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The “New Alarmism” is not new and is not alarmism.

March 10th, 2017 | 15 min read

By Jake Meador

When asked about the Holy Roman Empire the French philosophe Voltaire once quipped that said empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. I had something like that thought while reading Dr. James K. A. Smith’s piece for the Washington Post. That said, Dr. Smith’s post is far from the first to raise this concern. As mentioned previously, Katelyn Beaty and Emma Green’s reviews also critiqued Rod’s project for alarmism, though Green was more fair about it than Smith or Beaty. Rachel Held Evans also made this attack in her Twitter thread on the book.

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Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, The Dispatch, National Review, Comment, Christianity Today, and Plough. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.