My 2021 Reading List
Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash
I set out to read six books this year. Between running a nonprofit, family, and settling into a new church home, I wanted to avoid being overly ambitious.
I ended up reading thirteen books. Many are theological or critically examine American Christian culture and history. One of my favorite things about being a post-evangelical Christian is that the full breadth of what the Church is doing in the world is more visible to me than ever before. This includes wider access to readings from other traditions within the Christian faith.
Other books were political or fiction. While each of these books is wonderful in their own way, here they are in the order of impact they left on me.
Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith And Fractured A Nation
by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
I’m far from alone when I write this, but Jesus & John Wayne hit home like no other book I’ve read. It’s a sweeping history of the last 75 years of white American evangelicalism and reveals how evangelical gatekeepers worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged American masculinity and Christian nationalism. Entire sections of Jesus & John Wayne were like reading experiences from my own life and, more importantly, showed how all the puzzle pieces of patriarchy, political conservatism, and abuse fit together.
I wrote one of the author’s favorite reviews and she was the first guest on my extremely limited podcast. Feel free to enjoy both, then go buy your own copy. Seriously, you won’t regret reading this book.
Love Matters More: How Fighting to Be Right Keeps Us from Loving Like Jesus
by Jared Byas
This book gave language to a lot of my thoughts and feelings the past several years as a Christian in the United States. The primary argument? A biblically-based Christian life is not grounded in having all the answers but in a living relationship.
Byas explores what truth is and why we fight over it. He makes a compelling case for how what we believe is less important than how we believe, and that telling the truth in love is really about following Jesus. For anyone who has felt forced to choose between truth and love, acceptance and rightness, Love Matters More offers a path out of legalistic religion. I loved every page. This book has shaped much of my post-evangelical faith trajectory.
White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
by Robert P. Jones
There are books that inspire. There are books that are emotional. And then there are books that are sledgehammers of truth. White Too Long is the latter.
Using history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience, Jones delivers a deep, detailed examination of the relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy. Parts of White Too Long are so painful to read that I had to sit it down for a day or two before picking it back up. His urgent call for white Christians to reckon with this legacy is also some of the best writing I have ever read on any topic.
I’d go so far as to argue that you can’t understand the current state of the American Church without having read White Too Long. It is that important.
How To Have An Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace
by Melissa Florer-Bixler
I admit that I came to this book somewhat ignorant of the Mennonite and broader Anabaptist tradition. I was encouraged to discover that I was already familiar with some of the themes found in its pages, having seen them play out through my day job, where enemies are very real. There were plenty of new ideas I found useful, too. Some of the theology is fascinating, and her examination of parts of Revelation through the lens of trying to understand enemies is absolute fire.
Mostly though, I love how practical How To Have An Enemy is. Florer-Bixler takes a difficult subject and provides biblical and real-world examples of who enemies are, how they exist, and how to confront them. It’s a book for our times, to be sure.
Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working And What To Do About It
by Brian D. McLaren
If you are a Christian currently going through the deconstruction journey and feel stuck, this is an incredibly useful book that provides context to your experience through personal story and the introduction of a four-stage model of faith development, one in which questions and doubt are transformed into a more fruitful kind of faith.
The four stages — Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony — offer a path forward that can help thoughtful people who are struggling leave behind unnecessary baggage and intensify their commitment to what matters most. I read Faith After Doubt at a pretty low point in my deconstruction journey, and it helped get me out of the rut I was in.
Shoutin’ In The Fire: An American Epistle
by Danté Stewart
This is without a doubt one of the most powerful books I’ve read. Stewart explores his reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy that hangs over our country and so many American churches. He uses his personal experiences to reimagine spiritual virtues like resilience, rage, and remembrance while exploring how they can function as works of love.
Shoutin’ In The Fire is a beautiful, difficult, and necessary read, and I have a feeling Stewart’s voice is going to grow louder in the years to come. I’m grateful for his words and look forward to his future writings.
by Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu
One of the most well-known voices who reached hurting believers in the American Church, Evans tragically passed away in 2019 while writing this book. Her friend Jeff Chu completed it with some of her other unpublished work. It is a rich collection of essays that ask candid questions about the stories we’ve been told — and the stories we tell — about our faith, our selves, and our world.
Evans is perhaps most well-known for her powerful critiques of fundamentalist and conservative, male-dominated forms of Christianity. Wholehearted Faith definitely examines some of those criticisms further, but it is ultimately about exploring the longing for a sense of spiritual wholeness in our broken, but beautiful world.
If you have been hurt by the local church but still can’t let go of Jesus and His Church, then this book is an honest and loving message for you. I read it at the end of my deconstruction journey and felt a sense of hope by the final page.
by Christina Sweeney-Baird
This was the only fiction book that made it on my nightstand. I’m glad it did. The plot felt a little too real at times: a global pandemic strikes, most men and boys die, and our planet becomes a women’s world.
The End of Men raises all kinds of deep questions about the meaning of family, labor markets, love, war, and so much more. It was surprisingly cathartic considering the state of our world and all the questions, arguments, and fights we are having about masculinity here in the United States right now. It is a beautifully written story about the resilience of women.
by Ezra Klein
Without a doubt one of the greatest minds of my generation, this short book from NYT columnist and Vox co-founder Ezra Klein is a wonderful read.
I don’t think Why We’re Polarized fully explains why we are polarized — no single book can — however, it does provide a solid lens to see how our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities have merged together and act as powerful forces that are tearing at the fabric of our country. It’s a relatively short, useful read that brings into focus life in the United States a bit more.
by Barack Obama
As I read through this massive book, I began to sense that this was President Obama wanting to set the record straight on some things. It’s an intimate and hyper-detailed memoir on his improbable journey from a young man searching for his identity to the leader of the free world.
A Promised Land was a good reminder to me that the work of being a democratic citizen never ends. It’s never supposed to end. Democracy is not a gift we are entitled to. If you feel discouraged by the state of American democracy right now, I hope you’ll read this book. I think you’ll find some gritty encouragement in it.
Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About The Bible
by Michael Bird
If you’re considering leaving a reformed white American evangelical church — with one of your reasons being that you feel like your church is misusing the Bible — this is a delightful and helpful read.
Bird is an Australian biblical scholar and evangelical theologian, so his writing style is friendly to those with an evangelical background. Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About The Bible stretches how you approach Scripture. It challenges some of the rigid interpretations that many white American evangelical gatekeepers claim is “absolute truth” that often get used as a means to control and abuse others.
For me, this book was a solid reminder that reformed white American evangelicalism is an outlier from the rest of the global church, including many evangelicals outside the United States, who often look at their American cousins with great alarm. If you’re frustrated by evangelicalism in the United States but aren’t ready to give up on the word yet, read this book.
by Pete Buttigieg
This book wasn’t mind-blowing, but I enjoyed reading it. Buttigieg himself calls it “a modest contribution,” so I imagine he wouldn’t be offended by that.
Mayor, er, Secretary Pete opens up with a story of his facing potential danger in Afghanistan and his need to trust someone he didn’t know in that moment, a near-identical experience I once had while quietly slipping into a war zone in Sudan. From there, I found a lot of common cause with the political philosophy Buttigieg explores and the need to repair trust in our institutions and culture writ large.
If you’ve become politically engaged only in the last few years, I would recommend Trust to you, especially. It’s easy to follow and a solid reminder that politics is about so much more than what happens in Washington D.C.
by Amy Peterson
This book reimagines virtue as a tool, not the weapon that much of American evangelicalism approaches virtue as. It explores the Biblical meaning of specific virtues like kindness, purity, and modesty.
I found Where Goodness Still Grows particularly comforting and hope-giving as I was reading it as we were leaving an imploding church. It helped me not give up on the Church in a moment when I really wanted to.
I explore faith and American church culture from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my free newsletter or becoming a member. You can also subscribe to my podcast.
