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Christian ‘Purity’ Guru’s Loss of Faith May Signal a Coming Reckoning For Conservative Christianity

By Elizabeth Shively

…two forces have been in American history. In Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians & Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017), historian of religion R. Marie Griffith argues that the positions of progressives (including non-Christians and liberal Christians) and conservatives (including many Protestant denominations and Catholics) have been “mutually constitutive”; that is, when there were progressive gains, conservatives respon…

Simple Questions: The Why, What, and How of Changing American Christianities

By Daniel Schultz

…the least. Most obviously, it’s 43 years old! You maybe have noticed that American society is a little different than it was in 1972? Specifically, Americans aren’t lurching to the right anymore. In fact, according to Gallup, they might even be going the other way, getting more liberal on a broad range of social issues. Yet, as we know, the slide in declining church affiliation continues, and is even accelerating. Conservatives will no doubt poin…

The Religious Lives of Soldiers

By Jonathan Ebel

…opriation of “the soldier” and of soldiers’ voices in what some would call American civil religion or American religious nationalism. I think that approaching this topic from the perspectives of history and of religious studies has the potential to reveal a great deal about ties that bind and have bound soldiers and civilians and the nation, and why it is that those ties are so strong. This may seem like something of an outlier given my interest i…

Searching for Moral High Ground While Houston Drowns: A Perspective on the Lakewood Church Controversy

By Joshua L. Lazard

…e in the Great Recession. This correlation highlights how certain veins of American Christianity function so closely with some of the core American ideals around free-market capitalism, wealth and consumerism. Prosperity gospel, for instance, only makes logical sense in a system of free-market capitalism. Those core American ideals have come under assault in very public ways when measured against the yardstick of liberation theology and faith-base…

Hip-Hop Religion and Spiritual Sampling in a “Post-Racial” Age

By Josef Sorett

…spection), The Tao of Wu can be read as a psycho-spiritual analysis of the American self. Alongside reconciling his social analysis with an embrace of the American dream, RZA’s journey is deeply spiritual; and scattered throughout the book are moments of redemption, salvation, and transformation. In addition to pillars of wisdom, sutras, and meditations on fear, peace, and love and happiness, he cites divine intervention at certain events in his o…

McCarthy, Born Again and Retooled for Our Time

By Sarah Posner

…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…

Can’t “Truss” a White Conservative’s Pledge

By Anthea Butler

…sed by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President. LBJ’s 1965 War on Poverty was triggered in part by the famous “Moynihan Report” finding that the black out-of-wedlock birthrate had hit 26%; today, the white rate exceeds that, the overall rate is 41%, and over 70% of African-American babies are born to single parent. Um, Hell-to-the-yeah s…

‘We’re Through the Looking Glass Now’: Talking Deradicalization with Dr. John Horgan

By Gordon Haber

…ventions to bring people back from the edge. One place to start addressing American extremism may be conspiracy theories—it seems that’s what most American extremists have in common and that what attracts people to conspiracy theories is well understood. Correct. We know which kinds of people and what factors make them fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But I think what is the wrong question. It’s when. When distress and uncertainty…

Dangerous Religion

By Gary Laderman

…lum era, white Protestant males continued the wanton devastation of Native American tribes as the American territories expanded; inflicted horrible suffering on slaves by tearing families apart, raping innocent women, and killing blacks as if they were not human beings; murdered Joseph Smith and harassed early Mormon followers; and discriminated against Catholics in both subtle and overtly hostile acts of violence. • In the late nineteenth and ear…

Religious Right Targets Obama Picks, Daschle and Holder

By Bill Berkowitz

…old?” is available here (pdf). Conference on Race, Religion and Rhetoric: “Americans at the Pulpit and in the Public Square: A conversation on race, religion, and rhetoric in a diverse America,” is a conference organized by the American Jewish Committee and the Office of Black Ministry of the Archdiocese of New York, and is scheduled to be held at Xavier University in New Orleans, from January 17-19. Trouble in Narnia: Bad news for Narnia fans. It…