Religion Dispatches
…course, fails amid religionists bent on turning America into a Neo-Eden. A free republic cannot, and must not, tolerate the intolerant. Democracy is doomed if so. The answer isn’t intolerance of religion. The answer is intolerance of bad religion, a belief system that drives political efforts to sabotage the republic itself. America, as President-Elect Joe Biden said last week, “is a covenant.” It is a community, a union, collective effort to reco…
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…nsifies the image of Bellah’s pastoral concern for the moral health of the republic, threatened as it is by impoverishing individualism. In addition, indeed, this is the Bellah who gradually emerges in his later work—an evangelist of republican virtue. Bellah’s evangelical civic spirit leads him to ponder reforms for the familiar institution of the university. In Bellah’s hands, the university becomes a place not only where knowledge for its own s…
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…e movement—we are the conservative movement,” they attacked “establishment Republicans.” Mike Lee criticized “the top Democrat and Republican in each chamber” for having gotten too powerful and echoed the narrative Suella Braverman presented on the previous day: that the Tories lost their recent election because they “met progressives half-way”—an observation completely untethered from reality. “We’ve gotta stop assuming that you win elections and…
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…lded. The military campaign was initiated by Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, which was unwilling to relinquish its centralized and increasingly nationalistic power. The day after those declarations of independence took place, I was on a plane to Boston on a two-month visit to an uncle who’d already lived there for several years. The timing was a coincidence; my family had been planning this trip for a while. But midway through my visit, se…
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…ed, for some, sacred terrain beyond the contaminating imprint of the white republic; whether in a storefront, freestanding building, or the surreptitious brush arbors of many yesterdays. However, in the racial imagination of America nothing operates outside of the deleterious insistence of whiteness—no place is a safe zone. As the history of lynching—the obscured legacy and culture of racist vigilantism—has taught us, black people live without san…
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…“Dismantle the deep state.” “Demolish woke tyranny.” “Restore the American republic,” in a way that hearkens back to a “glorious past” that is very much the era of the Second Klan. How can you tell? It’s law and order rhetoric tacked onto The Ending—“make America safe again,” the Southern Strategy as apocalyptic promise. CPAC is now the venue where calls for violence are made, either alongside or else by, the power brokers of the Republican Party;…
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…e potential for an attack on Sarah Palin as an event that would “bring the republic down,” Beck plays into the martyrdom fantasy he promotes daily. It is this type of bombastic hyperbole that has the nation in mourning. By turning the tragedy inside out, making it about themselves, and not about Palin’s “don’t retreat, reload” refrain, and the crosshairs map smack dab over Congresswoman Gifford’s district, Beck and Palin are taking advantage of th…
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…agine Foreign Minister Zarif similarly providing an account of the Islamic republic. Imagine this debate continuing, fueled by endless cups of tea, long into the night, as Kerry discusses, say, John Locke and James Madison and the American founding, and Zarif discourses on Mulla Sadra and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, as they argue about the nature of the human being, the purpose of the political community, the origin…
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…o we hear something just a tad bit proprietary? The legend of the Virtuous Republic has been invoked, the American system is what renews and guarantees the virtue, but that system is now malfunctioning on account of a God deficit. Or perhaps because of a Flag deficit. It’s hard to tell which, because in minds made like Douthat’s the two always run together. And now comes the hard slap at liberals whose faith is watery at best and whose weakness al…
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…morally or patriotically. They’re trying to extract an advantage that the Republicans would never give up voluntarily. If the Republicans agreed to a commission, the Democrats would win, which would be intolerable from a party that’s supposed to lose, because God’s chosen always win. Covid deaths Enough time has gone by since the beginning of the Covid pandemic to see that states with Republicans governors had far more deaths than did states with…
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