Religion Dispatches
…calling it Huntsman’s “Utah problem.” Jake Garn asks, “If he can’t generate support from those with whom he worked most closely, why should folks in New Hampshire and South Carolina offer theirs?” Don’t worry—Al Gore lost Tennessee too, and look how well it turned out for him……
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…who supports marriage equality and abortion rights be elected in the rural South? And then there are the new district maps that were released just last week. According to Aaron Blake at The Fix, Shuler now represents the most conservative district in the state. His district (which voted 52 percent for McCain/Palin in 2008) has, with a few redrawn lines on a map, been converted to one that voted 58 percent for the Republican ticket. Blake notes,…
Read More…ormon missionaries and when Mormon elders were tarred and feathered in the South. It’s a timely and necessary reminder. Because from the chatter around the Mormon blogosphere, I’m gathering that politically opportunistic anti-Muslim sentiment is simmering in the more conservative sectors of the LDS world. And whereas one usually hears valiant reports on the Mormon grapevine of LDS humanitarian responses to major natural disasters, I’m getting at…
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…tester.” Sanders has served on the Board of Directors of the League of the South, a Southern nationalist organization the SPLC characterizes as “a neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by ‘European Americans.’” That society would be, according to the SPLC, a “godly” nation “run by an ‘Anglo-Celtic’ (read: white) elite that would establish a Christian theocratic state and politically dominate b…
Read More…hat I serve is not too far from the Army base at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. Because of our proximity to the Air Force Chaplain Corps College housed there we often get chaplain students attending our services. It’s part of their training to get off the base and attend church services of denominations that they may not otherwise experience. A uniformed young man showed up at one of our services recently and, as part of his assignment,…
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….” Thus spake Jim DeMint, the ultra-conservative Republican senator from South Carolina, in a recent radio interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. No, I don’t listen to Tony Perkins. I found the quote thanks to Think Progress blogger Scott Keyes, who offered what he calls this “outlandish statement” as an example of conservatives’ tendency “to dress their political ideology in religious language.” Maybe so. Politicians typica…
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…taken in the “Second Middle Passage” from the eastern seaboard to the Deep South during the very years that the Second Great Awakening proclaimed spiritual freedom for all. Anglo-Americans created the evangelical synthesis. They also fostered a racially exclusivist and religiously restrictive culture that limited the freedom of those defined outside the ranks of the free and the citizen. This remained true during the era when America’s God was a r…
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…something beyond immediate material realities? “Did your God find me a job today?” And this brings us to a second theme at Tribulation Trail: the impact of the recession, particularly on the US working class. Quite literally the recession was present from the beginning to the end of Tribulation Trail. In the second scene, Jesus returned to rapture a woman as her unemployed husband berated her for trying to convince him to go to church: “Did your G…
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…the very small class of free black slaveholders in the nineteenth-century South. After his death, Bryan’s nephew, Andrew Marshall, took the pulpit at First African Baptist, and became one of the best known (and most controversial) black ministers of the antebellum era, leading to a major schism of the church body. In the early twentieth century, First African was rather famous for its fights and dissension, but eventually became known as well for…
Read More…er groups. Men, blacks, and those living in the traditionally conservative South are less accepting of gays and lesbians; but even there, the numbers are encouraging. Fifty-five percent of men said they strongly or somewhat agree that there’s nothing wrong with same-sex marriage, while 47 percent of blacks said the same thing, and a majority of southern millennials, 56 percent, agreed. In fact, out of all of the subcategories, it’s only in the bla…
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