Religion Dispatches
…l, and hard work. With just enough walk-shoveling. That was always a risky bet for a wonky Yankee Mormon. And evidence suggests that it hasn’t worked: evangelical Christians are consolidating behind Rick Santorum. Had Romney not spent the entire first part of his candidacy trying to pass himself off as a regular Christian conservative, he might be in a position to state the obvious: to take the Republican party by the shoulders and make the case t…
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…s not make a person wicked. Only having the power to change things for the better and using it to change them for the worse can make a person wicked. In short, I moved to the left because I gave you more credit than many of you give yourselves. Yes, I know some of you are scoundrels; what I don’t know is whether some of the activists I’ve met would be any better in your tailor-made shoes. Yet it is you who abide the slander whenever someone cl…
Read More…ade most memorable by an aggressively wooden one-liner involving a $10,000 bet and Rick Perry, people who are kind of rooting for Mitt Romney (and kind of rooting is as good as he’s polling these days) are suggesting that candidate Romney should start talking about his Mormonism as a means of seeming, well, more human. All along, the conventional wisdom has been that Romney should avoid Mormonism, given the uncertainty it engenders in American vot…
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…n these pages that paranoia about the president being the Antichrist stood between Obama and winning over evangelicals, advances this argument again in the Times, noting that these apocalyptic views “could help define the 2012 presidential campaign.” Sutton provides a brief history of the apocalyptic fervor of American evangelicals, and its impact on our politics. But for Democrats pondering over how Obama can win reelection, I found this to be th…
Read More…The result, though, is it makes it easier to legally shoot people. Now, I bet you see where this is going. The column is so terrific it really needs to be read in its entirety. Seriously. Read it. But Argento does see a potential downside to the plan. Of course, some people may object because of all of that stuff in the Bible about caring for the poor and being your brother’s keeper and such. They may point to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Je…
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…f? I think this book can go a long way to inform people about the tensions between democracy and social control in American history. And it can teach people a lot about how evangelical Protestant traditions have changed over time, including the ways they have reshaped strategies to engage the political realm. I’m afraid there are no pleasurable parts of this book. In fact, it’s really grim. People with relatively good intentions did bad things. Bu…
Read More…doctrines and policies. But that doesn’t mean that he “gets religion” any better than the rest of us who report from the pews at the back of the worship hall, or from all of the unauthorized places—homes, schools, street corners, campuses, government—where religion wields major power. A few weeks ago, Mattingly criticized RD for running my story on a recently-installed, openly-gay Mormon congregational leader in San Francisco. Get Religion insist…
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…ols. The new rules eradicated both those policies and broadened many other freedoms. Salinas de Gortari also reestablished state relations with the Vatican. Feminists’ Reasons for Hope The formation of PRI/Church alliances is largely viewed as a political maneuver, not an ideological transformation. Does that mean the new bonds are tenuous? Mexican liberals sure hope that’s the case, and despite the PRI’s gubernatorial gains in 2009, feminists sti…
Read More…ntegrity of the study. But politically, the integrity of the study may be beside the point. The Witherspoon Foundation and Bradley Foundation apparently wanted a weapon they could use to fight marriage equality and they got it. It’s a safe bet that the Regnerus study will be cited by religious right groups for years to come, the way they have over the past decade cited a horribly flawed study of “ex-gays” by Dr. Robert Spitzer—even after Spitzer a…
Read More…ngelical feminists argue that the Bible actually teaches mutual submission between men and women. But Reconstructionists, some of whom have influenced Bachmann, have suggested that, given the biblical order for families, women probably shouldn’t be voting. I wrote about Reconstructionist biblical patriarchy here. While Christians traditionally hold that God is beyond gender (even while often using masculine language for God), in “The Tenets of Bib…
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