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How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism — An Interview

By Bradley Onishi

…tianity Today? Christianity Today is a new magazine in the fifties. It’s just starting out. And they’re trying to connect with prominent individuals that they believe will help to bolster this new thing they’re calling “neo-evangelicalism” or “modern evangelicalism.” And they reach out to Hoover and ask him to be one of their contributors to the magazine. And Hoover does that. Hoover writes for Christianity Today beginning in the fifties. And one…

Public Shrines to Treason: Charlottesville and the Cult of Confederate Memorialization

By Spencer Dew

…e supremacism and white nationalism, the anti-black fantasies and revisionist histories of slavery at the heart of Confederate civil religion. For Duke, whose romance of the Southern slavers’ rebellion has always been linked with an appreciation for Hitler and a penchant for posing in SS uniform, there is no space between these two positions, between the Stars and Bars and the Hakenkreuz. But for many other Americans, particularly but not only in…

Why We Stay: What the History of Mormonism Reveals About the Origins of “Race”

By Max Mueller

…to one’s own implication in this system of oppression is the essential first step to dismantling it. What alternative title would you give the book? Jane Manning James told a friend near the end of her life, “I am white with the exception of the color of my skin.” This is a stunning and heart-wrenching confession. But one that encapsulates much of the theology that I explore in the book. I thought about titling the book with this powerful quote….

The Sacramental American Day of Thanks

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…m Lincoln (Gary Laderman’s important book, The Sacred Remains, tells the disturbing story of how Lincoln’s corpse itself became an important artifact for public display, until its corruption provided an alternative-, and almost anti-, myth of national salvation). For Bellah, writing in 1966 (the essay was reprinted in a collection of essays entitled Beyond Belief in 1970), the American civil religion was then involved in what he called its “third…

Archbishop Drops the Girl Scouts Amid Alarmist Rhetoric and Fake Accusations

By Patricia Miller

…decide the fate of Girl Scout troops in their dioceses. The Archdiocese of St. Louis has urged parishes to drop the Girl Scouts and individual churches have dropped the organization, but Naumann, who claims the diocese has spent “hundreds of hours researching concerns” about the Girl Scouts, is the first Catholic prelate to mandate the removal of the Girl Scouts from all Catholic parishes in a diocese. But by buying into the alarmist rhetoric of o…

Pope: Heterosexual Marriage “Makes Europe Europe”

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…sador is, whether he or she is married, and how many children they have. Just last week, for instance, we learned that Fernando Felipe Sánchez Campos of Costa Rica is 36, married, with two children. And we learn that Gábor Győriványi of Hungary is 51, married, with four children. Yet there may be a more subtle rationale to this standard formula of diplomatic description than the simple recitation of facts. The arrival of new diplomats in Vatican C…

AIG: On Charisma and Routinization of Greed

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ts elegant simplicity and broad comparative reach. The prophet, Weber suggested, is best defined as the unique bearer of charisma. No sooner had Weber offered his “unified theory” of the prophet than he subdivided the essential concept again, noting that there were two very different kinds of charisma with which he had to deal. On the one hand, there is the charisma of personality; on the other, there is the charisma of office. The two forms rarel…

American Christmas (Shopping) and the Protestant Reformation

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…church with a Catholic one is that Jesus is not depicted on the Cross in most Protestant churches. There is just a Cross, an empty Cross, on the wall. The broken, bleeding body, so prominent in most Catholic cruciforms, looks quite jarring when you come to it from the perspective of this Protestant emptiness. So, Roman Catholics leave the Baby Jesus out of the manger, whereas American Protestants seem especially obsessed with that symbol of primal…

Patron Saint of AIDS/HIV To Be Canonized

By Susan Henking

…sexual licentiousness on the part of Hawaiians. (He was defended by Robert Louis Stevenson from claims of his unworthiness in 1890.) We have, of course, come to understand Hansen’s disease, and colonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples such as Hawaiians, (we hope) in new ways. So, too, have we many moved beyond the Protestant anti-Catholicism, to which some of the contemporary criticism of Father Damien has been attributed. Pope Paul VI recogn…

The Bible Says… and Other Myths About Scripture

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ll with the Book of Common Prayer still in liturgical use; and fundamentalist, mostly independent Baptist churches retain the KJV as the only truly inspired word of God. In its extreme form, KJVO Baptists argue that the divine spirit breathed through Wycliffe and Tyndale (but not Douai) and culminated in the foreordained event of the 1611 “Authorized” English Bible. A strange conclusion to draw about an anti-Calvinist Bible. For those who were not…