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America, the Mythical: “Mother of Exiles” or Denier of Safe Haven?

By Ed Simon

…rather on the beaches of New England. As historian Jill Lepore writes “One American abolitionist, writing in 1857… implied that we ought to ignore 1607 and instead pay attention to the divided nation’s twin founding moments.” The other partner in this twinned pair of national origins was the sale of twenty Africans by Dutch slave traders to the English colonists at Jamestown a year before the Pilgrims would land at Plymouth. For the New England ab…

Entitled And Enraged

By Daniel Schultz

…us is the subtle promise that believing in the American Dream makes you an American. Being American, after all, isn’t an ethnicity. Nor is it a matter of subscribing to a particular creed. It isn’t even a matter of being born in a particular geographical location. No less a “real American” than John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. So what is the American identity? If William Cavanaugh is right, it’s a convenient fiction designed to bind…

Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars

By Paul Wallace

…estion, at least. 8. Jon Stewart, political satirist, for shining light on American Atheists’ frivolous lawsuit against the inclusion of the Ground Zero cross in the 9/11 memorial museum In July American Atheists filed a lawsuit against those who planned to display a cross-shaped piece of wreckage at the 9/11 memorial. In their statement, American Atheists said that the cross was a reminder to Christians “that their God, who couldn’t be bothered…

RDBook: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World: An Interview with Michelle Goldberg

By Mandy Van Deven

…ights than by terror of overpopulation, which was incredibly intense in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, women’s rights activists have mostly taken over the structures created by the population controllers, and they’re also doing work that helps women around the world challenge prevailing power arrangements. Partly as a result, conservative and fundamentalist forces accuse feminists of being American imperialists. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega’s San…

American Evangelist Who Sparked Anti-Gay Panic Sued By Ugandan Gay Rights Group

By Sarah Posner

…nda has been intensified over the last year and a half, says Kaggwa, since American religious right activist Scott Lively dropped, in his words, a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Lively, the former head of the California affiliate of the American Family Association, and an ally of the AFA’s virulently anti-gay policy director Bryan Fischer, led a three-day conference that Kaggwa says sparked a “panic” in evangelical and Pentecosta…

Charged with Impiety: When Black Bodies Defy Tradition

By Yazmine Nichols

…uglas’ theory to its conclusion, all civic space becomes part of the white American sacred. American civil religion, seen this way, is predicated on the protection of the white body, property ownership, veneration of founding patriarchs and flag worship. It is a religion that values national sovereignty above all else, and consumes non-white bodies that, like Thind’s, “retain indefinitely clear evidence of their ancestry.” All who do not worship t…

Clueless in Gaza

By Shalom Goldman

…wish establishment is the Israeli newspaper of record, Haaretz. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Haaretz was consistently critical of the settler movement and its supporters in the government, it was the target of much sniping from the movement’s considerable US constituency. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, prominent intellectual, Columbia University lecturer, and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books quipped at the time that “if Haar…

To Be Atheist, Feminist, and Black

By Sikivu Hutchinson

…hgoing and religious belief are the highest in the nation — making African American communities the most unwaveringly religious in the U.S. At the same time, African American communities are among the most economically and racially disenfranchised; in the U.S., African Americans are still disproportionately poor, under-educated and over-incarcerated. Black incarceration rates and black homelessness parallel each other. And for all of the sound and…

Billy Graham and the Gospel of American Nationalistic Christianity

By Anthea Butler

…uman to set aside a day of prayer—as did President Abraham Lincoln on April 13, 1863—as a “day of confession of sin, humiliation, repentence, and turning to God at this hour.” Graham spoke from the place where the stand is erected for the inauguration of presidents. Mr. Truman, specially invited, did not attend. The crowd filled about half of the paved parking space facing the center steps of the Capitol. The staircases leading up to the House and…

How the Right’s War on ‘Critical Race Theory’ Taps into the Powerful Religion of American Innocence

By Peter Laarman

…y of them evangelical Christians who identify as white—to the old story of American exceptionalism and American Innocence. To be clear, I think that this war can be won, but it can only be won if we don’t make the mistake of misjudging the enemy. It can be won if Black people continue to be the field commanders, as their righteous witness can’t be dismissed and ridiculed by the Raging Right without exposing the racist core of the Right’s project….