the God we serve.

This was an excellent read and will be a book I will recommend to friends, churches, and the broader public.

During primary season in 2008, my pastor challenged the congregation to “Vote the Bible.” I took his exhortation seriously and scoured the pages of scripture over the next five months, with the result that for the first time in 30 years, I voted for a Democrat for president.

No doubt the pastor thought abortion and gay marriage would point me to the Republican candidate. But when I examined the Iraq war, the financial collapse, healthcare, the environment, immigration and criminal justice reform, I found the Democratic platform to be more in line with biblical teaching.

In Revolution of Values, Wilson-Hartgrove shows how conservative white Christians have been defining the moral issues in public life rather narrowly (namely abortion and gay marriage – but interestingly not #metoo) and that it is time to reclaim a broader definition of morality. Quoting Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the author asserts that a “revolution of values” is needed to change our nation.

Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the conservative evangelical subculture, serving as a Senate page to Strom Thurmond. He spells out the way Christian nationalists, such as David Barton, have misused scripture to promote a political agenda. (E.g. Deuteronomy 32:8--where God “set[s] up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel”--is support for a border wall.) Or how Dr. James Fifield joined Christianity and capitalism with the help of the National Association of Manufacturers in the 1940s. And sadly, the link between racism and the Christian right, with many Christian schools launched in the south as a way to avoid integration. In the aftermath of George Wallace, the author contends, the Christian right swapped “culture” for “race” when describing their ongoing war with the larger American society.

It would be easy to dismiss this book as a screed—and no doubt some will. However, 15% of the book consists of endnotes supporting the author’s contentions. Clearly, he has done his research. At the same time, Wilson-Hartgrove holds the reader’s attention by skillfully weaving human interest stories into the didactic portions of his argument … much like a well-placed sermon illustration in the hands of a captivating preacher. Among the topics covered are: immigration, poverty, voting rights, criminal justice, women’s rights, science, and war. (Chapter 6 is my personal favorite.)

Every now and then, it is a good practice to read a book outside your comfort zone; one that will challenge your presumptions and make you think. C.S. Lewis coined the term “chronological snobbery” to define “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” I would like to apply Lewis’s tenet to a common practice today of reading only within our preferred bubble and discounting anything from the other side, whatever that may be. For those, who like me, have spent their lives in the evangelical wing of Christianity, Revolution of Values is a great place to start.