Religion Dispatches
…lum era, white Protestant males continued the wanton devastation of Native American tribes as the American territories expanded; inflicted horrible suffering on slaves by tearing families apart, raping innocent women, and killing blacks as if they were not human beings; murdered Joseph Smith and harassed early Mormon followers; and discriminated against Catholics in both subtle and overtly hostile acts of violence. • In the late nineteenth and ear…
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…er of the community. Ahmadis consider themselves fully Muslim, and to most American eyes they would be indistinguishable from any other Muslim denomination. But this self-understanding is highly contested within Islam. They have been described as the “Quakers of Islam” because of their commitment to pacifism, social equality, and democratic self-governance. They have also been frequent targets of violence and persecution, particularly in their hom…
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…premacists and white nationalists and Christian nationalists have told the American story, right? Is they take things that they opposed in the past that are now a lost cause, and then act as if they were great ideas and they achieved everything that needed to be achieved. So all the people that hated MLK [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] when MLK was alive and was active and so forth, once it’s clear the impact that he had on the country—and obviously…
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…ustice Clarence Thomas went so far as to joke in 2018 that Mr. Leo was the number three most powerful person in the world. Thomas belly-laughed as Leo quipped in reply, “God help us! God help us.” Right-wing forms of Christianity have reshaped the political landscape of the US in recent decades, culminating with the current 6-3 conservative Supreme Court majority. But despite the fact that they’ve achieved so much as their numbers have dwindled, a…
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…nsisted, “A good, Bible-believing Christian is by nature a good, patriotic American.” This profound sense of defiant loyalty to old-fashioned Americanism helps explain white evangelical enthusiasm for Trump and it has always been embedded deep in the bones of evangelical colleges and universities. For those familiar with this history, recent moves against skeptical faculty members come as no surprise. In 2015, administrator Randy Beckum was chasti…
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…re raised in it traumatized. And yet, unfortunately, the fact that much of American Christianity is harmful doesn’t stop Scientific American from echoing Christianity Today by claiming that a sharp increase in internet searches for “prayer” during a pandemic somehow indicates that religion is the cure for what ails us. Perhaps the ultimate irony here is that, according to the same Scientific American article, “psychiatrists are the least likely of…
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…expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony. He wrote an early primer on Native American language. That he anticipated American religious pluralism and freedom of religion in ways that seemed impossible in his era, even including ‘Turks,” Jews, native religion, and women preachers. He helped to found the Rhode Island colony, the first to give full religious liberty to its citizens, as a “shelter for persons distressed of conscience.” How do you think W…
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…t, “Since the megachurch movement took off in the 1990s, the percentage of Americans identifying as evangelical has declined from nearly a third to just over a fifth,” suggesting direct causality. But of course, correlation isn’t causation. And sociologists have long since established that it’s actually the evangelical culture wars and the association of American Christianity with the political Right that caused the rapid decline in religious affi…
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…s calls “the happiness industry.” Not surprisingly, this is something many Americans are eager to hear: mindfulness can give you sukha vedana, that “happy feeling.” Putting aside the metaphysical question of what in the world we mean by the word “happiness,” there’s the anterior fact that Buddhism isn’t about becoming happy. Happiness and unhappiness are what the Buddha called “Worldly Winds,” like success and failure, gain and loss. Buddhism’s in…
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…ocal politicians and Jewish groups. Jews represent only two percent of the American population, but over sixty percent of American males are circumcised—and Jews are not the only religious group that practices circumcision. American Muslims do as well. Six years ago, in a similar challenge, the Association for Genital Integrity, a Canadian advocacy group, sought public funding to initiate a campaign to outlaw circumcision in Canada. As the Canadia…
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