Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Pilot (Library of Religious Biography | LRB)

by Christopher Gehrz

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2021

Overview

The narrative surrounding Charles Lindbergh’s life has been as varying and complex as the man himself. Once best known as an aviator—the first to complete a solo nonstop transatlantic flight—he has since become increasingly identified with his sympathies for white supremacy, eugenics, and the Nazi regime in Germany. Underexplored amid all this is Lindbergh’s spiritual life; what beliefs drove the contradictory impulses of this twentieth-century icon?

An apostle of technological progress who encountered God in the wildernesses he sought to protect, an anti-Semitic opponent of US intervention in World War II who had a Jewish scripture inscribed on his gravestone, and a critic of Christianity who admired Christ, Lindbergh defies conventional categories. But spirituality undoubtedly mattered to him a great deal. Influenced by his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh—a self-described “lapsed Presbyterian” who longed to live “in grace”—and friends like Alexis Carrel (a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon, eugenicist, and Catholic mystic) and Jim Newton (an evangelical businessman), he spent much of his adult life reflecting on mortality, divinity, and metaphysics. In this short biography, Christopher Gehrz represents Lindbergh as he was, neither an adherent nor a skeptic, a historical case study of an increasingly familiar contemporary phenomenon: the “spiritual but not religious.”

For all his earnest curiosity, Lindbergh remained unwilling throughout his life to submit to any spiritual authority beyond himself and ultimately rejected the ordering influence of church, tradition, scripture, or creed. In the end, the man who flew solo across the Atlantic insisted on charting his own spiritual path, drawing on multiple sources in such a way that satisfied his spiritual hunger but left some of his cruelest convictions unchallenged.

Key Features

• Provides a historical case study of an increasingly familiar contemporary phenomenon: the “spiritual but not religious”
• Links the lives of their subjects to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them
• Brings to life important figures in United States history and beyond

Contents

• Introduction
• Ancestors
• A Boyhood on (and beyond) the Upper Mississippi
• “The Winged Gospel”
• “The New Christ”
• Anne
• “A Cruel God of Chance”
• The Happiest Years
• “The Nazi Theology”
• America First
• The War
• Beyond Flight
• Last Years
• Of Death and Afterlife
• Afterword

Product Details

• Title: Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Pilot
• Author: Christopher Gehrz
• Series: Library of Religious Biography
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2021
• Logos Release Date: 2021
• Pages: 265
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Lindbergh, Charles A. (Charles Augustus), 1902-1974; Lindbergh, Charles A. (Charles Augustus), 1902-1974 › Religion; Air pilots › United States--Biography
• ISBNs: 9780802876218, 0802876218
• Resource ID: LLS:FLYNGSLCLNDBRGH
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-10-08T04:46:01Z

About Christopher Gehrz

Christopher Gehrz (PhD, Yale) is professor of history and chair of the history department at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also helps coordinate the Christianity and Western Culture program and contributes to the program's podcast. He is the coeditor of The Pietist Impulse in Christianity.