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Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…Newspaper and the Chosen Nation is that, in the decades leading up to the American Civil War, black Americans used their newspapers to not only proclaim their status as God’s chosen nation on Earth, but to then apply that faith in black chosenness to a range of on-the-ground struggles for black liberation. So I hope that readers of the book not only come away with a better understanding of the contours of black chosenness, but also with a sense o…

American Civil Religion is Dead, Long Live American Civil Religion

By Peter Laarman

…cultures while they are also expected to understand and respect the common American culture; 4. We acknowledge the nobility of the American experiment even as we acknowledge certain “flaws” that God needs to “mend” (in the prayer-hymn wording of Katherine Lee Bates). Now suppose we update this problematic creed for the sake of telling the truth, junking the impossible notion that God has somehow chosen the United States for a special destiny or is…

The Brutality of the American Eden

By Paul Harvey

…rily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God knows, while Glenn Beck rants in Twitter-like aphorisms condensing David Barton’s execrable version o…

Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Universe

By Paul Harvey

…testations to the contrary notwithstanding. His game is to inundate public policy makers (including local and state education boards as well as Congress) with ideas packaged as products that will move policy. Historical scholarship moves slowly and carefully, usually shunning the public arena; Barton’s proof-texting, by contrast, supplies ready-made (if sometimes made-up) quotations ready for use in the latest public policy debate, whether they in…

Billy Graham and the Gospel of American Nationalistic Christianity

By Anthea Butler

…er a president needed him to provide the imprimatur of Christianity for an American activity, policy or action. Richard Nixon would use Graham in this way by having him open the “Honor America Day” events on July 4, 1970, which Nixon envisioned as a way to bring the country together after the Kent State massacre and the toll of the Vietnam War. Graham led a prayer service on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Graham’s sermon included checking the…

Don’t Laugh at Rick Scott’s ‘Plan to Rescue America’ or Be Fooled by Reports of a ‘Backlash’ — His Only Mistake Was Revealing the Truth of Today’s GOP

By Annika Brockschmidt

…they “assimilate,” and they shouldn’t seek to “change” America, only to be Americans—or, rather, what Scott deems to be real Americans. This is along the same lines as the ethno-nationalist sense of “volk” that animates the latest ad for Peter Thiel-backed far-right candidate for US Senate in Arizona, Blake Masters. Both claim that there’s a narrow and fixed definition of who is and is not American—first and foremost, white, Christian people who l…

Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuse for Perpetrators—or for Provocateurs

By Haroon Moghul

…How do we think this kind of film plays out in the minds of those to whom American foreign policy seems wrapped up in anti-Muslim sentiment? (Consider, for example, how the fate of Adnan Latif is read across the Atlantic.) Terry Jones, mind you, is the same pastor who made a public spectacle of burning a Qur’an; he also reportedly hanged President Obama in effigy. Consider him a political actor who exploits anti-American sentiment in the Muslim w…

Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You Wouldn’t Know it From the Media

By Chrissy Stroop

…e “big three” advocacy organizations—the Freedom from Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State—and commented on the increasing diversification of the secular movement, as a result of which “the movement has seen a more intersectional approach.” To be sure, movement atheism has long been dominated by cisgender white men, and much work remains to be done both in terms of diversifying leaders…

The Anti-Gay Highway

By Kathryn Joyce

…portant. When he goes to Uganda, he’s not known as Scott Lively, but as an American evangelical. When Warren goes to Kenya, he’s not Warren, but an American evangelical. As long as they have a church title and stand for conservative politics, they have influence. The Africans don’t always have the resources to follow their statements so they say: this man of God says this is going on in the world. Or Scott Lively goes to the Uganda Anti-gay Confer…

American Muslim Community Must Search its Soul After Orlando Massacre

By Omar Sarwar

…ugh for us to talk honestly about socially regressive attitudes within the American Muslim community? The reality is that homophobia in the American Muslim community very likely played a causal role in producing Omar Mateen’s hate crime. It certainly wasn’t the only source of homophobic bigotry influencing him, but it was one such source, and that is reason enough for American Muslims to resist the anti-gay sentiment in their mosques and community…