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Robbing Peter to Give Charity to Paul: The Dirty Secret Behind American ‘Giving’

By Peter Laarman

…charity can ever substitute for public justice. Dr. King said that when we Americans finally get our values right we will still need to play the role of the Good Samaritan but we will also come to understand that “the whole Jericho Road must be transformed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” In the decades since King first called for a transformatio…

As We Survey the Damage of Yesterday’s Violence, What Will Christian Nationalist Politics Look Like in 2021? New Report Offers Clues

By Chrissy Stroop

…Justice” and the not-so-apolitical after all “Jesus 2020,” the release of American Atheists’ new report serves as a timely reminder not only of the serious threat that Christian extremism represents to American democracy, but also that the spectacular drama that’s been unfolding on the national stage this year is only part of the story. Many crucial church-state separation battles are won and lost at the state level. To be sure, state-level cultu…

Global LGBT Recap:Culture War Exports, Mob Violence and Kidnapping as Weapon of Homophobia

By Peter Montgomery

…bic leaders in Africa have been amplified by large infusions of money from American right-wing culture warriors such as Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., who has bankrolled homophobia on both sides of the Atlantic and helped make common cause between right-wing American Anglican splinter groups and the Anglican churches of Nigeria and Uganda. The Toronto Star also considers rising homophobia and anti-gay violence in Africa, suggesting that it reflects, in a…

Religious Leaders Condemn National Prayer Breakfast; Offer Alternative American Prayer Hour

By Sarah Posner

…-gays bill pending in the Ugandan parliament. “Prayer is a good thing, and Americans ought to gather to pray, but we better be careful what we pray for,” said the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the Ninth Bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church, speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday morning. “We have a duty to confront those who are praying for those things that would break God’s heart.” “I call upon our pr…

The Myth of ‘Voodoo’: A Caribbean American Response to Representations of Haiti

By Dianne M. Stewart

…d’s good nature is reflected in the slave trade, what was the Devil up to? American ignorance of Vodou beliefs and practices aside, I am befuddled by Robertson’s lack of reflection on what his tall tale of Haiti’s unpaved road to hell inevitably registers about the nature of the Christian God. Where was the almighty Christian God when Haiti’s founding patriots and defenders of human liberty allegedly “swore a pact to the devil?” There is something…

The Shared Assumption Behind Creationism and Anti-GMO in Europe

By Michael Schulson

…American pastime. And, like baseball, creationism can feel like a uniquely American sport—“a local, indigenous, American bizzarity,” in the words of Stephen Jay Gould. There’s no question that anti-Darwinian sentiment occupies a special place in the American psyche. But there is nothing uniquely American—or, for that matter, especially right-wing—about feeling as if nature works in ways other than those specified by contemporary biology. And skept…

New Data Strongly Suggest a Correlation Between Disaffiliation and Christianity’s Association with the U.S. Right

By Chrissy Stroop

…every year. They noted that religious affiliation was holding steady among American conservatives but declining among American moderates and liberals, and argued that “this political part of the increase in ‘nones’ can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the religious right.” Subsequent events seem to have borne the thesis out, with the American population becoming more politically and religiously polarized. Since the early 21st century, the…

The Uses and Abuses of the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…m the popular narrative. King’s legacy has been appropriated in service to American exceptionalism and Christian supremacy. In essence, to be a real Christian and real American is to be like the mythic King. In the years after King’s assassination, his opponents (and some allies) were relegated to the category of the “scribes and Pharisees.” Useful props to deploy to demonstrate the superiority of King’s approach of nonviolent resistance and integ…

Masculinity and Mass Violence: When Will We Acknowledge the Smoking Gendered Pronoun Hiding in Plain Sight?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…07 before turning the gun on himself; Jiverly Wong, a Buddhist, Vietnamese American who killed 13 people (himself included) and wounded four in Binghamton, New York in 2009; John Allen Muhammad, the Islamic, African American “Beltway Sniper,” who, with Jamaica-born partner Lee Boyd Malvo, killed at least 10 people in the Washington DC area through the month of October 2002. Many of these shooters, regardless of race or religion, had known mental h…

Secure Borders? Not a Chance, Senator

By Ira Chernus

…other side of this paradox, and the emphasis can change over time. Recent American history illustrates that point very well, as another scholar of American religions, Robert Wuthnow, demonstrates in After Heaven, a book that offers a unique, if indirect, insight into the current debate on immigration reform. Wuthnow first set out to understand the distinctive spiritual style of the 1950s. Reading the religious literature of that era and interview…