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American Prosperity Gospel Makes South Sudan “Ripe for Exploitation”

By Anthea Butler

…ar, the believers at this Pentecostal church also consume the preaching of American Pentecostal media stars like T.D. Jakes and Benny Hinn. Anytime someone says, as a woman interviewed for the program did, that Benny Hinn is the man because he’s on TV, well, that’s an issue. Add in the prosperity gospel, and you have a potent mix that will surely change the scope of how Christianity will become appropriated in tandem with the political in South Su…

The Most Ridiculous Responses to the Vatican’s Call-out of the Catho–Christian Right

By Patricia Miller

…ve come to characterize the U.S. church: Over the last decade, however, as American Christianity has weakened and American politics become ever-more-polarized, the Catholic position in the United States has become more difficult and perplexing. The Democratic Party, whose long-ago New Deal was built in part on Catholic social thought, has become increasingly secular and ever-more-doctrinaire in its social liberalism. The Republican Party, which un…

The Invention of a Corporate Christian America

By Andrew Aghapour

…ciation of Manufacturers to the cause and creating brand new ones like the American Liberty League. But Americans dismissed their naked paeans to capitalism as just business looking out for its own self-interest. (Democratic leader Jim Farley famously joked that they ought to call the American Liberty League “the American Cellophane League” because it was a DuPont product that you could see right through.) Realizing that the direct approach hadn’t…

The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

By Saba Soomekh

…but is not tangible to me in any way any more. Recently I was listening to American Beauty again, as I revisited all of my old albums in preparation for the Santa Clara shows, and for the first time, a new song spoke to me: “Attics of My Life.” With some of the most iconic Dead songs coming from that American Beauty, “Attics of My Life” somehow got lost in the shuffle for me. But as I listened to it again for the first time in a long time, I reali…

Scientology: All-American or Aging Hoax?

By Gordon Haber

…ory than a supposition that the church is, to some extent, a reflection of American values. He also posits a number of broad questions (maybe too broad) about how we define religion in America and about “legal and theoretical issues in the study of religion.” In the interest of objectivity, Urban employs a simultaneous “hermeneutics of respect and hermeneutics of suspicion”—meaning that he takes Scientology’s religious claims at face value while…

An End to the “Gentleman’s Agreement” on Israel?

By Jay Michaelson

…pped even more spectacularly than their many previous ones, Israel and its American friends have tended to focus on practicalities: money, boundaries, resources… and settlements. American maps may show the Golan as part of Syria, but every year, more Israeli-owned vineyards are planted. To suddenly focus on symbolism is good for fundraising letters, but bad for actual policy. In this case, at least, symbolism has prevailed. Because it is only a bu…

Battlestar Galactica and the Future of American Religion

By Nick Street

…larger than Methodists, Episcopalians and Lutheran combined and double the number of “nones” since that last such survey in 1990. And among the 18- to 29-year-old demographic—the leading edge of a new generation of spiritually and technologically iconoclastic seekers and the core audience for media convergence phenomena like Battlestar—“nones” account for a quarter of the total population and an even higher portion of men. Even as traditional bric…

Conservatives Accuse Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of Misconduct

By Elizabeth Drescher

…and theological subterfuge. The group is a strategic reincarnation of the American Anglican Council of Washington, a chapter of the American Anglican Council (AAC), the national body created in 1996 to oversee congregations that split with the Episcopal Church. As an organization independent of the Episcopal church, the AAC and its affiliates would have not have standing in the church to bring disciplinary charges. Trustees of the AFF have been a…

Bobby Jindal Hypes His Christian Cred at Liberty U.

By Murali Balaji

…ten embarrassed to identify as a Hindu. I just wanted to be accepted as an American, because in this country, the dominant narrative has been—and continues to be—that being American implicitly (or explicitly) means being Christian. It’s likely why Barack Hussein Obama has had to repeatedly reaffirm his Christian bona fides. For Hindu kids, the dilemma of having to explain a “funny religion” can be traumatic, and the bullying that takes place—often…

A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…o theirs, but they aggressively tried to ban him. In the early 1960s, the [American Psychological Association] wrote letters banning members from having anything to do with Hubbard or his theories. Hubbard saw them as enemies, and that has not changed in Scientology. Children who grow up in Scientology say their understanding of psychiatry is that it’s the root of all evil. In your chapters on Lisa McPherson, the young woman who died under myster…