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MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Needs to Get a Grip on his Issues with Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…haracterized pro-equality Catholics as not being representative of general American sentiment. “Is this some weird subset of the American population, some little cult? Did I forget to mention that Catholic is the largest single religion in the United States? The people we are talking about are real Americans,” said O’Donnell. “When Glenn Beck slanders those millions and millions and millions of liberal American Catholics, he does so because he…

How a Pioneer of Branding Invented Christian Fundamentalism

By Daniel Silliman

…aging and trademarking, as it were, old-time religion. How is the story of American capitalism also the story of modern American Christianity? They’re cultural twins. They’re both drawing from the same set of ideas about the nature of self and society that was, frankly, new in the days after the Civil War. These are the idea of the individual being the basic unit of analysis, that individual choices are really what matters, that’s how you create y…

Rising Influence of New Apostolic Reformation Teachings is Ominous Sign For the US — Especially For LGBTQ Students

By Jonathon Sawyer

…of government via policies that would drastically change the landscape of American governance and, as the document says, “bend or break the bureaucracy to the President’s will.” Calling for the abolishment of the Department of Education, Project 2025 would roll back (if not eliminate) civil rights protections for LGBTQ students in publicly funded schools. While the language may be different, this massive shift away from federal regulation aligns…

Secure Borders? Not a Chance, Senator

By Ira Chernus

…other side of this paradox, and the emphasis can change over time. Recent American history illustrates that point very well, as another scholar of American religions, Robert Wuthnow, demonstrates in After Heaven, a book that offers a unique, if indirect, insight into the current debate on immigration reform. Wuthnow first set out to understand the distinctive spiritual style of the 1950s. Reading the religious literature of that era and interview…

Tea Party Needs a History Lesson on Islam in America

By Michael J. Altman

…t America is a “Christian nation.” In fact, during the early period of the American republic America depended on many Muslims for its economic success. On the one hand, many of the African slaves that worked to produce the raw materials of early American industry were Muslims. On the other hand, during the trade of goods between India and New England, some of America’s trading partners were South Asian Muslims. These two economic factors helped ke…

Suicide Bombers and the Prozac God: A Review of Dying for Heaven

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…anted. Next is Hamza Yusuf. He may be still more dangerous, since he is an American born convert to Islam. He also has a high profile on YouTube and offered a written reflection on Michael Jackson’s death. Yusuf has failed the test (distinguishing moderate from militant Muslims—though in all fairness his failure is self-professed) created by that pillar of American tolerance, Daniel Pipes, so he too warrants a surveillance wherever his followers c…

‘Hell is a World Without You’ Shows Readers How Squarely They Would Have Been on Path to Jan 6 if They’d Come of Age in Evangelicalism

By Michael J. Altman

…ils, however, Kirk’s novel resonates with much of the current discourse of American religion. The flight of millennial and Zoomer exvangelicals out of churches, the embattled politics of American Christian nationalism, and evangelical attacks on LGBTQ+ rights provide a backdrop for this coming of age story. RD spoke recently with Kirk, a senior editor at The Athletic and co-creator of several popular podcasts, about the book, Christian Nationalism…

In This Week’s LGBT Recap: Are Gay Priests Overdue for a Stonewall Moment?

By Peter Montgomery

…e fairy-tale story of irreversible progress in LGBT rights is a very white American story. Americans of color have long known that progress is not linear. LGBT people from countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, among others, can tell you what it feels like when attitudes make a U-turn. The laws in these countries are benign, compared to the many places in the world where homosexual behavior is punishable by imprisonment or even death, but tha…

Keepers of History or Dangerous Idols: The Case Against Statues From an Unlikely Source

By David Zvi Kalman

…eliminate the idea of America. The tie between memory and statuary is more American than Americans realize. Given that many Americans don’t know that the Civil War happened after the War of Independence, and that the president this week misidentified a sculpture while defending its importance to memory, it’s questionable whether our memorializing strategies have been all that successful in the first place. Given this dubious track record, we would…

Spiritualism and Sex Meet Evangelical Censorship, 19th-Century-Style

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…ge of freethought” in the late nineteenth century. At this point I see the 1920s and 1930s as a watershed moment. Again, that’s quite preliminary. The third one is a reflection on the quest for perfection in American culture. I take this to have significant religious roots, but the inquiry would quickly spill out into any number of other cultural realms. That one is even more preliminary still….