Religion Dispatches
…ion. Perhaps in the wake of the tragedy in Ferguson there will be a renewed vigor from progressive churches that will help repair old coalitions, build new ones, and tell a new story about who gets to speak “for religious people.”…
Read More…wth of churches like the Juba Christian Center, the prosperity gospel, and American televangelism plant the seeds, as it were, for this new nation to cultivate religious hucksters eager to cash in on souls to be saved? Or will the situation in South Sudan become similar to Brazil, where cultural religious traditions such as Candomble are demonized, and Pentecostalism is lauded as the progressive religion not connected to a difficult history? I pre…
Read More…s might have talked about peace and poverty, but Francis’s much-discussed “new tone” seems like a permission slip for Democrats to talk religion without a full scale showdown on culture war issues. That said, there are topics apparently left undiscussed: a new war on LGBT people in Russia, Nigeria, and elsewhere, not to mention that elephant in the room with all things Francis, what freedom means for half the world’s population, women. Obama and K…
Read More…ng Is This The End Of The Religious Right?, pointing to the emergence of a new liberal wing of the evangelical movement, or declaring that this is the year evangelicals are going to totes break up with the GOP nominee. And then Lucy pulls the football and right about three-quarters of evangelicals vote for the GOP nominee, whoever he is. Currently, 78% of white evangelicals support Donald Trump (identical to the number that voted for Mitt Romney i…
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…mics gained supporters over the years but for more than three decades, the New Deal shaped American values and set the national vision. But in the 1960s and the 1970s, a series of cultural upheavals—starting with the Civil Rights movement and ending with the Iranian revolution—laid waste to FDR’s notion of a benevolent centralized state. Ronald Reagan began dismantling Roosevelt’s legacy and successive presidents followed suit. Free markets boomed…
Read More…civil unions. These developments please a lot of people; the press gets a new narrative and the Democrats eye a widening pool of potential evangelical voters. Two recent books, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right by E.J. Dionne and The Party Faithful: How And Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap by Amy Sullivan, both describe a changing situation in which evangelicals and other serious religious people will not au…
Read More…ell as the appeal to “remove the veil from their hearts.” According to the New York Times, the new prayer may be translated as follows: “Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men.” The prayer also expresses hope that “all Israel may be saved.” What many may not realize is that both the old and the new Good Friday prayers are citing the apostle Paul. The re…
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…hat never existed, a mythical Constantine at best. What they’re after is a new Mussolini; an American one. A Christofascist dictator with stars and stripes behind him, Bible in hand—a Caesar in the White House. The idea that all that’s needed for the US to recover from the throngs of secularism and equality (which the Right considers to be unnatural), is a benevolent dictator—benevolent, at least, to the supporters of the Right. And this idea is n…
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…to participate in interviews, and I had a much harder time getting Muslim American men. I found that there’s a lot of self-surveillance. American Muslims are surveilled by the state. They’re surveilled by private citizens. Then they participate in self-surveillance as well. When you’re hyper-surveilled you monitor what you say and do to avoid bringing suspicion onto your body. When you’re on a state list that’s very disempowering. When I got men…
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…cation at the high court, according to Tisa Wenger, associate professor of American religious history at Yale and author of the new book Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal. “Those most powerful in society have always been able to wield religious freedom arguments for their own interests,” Wenger explained in a recent conversation with RD. And although conservative Christians (particularly white evangelicals and conservat…
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