John Piper has just finished a blog series on Mark Noll’s book, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Here are the posts:
- Agonizingly Both-And: God and Race as the Inauguration Approaches
- Just When You Die for Them, They Lynch Your Nephew
- Noll Wisely Risks the Un-sensible
- How the “Fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths” Flunked
- Christianity Is the Best Explanation
In the first post Piper writes:
It is fitting as the inauguration of the first African-American president approaches that we highlight some history in a theological context. Remarkably, a newly published book helps us do this. The book is Mark Noll’s God and Race in American Politics: A Short History.
Mark and I graduated together from Wheaton in 1968. He was my Resident Assistant during my senior year. I admired him then; I admire him today.
With an eye for concrete (incarnational) stories, and meticulous historical detail, Noll is above all a seer of Both-And. Or call it paradox. Or historical conundrum. There are no simple explanations of anything. If you have to have situations and people be only good or only bad, you won’t like this book.
The thesis of the book is: “Together, race and religion make up, not only the nation’s deepest and most enduring moral problem, but also its broadest and most enduring political influence” (1).
That is provocative enough. But his working out of how race and religion are interwoven is where the puzzles come.
