Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…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…
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…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…
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…communities—save for the Reconstructionists—identified Jewishness through one’s mother and not the father. I will focus on the substantial political and religious literature during this decade that stresses the “fracturing” and “polarization” of American life. The patrilineal decision decentered American Judaism, causing rifts within the various movements and shifting the center of concern from the United States to Israel. So far, I have delivere…
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…the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that selfconsciously seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective. De-center American history? Heaven forfend! Subordinate our glorious saga to a “global and social-scientific perspective”? Never! National Review’s Stan…
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…utsiders. So we tell ourselves these stories about what happens when white American women and children are either forced into—or choose to come into—sexual contact with religious outsiders who are also raced. The violation of a Betty Mahmoody [the author of Not Without My Daughter] also becomes the violation of the American body politic, because the white woman gets to stand in for us as a country. Her violation becomes our violation, and her esca…
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…And a riveting read. RD: What inspired you to write How to Be a Muslim: An American Story? Haroon Moghul: Officially, this book began, in very, very different form, when a contact at a major university press asked me to write a textbook about Islam in America. I could not believe my good fortune. I’d taken summer classes at Yale, and still got turned down when it came to college. Fail. But here I was, a Yale reject, about to have Yale publish my b…
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…t, “Since the megachurch movement took off in the 1990s, the percentage of Americans identifying as evangelical has declined from nearly a third to just over a fifth,” suggesting direct causality. But of course, correlation isn’t causation. And sociologists have long since established that it’s actually the evangelical culture wars and the association of American Christianity with the political Right that caused the rapid decline in religious affi…
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…e in the Great Recession. This correlation highlights how certain veins of American Christianity function so closely with some of the core American ideals around free-market capitalism, wealth and consumerism. Prosperity gospel, for instance, only makes logical sense in a system of free-market capitalism. Those core American ideals have come under assault in very public ways when measured against the yardstick of liberation theology and faith-base…
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…old?” is available here (pdf). Conference on Race, Religion and Rhetoric: “Americans at the Pulpit and in the Public Square: A conversation on race, religion, and rhetoric in a diverse America,” is a conference organized by the American Jewish Committee and the Office of Black Ministry of the Archdiocese of New York, and is scheduled to be held at Xavier University in New Orleans, from January 17-19. Trouble in Narnia: Bad news for Narnia fans. It…
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