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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…

2010: What Did We Believe In?

By Gary Laderman

…ise the biblical creation myth to the level of a universal fact that every American, or at least every American student using Texas textbooks, must accept as truth. On the other hand, some biologists along with neuroscientists, psychologists, and other intellectuals see evolutionary theory and knowledge about the brain as a way to better understand that most basic of religious elements: morality. 8. Sports Values: Where do Americans get their mora…

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…

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…

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….

Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

By Spencer Dew

…ch as Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Digital Atlas of American Religion—to the narrow—the Hindu American Foundation’s map of Hindus worldwide (with accompanying demographic information comparing “Hindus/Asian/Indian” favorably on various socioeconomic rankings to other racial and nationality categories). Unlike other kinds of maps, maps of American religion must negotiate the difficulty of that term—what counts, what doesn’t,…

The Desire to Annihilate Gaza Wasn’t Born on 10/7 — It’s Part of a Long Tradition that Includes 19th Century Travel Writing

By Adam Yaghi

…ainly targeted Catholic and Muslim Palestinians. This view was typical for American and European missionaries as well. In the American Christian imagination, Ottoman “Christianity and Islam were coupled,” Ussama Makdisi argues, “as the two pillars of temporal and spiritual corruption that had to be struck down.” Twain’s comic depictions of a desolate, barren, and neglected Palestine later serve as documentary evidence in both Christian Zionist and…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…ged in my seat at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre as I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to…

American Virgin Doesn’t Quite Get It

By Gabriel Mckee

…have had, Seagle still deserved a bit more room to finish it. Ultimately, American Virgin is a missed opportunity. It never lives up to the promise of its opening pages, which hint at a thoughtful, complex critique of American religion that never really materializes. And a thoughtful, complex critique is exactly what is needed—the gun-toting messiahs and sneering preacher-villains that have become go-to clichés for comics that deal with religion…

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

By Peter Manseau

…ders hoping to gain insight into what it actually might mean to live as an American Catholic who was not a member of the clergy were better served elsewhere. Through much of its history, Time’s blind spot to certain kinds of Catholic stories was compensated by its sister publication, which came to being at the suggestion of Clare Boothe Luce. Perhaps one of the most influential Catholic converts in American history, she had learned the faith at th…