Eagle Huntress is Nest-Bound

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS (2016)

Directed by Otto Bell

Sony Pictures Classics, 87 minutes, English subtitles, G (animals harmed)

★

The Eagle Huntress played at my local cinema for so long I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about. Here’s your answer: Not much. The Oscars wisely withheld a Best Documentary nomination for this contrivance, and I don’t generally use the words “Oscars” and “wisely” in the same non-ironic sentence. The Eagle Huntress depressed me—not the subject matter, but the thought that audiences are so starved for something honeyed that they will settle for watered-down NutraSweet.

The film follows Aisholpan Nurgaiv’s quest to become a champion eagle handler. Aisholpan comes from twelve-generations of respected eagle hunters, but faces a challenge: this young Kazakh is a girl seeking to make her mark in a sport hitherto reserved for males. Alas, this is only a perseverance tale for young girls for the terminally Politically Correct crowd. Aisholpan’s major obstacle isn’t gender—it’s getting up to snuff. Her father, Rys, has allowed her to handle eagles since she was tiny, is 100% supportive of her goal, and aids her at every step. And, because his family is associated with a line of exalted eagle executors, those who would cleave to patriarchal tradition can only sneer and tut-tut Aisholpan’s boldness. I must admit that they look quite regal doing so in their colorful Kazakh robes, structurally impressive hats, and imposing moustaches, but we already know they can’t stop her, so pull the plug on that piece of potential drama. Ditto Aisholpan’s ascent into an eagle aerie to kidnap a three-month-old eagle. We see her belay down a rock face with Rys playing out the rope, but we also know she won’t fall or be mauled by a PO’d Golden Eagle Mama because this is a G-rated film for heaven’s sake.

Director Otto Bell swears that he didn’t stage any of the dialogue or scenes, but it sure plays that way. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because I don’t want to add “lousy script writer” to his job description. Imagine Werner Herzog in one of his worst bouts of New Age excess. Sprinkle with dad/daughter bonding. Knead into bland Disney-like dough. Add more filler than the last five pages of a paper from a panicked sophomore sixty minutes from deadline. Sound appetizing? Shots of the Mongolian steppes and craggy snow-covered mountains are breath-taking in their beauty, but they are often National Geographic discursion merely masquerading as back story to Aisholpan’s appearance before bemused co-contestants and skeptical judges.

The Eagle Huntress is essentially the Westminster Dog Show for eagles and handlers in exotic costumes. Aisholpan competes at a festival in a town several days’ horse ride from where her semi-nomadic herding family is camped. Over the course of three days she has to demonstrate her prowess in making her eagle come to her (in several situations), grab onto bait, gracefully soar onto her arm, and simulate various hunting maneuvers. Although it’s unclear if this is part of the competition or a tribal confirmation of her status, Aisholpan and her father also set off for snowy high elevation to meet the ultimate challenge of having her eagle kill a fox. For the squeamish, rabbits and sheep don’t fare very well in the film either.   

Aisholpan is fearless and charming and the scenery is awe-inspiring, but overall The Eagle Huntress is turgid, dull, and fake-feeling. Its 87-minute length could have been pared to twenty and lost nothing in the telling. Call this one as over-sold as its Sia pop song theme: “You Can Do Anything.” All that’s lacking for the total force-fed feel-good package is a troupe of dancing puppets.

Rob Weir   

May 2017 Album of the Month: I Draw Slow

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I DRAW SLOW

Turn Your Face to the Sun

Compass Records

Here's a recording in the tradition of Nickel Creek, Alison Krauss, and Ryan Adams. Who knew that some of the very best purveyors of North Carolinian bluegrass are Irish? I Draw Slow is built around the brother/sister collaboration of Dubliners Dave (guitar/vocals) and Louise Holden (vocals), and is rounded out by Adrian Hart (fiddle), Colin Derham (clawhammer banjo), and Konrad Liddy (double bass). The Holdens excel at close harmony singing, but Louise is a treasure in her own right—she of the strong, clear voice tinged with just the right amount of husk.

I do not exaggerate when I say that this is music that makes you wonder if the Wicklow Mountains were magically transported to the suburbs of Asheville. Like the best bluegrass/trad folk bands, I Draw Slow mixes darkness and light, though they list a bit more to the former. What's really cool is that they take you to dark places with a smile on your lips. The album's title comes from a line in the opening track, "Maria," in which Dave sings: Turn back Marie, don't follow me/Maria, turn your face to the sun/Oh my Maria/Oh, if you knew what I had done. This is your classic bluegrass bad man tale, complete with its Will I always be alone lamentation. Generally, though, this band makes you think by sneaking up on you. There is, for example, "Don't Wake the Children," a quiet song with a melody more gorgeous than a week full of power ballads. It's so pretty you'd be excused for thinking it a lullaby, though it's really about the gnawing worry that life is slipping away without measure or reckoning: Is this the midway or the end?/Hands over your heart, do you sleep or just pretend?/I'd like to reach across the stone/Each wonderful day that we are flesh as well as bone/So don't wake the children, don't wake the children just yet. And there's "Apocalypso," a love song, but of the Devil take the hind parts variety. Louise Holden is absolutely stunning on this one (and every other track as well)—ethereal of voice, yet full of verve and energy at the same time. Another stellar track is "My Portion," which is about the journey of addicts of all varieties, so I guess that covers all of us. It includes the wonderful line: Oh, love you give what I need/You take like a one-armed bandit.

If you'd prefer lyrics a bit less cryptic, try "Twin Sisters," (at 4:40) another bluegrass staple: the love-me-or-I'll-die high-energy song (What'' I do if I can't have you), framed by deliberately raw scratch fiddle. Or perhaps the mountain wedding song "Same Old Dress Will Do," or the more country-laced, flat-picked "Garage Flowers," a duet-commit-or-leave song: Hey honey, I was wondering where you've been/Because if you don't ring the bell then you won't get in/I'm not getting any younger waiting home alone for you/If you're just gonna leave these garage flowers and push on through.

If you listen carefully you'll hear some Irish references, but mainly you'll marvel over how well I Draw Slow has mastered American folk and bluegrass. I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised; after all, scores of Yanks play Irish music. A lot of them can but dream of mastering the songs of Erin with the mastery in which these five sons and daughters of the Auld Sod have carved out their own little piece of Appalachia.

Rob Weir

Postscript: Some might have heard of I Draw Slow from their song "Valentine," which appeared in a Game of Thrones episode. 

Anything is Possible Too Saccharine

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ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE (2017)

Elizabeth Strout

Random House, 254 pages

★★

When Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in2009 for Olive Kitteridge I thought I'd be reading her forever. Now I think I may have been hasty. Nothing she since done matches the acerbic tone of Olive Kitteridge, nor have her subsequent female characters possessed a fraction of Olive's resolve and grit. Strout seems to be becoming a "women's" writer. I have trouble with exclusivity of all sorts: women's music, black entertainment, gay film, men's magazines, identity-segregated college dorms …. I had hoped we had moved beyond 1970s conscious-raising tactics. But that's another matter. Contemporary women's literature—and its tacky younger cousin, chick lit—crosses the border between sentiment and sentimentality and often descends into mawkishness and nostrums. Worse, characters too often wallow in victimhood. I could hardly stomach the whininess and passivity of the titular character in Strout's previous work, My Name is Lucy Barton. Lucy's ultimate "triumph" of settling in New York and becoming a writer seems more accidental than anything she accomplished on her own. (Heaven save us from another damn novel where the protagonist becomes a successful novelist. That's fiction within fiction as only handful of authors in the entire country sustain themselves by writing alone.)

As much it grieves me to say it, the only people I know who liked Lucy Barton were women, as were nearly all of the reviewers.  Thus far the same breakdown is true for Anything is Possible. It is a quirky sequel to Lucy Barton melded to an Illinois version of Spoon River Anthology—nine tales involving people and communities mentioned in Lucy Barton. Barton appears in just one of the chapters, a story of her first post-success visit home. In it, Barton is shocked to find that a relative has fallen upon hard times and outwardly resents her success. Lucy dispenses fairy-like kindness and Florence Nightingale charity, though one wonders how someone who has been living in New York could be so surprised to find people living on the margins. Lucy haunts all nine tales—as the one who escaped, a role model, an idle thought, someone to begrudge, or an unsolved mystery. Strout's small town life (mostly the fictional Amgash) has virtues and challenges, but her characters usually experience joy or sorrow privately. I liked that exterior/interior touch. I also admired Strout's willingness to confront ugly things: illness, sexual predators, unhappiness… though I have issues with how she resolves such things. Each chapter is semi-discrete, which makes the book a hybrid between a novel and a short story collection. As in (too) many such efforts, the individual tales range from deeply poignant to "Who cares?" For me, there were too many of the latter.

I also find Strout's work increasingly sentimental and sneakily preachy. I've no objection to interjecting Christian themes into literature, but I am leery of using them as magical thinking—something often experienced by the characters in this book. I get the notion that faith perhaps plays a bigger role in the Midwest than in other regions of the country, but I also suspect we are hearing Strout's views imposed upon her characters in ways that are inconsistent and too convenient. Her opening story, "The Sign," deals with an elderly man whose farm goes up in smoke. Sorry, but I simply find it hard to believe that his first thought was of God's grace as he watches his house disappear beneath the flames. I have no doubt that individuals come to see loss as a blessing, but it's hard for me to get past my impression that this scene is an implausible contrivance and an exercise in overwriting. Overall, I enjoyed about a third of the book, but found the rest either saccharine or sententious.

I am open to the possibility that mine is a too-male interpretation. I invite comment from other readers and am willing to take my lumps. My critics might be right, but either way, I think I'm done with Elizabeth Strout—unless she has another Olive in her writing bowl.

Rob Weir  

Fences a Powerful Drama

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FENCES (2016)

Directed by Denzel Washington

Paramount, 139 minutes, PG-13

★★★★

Fences is a powerful drama sparked by two towering performances, those of Denzel Washington as Troy Maxson and Viola Davis as his wife, Rose. It is based on August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name and Mr. Wilson completed the screenplay before his death in 2005. Both the play and film have been hailed for their frank discussions of race, but Fences, if you will, goes well beyond the boundaries of race. It is also about patriarchy, psychological abuse, internalized anger, ageing, fidelity, and fealty. If, like me, you missed it at the theater, rest assured that it works very well on video because it is essentially a filmed play.

Fences is set in 1950s Pittsburgh and centers on Troy Maxson, who is equal parts proud and beaten down. Troy was a baseball star in the Negro Leagues, but was past his prime by the time Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s color barrier. Troy, however, sees racism, not age, as the reason he never got a chance to play, a self-deception fueled by the fact that life hasn’t dealt him the best of hands. He fled from an abusive father when he was just 14; has an older musician son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), from a relationship that ended long ago; is brother to the  harmless but mentally ill Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson); and works as a garbage man. About all he has going for him is his friendship with coworker Jim Bono (Stephen Henderson), and his eighteen-year marriage to Rose, with whom he has another son, Cory (Jovan Adepo).

Troy’s is a life of over-compensation in which he lies to himself so he doesn’t have to face the fact that he is repeating the sins of his own father and adding a few of his own. His relationship with Bono is essentially that of celebrity and yes-man sycophant; he constantly derides Lyons, whom he sees—with some justification—as a no-account freeloader; brags at the local bar; and treats Cory more like a lowly vassal than a son. Through it all, Rose is the better angel who can free his emotions, buried desires, and sense of humor. She’s also the only one who isn’t afraid of him, calls him out, and has the strength to push him aside when he betrays her. 

Deep inside, Troy fears he is as psychologically scarred as his war-damaged brother, but without Gabriel’s sweet nature. Troy holds imaginary wrestling matches with Death and often takes bat to a bolted-through baseball hanging from a backyard tree, a symbol of both his derailed dreams and what he suspects is a path poorly chosen. Yet Troy rides roughshod over Cory’s dream of playing college football—a compensatory fear that if Cory broke the Maxson pattern of futility his own failures would be magnified. Troy steadfastly refuses to see—as Rose constantly reminds him—that times have changed and that both his patriarchal privilege and the model of raising subservient children with scaled-down dreams are outmoded. Troy uses his successful battle to become Pittsburgh’s first black sanitation truck driver as an aspirational triumph, yet rides Cory as if he were a field-hand slave driver, and fails to see the possibilities within the civil rights dramas occurring beyond his unfinished backyard fence. Is that fence taking (or failing to take) shape to keep Troy’s demons in or out?   

This is powerful stuff, even if it is often a mash of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. (Wilson always denied having any secondary inspirations, a claim of which I am dubious.) Washington and Davis are absolutely riveting in their reprisals of roles played on Broadway. Those reprisals raise issues, though. How much should a movie depart from a play in content and in look to be more than a filmed stage performance? I was blown away by the performances, but nothing was added by making Fences into a movie. Aside from a few street scenes, the camerawork is static, the drama is confined to two rooms and a backyard, and play’s acts are faithfully duplicated. This is something of a problem for the final “act,” which telescopes to 1962 as the family gathers for Troy’s funeral. On screen, what we see and hear doesn’t make a lot of sense. The differences in media come into sharp focus here. Live theater builds audience emotions in ways that encourage the filling in of narrative blanks, but the extra distancing of the screen generally requires more explanation. As great as the performances are—and they are stupendous—should reprised stage roles filmed qualify for film acting awards? I don’t think so, but I do think you should see Fences if you haven’t already. You will witness actors at the height of their craft and ponder issues deep and dark. And the next time you need to explain the difference between acting and celebrity, or art versus mere entertainment, you’ll have ammunition.

Rob Weir           

Kelley McCrae, Brian Alexander, I am Samson, Amelia Romano, Daniel Dorman

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Goes Down Easy

The term "easy listening" is often slapped onto music so innocuous that it's little more than aural wallpaper. In this column I'd like to be more literal: music that's smooth and easy on the ears.

Kelley McRae is often called an Americana artist—perhaps because her music isn't quite folk and isn't quite country, but is too much of each to get called bluegrass. On her latest, The Wayside, you'll hear echoes of Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch, and Lucinda Williams. Many of the songs come from time on the road. McRae is Mississippi born, but lived in Brooklyn for a while, until she and her husband, dobro/guitar artist Matt Castelein, traded their apartment keys for that of a van, their new home for a prolonged stretch. McRae's songs reflect some of the places, emotions, and deep musings that took place along the way. Hers are the small gems that come from fatigue, wonder, and long silences. A personal favorite is "Land of the Noonday Sun" in which she sings, "Time goes by like a dream/No matter how hard you run/Some things are better left unsaid/Some things are better left undone." Similar sentiments emerge in the title track—a road song that hints of being about something deeper: "And when my time comes to say goodbye/When the long day turn to night/I hope I've held close to the love that abides/And left the rest for/For the wayside." The album is filled with little insights such as this, another emerging in "If You Need Me" with its sleepy feel and the line "Anything worth holding onto is worth letting go." There is outstanding dobro, guitar, and harmony work by Castelein throughout, and Jon Andersen contributes tasteful, often understated, pedal steel. All eleven tracks are winners, but others that stayed with me were "Red Dirt Road," which is set in Oklahoma and invokes snippets of Woody Guthrie verse; the return-of-the-prodigal "A Long Time," and "Rare Bird," which seems to be about a person who flew too high when young and is looking toward home to roost.★★★★

 Brian Alexander has a soothing light tenor voice. His EP, Mountain (NoiseTrade), is five songs in the folk and folk rock vein. He grew up in Michigan, and the album's titular peak is a hill outside of his current Nashville home, but you can be excused if you think of him as a Colorado lad, as his songs deal more with the Rockies and points westward. He counts John Denver among his influences and we hear touches of that in his songs. "Telluride," for instance, deals with rogues as well as those who simply love high altitudes, but both are wrapped into a bright song with a refrain that will stay with you. The arrangement is the "western" part of the country formula: some pedal steel, steady percussion, some fiddle, and a cool bass riff. That formula repeats on the title track, with its hopeful message of feeling as strong‑and sometimes as lonely—as a mountain. "Night" is another winner—one that starts as if it will be a fragile acoustic offering, evolves into a bigger production with electric guitar and a hooky melody. Alexander is another promising new talent. Watch for him, but don't confuse him with the pop musician of the same name. ★★★ ½

I am Samson is the brother-sister collaboration between former Seattle (now Washington, DC) residents Josh and Anna Tigges. They call their new project, Humanity in Earth Tones, "songs for beautiful people," by which they mean the late 60s/early 70s version of beautiful—those holding human- and earth-centered values. They note that Samson means "bright sun" in Hebrew and that they are dedicated to "bringing truth and light to the world." It is an album in two parts, the first looking at what it means to be human and the second thinking of the "sounds and symbols" all humans encounter in the world. The album has a wholesome and hopeful vibe and the duo mesh well together. "Sorry Not Sorry" begins with Josh's call and Anna's response, transitions to a duet, and then ups the energy. "Are You Love" spotlights Anna's fragile vocals and emotional piano; "Sunflower" came from a dream of a woman with blooms sprouting from her head. A little New Age-like? Perhaps in sentiment, though the music is more consoling. One downside—though both have pleasant voices, neither has a clear one, so it's often hard to make out lyrics. Maybe a little less atmosphere and more articulation is in order. ★★★

Who can resist a striking woman in a blue dress and a blue concert harp? Amelia Romano takes that blue harp to intriguing places on New Perspectives. We seldom associate the harp with jazz, which is Romano's forte—mostly of the Latin variety, with some gypsy, experimental, and world music influences tossed in. She also likes to bring her personal experiences to the table. "Crazy Day" comes from her time in South Africa, here she lived in both the Townships and in Cape Town—studies in contrast if ever there were any. She uses jangly higher notes to suggest shaky stability and then anchors the piece with sturdy bass notes. The very next piece is about climate change, but is rendered in ways evocative of Tin Pan Alley, with her harp almost piano-like. There are also more conventional pieces—a harp turn on "Besame Mucho," a bolero penned by the late concert pianist/lyricist Consuelo Velázquez; "Baroque Flamenco," which despites its title, is of recent vintage; and a for-real vintage "I'd Rather Go Blind," a song popularized and co-written by Etta James. It's one of five pieces on which Romano also sings. She does a credible job, as long as you push James out of your mind, and she wisely gives it a different feel. Romano, a Bay Area native, enhances Latin tracks with the percussion of John Mellinger and Jackie Rago. On the title cut, though, she veers onto new turf by exploring ways in which the electric harp can move between melody and percussion. That works, as does just about everything else on the album. I will leave it to aficionados to judge whether Romano has a jazz voice, but I give thumbs-up to the harping. ★★★ ½ 

Live from Sean's Room is about as homespun as you can get. This debut EP from Toronto-based Daniel Dorman was done with a single mic, a single track, and a single take. The songs have that slightly hollow feel you get from recording in an actual room rather than a soundproof studio. Dorman plays spirited guitar and has a mid-range tenor voice that's strong and can reach to falsetto. His songs are personal and reflect his undergraduate studies in theology and English. "ABetter Man" is wistful—as it should be for a man regretting his numerous sins. Ironically, "A Sad Song" is brighter in tone, if not theme, and "New Orleans," though in no way Cajun, has jauntier feel. As we hear in "She is Goodness," though, Dorman is a young artist prone to being over earnest. The guitar tempos are quite similar on all five tracks. This is music naked to the bone—raw and spare. ★★ ½      

Keyy

Light Between Oceans Shines but with Subdued Illumination

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS (2016)

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Touchstone Pictures, 133 minutes, PG-13 (brief nudity)

★★★

The Light Between Oceans is based on M. L. Stedman’s 2012 debut novel, a much beloved book about a lighthouse keeper at what could be considered the ends of the earth: a vest-pocket outcrop where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet. The good news is that the movie is probably as good an adaptation of the novel that could be made. The bad news is that it’s still not a patch on the book.

First, more good news. The acting is superb and the film’s exteriors—shot in New Zealand, Tasmania, and Australia—are gorgeous to behold. The script, which is faithful to Steadman’s novel, casts Michael Fassbender as lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne. The year is 1921—just after the World War I armistice and a time in which grisly reminders of the conflict are highly visible: ex-soldiers lacking limbs, those with suppurating wounds, and men hideously deformed from gas attacks. What can’t be seen are those suffering from psychological wounds—the kind we’d today label PTSD but were then simply called “shell shock.” The latter was so poorly understood that when Tom applies for the lighthouse job, both officials and locals from the West Australian port from which he will sail think he’s simply a man of few words. In truth, Tom is a tormented soul who has seen more death than any man should, and is happy to remove himself from society to see if hard work and isolation can heal his soul. Where better to do that than Janus Rock Lighthouse, a place so remote it’s only provisioned every six months.

Tom’s self-imposed exile might have worked were it not for occasional mainland shore leave, where he catches the eye of Isabel Graymark (Alicia Vikander). She shares Tom’s desires to live life on the margins, though in most other ways she is buttoned-up Tom’s opposite: vivacious, impulsive, talkative, and defiant of social conventions. Against his better judgment, Tom marries Isabel and takes her to Janus Rock, which she takes to like a seal in a fish-filled cove. Their idyllic world is marred by just one thing: Isabel’s miscarriages. Tom stoically and lovingly helps Isabel through the one thing that he most wants to avoid-—more death—but Isabel desperately wants a child. Then, one day after Isabel’s most recent miscarriage, a dinghy washes up containing a dead man and a living baby girl.

From here, the story veers from inner struggles to external questions of duty, situational ethics, and how one chooses whose pain matters most. In essence, does Tom report the wreck, per the charge of his commission, or should he and Isabel raise “Lucy” (as they infant is dubbed) as their own?

This film had just moderate box office success, returning $24 million on a $20 million outlay. Again, it’s beautifully filmed and the acting is superb. In addition to strong performances from Fassbender and Vikander, we are also treated to fine turns from Rachel Weisz, Thomas Ungar, and Emily Potts. It was a special treat to see Bryan Brown on the screen once again, an actor most of us haven’t seen since either The Thorn Birds (1983) or Gorillas in the Mist (1988).

As noted, this is probably the best film one could make from Ms. Stedman’s novel. This, however, raises the question of whether there should have been a filmed version in the first place. It’s always a daunting challenge to make movies about quiet characters. Stedman’s novel conveyed what is difficult to show in moving images: thoughts, turmoil, and moral dilemmas that are internalized rather than expressed. Fassbender’s plasticity gets us part of the way, but not even he can bring it all the way home. Director Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) ultimately relies upon cinematic mood-enhancing tricks such as color-soaked sunsets, gray cemeteries, howling winds, light shining across the water, and other such ilk that skirt the border between expressiveness and cliché. He also had to pare a 416-page novel, an act requiring elision. Even then the film clocks in at 2:13 and it seems longer given its need to show Tom as an emotionally closed man wrestling with sorrow and conflicting duties.

The bottom line is that this is a good film, but not a great one. Those who’ve not read the novel have an advantage on those of us who have: they won’t know what they’re missing.

Rob Weir

  

John Fea Asks, Is American Supposed to be a Christian America?

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WAS AMERICA FOUNDED AS A CHRISTIAN NATION?  (Revised Edition, 2016)

By John Fea

Westminster John Knox Press, 324 pages

★★★★

This review first posted at: https://nepca.blog/2017/05/05/was-america-founded-as-a-christian-nation-book-review/  

For tens of millions of Americans, there’s no need to pose the question raised in the title of John Fea's monograph. Most self-identified evangelicals adamantly insist that it was, and humanists and political progressives vigorously assert that the Founding Fathers intended that a “wall” be erected between church and state. You might expect Fea to side with evangelicals, given that he’s a believer and a professor at a Christian school, Messiah College. He doesn’t. Nor does he cast his lot with those who take the opposing view. As a historian, Fea sees nuances, not nostrums. His is a take that, depending upon the openness of the reader, will be seen as a rare middle view within a polarized nation, or will induce outrage.

He begins this edition—the first appeared in 2011—with a recounting of recent reactions to his work. Predictably, he has been attacked by both born-again believers and committed secularists. Neither is satisfied with his insistence that how one answers the central question depends upon several subordinate questions. These are not political questions, though the debate is often discursively framed that way. For example, during his values-centered 2016 presidential campaign Mike Huckabee insisted that “most” of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were ministers. In truth, just one was a man of the cloth: New Jersey’s John Witherspoon. Fea, however, suggests it really wouldn’t matter if all had been ministers; hard-right conservatives such as Huckabee, Glenn Beck, and David Barton fail to define their terms. Was America founded as a Christian nation? It depends upon what one means by “Christian, “founding,” and “nation.”

In a careful analysis of Founders such as Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Witherspoon, Fea employs the very important concepts of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, that is, adherence to Christian doctrine and practice of its precepts. Although he agrees with those who deny that Franklin and Washington were Deists and that Jefferson was an atheist, all three flunk the orthodoxy test, and most slaveholders resorted to selective Bible reading to justify the practice and come up short on the orthopraxy standard. Moreover, it takes more to be called a Christian than merely seeing it as admirable or useful for keeping public order. Attempts to make Jefferson into a Christian, therefore, must be seen as sophistry; Jefferson did, after all, slice all references to Jesus’ divinity from his personal Bible.

Then again, when was the United States “founded?” Did it come into being under the Declaration of Independence? If so, the Declaration indeed mentions God and makes appeals to the guidance of Providence. Fea finds this at best anecdotal evidence, as those references do not specify the Christian God and the document’s overall intent was exactly as embedded in its title—to serve as a political treatise justifying rebellion. If “founding” came with the adoption of the Constitution, all ambiguity disintegrates, as it does not contain any mention of a deity.

But what if the nation was founded through the practice of democracy? What is meant by a “nation?” Had 19^th century Americans been polled, they would have asserted that the United States was indeed founded as a Christian nation. Christianity was the prevailing belief of nearly every Euro-American of the day, and few would have imagined a "wall" between church and state. Jefferson used that term, but within the context of forbidding the establishment of any official church. The Founders feared the sort of exclusivity that precipitated Europe’s wars of religion or Puritan bigotry, but most would have viewed some variety of Protestantism as necessary for public morality and a healthy body politic. Moreover, until the Civil War settled the question, the republic was often referenced as these, not the United States. The U.S. Constitution did not mention God, but state constitutions uniformly did so and meant the Christian God. Even after the Civil War, there is little in the historical record to challenge evangelical beliefs that America was founded as a Christian nation until the Supreme Court did so beginning in the 1960s.

Fea is willing to concede the evangelicals’ view that this has been a Christian nation, but he also shows how moments in history have forced a broadening of what that means. For example, the post-World War II period has seen the Cold War evangelicalism of Billy Graham, the Americanized Catholicism of John Kennedy, the activist Christianity of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the political born-again movements that have coalesced around conservative Republicanism. Consider how markedly the materialism of the last of these departs from the Social Gospel movement of the early 20^th century or the Jesus Freaks movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Frances FitzGerald’s new book, The Evangelicals, argues that modern evangelicals have essentially merged Christianity with capitalism as if Adam Smith had become an honorary member of the Trinity. I wish Fea had tackled this. Because he avoids siding with anyone, the bulk of his post-Civil War analysis centers on evangelical belief rather than orthopraxy.  FitzGerald shows the deep roots of evangelical materialism, leading me to wonder how Fea would explain Christian Donald Trump voters, given that Trump doesn’t pass muster as either an orthodox believer or as a Christian practitioner. I also wanted to hear from liberal Christians like Jim Wallis or Randal Balmer. Lea sometimes falls into the trap of saying that a thing is true if enough loudmouths say so. Not so if orthopraxy is the ultimate Christian sniff test.

Rob Weir