Religion Dispatches
…Heaven” news to their mom, Cassie is sitting at the kitchen table with headphones on, rocking out and ignoring all of it. Jokes aside, Heaven is for Real made me uneasy—although Pastor Burpo in real life spun the straw of Colton’s scanty “visions” into a fair amount of gold, what about the rest of the “hard working Americans” in Imperial, Nebraska? What about us all? We just have cool it down here, work really hard for little to no reward, and wai…
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…’s “supreme being” and another’s “Queen,” even. As Marc Leepson’s Flag: An American Biography tells the story, the American flag, while approved in 1777 largely for the protection of American ships at sea, was not widely displayed by civilians until the Civil War. Once the flag was lowered over Fort Sumter, flags rose over houses and wagons and even hats. The next major watershed in civilian relations to flags was 9/11. Gardella writes that “Accor…
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…07 before turning the gun on himself; Jiverly Wong, a Buddhist, Vietnamese American who killed 13 people (himself included) and wounded four in Binghamton, New York in 2009; John Allen Muhammad, the Islamic, African American “Beltway Sniper,” who, with Jamaica-born partner Lee Boyd Malvo, killed at least 10 people in the Washington DC area through the month of October 2002. Many of these shooters, regardless of race or religion, had known mental h…
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…m the popular narrative. King’s legacy has been appropriated in service to American exceptionalism and Christian supremacy. In essence, to be a real Christian and real American is to be like the mythic King. In the years after King’s assassination, his opponents (and some allies) were relegated to the category of the “scribes and Pharisees.” Useful props to deploy to demonstrate the superiority of King’s approach of nonviolent resistance and integ…
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…deem them too inclusive, and alter them to showcase who they see as “real” Americans—with the addition of the “thin blue line,” for example, to showcase their contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight against police brutality. And while the American flag is not seen by all Americans as the inclusive symbol that it purports to be, replacing it with the preferred gun of White supremacists out to kill Americans they deemed unworthy s…
Read More…a long way towards explaining the outrage felt by legislators and by many Americans. The president was not speaking to a labor union in Ohio or to teachers in Florida—he was speaking to a joint session of Congress, a ritualized setting that invokes all the sacredness of the democratic government of the United States of America. Americans tend to watch such speeches together—as families, in restaurants, in bars. For a few moments, a significant po…
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…have the chance to create something different. The final word goes to the American scholar of Judaica Jacob Neusner. In his 1981 book Stranger at Home: The Holocaust, Zionism, and American Judaism, Neusner argued that an obsession with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, painting the Jew as a victim—the foundation of American Jews’ civil religion—is essentially an act of Jewish self-hatred because it perpetuates derogatory Jewish stereotypes. The sol…
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…Abraham Lincoln. This is also, to be clear, a religious question. For many American Christians, particularly some American evangelicals and members of the Latter-day Saint movement, American history is as sacred and theologically charged as medieval and early modern Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern European history is for Orthodox Christians. If you believe in a God of History, you inevitably also believe your own history is divinely-mandated and…
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…mony about PRENDA as an anti-woman wolf in pro-woman sheep’s clothing by a number of advocates. This from Miriam W. Yeung, Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum: PRENDA pretends to speak the language of women’s equality, but, unfortunately, the voting records of its supporters do not strengthen civil rights, women’s rights, or the rights of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. For example, this year alone, spons…
Read More…sionary growth in Mexico, Central, and South America. Over the years, some American Indian and Latin American indigenous Mormons have actively claimed a “Lamanite” identity and positioned themselves as the direct heirs of the Book of Mormon. (I have heard Navajo LDS friends tell me that what they read in the Book of Mormon resembles stories they’ve heard from their grandparents.) Today, the Church’s greatest convert growth in the US is among Latin…
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