One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 Bill McKibben—award-winning author, activist, educator—is fiercely curious. “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.” Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth. But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril. And he is curious: What the hell happened? In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.

In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; where it's headed and why it threatens democracy. Tracing the development of this ideology over the course of three centuries and especially its influence over the last three decades, they show how white Christian nationalism motivates the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent impulses on display in our current political moment.

American nationalism -- is it synonymous with evangelical Protestantism? Do Christians carry a cross in one hand and wave a flag with the other? The following chapters by young Christian scholars respond to this all-too-frequent identification of evangelicalism with the interests, values, and policies of Americanism. ÒSome of today's most sensitive issues are discussed -- militarism, disarmament, revolution, war, the Israel-Arab tinder-box, ecology, poverty, racism, the radical right, the radical left, and Women's Liberation. ÒCommitted to a high view of Scripture, these critical lovers and loving critics of evangelicalism attempt to be Biblical -- socially, economically and politically as well as theologically. They have no hesitancy in attacking a number of sacred cows; they have no hesitancy, either, in advocating positions which their fellow-believers call leftist. Their approach, however, while occasionally sharp and necessarily negative, is objective, dispassionate and peaceful. ÒWe are reminded in this courageous book that the political problems inevitably become moral problems, and on moral problems the Bible speaks in a loud voice. The writers plead for some serious thinking and rethinking instead of a closed-minded patriotism which proudly renders to Caesar the things which are God's. -- Vernon Grounds Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary

"Veteran anthropologist and historian Aylward Shorter takes the reader inside the ideals and lives of the "White Fathers" - the spiritual sons of Cardinal Lavigerie, who are now known as the "Missionaries of Africa." In a twenty-two year period, these missioners worked to understand how to preach the Gospel, establish the Catholic Church, and educate an African clergy. Often these missioners found themselves at odds with colonial authorities and at other times the objects of attempts at co-optation."--BOOK JACKET.

This resource contains antisemitic and racist content.

Describes the history and design of the American flag, and explores its significance and meaning to America's culture and daily life.