A thoroughgoing study of Baptists, radicalized by persecution and honed by internal schism.
Although both authors are avowed Baptists and teach at the Baptist Baylor University, Kidd (George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father, 2014, etc.) and Hankins (Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars, 2010, etc.) present a fairly evenhanded account of Baptist history, from the first Baptist colony at Providence to the full-blown clashes over fundamentalist doctrine between the powerful and competing Baptist organizations allied with the political right from the 1970s until today. Baptists emerged originally as a radical element from the Reformation movement (“Anabaptists”) that rejected infant baptism, which had become accepted as an “emergency measure” for children in an age of high infant mortality, in favor of “believer’s baptism,” whereby adults recognized and repented their sins and were reborn. A branch of the Separatists in Colonial America, the Baptists were seen as dangerous dissenters from the Puritan and Anglican mainstream, however, and persecuted relentlessly. The Great Awakening of the 18th century would spur a radical evangelical wing that helped dismantle the older New England churches in favor of new churches in Philadelphia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Sandy Creek, North Carolina. The authors highlight the important role the Baptists played in the American Revolution in their campaign for the disestablishment of the state churches and insistence on pressing for religious liberty. Kidd and Hankins demonstrate how the first schism occurred over the issue of slavery, with growing tensions between northern and southern Baptists and African-American membership doubling. Shut out from political power after Reconstruction, blacks formed their own institutions—e.g., the influential National Baptist Convention USA. The authors usefully trace the Baptists’ shift from outsiders to consummate insiders, all the way to the White House.
An instructive work that allows for a fuller understanding of an important religious element in America.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-997753-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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