Religion Dispatches
…e of duty for the first time in 33 years. Three others perish with him. An American consulate is destroyed. At the same time, an American flag is torched, while another diplomatic post, an embassy, is stormed in a neighboring Arab Muslim country. Days later, further outbursts against American officials and diplomatic sites occur in two other Arab Muslim countries. The headlines are here stripped of their local names, not to protect the innocent bu…
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…top leadership, as noted above, still consists entirely of straight white American men in their 80s and 90s not known for their open-mindedness or innovation, it seems likely that much of the controversy that has plagued the church will continue. But perhaps now I’ll get an answer to a question I’ve had for several years about one of the songs from The Book of Mormon musical. Will the lyrics to “I Believe,” in which Elder Price affirms his belief…
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…t amounts to little more than “the power of positive thinking” or with any number of programs that bring people together for dialogue across political and religious divides. These problems don’t have convenient “spiritual” solutions. For a set of highly privileged Americans, I can understand why Worthen’s prescriptions might hold a certain attraction. But whatever one’s attitude to metaphysics and religion, it’s necessary to face the truth that Am…
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…said, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” The ADL is, then, endorsing a man who actively fantasized about ignoring a second Holocaust. Kissinger summed up his attitude to Jewish people by blandly and directly admitting his own prejudice. “If it were not for the accident…
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…onalism came out. That book was about religious fundamentalism in domestic American politics, but while researching it, I was struck by how the movements I was covering were branching out into global issues. In a way, the American anti-abortion movement has had more of an impact abroad than at home. The Supreme Court has limited the movement’s scope of action here, so Republican presidents have rewarded their base by giving them tremendous influen…
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…onality withers people will replace our civil religion for Mormonism, with Americans embracing the church’s American-centered cosmology and stable sense of family values. It’s the largest religious tradition actually birthed in America and remains one of our fastest growing religions—could it be possible that the twenty first century sees Mormonism becoming America’s dominant religion? And what about Europe? The Pew study indicates that traditiona…
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…he restoration or defense of such worlds. So “religious enthusiasm” or the American apocalyptic can be read as modes of the disaffection of the citizen in a time of political delegitimation. We often see this “religion” taking shape most clearly when we focus all the way down, to the odd hybrid of melancholy and triumphalism in these assertions about Damascus. The ephemeral links between scripture and the present are made firm through the intensit…
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…irmed the importance of what I was doing. I needed to see this for myself. Americans, and American Muslims especially, need to know how certain interpretations of professedly apolitical Christianity become allied to a far-right agenda of foreign wars and domestic austerity, glorifying the rich while demonizing the poor. Political Christianity’s treatment of Islam is one of the few points, and perhaps the only point, at which right-wing, political…
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…bel, it turns out, was responsible for ousting Hargis from the Tulsa-based American Christian College (founded to teach “anti-communist patriotic Americanism”) after Hargis was embroiled in a sex scandal; Hargis was accused of having sex with four male and one female students; the woman, it turned out, married one of the men in a ceremony officiated by Hargis, and the couple found out on their honeymoon that he had had sex with both of them. But i…
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…dation, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, American Atheists, the Center For Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, and others. The wall of separation is crumbling, though not from neglect. It’s being attacked. The Trump administration is rife with Christian nationalists attempting to rewrite the Constitution by revising American history and declare this a “Christian nation.” Betsy Devos, Mike Pence, Ben Carson…
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