In eighteenth-century political reasoning and rhetoric, ministers and statesmen were not obliged to choose between pragmatism or piety, orthodoxy or heterodoxy, reason or revelation. As we grapple with the role of religion in the American Revolution, we should not impose false dichotomies routinely used by modern scholars but were unknown to their subjects.
Candida Moss and Joel Baden sound an alarm about the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby and founders of the Museum of the Bible. The real target here, though, is not so much the Greens as the evangelical Protestant view of the Bible that they embrace.
Candida Moss’s book on the history of Christian persecution is a case study in how scholarship gives way to politicized polemic—but it’s also an important reminder for contemporary Christians.