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This is not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism

By Jeff Sharlet

…e can’t.” The common denominator is power. The best way to help the middle class, the Fellowship believes, is to help the ruling class. The benefits will trickle down. “They’re so busy loving us,” one Fellowship brother once said of the elites to whom he ministered, “but who’s loving them?” The Fellowship is, and right now they’re loving Sarah Palin, a candidate who has excited the evangelical base like no other since William Jennings Bryan raged…

This is Not a Religion Column: The Audacity of Compromise…

By Jeff Sharlet

…secular liberalism’s political elite, it responds with yet another ruling class: a “responsible” elite. There’s an element of the superhero sensibility in Obama’s Social Gospel politics, a perspective that sees the poor as damsels in distress or children in burning buildings, awaiting rescue by the best and the brightest: Jane Addams, the early 20th century reformer who ministered to the slums of Chicago; Josiah Strong, founder of the League of S…

Studying Religion is Suddenly Popular

By Mark Hulsether

…ntentionally or not, one effect is to underplay the importance of economic class as a focus of attention. Can the religious concerns of white working-class Christians (or for that matter the concerns of non-white immigrants, who are predominantly Christian) be valorized as part of ASR’s bold new future? Within the logic of this argument, must such groups present themselves as just one more form of “global diversity,” deserving about the same amoun…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…drugs and prostitution, whereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d…

Are Social Issues Non-Issues?

By Jay Michaelson

…y debatable quality, shot through with assumptions about gender, race, and class, but nonetheless the most important factor for those muddle-headed moderates we refer to as undecided. Romney was The Man out there tonight, in all those gendered, racial, and class-bound ways. Inchoate as it was, he did in fact articulate a clear, moral vision: where men like him are in charge, free enterprise reigns, and those who are weak deserve the suffering they…

God’s Law is the Only Law: The Genesis of Michele Bachmann

By Sarah Posner

…ers except in the most extraordinary circumstances. Christians are “Second-Class Citizens” The claim that powerful, anti-Christian forces aim to undermine God’s “truth” lies at the heart of the IOTC’s and Titus’ conception of the constitutional roles of government and religion. Titus insists that Christians are discriminated against by these conventional interpretations of the Establishment Clause, which are at odds with his own, and which he cont…

Southern Baptist Convention Declares Gay Rights Are Not Civil Rights

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…to every last detail, is incomprehensible—and reprehensible. If a group—or class—of people is being blatantly discriminated against not just by churches, but by federal and state governments, and said group, or class, decides to rebel against that discrimination and claim its rightful place as full, tax-paying citizens of the United States of America, you can damn well bet it is a civil rights movement. Nobody copyrighted the phrase, and nobody ca…

We’re Not Just “Heterosexual with Issues”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ey lose the cultural war. If they can keep LGBT people in misery as second class citizens, then our community continues to fulfill their prophecy that we live in misery. Denying marriage rights (and the benefit of happiness it can bring) is part and parcel to the religious right’s war on LGBT people. They must keep this entire class of people from engaging in anything that might make the whole community happier and healthier—their very jobs depend…

The Gospel Gestalt: From Joyful Noise to Whitney Houston

By Douglas Harrison

…ealthy, white woman of social prominence in the rural South, and a working-class, (sort of) single black mother who profoundly, instinctively dislike one another without ever once openly countenancing race and American race history as a possible explanation for their troubles. Instead, they play out their conflict through their fight over the future of gospel music in the Pacashau, Georgia Sacred Divinity Choir, which, in addition to having the mo…

Santorum’s War on Satan… er, on Higher Education

By Eric Reitan

…b-training programs. He has spoken far more about the need to give working class people tools to advance their careers (through certificate and associate degree programs) than he has about four-year liberal arts degrees. Expanding access to such career-enhancing educational opportunities is, to put it bluntly, the very opposite of elitist snobbery. Even Newt Gingrich, who isn’t the president’s number-one booster, told the Today show that the Obama…