Religion Dispatches
…ade repeatedly by Republican politicians in speeches lately, including Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich. That’s the new “values voters” rhetoric: government is a tyrant, disobedient to God. Sure, all the anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-secularism stuff is packed in there. But at its core — and at its dangerous intersection with the tea party — the new mantra is fundamentally about subverting the “tyrannical” federal government….
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…o people’s lives too. Does that mean we should evaluate suffering on a case-by-case basis? Yes, we need to respond to concrete circumstances and particular cases. Can you talk a bit about how you imagine sin in this reading? Basically, in my final chapter, I tried to create a contemporary theory of atonement which I’ve grown out of the tradition; I replace the concept of sin with possessiveness, and then contrast this to the free sharing of enjoym…
Read More…Take those three speeches. Add two prayers, three hymns, and a white-bread-and-tap-water sacrament, and that’s pretty much what a Mormon Sunday church meeting sounds and feels like. We talk about helping one another. We tear up. And we usually try to sidestep the thorny issues. Of which Mormonism certainly has its fair share: controversial chapters of Church history, a century of racist exclusion, and political opposition to equal rights for wom…
Read More…court. For the long historical view, it’s useful to read Julie Ingersoll’s new book on Christian Reconstruction, which details how a Calvinist religious movement (which would part company on several key theological points with an apostolic Pentecostal movement) brought the argument that the Bible trumps civil law into the mainstream of the religious right. As Ingersoll told me in an interview last month: Christian Reconstructionists argue that the…
Read More…setting things aflame.) To the rescue, our own Haroon Moghul explained to Lemon why the media hasn’t paid attention to the vast majority of Muslims who aren’t protesting, why protests in the Muslim world are about far more than blasphemy and a crude film. Watch:…
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…ligion. Not only do those on the Christian Right believe this; so do the so-called “New Atheists,” who have invested their entire worldview in this notion. Their difficulty with religion seems to be borne of the mistaken ideas that God is subject to scientific categories and that religion is a purely propositional exercise. But God is not contained by discursive language; God is the fundamental mystery of life, the universe, and everything. Religi…
Read More…n state are, by significant majorities, hostile to civil rights for African-Americans, immigrants, Muslims, and LGBT people. Those committed tea party supporters represent 19% of the Washington state voters, according to the poll, and only 18% of them believe that gay and lesbian couples should have the right to marry (as compared to 41% of all voters). Seventy four percent of tea party supporters (compared to 52 percent of the general population)…
Read More…and Kenneth Copeland, read my book). Right Wing Watch is doing a fine job compiling a greatest hits of some of Perry’s prayer partners, including, most recently, John Benefiel of the Heartland Apostolic Network, who thinks that the Statue of Liberty is a “demonic idol.” At the end of the bloggingheads segment, Amy asked me what I would like to see the GOP candidates asked in presidential debates. The question I’d like to see goes to the heart of…
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…aken to mean that human life receives its morality from a transcendent, out-of-this-world, divine. But de Waal notes that top down morality isn’t a purely religious problem. He attacks, for example, the philosophical presumption mentioned earlier, that morality is a matter of reasoning—that we reason our way “up” to moral action or decision. Likewise, de Waal takes issue with human exceptionalism—the idea that morality is something that only human…
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…ems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with survey questions which ask respondents to define their religious outlook in negative terms—“no religion,” “no rel…
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