Letter to MY Anxious Christian Friends

David P. Gushee, A Letter to my Anxious Christian Friends: From Fear to Faith in Unsettled Times, WJK, 2016, 130 pages, ISBN 978-0-664-262686

The 2016 Presidential election reveled the deep divide or polarization in our country. The presidency of Donald Trump has been a lightening rod. Many Christians feel unsettled in our changing times. Many Christians unsure how they should respond to hot button issues, such as race, police, sex, abortion, immigration and other issues. David P. Gushee is the Professor of Christian Ethics and the Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. He has felt the anxiety and observed it in the Christian community. He seeks to help Christians to better understand these issues. Gushee's background is evangelical and his major intended audience seems to be white evangelicals who strongly identify with the Republican party. Gushee does not hope for "any kind of recovery of a religious or moral consensus" (16) Neither does he think that there is "hope for some kind of traditional Christian resurgence or conservative movement to 'take back America.' Our divisions are two deep, our differences too entrenched, and the raw exercise of political power by Christians to coerce adherence to values many people have abandoned would be both bad governance and bad Christian witness" (16).

A Letter to My Anxious Christian Friends should be a helpful resource to hep Christians explore difficult and complicated issues. Some of the issues explored in this book are homosexuality, guns, immigration, Obamacare, climate change, abortion, and others. The author seems to explore these issues in a calm manner, guiding the reader between the polarization of the right and left. This book includes twenty letters (chapters) to begin a conversation on these issues. The author seems to be a more than capable guide to the reader through these highly relevant political and social issues. The first few chapters discusses the relationship between Christians, America, and democracy. The author believes we should not give ultimate loyalty to any political party. In his letter on the fracturing of America, he states that "large parts of our media have joined the polarization" (34). We have seen this in the reporting of Breitbart, Fox News, NY times, and other news outlets. In his letter on race, he states, "white racism became a deeply woven part of American culture" (54). In his letter on the police, he asserts that it is tough to be a black parent "afraid that your son or daughter won't make it home from a white section of town because they might be killed by a police officer" (62). He argues that the immigration issue seems to never go away. He thinks a good solution is a "type of comprehensive immigration reform that finds a way to welcome most of the eleven million who are here but also finds a way to secure our borders" (80). On his letter on guns, he believes that the "premises of our gun culture need to be challenged. The most dangerous of these is that having three hundred million guns in civilian hands makes us safer" (87). He point out a major source of the disbelief in climate change: "A sense of mission focused exclusively on the eternal salvation of human souls rather than anything much that happens here contributes to a kind of constitutional indifference to human affairs. An overall distrust of modern science, especially natural science, remains a residue of the evolution fights that have never really gone away since Darwin" (99). Other issues discussed are war, executions, education, and healthcare.

David Gushee seeks to explore these issues from a Christian perspective. Every reader will not agree with his conclusions. He seems to handle the different positions taken on these various issues.