David P. Gushee - Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism

Advance Praise for Still Christian

Evangelicals spend far too much energy harmonizing the Gospels, ensuring that all four evangelists tell the same story. If, however, we want to read the Gospels as permission to tell our own stories of our encounters with Jesus, David Gusheestripped, of course, of the burdens of canonicity, much less inerrancyprovides a good model. Still Christian is an excellent book, both a lovers quarrel and a cautionary tale.

RANDALL BALMER, John Phillips Professor in Religion,
Dartmouth College, and author of Evangelicalism in America

Still Christian takes us on the journey of a Christian leader who endeavors to maintain his integrity while navigating his way from a rigid fundamentalism with its right-wing political agenda into a progressive worldview. Gushee describes the conflicts and pains that may have to be endured by any who would dare to make a similar journey. I loved this book!

TONY CAMPOLO, Professor Emeritus
of Sociology, Eastern University

David Gushee is one of our finest public theologians in a moment when global life needs public theology reimagined and resurrected. Now he opens his personal journey as a light on this moment of cultural and spiritual reckoning. The story he tells with frankness and vulnerability mirrors that of so many people in this young centurythe complexity of being American, Christian, and evangelical and the imperfect and often perilous intersection of theological and biblical conviction with political modes of thinking and operating. Gushee holds all this together with his love of the Gospel and a reverence for the heart of the Church and of evangelical tradition. The classic tradition of public theology had an embodied integrity to challenge and nuance thinking on every side of every issue. In laying bare his deepest questions and confusions alongside his deepest clarity and fidelity, David Gushee shows us how this way of being Christian might also be a redemptive force for our time.

KRISTA TIPPETT, executive producer/host,
On Being; curator, The Civil Conversations Project;
and CEO, Krista Tippett Public Productions

David Gushees fascinating memoir will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the complex religious forces shaping American politics and society today. From his conservative Southern Baptist beginnings all the way to his advocacy for LGBT Christians in recent years, Gushees life and career make for an engrossing account from the front lines of the culture wars. Still Christian is essential reading for discovering where the church has come from, where were headed, and what faithfulness to Jesus looks like when it requires prophetic dissent.

MATTHEW VINES, executive director, The Reformation
Project, and author of God and the Gay Christian

Testimonies remain an important component of the Christian worship experience, for they reveal how less-than-perfect-humans wrestle with God. Still Christian is the testimony of an influential Christian ethicist that embodies what it means to remain faithful. One can learn more about Christian ethics reading Gushees testimony and then academic theses on the subject.

MIGUEL A. DE LA TORRE, Professor of Social Ethics and
Latino/a Studies, Iliff School of Theology

David Gushee is one of the most thoughtful Christian thinkers writing today. Still Christian gives an astute and troubling account of the turbulent changes in American evangelical Christianity in recent decades and examines how these changes continue to shape the broader religious landscape. It is also a brave, honest, and deeply personal account of what it means to remain Christian in the early twenty-first century.

VICTORIA J. BARNETT, general editor,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English translation series

David Gushee has written a gripping memoir. His is a life that reveals an amazing journey of faith and startling encounters with the idols that may challenge it. Every chapter brims with the power of his witness: from the moment he gave his life to Jesus, to navigating the inner circles of white American evangelicalism, to finding courage in his faith to speak his truth to power, and now to experiencing sheer joy with his family and grandchild. This is a must-read for anyone trying to walk in faith... for anyone trying to live life fully and with purpose.

EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR., William S. Tod Professor of
Religion and African American Studies, and Chair, Center for
African American Studies, Princeton University

David Gushee has written a heartfelt, accessible, deeply personal memoir. Still Christian is a moving account of his journey through four decades of asking difficult questions about how Christian faith ought to inform ones positions on the thorniest ethical and political issues of our time. Gushee says he is leaving the white-enculturated and Republican-politicized evangelicalism he has grown up with (and rightly so) but has steadily moved toward the meaning that Jesus gave to the evangel as good news to the poor and the oppressed.

JIM WALLIS, New York Times best-selling author of
Americas Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the
Bridge to a New America, president of Sojourners,
and editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine

Writing with a painful honesty, Gushee provides an account of his life with the Baptists that not only helps us understand the struggles that have made him such a humane voice in the so-called evangelical world but also helps those of us outside that world understand it better. Gushee makes clear that Still Christian is a testimony not only to mentors like Glen Stassen and Ron Sider but also to the God that refuses to abandon those who call themselves Baptist. Memoirs are fragile genres for theologians, but Gushees memoir is a must-read for Christians and non-Christians so that both kinds of readers will better understand the challenges of being Christian in this fearful time.

STANLEY HAUERWAS, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus
of Divinity and Law, Duke University Divinity School

As a thinking person of faith in a world where the church and academy are viewed at odds with one another, David Gushee reveals a vulnerability bound to a firm belief that the lives of those who follow Jesus need to be spent saving souls without losing minds, especially their own. In this compact yet complex autobiography, Gushee unpacks the emotional and ethical baggage of his forty-year journey in a modern-day wilderness with vivid honesty and vital hindsights. Readers will marvel at how he has surveyed as well as survived the ravages of the contemporary culture wars from the front lines armed with his conservative faith, liberal education, and fragile politics. Any scholar wondering why theyre still Christian will find solace in his testimony.

STACEY M. FLOYD-THOMAS, Associate Professor of Ethics
and Society, Vanderbilt University Divinity School

David Gushee articulates beautifully and personally the journey many Christians today are facing: finding a way to remain still Christian in a complex and challenging world where the black-and-white biblicistic evangelical/fundamentalist faith of ones youth has lost much of its explanatory value. Gushee has lived it, and his courage, conviction, and honesty will certainly resonate with many, as they do with me.

PETER ENNS, Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical
Studies, Eastern University, and author of The Sin of Certainty

It may not seem like it, but American evangelicals are soul searching. Behind closed doors the faiths leaders are asking one critical question, which speaks to the ethical integrity of the evangelical movement itself: How could more born-again Christians vote for an explicitly racist, twice-divorced, nonconservative, non-Christian presidential candidate than for devout, traditional conservatives Bush and Romney? Open, honest, and informed, Christian ethicist David Gushee invites readers of