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How Herbalife’s Gospel of Health and Wealth Fuels a Billion-Dollar Deception

By Michael Schulson

…These talks took on the aura of sermons. They “were part revival meeting, part Richard Simmons-style pep talk, part the Apostle Paul finding his vocation as a missionary,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. Videos of these speeches still float around YouTube, where seemingly pirated compilations like “Timeless Wisdom Of Mark Hughes DVD Collection – Volume 2 – Foundational Concepts” rack up tens of thousands of hits. Hughes’ rhetoric is relentlessly focu…

How New Religions Are Made

By Jacob S. Dorman

…920s, as in the 1970s. I think African American adoption of both religions are variants of Black thought about “the East,” and deserve to be thought of as Black forms of Orientalism—not in a pejorative sense, but in an affirmative and romantic sense. So at one point the book was at least twice as long, before I decided that the Islam/Orientalism piece needed to be a book of its own. Even then, the Black Israelites book continued for five more chap…

Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

By Eric Reitan

…who copulated with a child and flew into the sky on a winged horse.” These are caricatures not because there aren’t people who believe things roughly along these lines, but because they tell us as much about the true substance of the faith as the shape and size of Obama’s ears tell us about the character of the man. While most of my Christian friends treat the Garden of Eden story as a myth whose religious significance lies not in its literal accu…

Mitt Romney and the Ghost of Anti-Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…Brion Davis has argued, once America had overthrown the authority of any particular church and rested the state of the union on “we the people” not divinely anointed kings, the highest source of authority was public opinion. The Enlightenment wagered that a free press and rational, open debate would lead to better decision-making, and people would exercise their franchise accordingly. But Mormonism seemed like a concentration of authority in a gr…

Robbing Peter to Give Charity to Paul: The Dirty Secret Behind American ‘Giving’

By Peter Laarman

…ng more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flour…

How a Pioneer of Branding Invented Christian Fundamentalism

By Daniel Silliman

…ion of individuals. One of the main points of my story is that the particular arrangement we see today of evangelicals’ alignment with business is not a new phenomenon. It can be traced back, specifically to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It was not there before. And it did not start after World War II. It really started here. I’m also arguing against the idea that American Protestantism has always been guided by the logic of the market. That…

The Myth of the Pro-Life Swing Voter the Dems Must Chase

By Daniel Schultz

…rs behind. What we’re not told is why Democrats—or readers, really—should care, particularly because there’s little evidence across various pollsters, from PRRI to Gallup to Pew, that Democratic voters are trending toward restricting abortion rights. So it goes: The praise for Klobuchar suggests that Democrats who have heeded rising worry within their base about GOP-backed abortion limits by pitching significant new abortion-rights policies may ri…

Water Water Everywhere

By Amina Wadud

…the nostrils. When the head is done, the whole head is wiped over and the ears are done as well. The foot is cleaned all the way up to the ankles. So yes, it can get to be messy. It doesn’t have to be, but when lots of people are in a hurry to get it done and then join a prayer line—well, you get the picture. In the United States, the regular sink in a house is difficult to manage the entire elaborate version without considerable effort. So, it is…

Intelligent Design Trial Celebrates Fifth Year Reunion

By Lauri Lebo

…ed tour of the Gettysburg Battlefield for all the folks from out of town. Barbara Forrest, the philosopher of science and the woman who defense attorney Richard Thompson tried to portray as an evil atheist, brought pralines and proudly showed photos of her children. Additionally, we also discussed what was accomplished and speculated on where the next big anti-evolution battle will likely occur. Can anyone say, “Academic freedom reunion in Louisia…

Peter Beinart’s Controversial The Crisis of Zionism: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Treatment

By Shaul Magid

…ationship between the United States and Israel.” The critics, it appears, care far less about Israel than they do about what American Jews think about Israel. If Beinart’s book were an indictment at all it was not of Israel, but of American Jewry. And the anger it evoked tells us more about what the fervent American Jewish pro-Israel critics really care about. Some years ago I presented an academic paper at an American Academy of Religion conferen…