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Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ven to the point of fallacy. At one point Langdon is rescued by an African-American man who is a thirty-third degree Mason of the Scottish Rite and a lodge brother of Peter Solomon, which is highly unlikely. American Freemasonry, including the Scottish Rite, has always been unofficially segregated. In the 1780s, Prince Hall, a black Bostonian, was initiated by some Irish soldiers. The white lodges in Boston refused to accept him, so he formed his…

Martin Luther & the Mass Media

By Svend White

…nailed to a church door in Wittenberg in 1517) from a local dispute to an international cause celebre was the involvement of the printing press that had been invented a half century earlier. To say that Luther’s cause was helped by this new media is to almost lie by understatement, as the singularly wide distribution of his tracts utterly changed the terms of debate and put the religious establishment of his day on the popular defensive for perha…

King as Inspiration, Not Guide

By William D. Hart

…Wright sound like that elderly, goatee-wearing, and uncritical booster of American patriotism named “Uncle Sam.” Toward the end of his life, he was not intimidated by those who questioned his patriotism. He realized that “patriotism” is a mistake, an ethical lapse of judgment; indeed, it is the last refuge of scoundrels. When faced with the choice between the “cross” and the “flag,” King chose the cross. That was his way of saying “God damn Ameri…

Purpose Driven Politics: Rick Warren’s Civil Service

By Bill Berkowitz

…stage during the campaign. “This is a critical time for our nation and the American people deserve to hear both candidates speak from the heart—without interruption—in a civil and thoughtful format absent the partisan ‘gotcha’ questions that typically produce heat instead of light,” Warren said in a press release. This is not the first time Warren has brought Obama to Saddleback. In December 2006, Obama and the ultra-conservative Sen. Sam Brownbac…

World AIDS Day: Sacralizing Change

By Susan Henking

…ltations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sahgha Metta project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” But it a…

RDBook: Whither the Religious Left?

By Bill Berkowitz

…unction as a broker epitomizes the mainstreaming of the Religious Right in American public life. BB: Organizers for the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama are putting a lot of time, energy and money into wooing evangelical voters. Obama has also met with a number of Christian evangelical leaders. Why such an accelerated focus on evangelicals? FC: There is a theory based on some polling that the white evangelical vote is in flux and that…

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

By Jeff Sharlet

…t Thursday, Obama made history not by introducing liberationist ideas into American politics, as readers of Obama’s 2006 campaign book “Audacity of Hope” might have, well, hoped, but by reviving the Social Gospel’s cautious optimism. That’s no small feat in a country where “liberalism” is considered next to “socialism,” the devil’s own doctrine. But it’s quite a bit smaller than what Obama set out to do. Obama wanted to transform politics. Instead…

RD News Round-Up—September 29, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…f global warming, check out the Evangelical Climate Initiative. ++++++++++ American Family Association’s voting guide The Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, one of the major Christian Right organizations spearheading up the drive to pass Proposition 8 in California—the anti-same-sex marriage initiative—has issued its 2008 Voter guide. Not too extensive in its coverage, the “Voter Issue Guide” for the 2008 Presidential Race is divid…

This is not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism

By Jeff Sharlet

…. They did. Vereide died in 1969, but his organization—known in his day as International Christian Leadership, in ours as the Fellowship Foundation or the Family—still prospers. In a recent survey of 360 evangelical leaders—not preachers but politicians and businesspeople—Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay found that a plurality named the Fellowship one of the most influential religious groups in Washington. “There is no other organiza…

RDNews: Oct 20, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…al Nominees,” told OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, that the “Ten Commandments would be removed all over the place. ‘Under God’ would be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. The death penalty would be banned. There’d probably be constitutional rights to all sorts of new things like human cloning and physician-assisted suicide. Racial preferences would proliferate.” In his blog, Levey claimed th…