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American Civil Religion is Dead, Long Live American Civil Religion

By Peter Laarman

…g the truth, junking the impossible notion that God has somehow chosen the United States for a special destiny or is interested in mending our “every flaw.” Try this: 1. Our country’s history has been a mixed bag from the start, with white male supremacy and white racist violence lying at the very core of the Anglo colonial culture—and with that toxic inheritance carrying right through into the revolutionary period and into the young republic and…

The Contested Religious Powers of Baseball on Display in Cuba

By Sean O'Neil

…t their realities are transparent and go without saying because, while the United States is a place of complexity and opportunity, Cuba is one of simplicity and degradation. According to this model, the American Dream is so appropriately irresistible and ubiquitous that it animates the deepest longings of taxi drivers in Cuba, who don’t need to offer us elaborations about such desires because they had us at “I love America.” To appreciate the ways…

Rising Influence of New Apostolic Reformation Teachings is Ominous Sign For the US — Especially For LGBTQ Students

By Jonathon Sawyer

…enominational churches (themselves amounting to many millions more) in the United States and abroad. What’s more, NAR teachings about demons, and the urgent call for Christians to conquer culture are increasingly held by the larger evangelical world—even among non-Charismatic and non-Pentecostal communities. The NAR’s unique sense of paranoia about secular culture has mutated and spread to the broader Christian Right, a movement that was already p…

Attack on the US Capitol Has Many Journos Finally Taking White Evangelical Authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism Seriously

By Chrissy Stroop

…re: I am an ex-evangelical). Under conditions of Christian hegemony in the United States, however, that has not been the prevailing practice—not by a long shot. If social media buzz is any indicator, there’s still a widespread tendency for liberals to dismiss Christian nationalists as “fake Christians”—a deflection that only serves to reinforce Christian supremacism by equating “Christian” with “good,” thus harming the non-religious and adherents…

The Way We Never Were: Calling Out Evangelicals For Hypocrisy Misses the Point

By Hollis Phelps

…rights serve as its contemporary calling card, the religious right in the United States, as some have argued, has its origins in racial segregation, particularly the establishment of private Christian schools as a work-around to the desegregation policies that emerged out of Brown v Board of Education. Given this history, it’s not surprising that those on the religious right would continue to support a president that is, by most sane accounts, a…

Huckabee in the Holy Land: A Christian Zionist Campaign

By Shalom Goldman

…support for Israel. In the period from 1948 to the mid ’70s, when both the United States and Israel were led by governments with secular democratic agendas, the ‘Cyrus idea’ was present, if somewhat muted. The confluence of the George W. Bush presidency and a rightward shift in the Israeli government meant that visions of the Third Temple were no longer thought of as metaphorical. And although supporters of the ‘Temple Mount Faithful’ still consti…

Another Manufactured Outrage: Rep. Ilhan Omar Did Nothing Wrong in Listing Hamas, Israel, and U.S. Together

By Joshua Shanes

…more effective if it were honest. And perhaps that would have lessened the number of death threats and other vile correspondences she has received. Second, others have said that she deserved the criticism for its political harm, that this hurts the Democratic party. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make much sense either, because the manufactured outrage made it worse. If a Democratic leader had privately contacted her and said, “Ilhan, you have to clari…

Global Precap: 5 Religion and LGBT Stories to Look For in 2015

By Peter Montgomery

…part to influence negotiations that will be taking place in 2015 over the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. During the summit, Austin Ruse of C-FAM hosted a press conference which featured Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, President of the Democratic Center Party in Colombia and a former presidential candidate; Zoltan Balog, the Hungarian Minister for Human Capacities, and U.S. Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, Helen M. Alvaré, Professor at George Mas…

SCOTUS Decision Changes the Meaning of Civil Religion in America

By Murali Balaji

…set by the legislative reversals of Ozawa vs. United States and Thind vs. United States (and the shameful Dred Scott decision) would guide the Supreme Court to sanction racializing citizenship and giving the executive branch carte blanche to exclude certain groups. Tuesday’s 5-4 decision proved us wrong. The court’s decision does more than codify exclusionary policies and expand the executive branch’s authority (which the court vigorously attacke…

The Islamists vs. The Markets: Egypt’s Election Analyzed

By Haroon Moghul

…riously thinks that Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, or Iceland, or even the United Kingdom and Germany, have any meaningful democratic domestic consensus? Who seriously thinks that the people in those countries have any meaningful options in how their countries respond to the current economic crisis—which affects a whole range of domestic social policy and priorities? And how will the Arab world possibly be any different? The source of much of the…