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From Original Sin to Flattering Mirror: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

By Jeanne Theoharis

…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…

Misusing Cesar Chavez in Immigration Debate

By Luis Leon

…ded in framing the practice of legislating racism as a failure not only of American policy, but of Americanism as a Christian cult in particular, and also among good people of all faiths: A powerfully sacred international transcript. Clergy and religious laity issued statements condemning the hatred and discrimination pulsating throughout Arizona’s Christian and Jewish communities (no official word to the large percentage of Mormons was issued). H…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…says with her hands on her hips. According to Bey, being an outed African-American woman atheist is the same as committing cultural suicide. You’re rejecting a long history and everything your ancestors believed and stood for. You are telling your mothers and sisters that you think they’re stupid. For African-American women, identity comes first. “Because of us, you are.” Enjoy Being an Atheist At last, the speaker I had waited for is introduced….

A Lone Blogger vs. the McCain-Hagee Alliance

By Bruce Wilson

…tly touched on with my 4-minute, no-budget video was the growing divide in American culture, religion and politics that (according to some well-respected observers) threatens the viability of American Democracy. Beneath the most obvious and salacious details of the scandal lies a Christian subculture that, like a vast chunk of Antarctic ice, had years before begun to diverge from the mainstream mass of secular culture; some, like Hagee’s church, h…

Douthat, Do Tell! Some Questions for a Columnist Longing for the Good Old Days of American Religion

By Peter Laarman

…ike that [old] way. I call your attention to the introduction of the term “American system”: do we hear something just a tad bit proprietary? The legend of the Virtuous Republic has been invoked, the American system is what renews and guarantees the virtue, but that system is now malfunctioning on account of a God deficit. Or perhaps because of a Flag deficit. It’s hard to tell which, because in minds made like Douthat’s the two always run togethe…

God’s Law is the Only Law: The Genesis of Michele Bachmann

By Sarah Posner

…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…

Addressing the Culture War Without Touching the Culture War

By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

…economy that provided most people with at least the hope of sharing in the American dream.” However, the justification for American values and ideals were no longer fixed, so Marsden maintains, in a higher law or ideology. The American Enlightenment ideal of a universal order had been replaced by a philosophy of pragmatism and moral relativism that stressed individual self-fulfilment. This would make a common program for reform impossible. Marsden…

An American and a Muslim: Reading Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

By Sarah Eltantawi

…the goals of shari’ah. In the end, Rauf argues that there is a version of American Islam that is totally compatible with current understandings of foundational American mythologies, and he had dedicated himself to articulating that vision. Within this scheme, then, to denounce shari’ah would would be to denounce the Constitution. The book is strongest when Rauf movingly conveys the richness and gentility of the Prophet’s example for millions of M…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…economic injustice, and other issues crying out for a prophetic response. American Baptists can claim a glorious history of defending the individual conscience (think of Roger Williams, and of Jefferson’s famous 1803 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association—the document in which the phrase “wall of separation” was first used). But this denomination has also managed to rip itself apart over whether gay-friendly congregations should be tossed out….

Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

By Diana Butler Bass

…eacher Jerry Falwell on the steps of the Trenton State House surrounded by American flags and a church choir. The story began: “The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority movement, brought his mixture of church meeting and political rally to the New Jersey State House steps today. He proclaimed that his church was a ‘sleeping giant’ that was ‘standing again across this nation.’” That class remains etched in my mind. California in the…