Mark isn’t finished with the wilderness at the mention of John. He will have Jesus in the wilderness for his temptation. This too is intentional. God, through Mark, wants us to see that Jesus enters into the wilderness in order to redeem it. He enters into the place of our greatest shame, emptiness, brokenness, and he redeems it. This is why Mark is so adamant about having us see John as in the wilderness. It’s his way of tying us back to all of the hope of the Old Testament and eventually showing us how Jesus is the Great Rescuer.

Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.
–Mark 1:6
Mark tells the story of Jesus in a little over 11,000 words. That’s 7-8000 less words than Matthew and Luke. He is concise, intentional, and action-packed. This begs the question, why stop and tell us about the clothing and diet of John the Baptist?
Why Even Tell Us About John?
Doesn’t it seem a tad strange that Mark begins by saying, “this is the gospel of Jesus Christ…” then he proceeds to tell us about some guy named John? What is he doing here? There is no birth narrative. We don’t know where Jesus came from…but we know that he came on the scene at the same time as some strange dude baptizing people out in the wilderness? What is Mark doing by starting his gospel account out in the wilderness?
The wilderness was an empty, abandoned, wasteland. It was symbolic of the wandering Israelites—a place that was spiritually bankrupt. You don’t want to go to the wilderness. But Mark wants us to start there. Why?
Mark starts in the wilderness because it will be out of this emptiness that great hope is found. The wilderness is the place where our nakedness and vulnerability is fully exposed. It’s the place where we are stripped of our own efforts and resources and are forced to rely solely upon God. It is because of the pruning of the wilderness that it became a place of hope and new beginnings. The wilderness is also the place where Israel will find God’s love for them and rekindle their love for God. This is why around the time of Jesus there were many desert dwellers waiting upon God for salvation.
Mark tells us about John the Baptizer as a bridge to the prophetic hope of the Old Testament. He quotes from Exodus, Isaiah, and Malachi to place John as the fulfillment of this out of the wilderness time of renewal—where a prophet like Elijah would prepare the way for the Lord Himself. That’s why John appears at the beginning of Mark’s gospel.
Why Mention His Diet and Dress?
If John is in the gospel account to serve as a bridge to the Old Testament, it would do us well to walk across that bridge and make the connections that Mark is intending.
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Pentecostalism grew out of the Holiness movement, and thus drank deeply from the populist movements in Methodism and Baptist and African-American circles. Charles Fox Parham (1873–1929), is usually credited with the beginnings of the movement. He was born in Muscatine, IA, and claimed a revelation of light at age 13. Parham associated with Methodism, but rejected their hierarchy, and moved toward holiness theology. He broke with Methodism in 1895 and established his own ministry, Bethel Bible College, in October 1900. He emphasized “primitive Christianity.” 

An easy error for a historian to commit is to equate or link events or movements in history that are similar, while ignoring or underplaying their differences. One example of this is when historians of worship note that modern negative reactions to contemporary pop-rock worship contain similar objections to ones leveled against the hymns of Luther, and later, Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts. Without question, there are similarities. What a lazy historian fails to notice is when the differences are greater than the similarities.
That can be said about the roots of Pentecostal worship, found in the populist religious mood that swept America in the late 1780s, through to the 19th century. Yes, there are many parallels to earlier reactions against ossified liturgical forms that sparked more colloquial and lay-driven worship (e.g., some Waldensians and Lollards, some Anabaptists, the Moravians). But there are differences to previous reformations of worship that far outweigh the similarities. When we examine those differences, we will find that the seedbed from which Pentecostalism grew in the 1900s was actually a considerable departure from prior worship reformers such as Luther, Wesley and Watts.
Nathan Hatch detects four waves of populist folk religious music in America from 1780 to 1830. The first was among Separatist Baptists in rural New England. Some of the early hymnals of these Baptists maintained continuity with the hymns of Watts and others, but a flood of hymnbooks published by Elias Smith between 1804 and 1820 contained no overlap with the accepted hymnals of the day. Original and catchy lyrics linked to popular folk tunes became the new tradition of rural New England Baptists.
The second wave of populist worship was Methodist revivalism. The Wesleys had taught the importance of the participation of all people, but had also insisted that hymns maintain dignity and reverence. But Methodism in America during the early 1800s went in a new direction. It included spontaneous song, shouting, jumping and seeking a rousing emotional response to the singing. These songs were the beginnings of the “gospel song”: simple, easily remembered lyrics, verses written in rhyming pairs with a chorus or refrain. Gospel songs were songs of testimony, marching songs of solidarity, humorous ballads, even appeals to repentance.
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A big problem we face today is that we have not made use of these authentically American ways to refresh our institutions. Our leaders have essentially doubled down on patching up the existing model that was created out of the Depression and postwar era, even as their limits and lack of suitability to today’s world become increasingly apparent.

Before we can talk about Christian nationalism, we first have to talk about nationalism. As many people conclude that something has gone fundamentally wrong in America, nationalism is just one of the proposed solutions. Christian nationalism is a variant of that.
Catholic integralism is another variation on this same theme. Others promote “post-liberalism.” The Left, of course, wants some kind of socialism. Some call for an American Pinochet. Some people on the dissident Right even flirt with discredited continental political philosophies.
While it is understandable that people want to see America change for the better, these approaches won’t work because they are foreign to the American political and cultural tradition.
America is not a “nation” in the European sense. Nationalism was a 19th-century European state-building movement. It was about constructing national identities out of the people in various estates and villages who spoke different dialects of the same language. America, on the other hand, is a continental empire—even if, like “nationalism,” “empire” is another word we would not use to describe ourselves. Manifest destiny was not about forming a nation out of a pre-existing sub-region with a shared history but about conquering and taming the West. America has always been something of a protean nation: restless, forward-looking, growth-oriented, constantly churning, changing and building. This makes it a bad fit for the imposition of some static concept of “nationhood.”
This is why “nationalism” is not a word that Americans have traditionally used to describe what they want for their country, even in the halcyon days of the 1980s. Even if the content of something like nationalism is said to be what Americans have always believed, the word itself is a foreign symbol. It doesn’t compute for most Americans.
As Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell has shown, wokeness shot rapidly through American culture because it exploited Protestant religious themes that are embedded deep in our public consciousness, whereas Marxism never got traction because concepts like “class” don’t resonate in America. Opponents of wokeness should learn from this: the language and symbols we adopt will have to resonate with Americans’ own self-understanding.
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