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Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…g, Wuthnow writes, is “the phenomenon of drawing generalizations about the American public, meaning all of the American population, based on evidence that mostly reflects the sampled responses of the white majority.” Christian norming happens, too: a poll that supposedly reflects the nation’s views on God is, often, mostly talking about Christian views. In doing so, it’s essentially conflating “Christian” with “American,” a strategy typically asso…

New History Finally Recognizes Afro-Creole Spiritualists

By Paul Harvey

…to the popular audience. A recent Harris poll reported that 42 percent of Americans believe in ghosts. Whether one believes in ghosts or not, Americans are fascinated by them. A century and a half before the popularity of ghost-hunter shows on the SyFy Network and NBC’s award-winning show “Medium,” belief in spirit communication was serious and widespread in the United States. New Orleans in particular is known for ghosts and spirits, and this bo…

Obama’s Supposed “Religion Dilemma” and American Exceptionalism

By Sarah Posner

…versus-them package: that Obama doesn’t understand the divine roots of the American founding, probably because he’s not really a Christian and not really an American, and only by electing the likes of Michele Bachmann or Jim DeMint can we ensure that the Christian nation ship can be righted again. By framing the confrontation of this narrative as an “uphill battle,” Democrats make the enormous and unnecessary mistake of placing themselves in the p…

4 (or 5) American Muslims For Ben Carson to Interrogate

By Haroon Moghul

…hile a hostage. Not that it mattered. ISIS, unlike Ben Carson, treated the American Muslim as an American, which he most certainly was. Beheaded almost a year after his abduction, Peter’s funeral services were held in absentia in November 2014, in his native Indiana, and led by a Syrian imam. I’m sure the Kassigs will appreciate how Carson might think, given their son’s sacrifices for his country, he might not have been entirely American. It’s eas…

Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Statement By Orthodox Church in America Should Be Christian Nationalist Warning Sign to US Orthodoxy

By Katherine Kelaidis

…including it in the matrix of the larger narrative concerning the slide of American religion and politics towards Christian nationalism. Before the 1980s, American Orthodoxy was, almost exclusively, a religious tradition composed of immigrants and their descendants. However, beginning in the 1980s, there were an increasing number of converts to Orthodoxy, many of whom (though notably and importantly not all) came as refugees from debates of gender…

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

By Ed Simon

…c story of America’s foundation. The conservative reads a tale about Anglo-American Protestant hegemony and the opening up of North American resources. But the radical, perhaps even the mystical interpreter, reads a more allegorically profound story about America as “Mother of Exiles,” a universal space that encompases all ethnicities, cultures, and religions precisely because of its universality. Arguments about the significance of the pilgrims b…

The Roots of the American Right’s Muslim Brotherhood Panic

By Sarah Posner

…k, like every other, bringing them forward as the spokesman for the Muslim American community. They shouldn’t be, any more than the president should be reaching out to them and utilizing them, I should say, as his go-to people. Gaffney’s claim that “in fact, any Muslim American organization in this country of any prominence is a Muslim Brotherhood front” is a complete lie. This, too, comes out of the Holy Land Foundation trial — in which the U.S….

A New Book By Esteemed Sociologist Robert Wuthnow Struggles to Show ‘Why Religion is Good for American Democracy’

By Peter Laarman

…nds me that someone could write a book about religion and democracy in the American context without addressing faith community responses to the 9/11 attacks and the catastrophic War on Terror that ensued. Unless my memory totally fails me, American religious leaders were mainly supportive of the “dark side” measures Dick Cheney told us were necessary in order to protect us against the alien evildoers. Yes, we did see some sporadic faith-involved p…

Gingrich on Obama’s “Kenyan, Anti-Colonial Behavior” and “American Exceptionalism”

By Sarah Posner

…motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King’s dream? Or something else? It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a “new order for the ages.” A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating “a distinct species of mankind.” This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press con…

White Nationalist Ideology Shines Through at Elite MAGA Conference: Inside NatCon Part II

By Ben Lorber

…ony is hypocritically indulging in racial politics by stressing the “Anglo-American” character of American nationalism while simultaneously disavowing this racial grounding and insisting his project is non-racial. Both Brimelow and Greer complained that NatCon assiduously avoids defining their nationalism in racial or ethnic terms, grounding the ‘American nation’ instead in ostensibly non-racial strata of culture, creed, ideology or aspiration. An…