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Unreleased Religious Freedom Manifesto Isn’t the Culture War Compromise It Hopes to Be

By Frederick Clarkson

…pposition to all discrimination, violence, and threats of violence against Americans based on their faith. We call on elected leaders and our fellow Americans to condemn such unconscionable acts in the strongest possible terms and to work with us to defeat them.” “[G]overnment must always respect and protect the bedrock principle that one’s rights as a citizen should never depend upon one’s religious identity, beliefs, or peaceful practices.” But…

Tattoos, Cremation, Personal Spirituality: The Jewish World in Transformation

By Dana Evan Kaplan

…the impact that the concept of personal spirituality has had on organized American Judaism. Americans today feel much freer to explore ceremonial and ritual practices that intrigue them regardless of what their community thinks of those particular ideas. This has allowed Jews to move in a number of different directions, including seemingly contradictory ones. I found some of these contradictory impulses fascinating. For example, there have been a…

Religion and Resistance at the New National Museum of African American History and Culture

By Anita Little

…enslaved people who could have never imagined in their lifetime an African American president or an African American museum in our nation’s capital. It’s no small thing, we are at the evening of President Obama’s presidency. A lot of the people coming on opening day are coming partially to say goodbye to President Obama in what will be one of his last public acts as president. For me personally, it makes me think of the spirits of the ancestors, a…

“I Think the White Evangelical Church is Dead”: Dr. Russell Jeung on ‘Guilt’ vs. ‘Shame’ and Decolonizing Asian-American Christianity

By Deborah Jian Lee

…practice. My research has looked at what a lot of second-generation Asian Americans are doing. For example, Vietnamese-Americans who are Catholics are also developing home shrines, a practice of honoring ancestors. Their approach revealed how they were doing it in a hybridized way—embracing both the traditional and the personally meaningful. On their shrine they’d place something traditional, like just a photo and maybe fruits, but they would als…

It Is Time For American Orthodox Christians to Protest Russia’s Persecution of LGBT

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ns have become too progressive. Of course, these are the most innocuous of American converts. American Orthodoxy has also managed to become the go-to religion of the alt-right, courtesy of being sufficiently medieval without being Roman Catholic. The combination of these historical realities has created an environment in which—even though there exists a progressive plurality among self-identified American Orthodox Christians—public statements that…

The Muslim Ban May Be Unconstitutional, But It’s Not Un-American

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…minds and bodies in America as deficient “others.” With this broad ban, the 109 detained persons, countless others abroad, and all Americans are victims of constitutional violence. It is becoming abundantly clear that this normative gaze of America makes Muslim humanity and its sacredness invisible. White supremacy makes “Muslimness” a reality to be feared and eradicated from the American orbit. We did not prevent his constitutional election, but…

The Marxist Roots of American Exceptionalism

By Michael J. Altman

…s out that it was the neoconservative interventionist foreign policy of the 1990s and the two Bush administrations that prompted folks on the right to claim American exceptionalism as its own. Lurking in the background of this unilateralist approach to foreign policy was the older meaning of American exceptionalism, though of course spun positively and shorn of its Marxism: America could have an exceptionalist foreign policy because it was differe…

How a Stars and Stripes Hijab on ‘Rupaul’s Drag Race’ Reveals America’s Troubling Relationship to Gender, Ethnicity and ‘That’ Religion

By Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst

…e) often face anti-Muslim hostility, which is related—but not reducible—to American white supremacy.¹ American whiteness is fragile, contested, and—especially for folks associated with Islam—contingent on good behavior. On episode 7, Jackie Cox wept while outing herself as the child of an immigrant from a Muslim-majority country and claiming “this part of [her] heritage that [she] hid for so long.” We were prepared to leave our analysis of Ms. Cox…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…se who preached a radical populist apocalypticism that harkened back to the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. And yet the apocalyptic never leaves. It’s still there, that’s where the polls come back. It’s now assumed by hundreds of millions of Americans that the rapture is a real thing and that Jesus is coming back. It’s a genius theology, because it allows people to look at very diverse, very troubling, very dark contemporary events and put them in a cont…

No, I Don’t Owe My Yoga Mat to Vivekananda

By Andrea R. Jain

…ch writes about Vivekananda as though he reflected something mainstream in American culture: “His prescription for life was simple, and perfectly American: ‘work and worship.’” And she claims that Vivekananda’s popularity waned because America’s “baby boomers commandeered the yoga business.” First, Vivekananda was never “popular” in the sense that modern yoga became popularized in the late twentieth century. He certainly gained the attention of a…