Olasky Books: Benefits of Being an Outsider

Jenny Taylor’s Saving Journalism (Pippa Rann Books, UK, 2025) ably chronicles the rise and fall of public interest reporting, and what we have lost as the powerful can now operate with fewer restraints. She notes how western culture’s journalistic innovators until about 1900 were “typically outsiders, religious dissenters who lived by a specific narrative: a narrative of reality and of human development, discerned in the Bible.”

That sensibility disappeared, but “secularization is not inevitable. It is just one form of narrative about the way the world stacks up.” Taylor calls progressivism “the Christian view of history without the Christian bit,” and criticizes the faith that life is “ever-evolving, towards our ever-increasing mastery over nature through science and technology, with no reference to transcendence or grace…. But that turns out be just another belief. It is not actually working, and it is giving way to despair.”

Taylor describes how one outsider, Marty Baron, a Jewish journalist from Florida, made a difference when he became the new editor of the Boston Globe early in his century. Globe journalists had largely ignored the story of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church, not as much of an intentional cover-up but because they did not suspect the sin could be as great as it was. “It takes an outsider,” one of the central figures in the story related, and Taylor notes that “outsiders are uncomfortable people,” troublers who are often happiest on the margins.

Two books provide contrasting perspectives on the treatment of Jewish outsiders. Pamela Nadell’s Antisemitism, An American Tradition (Norton, 2025) shows how some who say abstractly that each person is created in God’s image, scowl that Semites are not. The book would be better if it also acknowledged that more American Christians since 1945 have shown love for Jews. David Kraemer’s Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2025) points out that the romance of Jews and America has benefitted all, with our entire nation gaining great benefits from “a surge in Jewish life and creativity… thanks to the peace and protection of a Jewish home like no other.”

Kraemer goes beyond that, though, in arguing that the “canonical” history—“Jews in exile have experienced an unending sequence of sufferings as strangers in foreign lands”—is one-sided. Equally true is a story “that emphasizes the peaceful and productive qualities of Jewish diaspora experience.” Jews ever since 586 B.C. have “absorbed and adapted elements of the cultures in which they lived.” In exile, Jews have gained the opportunity “to reinvent themselves, often unconsciously, thus providing new energy and strength.”

Christians can derive three lessons from this. First, people who gain great power often abuse it and thus degrade themselves: A lack of power can be spiritually advantageous. Second, when one eastern European Jew decided he needed to move to the Holy Land to advance spiritually, his rabbi told him, “Make Israel here.” (As Booker T. Washington put it, throw down your bucket where you are.) Third, when we realize we are guests, we are less likely to take for granted what surrounds us, and more likely to learn from our hosts.

In Words That Shape Us: How America’s Most Influential Evangelical Magazines Craft the Narrative of Christian Culture (Integratio Press, 2025), Ken Waters reports on coverage of hot issues by The Christian Post, Christianity Today, Sojourners, and World, all outsiders in the secular-dominated journalistic world. Among the subjects: presidential elections 2016 through 2024, immigration, Christian nationalism, the George Floyd killing, COVID-19, abortion and same sex marriage.

In each chapter Waters proceeds publication by publication, so comparison is easy. The Christian Post pushed for building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, but Sojourners opined that the wall “is obviously a terrible idea.” World, instead of sticking to what seemed obvious, “decided to visit the border and talk to people who might be affected,” and gave specific detail on how Hispanic immigrants were helping Sioux City, Iowa. Christianity Today printed prayers for refugees, advocated immigration reform, and “avoided criticizing the idea of the wall [but] reminded readers that prejudice toward non-white Americans persisted.”

Briefly Noted

Tomer Persico’s In God’s Image (NYU Press, 2025) describes the revolutionary idea that arose from the Bible and shaped western civilization: Each human life is significant, and we are not just part of a clan. Daniel K. Williams’s Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2025) details how Christians reminded themselves and others that every unborn person is in God’s image.

Scott Seligman’s The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906 (U. of Nebraska Press, 2025) shows how a battle concerning Christian hymns in public schools led a school board to give in and antisemites to shout out.