Religion Dispatches
…mes Baldwin writes that for blacks, “[American society] is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down …[as it] has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day…The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.” This brutality is not incidental but intrinsic to America and its material prosperity. Spiritually speaking, I am—as…
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…g into some of the groups that were supportive of the pharmacists’ movement, though, I came across a surprisingly well-organized coalition of evangelical anti-contraception groups, some of whom were arguing that Christians should leave their family size and spacing in the hands of God. As I began to read a number of books that shaped the community and conviction, particularly early movement texts like Mary Pride’s The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Ba…
Read More…78%, respectively. And despite the whopper of zombie lies told by Ted Cruz, no, 54 million evangelical voters did not stay home in 2012, rather than vote for Romney. In fact, white evangelicals have made up around one-quarter of the electorate ever since 2000. According to Pew, that number will be a bit lower this time around: about 20%, by their estimate. White evangelicals are losing ground to non-white voters just like all whites, and to the r…
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…rallies, Bible camps, survivalist and gun shows, White-power music concerts, etc., many of which are described in my book. Second, when David Duke won a majority of White votes while running in two Louisiana statewide elections in 1990 and 1991, he uncovered a middle-American constituency that supported at least a portion of his national socialist ideas. Third, a group of respected (if not respectable) ultra-conservatives broke with the Bush 41-er…
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…nestown is the one emblazoned in our cultural consciousness. On November 18, 1978, the largest number of American civilian lives was lost due to a single non-natural disaster—a sad distinction Jonestown would hold until September 11, 2001. In Stories from Jonestown, the most recent addition to the Jonestown library, Leigh Fondakowski has compiled the numerous interviews that she conducted in order to write her play, The People’s Temple, which ran…
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…ld the answers to their modern longings. As a result, there were many gurus, yogis, and spiritual teachers that headed to America eager to establish themselves and build a large following. Since Sri Chinmoy had been raised in an Indian ashram, he believed he had the proper credentials to become a guru. How did Sri Chinmoy court fame? How did he make his publicity stunts and celebrity meetings seem necessary and legitimate among his core followers?…
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…program of its kind and from where I earned my Ph.D. (go Gators!). I think, too, of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, as well as the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. In theology I think of, for example, Drew Theological School; but I also think of the very real pushback from some of the more conservative (read: white evangelical) schools of theology and the approaches of their traditions to understanding…
Read More…stop in Athens for the annual conference for ILGA, an international lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex rights association. Church officials accepted. “I wanted a chance to brief Vatican officials myself,” Berry says. “These issues of violence and extreme discrimination are of concern to us all.” Berry flatly denied claims by church officials that the U.S. was threatening to withhold foreign aid from countries as a means of pushing them to…
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…ng as many children as God gave her, submitting to her husband’s leadership, and, in a related conviction common among Quiverfull adherents, her plans to deliver her children through unassisted childbirth—a home birth with no doctors, nurses, or midwives to help her and her husband through labor and aftercare. For weeks, Chmielewski’s plans drew the scrutiny and concern of Quiverfull critics, such as the commenters on the wryly-named ”Free Jinger”…
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…clarify to his audience at a 2002 Holocaust denial conference in Washington, D.C., that his organization, the Free Congress Foundation, did not engage in Holocaust revisionism. However, he winked, it was worth mentioning that “these guys [Frankfurt School theorists] were all Jewish.” Today, a central belief of the alt-right and white nationalist movements is that generations of progressive Jews in the United States have worked patiently and covert…
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