Religion Dispatches
…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
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…alism is central to its ideology. Scott would also eliminate anything that promotes diversity in government and public life—a drastic, devastating way of enacting the rhetoric of “colorblindness” into what it actually means: ensuring white, Christian dominance in all matters cultural and political. Immigrants, Scott’s document claims, will only be allowed into the country if they “assimilate,” and they shouldn’t seek to “change” America, only to b…
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…asure and marks the subservience of man to divine (or human) authority. We today are Abraham’s heirs, and re-enactors, of countless acts of circumscription. Today, as 2500 years ago, our own bodies are the instruments of authority, power, and control. Religious and political institutions of authority, usually backed up by violence, inscribe themselves on our genitals, our hairstyles, the ways in which we express our sexuality. We learn how to obey…
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…We had more political power after the Voting Rights Act in 1965 than we do today after Shelby. Unless we face the fact that America’s first two Reconstructions were undermined by the monied elites of plantation capitalism, we can’t even name the challenge we face today. In seeking a higher moral ground, we must break out of dead-end racialized framing. We must intentionally challenge the ahistorical and amoral tendencies that many public intellect…
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…t the Islamic State (or ISIS as it’s colloquially known) which argues that today’s jihad has little in common with earlier iterations of that phenomenon but does share certain features with far-right movements in the West, I approach the comparative question from a different angle. Setting aside the terrorism framework, which sidesteps crucial questions about the nature of militant organizations and their appeal at this historical juncture, I inst…
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…espond to God’s love by loving our neighbors. The same call is still heard today in the push to control guns. But the power of religion to shape social values and government legislation was already waning even at the height of the Progressive era. The Social Gospel movement back then, despite its undeniable influence, was generally an adjunct to successful progressive programs, not their spearhead (with the notable exceptions of alcohol prohibitio…
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…ite families for about two and a half times national mediate income, or in today’s dollars, about $125,000. That’s a home price that was affordable with an FHA or VA mortgage to working class families, black or white. Many black families could have afforded those homes in the late 1940s and 1950s, but they were prohibited from purchasing them by FHA policy. Today, those homes sell for $500,000 or $600,000. We now have a law, the Fair Housing Act,…
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…for most of Western history “belief” has meant nothing like what it means today. Today, when someone asks me if I believe in God, for example, they are asking if I assent to the proposed verity or the factual existence of God—and usually it is in reference to a very specific understanding of that God. Similarly, if I’m asked if I have “faith in Christ”, the question is whether I agree with the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, died o…
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…ord to resist government direction in matters of faith and public justice, today’s faux Protestants (DC division) appear only too happy to serve as the king’s errand boys and check their prophetic critique at the door. I am calling the self-willed domestication of what should be a fearless Protestant voice “Areopagitica in reverse” because Milton, in his 1644 anti-censorship polemic, was insisting on the necessity of the free interplay of ideas fo…
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…n I read Kamesh Sankaran’s “The Humbling of a Proud Hindu” in Christianity Today, which mixed a genuine spiritual journey with the idea that Christianity is superior to Hinduism. This sort of triumphalism among Christians—particularly converts—is nothing new, but it also hides the realities many Hindus living under Christian contexts face. For example, in southern India, where Sankaran (and my parents) hails from, many poor Hindus couldn’t receive…
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