Religion Dispatches
…ty by descending to the level of their enemies: “There is no such thing as freedom of religion in Islam, and it is sheer folly for Americans to delude themselves into thinking otherwise.” (By this standard, the United States should have established gulags for political dissidents during the cold war.) Fischer makes it clear that what he really wants is for Muslims to renounce Islam: “If a mosque was willing to publicly renounce the Koran and its 1…
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…Beinteinsson and the Icelandic constitution is different from that of the United States. But the contours of these controversies are the same. Both involve a minority seeking an alternative to the cultural authority of Christianity and a conservative Christian response seeking to shore up a definition of religious freedom that excludes these alternatives. In the long run, it seems that our legal understanding of religious pluralism is destined to…
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…ok to Western Europe, he sometimes moves seamlessly into examples from the United States, where he seems to believe the differences matter less than one might expect. The war on the war on Christmas Since the 1960s, Roy contends, a “new anthropology,” with a morality centered on human “freedom”―including many of the latest cultural trends, including environmentalism, trans-humanism and such―became the heart of the West’s new value system. Despite…
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…an’t travel because they are considered war criminals, but they can travel freely in the United States, making the rounds on talk shows and going on book tours. What makes this failure of accountability so insidious is that a lack of punishment can be read as a kind of sanction. Torture will not seem wrong, will not be labeled as the crime against humanity that it technically is, if no one gets in trouble for doing it. This lack of accountability…
Read More…argeted, and a cynical president used the attacks as a pretext to rush the United States into two irrelevant and ill-considered wars. And surely the most reprehensible consequence of 9/11 was the use of torture against those the president deemed “enemy combatants.” But Americans themselves, sooner or later, rise to their better selves and come to embrace the principles of toleration and respect for minorities encoded into our charter documents and…
Read More…begin with, such criticisms often assume that white evangelicalism in the United States has somehow devolved from a once salutary moral vision to brute political opportunism. Or, as Paul Robeson Ford recently argued, evangelicals have lost their “moral standing” with the broader culture. Such “moral standing,” however, has always been more of a political self-designation, designed to implement conservative, often racist and/or discriminatory, pol…
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…rch taught that one cure for homosexuality was heterosexual marriage. Even today, the internet hosts a large support community for Mormon MOMs, or “mixed-orientation marriages,” usually between gay men and straight women. Although some couples claim their marriages are successful, too many resemble the marriage of gay Mormon blogger Beck, who details his desire for “bromances,” freely admits to his sexual rejection of his wife for close to three d…
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…reat faith in what he believes this particular sporting contest represents—freedom and the American Dream. And that is why, from behind the wheel of a 1950s Chevy, one taxi driver told me something I’d heard other Cubans intimate but never say explicitly: “I love America.” Had he been there before? No, he said. “But if Obama can come here,” he told me, “then maybe I can go there.” He didn’t explain how he could love a country he’d never seen. We b…
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…hat most Americans would prefer to live in a friendlier, more humane, more united country; I certainly would. But there can be no cheap or easy unity in a country torn apart by an increasingly fascist Right. Troublingly, establishment Democrats like Biden seem unwilling to hear that comity with unreconstructed bigots will only legitimize and empower them in their authoritarian lust for power, causing severe harm to—to use a biblical turn of phrase…
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…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…
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