The widespread anxiety bubbling up along economic, cultural, and political lines, especially among white Christians, led Christian ethicist David P. Gushee to write his latest book, A Letter to My Anxious Christian Friends: From Fear to Faith in Unsettled Times (Westminster John Knox, out now).
Gushee, distinguished professor of ethics at Mercer University, says, “I was already beginning to see the appeal of Donald Trump to at least a certain part of the white Christian community, and I was trying to make sense of that without focusing on a particular individual.” He notes that “a widely felt anxiety is one of the major stories of the American election of 2016, so I wanted to offer an alternative kind of spirit and vision, at least for Christian readers.”
Distilling 30 years of observation, Gushee, the author or editor of some 20 books, argues that Christians should not approach public life from a posture of anxiety, nostalgia, or anger, but from a place of confidence in God and a commitment to bear Christian witness, no matter what is occurring in the culture. He wants to detoxify some of the rhetoric around the election and offer a perspective for “looking at the issues and a way of engaging them that might give us some constructive, hopeful way forward.”
A Letter to My Anxious Christian Friends challenges the idea that America, where people were enslaved, was ever a Christian nation. “We have all this nostalgia about the Christian values of our past,” Gushee says. “That’s very strong among conservative Christians, but it is usually uninformed by serious reflection on all the evils of American history.” He calls it “a white nostalgia for an imaginary Christian past that doesn’t take seriously the problems of racism” and cautions against “overidealizing the past in any way.”
Gushee structured the book as a series of letters to Christians that can be read by anyone, and he hopes that it will help readers “look with a nonideological, nonpartisan, and nonhysterical gaze on American public life right now and how we can contribute.” He adds, “It’s a love letter to America and my fellow Christians to say, lift your head up, don’t be hysterical, try to be as constructive as you can be and engage in our culture at this time. And try to see the good in our country as well as the things we are concerned about.”
