Religion Dispatches
…ng brought into America by people from backwards countries threatening our American way of life. As Americans of mixed heritage, we grew up hearing stories about how our Jewish grandparents faced similar prejudice in the early 20th century and how our Irish ancestors faced more of the same when they arrived in the mid-19th century. Chinese workers faced even harsher legal restrictions with the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese-Americans were inte…
Read More…biblical roots (Calvinist, actually) of the American political system and American Law. At the American Vision conference, he presented a belabored discussion of what a church can and cannot do within the guidelines of the IRS rules. He cited the part of the code that prohibits influencing legislation and labeled it “legalese,” before a lengthy parsing of what counts as legislation and then what counts as influencing— none of which substantially…
Read More…re warning has come to pass. As Candace noted, this all has happened while American evangelicals either actively promoted homophobia, downplayed the urgency of the situation, or engaged in dishonest doublespeak after bolstering Uganda’s AHB supporters. As has been extensively documented by Political Research Associates, and as Lou Engle’s visit to Uganda last year made clear, American religious right figures played an important role in fanning the…
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…that it could have a bigger tent if it stopped playing to such a narrow base. One day, sooner or later, I’m sure they’ll see the benefit in that. For now, both Romney and Gingrich, and the Republican establishment, would do well to note that there is an increasing number of Arab and Muslim Americans. They are not one and the same. But, they are politically active, eager to vote, and often donate time and money to candidates and campaigns. They are…
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…the others, it’s claimed, aren’t “real Christians”—and therefore not “real Americans.” Christian and American identities are inseparable in Christian nationalism, merged into one another. At the same time, blood and soil are central to this ideology. This focus stems, as Yale sociologist Philip Gorski describes, from drawing a parallel between the Bible’s conquest of the Holy Land by the Israelites, and the violent conquest of the American contine…
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…n Without Tarrying for Any!” foreshadowed Freedom Now! The Sixties were as American as apple pie or that great American hippie Johnny Appleseed. 3. Given the reality of the socially constructed cages we are trapped in, the Matrixes which we accept unknowingly, we have two choices. We can either make the cage as comfortable as can be for as many people equally as possible; Or we can try to break out of the cage, break out of the text, break out of…
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…nd striking some as too political. When my book If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right was reviewed by one conservative Christian English professor, he complained that I “blamed” the Christian Right “(with scant justification) for all manner of America’s ills.” He went on to say that my “literary analysis rests on firmer footing than [my] political commentary.” In other words, stick to literary criticism…
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…m fighters who in life had challenged the racial injustice at the heart of American society and who had often been treated as “un-American” for doing so. Now the civil rights movement had come to embody American grit, courage, and resolve, and these two activists could be invoked as the country’s most famous emblems. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History Jeanne Theoharis Beacon Press Jan 30, 2018 Argua…
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…lf over to tyranny—your health care decisions made by bureaucrats.” “Real” Americans Bachmann’s history of questioning Barack Obama’s American-ness, or of espousing “normal people values,” is rooted in the Reconstructionist conception of “American-ness.” Not just Christian, but their kind of Christian; one who would obey God, exercise “dominion authority,” and, most crucially, is one of their “brethren.” Titus, founder of Bachmann’s law school, ha…
Read More…conveniently written in English so that it can be understood by any plain American. He also shows how toxic this triple fundamentalism is to civic discourse where reasoned philosophical disagreement gives way to a mentality of holy war in which those with whom we disagree are not well meaning fellow Americans engaged in the democratic process, but instead, heretics. Lind is optimistic that “sooner or later, dogmatism and reality will collide,” an…
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