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Muslims Helped Legitimize Lowes’ Decision to Pull Ads From All-American Muslim

…that actions have consequences. I would love to see a second season of All-American Muslim (AAM) that comes to Jackson Heights in Queens to do South Asian Muslims, or to Chicago to cover African-American Muslims. So, what these criticizers did is to create a narrative that even Muslims don’t believe that this show represents Muslims. There was no positive or constructive criticism, just complaints that the critics themselves weren’t on TV. It take…

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Gay, Black, and Quaker: History Catches Up with Bayard Rustin

…significance, as conservative (mostly religious) voices within the African American community resist the expanding embrace of LGBT rights by African American elected officials and civil rights leaders—and as proponents and opponents of LGBT equality contend for the moral mantle of the civil rights movement. Rustin, who became active in the gay rights movement in his later years, wrote eloquently about the need for activists to build coalitions for…

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Don’t Blame Secularism: Reading Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion

…of politics, but simply to refocus on the much broader question: Why have Americans in general—Muslim-Americans and scholars of Islam aside—remained ignorant for so long of a world religion with such vast social and political relevance in contemporary American life? The answer is not ‘secularism.’ In thinking about that question, I find myself returning to memories of my school days in the 1970s, and to the image of those colorful world maps that…

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A Portrait of Islamophobia?

…zona. When the police arrested the shooter, he said: “I’m a patriot and an American. I’m American. I’m a damn American.” Muslim girl power The fictional war between America and “Muslims” (including actual Muslims, those who “look like” Muslims, and those who live close to Muslims, like Iraqi Christians) is perpetuated and extended by the uncritical visuality of the news media. While I believe the war is based on fictional understandings of “Muslim…

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

…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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Creationism and Evolution are Competing ‘Myths’

…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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My Bible and the Bill of Rights

…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…

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Beck’s “Dream”—Our Nightmare

…verwhelming majority of the founders were “sincere Christians” who thought American slavery was “unbiblical,” blamed England for imposing the institution on the colonies, and set in motion the processes to end it. But as with his “Christian American History,” scholars dispense with these claims. According to historian Diana Butler Bass, the few white Christians in the 18th century who thought slavery was unbiblical were mostly women. She said, “It…

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As an African American Who Loves Thanksgiving, Must I Simply Ignore the Historical Suffering of the Wampanoag and Pass the Sweet Potato Pie?

…he oppressed and as celebrated participants in the dispossession of Native Americans. Take, for example, the Times’ story about Liberian-Americans’ struggle with the continued observance of Thanksgiving given their own history as descendants of ex-slaves who colonized territory along the coast of West Africa, dispossessing the indigenous populations for what would become Liberia. But Liberian Americans aren’t alone in this paradoxical relationship…

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Yes, It Can Be Hard to Be an Atheist in America; Now We Have the Data

…adly progressive public might relate to the representation of nonreligious Americans as a stigmatized minority. I did so, as a queer nonreligious American myself, by posting a 24-hour Twitter poll in which I asked respondents, “Can the language of ‘coming out’ properly be used by anyone forced to conceal an aspect of identity, or does it belong only to the LGBTQ community?” I noted that the question was inspired by the new report on the Secular Su…

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