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How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…stian nationalism have been a part of evangelicalism from its beginning? A number of recent studies, for instance, have shown that the Moral Majority’s founding was prompted as much by federal interventions into the racist admission policies of evangelical colleges as it was by more moral concerns like abortion. Other scholars, meanwhile, have highlighted race’s centrality to American church history, noting that the evangelical involvement in the…

The Best Books Media of 2008

By Jeff Sharlet

…elen Burroughs argue across some of the most tumultuous decades in African-American history over the responsibilities of churches and the effectiveness of African Americans’ religious commitments in the struggle for liberation. * * * Adele Oltman’s Sacred Mission, Wordly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Georgia) blooms from a careful, revelatory reconstruction of the spiritual and economic lives of black…

Religious Freedom Manifesto Calls for Compromise and Civility—What’s So Wrong With That?

By Frederick Clarkson

…d for Religion Dispatches in October, behind the rhetorical bunting of the American Charter lies an effort to press the best of American democratic aspirations into the service of the religious and political agenda of the Christian Right and the Roman Catholic Bishops. These things said, good faith efforts to seek compromise on difficult issues at the heart of our nation’s most democratic values, and to achieve greater civility in public life are…

The Sacramental American Day of Thanks

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…re prominent then (so, too, was the disturbing implication that indigenous Americans were Canaanites, and thus fit for destruction). The Civil War provided the American civil religion with a new dimension of more explicitly Christian symbolism: the original sin of human enslavement was overcome only through the punitive bloodbath of civil war and the Christ-like sacrifice of the blood of the then-US President, Abraham Lincoln (Gary Laderman’s impo…

Gay-Hating Church Burns “Idols”: A Report

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ued that acts such as the burning of the Qur’an, while legal, provoke anti-American sentiment and endanger American troops, Westboro’s Tim Phelps argues that it’s the invasion of Muslim nations and the killing of countless civilians that has inspired violence by Muslims. The media, he says, ignores these civilian deaths, “as if their lives did not matter at all,” instead calling down wrath on religious believers exercising their rights to free spe…

The Age of Dhikr

By Amina Wadud

…n important route into Islam at the end of the 20th century for more white Americans. African Americans came to Islam at the beginning of the 20th century, for various reasons. African Americans are minorities within the American Sufi communities. These communities are mostly populated by white Americans and the should-be-hyphenated-Muslim immigrants and their descendants. I don’t consider Sufism about race politics. In addition, generally these c…

Fear of U.S. Marriage Equality Exported to Africa

By Kapya Kaoma

…vernment is being run by ‘‘perverted Satan-worshipers who insult the great American nation.” In Kenya, evangelical Bishop Mark Kariuki (who has direct links to Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice) challenged Kenyans to “know that the U.S. is not God.” And Kenya’s Deputy President, William Ruto, reportedly called on both Christians and Muslims in Kenya to fight against “dirty things,” saying, “Homosexuality is against the plan of Go…

On Gaffney’s Radio Show, Rep. King Suggests Muslims Aren’t American

By Sarah Posner

…r for the benefit of House staffers, and spoke to a room of about 50 people. It surely is a deeply troubling development that King is cavorting with Gaffney and pontificating about the “Americanism” of American Muslims, in light of Gaffney’s agitation about fifth columns of shari’ah proponents bent on undermining the Constitution….

No, I Don’t Owe My Yoga Mat to Vivekananda

By Andrea R. Jain

…ch writes about Vivekananda as though he reflected something mainstream in American culture: “His prescription for life was simple, and perfectly American: ‘work and worship.’” And she claims that Vivekananda’s popularity waned because America’s “baby boomers commandeered the yoga business.” First, Vivekananda was never “popular” in the sense that modern yoga became popularized in the late twentieth century. He certainly gained the attention of a…

2010: What Did We Believe In?

By Gary Laderman

…ise the biblical creation myth to the level of a universal fact that every American, or at least every American student using Texas textbooks, must accept as truth. On the other hand, some biologists along with neuroscientists, psychologists, and other intellectuals see evolutionary theory and knowledge about the brain as a way to better understand that most basic of religious elements: morality. 8. Sports Values: Where do Americans get their mora…