Religion Dispatches
…o sacralize American national identity. Just take a look at the Born Again American campaign featuring a music video and an opportunity to join in as a “Born Again American.” I was the 5,451,536th visitor to the site which only launched on January 18, 2009, the opening of the Obama era. Change you can believe in, or The more things change, the more they stay the same? The campaign is the brainchild of Norman Lear, the TV producer of megahits All i…
Read More…’t think the Bible says anything about democracy” “lobbed a grenade at the American Jewish establishment.” In other words, at the heart of the American Jewish establishment’s pro-Israel cause is a claim to support democratic values in the Jewish state. “By claiming democracy doesn’t matter, Adelson was sabotaging the case for Israel that the American Jewish establishment has been making for decades,” Beinart writes. This is evidence, Beinart argue…
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…t documents the behind-the-scenes work ADF is doing at the Organization of American States and its Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The push into Latin America follows earlier expansion of its presence in Europe. Today, ADF is one of the largest conservative legal organizations in the United States, with a budget dwarfing those of sister groups like the Becket Fund and Liberty Counsel. Indeed, one might argue that it is chiefly responsib…
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…hat some forms of slavery are permitted by biblical law. While criticizing American slavery as violating a number of biblical requirements, however, he did not view it as inherently immoral. By promoting McDowell, and by extension Rushdoony, Barton promotes a “biblical worldview” in which slavery is in some circumstances acceptable. This worldview (like his discussion of the three-fifths rule, which minimizes the rule’s dehumanization of slaves) d…
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…ations to refute such claims seem to have had little effect on many middle Americans—not surprisingly the exact demographic targeted by AiG. The Ark Encounter’s planned home in northern Kentucky will situate it, like the Creation Museum, within a day’s drive of two-thirds of all Americans, some 40% of whom, according to the latest Gallup poll, affirm the creationist view that God created humans sometime in the past 10,000 years. Opponents have fra…
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…Unite the Right” called attention to this, that dueling visions of America—American history and expectations for and patterns of an American future—are more than just differences of opinion, they are radically divergent worldviews, with separate systems of values, conceptions of humanity, and even understandings of the good. The problem of the proliferation of Confederate civil religion has always been what to do with a citizen who glorified seces…
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…al gestures toward peace in the Middle East, we also saw a remarkably high number of attacks on Islam, on Iran, and on Arab Americans. There was the Republican outing of Barack Obama as a ‘secret Muslim’ and the promotion of this theory to both elderly Jews and conservative Christians. One survey, released in October, showed that at a sizable portion of the Texas voters polled actually believed Obama to be a Muslim. The other glaring example was t…
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…ms, a new approach to children’s rights has emerged. While portions of the American Right have begun to embrace the language of children’s rights, they are using that language to promote their anti-child agenda. These efforts have been successful on many fronts, opening opportunities for the American Right to promote their ideology around the world and even in spaces like the United Nations. A pair of recent books from some familiar voices on the…
Read More…dom of religion and the freedom from religion have never applied to Native American traditions. There are also difficult theological issues. Why does Christianity feel such unease with respect to Native American traditions, and seem to require an overwhelming confidence in knowing the nature of God? As the boarding schools reflect, religious institutions have committed themselves to a dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized.” Are we suffering…
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…the country on a five-week pilgrimage across the United States to educate Americans on the AHB and the American evangelicals who helped provoke this witch hunt. Rev. Mark Kiyimba is a Unitarian Minister and founder of the Unitarian Church in Kampala, one of the few churches in Uganda that welcomes LGBT people. During his four-day stop in Boise, Idaho, Kiyimba told RD, “I think [Yiga] was among the people who were outed in the newspaper.” Earlier,…
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