THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief How America Got It Right: The U.S. March to Military and Political Supremacy by Bevin Alexander (Crown, 320 pp., $25.95) In How America Got It Right, Bevin...
...Simply taking the name, however, does not mean a person stands in continuity with historic Baptist traditions...
...Alexander argues that the characteristically American principles of "democracy over plutocracy, equality over privilege, liberty over oppression, and the prosperity of the many over the greed of the few" have led to a record of military success, and to a moral superiority over our reluctant European allies...
...But that is a simplistic reading of Baptist history...
...Alexander includes events that may change one's view of historic motives—events frequently slighted in politically correct texts...
...Rather, the core of the book is a readable narrative history that "connects the dots" so as to create a picture that defends current American foreign policy...
...The book is neither a survey of American history, nor an in-depth analysis of foreign policy...
...Greg D. Gilbert...
...There are Baptists, Leonard explains, who stand in the Calvinist tradition of New England Puritanism, and others who deny even the Christian doctrine of the Trinity...
...Everyone else, however—including the vast majority of the nation's Baptists—will find the book rather unremarkable...
...Much of the text is accompanied by similar normative judgments...
...Alexander's policy prescriptions— advanced in the introduction and conclusion, more so than in the core of the book—are dominated by a zealous defense of American policy decisions he perceives as correct, and an indictment of those he perceives as inappropriate...
...An example is the late 19th-century German and Japanese advances on the Philippines that preceded, and in Alexander's view justified, American occupation...
...Eric Wasserstrum Baptists in America by Bill J. Leonard (Columbia University Press, 336 pp., $40) Bill Leonard began cutting his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1990s, when that denomination—America's largest among Protestants—made a decided return to theological conservatism...
...Since then, he has emerged as a leading voice on the Baptist left, arguing that conservatives have tried to define Baptist identity far too narrowly...
...Alexander is not, however, above the occasional partisan gibe...
...Baptists in America will no doubt be a reassuring read to theological liberals who have much to gain by asserting diversity as the key to Baptist identity...
...There are Baptists who approach the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, and others who approach it as a merely human record of religious experience...
...As Leonard himself makes clear with his quotations of Baptist confessions of faith, they have always been a people who draw sharp lines between those beliefs they could recognize as orthodox Christianity, and those that they understood to be outside the pale...
...More troubling is the extremely aggressive foreign policy that he advocates, which is rooted in his own unique view of history...
...There are Baptists who believe abortion is an unconscionable evil, and others who believe "a woman's right to choose" is grounded in the Baptist tradition of liberty of conscience...
...Of course anyone can set up a church, claim to be Baptist, and defy the world to say they are not...
...To be Baptist, Leonard asserts, is to be diverse...
...March to Military and Political Supremacy by Bevin Alexander (Crown, 320 pp., $25.95) In How America Got It Right, Bevin Alexander presents an abridged American history aimed at justifying our current foreign policy...
...Alexander appears to present his policy views as those shared by many or all Americans (which they're not...
...In discussing events that led to American intervention in the Balkans, he comments that the shelling of a marketplace in Sarajevo "forced our timid president, Bill Clinton, to respond because he saw that inaction would lower his numbers in the next poll...
...On the contrary, few Baptists have ever taken an "anything goes" attitude to Christian belief and practice...
...Leonard's latest offering is a kind of field guide to Baptist life in America, a topical study of how people who call themselves "Baptists" have disagreed with one another over everything—from doctrine and polity, to social issues like abortion...
Vol. 10 • June 2005 • No. 41
