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Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Universe

By Paul Harvey

…egun reinterpreting America’s founding and expansion as God’s plan for his American nation. Mason Locke Weems, the self-styled “Parson” Weems, constructed his own quasi-WallBuilders outfit in the early nineteenth century. As Rebecca Goetz, a historian at Rice University, has written, Weems had a habit of recreating the colonial and revolutionary American world for his readers, and he did it, I think, to show readers a lost world of religiosity and…

Addressing the Culture War Without Touching the Culture War

By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

…economy that provided most people with at least the hope of sharing in the American dream.” However, the justification for American values and ideals were no longer fixed, so Marsden maintains, in a higher law or ideology. The American Enlightenment ideal of a universal order had been replaced by a philosophy of pragmatism and moral relativism that stressed individual self-fulfilment. This would make a common program for reform impossible. Marsden…

Apocalypse Now and Then: How a Biblical Genre Shapes American Politics

By Christopher Douglas

…the first African-American president—and then the first African- and Asian-American woman Vice President. They have seen the Supreme Court strip school-mandated Bible reading, prayer, and so-called “creation science” from public schools, even as evolution became standard fare. They have watched feminism challenge gender roles, and the Supreme Court legalize abortion and mixed-race marriage and then same-sex marriage. They feared losing their child…

What Fundamentalist Christian Fiction Can Teach Us About Our American Crisis

By Christopher Douglas

…nd striking some as too political. When my book If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right was reviewed by one conservative Christian English professor, he complained that I “blamed” the Christian Right “(with scant justification) for all manner of America’s ills.” He went on to say that my “literary analysis rests on firmer footing than [my] political commentary.” In other words, stick to literary criticism…

Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

By Diana Butler Bass

…eacher Jerry Falwell on the steps of the Trenton State House surrounded by American flags and a church choir. The story began: “The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority movement, brought his mixture of church meeting and political rally to the New Jersey State House steps today. He proclaimed that his church was a ‘sleeping giant’ that was ‘standing again across this nation.’” That class remains etched in my mind. California in the…

God’s Law is the Only Law: The Genesis of Michele Bachmann

By Sarah Posner

…lf over to tyranny—your health care decisions made by bureaucrats.” “Real” Americans Bachmann’s history of questioning Barack Obama’s American-ness, or of espousing “normal people values,” is rooted in the Reconstructionist conception of “American-ness.” Not just Christian, but their kind of Christian; one who would obey God, exercise “dominion authority,” and, most crucially, is one of their “brethren.” Titus, founder of Bachmann’s law school, ha…

Goy to the World: What Does Hanukkah Have to Teach Us About Living in Empire?

By Garret Keizer

…ntling imperial America would require a realization of the extent to which American democracy has been subordinated to so-called American interests, as defined by the moneyed interests now squatting in the civic temple. It would require a radical rededication to the rule of law and to the principle of human solidarity, according to which 3,000 Afghans killed as collateral damage weigh no less heavily than 3,000 Americans killed on September 11th….

Was George W. Bush the Last Hippie?

By David R. Williams

…n Without Tarrying for Any!” foreshadowed Freedom Now! The Sixties were as American as apple pie or that great American hippie Johnny Appleseed. 3. Given the reality of the socially constructed cages we are trapped in, the Matrixes which we accept unknowingly, we have two choices. We can either make the cage as comfortable as can be for as many people equally as possible; Or we can try to break out of the cage, break out of the text, break out of…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…the crags and moors of their windswept aerie; and most significant for the American experience, English Nonconformists (note the term) struggling hard with questions of polity and ultimately breaking with what they viewed as a half-reformed Anglicanism. Christopher Hill remains the historian par excellence on the political significance of dissent among the English. Read him if you have the time, but absolutely do read Kevin Phillips’ The Cousin’s…

A Lone Blogger vs. the McCain-Hagee Alliance

By Bruce Wilson

…tly touched on with my 4-minute, no-budget video was the growing divide in American culture, religion and politics that (according to some well-respected observers) threatens the viability of American Democracy. Beneath the most obvious and salacious details of the scandal lies a Christian subculture that, like a vast chunk of Antarctic ice, had years before begun to diverge from the mainstream mass of secular culture; some, like Hagee’s church, h…