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‘Christian Warriors’: Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?

By Chip Berlet

…nment social policies Right-wing apocalyptic Christians who fear a Satanic New World Order Nebulous conspiracy theorists who fear a secular New World Order Nationalistic ultra-patriots concerned that US sovereignty is eroding. Xenophobic anti-immigrant white nationalists who worry about preserving the “real” America. These grievances are interacting in a global economy often eager to accommodate corporate interests. And now we add in the fact that…

The Forgotten History of Black Calvinism and the Haunting of American Folk Music

By Joshua Guthman

…y escaped notice even though its burdens and aspirations tell us something new about African Americans, Calvinism’s complex fate, and the religious reconstruction of the post-Civil War South. It has long been a given among historians of religion in the South that Calvinism had little, if any, purchase among the enslaved or their descendants, that the doctrines of predestination were invariably arms of the status quo, and that a sin-obsessed Calvin…

The Marxist Roots of American Exceptionalism

By Michael J. Altman

…ferent from, rather than superior to, other countries, the long history of American beliefs in U.S. superiority could easily be retroactively attached to the concept. Part of the Marxist baggage that follows “American exceptionalism” is its teleology. Marxism posits a history of progress towards a goal. There will be a revolution and it will lead to equality. Similarly, today’s conservatives deploying American exceptionalism have a goal in mind—th…

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…

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…

Puritan Narcissus: The Myth of American Exceptionalism

By Nick Street

…r. Most of our politicians trade on the illusion that the globalization of American (and American-style) consumerism is synonymous with democratization and social stability. In fact, stabilizing the supply of energy to the transnational economic grid has meant our investing billions to support politically destabilizing alliances and undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. Islam, like Christianity, contains seeds of violence and radi…

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

By Katherine Kelaidis

…rd mobility their ancestors fought so hard to achieve. As for that wave of new American converts, it is arguably unclear how much objection to the actions of the Moscow Patriarchate there really is. From conservative former-mainline Protestants trapped in a zero-sum game Culture War mentality to truly reprehensible fascists, the culture of conversion with American Orthodoxy does not lend itself to this kind of dissent. That is not to say there isn…

“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…

The New Christianity: What the Mainstream Media Has Missed

By Bill Berkowitz

…e fiction. Three points of reference we used were Alix Spiegel’s 1997 This American Life radio story, “Pray” (about the strange goings on at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church); Jane Lampman’s two September 1999 Christian Science Monitor stories on The World Prayer Center and the ‘spiritual mapping’ movement; and René Holvast’s 2005 dissertation for the University of Utrecht, “Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Paradigm,” w…

Former Employees: Racism & Abuse in Leading Religious Right Org.

By Sarah Posner

…puppies in the corner who learned to keep out mouths shut.” Inside the One News Now Newsroom The AFA’s radio and news division, in particular, said Martin, had become a place where authority could not be questioned, and where the “news” was nothing more than a mouthpiece for conservative “sources” whose views were portrayed as fact. (The Values Voter Summit award citation to Wildmon described One News Now as a “respected online news service.”) And…