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Ebola and Us: The American Roots of Liberia’s Trauma

By Peter Laarman

…cut they blocked the opening of a black college (the first of its kind) in New Haven, and they persecuted Prudence Crandall’s school for African American girls and women in Canterbury, putting Crandall on trial and physically destroying her school. The Colonization Society’s official name was “The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color in America.” In the end the people who were transported to Liberia were English-speaking Protestant…

2010: What Did We Believe In?

By Gary Laderman

…10. RD celebrates its Two-Year Anniversary (February 4th). Sorry. This may have been sacred to only a few… Can you blame me? *** Finally, just so I can’t be accused of slapping the label on any old thing, here is a list of items in the news that, for too many Americans, have nothing at all to do with the sacred—they are thoroughly mundane, lacking in urgency, ultimate values, or transformative power: 1. Education 2. Helping the poor 3. The Presid…

American Infidel: Robert Ingersoll Was the “Great Agnostic” of the (Last) Gilded Age

By Peter Laarman

…goers and doubters alike—could relate to his insistence that the framers “knew that to put God in the Constitution was to put man out… They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man… They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone.” Everyday people loved hearing Ingersoll’s stock response to repeated pleas from Protestant clergy to inser…

The Right is Using the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Search to Martyr Trump and Maintain the Violent Myth of the Big Lie

By Bradley Onishi

…ase—for Attorney General Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden, and for the American people. He’s also correct in saying that this will galvanize the American Right behind Trump and propel him even further ahead of his GOP rivals as the favorite for the 2024 nomination. Father Frank Pavone, national director of the anti-abortion Priests for Life and one of the most influential and outspoken Catholic supporters of Trump, tweeted Monday night: “Presi…

Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

By Brock Bahler

…and barbarians such that, even in 2021, 74% of Republicans and 50% of all Americans agreed with the statement: “Islam is at odds with American values and ways of life.” In other words, to be an American is to be a Christian. Therefore, since Muslims are portrayed as enemies of civilization—i.e. as enemies-of-Christ—a significant percentage of Americans are inspired by Netanyahu’s religious rhetoric, imagining themselves as mutually engaged in def…

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…s this haunting is typical in the US, and I would suggest that by studying American hauntings, we can better understand the American spiritual landscape. ### UPDATE 1/24/22: Readers have been asking, with varying degrees of urgency, whether there are any updates or resolution to this story. The author, Daniel Wise, writes: “Maria and Mark moved out of the Lancaster house in December of 2021 for reasons unrelated to the haunting. A couple days befo…

The Landmark 85-Year-Old Report Absent From Debates Over Missionary’s Death

By Amy Fallas

…ve” justifies the means. As a scholar of missionary history, I’ve seen how American missionaries have assisted those in need. During World War I, American missionaries across the Middle East were key protagonists in forming the Near East Relief, which administered aid to millions displaced by war and conflict. Into the mid-twentieth century, missionaries and faith-based organizations were at the forefront of addressing global refugee crises follow…

What Passover Taught Me About Being Black

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…happened, I converted to rabbinic Judaism under the guidance of an African-American rabbi and within the context of a primarily African-American congregation. Observing the Passover seder communally with my congregation was exciting. As time progressed, however, Passover became further removed from my annual celebration of freedom from Egyptian slavery and the hope for the end of American bondage to debates over whether, as a non-Ashkenazi Jew, I…

Sacred&Profane: Wilco Worship and the “Churn” in American Religion

By Gary Laderman

…ure adequately. In a review of the recently released DVD concert, Ashes of American Flags, PopMatters columnist Michael Franco discusses the film’s somber depiction of a fading American landscape by focusing on unique concert venues like the Ryman in Nashville that are disappearing from view in corporate-minded America, as well as its uplifting celebration of the band’s energy and musical talents on display in these settings. Rather than deliver a…

Making Fun of Mormonism

By Max Mueller

…at this is a natural, and even welcome, vetting process of both Mormons as American and a Mormon as the chief American. (In this vetting process, one belief that America will soon discover—and a belief that the Mormon candidates could make more of—is that the LDS Church counts the Constitution as divinely inspired. Thus the Mormon canon of sacred scriptures includes the central document of America’s political and moral self-construction.) Many Mor…