How the Nations Rage: Rethinking Faith and Politics in a Divided Age Hardcover – April 3, 2018

This book needs to be read through the grid of divisive U.S. politics. I write this for the person who lives outside of the United States who may find limited value in the content. The book was also written for Christians. Specifically, followers of Jesus like me, a 58-year old, right-leaning Caucasian who struggles with what I perceive as anti-American rhetoric from the left and who mourns over the moral decline within the neighborhoods, schools and culture in which I was raised and live. It was also written for the left-leaning Christian who grieves over the historic moral failures of the United States and hears the rhetoric from the right as unloving ignorance of history and a threat to return to the abuses and failures of the past.The author seeks to help all Christians: Rethink politics from a Biblical perspective. Specifically, helpful to me was the understanding that our trust reveals our god and our politics reveals our worship. My own idols that include a Utopian America or yesteryear (that never was) helped me see that my daily angst about U.S. culture and politics is actually caused by wrong worship.The author’s second goal is to call both right-leaning and left-leaning Christians (and any other category) to focus our worship and our politics first and foremost in local churches. It is under Biblical authority and within Gospel proclaiming local churches where every age, ethnicity, background and political affiliations finds unity and our true beliefs are lived out and demonstrated.Finally, the author challenges the reader to be involved. The book, is NOT anti-American, unpatriotic nor pro or anti any political party. It is a call for Christians to strive side-by-side for the Gospel and live life together within a local church. Here we find more political power than “electing a president, installing a Supreme Court Justice or even changing a constitution.” It is also NOT a book about retreating or isolationism. The author encourages Christians within local churches both to gather and scatter to engage the culture with Biblical justice and for loves sake. He provides many personal examples and practical steps to involvement.Reading "How the Nations Rage" will require serious self-examination, especially if you are devoted to a political party or position. It is well worth the time to read and to set aside time to consider the implications on our lives as followers of Jesus.

If you are a voter in the United States and you have conservative Christian friends, this book offers a sobering insight into how these friends may be thinking. Leeman's primary goal is to remind his readers, that is, his target audience of conservative American Christians, of facts about how Christians are called to behave towards each other. Although these are points the rest of us--Christian or not--might have hoped were already fairly familiar to the target audience, Leeman's review of them is certainly beneficial and probably accounts for the high rating this book gets from most reviewers.The sobering part of the book is how Leeman teaches his target audience to view their role as American citizens. For example, Leeman explain in great detail how his readers can distinguish between those existing US laws they should obey and all the other existing US laws they are free as Christians to secretly disobey. We all know that, throughout history, there have been individuals, both Christian and non-Christian, who have publicly refused to follow a law and also publicly declaring their willingness to accept the legal consequences of their decision. But for Leeman, secrecy is definitely on the table--especially if it can save the Christian a few bucks. The reader is encouraged to seek the counsel of other conservative Christians but Romans 13 is explicitly -not- on the table.The most sobering part of the book for me as a voter in the United States is how Leeman teaches his readers to explain themselves to rest of us, that is to those of us, Christian or not, who have the wrong "values". Leeman stresses repeatedly that the ideal explanation his readers can offer the rest of us for their voting decisions is "because God said so." He allows a variety of other techniques to "win" against us but reminds his readers of the grave danger of these techniques: any appeal to concepts such as "justice" or "the common good", etc. is ultimately flawed because those of us with the wrong values cannot know what any of those things really are. Concepts such as "justice", etc. can only safely and properly be used when talking privately with other conservative Christians to make a decision. In short, only conservative Christians can determine the right way to vote and it's not possible for them to explain what's going on in their heads to the rest of us.I recommend this book for anyone who wants a hint of the possible thinking behind some of the puzzling things our conservative Christian friends say and do.