Religion Dispatches
…ey on American Jewish attitudes. His money isn’t about 2016 or even 2020 or 2024, it’s about staving off the shifting views of American Jews about Israel, or at least constraining political dialogue about it. Citizens United enabled Adelson to pour as much of his money as he wants into influencing elections, but that’s really a misnomer. He’s not influencing the outcome of elections, but enforcing how candidates speak. Case in point (a story we kn…
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…that Trump’s enemies are possessed by demons, while the Trump campaign has promoted the idea of “prayer warriors” fighting the forces of Satan. Not surprisingly, many Christian leaders promised that the January 6 insurrection would be a reckoning with the “demonic influence” that “stole” the election of 2020, and there’s strong evidence that “figures within the Trump White House were strategizing with” the prayer warriors of the New Apostolic Refo…
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…help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5th, 2024. It’s a great revival. “Upon taking office…” Trump makes several concrete policy promises that flow from this White Christian nationalist vision. It’s not worth quoting Trump’s rambling justifications for the policy proposals he connects to this worldview. Lest anyone think Trump’s White Christian nationalism is empty rhetoric, however, this speech also included promi…
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…during his speech at this year’s CPAC conference as a means of framing the 2024 presidential election. Add to all this the tumult that America has endured over the past decade—an unprecedented global pandemic, a border crisis, an increase in overt and often violent racism, an insurrection, an opioid epidemic, multiple presidential impeachments, the overturn of Roe v. Wade, increasing fallout from climate change—and the fact that the United States…
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…verred, “is predict which individual upon hearing the rhetoric of clear or coded incitement will turn to violence.” Berlet’s essay was titled “Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence.” Indeed, villain identification has been going on for a long time, and NAR leaders are now featuring ancient scripts for modern violence and religious war. We hear it in the form of imprecatory prayers by religious and politic…
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…Electoral Maps, and Representation Ismar Volić Princeton U. Press April 2, 2024 Following similar elections in Slovenia and Croatia the previous spring, this was Bosnia’s first general election while it was still a constituent republic of Yugoslavia, a country whose socialist-era days were clearly numbered. Three ethnic parties, representing Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, swept the election and formed the new seven-member presidency. The dre…
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…The flowers! The birds! The… pundits? Although the first primaries for the 2024 presidential election are about nine months away, election season is already being thrust upon us. Like the annual commercial push for Christmas, which, to my great annoyance, seems to come earlier and earlier each year, election cycles bring with them an array of tired tropes that should have been dumped ages ago, including an avalanche of obnoxious public God talk….
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…otest, take our nation back!”—Trump will host his first formal rally of the 2024 presidential campaign season at the Waco Regional Airport. The location is, in theory, all about the positive Trump vibes in Texas. As his campaign staff wrote, “It is undisputed that Texas is Trump Country after electing 37 Trump Endorsed Candidates and recent polling among Texas primary voters.” Indeed, Waco boasts the largest Baptist university in the world, which…
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…s speech—after a long list of far-right celebrity shout outs—by framing the 2024 election as a battle: “the greatest in our history, most important battle in our lives is taking place right now as we speak. For seven years, you and I have been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it.” The stakes aren’t just political control—though political control is part of it—but existenti…
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…Kremlin must feel giddy knowing that Putin may only need to hold out until 2024—under a GOP president, it appears, Ukraine should not expect aid. The Right’s admiration of Russia hasn’t subsided, even though the images from a besieged Ukraine—the slaughtered civilians, including children—forced them to tone down their accolades for Putin a bit over the last year. Putin’s Russia is their utopia; they imagine it as a White, conservative Christian p…
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