Religion Dispatches
…m said: To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? This view is frequently thought of as emanating from evangelical organizations like WallBuilders or the classrooms at Liberty University. But Santorum had a Catholic mentor, if not for the precise physical reaction, for the ove…
Read More…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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…; 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 claims that a more equitable distribution of wealth would retard society by “killing incentive.” In other words, without the motive of making a bundle, people like you wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. Some of us work to be creative and socially useful, but you guys are made of coarser…
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…
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…s videos about Entebbe and memories of Munich in 1972 accompanied the alef-bet. In the way that both children and adults sometimes do, I took the car as a sign that we were not safe because we were different. As Jay Michaelson argues, we can “recognize millennial thinking in our own minds,” and mine seemed to always expect—briefly, quite irrationally—an undoing of the world. I imagined armed men entering the quiet sanctuary, always marking the nea…
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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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…y leaders will select their presidential candidate next February. But most bets are already on Enrique Peña Nieto, the young and dapper outgoing governor of Mexico State, which surrounds the capital. In 2009, Peña Nieto led a delegation that journeyed to the Vatican to present the Pope with gifts from Mexico state. When he spoke about his upcoming plans to marry, Pope Benedict XVI blessed the governor and his fiancée, Angélica Rivera, a Mexican so…
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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