Religion Dispatches
…hink about our bodies. What of Christianity, the dominant religion in the United States? A large majority of Americans identify as Christian, and even non-Christians may find themselves holding “Christian” ideas about sex and proper and improper uses of the body. Additionally, whether you are Christian or not, in the United States you will be subject to laws that are directly influenced by Christianity’s historical ambivalence about, and even fea…
Read More…onents of the coverage requirement. O’Brien had argued that, post-Citizens United, a corporation should be considered a “person” under RFRA, thus capable of having a “substantial burden” placed on its religious exercise by government regulation or action. These are the two crucial legal issues at stake in cases brought by for-profit companies: is an attenuated “burden”—as opposed to an actual burden on one’s ability to exercise one’s religion—eno…
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…mbrella company called Alticor Inc., which does business as Quixtar in the United States and Canada and as Amway Corp. throughout the rest of the world. Whatever name it goes by, Amway is in the process of launching a major comeback in the United States. A Scam by Any Other Name Over the last four decades of the 20th century, Amway became a phenomenally successful company, and is now the second-largest direct sales company in the world. In 2007, A…
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…year’s anti-gay conference and others like it are organized and funded by United for Life, a Western Evangelical Christian organization that receives funding from the U.K. and U.S. In May 2013, United for Life hosted a workshop during which police told government officials, religious leaders and health professionals that “homosexual family members and neighbors” were likely to sexually abuse children. A representative from the Ethiopian Inter-Rel…
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…in the “the context of the ‘culture wars’ regarding ‘family values’ in the United States, emancipating children from parental authority seems like yet another attempt to undermine the family.” He writes: To a large degree, many religious conservatives distrust elite cultural institutions within the United States and prefer to cast their lot with democratically accountable institutions. These forms of religious populism reflect a deep strand of ant…
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…izens from any or all ethnic, religious, and genetic backgrounds, a people united by their shared allegiance to the Constitution. In theory the United States could adopt any language as its official language, could take any size or shape, and contain any kind of terrain. By contrast, Native Americans generally have specific homelands tied to specific landforms with unique names from their languages. By creating a sacred homeland, pioneer Mormons m…
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…elationship is part and parcel of that broader antisemitic worldview. “The United States of America has a Zionist occupied government,” railed white nationalist Keith Woods, who helped launch the antisemitic #BantheADL campaign last month that won support from Elon Musk. Woods’ tweet references the phrase ‘ZOG,’ long a mainstay in White nationalist propaganda. White Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes—who recently proclaimed “we need to eradicate t…
Read More…ncil. RD asked Samantha Sokol of the legislative affairs unit at Americans United for Separation of Church and State to compare the 20 models bills of Project Blitz with the bills they track and she found that 71 bills introduced in 2018 (or carried over from the 2017 state legislative session) are based on the model bills or are similar in intent. Of the bills tracked by Americans United [see bill descriptions in side bar of the original post on…
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…e claims made against it were that it did not recognize secular authority, promoted intolerance and violence, and demanded blind obedience to its ancient doctrines. These are all charges currently made against Islam as a religion. In the late 19th century, the prominent nativist Josiah Strong wrote, “It has been shown that it is the avowed purpose of Romanists to ‘make America Catholic.’ It has been shown that this could not be done without bringi…
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…seemed like a problem that was happening “out there” instead of within the United States. With the rise of the Soviet Union to a world power and the start of the Cold War, those pesky demons once again entered the world of politics. In the shadow of communism, Merrill Unger, one of the premiere demonologists of the 20th century, wrote Biblical Demonology: A Study of the Spiritual Forces Behind the Present World Unrest. Suddenly, the United States…
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