Review: The Sword of the Lord-The Roots of Fundamentalism

Andrew Himes has written a fascinating book, a mixture of personal memoir and history lesson, which traces the roots of his family’s commitment to fundamentalism and his own evolution toward a different kind of spirituality. In his writing Himes is courageous and vulnerable and the book is meticulously researched. He has given those who are concerned about the polarization of left and right in our country and the impact of fundamentalist thinking on our politics an extraordinary gift. The book is unexpectedly generous, loving and ultimately wise. Anyone who cares about the fusing of the political with the spiritual will find much to learn here.

Andrew Himes grew up in a family which was completely committed to fundamentalism, an offshoot of the Southern Baptist denomination. Raised in a close and loving family, and coming of age in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Himes could have been expected to follow the family religion and become a preacher or evangelist himself. Instead, starting at age 13 he began to question and secretly to rebel against the family’s ideology and values. Growing up when the Civil Rights movement was at its zenith, and with the family’s history of having owned slaves before the Civil War, one glimpses the forces the young Himes had to contend with. His rebellion broke out in the open when he entered college and embraced Maoism, Leninism and the leftist politics that were so popular during the Vietnam War era. The internal struggle to listen to one’s conscience or to abide by the values and teachings of one’s family is a struggle I know well. The wounds acquired from the effort to emancipate and differentiate oneself as an adult can run very deep. It is to Himes’ credit  that in this book he reveals a path to reconciliation and deep compassion for his family’s spiritual beliefs.

Himes takes us on an amazing journey as he traces his family’s history, from Scots-Irish pioneers who settled in the American south in the eighteenth century, to the family’s acquisition of wealth through slave-holding in the years before the Civil War. The sections of the book which reveal the family devastated by the losses of that war are particularly compelling. The focus on his grandfather, John R. Rice, a famous and influential saver of souls and later editor of the Sword of the Lord newspaper, was particularly illuminating for me. Himes describes his grandfather’s story of why he committed his life to becoming an evangelist. When Rice was preaching as a young man he had the repeated experience of watching people who were lost and in great emotional and spiritual distress, suddenly finding extraordinary peace in a matter of moments when they realized they were loved by God. Realizing he could be the conduit for such experiences, the senior Rice chose this as his life work. As one who has also witnessed and experienced such  transformational experiences, I understood immediately the extraordinary effect of this on John Rice. It is altogether human to want to give meaning to such mysterious events. We humans are all too wont to make up explanations and collapse them with an inexplicable thing we have witnessed. Out of such explaining ideologies are born. Eventually the explanation becomes confused with the actual experience.

This book could have used some editing to cut down on the redundancies within it and to tighten its length. Nevertheless, for those willing to stay with it, Himes book is rich, generous and deeply compassionate. It is possible to love those people whom we disagree deeply with. This is Andrew Himes’ gift to us.