The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church
Author: Gregory A Boyd
The church was established to serve the world with Christ-like love, not to rule the world. It is called to look like a corporate Jesus, dying on the cross for those who crucified him, not a religious version of Caesar. It is called to manifest the kingdom of the cross in contrast to the kingdom of the sword. Whenever the church has succeeded in gaining what most American evangelicals are now trying to get – political power – it has been disastrous both for the church and the culture. Whenever the church picks up the sword, it lays down the cross. The present activity of the religious right is destroying the heart and soul of the evangelical church and destroying its unique witness to the world. The church is to have a political voice, but we are to have it the way Jesus had it: by manifesting an alternative to the political, “power over,” way of doing life. We are to transform the world by being willing to suffer for others – exercising “power under,” not by getting our way in society – exercising “power over.”
Christianity Today
"Boyd's intervention into the discussion is welcome. He is bold,... passionate, and discerning, while still attempting to be charitable. Boyd doesn't pull punches, denouncing the nationalistic "idolatry" of American evangelicalism, which often fuses the cross and the flag. Boyd also calls without apology for a renewed Christian commitment to nonviolence, citing the Anabaptist refrains of John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Lee Camp. But Boyd's claims can't be dismissed as mere ranting of a Christian leftist. Rather, one senses that his are the expressions of a pastor's broken heart which, every once in a while, bubbles over into a kind of restrained, low-boil anger."
Table of Contents:
Contents
Introduction / 9
1 The Kingdom of the Sword / 17
2 The Kingdom of the Cross / 29
3 Keeping the Kingdom Holy / 51
4 From Resident Aliens to Conquering Warlords / 67
5 Taking America Back for God / 87
6 The Myth of a Christian Nation / 107
7 When Chief Sinners Become Moral Guardians / 127
8 One Nation under God? / 147
9 Christians and Violence: Confronting the Tough Questions / 161
Acknowledgments / 187
Notes / 189
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They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace in Vietnam and America, October 1967
Author: David Maraniss
Here is the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties told through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967. They Marched Into Sunlight brings that tumultuous time back to life while exploring questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth, issues as relevant today as they were decades ago.
In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together the stories of three very different worlds: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. To understand what happens to the people in these interconnected stories is to understand America's anguish. Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the book describes the battles that evoked cultural and political conflicts that still reverberate.
The New York Times
Are the battle and the antiwar melee profoundly linked because they occurred simultaneously? No...but what will now connect them forever is this book's inspired use of narrative cross-cutting to produce devastating culture shock. In adopting what is surely the most hackneyed and overused of storytelling techniques, too often a method of building fake suspense out of arbitrary connections, Mr. Maraniss succeeds in making adroit, wrenching juxtapositions.—Janet Maslin
The Washington Post
At its best, They Marched Into Sunlight is wonderful reporting. The military part, the story of the 2/28 (second battalion of the 28th infantry regiment) Black Lions walking into the ambush that day, recalls some of the very best nonfiction writing of the war...I consider We Were Soldiers the gold standard, the best nonfiction combat writing of the war. Maraniss's heartbreaking portrait of ordinary American grunts arriving in country, preparing for combat and finally being mauled just north of Lai Khe is of the same high order...He has added one more uncommonly readable book to what is already a rich literature of a difficult chapter in American life.—David Halberstam
The New York Times Book Review
Moving between the campus at Madison and the jungles of Vietnam, with side trips to Hanoi and Washington, the tale unfolds with a magisterial sweep that recaptures the war and its era, filled with moral ambiguity and moral conviction, with promise and dread, with hippie antics and weekly body counts.—Philip Caputo
Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Maraniss (When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi) intertwines two compelling narratives to capture the Vietnam War at home and on the battlefield as well as, if not better than, any book yet written. The first narrative follows the soldiers of the army battalion the Black Lions, 61 of whom died in an ambush by North Vietnamese on October 17, 1967. The battle scene description is devastating, brilliantly compiled with painstakingly recreated details of the four-and-a-half-hour battle, unflinchingly drawn pictures of the damage modern ordinance inflicts and an equally unflinching record of the physical and psychological residue of battle. The second narrative centers on the October 18, 1967, riot at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when student protesters tried to stop Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, from recruiting on campus. Here Maraniss, a Madison native and a freshman at the university at the time, successfully depicts the complicated range of motives that led students to participate in the protest: many began the day as curious observers, and the riot radicalized them against the war. The author also re-creates the sense of loss, confusion and anger of the university administrators as they were overtaken by events that would change the fundamental relationships between students and faculty. The two narratives together provide a fierce, vivid diptych of America bisected by a tragic war: a moving remembrance for those who lived through it and an illuminating lesson for a new generation trying to understand what it was all about. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
On October 17 and 18, 1967, a tragic ambush of American soldiers occurred in Vietnam, while at the same time a sit-in at the University of Wisconsin against Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm and Agent Orange, turned violent. Maraniss (First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton) vividly portrays these contrasting events as metaphors for how the United States failed its soldiers in Vietnam and how deeply the war scarred American society. The home-front story includes interesting accounts of how protesters were angered by the university's soliciting federal funding for projects that would benefit the military. But the most gripping stories from the 180 interviews Maraniss conducted are about the officers and enlisted men who were killed in the attack or suffered severe wounds, both physical and emotional, they have spent the last 35 years trying to heal. The reader will feel rage at the high-level officers who tried to spin the massacre into an American victory. Maraniss concludes with a moving reunion in Vietnam between American and Vietnamese commanders on both sides of the attack. This lengthy narrative keeps the reader engrossed throughout. Highly recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/03.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School-For 40 years, the Vietnam War, and its effects on American society, has been a popular topic for authors. The best of these books tend to focus on a single aspect of the conflict, a certain group involved, or a specific period of time. In that tradition, Maraniss concentrates on two events that unfolded over two days in October 1967. On the first of those days, the members of the First Division's Black Lions battalion marched into a trap in the jungles of Vietnam and paid for it dearly. On the next, a large student protest at the University of Wisconsin against Dow Chemicals, the makers of napalm, turned into a battle of its own. By picking these moments in time, while looking at events in the U.S. and in Vietnam, the author shows how the war was affecting Americans, not merely with bullets and nightsticks, but with ideas and ideals as well. One might wish that Maraniss had shown a greater willingness to take on the larger questions posed by these two events, but by bringing these disparate occurrences together and placing them in context, he has provided one of the best books to date on the Vietnam War.-Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A sprawling, vivid, and hard-to-put-down account of a mere two days in the fall of 1967, a time of two fierce battles: one in South Vietnam, the other in Wisconsin. Washington Post reporter Maraniss (When Pride Still Mattered, 1999, etc.) probably wasn't thinking of James Michener when he set this epic down to paper, but the project certainly has a Michener-esque feel, with its huge cast of characters acting out in the face of great historical forces beyond their control. Maraniss is the more engaging writer, though, and he does a superb job of relating dozens of interwoven but distinct stories in which the obscure and the famous meet. In the Cs alone, for instance, there are William Coleman, a commander; Joe Costello, a grenadier; and Doug Cron, a rifleman—but also activist and actor Peter Coyote, US attorney general Ramsey Clark and his assistant Warren Christopher, and current US Vice President Dick Cheney. The latter, by Maraniss's account, was busy avoiding the draft at the University of Wisconsin on those bright October days, though he would go on to rattle more than a few sabers. Meanwhile, the real saber-wielders, led by the noted soldier Terry Allen Jr., were busily killing and being killed in a ferocious battle 45 miles northwest of Saigon; some, even as early as 1967, had lost spouses and friends to the antiwar movement, which was gathering strength at the Madison campus, battling such hated symbols of the war as the Dow Chemical company and Lyndon B. Johnson. "There was an emerging awareness," writes Maraniss of the antiwar activists, "that everything that had been tried to stop the war to that point had failed," and, now toughened by tear gas and nightsticks, they wereready for the fight they got on the streets of Madison. Off in Vietnam, for their part, the soldiers of the tough-as-nails Black Lions unit were finding a vicious fight of their own—and compromised in that struggle by the leaders, or so many of the surviving soldiers felt. Both battles wrought terrible scars that have still not healed, and Maraniss's careful narrative shows just why that should be so. Extraordinary, and likely to become a standard in courses devoted to the history of the Vietnam War. First printing of 150,000; author tour. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn/Sagalyn Agency
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