Testimony
Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation
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5.0 • 9 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Ward is consistently clear-sighted and perceptive as he charts a genuinely fascinating personal and spiritual evolution."--Publishers Weekly
Jon Ward's life is divided in half: two decades inside the evangelical Christian bubble and two decades outside of it.
In Testimony, Ward tells the engaging story of his upbringing in, and eventual break from, an influential evangelical church in the 1980s and 1990s. Ward sheds light on the evangelical movement's troubling political and cultural dimensions, tracing the ways in which the Jesus People movement was seduced by materialism and other factors to become politically captive rather than prophetic.
A respected journalist, Ward asks uncomfortable but necessary questions, calling those inside and outside conservative Christian circles to embrace truth, complexity, and nuance. He recounts his growing alarm and grief over the last several years as evangelical conservatives attacked truth, rejected personal character, and embraced authoritarianism and conspiracism. He shares his search for a faith that embodies the values he was taught as a child.
Ward's experience and reflections will resonate with many readers who grew up in the evangelical movement as well as all those who have an interest in the health of the church and its impact on American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enlightening memoir, Ward (Camelot's End), senior political correspondent for Yahoo! News, recounts a life caught between Christian and secular worlds. Ward grew up in the 1980s and '90s as an evangelical pastor's son, going to protests outside abortion clinics and embarking on mission trips. But when the Sovereign Grace Church took a sharp turn toward New Calvinism, its notions of man's total depravity left Ward further disenchanted with the sin-obsessed, "hermetically sealed" church world he'd already started to question. Ward pursued journalism and landed his first reporting job at the Washington Times, though for years he dealt with an "existentialist despair" after realizing his upbringing hadn't prepared him for "the world in which now moved." West fully broke with the church after the evangelical community embraced Donald Trump in 2016, causing rifts with his family. Nonetheless, Ward advocates for a Christian presence in public political discourse, in which he contends believers should serve as "agents of nuance rather than of reductionism." While this sometimes seems more like an ongoing personal inquiry than a finished product (as when he touches on the current status of his faith in the final chapters), Ward is consistently clear-sighted and perceptive as he charts a genuinely fascinating personal and spiritual evolution. This will resonate especially with Christians wondering about faith's place in modern American society.
Customer Reviews
Truth
As a southern born boy, I can attest to the unwarranted power that religion can have, often more about the men in power than about the teachings of Jesus, Christ.