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Why I Fear The Post-Trayvon Martin Sermon

By Elizabeth Drescher

…culture rigidly segmented and stratified on the basis of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other social categories. I expect that she won’t, for instance, offer tepid prayers for the comfort of the Martin family and a promise of compensatory goodies at some heavenly banquet in the hereafter where, in one of the stupidest prayers I came across on Facebook in the wee hours of the morning, we are promised, “there is no death, pain or sorrow; nor p…

The Religion of Self Improvement Grinds On Despite Hard Times for Grads

By Peter Laarman

…equired to hold a job, but it is not enough to deliver a reasonable middle-class income. In a recent Harper’s essay, Jeff Madrick accurately describes “get more education” as a cardinal tenet of mainstream economic orthodoxy, even as he pounds that tenet to smithereens: “Mainstream economists are disturbingly wedded to an ideology that fails to take into account the fact that labor markets can fail or that workers can be abused.” Madrick is especi…

Without Bev Shea, No Billy Graham

By Douglas Harrison

…me Brother Billy persona was of course one powerful alternative for middle-class evangelicals who wanted to look up and away from Sister Aimee’s down-market unseemliness. Shea’s success distinguished itself for being both more explicitly commercialized than Graham’s, while also retaining all the bourgeois respectability so often found missing in the tawdriness of the Elmer Gantrified competition—the faith healers and the New Thought movement and t…

Marriage Equality: Race, Family Values, and the 99%

By Sikivu Hutchinson

…on public social welfare and health care assistance. Nonetheless, when textbooks, TV shows, and Hollywood films envision culturally “diverse” LGBT families it is through the lens of privileged white middle class folk who have “benevolently” decided to adopt a child of color (à la the white gay couple on the sitcom Modern Family) or used expensive reproductive technology to have children. In this context, marriage equality merely secures white weal…

Forget History Channel’s The Bible, Meet Omar

By Haroon Moghul

…hed it, I started all over again. What other choice did I have? As an Anglophone Muslim, it’s a little harder to get the same range at your local bookstore’s Islam section. Firstly you might find Islam under ‘eastern religions,’ which is like finding your parents’ cuisine under ‘ethnic food’ (white people, apparently, don’t have an ethnicity, to which the universe has responded with Jersey Shore.) Then, when you actually locate Islam—organizationa…

Is Downward Dog the Path to Hell?

By Andrea R. Jain

…sm is [sic] all opening to demonism… if you just sign up for a little yoga class, you’re signing up for a little demon class. That’s what you’re doing. And Satan doesn’t care if you stretch as long as you go to hell.” Similar to Islamophobic attempts to produce and demonize a monolithic vision of Islam, Mohler’s recent post simplifies and flattens yoga. In particular he’s bothered by the fact that yoga is grounded in the belief that the body is a…

An Evangelical (Millennial) on the Canterbury Trail

By John Schmalzbauer

…ron, to the poet Luci Shaw and even Bono of U2 — evangelicalism’s creative class is loaded with Anglicans.” This quest for wholeness leads her to the doors of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tenn. Organizing her memoir around the sacraments of baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, anointing the sick, and marriage, she longs to “touch, smell, taste, hear, and see God in the stuff of everyday life.” Evans is not the fi…

A King for Jesus: What the Religious Right Sees in Trump

By Roger O. Friedland

…l right has captured the Christians, not the reverse. It’s about politics, class and honor, not God. Arlie Hochschild, in her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, based on her ethnography of Calcasieu Parish in Southern Louisiana, explores the paradox that white low-income citizens who depend on the state both hate it and love Trump. Her subjects were almost all believing Christians, mostly Southern Baptists and other evangelicals. Her account r…

Trump’s Rise: What’s a Christian Progressive to Do?

By Jonathan Orbell

…t a certain level of pathology is at work among white, working- and middle-class Americans. There is a spiking mortality rate in this population, attributed not to the usual culprits like heart disease or diabetes, but to “an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.” I would like to suggest that it is no coincidence that Trump’s rise and an uptick…

Doing Political Theology In an Election Season: Howard Thurman on Deception

By Andrew Wilkes

…exercises in deception. The prevailing frame of the ideal voter as middle class and the excessive attention given to our presidential candidates’ tax returns (or lack thereof) and Goldman Sachs speaking fees have obscured more pivotal realities on the other side of the asset and income scale: there is a class of citizens and residents who endure taxation without effective political representation. Neither candidate, for example, has a major platf…