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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…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…the religiously unaffiliated, changes in religiosity, and the evolution of American secularity. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Bender extends the work of Albanese, offering an ethnographic exploration of self-identified metaphysical practitioners as their apparently eclectic, unique, and personal spiritualities resist, engage, resource, and i…

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…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…researchers share the unsurprising finding that “young adults engage in a number of religious practices less often than do older Americans.” What they may mean to say is traditional religious practices: weekly attendance at religious services, weekly scripture reading, daily prayer, and weekly meditation. (My guess is as good as yours on the greater expected frequency of prayer in the survey.) The Pew survey design is problematic—and this is wher…

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

By Sarah Posner

…to Allah as “Satan.” According to him, Groening received a subscription to American Renaissance magazine at the office. American Renaissance is published by white nationalist Jared Taylor, and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the magazine and Web site “regularly feature proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black racists.” Taylor’s New Century Foundation, which runs the magazine, “also sponsors American Renaissance conferences ever…

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…

“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…

How AIDS Changed the Way American Christians Talk About Sex

By Anthony Petro

…an one of transformation. The cases I discuss reveal ongoing negotiations between secular and religious forms of knowledge about bodies and about health that have advanced new understandings of personhood, moral citizenship, and Americans’ relationship to the politics of health. At its broadest reach, my research asks how “health,” including public health, has become a central category through which American Christians have continued to shape mora…

Obama Criticizes Black Fatherhood

By Jonathan L. Walton

…with such criticisms does not seek to dismiss or deny the problems African Americans need to confront. The American cultural ills of perverted masculinity and family breakdown—which are particularly acute in poor black neighborhoods—must be a part of our spiritual and political agendas for social renewal. I do question, however, why it is that the black church seems so obsessed with negatively critiquing the deviance of some, while invariably igno…