American democracy is in danger. How do we protect it from authoritarian reactionary Christianity?

On January 6, 2021, hundreds of Americans stormed the Capitol to prevent the certification of their political opponent's election. At the forefront were Christians claiming to act in the name of Jesus Christ and his supposed representative on earth, Donald Trump. How can this have happened?

David P. Gushee tackles the question in this timely work of Christian political ethics. Gushee calls us to preserve democratic norms, including constitutional government, the rule of law, and equal rights for all, even as many Christians take a reactionary and antidemocratic stance. Surveying global politics and modern history, he analyzes how Christians have discarded their commitment to democracy and bought into authoritarianism. He urges us to fight back by reviving our hard-won traditions of congregational democracy, dissident Black Christian politics, and covenantal theology. 

Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies makes a robust case for a renewed commitment to democracy on the part of Christians--not by succumbing to secular liberalism, but by drawing on our own best traditions. Any concerned Christian will leave its pages with eyes wide open to the dangers of our current form of political engagement. Readers will gain insight into what democracy is truly meant to be and why Christians once supported it wholeheartedly--and should do so again.

The growing movement of post-evangelicalism highlights an opportunity to elevate and center the moral teachings of Jesus. So many of those who identify as Christian intuitively know that their old version of faith is no longer working, and they feel a theological vacuum. David P. Gushee has been a leader in recent years for those ready to move on to a more examined and robust faith. Now, in The Moral Teachings of Jesus, Gushee examines forty teachings of Jesus, drawn from all four New Testament Gospels, to clarify exactly what Jesus said about the moral life.

A comprehensive one-stop manual on what it means to live Christianly.

Peter Enns, author of The Bible Tells Me So

What does it mean to be a Christian in today's turbulent world? After every disillusionment and debate, what convictions survive? Dr. David P. Gushee is an influential voice in American religious life as an ethicist, pastor, and activist. He's advocated on issues ranging from torture and climate change to truth in politics and LGBTQ inclusion. He co-authored the pivotal Kingdom Ethics, a Jesus-based ethics textbook, and has written numerous books and hundreds of opinion pieces on what Christianity has to say about how we should live. Now, in this ambitious new book, Gushee sums up his many years of teaching and experience to provide a definitive, comprehensive vision of the Christian moral life.

With twenty-five easy-to-digest chapters, plus audio and video versions that readers can access from links in each chapter, Introducing Christian Ethics offers readers a way to understand how to situate moral reasoning not only in scripture, but also in tradition and human reasoning. It offers a focus on Jesus and the disinherited, and a nuanced rethinking of the kingdom of God and its meaning for Christian ethics. Drawing on Gushee's own work and life story but also a richly diverse set of sources, it covers general principles like virtues, truthfulness, love, and justice. And it discusses issues like creation, patriarchy, white supremacy, abortion, sexuality, marriage, politics, crime, and more.

This new book is groundbreaking in its breadth. Written for seminary students, educators, pastors, small groups, and Christians everywhere, this is the first time in his long publishing career that Gushee has offered both audio and video versions along with each copy of the book. The multimedia elements were recorded at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, where Gushee is the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics. The book also includes a complete discussion guide with questions conveniently organized by chapter.

Early reviewers around the world are describing Introducing Christian Ethics as an inspiring guide to finding core Christian convictions in a post-evangelical world.

Gushee has distilled a lifetime of learning, thinking, and teaching Christian ethics in universities, seminaries, churches, and other settings into a comprehensive yet very readable book, writes Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Professor of Systematic Theology at Saint Louis University, in the book's Foreword. Drawing on his own extraordinary journey as a practicing Christian and professional ethicist who has engaged all the major moral dilemmas confronting the Christian faith in the postmodern world, Introducing Christian Ethics serves as both a practical manual for how one ought to live the Christian life and an encyclopedic introduction to the academic discipline of Christian ethics. Throughout the text Gushee's considerable genius manages to interject a pastoral focus without sacrificing intellectual rigor, explore contemporary challenges to Christian faith without disregarding the vast resources of the Christian tradition, and give preference to marginalized and silenced voices ... without losing sight of the fact that Jesus's good news of liberation extends to both the oppressed and their oppressors.

A building crescendo of developments, culminating in evangelical support for the Trump presidency, has led many evangelicals to question the faith they inherited. If being Christian means rejecting LGBTQ persons and supporting systemic racism, perhaps their Christian journey is over.

David Gushee offers a new way forward for disillusioned post-evangelicals by first analyzing what went wrong with U.S. white evangelicalism in areas such as evangelical identity, biblical interpretation, church life, sexuality, politics, and race. Gushee then proposes new ways of Christian believing, belonging, and behaving, helping post-evangelicals from where they are to a living relationship with Christ and an intellectually cogent and morally robust post-evangelical faith. After Evangelicalism shows that it is possible to follow Jesus out of evangelical Christianity, and more than that, it's necessary.

Every generation has its hot-button issue, writes David P. Gushee, For us, it's the LGBT issue. In Changing Our Mind, Gushee takes the reader along his personal and theological journey as he changes his mind about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inclusion in the Church. For decades now, David Gushee has earned the reputation as America's leading evangelical ethicist. In this book, he admits that he has been wrong on the LGBT issue. writes Brian D. McLaren, author and theologian.

This is a book for folks whose commitment to Jesus has put them at odds with American evangelicalism. --Shane Claiborne

So many Americans today love their faith but have found their church doesn't love them back. They then leave, seeking community elsewhere. Of all those personal stories, few have ever been told by someone so far inside the powerful places of white evangelical Christianity. In this provocative tell-all, David Gushee opens the door to the frictions and schisms of evangelicalism, tells his own story of leaving, and shows that you, too, can find a Christianity that is worth following.

Gushee's experiences begin with becoming a born-again Southern Baptist in 1978 and end with being kicked out of evangelicalism in 2014 for his principled stance on full LGBTQ inclusion. But his religious pilgrimage proves even broader than that, as he leads his doctoral studies at Union Seminary in New York, his dismay when the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary expelled female professors and fellow colleagues, to his days as every evangelical's least-favorite liberal, and more.

In telling his story, Gushee speaks to those who have been disillusioned by American Christianity. As he describes his own struggles to find the right path at different stages of his journey, he highlights the turning points and decisions that we all face. When do we compromise, and when do we stand our ground? Is holding to moral conviction worth sacrificing friendship, jobs, and security? As he takes us through his sometimes-amusing, sometimes-heartbreaking, and always-stirring journey, Gushee shows us that we can retain our faith in Christ even when Christians disappoint us.

A Group Study Guide to David Gushee's Bestselling After Evangelicalism

Millions are getting lost in the evangelical maze: inerrancy, indifference to the environment, deterministic Calvinism, purity culture, racism, LGBTQ discrimination, male dominance, and Christian nationalism. As one of America's leading public scholars on these issues in religion today, David Gushee offers a clear assessment and his book After Evangelicalism shines a light on the path forward.

The After Evangelicalism Group Study Guide encourages people to read and reflect together on Christianity after evangelicalism.

This study guide, written by someone who taught the material himself, can be used by individuals or groups to accompany the reading of the book. The guide is structured in five sections, each dealing with two of the book's chapters. Each week of the guide offers three sections: Getting Ready, giving a summary of the big ideas from the book as well as questions for personal reflection; Group Discussion, offering five or six discussion questions; and Paths Forward, providing supplementary material for going further or deeper. There are also one or two spiritual practices people can try, as well as an optional simple Bible study.

. . . a succinct yet deeply informed guide for post-evangelicals seeking to pursue Christ-honoring lives.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne

Kingdom Ethics is arguably the most significant and comprehensive Christian ethics textbook of our time. -- Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom, North Park Theological Seminary

Christian churches across the spectrum, and Christian ethics as an academic discipline, are often guilty of evading what Jesus actually said about moral life, focusing instead on other biblical texts or traditions. This evasion of Jesus has seriously malformed Christian moral witness--which Jesus said is tested by whether we put his words into practice.

David Gushee and Glen Stassen's Kingdom Ethics is the leading Christian introductory ethics textbook for the twenty-first century. Solidly rooted in Scripture--and uniquely focusing on Jesus's teachings in the Sermon on the Mount--the book has offered students, pastors, and other readers a comprehensive and challenging framework for Christian ethical thought. Writing to recenter Christian ethics in Jesus Christ, Gushee and Stassen focus on the meaning of the Kingdom of God, perennial themes of moral authority and moral norms, and all the issues raised by the Sermon on the Mount--such as life and death, sexual and gender ethics, love and justice, truth telling, and politics.

This second edition of Kingdom Ethics is substantially revised by Gushee and features enhanced and updated treatments of all major contemporary ethical issues--including updated data and examples, a more global perspective, gender-inclusive language, a clearer focus on methodology, discussion questions for every chapter, and a detailed new glossary.

Kingdom Ethics is for readers anywhere wanting a robust, comprehensive understanding of Christian ethics that is founded on the concrete teachings of Jesus and will equip them for further exploration into the field.

The growing movement of post-evangelicalism highlights an opportunity to elevate and center the moral teachings of Jesus. So many of those who identify as Christian intuitively know that their old version of faith is no longer working, and they feel a theological vacuum. David P. Gushee has been a leader in recent years for those ready to move on to a more examined and robust faith. Now, in The Moral Teachings of Jesus, Gushee examines forty teachings of Jesus, drawn from all four New Testament Gospels, to clarify exactly what Jesus said about the moral life.

Just as it is impossible to understand the American religious landscape without some familiarity with evangelicalism, one cannot grasp the shape of contemporary Christian ethics without knowing the contributions of evangelical Protestants. This newest addition to the Library of Theological Ethics series begins by examining the core dynamic with which all evangelical ethics grapples: belief in an authoritative, inspired, and unchanging biblical text on the one hand, and engagement with a rapidly evolving and increasingly post-Christian culture on the other. It explores the different roles that scholars and popular figures have played in forming evangelicals' understandings of Christian ethics. And it draws together the contributions of both senior and emerging figures in painting a portrait of this diverse, vibrant, and challenging theological and ethical tradition. This book represents the breadth of evangelical ethical voices, demonstrating that evangelical ethics involves nuance and theological insight that far transcend any political agenda.

Contributors include David P. Gushee, Carl F. H. Henry, Jennifer McBride, Stephen Charles Mott, William E. Pannell, John Perkins, Soong-Chan Rah, Gabriel Salguero, Francis Schaeffer, Ron Sider, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Glen H. Stassen, Eldin Villafa e, Allen Verhey, Jim Wallis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Howard Yoder.

The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important, and otherwise unavailable, texts--English-language texts and translations that have fallen out of print, new translations, and collections of significant statements about problems and themes of special importance--in an easily accessible form. This series enables sustained dialogue on new and classic works in the field.

A comprehensive one-stop manual on what it means to live Christianly.

Peter Enns, author of The Bible Tells Me So

What does it mean to be a Christian in today's turbulent world? After every disillusionment and debate, what convictions survive? Dr. David P. Gushee is an influential voice in American religious life as an ethicist, pastor, and activist. He's advocated on issues ranging from torture and climate change to truth in politics and LGBTQ inclusion. He co-authored the pivotal Kingdom Ethics, a Jesus-based ethics textbook, and has written numerous books and hundreds of opinion pieces on what Christianity has to say about how we should live. Now, in this ambitious new book, Gushee sums up his many years of teaching and experience to provide a definitive, comprehensive vision of the Christian moral life.

With twenty-five easy-to-digest chapters, plus audio and video versions that readers can access from links in each chapter, Introducing Christian Ethics offers readers a way to understand how to situate moral reasoning not only in scripture, but also in tradition and human reasoning. It offers a focus on Jesus and the disinherited, and a nuanced rethinking of the kingdom of God and its meaning for Christian ethics. Drawing on Gushee's own work and life story but also a richly diverse set of sources, it covers general principles like virtues, truthfulness, love, and justice. And it discusses issues like creation, patriarchy, white supremacy, abortion, sexuality, marriage, politics, crime, and more.

This new book is groundbreaking in its breadth. Written for seminary students, educators, pastors, small groups, and Christians everywhere, this is the first time in his long publishing career that Gushee has offered both audio and video versions along with each copy of the book. The multimedia elements were recorded at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, where Gushee is the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics. The book also includes a complete discussion guide with questions conveniently organized by chapter.

Early reviewers around the world are describing Introducing Christian Ethics as an inspiring guide to finding core Christian convictions in a post-evangelical world.

Gushee has distilled a lifetime of learning, thinking, and teaching Christian ethics in universities, seminaries, churches, and other settings into a comprehensive yet very readable book, writes Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Professor of Systematic Theology at Saint Louis University, in the book's Foreword. Drawing on his own extraordinary journey as a practicing Christian and professional ethicist who has engaged all the major moral dilemmas confronting the Christian faith in the postmodern world, Introducing Christian Ethics serves as both a practical manual for how one ought to live the Christian life and an encyclopedic introduction to the academic discipline of Christian ethics. Throughout the text Gushee's considerable genius manages to interject a pastoral focus without sacrificing intellectual rigor, explore contemporary challenges to Christian faith without disregarding the vast resources of the Christian tradition, and give preference to marginalized and silenced voices ... without losing sight of the fact that Jesus's good news of liberation extends to both the oppressed and their oppressors.

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. A foremost expert in the field of Christian ethics, he is the author or editor of twenty books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Kingdom Ethics, The Sacredness of Human Life, Changing Our Mind, and Evangelical Ethics. A regular blogger for Religion News Service, Gushee was recently elected to Vice President of the American Academy of Religion and to President of the Society of Christian Ethics. Visit his website at www.davidpgushee.com.

Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust by David P. Gushee is an authoritative and indispensable exploration of a highly important aspect of the Holocaust, the willingness of a small, but morally significant, number of non-Jews to take on great risks for themselves and their families to rescue Jews from the Nazi death machine. In this well-documented, well-written book, Gushee explores the full range of Gentile responses to the plight of the Jews from overt hostility and obscene brutality to altruistic rescue, the better to understand the achievements of truly Righteous Gentiles. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Holocaust.--Richard L. Rubenstein, President Emeritus, Distinguished Professor of Religion, University of Bridgeport

David Gushee argues convincingly that there is in U.S. politics an evangelical center of voters who do not identify with the politics and religion of either the right or the left. Although evangelical Christians are portrayed by the media as conservatives, Gushee claims that the evangelical movement includes nearly even numbers of voters on the right, in the center, and on the left of the political spectrum. He provides portraits of the major figures in each of the three camps, outlines the core convictions of the adherents, and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each group's positions. He suggests that the evangelical center is poised for growth; this book could be its manifesto.

In the Fray collects David Gushee's most significant essays over twenty years as a Christian intellectual. Most of the essays were written in situations of ethical conflict on the highly contested ground of Christian public ethics. Topics addressed include torture, climate change, marriage and divorce, the treatment of gays and lesbians in the church, war, genocide, nuclear weapons, race, global poverty, faith and politics, Israel/Palestine, and even whether Christian ethics is a real academic discipline. Quite visible in the collection is Gushee's deep research interest in the Nazi era in Germany and how the churches fared in resisting Nazi intimidations and seductions and, finally, the Holocaust. All essays reflect the desire for a church that has learned the lessons of that period--a church with resistance to racism, militarism, nationalism, and other social-ideological toxins, and with the discernment and courage to resist these in favor of a courageous allegiance to the lordship of Christ at the time of testing. Considerable attention is directed to contesting some of the public ethics found in the author's own US evangelical Christian community. Concluding reflections on Gushee's ethical vision are offered in an illuminating essay by senior Christian ethicist Glen Harold Stassen.

In the Fray collects David Gushee's most significant essays over twenty years as a Christian intellectual. Most of the essays were written in situations of ethical conflict on the highly contested ground of Christian public ethics. Topics addressed include torture, climate change, marriage and divorce, the treatment of gays and lesbians in the church, war, genocide, nuclear weapons, race, global poverty, faith and politics, Israel/Palestine, and even whether Christian ethics is a real academic discipline. Quite visible in the collection is Gushee's deep research interest in the Nazi era in Germany and how the churches fared in resisting Nazi intimidations and seductions and, finally, the Holocaust. All essays reflect the desire for a church that has learned the lessons of that period--a church with resistance to racism, militarism, nationalism, and other social-ideological toxins, and with the discernment and courage to resist these in favor of a courageous allegiance to the lordship of Christ at the time of testing. Considerable attention is directed to contesting some of the public ethics found in the author's own US evangelical Christian community. Concluding reflections on Gushee's ethical vision are offered in an illuminating essay by senior Christian ethicist Glen Harold Stassen.

This book contains fifteen essays originally presented at a conference on evangelical Christianity and global peacemaking held at Georgetown University in September 2012, together with a critical analysis of the collection by the editor, David P. Gushee. The essays fall into two categories: the first four essays primarily engage theoretical issues in the ethics of war and peace, considering pacifism, just war, and just peacemaking approaches, all in contemporary US context. The other eleven essays offer glimpses into current evangelical peacemaking efforts being undertaken by individuals, congregations, parachurch organizations, and global evangelical bodies. The collection as a whole gives considerable attention to Christian-Muslim relations and offers a number of extraordinary accounts of evangelical peacemaking with Muslims and efforts to engage Islam as a living religious tradition. The concluding essay suggests that while evangelical peace and war thinking cannot escape the paradoxes and challenges that have always bedeviled Christian theorizing about war, contemporary evangelical peacemaking efforts reflect substantial progress in implementing the radical love of Jesus Christ in some of the most challenging contexts and conflicts in our world today.

This book contains fifteen essays originally presented at a conference on evangelical Christianity and global peacemaking held at Georgetown University in September 2012, together with a critical analysis of the collection by the editor, David P. Gushee. The essays fall into two categories: the first four essays primarily engage theoretical issues in the ethics of war and peace, considering pacifism, just war, and just peacemaking approaches, all in contemporary US context. The other eleven essays offer glimpses into current evangelical peacemaking efforts being undertaken by individuals, congregations, parachurch organizations, and global evangelical bodies. The collection as a whole gives considerable attention to Christian-Muslim relations and offers a number of extraordinary accounts of evangelical peacemaking with Muslims and efforts to engage Islam as a living religious tradition. The concluding essay suggests that while evangelical peace and war thinking cannot escape the paradoxes and challenges that have always bedeviled Christian theorizing about war, contemporary evangelical peacemaking efforts reflect substantial progress in implementing the radical love of Jesus Christ in some of the most challenging contexts and conflicts in our world today.

A collection of essays that suggests that American counterterrorism policies in the Bush years were immoral, unwise, and un-American, and offers an analysis to back up such claims. It offers probing religious and ethical analysis from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspectives.

This volume explores Christianity's relationship with democracy in a global perspective.

How are the various democratic ideals being addressed by influential Christian intellectuals, theologians, ethicists, churches and church leaders around the world today? The contributors reflect on the status of the democratic idea in the churches, theological academy and public religious life in a variety of social and political contexts. They consider how the democratic idea can be cultivated in Christian communities and intellectual traditions with a view to contemporary challenges.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religion, theology and political science.