"After Trump" by Don Heinz

I just read the book, After Trump: Achieving a New Social Gospel, penned by my colleague and friend, Don Heinz. 

Here are few comments adapted from my endorsement on Amazon.

Packed with insight and perfectly timed, Heinz imagines a world “after Trump” in which Christians formulate—and more importantly, embody—a new social gospel for the 21st century. This book will certainly appeal to those who yearn for a movement “that would redeem American Christianity in the time after Trump.”

How can this happen? Heinz argues that, by taking seriously God’s liberating love—the love that freed the Israelite captives and took them out of Egypt, the love that is incarnate in Jesus and his ministry of transformation, a new movement can find its inspiration.

As a student of American religion—particularly where it’s headed with the increase of the not-religiously-affiliating, or the "Nones"—I appreciate how Heinz roots these reflections in American soil. A few favorite examples: his insights about Robert Bellah’s “civil religion” and Jonathan Winthrop’s “city set on a hill,” as well Charles Taylor’s Secular Age (and why we can’t take recourse in a simple slogan of “science vs. religion”).

All in all, Heinz does not argue for a new “Christian” political party, but a new movement of the social gospel, learning from, but not restricted to, Walter Rauschenbusch et al.’s famous early 20th century formulation.

In sum, as Heinz puts it, this book is “an invitation and a manifesto.”

Will this movement happen? 

It’s now time to see, but one can pray for a more just, socially engaged, and faithful nation. And I suppose Heinz might add that it depends on those of us who call ourselves followers of Christ to decide what we will do. After Trump.