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American Anti-Gay Campaign in Africa Opposes “Fictitious Sexual Rights”

By Warren Throckmorton

Sharon Slater, American anti-gay activist and president of Family Watch International, recently encouraged delegates attending a law conference in Lagos, Nigeria to resist the United Nations’ calls to decriminalize homosexuality. Keynoting the Nigerian Bar Association Conference, Slater told delegates that they would lose their religious and parental rights if they supported “fictitious sexual rights.” One such “fictitious right” is the right to…

“Americans Hate Muslims, Too” (And Other Impediments to U.S. Advocacy for Religious Freedom Abroad)

By Chad Bauman

…e value the expressions of evangelical Christian piety so common among the American political class, and do not dismiss them—as many Americans do—as cynical political machination. Stories in respected media outlets warn of aggressive evangelical campaigns “emanating from America,” and “backed by the highest of the land,” and are often accompanied by sound bites or pictures—in this case of George W. Bush, Jr., speaking in front of a large mural of…

The Islamophobia Election: How “Muslim” Became a Racial Identity

By Michael Schulson

…to participate in interviews, and I had a much harder time getting Muslim American men. I found that there’s a lot of self-surveillance. American Muslims are surveilled by the state. They’re surveilled by private citizens. Then they participate in self-surveillance as well. When you’re hyper-surveilled you monitor what you say and do to avoid bringing suspicion onto your body. When you’re on a state list that’s very disempowering. When I got men…

Op-Ed: A Few Things I Wish Barack Obama Had Said

By Garret Keizer

…cus on the profound similarity. Both are based on the firm belief that the American electorate regards its suffrage as a thing for sale. Both are based on that time-honored American political tradition of buying votes. You know, people have tried to accuse me of having messianic pretensions. But here is the proof that I am not “the one you’re waiting for.” The true messiah of American politics will be the candidate who is willing to say that enjoy…

David Becomes Christian at Values Voter Summit

By Daniel Schultz

…ifficult to see how this applies to the conservative religious view of the American story: The golden age begins with a founding agreement between the Christian God and the American people. When the people fall away from the covenant, God punishes them by withdrawing his blessings and unleashing his wrath. To win back God’s grace, the people must return to the covenant. In fact, the CART narrative is all over American history: The trope is old and…

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…

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…

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

By Dianne M. Stewart

…seasoning ritual. Though they are determined to interpret Vodou religious services like the legendary Bois Caïman ceremony as conventions with the “devil,” most Haitians need no cues from alien interpreters when it comes to their history and religious heritage: Bois Caïman is one of many Haitian landscapes where the divine Vodou community (Lwa) mercifully answered its devotees’ prayers for guidance and protection during their struggle to liberate…

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…

‘Christian Warriors’: Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?

By Chip Berlet

…S. Boyer, author of When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, suggests that religious views about biblical prophecy in the United States have “always had an enormous, if indirect and underrecognized, role [in] shaping public policy.” If the message of apocalyptic demonization is not clear, try reading one of the novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in their Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic novels whic…