The emphasis on positive thinking and avoidance of grief is strong, both in American Christianity and American culture more broadly. Around seasons like Christmas in particular, our modern American tendency to gloss over the waiting of Advent and jump straight to Christmas celebration shows how our culture has shaped our perspective on the liturgical seasons of Advent and Christmas. But, as Adam and I found when writing Candles in the Darkness: Experiencing Advent with the Early and Medieval Church, earlier generations of Christians were far better at sitting in grief and darkness while waiting for the coming of Christ, both in the Incarnation and eventually in healing and redemption for a broken creation.

Advent and Death

This appears in texts from early and medieval authors that center death in Advent reflections, like in this sermon On the Holy Birth of Christ from the fourth century author Basil of Caesarea:

Are you puzzled how the easily corruptible nature can have incorruptibility through its communion with God? Realize that it’s a mystery. God is in flesh that he may kill the death that lurks therein. For as the harm caused by poisonous drugs can be overcome by antidotes when they are assimilated by the body, and as the darkness residing in a house is dissolved by the introduction of light, so too the death that dominates in human nature is obliterated by the presence of divinity. And as ice in water, for as long as it is night and dark, is stronger than the liquid that contains it, but the warming sun melts the ice by its ray, so too death rules until the advent of Christ, but when “the saving grace of God appears” (Titus 2:11) and “the sun of righteousness rises, death is swallowed up in victory” (Mal 4:2), unable to bear the visitation of true life. . . . Realize that God is in flesh for this reason: because the flesh that was cursed needed to be sanctified, the flesh that was weakened needed to be brought into affinity with him, the flesh that had fallen into paradise needed to be led back into heaven. (Basil, “On the Holy Birth of Christ,” in On Fasting and Feasts. Translated by Susan R. Holman and Mark DelCogliano. St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013, p. 30)

“God is in flesh that he may kill the death that lurks therein.” God came in flesh as a way to overcome the harm of sin, to break through the darkness and bring our fallen flesh back into union with him. Light does not break through the night right away, nor does ice melt as soon as it touches water; these processes take time, much like waiting for the coming of Christmas. We wait, in grief and repentance, but with the certainty that in Christ, we have assurance that we know the ending of our stories. As surely as light dissolves darkness, ice melts in water, and the sun melts the ice, death and grief will end: the sun is rising, and Light is coming.

Advent and Grief

Although it’s not explicitly framed as an Advent text for those in grief or suffering, I think the festal odes of Gregory of Narek also offer gentler paths into the joy of Christmas. Gregory of Narek (ca. 951–1003) is considered the greatest theologian and poet from Armenia and is venerated as a saint and doctor of the church, a title given to individuals who made especially significant contributions to theology and doctrine through their writings. He and his brother entered a monastery at a young age, where he was eventually ordained and taught theology at the monastery school in Narekavank (on the shores of modern-day Lake Van, Turkey). His most famous work, the Book of Lamentations (simply called the Narek by many), was written near the end of his life, when he appears to have been struggling with a terminal illness. It is a series of prayers and meditations in poetical meter, focusing on God’s grace amid his failures and inadequacies. In short, in his best-known work, Gregory of Narek was familiar with looking to Christ in repentance, grief, and suffering, while pointing us towards new ways to hold hope and pain in tandem.

In his “Ode for the Nativity,” a festal ode written for congregational use in liturgical celebration of the coming of Christ, Gregory’s abstract and poetic retelling of the coming of Christ might not be how we are used to thinking about Christmas. Yet in its emphasis on love and on the soft, quiet giving of life that came through the incarnation, it can offer us a new way to rejoice.

At the very right hand of the Ever-Existent (he sat)

At his very right hand, from right hand to right hand,

In the glory of the Father’s Light from the left.

In the parental bosom he was called “the Dawn”;

With the rising of the sun he came with love,

Being born of the Virgin, the flower of her bosom.

Flower of the bosom, the Paternal bosom,

He descended from heaven as a cloud,

Showering his love gently upon us.

Love within a cloud, a cloud moved by love

Pervading that same ethereal fleece,

Bringing drops of rain.

He made known the love begotten of love,

Love blossoming with ardent desire

To unite love with love.

The moon, coming to its fullness of light,

With the gracefully gliding evening star,

Brought bright stars in its train.

By morning the dew had descended

Upon New Sion, the gentle Sun

Shining around Venus

Harbinger of Spring, that wondrous Spring,

In laudable beauty, adorned in variegated hues

Fit for the union of newlyweds.

Let us come anew, who have been rejoicing lately,

Lanterns lit, vestures in plaits

Let us weave a garland for the bush.

(Grégoire de Narek, “Ode for the Nativity,” in The Festal Works of St. Gregory of Narek: Annotated Translation of the Odes, Litanies, and Encomia. Translated by Abraham Terian. Liturgical Press, 2016, pp. 16-19)

As we see here, in Gregory’s hymn, the Light came quietly and gently. God the Creator entered his creation not as a powerful military hero or in a raging storm but instead softly, like a cloud bringing gentle rain or the dawn slowly breaking through the darkness. The metaphors used throughout this poetic description of Christ’s advent in Gregory of Narek’s “Ode for the Nativity” all represent parts of creation that bring life and renewal, reminding us that despite the soft and quiet coming of Christ, he nonetheless brought the life and liberation that has always been expected from the Savior. For those in seasons of grief or pain, this gentleness is a gift. The image of Love come down here is not a loud or strident party, but a reminder that God meets us where we are: gently and lovingly, inviting us from darkness and death into light and life.

Hope in Darkness

Both of these texts, Basil’s Homily and Gregory’s Ode, were offered to congregations in the turn from Advent waiting to Christmastide joy. Both highlight death and brokenness and pain, but then the end to these things. Neither take the tone we might expect from modern Christmas celebrations, of simple joy; each author acknowledges that the death and the waiting has a cost, and deals gently with those who have waited in both pain and hope.

In this season of Christmastide, you may not be at a point where loud jubilation is possible; despite the coming of the light, you may still feel surrounded by darkness. But these readings are a beautiful reminder that God is love, gently present and as sure as the dawn. Ice melts, dawn comes, and, despite grief and pain, so will joy and hope. The dawn comes slowly– but it still comes. Christ’s coming and the promised joy and healing may feel distant– but Christ still comes, in love, in justice, and in joy.

For more readings like these for your Advent and Christmastide, consider getting yourself or a loved one a copy of Candles in the Darkness: Experiencing Advent with the Early and Medieval Church.

There lies in Boston harbor an eroding island called Nix’s Mate. In 1636, a harbor pilot, John Gallop, received the grant of the island to graze his sheep. Once twelve acres square, it had been a safe natural pin for his flock. However, during the eighteenth century golden age of piracy the island became a haunting symbol of Britain’s brutal policy against piracy.

When the War of Spanish Succession concluded, out of work naval men resorted to piracy rather than accepting terrible wages on merchant ships. The British Empire suppressed this trend with an innovative policy on piracy, which was repeatedly renewed during the early eighteenth century. An example of this policy’s renewal is found in the London Gazette, which published the Proclamation of the Suppression of Piracy on September 14, 1717. The proclamation offered the king’s pardon to anyone that had been implicated in the act of piracy, as long as they turned themselves in prior to September 5, 1718. The proclamation reinforced a Christian sentiment of repentance. Those who turned from their old ways of piracy toward making an honest living would be spared the king’s judgment.^[1]

However, those who accepted the king’s amnesty commonly exploited the latitude given in the proclamation, and they frequently returned to piracy. Carolina’s Governor Robert Johnson shared with the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1718 that he believed the king’s pardon failed to suppress piracy. According to Johnson, “some few indead surrender and take a certificate of there so doing and then several of them return to the sport again.”^[2]

The infamous pirate Edward Teach (Blackbeard) provisionally accepted the king’s pardon in June of 1718. He subsequently married the daughter of a Carolina plantation owner in July but then returned to piracy within the coming months. His last cruise led to his undoing when he was killed at Ocrakoke inlet in a bitter battle to the death during November of 1718.

The pseudonymous author Captain Charles Johnson (perhaps Daniel Defoe) popularized Blackbeard’s exploits, among other pirates, in A General History of the Pyrates (1724). The legendary stories of this volume included women pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonney, Teach’s mentee Stede Bonnet, and the legendary Black Bart, Bartholemew Roberts. While it’s arguable that A General History of the Pyrates suppressed piracy, a case also may be made that the publication inadvertently emboldened disillusioned sailors to enact piracy.^[3]

The Piracy and Execution of William Fly

One such case of a sailor who may have gained inspiration from Johnson’s publication is the story of William Fly and the mutiny aboard the merchant snow, Elizabeth. Fly and his cobelligerents took control of the Elizabeth on May 27, 1726 and cast its captain and first mate overboard, renaming the ship Fames Revenge. Renaming the ship Fames Revenge appears to be an honorific in homage to both Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach, who pirated ships named the Revenge and Queen Anne’s Revenge, respectfully.

Fly and his crews’ piracy lasted nearly a month before they were captured. During their cruise they took a sloop named John and Hannah on June 3, a ship called John and Betty on June 7, the sloop Rachel on June 11, and the schooner James on June 23. They flew under a black flag and offered quarter to sailors from the ships they took. Fly and his crew were poor pilots and unfamiliar with the inlets along the Massachusetts coast, so they pressed knowledgeable men into Fames Revenge’s service. Altogether they took 50 captives. A few sailors led by Captain William Atkinson employed subterfuge to capture Fly, slap him in irons, and turn him over to the Boston authorities.

The tale of his cruise was recorded by Joseph Edwards in the pamphlet The Tryals of Sixteen Persons for Piracy (1726), and the execution sermons and commentary from Cotton Mather’s A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea (1726) and Benjamin Colman’s It Is a Fearful Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God (1726) corroborated Edwards’s pamphlet but also developed the spiritual consequences of Fly’s criminal acts.^[4]

Pamphlets and execution sermons were published to extend the scope of influence that the ritual of public execution held for Puritan New England. Criminals were publicly punished for their sins by the sword of the state. The ritual of the gallows included the central role of clergy ministering to condemned criminals, offering them redemption and salvation in Jesus Christ, and giving them the opportunity to publicly testify to their repentance or to have the minister reassure the watching public that the condemned had reconciled with God. The drama of the execution sermons took center stage in the theater of the gallows and sometimes overshadowed the execution. The ministers preaching the execution sermons played a pivotal role on the stage of execution, often times subordinating the condemned into a passive, supporting role.

Execution sermons like Colman’s and Mather’s warned hearers to not follow in the criminality of the condemned; they also pled with hearers to accept the same offer of salvation that the condemned accepted. These sermons played a crucial role in upholding the Puritan moral order while also serving as an instrument for the morphology of conversion. Execution sermons consequently became bestselling publications for ministers because they re-enacted the drama of execution. Those who could not be present to observe the theater of the gallows might in some way benefit spiritually and morally from the lessons of the ritual. According to Daniel Cohen, about half of the execution sermons published in the first third of the eighteenth century recounted the executions of men condemned for piracy. Mather oversaw many of those men’s conversions and preached their execution sermons.^[5]

Subverting the Power of the Theater of the Gallows

However, not all condemned criminals participated in the ritual the way the state and Mather wished. William Fly happened to be one such character in New England’s history who subverted the ritual of public execution. The record of Mather’s prison visits with Fly portray him as a stubborn, hardened, and irreverent man, who had no intention of repenting for piracy. Fly refused to forgive Captain Atkinson for turning on him and his accomplices, saying to Mather, “If I should say, that I forgive that Man, and that I wish him well, I should ly against my Conscience, and add sin to sin.”^[6] Moreover, he conveyed no remorse for murdering the captain and first mate of the Elizabeth. Mather recounts Fly’s attitude concerning his circumstances:

I can’t Charge myself, — I shan’t own myself Guilty of any Murder, — Our Captain and his Mate used us Barbarously. We poor Men can’t have Justice done us. There is nothing said to our Commanders, let them never so much abuse us, and use us like Dogs.^[7]

Fly refused to attend the execution sermon Mather preached because he did not wish to be a prop for the mob to behold, as he sat helplessly in irons. Rather, when he did appear for his execution, he inverted the gallows theater created by the state and the ministers. Mather described Fly’s extraordinary behavior:

He seem’d all along ambitious to have it said, That he died a brave fellow! He pass’d along to the place of Execution, with a Nosegay in his hand, and making his Complements, where he thought he saw occasion. Arriving there, he nimbly mounted the Stage, and would fain have put on a Smiling Aspect. He reproached the Hangman, for not understanding his Trade, and with his own Hands rectified matters, to render all things more Convenient and Effectual. When he was called upon, to Speak what he should judge proper to be spoken on that sad occasion, at least for the Warning of Survivers, he only said, That he would advise the Masters of Vessels to Carry it well to their Men, lest they should be put upon doing as he had done.^[8]

Mather assessed Fly’s behavior, saying that the pirate was “a most uncommon and amazing instance of impenitency and stupidity.”^[9] In Hanging Between Heaven and Earth, Seay observes, “The impenitence and insubordination of condemned criminals threatened to subvert the moral lessons of execution day in provincial New England and to rob the ritual of its significance.”^[10] Regarding the Fly incident, Daniel E. Williams asserts, “Unable to control the character, the ministers set out to control the context, portraying Fly as a miserable sinner trapped in his own obdurancy.”^[11]

Mather controlled the context by using Fly’s remains as a spiritual object lesson after the execution was completed. The authorities gibbetted his body and hung it from Nix’s Mate. Mather extended the shame of this pirate’s public hanging by using Fly’s remains as a prop that continually hung between heaven and earth. His carcass greeted travelers entering and departing Boston. Wrapped in chains and rotting, his corpse functioned as an intimidating message to any would be mutineers and pirates. Boston’s magistrates, ministers, and merchants would not tolerate piracy. His remains were eventually buried on the island along with those of two other condemned pirates.

The Curse of Nix’s Mate

Some may assume that Mather had the last word when he fashioned Fly’s corpse into an intimidating symbol of the power of the state and church. However, it may be the case that Fly’s final words were the memorial of his corpse, and the message sailors received when they looked upon it as they passed Nix’s Mate. His final words were a warning to merchant ship captains that they ought not misuse their crews lest judgment fall upon them and their ships. Those final words became the curse of Nix’s Mate.

Folklore spread that Fly spoke a curse that the island would disappear if he was wrongfully condemned. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century the island had been harvested for ship’s ballast and slate, reducing its acreage. Removing stone from the island caused rapid erosion, and the island was covered and uncovered by the tide, seemingly fulfilling Fly’s curse. Tales about the curse of Nix’s Mate spread, including stories about the island causing shipwrecks. To prevent shipwrecks and alert merchant captains and pilots of the tiny island in Boston harbor, a wooden pyramidal daybeacon was placed on Nix’s Mate in the early nineteenth century. It warned passing ships of the dangerous shoals surrounding the island. Lore continued to spread about hauntings and mysterious deaths related to the curse of Nix’s Mate up to the present.

Regardless of whether you live in an era where public executions are deemed righteous or revolting, or you live in an era that believes in haunts or one that has overcome the specter of the spectral, there are lessons that may be gleaned from the story of the pirate curse of Nix’s Mate. Every theater of ritual has scripts that are intended to be followed and actors that are supposed to perform them. However, one never fully can know if an actor will improvise and subvert the script to reclaim their own power, or if the audience will receive the message of the script and its props the way that the writer intended.

^[1] The London Gazette, Issue No. 5573, September 14, 1717, 1.

^[2] Quoted in Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004), 27.

^[3] Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724).

^[4] Joseph Edwards, The Tryals of Sixteen Persons for Piracy (Boston, 1726); Cotton Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea (Boston, 1726); Benjamin Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God (Boston, 1726).

^[5] Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, 2006), 66.

^[6] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 15–16.

^[7] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 21

^[8] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 47–48.

^[9] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 47.

^[10] Scott D. Seay, Hanging Between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crimes, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 30.

^[11] Daniel E. Williams, Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives (Madison House Publishers, 1993), 10.

If you must, you can read scary recent stories of ghosts and horrors for Halloween, but why not just go right back to the original sources from which all those tales are derived? When you do, you find that those originals are at least as good as anything imagined by later generations. And as a bonus, you can discover a significant moment in Western religious history, and controversy.

This photo is my own, and all other images are in the public domain

As a case in point, look at the vampires who will be proliferating in this late October season. Yes, we see their immediate sources easily enough, in the novel of Dracula (1897), and countless films. But where do all those ideas come from? Very soon, that question takes us back to an amazing work of Enlightenment scholarship that appeared in 1746, from the pen of a French Benedictine named Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672-1757), who published a vastly influential treatise entitled Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie (an expanded edition appeared in 1751). This translates to Dissertations on the Apparitions of Angels, of Demons and of Spirits, and on Revenants or Vampires of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Moravia and of Silesia, and I will refer to it here as the Dissertations. You may think that you have never heard of Calmet or his book, but if you have ever come across a snippet of vampire lore in popular culture, then you should give thanks to this erudite monk. Bram Stoker certainly drew heavily on his writings to create Dracula. Calmet’s work also explains why, when we think of vampires, we locate them in a mist-shrouded mythic Transylvania of the mind, where the castles and the inns, the burgomeisters and the peasants, look just as they do.

Much as he would have loathed the title, Calmet was the godfather of modern horror writing.

Calmet’s work created a European sensation, and was widely translated. One English version appeared in 1759 as Dissertations upon the Apparitions of Angels, Daemons and Ghosts, and Concerning the Vampires. The standard English edition is the translation by Henry Christmas, published in 1850 as The Phantom World: The History And Philosophy Of Spirits, Apparitions, etc, etc, in which the vampire material is an “etc” in the second volume. Following the link will take you to the full text versions of both translations. Calmet’s work established the idea of the vampire in English culture, from which it later evolved through writings such as John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). A separate strand in French literature, equally dependent on Calmet, owes its origins to Prosper Mérimée, in his La Guzla (1827), and thence into Russian.

Calmet was a highly esteemed scholar, who wrote very learned Bible commentaries, which erred a little on the side of over-conservatism. But his work on ghosts and vampires took him into very different territory. Remember the date: this was the height of the Enlightenment in France, when virtually all spiritual and supernatural doctrines were facing intense challenge from skeptics and deists. Calmet’s book announced that in the Habsburg realms, a great many people believed very firmly in undead monsters, which were so commonplace and so terrifying as to demand something like an imperial military and judicial campaign.

Nor was Calmet a lone credulous paranoid. His extensive correspondence shows how many other educated people believed these stories. Moreover, they were often good Enlightenment figures in their own right, who struggled to find material and medical explanations for the wonders they witnessed. Had the apparent vampires been buried alive? Were they suffering from some kind of rabies? Might vampirism be, literally, a kind of plague?

Interestingly, Calmet himself often comes across as a skeptic, even when he is discussing these supernatural horrors. He presents the great vampire scare almost as a fad, a moral panic, the sort of thing that people fret about every few years. Those phenomena rise and pass, and are forgotten and mocked. Surprisingly, perhaps, for a faithful Catholic, he includes in this category many aspects of familiar devotion:

The pilgrimages to Rome were formerly very frequent and very famous. All that is fallen away. We have seen provinces over-run with flagellants, and now none of them remain except in the brotherhoods of penitents which are still found in several parts. We have seen in these countries jumpers and dancers, who every moment jumped and danced in the streets, squares or market-places, and even in the churches. The convulsionaries of our own days seem to have revived them; posterity will be surprised at them, as we laugh at them now. Towards the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, nothing was talked of in Lorraine but wizards and witches. For a long time we have heard nothing of them.

To borrow a famous title, these were all examples of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. And then he offers a nice jibe against the Enlightenment, suggesting that the great thinkers of that movement were themselves modern day fads, and they too would be forgotten:

When the philosophy of M. Descartes appeared, what a vogue it had! The ancient philosophy was despised; nothing was talked of but experiments in physics, new systems, new discoveries. M. Newton appears; all minds turn to him.

And this is the context in which we are to place the fad or vogue of his own day, which has torn apart society across a large part of Central and Eastern Europe:

In this age, a new scene presents itself to our eyes, and has done for about sixty years in Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland: they see, it is said, men who have been dead for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use both men and beasts, suck the blood of their near relations, make them ill, and finally cause their death; so that people can only save themselves from their dangerous visits and their hauntings by exhuming them, impaling them, cutting off their heads, tearing out the heart, or burning them. These revenans are called by the name of oupires or vampires, that is to say, leeches; and such particulars are related of them, so singular, so detailed, and invested with such probable circumstances and such judicial information, that one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that these revenans come out of their tombs and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them. …

The revenans of Hungary, or vampires, which form the principal object of this dissertation, are men who have been dead a considerable time, sometimes more, sometimes less; who leave their tombs, and come and disturb the living, sucking their blood, appearing to them, making a racket at their doors, and in their houses, and lastly, often causing their death. They are named vampires, or oupires, which signifies, they say, in Sclavonic, a leech. The only way to be delivered from their haunting, is to disinter them, cut off their head, impale them, burn them, or pierce their heart.

“Hungary” here refers to the great kingdom of that name, which stretched considerably further than the modern nation, and included bits of what we would call Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia – including Transylvania itself. That geographical context gets to a whole other agenda here that I don’t want to get into too much, but I should mention it. In 1612, the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory was accused of a series of monstrous crimes against young women, which were magnified in later mythology to include her bathing in the blood of virgins, although there is plenty of debate about which if any of those tales were true. The records of the trial were sealed, but they came to light in the eighteenth century, and were sensationally publicized in the 1729 book Tragica Historia by Jesuit historian László Turóczi, who included the most grotesque charges and allegations, and many other books followed. Although vampirism was not one of those charges, the image of the (literally) bloodthirsty aristocrat in the castle on the hill has led to her being called “Countess Dracula” in many modern accounts, not to mention one great Hammer film. The Countess was based in the castle of Csejte, in what we would call the far west of Slovakia.

For present purposes, the point is that in the 1730s, in Calmet’s time, those regions of Central Europe already had a reputation for frightful horror stories with what we might, slightly anachronistically, call a Gothic flavor: Turóczi himself was a near contemporary of Calmet. This was the sort of place where such gory things were meant to happen. Moreover, civilized West Europeans asserted their own sophistication and Enlightenment by stressing how radically different they were from those still-medieval folks to the east: think of this as a kind of short-range Orientalism.

Getting back to Calmet, he then goes on to offer many examples of such vampire stories, none of which would cause the slightest surprise to anyone who ever saw a modern horror film. Most come from official or judicial records, with a heavy concentration on the years since the late 1720s. I will quote one example at some length, from 1738, but I repeat, this is one of a great many:

We have just had in this part of Hungary a scene of vampirism, which is duly attested by two officers of the tribunal of Belgrade, who went down to the places specified; and by an officer of the emperor’s troops at Graditz, who was an ocular witness of the proceedings.

In the beginning of September there died in the village of Kivsiloa, three leagues from Graditz, an old man who was sixty-two years of age. Three days after he had been buried, he appeared in the night to his son, and asked him for something to eat; the son having given him something, he ate and disappeared. The next day the son recounted to his neighbors what had happened. That night the father did not appear; but the following night he showed himself, and asked for something to eat. They know not whether the son gave him anything or not; but the next day he was found dead in his bed. On the same day, five or six persons fell suddenly ill in the village, and died one after the other in a few days.

The officer or bailiff of the place, when informed of what had happened, sent an account of it to the tribunal of Belgrade, which dispatched to the village two of these officers and an executioner to examine into this affair. The imperial officer from whom we have this account repaired thither from Graditz, to be witness of a circumstance which he had so often heard spoken of.

They opened the graves of those who had been dead six weeks. When they came to that of the old man, they found him with his eyes open, having a fine color, with natural respiration, nevertheless motionless as the dead; whence they concluded that he was most evidently a vampire. The executioner drove a stake into his heart; they then raised a pile and reduced the corpse to ashes. No mark of vampirism was found either on the corpse of the son or on the others.

Thanks be to God, we are by no means credulous. We avow that all the light which physics can throw on this fact discovers none of the causes of it. Nevertheless, we cannot refuse to believe that to be true which is juridically attested, and by persons of probity.

Calmet draws widely on local correspondents, who report for instance that

A little before, he says that in 1732 they discovered again some vampires in Hungary, Moravia, and Turkish Servia; that this phenomenon is too well averred for it to be doubted; that several German physicians have composed pretty thick volumes in Latin and German on this matter; that the Germanic Academies and Universities still resound with the names of Arnald Paul, of Stanoska, daughter of Sovitzo, and of the Heyducq Millo, all famous vampires of the quarter of Médreiga, in Hungary.

The Dissertations offers details of several such notorious cases:

About five years ago, a certain Heyducq, inhabitant of Madreiga, named Arnald Paul, was crushed to death by the fall of a wagonload of hay. Thirty days after his death four persons died suddenly, and in the same manner in which according to the tradition of the country, those die who are molested by vampires. They then remembered that this Arnald Paul had often related that in the environs of Cassovia, and on the frontiers of Turkish Servia, he had often been tormented by a Turkish vampire; for they believe also that those who have been passive vampires during life become active ones after their death, that is to say, that those who have been sucked suck also in their turn; but that he had found means to cure himself by eating earth from the grave of the vampire, and smearing himself with his blood; a precaution which, however, did not prevent him from becoming so after his death, since, on being exhumed forty days after his interment, they found on his corpse all the indications of an arch-vampire. His body was red, his hair, nails, and beard had all grown again, and his veins were replete with fluid blood, which flowed from all parts of his body upon the winding-sheet which encompassed him.

The hadnagi, or bailli of the village, in whose presence the exhumation took place, and who was skilled in vampirism, had, according to custom, a very sharp stake driven into the heart of the defunct Arnald Paul, and which pierced his body through and through, which made him, as they say, utter a frightful shriek, as if he had been alive: that done, they cut off his head, and burnt the whole body. After that they performed the same on the corpses of the four other persons who died of vampirism, fearing that they in their turn might cause the death of others.

All these performances, however, could not prevent the recommencement of these fatal prodigies towards the end of last year, that is to say, five years after, when several inhabitants of the same village perished miserably. In the space of three months, seventeen persons of different sexes and different ages died of vampirism; some without being ill, and others after languishing two or three days. It is reported, amongst other things, that a girl named Stanoska, daughter of the Heyducq Jotiützo, who went to bed in perfect health, awoke in the middle of the night all in a tremble, uttering terrible shrieks, and saying that the son of the Heyducq Millo who had been dead nine weeks, had nearly strangled her in her sleep. She fell into a languid state from that moment, and at the end of three days she died. What this girl had said of Millo’s son made him known at once for a vampire: he was exhumed, and found to be such. The principal people of the place, with the doctors and surgeons, examined how vampirism could have sprung up again after the precautions they had taken some years before.

They discovered at last, after much search, that the defunct Arnald Paul had killed not only the four persons of whom we have spoken, but also several oxen, of which the new vampires had eaten, and amongst others the son of Millo. Upon these indications they resolved to disinter all those who had died within a certain time, &c. Amongst forty, seventeen were found with all the most evident signs of vampirism; so they transfixed their hearts and cut off their heads also, and then cast their ashes into the river.

You don’t have to believe any of these reports as literal to accept that a real scare or panic was in progress. As more stories mounted, so people noting a wave of sudden deaths would leap to supernatural conclusions, and go exhuming the bodies of likely vampires. Meanwhile, people terrified of the danger were liable to emotional or mental collapse, and even death. Calmet spoke aptly of a “phanatisme epidemique” – mass hysteria is a close equivalent:

On examining the narrative of the death of the pretended martyrs of vampirism, I discover the symptoms of an epidemical fanaticism; and I see clearly that the impression made upon them by fear is the true cause of their being lost.

That is a sane, and quite realistic analysis.

Calmet’s dating of all this to the previous sixty years is interesting. That would take us back to the great Habsburg reconquest of the region in the 1680s, and the reoccupation of large sections of previously Ottoman territory. Religious relations were very sensitive, with Catholic and Orthodox living near each other, often with close memories of recent Muslim dominance. This might well have provided an unsettling context to tales surrounding sacred places, and overlapping folk-tales. Literally, these regions were liminal, borderlands, in multiple senses. But whatever the origins, the great vampire scare prevailed for some decades.

The good news for us today is that if we look at the wonderful resources offered by the Internet, there is some terrific seasonal reading waiting for us.

Some recent scholarship on the whole affair includes

Ciaran Craig, “Augustin Calmet and the Construction of the Eighteenth-Century Vampire,” Central European Yearbook 3(2021)

Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (Yale, 2018)

Gianfranco Manfredi, “Voltaire et les vampires,” Multitudes 33(2008), 91-99

Fernando Vidal, “Ghosts of the European Enlightenment,” in Mu-chou Poo, ed., Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions (Brill, 2009): 163–182

Also a great many books on vampires by my former Baylor colleague Gordon Melton, who might actually be a reincarnation of Augustin Calmet.

In the early fourth century, an emperor decided to convert to Christianity. The reasons why he did so are likely many—to establish his legacy as a world leader, to enhance the possibility of trade and patronage, to garner the support of a powerful god when he went into battle. Whatever the reasons, by the middle of the fourth century his initiative to infuse imperial power with a Christian cosmology was well underway. Coins were minted bearing both the emperor’s likeness and the symbols of Christian faith. Houses of worship were erected, being funded by the state. Monuments inscribed the emperor’s victory over the rival pagan rulers through the help of the Christian god. Bishops solemnly recognized the legitimate marriage of their religion, the religion of the crucified Messiah, and the imperial crown, praising the emperor as a servant of God and a protector of the Church.

But that emperor—the one who began the transformation of both empire and Church—was not the Caesar in Rome named Constantine. His name was Ezana (d. 360 CE), and he was the negus in Ethiopia.

Defending Constantine, Against My Better Judgment

I think Constantine gets a bad rap. Even as a I type it, that sentence gets stuck in my throat—or the throat of my brain. See, I’m inclined to the Anabaptist camp, spiritually speaking, when it comes to the marriage of Christianity and state power. I’m firmly anti-imperial in my politics and in my theology. I believe Jesus when he makes the distinction between the rulers of the Gentiles, who dominate and subject people, and his disciples, who live by serving (Matt. 20:25). I think the vision of John in Revelation, of beasts rising from the sea, should send shivers down the spines of any who dream of a military and economic power that would try to coopt the message of the slain Lamb. The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.

But I’m also a historian of Christianity. And I try to be a good one, which means I’m also firmly on the side of useful contrarianism. We historians are a lot of fun at parties.

So when I say Constantine gets a bad rap, what I mean is, I think it’s popular to blame Constantine as a uniquely bad actor in the Christian story, and the Church in his time as especially problematic for letting that sneaky empire slip in under the door of the Church. Constantine is the foil for many progressive or peace-tradition Christian metanarratives about everything that’s wrong with modern Christianity, especially on the Christian right. That story goes something like this:

“Prior to Constantine, Christianity was characterized by the radical counterculture of a Christian underclass. Christianity had a variety of theological approaches, and it was focused on social justice and equality, which is why the empire saw it as a threat to be neutralized. Earlier emperors attempted to neutralize the threat via persecution. Constantine decided the neutralize the threat through imperial favor and imposing rigid doctrinal agreement.” (Sometimes the Nicene Creed gets brought in here as the example par excellence of imperial overreach and forced conformity).

We don’t have to go too far to find these kinds of declension narratives. Such opinion was captured poignantly and asserted repeatedly in the work of the brilliant German historian Adolf von Harnack, who sought to distinguish between the simple, monotheistically grounded ethic of love Jesus taught and the later departure of philosophically-minded Christological creeds. For Harnack, Constantine represented the imposition of theological unity at the expense of Christ’s message about the kingdom of God and the brotherhood of man. On the question of why Christianity had not successfully taken up the cause of social reconstruction, Baptist minister and social gospel architect Walter Rauschenbusch wrote that the “dogmatic interest” of historical Christianity became a “deflecting influence.” Recovery of Jesus’s true message was hampered on all sides by this doctrinal obsession. “Since the second century, and especially since the great doctrinal controversies of the fourth century,” Rauschenbusch wrote, “dogma came to be regarded as the essence of Christianity…But when dogmatic and speculative questions absorbed the religious interest, less of it was left for moral and social questions.”1

More recently, progressive Protestants have echoed similar thoughts. One United Methodist elder writes that Constantine and his creed shifted “hope for liberation to life after death, but only if you believe and do what the empire approved church tells you to. In effect, the Nicene Creed functions as an Imperial Creed to further the imperial interest in order and stability based on unity of belief, and order is often in conflict with justice and liberation.”2 Episcopal priest Matthew Fox called the fourth century a “two-fold detour” from the essence of Christianity. In the first place, the Council of Nicaea called by Constantine moved the religion from persecuted sect to a crusading theo-political movement. Second, the post-Nicene era gave birth to Augustine and his Neo-Platonic dualism.3

The most recent iteration of this idea comes from Matthew Taylor in his new book, Defying Tyrants (Broadleaf, 2026). First, a caveat. I think there is a lot of good stuff in Taylor’s book. As I get to the latter sections, I find mysef in agreement on most of Taylor’s prescriptive claims about how best to live the way of Jesus. Yes to mutuality, anti-violence, an economy of sharing, and radical love of enemy. No to corrosive politics, high-control religious environments, glorification of militarism and wealth. I also think Taylor’s guidance that we need to account for the whole witness of the New Testament is so very important, but that sword (forgive me) cuts both ways.

Taylor clearly sees the rise of Constantine to power as a hinge-point in the development of Christianity, largely because Constantine accepted Christianity as a legitimate religion in the empire and adopted Christian symbols as talismans of conquest. All this came to a head with the Arian controversy and the Council of Nicaea. “So at the same moment the bishops and theologians of the early fourth century (the church fathers of that era) were staring down the theological threat posed by Arius, a Christian emperor threw a new possibility, a loaded gun on the debate table. Here, in the midst of a pitched theological skirmish, we are introduced to a powerful weapon in the theological arsenal: imperial enforcement of one orthodoxy. Was it worth going nuclear and ending the Roman toleration of many Christianities in order to rid the empire of Arianism?”

He concludes, “In the early fourth century, the serpent Constantine presented the bishops with a seductive offer: power over your enemies, the imperial vindication of orthodoxy. Like Eve and Adam (and the rest of us), the Nicene bishops fell for the devil’s corrupting promises. We got orthodoxy, but we bound it to empire.”

But it’s not at all clear from the sources that Constantine’s intent was to seduce the bishops with coercive power. That’s a modern interpolation. Taylor’s assessment of the fourth-century story raises a few questions—important questions for telling the story of Christianity aright. Taylor rightly notes that Constantine’s turn to Christianity wasn’t unique but paradigmatic. But if that’s so, it’s worth asking, What did Christianity mean in antiquity that made Constantine’s embrace of the religion make sense to Christians? Why didn’t anyone raise an eyebrow when the emperor started doling out favors? Why wasn’t there a prophetic outcry when the emperor stuck his “grubby hands” in the spiritual business of the church? That is, beyond persecution fatigue or cynical power grabs, was there something intuitive within the Christian religion of the ancient world that found expression in imperial acceptance? I think there was.

Another Perspective

If we begin with a different assumption than the Church’s capitulation to villainy, we can go to some interesting places. Let’s start with, say, the strategies of conversion in the first and second-century Christian contexts. Christianity developed in an ancient world that interpreted life through a network of social relations of power. In that context, many of the conversions we find in the Acts of the Apostles are what we would call “household conversions.” That is, if the householder—typically but not exclusively the paterfamilias—were to convert to the faith, it was taken for granted that those under the householder would follow suit. Cornelius the Roman centurion (Acts 10:2; 11:14), Lydia (Acts 16:15), the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:31), Crispus the synogogue official (Acts 18:8)—all instances of the house leader bringing their houses along with them in the act of conversion. So from the very beginning, the idea of inherited religious identity (“forced” conversion, but only anachronistically) was assumed on a small scale. It’s clear that household conversions were the prevailing paradigm, although it’s true many others converted out of their household religions, a potentially precarious situation to be sure. Karl Olav Sandnes outlines the inextricable bond between house religion and broader society.

In Antiquity social harmony was associated with people worshipping the same gods…There is a basic parallel between the sacra publica and the sacra privata. The fundamental assumption that the household is a city-state in microcosm means that domestic worship is seen in a political perspective. This is common thinking in Antiquity…What happens in the families may safeguard or endanger the harmony and well-being of the wider community. The main religious activity in Antiquity was therefore the family cult.4

The connection between the public and private in ancient religion is the ballgame. It’s one reason why Paul is so concerned about individual holiness. When he writes against the abuses of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, he singles out those who are not discerning the body, but his warning is to the collective: “If you (sing.) are hungry, eat at home, so that you (pl.) might not come together for condemnation” (1 Cor. 11:34). The piety of one member can affect the divine standing of the body. This too was built in as a culturally-embedded notion that could scale up from households to churches to cities to—empires?

Because group status could rise and fall with its members, it’s clear that early Christian communities saw some benefit—some social legitimation, even—in aiming for the conversion of socially respectable persons, be it on the private scale, the householder, or the public scale, the centurion or the synagogue official. Converts of high status could help facilitate broader cultural acceptance, as well as providing churches with important patrons who could help advance the work of the churches through social capital and material means. One must wonder if Paul had a bigger strategy than his own vindication in mind when appealing to Caesar in his arrest case, thereby evangelizing Roman Judean governors Antonius Felix and Porcius Festus, as well as Herod Agrippa II.

So too, any simple notions of Christian “anti-hierarchy” are complicated by the realities that a) Christian practices of enculturation meant that Christians were trying to adapt the teachings of Jesus to intricate webs of meaning and social values, and relatedly b) Christians in antiquity were by-and-large amenable to hierarchies of varying sorts, although their hiearchies didn’t map on to modern progressive ideas about race or gender. One need only look at the household codes, or the qualifications for bishops in 1 Tim. 3, to see that while New Testament Christians saw the inherent tensions and sought to reorient structures of authority and submission around a Christian ethic of love, they continued to see the necessity—the value, even—in acknowledging the real-world social distinctions represented in their communities. Heck, the very idea of bishops stands as evidence of this fact. Jesus was against domination. But what domination looks and feels like—what counts as domination as opposed to authority legitimately deployed—is largely negotiated in particular places and spaces according to group values. It’s a contested notion, which is why I think Taylor helpfully points us to those on the underside of power in Christian history, but it’s not settled with universal rubrics.

Praying for the Emperor

The New Testament churches developed in a sometimes-tenuous social situation, but they held out hope that their virtue would become evident in lives well-lived, and they sought the good will of those in authority over them. As such, the earliest Christians were instructed not to resist the emperor, but to pray for him and all other rulers. The letter of 1 Timothy, probably written at the end of the first century, admonished believers to offer “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made…for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Tim. 2:1-2). First Peter tells Christians to accept the authority of the emperor as supreme “for the Lord’s sake” and to “honor the emperor” (1 Pet. 2:13, 17). To sacrifice to the emperor, or to worship the emperor, would be a sin since only God was to be worshipped, but Christians were to pray for the emperor, especially since the earthly authorities were empowered by God to preserve order and justice. Early Christian apologists were clear in this distinction: the emperor is not God, but he is chosen by God to judge and enact laws for the public good. In his Apology, the African theologian Tertullian (d. 240) wrote that Christians prayed “for the safety of our princes to the eternal, the true, the living God, whose favor, beyond all others, [the princes] must themselves desire.” Tertullian wrote that Christians wanted the same things that all good Romans wanted; the only difference was that Christians knew the right direction to address these wants, and who ultimately enabled the emperor to secure such goods: “We pray for life prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish.”5

Even earlier, the bishop of Antioch, Theophilus, wrote against emperor worship, but promoted the notion that the emperor was a divine emissary: “You will say to me, ‘Why do you not worship the emperor?’ Because he was made not to be worshipped but to be honored with legitimate honor. He is not God but a man appointed by God not to be worshipped but to judge justly. For in a certain way he has been entrusted with stewardship from God.”6

George Karamanolis summarizes the situation of the first three centuries aptly: Christian intellectuals

accept and largely approve of the current political establishment and the political norms of their society, despite their pagan character…[they are] unanimous in their political integration in pagan society and in their approval of the authority of the Roman emperor and of the political norms of pagan society, such as laws. They justify that approval by claiming that the Roman emperor is appointed by God.7

What about persecution? Sometimes it was contextually beneficial to claim space between the Church and the state, such that if and when Christians were persecuted, that was just empire doing “empire things” (see, e.g. the book of Revelation).

But many other times, it was useful to point out persecution was precisely a failure of the empire in that the emperor’s job was to ensure order. In sum, early Christians argued that 1) they were peresecuted unjustly, since they were virtuous and loyal subjects. Persecution was a miscarriage of justice and brought unnecessary disorder; 2) it was right to appeal to the imperial power, since the emperor was chosen by God to uphold social order and enact justice.

Given these two interlocking notions, it makes perfect sense that Christian bishops in the fourth century saw Constantine as the answer to their centuries-long prayers for an emperor who would rectify these injustices and facilitate a society where Christians could live peacefully. Even more so, these twin concepts help explain why Constantine might have felt it necessary to intercede in the Alexandrian conflicts between Arius and Alexander. Taylor writes that Christian bishops knew Arius’s “ideas were deeply unorthodox and also startlingly popular.” What he doesn’t tell you is that that popularity emerged in a fractious Alexandria, and that social unrest was simmering in the city. It wasn’t at all uncommon for religious disagreements to issue in riots. Such social disorder could create all kinds of problems, not the least of which was mob violence.

Previous emperors might have marched troops into the city to make arrests and quell disorder with a strong hand. But Constantine had already taken persecution off the table. If policing was an unattractive option to Constantine, what other means was there? Constantine tried diplomacy first, writing to both Arius and Alexander that this silly little quibble amounted to a philosophical spat but no true heresy. They should shake hands and agree to disagree. When that failed, a conciliar decision—unprecedented, to be sure—offered an opportunity at resolution through consensus rather than imperial fiat.

Okay. Absolutely, the Nicene council had its fair share of political machinations. But were these bishops “getting in bed with the emperor”? Or were they doing what Christians had been praying about for centuries up to that point—honoring and submitting to an emperor who, in their eyes, was doing his God-given duty, aiming not simply or even primarily for religious unity but for social order so that Christians could live peaceable lives? I think that’s a live debate.

Converting Kings

Beginning in the 3rd century, Christian imaginations were aflutter with the possibility of converting kings. The Syriac text, the Acts of Thomas (c. 210), told the story of Jesus’s disciple, Thomas, being sold into slavery by Jesus to the king, Gudnaphar. According to the legend, Thomas (also called Judas) had been comissioned to take the gospel to India. Thomas was sold to Gudnaphar to build the king a new palace. The king left Thomas with a large sum of money which he (of course) used to feed the poor and heal the sick. This was the “palace” that Thomas built for the king, an eternal, immaterial palace of salvation that king Gudnaphar ultimately receieved through baptism.

Around the time the Acts of Thomas was being written, King Agbar VIII of Edessa converted to Christianity, establishing Christianity as the state religion of the small Roman client-kingdom of Osroene in modern-day Turkey. Edessa became an important center of Christian theology, and legends circulated that an earlier King Agbar had become a disciple of Jesus when Jesus sent him a letter and an image of Christ’s face that had the power to heal the king’s ailment. Just under a century after Agbar VIII’s conversion, and to the northeast, in 301, the king of Armenia, Tiradates, established Christianity as the state religion of his kingdom. I’ve already mentioned the Ethiopian king Ezana’s Christianization of the kingdom of Aksum right at the time of Constantine. Clearly, something was in the fourth-century waters.

Now, it’s worth saying that each of these kingdoms likely converted for a complex of reasons personal, social and geopolitical. There were likely more than (or less than?) interior spiritual aims at play. But it would be a mistake to assume purely cynical or nefarious motives in these cases. If we know anything about conversion in antiquity, it’s that individuals and groups converted for all kinds of reasons: miraculous healing, social advantage, the chance to establish new kinship groups, inclusion in a household, the death of a loved one, divine protection, etc. Which is to say, the notion of a pure conversion, in the sense of a religious conversion untouched by material influences or unmediated by one’s social world, is a nonstarter. In the words of Andrew Walls, the “Jesus Act” is part of the drama of human life.

Two Concerns and a Hope

I think Taylor and I would find much to agree on. In fact, we do. My fear is that the real stuff of Christianity is too often blended into an inconspicuous paste, giving us tasty and easily digestible answers to why Christians in the past don’t behave the way we think they should’ve, especially when it can serve as grist for our modern political mill.

Taylor writes that “Constantine exposed our congenital condition as Christians: We are drawn to easy solutions and power over our enemies, even though Jesus explicitly taught us to be patient, to love our enemies, and to give up power.” Indeed. But if the allure of hierarchy is in its power to bring people in line, the allure of idealism lies in its power to ignore or deride people who don’t meet our standards. Fewer solutions are easier than that. I found myself asking, who is this book for? A concern I have is that the histories presented in books like Defying Tyrants do little to complicate our preconceived notions of the past. The cast of heroes and villains is familiar—and that’s not always a good thing. Another concern of mine is progressive Christians, my “team,” will eagerly deploy the good warnings here as a way to stir conversations in their own subgroups without turning in love to their church members, community members, and family members. Is Taylor’s notion of Christian antichrists ammunition for further polarization? I hope not, and I don’t think Taylor would want it that way. But moral indignation and self-righteousness feel the same way sometimes. I speak from experience.

But the question still remains: how ought Christians respond to the prospect of public executions? And for historians, how does Hegseth’s eager promotion of a spectacle execution recall some of our nation’s darkest moral instincts? To think through this, I wanted to talk to someone whose research speaks to the intersection of Christian ethics and historical memory. Malcolm Foley is a pastor, theologian, and historian who writes about Black Christian responses to lynching in the early 20th century. He is the author of The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward.

Buy The Anti-Greed Gospel.

“Four Wrongs of a Public Execution” by Timothy Snyder

“Why Nidal Hasan’s Execution Demands A Public Witness” by Andrew Walker

“Public Execution Proposal of Fort Hood Shooter Divides Christians” by Steve Mollman

When Jimmy Carter hosted a small gathering of supporters and media at his home to announce his presidential candidacy, one person asked him if he was a born again evangelical. He confirmed that description and elaborated on the significance of what that meant to him. In the wake of Nixon’s Watergate Scandal, the public needed a President like Carter—an unassuming Georgia peanut farmer and moral Christian. Of course, he was more than that. He had served in the Navy as an officer on a nuclear sub and more recently served as Governor of Georgia. However, he differentiated himself from the field of candidates by doubling down on his evangelical spirituality. His evangelical identity became the signal characteristic he wanted potential supporters to remember. The media immediately picked up on this theme in his candidacy, and they scurried to pull together the consequences of that part of his platform.

Fifty years ago on October 25, 1976, Kenneth Woodward published a cover article for Newsweek entitled “Born Again! The Evangelicals.” While the piece helped people understand what it meant for presidential candidate Jimmy Carter to be an evangelical, it did more to publicize this curious American subculture of evangelicals and extend the reach of their influence in the public square. The article contributed to putting these people and their interests into the field of contest for the presidential election.

Woodward noted the peculiar evangelical spirit of the 1976 election cycle. Both presidential candidates, Carter and Ford, had tailored their candidacies around their evangelical connections. Ford’s bid to court evangelicals emphasized his son’s studies at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. His hopes to curry their favor were then furthered when he earned a covenanted endorsement from W. A. Criswell, pastor of what many have called the SBC’s flagship church, First Dallas. Woodward pointed out that regardless of which candidate became elected in two weeks, the fact remained that this election cycle brought “national attention on the most significant—and overlooked—religious phenomenon of the ‘70s: the emergence of evangelical Christianity into a position of respect and power.”^[1]

Woodward cited survey data from George Gallup’s organization throughout his article to provide figures related to the values and numbers of evangelicals in America. According to Gallup, evangelicals made up a voting bloc of 50 million voters. They were people who believed in a subjective, personal conversion experience, and they looked to the bible as fully inspired and their final authority. While evangelicals long had been considered the silent majority by their spokespersons, Gallup asserted that this election cycle made it apparent that 1976 can be considered “the year of the evangelical.”

Just days before the Newsweek cover article, David Kucharsky’s article, “The Year of the Evangelical ’76” was published in Christianity Today’s landmark twentieth anniversary edition. While covering similar material to Woodward, Kucharsky highlighted the correspondence of the year of the evangelical to America’s bicentennial, pointing out that “the evangelical ethos was never far from the heart of the American experience . . . and the two-hundredth anniversary of the nation has underscored their presence.”^[2]

I think we should linger on that for a moment, and consider what this assertion now means 50 years later—what was significant about “the year of the evangelical” in relation to the bicentennial, what is significant about our evangelical moment in 2026, and the uncanny tethering of evangelical destiny to the destiny of our nation at 250 years?

Evangelicals and Politics

During Carter’s 1976 candidacy, it would have been natural to expect that he would have augmented his evangelical bona fides with an affiliation to one of the most influential evangelical spokespersons, Billy Graham. However, Graham’s credibility had been sorely tarnished by his close association with the disgraced President Nixon. Nixon had devastated the Graham brand, and Graham needed to rehabilitate his brand image with evangelicals. Rather than wage into the fray of domestic politics, Graham prudently turned his attention to global revival, a tactic that restored people’s confidence in him.

Rising star televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson entered into the spiritual vacuum that Graham’s political retreat left. Carter would reluctantly court these new spokespersons of evangelical values to get the word out that he, too, was one of them. However, for the most part Carter rested on the laurels of his own private spirituality to vindicate his claim to be a righteous presidential candidate.

Much like what had happened with the symbiotic relationships between Graham and Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, these new evangelical spokespersons would leverage their substantial social and cultural capital with the evangelical voter bloc to enhance their influence in the public square among political hopefuls while also using those networks to enlarge their influence among their evangelical constituencies. In the ensuing decades, everyday evangelicals and evangelical spokespersons experienced enhanced public power and influence in multiple spheres. Their newly accrued power and influence proved two things about evangelicals: their newfound power was intoxicating and it gave the evangelical subculture a sense of hegemonic entitlement. These ascendant evangelicals believed they deserved a central place of power and privilege within the American system.

If I were to get into all the details of how this looked in the 1980s and 90s, I would take away the punch of my forthcoming book, Our God Is an Awesome Brand, and I would also end up with a far too long column. I will exercise editorial liberty by skipping to the near present and asserting that the intoxicating power and privileged entitlement of evangelicals led to Trump and MAGA in 2016. The tethering of evangelicalism to both political power and market-oriented capitalism has led to an irreconcilable tension.

Paris and CT Burn

Fifty years after “the year of the evangelical”, Paris is on fire and so is Christianity Today magazine. Global national populism’s rise against global social democracy has caused a chaotic clash of ideologies in intensely secularized spaces. France first became a secular country by virtue of the French revolution, and it has always prided itself in this quintessential feature of its identity. France is perhaps the single best context and test case for which will win out, social democracy or national populism. As we watch France burn, we should wonder: what will emerge from its ashes? Edmund Burke in England pondered such things in the wake of the early birth pangs of the French Revolution while Mary Wolstonecraft hurried across the channel to midwife a new french republic.

US’s history is a different version of this story. France’s revolution occurred in the context of enlightened anti-clericalism against Catholicism. Perhaps the failure of the Reformation to influence France inevitably paved the way to the French revolution. Converse to this, the American revolution occurred in the wake of a spiritual awakening in the British colonies, which had reverberated into fresh manifestations of awakening as an immediate precursor to the American revolution. Perhaps the success of Puritanism’s errand into the wilderness inevitably led to the political, commercial, and military superiority of revolutionaries against their imperial head, Britain. The glorious cause of revolution in America birthed a righteous early republic that tethered Christianity with liberal democracy and market-oriented capitalism. This trifecta proved to be a stabilizing force across much of American history, up to the decade prior to its 250^th anniversary, when America’s version of national populism, MAGA, came onto the scene and shocked the nation.

The convenient relationship between evangelicals and an establishment liberal democracy, whether the Bush dynasty variety from the right or the Clinton dynasty variety from the left, had now been upset by the zeitgeist of racial capitalism, corporatism, and muscular patriarchy—all signature qualities of national populism. American evangelical meritocracy had now been eclipsed by Christian nationalist plutocracy, and you had to make fast friends with the plutocrats to get your share of the nationalistic benefits. Many evangelicals quickly got in bed with MAGA and have temporarily benefited with that unholy alliance. It will eventuate in them being jettisoned once they’ve outlived their national usefulness, as has been the historic case for every religious group that has hitched its hope of survival with every variety of ascendant totalitarianism.

On the other hand, some evangelical parties stubbornly refused to be party with MAGA power. Christianity Today Magazine (CT) has attempted to be one of those neutral institutions, but it too has become a test ground for what happens when the polarizing ideologies of social democracy and national populism and their spiritual corollaries liberalism and fundamentalism collide and conflict. It seems that evangelicalism itself and its flagship institution are no longer sturdy enough to stand in the gap, as the centrist power, and mediate this conflict. And now while Paris burns, so does CT. Why?

The Birth and Death of CT

When the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was born in 1942, Harold Ockenga argued that the third motivation for the existence of the NAE was to develop a strong public relations between conservative Christians and the broader American culture. He argued:

“It is time for us to reach into the rural areas of America with a unified evangelistic program. It is time to have magazines with a 2-million circulation instead of a 40 or 50 thousand, as the largest evangelical publications have today.”^[3] A number of periodicals attempted to occupy that space and Our God Is an Awesome Brand gets into that story. However, CT ultimately filled that role in October of 1956. Yes. This month also marks 70 years of CT.

When Carl F. H. Henry, L. Nelson Bell, and Marcellus Kik hatched the notion of creating a nationwide fortnightly to provide nourishing evangelical theology to pastors, they planned to have it located in Washington D. C. for a reason. They were writing to benefit pastors and to benefit our nation. They wanted to benefit both spheres, and they wanted it to be a transatlantic endeavor for their Anglo-British allies as well. To execute this task, it was critical for them to build a national network of noteworthy contributing editors who simultaneously would enhance the evangelical brand and the CT brand.

The quality of each contributing editor was of immense significance to this trio. While it’s a tad bit of an aside, the brief tale of their failure to capture a big fish on the other side of the Atlantic serves to illustrate this point. You have no idea how disappointing it was for Henry that he failed to get C. S. Lewis to sign on as an editorial board member and contributor. Henry and Bell repeatedly commiserated about this loss in their early correspondence. It’s also noteworthy how adamant Lewis was with not wishing to associate himself with Henry’s project. Purportedly, he told a mutual between him and Henry, Goodwin Hudson: “You may as well ask me to dance in a ballet, or to bowl for England.”^[4] In Lewis’s letter to Henry dated September 28, 1955, he wished the CT project well but sent his regrets because he did not think he was “at all likely to write more directly theological pieces.”^[5] Henry’s disappointment is palpable when he wrote Bell in early November and said: “C. S. Lewis is definitely out” and in late November he lamented, “I wanted C. S. Lewis if we could get him.”^[6] His disappointment was likely driven by the missed out symbolic and cultural capital that Lewis’s name would have brought to enhance evangelical brand power and particularly CT’s brand power.

When we turn to one of the first marketing pieces Henry drafted for the enterprise, we see clearly the publicity techniques Henry employed to engineer this project. After explaining the function and place of evangelicalism in the modern landscape, Henry announced the coming of CT, and he described the operation as:

A competent, carefully selected staff of editors is directing the project. A large group of contributing editors and correspondents from all over the world has been secured. CHRISTIANITY TODAY specifically aims to present Christian truth in a clear, scholarly way and to show its power and pertinence for every area of life….An initial circulation of at least 200,000 is assured. By this outreach to Protestant ministers and to intellectually-alert laymen, a vital emphasis on Christian truth may be renewed on many fronts in this critical hour of national and world history.^[7]

Henry knew that CT would thrive by attracting well regarded pastors and scholars, who would make up a nationwide network that would enhance and enlarge the audience of the evangelical brand. When its first marketing piece did land in laymen’s mailboxes, the piece’s purpose was to enlist laymen to sponsor the subscriptions of the magazine’s target audience, pastors. The marketing piece recounted that “A group of evangelical laymen and ministers has started a project which should give direction and depth to this revival of religious interest. The project: an evangelical magazine designed for the ministry.” The marketing piece then later assured readers that “the staff salaries and office expenses have been underwritten by generous friends.”^[8] Large individual gifts from stakeholders as well as grants from foundations continued to offset the operational budget throughout the magazine’s history.

Seventy years later much has changed. With the advent of digital web presence, the place that CT once filled as a resource to pastors has been replaced with online platforms like Desiring God (DG) and The Gospel Coalition (TGC), whose readership dwarfs CT’s traffic by two to four-fold. As that phenomenon emerged, CT rightly leaned in on its stable of global news reporting, which became its differentiating competitive advantage. It seems that CT has been in turmoil over its identity since the rise of its alternatives, DG and TGC.

While continuing to build a stable of opinion editorials and thought pieces from pastors and influencers, CT has also tried to scale its news reporting globally and expand its multimedia resources, such as its successful podcast from Mike Cosper, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Many financial burdens were absorbed with these various experiments, including its 2025 brand and magazine refresh and its recent CT application.

The ebb and flow of the left or right leaning tendency of CT’s DNA has also impacted its readership and polarized it. As it has cycled through reporters, editors, and thought leading columnists—there has been a network effect. All those workers have their networks, and loyal readers see, feel, and hear when their friends have been mistreated by a mismanaged organization which is representative of an evangelical world that according to Beth Barr “wants affirmation of their goodness over truth-telling and historical critique.”

Celebrity also has proven to be a double-headed hydra in evangelical spaces. A personality can both enhance or damage a brand, depending upon its public or private behavior, just as we saw earlier with the Nixon and Graham illustration. Today this process is accelerated and amplified by the power of social capital on social media. Mobs of people can build and tear down the platform and celebrity of a personality or brand overnight, and media is harnessed to accomplish this task. Just as an institution can be built through the cooperative effort of a nationwide network of likeminded workers, an organization can slowly burn to the ground as its network becomes mismanaged, fragments, and revolts against it.

Let’s merely perform an autopsy on news related to CT during the past week. All while Paris burned, CT burned. Recent revelations related to financial trouble and leadership turnover at the flagship evangelical magazine led Ruth Graham to report in the New York Times on the latest series of staff cuts and sources behind the organization’s turmoil. This was followed by a series of Substack pieces from former CT staff. Bonnie Kristian shared why she left CT and provided greater detail concerning the C-suite overreach into the editorial side of the organization, including the recent squabble over the Lucy S. R. Austen piece on Elisabeth Elliot. Daniel Silliman wrote a piece where he processed his feelings regarding the slow death of the organization. Katelyn Beaty built on Graham’s piece by providing some insight on the gender dynamics of the situation and reminding us that news is a mirror. Contributors like Alan Noble talked about the valuable role CT has played for centrist evangelicalism. And it’s most recent executive editor, Marvin Olasky, announced what was next for him by creating a Substack featuring a dog picture and posting on the next stage of his writing.

These personalities are merely the most recent examples of the scores of disillusioned staff that have walked away or been pushed out of CT since 2016. Since these are all very talented folks, they will land on their feet, but their stories travel with them. Those who pay closer attention to CT’s going ons and have experienced its tendency to marginalize some while amplifying others recognize that CT on fire has been a slow burn from over a decade of mismanagement. It all points to the death throes of evangelicalism, the early signs of which were the rise of MAGA and election of Trump in 2016 and the death of Billy Graham in 2018.

^[1] Kenneth Woodward, “Born Again! The Evangelicals” in Newsweek, October 25, 1976, 68.

^[2] David Kucharsky, “The Year of the Evangelical ’76,” Christianity Today, October 22, 1976, 13.

^[3] Harold J. Ockenga, “The Unvoiced Multitude” in Evangelical Action, 36.

^[4] Letter from Henry to Bell, November 1, 1955. Carl Henry Papers. Box 1955, Christianity Today. Folder “1955 – Christianity Today – Correspondence – November.”

^[5] Hooper, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3, 707.

^[6] Letter from Henry to Bell, November 1, 1955 and November 30, 1955. Carl Henry Papers. Box 1955, Christianity Today. Folder “1955 – Christianity Today – Correspondence – November.”

^[7] Draft Statement for Laymen. Carl Henry Papers. Box 1955, Christianity Today. Folder “1955 – Christianity Today – Correspondence – November.”

^[8] “A New Evangelical Venture” in Carl Henry Papers. Box 1955, Christianity Today. Folder “1955 – Christianity Today – Origin/CT.”

By way of definition, folk horror is grounded in the idea that potent ancient forces and deep-rooted evils survive in the landscape, scarcely acknowledged by the modern world. In isolated communities, active witches or pagan groups mobilize those dark forces, deploying rituals dating from pre-Christian times. The booming scholarly literature on that topic has a heavy British emphasis, but what we often miss is just how specific the material is within that nation, and how much of it is neither British nor English, but Scottish. Scotland, in fact, has done a huge amount to condition modern views of the weird, the occult, and the supernatural. – and specifically of much of what we know about witchcraft and paganism, which is what I am concentrating on in my present blogs.

It Came From Outer Scotland

Among the founding texts of folk horror was the 1973 film of The Wicker Man, which concerns a lethal pagan cult on a Hebridean island, which stands off the Scottish coast. But that is only one small part of the story. Scotland gave us Robert Kirk, a major source for later interpretations of fairies and witch-cults (which I discussed at length in my last post). Scotland also supplied John Buchan, one of the most prolific and influential folk horror writers of the early twentieth century, whose 1927 title Witch Wood is the pioneering full-length novel in the genre. The same small country also gave us Sir James Frazer, whose book The Golden Bough (1890-1915) laid out the full modern mythology of the supposed pagan world of fertility cults and human sacrifices. Folklorist David MacRitchie popularized the weird and wonderful idea that ancient dwarf races literally lived in the margins of modern society, where they were described by such names as elves and fairies. And there were lots more - multiple other key titles and authors, including James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson.

In a sense, Scotland actually invented the “weird.” The original Anglo-Saxon word “wyrd” implied fate or destiny, and it long retained that meaning in English, with no sense of the occult or witchy. Matters changed when Shakespeare’s Macbeth introduced the Three Witches, also the Fates, who control that destiny. Hence, they were the “weird sisters,” and the link between weird and supernatural or eerie was firmly established (although some early versions of the play have it as “wayward sisters”). From that usage in The Scottish Play, we find regular later uses of weird in the context of ghosts and the Gothic, and ultimately, of Weird Tales.

In this blog post, I will discuss “weird” pieces by three key authors, namely Robert Burns, James Hogg, and William Bell Scott.

Why Scotland?

It all starts with witches. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British and European scholars fervently investigated ancient folk beliefs and customs, in the hope that they might thereby dig up the relics of an ancient paganism. But what must strike us about the British Isles is how much of what we might expect in such matters came specifically from Scotland. It was Scotland that did a far better job of keeping old seasonal festivals, like Halloween, but above all, they cherished witchcraft lore in a way that the English certainly did not.

Although England had its shameful history of witch persecutions, these normally involved accusations against individual suspects who reputedly acted in ones and twos. Scotland however produced a far greater number of cases, which reputedly involved organized covens engaged in the ritual worship of Satan, commonly at large gatherings, at which literal demons (or fairies) were in attendance. That national difference reflected the use of systematic torture in the Scottish context, which forced suspects to confess to outlandish charges as they were presented to them. Scottish witch trials thus involved florid charges and confessions, on the lines of French and German cases, which the English emphatically did not. Scotland did not execute its last witch until 1727.

We now have an excellent Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, which attempts to compile all the known cases. In recent years too, the commemoration and vindication of those accused witches has become a significant feminist cause in Scotland, and memorials are proliferating.

Those lethal persecutions generated a sizable literature, which in 1830 became easily available through the comprehensive Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft by Sir Walter Scott, who summarized a vast trove of early writing and judicial records. In terms of writing horror or weird literature, that coven idea obviously has vastly more potential than the image of one very poor and elderly village woman, which is the English model.

Inventing the Witch Cult

I have already described the truly strange case of Isobel Gowdie, who in 1662 confessed to an incredible array of witchcraft misdeeds, apparently without torture. Her case had a phenomenal influence on the later development of writing on the subject.

It is those Scottish aspects that provided so much of the evidence assembled by Margaret Murray, who made extensive use of Isobel Gowdie, and she assumed that her confessions were sincere and genuine. Murray’s 1921 book The Witch Cult in Western Europe outlined the (totally incorrect!) theory that early modern witchcraft was a survival of ancient paganism. That idea exercised its baneful influence through the 1970s, and it largely shaped modern understandings of witchcraft. (Murray, by the way, had distant Scottish ancestry, but in no sense identified thus). Those ideas also totally formed modern neo-pagan and Wicca traditions.

Americans are used to the idea that all their cultural ideas of witchcraft ultimately track back to Salem. All British ideas of witchcraft, as they have existed over the past century or so, track back to Scotland. That includes all English ideas: most modern ideas of witchcraft represent Scottish cultural imperialism at its most egregious!

Tam O’Shanter

Scotland made other vital contributions, producing abundant materials on which fictional authors could draw so freely. As fears of real-life witchcraft subsided, Scotland’s romantic and antiquarian writers explored early sources for their literary potential, which represented local color rather than any element of horror. Those tales even offered opportunities to explore subversive challenges to respectable society and its gender roles, and especially to challenge the staid and hypocritical state church, the powerful Kirk.

I will mention a poem that, in its day, was one of the best-loved pieces of verse in English: Robert Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter” (1791). Now, this is emphatically not folk horror – it is far too funny to be considered horror in any sense – but it perfectly demonstrates the difference between English and Scottish perceptions, as they existed at that point. You can find the poem full text in many places.

Burns himself had a lifelong interest in the otherworldly, an interest he attributed to a maid employed by his mother, who “had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions … and other trumpery.” She obviously told many stories, and he listened attentively.

“Tam O’Shanter” describes a drunken traveler going home from the pub, where he encounters a classic Sabbat, with all the macabre features accumulated in witchcraft lore over the previous three centuries. And the Devil is there in person:

Warlocks and witches in a dance;

Nae cotillion brent-new frae France,

But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels

Put life and mettle in their heels.

A winnock bunker in the east,

There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast:

A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,

To gie them music was his charge;

He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,

Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl.—

Coffins stood round like open presses,

That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses;

And by some devilish cantraip sleight

Each in its cauld hand held a light,

By which heroic Tam was able

To note upon the haly table

A murderer’s banes in gibbet airns;

Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns;

A thief, new-cutted frae the rape—

Wi’ his last gasp his gab did gape;

Five tomahawks, wi’ blude red-rusted;

Five scimitars, wi’ murder crusted;

A garter, which a babe had strangled;

A knife, a father’s throat had mangled,

Whom his ain son o’ life bereft—

The grey hairs yet stack to the heft;

Wi’ mair o’ horrible and awfu’,

Which ev’n to name wad be unlawfu’.

Although Tam is terrified, he shouts his praise of one witch dancer, a “winsom wench” who wears a short shift or underskirt, a cutty-sark. Hence his yell, “Weel done, Cutty-sark!” The witches chase him home, but he does escape. We are left to debate how much of what had happened was reality, and how much stemmed from a wildly drunken imagination.

The point here is that Burns is thoroughly enjoying all the classic images of Scottish witchcraft – the organized groups, the covens, the ritual gatherings, and their connection to Satan. However, that is totally standard in modern ideas of witchcraft; at the time, it would have meant nothing in English folklore or traditional storytelling. That is just not what witches did. After Margaret Murray had done her work, that is what English writers came to imagine about their own history, and that Scottish importation has left its mark to the present day.

The Witches of Traquair

As I say, that is one example I could choose out of a great many. Burns’s poem “Halloween” was likewise immensely popular, with its detailed description of country people’s celebrations with their folk magic and divination rituals. As I will discuss in a later post, this work had a huge impact on the American founders of popular folklore studies, notably John Greenleaf Whittier.

Very prominently, there was also James Hogg, about whose poem “The Witch of Fife” I have already posted at this site. But Hogg published widely, and one of his greatest achievements was the collection of stories and sketches that appeared in the two volumes of The Shepherd’s Calendar (1829). These stories are a goldmine for vernacular belief and folk tales, and for the supernatural worlds which ordinary rural Scots lived in Hogg’s youth. A couple of stories in particular are supernatural/horror classics, with strong themes of possession, fairies and changelings, and strange otherworldly beings, variously kelpies or brownies. Being Hogg, he usually leaves it open to the reader to figure out exactly what might or might not be supernatural, and what exactly is happening.

The best-known stories in this vein are “Mary Burnet” and “The Brownie of the Black Haggs.” You can find these or others in full text at the links I supply here. But for witchcraft, the great story is “The Witches of Traquair,” which is set in the Scottish Borders of the mid-sixteenth century. Briefly, it tells the story of young Colin Hyslop, who falls into despair and is determined to join the witch cult, complete with a pact with the Devil. Throughout, Hogg puts himself into Colin’s mind, and reproduces what would plausibly have been the belief system of a man of that time. Colin lives in a society obsessed with the threat of witchcraft:

Traquair was a terrible place then! There was a witch almost in every hamlet, and a warlock here and there besides. There were no fewer than twelve witches in one straggling hamlet, called Taniel Burn, and five in Kirk Row. What a desperate place Traquair had been in those days!

The Devil took full advantage of the fluid religious situation, on the eve of the Reformation:

The making witches and warlocks, and holding nocturnal revels with them, where every sort of devilry was exercised, was at that time with him a favourite plan. It was also favourably received by the meaner sort of the populace. Witches gloried in their power, and warlocks in their foreknowledge of events, and the energies of their master. Women, beyond a certain age, when the pleasures and hopes of youth delighted no more, flew to an intercourse with the unseen powers, as affording an excitement of a higher and more terrible nature; and men, whose tempers had been soured by disappointment and ill usage, betook themselves to the Prince of the Power of the Air, enlisting under his banner, in hopes of obtaining revenge on their oppressors, or those against whom they had conceived displeasure.

Colin is rescued by two creatures who are themselves pure folklore creations, vestiges of the old pagan belief system, namely a couple of blessed ladies who are “clothed in white, with garlands on their heads,” and who manifest in the form of deer. They converse with him at “a fairy knowe, on the top of the Feathen Hill,” so presumably these are themselves blessed fairies or sidhe, about whom I also posted recently. Hogg, through his obtuse narrator, affects to believe that actually they must have been Catholic saints. Um, sure, the kind of saints who hang out on fairy rings and hills, and who appear in the form of sacred deer … right!

Furious at the rescue, the Devil arranges for him to be seized and tried as a warlock, and a burning is imminent. He is saved only when his beloved convinces the court that the holy woman who intervened was actually the Virgin Mary, which leads them to value him as something like a saint.

Like I say, the whole collection demands to be read.

The Witches Go To Market

In a somewhat later era, the fine Scottish artist and poet William Bell Scott did a rollicking poem called “The Witch’s Ballad” (1875), which you can find easily online. It recalls Hogg’s “The Witch of Fife” in portraying witches as hedonists who raise hell in the figurative sense as much as the literal. The story tells how a group of four young witches assault a staid Scottish town, initially by posing as well-dressed regular women. Soon, however, they lead the locals into a wild dance:

Without a choice, against their will,

Doited, dazed, against their will,
The market lassie and her mither,
The farmer and his husbandman,
Hand in hand dance a’ thegither.

Slow at first, but faster soon,
Still increasing, wild and fast,
Hoods and mantles, hats and hose,
Blindly doff’d and cast away,
Left them naked, heads and toes.

They would have torn us limb from limb,
Dainty limb from dainty limb;
But never one of them could win
Across the line that I had drawn
With bleeding thumb a-widdershin.

I love this contemporary illustration of the story by Scott’s lover, Alice Boyd, who was in her own right a Scottish laird. (Scott and Boyd were part of a ménage à trois with his wife, but that is another story). Is that not a startling contrast to the customary depictions of witches in earlier eras? We have come a very long way from Macbeth.

The four witches then turn their attention to seducing the town’s most respectable men, the lawyer, the innkeeper, the priest, and the provost’s son.

Although the weird women are at first thwarted, they will soon be back to conquer the whole town through marriage:

And we’ll gang once more to yon town,
Wi’ better luck to yon town;
We’ll walk in silk and cramoisie,
And I shall wed the provost’s son
My lady of the town I’ll be!

For I was born a crown’d king’s child,
Born and nursed a king’s child,
King o’ a land ayont the sea,
Where the Blackamoor kiss’d me first,
And taught me art and glamourie.

Each one in her wame shall hide
Her hairy mouse, her wary mouse,
Fed on madwort and agramie,—
Wear amber beads between her breasts,
And blind-worm’s skin about her knee.

The Lombard shall be Elspie’s man,
Elspie’s gowden husband-man;
Nort shall take the lawyer’s hand;
The priest shall swear another vow:
We’ll dance again the saraband.

Cutty Sark

Remember I said that “Tam O’Shanter” was very well known, and cherished? How can I prove that? Well, in the 1860s, the British devised an amazing new sailing ship, a tea clipper, intended for very rapid trips to Asia. In its day, it was a technological marvel, and it was speedy, elegant and, well, witchy, and it is still a popular tourist attraction in Greenwich. So what else could you call it but the Cutty Sark?

Even seventy years after the poem appeared, you didn’t need to explain the reference, or the witch it was named for. Everybody knew “Tam O’Shanter,” sabbats and all.

In terms of background, the serious literature on Scottish witchcraft is enormous, but here I will just highlight a special issue of the magazine The Bottle Imp, which includes an enjoyable piece by the leading scholar Julian Goodare on fantasy and humor in Scottish witchcraft. As he concludes, “Before 1590, and again from 1720 onwards, witchcraft could be entertaining. Between those two dates, though, the anger, fear and hatred generated by witch-hunting took precedence. About two and a half thousand people died at the stake, and it wasn’t funny.”

From a great many possible titles to cite here, see for example Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà, eds., Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Growing up, one of my mother’s favorite movies was Wayne’s World. If you haven’t seen it, the movie is an extended Saturday Night Live skit, featuring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as rock-loving, local television hosts who make it big; hijinks ensue. While it definitely has not aged well, there are still some ‘excellent’ moments, and I loved watching it as a kid.

It is probably important to mention at this juncture that my mother was also the worship leader at our local Pentecostal Holiness church! Suffice it to say, our family had converted to the Pentecostal Holiness world, but our sanctification had yet to fully take hold.

The Beginning of the Golden Era

At the same time, the Pentecostal world we converted into was not the same one of previous decades. Of course, there were still misgivings about ‘Hellywood.’ Throughout the 1990s, conservative Christian communities experienced regular rounds of Satanic panic, media bans, and concern over specific movies or franchises—shoutout to all my friends who snuck their Harry Potter books home from the library!

However, the wholesale dismissal of moving pictures as a medium was a thing of the past. By the 1990s, conservative evangelicals had successfully created their own media ecosystem and were riding atop a wave of direct-to-video productions and media franchises. Organizations like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family or Forrest S. Baker’s Feature Films for Families were producing and distributing faith-friendly entertainment into a major market niche that had remained largely untapped by Hollywood-centric production companies.

This began to change around 1998, when DreamWorks released The Prince of Egypt—a commercial and critical success. The movie’s honest depiction of faith, reverence for the biblical narrative, and dramatic score struck a chord among evangelicals (What God-loving Christian doesn’t fall to their knees when Whitney hits the high note in “When You Believe?”). The Baptist Press declared the production worthy of “evangelical ‘greenbacks’” and Focus on the Family’s Plugged In suggested that it might be “this generation’s The Ten Commandments,” referencing the 1923 DeMille classic. Evangelicals turned out in droves, and Hollywood executives began to take notice. The 2000s were marked by Hollywood-produced, big-budget, faith-forward films, such as The Passion of the Christ (2004), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), One Night with the King (2006), and Prince Caspian (2008). The golden era of Christian movies had begun.

That advent of the Christian movie industry is not my focus. Besides, it is far better told and documented in works like Lindvall and Quicke’s Celluloid Sermons, Benjamin Sampson’s dissertation for UCLA, “Marketing Miracles,” and more briefly in Quicke’s chapter, “Independent Protestant Film.”

Instead, I want to focus on the turn that made it all possible. When and why did conservative Christian groups embrace the medium of moving pictures?

If you’ve read my last two posts, you’ll know that in the first two decades of the Pentecostal movement, moving pictures were anathema, banned outright for their associations with debauchery and imprudence. Any “Christian” film at the theater was suspect, a Trojan horse meant to accustom you to the insalubrious airs of the cineplex.

The Times They Are a-Changin’

In the 1930s, however, things began to shift. The first positive mention I could find in Pentecostal periodicals appeared in an April 1931 issue of the Foursquare Crusader. The brief article relays that a team of two young Foursquare evangelists

had moving pictures taken of all the Temple activities which they will reel off at the various churches they will be visiting to better acquaint the people on the field with the headquarters of the Foursquare Gospel and what is being done at the home church.

The film was intended to educate, excite, and ultimately, convince Foursquare members to contribute to the publication subscription campaign. Raising revenues for the publication department is hardly an exciting first foray into motion pictures, but it seemed to signal a shift in tone, at least among media-savvy Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare. In November of the same year, the Crusader reprinted sections of an article from a local Los Angeles paper in which a Baptist pastor argued that “a person speaking in conjunction with the showing of parables on a motion picture screen can deliver a most effective lecture.” The article merely added an affirmative quote from McPherson stating that “the Gospel is ever the same, but the methods of presenting it must change with the progress of time.” A December issue subsequently reported on the first showing of a recorded sermon, though some critical remarks about the absence of prayer were included.

Outside the Foursquare, film was beginning to take root, as well. At the 1936 convention of the Open Bible Evangelistic Association, the “Missionary Day” was brought to a close as Noel Perkins, secretary of the Missions Department of the Assemblies of God, spoke and showed “moving pictures” of some mission fields. While this could be a reference to emotionally moving pictures, other references around this time firmly state that Perkins was showing motion pictures. Similar moves were being made in the Church of God (Cleveland). In James H. Ingram’s 1938 Around the World with the Gospel Light, he recounts that a member of his evangelistic party was recording motion pictures of baptisms in the Holy Land.

After the 1930s, it became increasingly common to see references to these sorts of in-house missionary and evangelistic films being shown at conventions and in church fellowship halls. Designed to move people’s hearts—and their pocketbooks –toward the major causes of the ministry, these films became powerful new tools in the institutional media repertoire.

The Ciné-Kodak Hypothesis

There was a lot happening in 1930s America that helped make this embrace of movies possible, and I’ve detailed some of those thoughts in my previous post. Those causes, however, are ultimately secondary to a far bigger shift. Underlying this embrace of moving pictures is a technological embrace. In 1923, Kodak released the 16mm Ciné-Kodak, the first mass-market movie camera. Hoping to do for moving pictures what the Brownie did for photography, Kodak’s first model did not completely revolutionize the market due to its size and expense. The 1923 “Model A” weighed almost 8 pounds fully loaded with 100 feet of film and sold for $335.00, $6569.95 in today’s money! The film itself was also fairly expensive, meaning that home movie making was out of reach for all but the most affluent. For creative ministers or missionaries who hoped to challenge the bias against moving pictures, such a purchase would be hard to justify to their many working-class donors.

Over the next few years, Kodak gradually improved the camera and lowered the price point to widen the potential market. Their ultimate success arrived in 1932 with the release of Ciné-Kodak Eight, a smaller, lighter version that used much cheaper 8mm film. Selling originally for $29.50 ($723.08 in 2026), the camera’s price point was much closer to the average consumer’s budget. Most importantly, such an expense could be easily justified for small- to medium-sized organizations or religious entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on the power of moving images. I cannot be sure, but if I were a betting man, I would wager that the missionary films mentioned above were shot on some model of a Ciné-Kodak Eight.

Motion pictures, then, became “safe” when Pentecostals could seize the means of production and create their own sort of movie that was independent of Hollywood executives, the moral stench of the movie house, and the questionable theology of mainline denominational films which were beginning to be produced around the same time (though more often on more expensive 16mm film!).

Much ink has been spilled over the democratizing effects of Pentecostalism. While I am not so sure of the conclusions in that debate, I am sure that the democratization of film had an outsized impact on Pentecostals and other groups of Christians who saw themselves on the outside of mainstream culture. Motion pictures represented a powerful new tool for shaping narratives and changing hearts. As of 1932, that power rested in the palms of Pentecostals’ hands, and at a price that didn’t break the bank.

Redeeming ‘Hellywood’

In trying to be a responsible historian, I need to note that I am conjecturing here. The rhetorical shift among Pentecostals correlates too well with the release of the Ciné-Kodak Eight to be happenstance (and the cost of 16mm cameras remained quite high throughout the 1930s). That said, I need to get my hands on some actual films (harder said than done) to prove it. Perhaps a better historian of film and mission, like Joseph Ho, could correct me on this. Insights from his book, Developing Mission, are swirling around in my head as I write this.

Whatever specific technology made this shift possible (16mm or 8mm), it seems clear that the embrace of the medium entailed a shift in perspective. As more and more home movies were “reeled off” in churches, the medium itself became less dangerous, and, in time, even a tool for God. So it was that by 1947, the senior class of the Bible Training School of the Church of God (Cleveland) could host a showing of Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings.

Convicted by the film, students returned to their rooms and prayed through the night. Some received their Holy Spirit baptism. At the urging of fellow students, the senior class showed the film two more times, each followed by an emotional, hours-long altar call. As they later proclaimed in their student magazine, DeMille’s big-budget Hollywood film was “the greatest motion picture of all time.”

It’s no Wayne’s World, but I’ll admit, it’s an ‘excellent’ film.

The early church holds a unique authority in the minds of most Christians—there is often an expressed desire to return to (or retain) the piety, theology, or structure of the earliest disciples of Jesus Christ. And if not exactly a return, there is a particular reverence granted to them which encourages us to retrieve their thought for the contemporary moment, or simply to make sure they are on ‘our side’. But all of the attention on and to early Christianity, as a result, does not always mean that we approach them in a proper spirit. So how should we use or approach early Christians?

Confessional Authorities

To answer this question, allow me to present two of the most common approaches to early Christianity, both of which have some implicit issues. First, is to employ early Christian history and the figures therein as support for a particular confessional, theological, or political position. This is exactly how these figures were used in the debates during the protestant reformations. Calvin and the protestant reformers, and their counterparts, the Roman Catholic theologians, would mine the early writers to show how someone like Augustine or Athanasius supported their position. And we do the same in something as broad as affiliations with certain traditions or denominations (Irenaeus was obviously a Baptist!) and as narrow as particular pressing questions, such as women in church leadership.

The desire to use the early church to bolster our position is not a bad thing—we should desire continuity with those who come before. It is helpful, therefore, to read and reflect on how early Christians approached these issues. But there is a danger to this as well, one which often outweighs the good of continuity. For one, to approach these figures with modern categories and questions has a tendency to distort their thought, insofar as it makes them play by our rules—but the Cappadocians, for instance, are not thinking in terms of denominational divides or with modern sensibilities. That is to say, we can make these figures into our own image, if we only use them to support our own ideas. As Briggman and Scully note, “reading early Christian theology in order to find support for particular confessional commitments often results in the neglect—and occasionally the distortion—of important aspects of the early Christian tradition” (“Historical Theology: Aim and Methodology,” 1) Additionally, and perhaps a more egregious offense, is to only care about these early disciples insofar as they bolster our own position. If they do not, away with them! If they do, we might read and employ them selectively to our own ends.

Theological Authorities

Second, is to go to the early church as a source to be mined for the development of our own theologies. For dogmatic or systematic theology, these figures are often used as interlocuters throughout, touchpoints to show theological mistakes or important developments. ‘Retrieval theology’, is similar insofar as it has a constructive end, but typically spends more time developing historical figures views to ‘retrieve’ for contemporary investigations. And so, modern theologians of widely variant theological and confessional convictions can employ ancient Christians as interlocutors for their own projects.

Like the previous position, this can be a good approach—if we are to continue to reflect on God and all things in relation to God with the questions that each age asks, we should be doing so in conversation with those who have come before. Additionally, retrieval theology in particular has great power to reframe conversations and rethink well-trodden issues, as “immersion in the texts and habits of thought of earlier (especially pre-modern) theology opens up a wide view of the object of Christian theological reflection, setting before its contemporary practitioners descriptions of the faith unharassed by current anxieties, and enabling a certain liberty in relation to the present (Webster, Theologies of Retrieval, 584-5).” But dangers still abound. Sometimes, this approach can fall into issues when borrowing nuggets of wisdom while rejecting or simply misunderstanding the broader system. By decontextualizing and detaching the ancient thinkers’ words from their frameworks of God, we fall into the same trap as the previous model—we distort their own thought, making them say what they might not have. This seems to be the case with much of the work of retrieval theology on the Trinity in the twentieth century, by the likes of John Zizioulas and others. Rather than drawing from the Cappadocians, for example, some of these theologians read their theologies onto Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa (for an accessible discussion, see: Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity, 1-32). In this, ancient figures are used as treasure troves to be plundered for our own theologies.

Reading our Ancient Brothers and Sisters in Christ Virtuously

There are two common issues that sometimes underlie the use of early Christian figures, then, in confessional and systematic theology: 1) distorting the thought of early Christians, and 2) treating them as objects to be used for our own ends. So how should we approach early Christians? The answer is not in a specific discipline, as if historical theology (which is where I spend most of my time) is better in this regard. Rather, it is one of virtue and proper perspective. Above all, we should place ancient Christians in their ecclesiological context—as our brothers and sisters in Christ, those who we can learn from and can learn with. These men and women are not objects to be used, but ancient ‘neighbors’ to be loved, if we take Christ’s words in Matthew 12:31 seriously.

If we approach early Christians this way, we might prevent some of the issues discussed above. First, to approach them as sisters and brothers in Christ prevents their objectification and instrumentalization. Both confessional and systematic theologies have a tendency to use these figures as a means to an end. This only works if we also grant them full personhood, not as systems to be plundered but as people to be in conversation with. This is especially apparent in their use as authorities—we reduce them to talking points to bolster confessional points, as if the early church is ‘on our side’. To think of early Christians as our brothers and sisters allows us to qualify their authority, viewing them in the same way that we might view a contemporary brother or sister in Christ. If they have been brought to unity with the Father through the blood of Christ and therefore have the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of them, they are authorities who we can learn from. It is a good to be in discipleship with other Christians, to allow their walk with God to form us, but not in a way that reduces their humanity. Finally, by placing them in their proper context, we acknowledge that we are united with them in the body of Christ and in our common goal: seeking God. By reading the Scriptures with them, learning from their perspectives, we are enriched by them in the same way that we might grow with our sisters and brothers in our local bodies.

So how do we ‘use’ the early church? With a posture of love and humility, learning from them and growing with them in our understanding of God. Perhaps you may start with Candles in the Darkness, an advent and Christmastide devotional that Lynneth Miller Renberg and I published which centers early Christian voices, or perhaps you can start with an accessible translation of a church father or mother. Read deeply and read widely, praying and seeking God’s voice. This posture, then, allows us to employ these authors responsibly in our confessional and systematic discussions, as people to be loved, not as sources to be plundered for our own ends.

Angelina Grimké might not seem the best case for that thesis since her formal affiliation with evangelicalism was a brief membership in the Presbyterian church. She had chosen it for its ethical seriousness compared to the perceived laxity of her native Episcopalians but quickly soured on its “formalism” and joined her sister Sarah’s Quaker circle in Philadelphia. Yet her exacting moral standards and demands for authenticity, along with her tireless searching of scripture, fit the evangelical model to a T.

The True Believer

There can be no doubt whatsoever about Angelina’s husband, Theodore Dwight Weld. Indeed, he has served as a poster child for evangelicalism’s dream of revival and social reform. Born (1803) in a Congregational manse in Massachusetts, he rebuffed his parents’ plan to groom him for the clergy and set out to become a free man of “the West.” But there, along the Erie Canal, he encountered Charles Finney’s revival crusade. Their dramatic confrontation comes right out of the evangelical playbook: the bright rebel was instantly turned into a passionate believer by the power of a legendary preacher. Weld joined a “holy band” of youthful converts determined to sweep the land with the same power of persuasion that Finney had turned on them.

To prepare, they went to the racially progressive Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. There Weld turned into an evangelist for its model of manual labor education. Over the course of 1832 he traveled some 4575 miles to promote the cause, proving his oratory and charisma as well as his stamina. The next year he led two dozen Oneida students to the new Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. By now a convert to abolitionism as well, Weld triggered the famous debates over immediate abolition that threw both seminary and city into an uproar, brought down the wrath of the trustees, and caught President Lyman Beecher in between. The Oneida band, now “the Lane Rebels,” exited for Finney’s Oberlin

The Faltering Crusader

Finney offered Weld a professorship in theology, but Theodore realized that he was more crusader than teacher. For the next two years he blazed across the towns of Ohio and upstate New York as one of the greatest orators, organizers, and recruiters white abolitionism ever saw. Until, that is, he was totally rebuffed at Troy, New York, in 1836. He left the circuit for a while to train others (including Angelina Grimké) to take his place, but that non-stop seminar, on top of years of shouting on the road—and perhaps some psychosomatic dynamics—cost him his voice. Marriage to Angelina brought new discoveries, and her research assistance helped make Slavery as It Is a landmark exposé.

Angelina then turned away from activism but Theodore kept at it for a while, though at an increasing cost to his soul. He tried to play organization man for the American Anti-Slavery Society [AASS], but its increasing factionalism disillusioned him even before its Great Schism in 1840. Weld opted for the political wing and went to Washington D.C. to head up research for the antislavery caucus in Congress.

Then, in early 1843, after two winters of it and just before Miller’s year began, he quit. He withdrew not just from politics but from antislavery activism altogether. He founded a school for the children of fellow radicals and devoted his energies to the family circle. Theodore and Angelina became as fixated as Horace Bushnell upon child nurture, and they restricted themselves as prescribed by Catharine Beecher’s new book on Christian domesticity to the spheres of home, church, and school. Only church they left behind.

Theodore’s Apocalypse

While still working in Washington, Theodore scolded Angelina for her Millerite obsession. “The truth is, the study of prophecy has great witchery over minds of a certain cast,” he wrote. “It powerfully stimulates curiosity, love of the marvellous, the element of superstition, the spirit of adventure, the desire for novelty, etc.” It was all part of “Satan’s grand delusion, I doubt not!”1 It was holy action, not prophetic words, that revealed God’s plan for the world.

Yet Weld cultivated his own apocalyptic scenario. The panic of 1839 had created a crisis in the Southern economy that would trigger rebellion within and war with Britain without, he taught. “[B]rought by Gods providence in[to] point blank range, the combustible trains [are] all laid into the very centre of the magazine and the blazing brand [is] waving over them….” He could match Miller in invoking biblical doom too. At the day of judgment, the God of the oppressed would proclaim to the slavocrats: “Ye shall seek me early but ye shall not find me. Therefore shall ye eat of the fruit of your own ways and be filled with your own devices.”

He also liked to set judgment day. In 1834 it was five years out. To his patrons in 1836 he predicted half a million voluntary manumissions within five years, a million and a half in ten. In 1842, when the slave power failed to get John Quincy Adams censured for agitating against Congress’s gag rule, Theodore exulted: “from this time their downfall takes its date. It will be as certain as that of Hamann.”2

The Failure of Means

So why did Weld give up the cause the very next year? For one, because the road to peaceful abolition had failed. Evangelical revivals were supposed to bring about the millions of voluntary manumissions; instead, while Southern conversions multiplied, the numbers enslaved rose even faster. Secondly, abolitionists themselves seemed to lack the zeal needed to crush the system. They talked a good game but were increasingly taken up with parading their virtue and competing for honor at their annual conventions.

Finally, Weld’s exposure to power politics convinced him that history was not in the hands of individual conviction but of vast rival complexes, and that these were not the forces of liberty vs. slavery but of Northern vs. Southern economies. The looming crisis dated back to Andrew Jackson’s veto of the Bank of the United States, not to the founding of the AASS. Between flagging faith and impersonal powers, then, Weld had to reassess the premise of individual willpower that lay behind his, and evangelicalism’s, entire enterprise: The practice of “association” was “omnipresent and omnipotent,” rendering “mankind … [into] a great herd tied together by the horns and fated to stand still, unless they all lift their hoofs together and in the same direction….”3

Down From the Mountain Peak

Maintaining purity of soul wasn’t easy either. Only two years out from his conversion Weld was mourning to Finney that what “the Devil would have me call joy … just moves over the soul’s surface” without penetrating to the root. “Oh for that joy unspeakable, that full-of-glory-joy” of the hour he first believed. Spiritually “sluggish” and “stagnant” though he was, however, he was more than ready to call his mentor to account. “Now brother beloved how is it with your own soul,” he pressed Finney. “Has no sin any dominion over you? … Are you remembering the command which claimed the whole heart and soul and mind and strength, all the time?” Your letters seem brimming with “head enough ‘tis true but no soul,” he scolded. Indeed, Weld feared that revivals had become for Finney “a sort of trade to be worked at so many hours every day and then laid aside.” It threatened to devolve into that great evangelical horror, “formality,” where “the machinery all moves on” but the “main spring” ran down.4

Weld lived for perpetual liminality. It was ill-suited to the pastoral ministry for which he had thought himself destined at Oneida and Lane, as it would be for the political career he eventually tried and spurned. It was perfectly suited for the crusading years in between, but his fever pitch eventually ruined his voice, and in those cold winters in Washington he discovered how thoroughly the ways of the world were opposed to the purity of untrammeled spirit. He finally opted for creating a mini-utopia of sound nurture in private spaces he could control. The crusader settled for a separate peace.

“[A dog] is domesticated, a house-dweller, a favorite companion, a constant companion, which follows running. It is happy, amusing; a tail-wagger, a barker, which lays its ears back. It barks, it is happy, it lays its ears back, it wags its tail.” (Florentine Codex, Book 11, 17r; Nahuatl to English translation)

“They lower their ears towards their necks as a sign of love.” (Florentine Codex, Book 11, 17r; Spanish to English translation)

According to pious legend, when Blessed Jane of Aza was pregnant, she dreamed about a dog that ran around with a torch in its mouth and set the world on fire. While visiting the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain shortly thereafter, she consulted a monk about her dream, and he told her that the baby in her womb would become a gifted preacher who would set the world ablaze. That child, born in Castile in 1170, was Santo Domingo de Guzmán who in 1216 would found the Order of Preachers, mendicant friars also known as Dominicans, a play on the Latin genitive domini (of the Lord) and plural canes (dogs) = dogs of the Lord. As such, St. Dominic is often depicted in sacred art with a dog at his side.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dogs lately because six weeks ago we adopted our first family dog. After seeing a flier, having long conversations with the rescuer and trainer, and several home visits, we brought a sweet 1.5-year-old shepherd husky mix named Lady home on my birthday. Instead of dreading the day because I would not be receiving a phone call from my dad, I was joyful, convinced that he had found a way to send me a birthday present from beyond.

Historian that I am, I found myself wondering what happened when the mendicants who arrived in Colonial Mexico to evangelize local populations – Franciscans in 1524, Dominicans, “the Lord’s dogs,” in 1526, and Augustinians in 1533 – encountered indigenous dogs. How many types of dogs roamed Mesoamerica in the early sixteenth century?

A few, as outlined in the sixteenth-century Nahuatl-Castilian Florentine Codex, Book 11, 16v-17v. Village dogs, the Itzcuintli (“dog”) and the short, stout Tlalchichi (“floor dog”), primary ancestor of the modern Chihuahua, were bred and fattened to be eaten. Xoloitzcuintli (“dog of the god Xolotl”) were companion canines and considered sacred, whereas the wild Itzcuintepoztli (“hunchback in the guise of a dog”) was dangerous, luring away pets with their howl before killing and consuming them. In the Maya region, locals bred large maize-fed dogs for tracking deer and birds; surviving Mayan codices often depict these maize-raised dogs with a torch in their mouth.

The Xoloitzcuintli, known today as the Mexican Hairless, is described as “a dog with no hair at all; it goes about completely naked” (Florentine Codex, Book 11, 17r; Nahuatl to English translation). These are the “dogs of Xolotl,” the deity associated with fire, lightning, and death, the god who would guard the sun as it traveled every night through Mictlan, Land of the Dead.

Nahuas valued Xolos long before Europeans arrived on Mexico’s shores. The dogs were not always hairless, according to the Florentine Codex, Book 11, 17r, for “when [the Xolo] is still a puppy they cover it with turpentine unguent, so that its hair falls out absolutely everywhere. Thus its body becomes bare” (Nahuatl to English translation). Small to medium in size and with a high core body temperature, Xolos were used medicinally as heating pads to provide relief for stiff joints or other pains in the body; Nahuas even stroked the earthly flesh of those diseased or ill with Xolo pups to draw out the illness unto the dogs. Xolos were not simply present in central regions but were extensively traded in Mesoamerica, evidenced by an anthropologist at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM) who tested the DNA of these prized little dogs with similar canines in Peru and found no genetic difference.

Companions in life, Xolos also served as companions after death, often ritually sacrificed so that they might accompany their beloved on their voyage through Mictlan, Land of the Dead. Nearly going extinct in the Mexican colonial period (1521-1821) due to Europeans who either feared their indigenous spiritual value and strove to eradicate them or who appreciated their culinary value and captured them for their tasty meat, Xolos survived by escaping into the mountains. Indigenous communities would eventually locate and re-domesticate these mountain-dwelling Xolos. Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera helped popularize the breed by including their pet Xolos in their paintings and photography. Today Xolos are Mexico City’s Symbol of Cultural Heritage, so named in 2016. When I lived in Mexico in the early 2000s, I saw a Xolo at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City – what a strange-looking creature, with smooth dark skin and a tuft of white hair between its ears. I was surprised to see a dog from a colonial Mexican source, for like most people outside Mexico, I did not know that they had survived into the present day.

Whereas I do not believe Lady will help me cross over the river after death, I am certain that she is helping me navigate my river of grief in this world . In a roundabout way, I suppose she is a “dog of the Lord” because she’s drawing me closer to a loved one who is with the Lord. Because death didn’t end my relationship with my dad. It just changed it.

I wanted to know what our current political moment might say about the state of American Christianity, its polarization, and the complicated notions of religious identity—notions that might tell us why mainline ministers are showing up as viable candidates in traditionally conservative states. My guest today is Isaac Sharp. Isaac researches at the intersection of American religious history and social ethics. He is the author of The Other Evangelicals as well as a forthcoming history of Southern Baptists and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Hosted by Jacob Randolph

Purchase The Other Evangelicals.

Follow Isaac on X and LinkedIn.

In the 1690s, Europe was definitively entering an era of Enlightenment, rebelling against what were portrayed as the medieval superstitions that dominated religious life. It is curious then that in 1691, the respectable and respected Scottish cleric Robert Kirk wrote what we might call an ethnography, a field guide, of the fairies, elves, and other mysterious creatures that were such a part of his neighborhood. So abundant were they, so active, that in his view, they constituted a whole parallel republic, which would be termed The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies.

That Secret Commonwealth tract has been well studied through the centuries, and from lots of perspectives (see the excellent piece by Andrew Schenker here). It even gave its name to a Philip Pullman book. But here, I want to focus on a couple of key aspects of the original title that are highly relevant to my present work. One is on the history of witchcraft, and the other is on studying the genre of folk horror, a major theme of mine right now. Also, and perhaps most basically, this is just an astonishing source for understanding lower class spiritual beliefs in at least one area, granted that it is in no sense typical.

In each case, moreover, we see the potent influence of Scottish thought and affairs on English thought and belief, and later, how those ideas spread through the whole English-speaking world. I’ll return to that theme in my next post.

Please note that in what follows, I do a systematic silent edit, modernizing spelling.

Defending the Faith

By way of background, a question comes immediately to mind. Assuming he was not out of his mind, why on earth would Rev Kirk feel the need to write such a bizarre tract at that particular time? Actually, that is the easy part of the story. From the 1680s, the rise of Deism, materialism and skepticism appalled and terrified conservative religious believers: they hated what they saw a renewed heresy of the Sadducees as described in the New Testament, who “say that there is no Resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits” (Acts 23.8). In response, many leading clerics and scholars published collections of what we would call supernatural tales of hauntings, possessions, apparitions, exorcisms and poltergeists, which collectively were intended to convince skeptics and “infidels” that the spiritual realm was totally real. That included not just the Incarnation and Resurrection, but also all the angels and demons (and witches) who were the low-hanging fruit in these debates.

Three books stood out in this counter-offensive, and each is very famous in its way, and hugely cited. The titles are worth citing in full, to suggest their scope and intent.

*Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, Or, Full And Plain Evidence Concerning Witches And Apparitions In Two Parts : The First Treating Of Their Possibility, The Second Of Their Real Existence (1681);

*Richard Baxter, The Certainty Of The Worlds Of Spirits And, Consequently, Of The Immortality Of Souls Of The Malice And Misery Of The Devils And The Damned : And Of The Blessedness Of The Justified, Fully Evinced By The Unquestionable Histories Of Apparitions, Operations (1691);

*and finally (and best known to Americans) Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana : or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England (1702).

That chronology helps us understand what Robert Kirk was up to, writing as he was in the same year as Richard Baxter, namely 1691. Kirk’s contribution was:

AN ESSAY OF The Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and, for the most Part,) Invisible People, heretofore going under the name of ELVES, FAUNES, and FAIRIES, or the like, among the Low-Country Scots, as they are described by those who have the SECOND SIGHT; and now, to occasion further Inquiry, collected and compared, by a Circumspect Inquirer residing among the Scottish-Irish in Scotland. A Subject not heretofore discoursed of by any of our Writers ; and yet ventured on in an Essay to suppress the impudent and growing Atheism of this Age, and to satisfy the desire of some choice Friends.

Like Baxter and Glanvill, Kirk wanted to show all those seditious infidels just how wrong they were.

Mr. Kirk’s Book

Robert Kirk was an Episcopal cleric based in Aberfoyle, Stirling. His book has a mysterious publishing history. Reportedly, it was actually published in that year of 1691, although nobody has ever found a copy of such a first edition. It was brought to light by Sir Walter Scott, who published it in 1815, and in 1893 it was incorporated in a much larger scholarly edition by the brilliant Scottish man of letters and anthropologist, Andrew Lang. He dedicated the book to fellow-Scot Robert Louis Stevenson, whose fascination with weird beings had recently produced his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Among many other things, Lang was deeply interested in folklore, and he classified Robert Kirk as a pioneering Scottish folklorist. Although that 1893 version was an expensive limited edition, Lang’s work popularized Kirk for the turn of the century enthusiasm about fairies and historical witchcraft, and as such it fed into the work of other theorists and scholars, to whom I shall return.

The Fairy Kingdom Next Door

Kirk was writing about Fairies, but not for a second should we think in terms of Disney and Tinker Bell (by the way, the J. M. Barrie who invented Peter Pan in 1904 was another wildly influential Scot). Kirk is describing beings with bodies composed differently from ours, but who absolutely operate in the material world.

These Siths [sidhe], or FAIRIES, they call Sleagh Maith, or the Good People, it would seem, to prevent the Dint of their ill Attempts, (for the Irish use to bless all they fear Harme of;) and are said to be of a middle Nature betuixt Man and Angel, as were Dæmons thought to be of old; of intelligent studious Spirits, and light changeable Bodies, (like those called Astral,) somewhat of the Nature of a condensed Cloud, and best seen in Twilight.

They feed on corn,

which these Fairies steal away, partly invisible, partly preying on the Grain, as do Crows and Mice; wherefore in this same Age, they are some times heard to bake Bread, strike Hammers, and do such like Services within the little Hillocks they most haunt: some whereof of old, before the Gospel dispelled Paganism, and in some barbarous Places as yet, enter Houses after all are at rest, and set the Kitchens in order, cleansing all the Vessels. Such Drags go under the name of Brownies.

They represent a whole alternative society, a commonwealth, adjacent to ours: “They are distributed in Tribes and Orders, and have Children, Nurses, Marriages, Deaths, and Burials, in appearance, even as we. … They are said to have aristocratical Rulers and Laws.” So like us are they, in fact, that “These Subterraneans have Controversies, Doubts, Disputes, Feuds, and Siding of Parties; there being some Ignorance in all Creatures, and the vastest created Intelligences not compassing all Things.” They even have their own “many pleasant toyish Books” … “Other Books they have of involved abstruse Sense, much like the Rosurcian [Rosicrucian] Style. They have nothing of the Bible, save collected Parcels for Charms and counter Charms; not to defend themselves withal, but to operate on other Animals, for they are a People invulnerable by our Weapons.”

At times, they might have wild celebrations:

The Stories of old WITCHES prove beyond contradiction, that all Sorts of People, Spirits which assume light aery Bodies, or crazed Bodies co-acted by foreign Spirits, seem to have some Pleasure, (at least to assuage from Pain or Melancholy,) by frisking and capering like Satyrs, or whistling and screeching (like unlucky Birds) in their unhallowed Synagogues and Sabbaths.

Ordinary humans are deeply concerned about their visitations, which take many sinister forms:

Their Houses are called large and fair, and (unless at some odd occasions) unperceivable by vulgar eyes, like Rachland [Rathlin], and other enchanted Islands, having fir Lights, continual Lamps, and Fires, often seen without Fuel to sustain them. Women are yet alive who tell they were taken away when in Child-bed to nurse Fairy Children, a lingering voracious Image of them being left in their place, (like their Reflection in a Mirror). …

The Tramontains to this Day put Bread, the Bible, or a piece of Iron, in Women’s Beds when travelling, to save them from being thus stolen; and they commonly report, that all uncouth, unknown Wights are terrified by nothing earthly so much as by cold Iron.

Whatever their own laws might be, they do things to humans that are pure evil, including “their stealing of Nurses to their Children, and that other sort of Plaginism [theft] in catching our Children away, (may seem to heir some Estate in those invisible Dominions,) which never return.”

The Rev. Kirk in Fairyland

No account of Robert Kirk can fail to include his alleged end, as reported by (among many others) Sir Walter Scott. Kirk, we are told, himself became a prisoner in the Fairy Kingdom.

It was by no means to be supposed that the elves, so jealous and irritable a race as to be incensed against those who spoke of them under their proper names, should be less than mortally offended at the temerity of the reverend author, who had pried so deeply into their mysteries, for the purpose of giving them to the public. Although, therefore, the learned divine’s monument, with his name duly inscribed, is to be seen at the east end of the churchyard at Aberfoyle, yet those acquainted with his real history do not believe that he enjoys the natural repose of the tomb. His successor, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, has informed us of the general belief that, as Mr. Kirke was walking one evening in his night-gown upon a Dun-shi, or fairy mount, in the vicinity of the manse or parsonage, behold! he sunk down in what seemed to be a fit of apoplexy, which the unenlightened took for death, while the more understanding knew it to be a swoon produced by the supernatural influence of the people whose precincts he had violated.

Reputedly, Kirk’s phantom appeared to a relative to seek release, but to no avail.

The Ancient Race?

So who were these fairies and elves? One theory that endured well into the twentieth century held that they existed as an objective reality, a parallel society, and that they genuinely survivors of prehistoric communities, or races. I posted about this theory at this site quite recently.

Actually, some features of Kirk’s fairies do lend support to that “ancient” interpretation. Those beings are associated with the sidhe, the “fairy hills” that were often old prehistoric sites and graves; they dread the iron that would, presumably, have arrived with later waves of prehistoric migrants; and they use flint weaponry:

Their Weapons are most what solid earthly Bodies, nothing of Iron, but much of Stone, like to yellow soft Flint Spa, shaped like a barbed Arrow-head, but flung like a Dart, with great Force. These Armes (cut by Art and Tools it seems beyond humane) have something of the Nature of Thunderbolt subtlety, and mortally wounding the vital Parts without breaking the Skin; of which Wounds I have observed in Beasts, and felt them with my Hands.

It is at least open to debate whether very long folklore traditions really had preserved some kind of trace memory of those ancient societies, and the hills in which the spirits of the long-dead might still rest.

There be many Places called Fairy-hills, which the Mountain People think impious and dangerous to peel or discover, by taking Earth or Wood from them; superstitiously believing the Souls of their Predecessors to dwell there. And for that End (say they) a Mote or Mount was dedicate beside every Church-yard, to receive the Souls till their adjacent Bodies arise, and so become as a Fairie-hill; they using Bodies of Air when called Abroad.

A lot of excellent work has been done about the folklore surrounding the great tombs of Neolithic Ireland, such as Newgrange, which later memory likewise understood as a sidhe, a fairy mound.

That interpretation is totally different from the (false) idea that ancient peoples might still live on in remote communities, effectively as surviving refugees from the Neolithic Age, as was proposed in the 1890s by the very influential Scottish folklorist David MacRitchie. Although those ideas gained very wide support for a couple of decades, and had a huge impact on folk horror tales, Andrew Lang goes out of his way to challenge MacRitchie.

Witches

Modern scholars are very well used to studying witchcraft trials, usually in the Early Modern period, in which Scotland produced an alarmingly large number of instances. Even if we do not believe in the objective reality of witchcraft, which we generally do not, we pay very serious attention to the underlying tensions and conflicts that often manifest in such cases. It is far more difficult for most of us, at least, to realize just how often such trials involved fairy beliefs very much akin to what Kirk is describing.

One particular case cast a very long shadow, and became a critical (if bizarre) source for so much modern writing and theorizing about witchcraft. In 1662, Isobel Gowdie not only confessed to involvement in witchcraft but she also portrayed a whole elaborate world of organized covens and regular Sabbat meetings, together with an account of the kingdom of the fairies. Still more remarkably, she apparently did so unforced and of her own volition, without the pressure of torture. Most modern accounts have followed Sir Walter Scott in judging that “this wretched creature was under the dominion of some peculiar species of lunacy.”

She had been, she said, in the Dounie Hills, and got meat there from the Queen of Fairies more than she could eat. She added, that the queen is bravely clothed in white linen and in white and brown cloth, that the King of Fairy is a brave man; and there were elf-bulls roaring and skoilling at the entrance of their palace, which frightened her much. On another occasion this frank penitent confesses her presence at a rendezvous of witches, Lammas, 1659, where, after they had rambled through the country in different shapes—of cats, hares, and the like—eating, drinking, and wasting the goods of their neighbours into whose houses they could penetrate, they at length came to the Dounie Hills, where the mountain opened to receive them, and they entered a fair big room, as bright as day. At the entrance ramped and roared the large fairy bulls, which always alarmed Isobel Gowdie. These animals are probably the water-bulls, famous both in Scottish and Irish tradition, which are not supposed to be themselves altogether canny or safe to have concern with.

In their caverns the fairies manufactured those elf-arrow heads with which the witches and they wrought so much evil.

Those ideas became a massive source for Margaret A. Murray, who in the 1920s devised the (totally false) idea that Early Modern witchcraft was a linear descendant of Neolithic paganism surviving into the present day; and also that primitive and dwarf races really did still exist into those modern era, somewhere over the next hill. In Murray’s view, Isobel Gowdie genuinely had paid a courtesy call on the Queen of the Fairies.

If you are studying witchcraft in this era, you ignore the fairy charges at your peril. People seriously believed them, and they strongly integrated them with the whole intellectual/theological system of witchcraft. Witness Robert Kirk.

Fairies and Folk Horror

As I remarked, my current work concerns the development of folk horror, and in that process, the whole Margaret Murray phenomenon is critical. Crucially, the theory (which endured powerfully into the 1970s) allowed modern writers to imagine ancient pagan cults surviving today, and entrapping unwary urban visitors. Whatever he actually intended, Robert Kirk offered a superb manual for such literature, with his entrancing portrait of those fairies in the adjacent realm, into which modern people could easily slip. Adding witchcraft to the mix created a very tempting brew indeed. Kirk offered later writers almost a pre-written script.

Although these ideas were originally Scottish, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they spread increasingly into the larger British realm, through the work of authors such as John Buchan and J. M. Brodie-Innes, and thence they gained very wide popularity. Scottish Weird becomes British (and American) Weird.

A couple of references:

Lizanne Henderson, Witchcraft And Folk Belief In The Age Of Enlightenment: Scotland, 1670-1740 (Basingstoke, UK : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

Michael Hunter, The Occult Laboratory : Magic, Science, And Second Sight In Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 2001)

Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Liverpool University Press, 2013)

My recent study of music history especially as it relates to faith has taught me a few things. First of all, never assume a musician’s story is complete or is as transparent as it might seem. Second, music is culturally grounded and often reflects the trends of the age. Finally, future generations may rediscover the music of the past and find a new appreciation of it. I find myself enjoying music of the present and of the past, and often tell my sons to give music a chance before judging it too quickly.

My charitable view of music is one often lacking when it comes to the way people discuss the term modernity. It is an often used term but not particularly helpful. However, for many writers it serves as a major turning point in history where everything sort of “goes bad.” In short, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the constant updating of industry and technology that is changing the globe is usually the reason for the contemporary disdain for modernity. Moreover, many Christian critics condemn it since the faith becomes privatized and loses its social-cultural-political influence, especially in the West. Debates over the decades discuss how does Christianity continue to function in our so-called secular age. Still, many have learned to work with the promises and the challenges of the last two hundred fifty years and encourage the Christian tradition to adapt.

The writer Paul Kingsnorth is clearly in the anti-modern camp. He was popping up everywhere, promoting his new book Against the Machine (see one example). I finally decided to read it since I like these sort of big, three hundred plus page intellectual histories. Many of the arguments against the modern age are the type I analyzed in my dissertation and book, Karl Barth and the Study of the Religious Enlightenment. This was not surprising. What was surprising about the book was Kingsnorth’s austere historical pessimism against anything coming from modernity.

Everything bad about the modern age is labeled by Kingsnorth as the machine. This is his way of narrating the modern story beginning with industrialization to globalization, concluding with the contemporary obsession over the newest technology including AI. All these machines have decimated the natural world. Again, from an environmentalist viewpoint this is not a new story. However, what might be most startling is that his antipathy toward machines leads him to wish all smartphones, supermarkets, and automobiles would suddenly disappear at the snap of his fingers. The stakes for him are this high.

Against the Machine is one of those rare books I had a hard time finishing since I found much to disagree. However, I powered through, and to the author’s credit, it made me think hard about what I thought about my own position.

Kingsnorth’s black and white view of history and technology reminds me of a music analogy from recent history. Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties and the recent film A Complete Unknown documents the time at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival Bob Dylan left the acoustic world of 60’s folk music and essentially began the rock and roll revolution of music. Dylan was met with derision from the folk crowd, but in the history of music, this was clearly the pioneering correct choice. The type of purity complex from the folk crowd reminds me of contemporary figures like Kingsnorth who see using the machine as compromising our purpose on this planet. Nothing good can come from it. For the purists, Dylan should have stayed strumming along to Woodie Guthrie songs instead of plugging in his electric guitar and creating songs like “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Tangled Up in Blue.”

Without going down a Dylan tangent, in what ways can Christianity respond to Against the Machine? Literature from Wendell Berry and even Byung Chul-Han decry how modern technology has dehumanized us. These writings are popular in Christian circles so the public conversation about the use and abuse of technology is clearly upon us. First we are using iPads to help teach and entertain our children only to be notified a few years later to demolish the device, if you love your kids. If you are not already prepared, be ready for the data, graphs, and charts to illustrate how much technology is wrecking us. Obviously like any tool—especially one with access to the internet—there needs to be some awareness and care about access. However, the decision to abandon all machines seems a bit too much.

Around the same time Dylan went electric, a Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers, started a children’s television Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers wanted to find a way to address the modern world using the newest technology and entertainment. He found that television was the medium to teach children about how to treat their neighbors. Who is our neighbor? According to Rogers, appealing to the very best of the Christian faith, everyone is our neighbor.

Imagine if Rogers followed the idea that all machines are bad. That all that has happened in modernity is a nightmare. That we should have a distrustful view of technology based on some of the misuses of it. Instead, Rogers pioneers the right path of embracing the newest media in order to communicate a positive message to the most people possible. Oftentimes the anti-machine/technology people flee to a hut in a German forest or a Nebraska farm like hermits. Rogers reached millions with a simple message of caring for the neighbor every day. If I look at the attitudes in the public square today, it is Rogers who we need more than the apocalyptic attitude of the anti-technology crowd.

Some might say that things have gotten so bad that we just simply need to ban devices or find ways to delink from the technological machine. Again, I don’t find this path helpful. Instead, I think the technological spaces we inhabit need to see more genuine kindness personified by Rogers. The recent documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Shea Tuttle’s book Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers reveal that Rogers’ Christian faith and strong commitment to prayer was crucial for his program. Therefore, perhaps if our lives were more saturated by prayer we would find ways to embrace the faces across our screens as neighbors.

Today it’s easy to find conservative Christian writers who claim that since race isn’t in the Bible, it is an “unbiblical” concept that Christians should avoid.

Historians find this laughable because we know from the work of such scholars as Colin Kidd, Willie James Jennings, Rebecca Anne Goetz, J. Russel Hawkins, David M. Goldenberg, and H. Shelton Smith, among others, that for centuries Western Christians were among the most prominent creators of racialized thinking, and they intentionally used the Bible to construct and defend racial ideologies into the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. The list of historic Christian protagonists in the Western racial project is long, just as is the number of deeply researched scholarly books that have proven this matter beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Despite these facts, scholars debate when modern ideas of race originated. Aspects of racial thought as it developed since about 1500 arguably predate 1500 (see The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and The Origins of Racism in the West), but it is in fact true that race as we have thought about it for the last couple of centuries clearly did not exist in biblical times.

Even though the Bible doesn’t claim people are divided into “racial groups,” it clearly recognizes the existence of many different people groups. Perhaps one of the oldest texts that could be called ethnographic, or proto-ethnographic, is Genesis chapter ten, often called the “Table of Nations.”

The Table as Early Ethnography

The Table of Nations occurs immediately following the story of Noah’s flood, and immediately preceding the story of the Tower of Babel. However, it names people groups and their different languages, so it is reporting a demographic reality that could not have existed until after the Tower of Babel incident in chapter eleven. The first eleven chapters of Genesis occur before we learn of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so, among other things, this section of Genesis provides the historical and cultural context for God’s calling of Abram, and the beginning of the Hebrew people.

The list of fathers and sons in the Table of Nations is neither technically complete (the sons of several men are omitted) nor meant to be taken completely literally (some of Canaan’s “sons” are people groups, not individuals). The names represent the earth’s entire population, and from Israel’s perspective, this list comprised all its neighbors, both near and far.

The Table of Nations names seventy individuals and groups, and is the first instance of the number 70 in the Bible. The other biblical references to the number seventy make it clear that the number represents “fullness” or “completeness.” For example, when Jacob’s family moved to Egypt (Genesis 46:27), it was a group of seventy people, and in Deuteronomy 32:8 Moses equates the number of Jacob’s family members with the number of nations. When God told Moses to select elders from among the people to share his leadership burden, God told him to select seventy men (Numbers 11:16-17) to represent all of Israel. Jeremiah foretold that Judah’s Babylonian exile would last seventy years (Jeremiah 25: 11-12; 29:10), declaring that that would be a “complete” punishment. Even though Moses was 120 when he died, in his Psalm 90 prayer, he wrote, “the days of our lives are seventy years.”

While we don’t find the names in Genesis chapter ten on modern maps (with the exception of Egypt), we know that awareness of these people groups existed long after Genesis was written, because we find many of these names in books written centuries after Genesis, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as well as in ancient extra-biblical Middle Eastern sources.

While these people groups are not “races” as currently defined, we must begin with the fact that as far back as we can go in recorded history people have organized themselves into different people groups. Genesis ten suggests that ancient people groups identified themselves through such traits as their language and geographic location, as well as by sharing a common ancestor, or lineage. The physical separation of these groups would have obviously led to different ways of living, or cultures. Sociological concepts such as the “other” and “in-group” and “out-group” clearly inhered in the human experience long before God called Abram, or the field of sociology developed as a distinct social science.

While the Table of Nations seems to be primarily descriptive and not evaluative of these people groups, that doesn’t preclude the likelihood that individual members of groups harbored generalized prejudices about members of other groups being better or worse than themselves at any number of activities, such as farming, shipbuilding, or artisanal work. However, the major factor distinguishing racial thinking since about 1500 from what we read in the Bible is that racial thinking developed as part of the centuries-long European colonial project to justify all sorts of socio-economic, political, and cultural inequities created and maintained by European colonialism and imperialism.

Racialized thinking varies from place to place and from time to time as colonial and imperial systems evolve. (See The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, and Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico) Despite the fact that racial identities were originally imposed by the dominant group, subaltern groups continuously find ways to redefine their racial identity dialogically with the broader culture.

We know that before the time of Christ the Greeks were using such terms as ethnos, genos, and laos to describe different people groups, and their use varied over the centuries. We also know that because of the prominent role of religion in group identity, early Christians used all three of these words to define themselves at various times, with Peter being the first one to do so, in I Peter 2:9-10. The ambiguous and evolving uses of these Greek words in classical times complicates our efforts to read modern definitions of race back into the minds of the ancients during the time of the New Testament. (See Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity)

In conclusion, we should be able to agree on several broad statements.

1. People have always grouped themselves, and have always had a name for their own group and names for other groups.

2. Groups naturally seek to strengthen and perpetuate themselves, and one way to do that is to draw clear boundaries between themselves and other groups.

3. Such boundaries are drawn and reinforced through various social, political, theological, and legal mechanisms and when that happens, over time, the members of a given group can’t help but to begin to mentally rank other groups vis a vis their own for self-serving ends. Names become labels, and labels become mental shortcuts (stereotypes) for not just identifying, but for also evaluating the “other,” then prejudices take on a life of their own.

4. Depending on the time, place, and circumstance, sometimes societies call differing people groups something like “ethnic groups” and at other times, something more akin to “races,” but both approaches are prone to create discriminatory and prejudiced thinking and behaviors, and even oppression. It’s just that some identification systems were intentionally made for oppression.

Occasionally, the health-food store near my house has loaves of Ezekiel bread marked down from $10 to $1. I invariably buy every single loaf and then fill up my freezer with this thick, coarse bread that is wretched on its own but makes for excellent toast. When it comes out of the air fryer with the layer of butter bubbling, I just need a (rather copious) helping of jam and cup of coffee to feel like I can take on the world.

Ezekiel bread feels like the epitome of biblical literalism. The recipe is based on Ezekiel 4:9, in which God tells the prophet the ingredients to use in making bread. Of course the sprouted grains, legumes, and flax used in America today are not the same as those used in the ancient Middle East, and that points to the inherent flaw of biblical literalism (and of my morning toast):

The Ancient Near East and Contemporary America Are Not the Same Thing

The way that the ancients wrote and read the books that became the Bible is just not the same way that contemporary literalists read and interpret the text. But biblical literalism is a cornerstone of today’s Christian nationalism, with Reconstructionist extremists on one end advocating that we implement Mosaic Law in civil government and evangelical seminaries teaching that the simplest explanation is the best one – the plain, literal reading of the text.

The Cost of Biblical Literalism

Christian nationalists ultimately insist that Christians and Americans ought to be the same thing, and the way to get there is to “vote the Bible.” Apparently, the Bible promotes unregulated capitalism, family separation of immigrants, ICE-style militarism toward civilians, and the unprecedented corruption of the Trump presidency. All these strategies were supposed to benefit the American economy and lead to a prosperity unequaled in American history. Instead, prices continue to soar as these policies are implemented, while resurgences of vaccine-preventable diseases are upending families and communities with needless deaths.

But the bigger point I want to make is how expensive the “biblically literal” bread is – and how expensive biblical literalism is. Even though Christian nationalism relies on a form of literalism that is selectively literal at best, one might reasonably expect that when Christian nationalists are in power — as they currently are — a loaf of bread based on the recipe provided in Ezekiel 4:9 would be so inexpensive as to become ubiquitous. After all, the Christian-nationalist sweep in 2024 was heavily predicated on promises of economic abundance.

Of course, that is not the case. The price of a plain loaf of white bread that cost 59 cents when I was a kid is skyrocketing, while the whole foods coming from Steve Taylor and Taylor Farms touted by MAHA fanatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are becoming increasingly out of reach for many working class individuals and families (cf. Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, Ch. 2).

And this leads me to Charlie Kirk – one of the most vocal proponents of Christian nationalism prior to 2025 – and the aftermath of his brutal assassination.

Living with the Myth of a Martyr

“Charlie said to tell people about Jesus, and we are going to honor his memory by doing just that.”

“I cannot believe that someone would kill a devoted husband and father who loves his country the way that Charlie Kirk did.”

“Who could do such a thing? His poor family.”

I did not realize how beloved Charlie Kirk was in my community until his assassination. The research I had done for American Dominion painted a pretty unremarkable depiction of an individual who had soared to greatness on personal charisma and his own brand of grievance. Kirk had dropped out of community college during the Tea Party surge and soon connected with prominent donors who wanted to support his ambition of mobilizing the conservative youth vote.

Kirk went on to partner with Candace Owens in attempting to prevent the University of Mississippi from removing Confederate statues. He made derogatory statements about just about anyone who was not a straight white male (somehow alongside an African-American female, but Owens is a different story). He was brash and provocative, constantly pouring gasoline on a cultural and political fire that was already raging out of control.

To be completely honest, I could not comprehend how beloved he was by truly good and wonderful people that I continue to enjoy seeing as part of my day-to-day life.

I have come to realize that, in understanding the responses that so many of my Christian nationalist friends, neighbors, and coworkers had to Kirk’s murder, I need to reframe the way I approach the conversation along the lines that one might approach a church potluck:

What Good Intentions Is This Person Bringing to the Table?

Not every dish at a potluck is worth savoring, but we can safely suggest that people who contribute to the meal are bringing their best intentions. Not all Kirk apologists are racist bigots. Some are bringing their best intentions (even though we do not want to sample them), and those best intentions include a worldview in which Kirk was an American and Christian hero.

The last word that he spoke before a bullet pierced his neck, live-streamed before the world, was “violence.” Based on the research I had already done, there was so much that could be said about this.

But for all my work on MAGA evangelicalism and Kirk’s role in crafting it, the Facebook posts by my friends and coworkers told a story about him that I had not been aware of. Kirk gave a voice to their conservative values when many conservatives felt shut out and even oppressed by universities and the mainstream media. He did not make them feel like they had a seat at the table; he gave them the table and told them to pull up a chair. When an assassin’s bullet took his life, people really believed that Democrats were literally hunting them.

I do not have to understand this story or agree with it, but I daily encounter people who embrace Kirk as a heroic figure and role model. And more than a year later, the fact remains that,

We Have Got to Figure Out How to Live Together

Maybe not in the same house, but in the same city, the same culture, the same country.

Especially with what may be the most consequential and divisive midterm elections in American history, we have got to figure out how to live together.

And in learning how to live together, the Reformation-era Anabaptists have some wisdom that can guide us. I do not intend for this to be an apologia for Anabaptism, which has its own challenges that deserve to be critiqued. But one thing that Anabaptist theology does well is emphasizing the need to reject violence in favor of Christ’s teachings that his followers love not only their neighbors but especially their enemies.

Reranking the Fundamentals

While I was doing my doctoral research on Jerry Falwell Sr., I spent a few weeks in his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. At about that time, Kirk had taken up residence there to work with Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University’s Falkirk Center (which ironically is also the name of the town in Scotland where I lived while studying at Edinburgh).

About two hours away from Lynchburg is Eastern Mennonite University, a conservative school based on Mennonite teachings. To better understand Falwell, I figured I should visit a college that adheres to the same “fundamentals” of the faith and shares much of its culture and history with Lynchburg. Some faculty members agreed to speak with me, and I asked for their thoughts on the five “fundamentals” of fundamentalism: biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth of Christ, his substitutionary atonement, his physical resurrection, and his imminent return within history.

The response was unanimous: We believe in all of these, but why is there nothing about the life and teachings of Christ?

The fundamentalism and biblical literalism that shaped much of America’s Religious Right jumped right from the virgin birth to the atonement without any consideration for the Sermon on the Mount or Christ’s compassion for the poor, sick, and marginalized. Without rejecting the fundamentals, many conservative Anabaptists have long focused on following Christ’s example and teachings.

Followers of the Way of Jesus Share Bread with Neighbors AND Enemies

Turn the other cheek.

Bless those who persecute you.

Love your neighbors.

Love your enemies.

Sometimes, your neighbors and your enemies they are the same people, and you happen to share a fence. Setting a fire to prove that you are right is likely to cause both of your homes to go up in flames.

I’m not suggesting that anyone reading this needs to embrace Charlie Kirk or any of his teachings. I certainly do not. What I am pointing out is that Christ himself said in no uncertain terms that we must learn to love our neighbors and our enemies. He knew that, despite our differences and outright distrust of each other, people have to figure out how to live together.

This practical guidance from Christ might be just what we need to get through the upcoming midterm elections. There can be no question that President Trump is attempting to suppress voter rights and, to an extent, has already succeeded. I would not be surprised to see another January 6th-style insurrection should the Democrats sweep the 2026 midterms, as polls continually suggest may happen. To be honest, I am more concerned about the aftermath of the midterms than the elections themselves.

Broken Bread, Healed Communities

The Bible consistently uses bread to signify something communal. Early followers of The Way gathered in each other’s homes and broke bread together. Jesus said that his body is the bread broken for us as we commemorate the Lord’s Supper; this sacrament occurs with other believers, not in isolation.

Remember during the Covid lockdowns, when everyone started making sourdough bread? We may have been making it individually in our own homes, but we were all making it together. Sourdough bread became a cultural symbol of doing life together though separated.

None of this is just about bread. It is about our connectedness to each other and what Christian nationalism has done to it, as well as how Christian nationalism has divided the Christians within this nation. In our backlash against Christian nationalism, we learned to call out the evil in a man whose brutal murder was livestreamed to the world, instead of asking why he was so beloved within our own communities.

But it also is about bread because so many people can no longer afford quality bread that is made with whole grains, seeds, and legumes, like my biblically literal Ezekiel bread. Instead, the only kind that can fit a constrained food budget, when prices continue to rise and nutrition benefits have been slashed, is the cheapest loaf of white bread that has had all of the nutrients extracted. It disintegrates as soon as you put it into your mouth because there is nothing really there in the first place, just some chemicals gluing together what is left of the original wheat.

There are few analogies that capture Christian nationalism quite like the cheap loaf of white bread. And just like with grocery-store inflation, the cost of Christian nationalism continues to rise.

The price of Christian nationalism is already too high. It has devastated our economy in the name of “biblical literalism” and “Christian values” while promoting nothing more than a gussied-up version of Neo-Confederacy. In turn, people within our own communities, including individuals who lionize Kirk, struggle to afford food that has any of its original nutrition left.

Meanwhile, we have become more estranged from each other than ever, with our communities ripped apart at hyper-local levels over the goings-on in Washington. Some people who reject Christian nationalism do not even know how to go to work when they have colleagues who mourned the death of Charlie Kirk.

The only way to stop paying the price that Christian nationalism demands of us all is to recover our connectedness to each other. This is symbolized by bread – the body of Christ, broken for us – and the need to support each other in affording it. But it is much bigger than bread. It is bigger than the midterms.

It is about how we move forward after.

Keri Ladner (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the author of American Dominion: The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom (Bloomsbury, 2026) and End Time Politics: From Moral Majority to QAnon (Fortress Press, 2024). Her work centers on conspiracy theories and the radicalization of America's conservative movement. She has explored the growth of antisemitic conspiracy theories alongside white-nationalist rhetoric, promoted by leaders who claim to be advancing biblical literalism and a Christian agenda. Her work has appeared in The Christian Century, Religion Dispatches, and The Public Eye.

When it’s time to talk about the Reformation, my students’ location at a Protestant school with strong denominational ties really reveals itself. It’s all about the printing press and reading, and it’s all about sola scriptura. They believe with all their hearts that reading is vital to good spiritual formation. In particular, they insist that Bible reading was the thing that made for the Reformation and allowed early modern Western Christians to throw off the yoke of papal tyranny. So they say.

And yet. For many people involved in the Christian education business, whether at our local churches with the children’s ministries, or in schools or universities, there is a strong sense that students aren’t reading the Bible. “Biblical literacy” is in decline, according Logos, whose software business is based on getting people to read more.

And of course, Bible reading is a subset of reading in general, which outlets such as iScience and PBS report is dropping among people in the United States. While most of us have to be literate for our work, and may read emails or text messages, reading books for pleasure (and I’m including Bible reading in this category) has declined over the last two decades by 40%. My own students, young as they are, recognize that their daily lives don’t include space for reading besides what they must do for school. Anecdotally, they regret reading less than in their elementary and middle school years.

What does it mean to be a Christian when one doesn’t read the Bible? As an early modernist, who studies the Atlantic world, including its varieties of Christianity, I am less convinced that reading is necessary for deep faith. I know that most Christians who have lived in the past, and perhaps as many as 10% of Christians today, have not been able to read or write in a meaningful way. When we think about to what extent reading is necessary for devout faith, we have to think about what we are saying about those in the past and present who may be faithful Christians with profound spiritual insight and practice, but who cannot read the sacred text.

For my own Christian formation, individual, daily Bible study, as part of my “quiet time with God” was vital. And daily reading of books, nowadays augmented by listening to fiction via apps on my phone, is part of my own life practice. And I require my students to read for my classes. I believe the sustained attention to an idea or a text is more important than ever in the world we live in with its 15-second reels and the constant dopamine hits from our smart phone apps. Nadya Williams, a past contributor to this blog, has written two books so far making the case for the importance of reading to Christians both historically and in the present.

Still, I think it is worth pausing, before we pronounce jeremiads on lack of Bible reading and what it might mean for Christian, even Protestant, commitments. Access to reading has only been around for about one fourth of the time that Christianity has existed. It was usually only a few set-apart Christians (in institutions organized to support books and their reading) who were able to do this for any length of time. Quiet prayer time, sustained attention to sacred music, and discussions about Christian ideas and practices with a community of believers can often be more powerful in moving Christians forward in their faith practice and connection with God. When it comes to good mental health and a right relationship to the Divine, communal connection with others, serving the world together, sharing burdens as well as worship practices may lead to more mature Christianity than highly individualized reading habits. It’s not an either-or. Data about Bible reading isn’t the only way, and may not even be a terribly useful way, of measuring Christian commitments and practice.

And the data is actually pretty good. Regular Bible reading is the highest it has been in decades, according to Barna, especially among the young. While physical Bibles may be less in use than they were in the past, audible or tablet-based reading might be encouraging more people to switch to reading or devotional practices.

And the information about reading declines needs to be taken in context. In the twentieth century, Gallup reported that the number of people saying they were reading a book fell from 29% in 1937 to 17% in 1995. In the early 1980s, 56% of people said they had read a book in the last 12 months. More recent polls have varied, from 45% reporting this in 2012 and 48% in 2022. And while the University of Florida found that 28% of people in the US read daily for pleasure twenty years ago, only 17% do so today.

So it’s never really been the majority of folks who read really regularly. And of course, all of these surveys use different matrices—some ask about reading for pleasure, some specify fiction, and others include short stories or other definitions. So the numbers could be even larger depending on how reading books is defined. It isn’t clear if people who read the Bible regularly would include that if they were answering these surveys.

I do think reading still matters, and reading the Bible for maturing Christians is important. And I’m optimistic that reading isn’t going anywhere. This semester, cribbing from one of my academic friends at another institution, I asked my World Societies students to meet in small groups for silent reading without devices for 45 minutes. I said they could read any physical book they wanted. They are beginning to turn in their reports on this experience.

My students are overwhelmingly positive about the experience of sustained reading. They do report feeling distracted, especially if their group chose to read in a place where other people could come by, or even in the university library with its crowds of not-always-quiet students. But they find that they did this without too much difficulty, and they enjoyed having to be required to do something that they would really lie to do anyway but find hard to include their lives. They want to read more. I can help make this possible by building it into the activities I am mandating. And I think this is transferable to other arenas.

It isn’t an original observation to notice that it is the structures of our lives that mitigate against so many of us reading more, including having quiet Bible reading. Until we learn to block off the access to our devices, to the bringing of the world into our mind via the internet and the attention seeking apps, we may always struggle to make space for reading. But it may not be much different than the struggle our spiritual ancestors faced in a world without electricity, the need for constant labor to provide food, and the expense of the books as material objects. Privacy was short. Reading time and fuel for light were short. Humidity and weather conditions made preservation of reading materials difficult.

Our shortened sense of history means we constantly compare ourselves to a particular time in the middle of the twentieth century where more leisure time and wealth combined with high levels of education. Reading is one of the great privileges of humanity. But it isn’t the fundamental requirement for the Christian life. Much more significant is an attunement to the Holy Spirit, and an orientation to following in the way of Jesus, a daily discipline of faith in the face of the temptations around us to doubt and despair. Reading may help with our discipleship, but it isn’t prerequisite.

Last time, I described the dazzling work of the Scottish writer James Hogg, and his radical reimaginings of historical witchcraft. Hogg is better known for another novel that I personally regard as one of the very finest classics of horror, mystery, and the weird in general. It is ideally suited for the approaching Halloween season. I am here adapting an article I published long ago in the sadly defunct magazine Books and Culture.

Living as a Beast

The story requires some background. In 1670, the astonishing confession of Scottish Major Thomas Weir suggested the depths of depravity that could be concealed under a cloak of holiness and respectability. Throughout his seventy years, he had been a paragon of Edinburgh’s rigorously orthodox and moral Calvinist society, and had earned glory in the Lord’s wars of the 1640s. Suddenly, though, this legendary saint spontaneously confessed to a litany of crimes that included devil-worship and witchcraft. He admitted to incest with his sister, herself an exemplary model of righteousness, and she confirmed the charge. Both were executed. Weir rejected pleas that he pray for forgiveness, declaring that “I have lived as a beast, and I must die as a beast.”

Historians can debate whether Major Weir truly was the sinful monster he claimed, or whether age and mental derangement had caused him to pour forth his darkest secret fantasies, so long suppressed. In either case, this unnerving scandal left long memories in Scottish culture. Not coincidentally, it was Edinburgh’s famous son Robert Louis Stevenson who in 1886 created one of literature’s most frightening dual personalities in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Long before Stevenson, the Weir affair had inspired another great Scottish writer, who specifically focused on its religious dimensions. In 1824, James Hogg published The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which has enjoyed very mixed fortunes in terms of its critical reputation. Long virtually forgotten in mainstream English literature, it achieved spectacular renown in Continental Europe, where it was regarded as a Gothic classic, as well as a brilliant psychological study of religious hypocrisy. In our own time, it also inspired Gene Wolfe’s brilliant novel Peace, about which I have posted at this site.

Through the advocacy of European writers like André Gide, the Anglo-American world rediscovered the Confessions of a Justified Sinner in the mid-twentieth century. As post-modernist approaches became popular, the novel awed critics by its playful attitude to historicity and chronology, its dreamlike surrealism, its pioneering use of multiple narrative perspectives, and by the creation of the ultimate unreliable narrator. Today, the book’s classic status is ensured. Quite apart from its well-known virtues, the book’s exploration of the religious roots of violence and fanaticism gives it a strictly contemporary feel, and makes it ripe for yet another popular rediscovery.

The Confessions is multiply astonishing, as one of the very first literary works to portray extreme violent insanity from the standpoint of a deeply disturbed perpetrator. We see the events initially through the eyes of an editor, who describes the late seventeenth century marriage of a worldly Scottish laird and a deeply pious woman. After having two sons, the couple separates, with the strong suggestion that the younger son, Robert Wringhim, is actually the illegitimate son of a hyper-Calvinist local cleric – “one whose righteousness consists in splitting the doctrines of Calvin into thousands of undistinguishable films, and in setting up a system of justifying-grace against all breaches of all laws, moral or divine.” When they become adults, Robert stalks his brother, and eventually kills him. During a furious investigation, Robert disappears.

Theology, Murder, and True Crime

So much for the editor’s (fairly) sober narrative. At that point though, a third of the way through the text, the book moves onto an entirely new and alarming plane with the introduction of Robert’s own “Memoirs and Confessions,” which reveal the inner mind of a religious fanatic. Hogg had read phenomenally widely in Scottish texts and archives, and knew precisely how devout Kirk members thought and wrote at the relevant time, around 1700. He also drew on such other confessional texts as John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Consequently, Hogg’s sense of the era’s religious discourse is pitch-perfect. At first glance, this is the sort of spiritual diary we could expect to find from a hundred archives in the English-speaking world, dating anywhere from the seventeenth century though the nineteenth.

Robert describes his upbringing, portraying what the reader will recognize as a mean-minded priggish hypocrite, whose parents delight in his theological sophistries. Indeed, Robert’s psychic and moral collapse has its origins in his religious views. Hogg was writing at a time when the Scottish church still retained its established status and much of its popular authority, yet its basic Calvinist tenets were under serious challenge from Enlightenment liberalism. One of the book’s principal goals is to satirize and undermine that Calvinism, especially the belief in Predestination, and to show how easily it could be carried to bizarre and unhealthy extremes.

Like any good Calvinist, Robert believes in his absolute and unconditional election. His spiritual father, the local parson, convinces him “That I was now a justified person, adopted among the number of God’s children - my name written in the Lamb’s book of life, and that no by-past transgression, nor any future act of my own, or of other men, could be instrumental in altering the decree.” Yet this particular justified sinner is utterly self-righteous and proud, identifying his own interests with God’s will. He dismisses all personal rivals or critics as enemies of that will, who are beyond any hope of salvation. They deserve to die.

Although he does not openly preach Antinomianism, it is the logical outcome of his fevered thinking.

The Mind Divides

As he cannot openly admit to his homicidal instincts, he projects an evil alternate personality. In a moment of revelation, he meets a wonderful stranger whom he first believes to be his guardian angel:

“You think I am your brother,” says the newcomer “or that I am your second self. I am indeed your brother, not according to the flesh, but in my belief of the same truths, and my assurance in the same mode of redemption, than which I hold nothing so great or so glorious on earth.”

In this new character, Gil-Martin, Robert is overjoyed to find an equally pious soul after his own heart, and with whom he shares intimate dialogues. The two vehemently reject ideas of good works, and affirm their common faith in Predestination. These discussions lead Robert to experience a parody of a classic conversion experience, an exulting Born-to-Kill-Again moment. Robert’s description is densely packed theologically, and lethally logical:

From the moment, I conceived it decreed, not that I should be a minister of the gospel, but a champion of it, to cut off the enemies of the Lord from the face of the earth; and I rejoiced in the commission, finding it more congenial to my nature to be cutting sinners off with the sword than to be haranguing them from the pulpit, striving to produce an effect which God, by his act of absolute predestination, had for ever rendered impracticable.

Not only do Christians waste time trying to convert the ungodly, it is blasphemous even to try:

The more I pondered on these things the more I saw of the folly and inconsistency of ministers in spending their lives striving and remonstrating with sinners in order to induce them to do that which they had it not in their power to do. Seeing that God had from all eternity decided the fate of every individual that was to be born of woman, how vain was it in man to endeavor to save those whom their Maker had, by an unchangeable decree, doomed to destruction. I could not disbelieve the doctrine which the best of men had taught me, and towards which he made the whole of the Scriptures to bear, and yet it made the economy of the Christian world appear to me as an absolute contradiction. How much more wise would it be, thought I, to begin and cut sinners off with the sword! For till that is effected, the saints can never inherit the earth in peace.

Killing For God

Robert’s life then takes bizarre and bloody twists. His lengthy dialogues with Gil-Martin give a verbally dazzling portrait of diabolic temptation, to which he increasingly succumbs. (Hogg’s older contemporary Goethe was in these same years undertaking his final revisions to Faust, and the two authors would have had much to discuss). In effect, Robert becomes an assassin for the Devil’s cause, targeting those who are self-evidently the enemies of truth and righteousness, as he conceives them.

Robert also finds himself losing periods of time, of which he has no conscious recollection. As he returns from those blackouts, these fugues, he is startled to find that he is accused of many acts of violence and fraud, all of which have clearly occurred, but without his waking knowledge. Someone has been using his body.

As the reader deduces, Gil-Martin, then, is obviously his alter, a splinter personality, though whom he commits his evil deeds, and Hogg leaves heavy clues pointing in that direction. Gil-Martin’s interactions with Robert are self-evidently internal and imaginary, existing only in the “Sinner’s” own mind.

But… Could It Be The Devil?

No sooner have we understood the dual personality theme, though, when Hogg throws a sizable wrench into the novel’s mechanism, baffling critics at the time and subsequently. (Hogg liked to play with his readers). We are perplexed to hear that other characters have also seen Gil-Martin, sometimes together with Robert, so the two are clearly distinct. That would presumably make Gil-Martin the Devil himself or one of his minions. I have no easy explanation for this paradox, unless we are to assume that Robert’s alter has assumed material form, and that he has in fact spawned a demon.

Whatever interpretation we ultimately place on Gil-Martin, Hogg is again delving deep into Scottish traditions of deluded confession. Scotland had reported many instances of alleged devil-worship, and perhaps the most quoted example in the whole literature of witchcraft was the wholly spontaneous confession of a young woman named Isabel Gowdie, who presented her revelations only a few years before Major Weir. Something in Scottish religious life was driving a deep and toxic fascination with evil and the Satanic.

Terror and Violence

At so many levels, the Confessions repay frequent re-reading, but its chillingly plausible anatomy of religious-based violence should make it required reading for anyone interested in contemporary global conflicts, and acts of terrorism.

Like modern Islamist terrorists, Robert is the self-appointed vessel of God’s wrath, unquestioning in his sense of serving as God’s chosen instrument: “There was one thing clear, I was now the Lord’s and it behoved me to bestir myself in His service. Oh that I had an host at my command, then would I be as a devouring fire among the workers of iniquity!” And like his modern-day counterparts, he utterly dehumanizes all who fall short of his own faith. They are sheep for the slaughter. Only their death can permit the saints to enjoy the world in peace. “I saw and was convinced that the elect of God would be happier, and purer, were the wicked and unbelievers all cut off from troubling and misleading them.”

In imagining Robert Wringhim’s mind, James Hogg was recording an imaginary visit to Hell, and reporting what he had seen there. That vision still informs our understanding of the psychology of terror.

But is this a good definition, or even a helpful one? Long written treatises or books are certainly a way of doing theology, but the actual definition of theology, according to its first uses from the fourteenth century onwards, is “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and God’s relation to the world” (Merriam-Webster). Or, to use a definition from a few noted theologians: John Webster, drawing on Aquinas, frames theology as “’the study of God and all things in relation to God” (”What Makes Theology Theological?” Journal of Analytic Theology, 3 (2015): 17-28). These definitions say nothing about the genre of study or work that contains this study of God: in this broadened understanding of theology, worship music or songs or poetry or film or literature are equally at home.

In the past year, my teaching and research have both highlighted the tensions and shortcomings of this modern understanding of theology and its practitioners. One of my current classes is a course on women in the history of the church, and as part of this class, students present case studies of women from throughout church history. In line with many of the modern sources about these women, the students do not usually refer to them as theologians. But I’ve noticed this time through the course that many of the women they highlight wrote hymns.

Take, for example, Kassia (or Kassiani), the 9^th century Byzantine abbess, composer, and poet, whose hymn of penitence (written from the perspective of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair) is still in use in the Greek Orthodox liturgy:

Accept the fountains of my tears, You who draw out from the clouds the water of the sea.

Take pity on me, and incline to the sighing of my heart, You who bowed the heavens by Your ineffable self-emptying.

I shall cover Your unstained feet with kisses, and wipe them dry again with the locks of my hair; those feet, whose sound at twilight in Paradise echoed in Eve’s ears, and she hid in fear.

Who can reckon the multitude of my sins, or fathom the depths of Your judgments, O my life-saving Savior?

Do not despise me, Your servant, since without measure is Your mercy. (translation here)

Here, Kassia explores several theological truths about Christ as God and Savior, particularly in His relationship to creation and to sinful humanity.

Another medieval woman, Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess from the eleventh century, likewise composed theology through hymns (and other genres, like plays, medical treatises, and more traditional works). Hildegard wrote the text Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, a collection of more than 70 sacred songs, antiphons, and musical sequences. Several of these hymns and antiphons focused on the Holy Spirit, like the antiphon translated here:

The Spirit of God

is a life that bestows life,

root of the world-tree

and wind in its boughs.

Scrubbing out sin,

she rubs oil into wounds.

She is glistening life

alluring all praise,

all-awakening,

all-resurrecting. (translation here)

Despite its metrical format, this is clearly a theological work! Both Kassia and Hildegard are exploring theological understandings of the triune God and God’s interactions with humanity; if these works were written in prose, we’d not hesitate to call them theological.

And it’s not just women doing theology that we often overlook in poem and song. In working on our devotional Candles in the Darkness, one of the figures that Adam and I loved was the fourth-century author Ephrem the Syrian, the author of numerous hymns, including this one on the nativity:

By His grace through [His] humanity

A nature never before fathomed is [now] perceived.

His hands bound and fettered, His feet nailed and fastened,

By His [own] will He clothed Himself with a body for those who seized Him.

Blessed is He Whom freedom crucified, when He permitted it.

Blessed is He Whom also the wood bore, when He allowed it.

Blessed is He Whom even the grave enclosed, when He set limits to Himself.

Blessed is He Whose will brought Him

To the womb and to birth and to the bosom and to growth.

(Hymns on the Nativity: Hymn 3, pp. 84-85, in Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns. Translated by Kathleen E. McVey. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989.)

The theological meditations here are rich: the paradoxes of sovereign God in finite flesh, the Creator who allowed creation to crucify Him.

Another figure, Romanos the Melodist, was so known for his theology through hymns that his very title reflects his work as a hymnist. A fifth-century author, Romanos also appears in Candles in the Darkness, with sung reflections like this one, titled On the Life of Christ:

Bethlehem has opened Eden, come, let us see;

we have found delight in secret, come, let us receive

the joys of Paradise within the cave.

There the unwatered root whose blossom is forgiveness has appeared,

There has been found the undug well

from which David once longed to drink.

There a virgin has borne a babe

and has quenched at once Adam’s and David’s thirst.

For this, let us hasten to this place where there has been born

a little Child, God before the ages.

(from Romanos. On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. Translated by Ephrem Lash. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, p. 1)

This hymn, one of the over 1,000 that Romanos authored in his lifetime, gives us a way to think about the full narrative of salvation history, the relationship of the Incarnation to the Fall, of the Old Testament to the New.

Theology as Music

Focusing on hymns as theological works says nothing of the other rich genres we encountered in working on Candles in the Darkness, like the poetry and metrical theology of Narsai, Jacob of Serugh, or Proba, or the theology in letters to one’s child written by Dhuoda. These authors offer up encouraging, penetrating, and challenging insights into God and His nature, as well as into how we can experience, understand, and worship Him. Yet in considering the development of theology, they’re often left out of the conversation, set aside as hymnists or poets rather than considered theologians. We’re more willing to read and consider the poems of someone like Augustine as theology because Augustine also wrote more traditional theological works– but we’re often unaware of those who do similar poetic theology on its own, especially if they’re women or from outside of the Latin church tradition.

In defining theology so narrowly in our modern context, I wonder if we’re putting our finite perspectives onto our infinite God- who surely cannot be fully comprehended or described or understood using just one genre of writing. Broadening our definitions of theology to include works like the hymns and poems from Kassia, Hildegard, Ephrem, or Romanos gives us a fuller perspective on our God the creator, using art, song, and word to illuminate facets of His character. Broadening our definition of theologian to include women and men from outside our own historical traditions helps us better understand our God, sovereign over all humanity. If theology is the study of the God’s relation to the world, surely we need to listen to voices from more than just a narrow subsection of it.

Several of these authors appear in our recent devotional, Candles in the Darkness: Experiencing Advent with the Early and Medieval Church. There, we provide brief biographical introductions to each figure in the text. For longer studies, see the below works:

• A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen. Edited by Beverly Kienzle, Debra Stoudt, and George Ferzoco. Brill, 2013.

• Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns. Translated by Kathleen E. McVey. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989.

• Jacob of Serugh and His Times: Studies in Sixth-century Syriac Christianity. Edited by George Anton Kiraz. Gorgias Press, 2010.

• Schork, R. J. Sacred song from the Byzantine Pulpit : Romanos the Melodist. University Press of Florida, 1995.

• Sherry, Kurt. Kassia the Nun in Context: The Religious Thought of a Ninth-century Byzantine Monastic. Gorgias Press, 2013.

James Hogg

I am referring to James Hogg (1770-1835), a self-taught poet and writer who deployed an immense knowledge of Scottish history and literature. He believed passionately in the peasant culture that was so abundantly available in his time in the form of ballads and folklore. This was an era when learned urbanites were happily exploring the countryside of every European country and seeing what treasures they could find from the “Folk,” the Volk. Among other things, this was the era of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Hogg became famous as a dedicated collector of Border ballads, which were commonly taken as authentic survivals from ancient times, and as such, they were widely adopted by the folk music revival of the mid-twentieth century. It was also soon known that he was inventing quite a few of those ballads, which were commonly set in a world of witches, fairies, and the weird. But he was hard to criticize because the pseudo-ancient works he was inventing were brilliant in their own right, and deserve to be counted among the highest achievements of Romantic writing in any language, and by no means only in English.

Scotland has a very rich vein of supernatural lore particularly in the context of witches and witchcraft, and Hogg loved it dearly. He also made his own amazing and, I think, wildly innovative, contributions to that lore. His monumental achievement was The Queen’s Wake (1813), which was notionally a collection of lengthy ballads composed by great bards who gathered to honor Mary Queen of Scots, in 1561, and all in deep Scottish dialect. Hogg, in fact, was the author of the whole work, which went through a few editions, some of which are very different from earlier versions.

The Witch of Fife

One ballad, “Kilmeny,” was a visionary tale of a girl abducted by fairies, and it is just a lovely mystical piece. But the most remarkable item was “The Witch of Fife,” which offered a quite revolutionary view of witches not just as sympathetic figures, but as heroic female rebels against domesticity and patriarchy.

In fact, let me pose a question here. Can anybody think of such a favorable portrayal of witches in that feminist mode before that point, in any language? Not just of witches as strong and powerful women, but as domestic rebels, using their activities to seek out wild travel and adventure? Witches as such were a popular Romantic (and Gothic) theme. To put this in context, this is very much the era of the Sabbat scene in Book One of Goethe’s Faust, not to mention Goya’s portrayals of witchly themes. But in no case that I can think of are the witches themselves depicted as such female hedonists and libertines.

I am really having a problem here. Hogg’s vision might be the first of its kind. See what you think as you read more.

“The Witch of Fife” begins with a hurt and baffled husband pleading with his wife to explain where she has been for these long spells – three nights away at a stretch! In response, she describes the long spiritual odysseys she has undertaken with her fellow-coven members, flying through the skies. They wander throughout the British Isles and north to Lapland, the spiritual capital of European witchery. What they are doing in those exotic settings is not Devil worship, and indeed it includes nothing that we might vaguely term religious: they are not there to worship Satan, nor Beelzebub, nor the Great Goddess. Rather, they are involved in intense partying, drinking and dancing, and general hedonism. Although judgmental critics at the time would undoubtedly speak of terrifying Witches’ Sabbats, we might rather think of an itinerant version of Burning Man (not that Burning Man can’t be terrifying).

Incidentally, it is easy to imagine these stereotypical witches as old women, but that is not the case here. Although she is a “poor old wife,” the Witch of Fife has “little” children young enough to share the parental bed, so in the context of the time, she can hardly be over thirty or so. Her “auld” husband need not be much more, and is just being described colloquially as “the old man.”

My Weird, Weird Wife

Here is a sample of the poem, in which I alter at least some words to standard English:

‘And aye we raide [rode], and se merrily we raide,

Throw the merkist gloffis [darkest parts] of the night;

And we swam the floode, and we darnit the woode,

Till we cam to the Lommond height.

‘And quhan we cam to the Lommond height,

Se lythlye we lychtid doune [so gently we lighted down]

And we drank fra the hornis that never grew,

The beer that was never brewin.

‘Then up there raise ane wee wee man,

Fra neithe the moss-gray stane [from underneath the moss-gray stone]

His fece was wan like the collifloure,

For he nouthir had blude nor bane. [he had neither blood nor bone]

‘He set ane reid-pipe til his muthe,

And he playit se bonnilye,

Till the gray curlew and the black-cock flew

To listen his melodye….

‘And aye we dancit on the grein Lommond,

Till the dawn on the ocean grew:

Ne wonder I was a weary wycht

Quhan I cam hame to you.

After all that piping and dancing, she says, no wonder I was worn out when I got back to you at home!

Her husband’s main role in the tale is to interject from times to time, objecting that no, she surely has done no such thing! And then she goes back to explaining just what she has done, and it is even worse then the “silly auld man” can dream.

As he asks, plaintively,

“Quhat guid [What good], quhat guid, my weird weird wyfe,

Quhat guid was that to thee?

Ye wald better haif bein in yer bed at hame,

Wi’yer deire littil bairnis [dear little children] and me.”

Warlock Men and Weird Women

And I love this one, her voyage to Lapland, crossing the Norway shore:

‘And quhan to the Norraway shore we wan,

We muntyd our steedis of the wynde,

And we splashit the floode, and we darnit the woode,

And we left the shouir [shore] behynde.

On her far travels she meets with warlocks, weird women, fairies, mermaids, phantom hunters, and other mystic creatures.

‘The dales war deep, and the Doffrinis steep,

And we raise to the skyis ee-bree;

Quhite, quhite was our rode, that was never trode,

Owr the snawis of eternity!

‘And quhan we cam to the Lapland lone,

The fairies war all in array;

For all the genii of the north

War keipyng their holiday.

‘The warlock men and the weird wemyng,

And the fays of the wood and the steip,

And the phantom hunteris all war there,

And the mermaidis of the deip.

‘And they washit us all with the witch-water,

Distillit fra the muirland dew,

Quhill our beauty blumit like the Lapland rose,

That wylde in the foreste grew.

…

‘Then the mermaidis sang and the woodlandis rang,

Se sweitly swellit the quire;

On every cliff a herpe they hang,

On every tree a lyre.

‘And aye they sang, and the woodlandis rang,

And we drank, and we drank se deip;

Then saft in the armis of the warlock men,

We laid us dune to sleip.

This last verse leaves little doubt that she is having sex with at least some of those friends.

Raiding the Bishop’s Cellar

Last night, she tells him, the witches got together and flew to the Bishop of Carlisle’s palace. They broke into his cellar and drank all his wine. The husband asks to join her, but it comes to no good.

The witches skalit the moonbeam pale;

Deep groanit the trembling wynde;

But they never wist till our auld guidman

Was hoveryng them behynde.

They flew to the vaultis of merry Carlisle,

Quhare they enterit free as ayr;

And they drank and they drank of the bishopis wyne

Quhill they culde drynk ne mair.

The auld guidman he grew se crouse,

He dancit on the mouldy ground,

And he sang the bonniest sangs of Fyfe,

And he tuzzlit the kerlyngs round.

Saving the Silly Old Husband

Depending on the version of the poem, either the husband gets trapped in the cellar and is burned as a witch; or else she has to rescue him. It is he, not his wife, who is subject to all the horrible tests for being a witch:

They nickit the auld man, and they prickit the auld man,

And they yerkit his limbis with twine,

Quhill the reide blude ran in his hose and shoon,

But some cryit it was wyne.

They lickit the auld man, and they prickit the auld man,

And they tyit him till ane stone;

And they set ane bele-fire him about,

To burn him skin and bone.

That is the “burned alive” conclusion. Here, alternatively, is the “she rescues him” ending:

They vanisht far i’ the liftis blue wale,

Ne mair the English saw,

But the auld manis lauch cam on the gale,

With a lang and a loud gaffa.

May ever ilke man in the land of Fyfe

Read what the drinkeris dree;

And nevir curse his puir auld wife,

Rychte wicked altho scho be.

He should never curse his old wife, no matter how wicked she might be!

But as I have said, the picture that emerges of the wife is not of somebody wicked, but an adventurous and even heroic figure, who has built for herself a life that is genuinely thrilling. We are dealing here with a proto-feminist classic.

So can anybody offer me some counterparts at this very early stage of Witch Lit?

By way of comparison, Hogg used similar themes in his “A Witch’s Chant,” which was to have formed part of his play All Hallow Eve (1817, and new edition 1831). This is in more formal and “artistic” English, and is much less fun.

See Karl Miller, Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg (London: Faber, 2003).

For scary supernatural women, see now Eleanor Johnson, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton University Press, 2026). Now that is a title.