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Did the Church Create or Co-Opt Human Rights?

By Austin Dacey

…torian, I am not qualified to go beyond the obvious): the President of the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address to Congress on January 6, 1941—the celebrated “Four Freedoms” speech—called for a foreign policy founded on “a decent respect for the rights and the dignity” of all and defined freedom as “the supremacy of human rights everywhere.” Once again, it’s a similar trope, but it’s not obviously a conservative Catholic concept. All of…

The Biggest Lesson Learned From the US War in Afghanistan is How Little We’ve Learned

By Sara Kamali

…upported progressive values, like women’s rights, and institutions, like a free press. This support by Afghans was never met with like-minded support from Americans or allies. A generation of Americans has grown up never knowing life before September 11, 2001. So, too, has a generation of Afghans grown up under the specter of war and drones overhead. There are certainly casualties of the decades-long war on all sides. Tens of thousands of Afghan s…

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…

It Is About the Hijab: Wheaton College and the Narrowing Criteria for Evangelical Belonging

By Hollis Phelps

…rather, assumed in advance that what constitutes evangelical belief in the United States ultimately has nothing to do with socio-political markers. Leith Anderson, president of the NAE, has said in relation to the definition, “Evangelicals are people of faith and should be defined by their beliefs, not by their politics or race.” That “should” is important, since I would suggest that it evinces more a desire to outline what some evangelical leader…

The Desire to Annihilate Gaza Wasn’t Born on 10/7 — It’s Part of a Long Tradition that Includes 19th Century Travel Writing

By Adam Yaghi

…ur Balfour, a Christian Zionist, mobilized Britain, France, Italy, and the United States and issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917. According to this official document, the British Crown promised to establish a European-Jewish homeland in Arab-majority Palestine at the expense of indigenous majority Palestinians. In 1919, with utter disregard for the Palestinians, Balfour attributes this support to shared colonialist and messianic values; in the…

When Religious Freedom Means Freedom for Religious Violence

By Frederick Clarkson

…stor Jackson Lahmeyer of Tulsa, Oklahoma also said nothing about religious freedom, except to claim, “the first amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees me and my church the right to gather together in person, virus or no virus.” Maybe. Maybe not. But religious freedom is about a lot more than temporary closings during a pandemic. The third, Bill Cook of Haymarket, Virginia however, seems to favor the elimination of religious freedom…

Engle Supports “Principled Stand” of Ugandan Anti-Gay Bill Promoters

By Sarah Posner

…on to maintain that because homosexuality hasn’t been “restrained” in the United States, “I don’t think it’s going to be good for the nation, it sweeps into the education system, and the church is going to end up losing its privilege to have its own voice. Gender rights, will trump religious rights. I think it’s wrong, it’s not good for society. Those are the statements I came with, so frankly I was quite surprised to be thrown into this huge con…

Denying Darwin: Another Peculiar American Institution

By Lauri Lebo

…a comparative religions class. The notion that this isn’t the case in the United States is surprising to the British. Unlike in the United States, where evangelicals preach that unless you are washed in the blood of Christ you will perish in hell, the British are less likely to be presented with such a strict religious dichotomy. “To me, they always seemed more like stories,” said Hodgson, who, along with Gordon, is studying human evolutionary be…

Catholic Universities Facing a Fork in the Road on Gender & Sexuality: The Church or the Culture

By Patricia Miller

…such coverage under new rules issued by the Trump administration. Finally freed to duck the hated “contraceptive mandate,” the university realized that ending access to contraception for thousands of woman—many of whom aren’t even Catholic—was an epic PR blunder, which it admitted didn’t recognize “the plurality of religious and other convictions among its employees.” A similar moment of cultural reckoning recently occurred at Georgetown Universi…

It Is Time For American Orthodox Christians to Protest Russia’s Persecution of LGBT

By Katherine Kelaidis

…s to the far corners of the globe: Canada, South Africa, Australia and the United States. Thus Orthodoxy emerged in the United States as an immigrant church, the church of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, as well as Arabs—all of whom occupied the lower rungs of America’s all-important racial pecking order. Consequently, respectability and assimilation quickly became important goals of these communities. This longing for assimilation, if n…