Religion Dispatches
…ies, the blaming of black individuals is actually based on judgments about African Americans at the collective level. Politicians, pundits, and pastors, white and black alike, consistently argue that the criminal behavior of black individuals is in part attributable to deficiencies in “black culture.” Crime would not be so high in black communities, they suggest, if African Americans properly valued marriage, family, and work. By contrast, the fin…
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…d. The anti-gay rights camp last Saturday held demonstrations in Northern, Central and Southern Taiwan to protest the same-sex marriage bills, arguing that the draft amendments to the Civil Code were contrary to traditional family values. Egypt: HRC reports on persecution and harassment Human Rights Campaign released a report “highlighting the persecution and harassment of LGBTQ people in Egypt by both the state and society.” From a blog post on t…
Read More…urch-going. According to Ross Douthat, all this suggests that “churchgoing Republicans look more like the party many elite conservatives wanted to believe existed before Trump came along—more racially-tolerant, more accepting of multiculturalism and globalization.” The religious faithful have Black friends, it seems, or at least they want to. For white evangelicals, Ekins ostensibly offers empirical evidence that religion has positive effects on r…
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…-American and likely non-white (the biggest Mormon growth areas are in the African diasporas of Central and South America and Africa). The Mormon people and the LDS Church itself has always grappled seriously with the implications of its racist past and continue to do so (see the church’s statement following the recent white supremacist march and terrorism in Charlottesville as a case in point, in which the church directly confronted the small, bu…
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…g, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight face, but actually insists that belief in the absurdity of the nation’s fundamental fiscal health is a central tenet of the true faith: patriotism. To express a concern, especially a serious one, is tantamount to political defection—or, to put it more bluntly, to heresy. And here several Christ…
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…public voice of Christians who made up a particularly strident base of the Republican Party. In the 1980s, the Christian leaders who dominated Republican Party politics called themselves a “moral majority” and brought an old version of evangelical Baptism to bear on the media. The power of men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson was their ability to turn the TV into the greatest collection plate in history, thereby amassing enough financial and p…
Read More…ew ways to read the Bible and what it has to say about sexuality and other central issues in the lives of African Christians. These new readings of old texts encourage Christians to accept LGBT people as God’s children. Even so, progressive African Christians are fighting an uphill battle. The voices of strident homophobic leaders in Africa have been amplified by large infusions of money from American right-wing culture warriors such as Howard F….
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…s with regards to same sex marriage and the ordination of gay clergy. Many Africans in the Anglican Communion and the Methodist Church are opposed to both. They claim that this position is an expression of their identity as Africans. This is a way that the personal becomes political for them. This of course stands in sharp contrast to the desires of the LGBT community in the west—another objectively marginalized group. Such tensions create great d…
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…ebruary, Sterling brings a new vision to a church that has served both the African-American and African-Caribbean community for over 100 years. When I went to meet with Sterling to discuss our roles as officiates in the mayor’s nuptials I asked her if she were ready to jump into in this conflagration that has the Episcopal Church at the brink of schism. “Some will leave I know, but those who oppose and stay, at least, we can talk about it in a spi…
Read More…ry agency it claims to inscribe. Such analytic vagary encourages a view of African Americans as static, universal, and essentially corporeal, while whites are allowed the possibility of change and multiplicity. Concepts like the Black Church are inherently resistant to individuation. While individual whites develop, regress, complicate, and contemplate over time, under the auspices of the Black Church, African Americans are trapped in eternal desc…
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