We Were Jesus Freaks

Welcome to the First Things daily newsletter, your guide to the ideas and events shaping our shared moral, cultural, and religious life. Each article we publish continues the conversations First Things has been leading for thirty-five years.

Stay with me as we examine the Evangelical culture of the 1990s, the old roots of the right's current conflict, and Armenia’s persecuted church.

We Were Jesus Freaks

Trevin Wax

From the December issue: Trevin Wax takes us back to the thick Evangelical culture of the 1990s in his feature-length essay. Part memoir, part cultural anthropology, Wax’s piece invites nostalgia and gratitude for the music, literature, and television that shaped Generation X and Millennial Christians. On the song “Jesus Freak” by DC Talk, he writes, “Thousands of teenagers embraced this anthem, proudly proclaiming the freakiness of their faith in the eyes of the secular world.”

For further reading: Wax traces the decline of the Contemporary Christian Music scene, noting that the rock and folk Chistian music of the late nineties gave way to worship anthems. Stephen Webb wrote about the tensions between rock music and Christianity in “Can Christian Music Be Real Rock and Roll?” (2014): “Rock is a threat to Christianity not because it is essentially transgressive, but because it too often acquiesces to modernity’s distancing of art from truth.”

The Right’s Thirty-Year War

Daniel McCarthy

The current battle on the right over platforming figures like Nick Fuentes is a reincarnation of the battle between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives in the 1990s, writes Daniel McCarthy. The interventionist neocons effectively ousted the “America First” paleocons, led by Pat Buchanan, from the conservative movement for on charges of antisemitism (some founded, some stretched). McCarthy explores this nuanced family history and what it implies for the movement’s current challenges.

For further reading: First Things is a fruit of the tensions between these camps: Our founder, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, had neocon sympathies that led to a split from the paleo-aligned Chronicles magazine. He remained interested in these debates, writing often about many of the figures mentioned in McCarthy’s piece today. He wrote in the October 1994 issue of First Things about an essay by Joseph Sabran: “The subject of anti-Semitism is weary and wearying. . . . A good argument can be made for simply averting one’s eyes, for not lifting the rock to see what is underneath. But Sobran’s writings are not under a rock.”

The Meaning of Armenia’s Prayer Breakfast

Joel Veldkamp

In a show of international Christian solidarity, European and American faith leaders participated in Armenia’s first national prayer breakfast. Joel Veldkamp, who attended the event, writes that despite the support expressed for Armenia’s Christians, “There was a shadow over the event—and it wasn’t just the recent ethnic cleansing, or the knowledge that twenty-three Armenians are still being held hostage by Azerbaijan’s dictatorship. The shadow was the Armenian government’s campaign against Armenia’s own national church.” The government has jailed several clergy members, and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is attempting to remove the head of the Armenian Orthodox church to install one more favorable to his regime.

For further reading: Though Armenia and Azerbaijan entered a Trump-brokered peace deal in August, it might not be sustainable. After decades of conflict between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan, only sustained American interest in the region will keep the fragile peace, writes Mark Movsesian in “Armenia and Azerbaijan’s Uncertain Peace.”