Religion Dispatches
…ion claims that it promotes “Constitutionalist Judicial Nominees,” told OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, that the “Ten Commandments would be removed all over the place. ‘Under God’ would be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. The death penalty would be banned. There’d probably be constitutional rights to all sorts of new things like human cloning and physician-assisted suicide. Racial preferen…
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…in the national Civil Rights Movement. But we are standing at a genuinely new moment. On the downhill slope of the rise and decline of the mainline and the swell and ebb of the religious right, we have before us a genuinely new task. Facing the reality that neither the religious left nor the religious right accounts for more than 20% of the country, we must embrace the passing of the time—if it ever existed—where one segment of our amazingly dive…
Read More…In leaving, there are social consequences and challenges in navigating the new world—a new meaning system—one that’s quite different from the religious one. Research shows that individuals who leave Christian fundamentalism experience a situational crisis in leaving the religion—a unique meaning-making framework focused on the sacred and divine—and undergo a meaning-making process to achieve a positive resolution in leaving the religion. The meani…
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…s a result, the long-term health and strength of Prosperity Gospel and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) rests on the elevation and promotion of these practices above all others. The deviations, then, are just as important in understanding how Pentecostalism is being reshaped and redefined. The Prosperity Gospel has had several names throughout its history, including the “Health and Wealth Gospel” and, as noted above, “Word of Faith,” whose ante…
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…across lines that divide us to work for justice and the common good. This new face of religion is certainly important for people who care about religion. But politically progressive people should care about this new religious movement—primarily because it is genuinely progressive. Every major movement for social change in this country has had religious leaders in the leadership. By trying to avoid religion and deeply held values—either because of…
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…eir home churches and satellite churches around the country and the world. New Apostolic Reformation The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), on the other hand, has been able to operate somewhat out of the general public’s purview, save for the work of writers at Talk To Action, who have chronicled the changes and escalations in the movement. The NAR roots are also firmly within the boundaries of the historic Pentecostal movement. Foundational to NAR…
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…eligion has the corner on the borrowing and incongruity of sacred stories. New Agers who use the sweat lodge are not so much “stealing Indian religion” as they are weaving a new religion out of strands of what they believe to be old religions. Various forms of the sweat ceremony were used by Indians from Canada into southern Mexico. In the south they’re called temescals and resemble a wet sauna or steam room; tribes in the American Southwest have…
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…eople who kill animals. Were Sears simply a critic and comedian shattering New Age pieties his videos would still be clever and hilarious, but Sears is a full-time life coach whose work focuses on emotional healing. When Sears notes that he too is guilty of the behaviors he lampoons, he puts himself in the far more interesting tradition of those who criticize and question the beliefs they themselves hold. I recently visited this New Age Stephen Co…
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…iberation. A first step TGL on its own, sadly, is unlikely to inspire. The new ‘New Age’ The roots of Goop lie in utopian dreams of other ways of being; the same set of impulses that drove the idea of universal human rights, jobs for all, communes, racially-integrated worlds, and both spiritual and this-worldly democracy. During the 60s and 70s, the intertwined movements for Black power, gay liberation and women’s liberation rose to prominence, ga…
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…aring with Larry King (for the full hour) and on Oprah’s popular talkfest, promoting the new HBO documentary “The Trials of Ted Haggard,” produced by Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Oprah tried her best to pin Ted down and get him to admit he is a homosexual,” J. Lee Grady, the editor of Charisma magazine, reported. “Ted balked, saying that his sexuality is complicated. He explained that he had sexual experiences in the…
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