[Book Review] A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond The Culture Wars

While there may be a widespread belief that Christianity is playing a significant role in influencing politics and cultural environment of the United States, Jonathan Meritt disagrees. I recently had the pleasure of reading his book A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture, and couldn’t help but find a distinct truth in the subject matter. That meant that this book immediately made it on my list of book reviews to share with you!

In his book, he posits that the youth of America is, in fact, steadily getting more and more disenchanted with the religion. This is a religion, he states, that has become increasingly culturally antagonistic and more and more aligned with partisan politics.

By drawing on his own personal experiences, Meritt uses this book as an attempt to explore and uncover the ever-changing face of Christianity, doing so by indulging in a close examination of the coming of age of a whole new generation of Christians.

A Faith of Our Own finds Meritt ruminating on the changes taking place in Christianity in the current climate in America, using his own personal story to draw comparisons between the then and now.

He was the son of a Southern Baptist president, brought up in a church where liberals like Bill Clinton were abhorred and rebuked on a very public level. He talks about the hope that the religious Right sold—that voting a certain way was all that was needed to change America. Eventually, he determined that this was indeed a false hope. The issues that were prevalent then are still prevalent now—not much has changed, Meritt claims.

The book suggests that the problem lies within how the religion has been practiced for the last 40 years. Churches, both conservative and liberal, remained considerably more focused on motivating people to be either more liberal or more conservative—taking the focus away from being more like Christ.

In his book, Jonathan Meritt seeks to shed light on the spiritual ethos of the new generation of Christians, who seek to engage within the world with Christ-centered faith, yet with un-polarized political point of views.

Using his personal stories as a backdrop, he examines that changing political and religious environment of the country.

At the core of the book, he draws on Scripture and the example of Christ, in order to identify the core truths that are the foundation of Christianity as a faith—something that is, with the new generation, only now coming of age.

Taking into account the core values of non-profit organizations like Transformational Leadership Forum, many parallels can be drawn between those ideologies and the values represented in Meritt’s book.