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How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power and Exclusion

By Eric C. Miller

…he one thing standing in the way of free market capitalism taking over the United States and ruining the morals of the citizens. He saw Christianity as providing a check on market logics. There have been times when certain forms of Christianity—that of the Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 40s, for instance—exhibited the potential for a gospel of debt forgiveness to stand in opposition to the free market. But it does seem that the two opposing t…

Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ates, self-contain’d, different from others, more expansive, more rich and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by American personalities, plenty of them, make and female, traversing the states, none excepted… and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off the surfaces, and from its own interior and vital principles reconstructing, democratizing society. A religio…

The Religious “Right” to Denounce Homosexuality

By Sarah Posner

…long line which have gradually morphed church-state separation cases into free speech cases — for Christians, that is. In other words, whereas courts used to determine whether religious action (such as use of public school resources for a Bible club) would constitute government endorsement of religion, religious right legal advocacy has altered the jurisprudence to evaluate such questions based on whether the school’s exclusion of the Bible club…

I Always Knew Santa Was Make-Believe: A Retired Pastor on Losing Her Faith

By Anne Grant

…Bush declared that he had to invade Iraq because God wanted to set people free. I paced our empty church and told the President: “You just cut my umbilical cord to Christianity.” I had no idea what that meant. If President Bush was like a midwife, cutting my connection to those lifelong beliefs, then what new life was being born? Years later, Phil reminded me that someone else had freed us from our theological assumptions in a far more generous a…

Archbishop of Chicago Accuses Emanuel of McCarthyism Over Chick-fil-A

By Sarah Posner

…ionally impossible to grant same-sex marriage rights and protect religious freedom. But then George does some more verbal gymnastics to try to claim that granting equal rights to gay and lesbian couples somehow constitutes an imposition of “state religion” on religious opponents of same-sex marriage—a bizarre formulation of the Establishment Clause. He concludes: Surely we can find a way not to play off newly invented individual rights to “marriag…

2012 Film Heralds Progressive Utopia, No Effort Required

By Jessica Weisberg

…or them. Meet Me at the Wrecking Ball Pinchbeck himself was raised among a number of sixties luminaries, including Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jack Kerouac. (He lived in Manhattan, where his father was a painter and his mother a Beat writer and editor.) In his twenties, he worked as a freelance journalist and founded a literary journal called Open City. “Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a typical Manhattan atheist, suspicious, cynic…

We Can’t Have Religious Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom

By Frederick Clarkson and Cari Jackson

…under the First Amendment. We think it’s time for us all to seek religious freedom for reproductive freedom, and to recognize that persistent efforts to interfere in reproductive decisions is “an infringement of a natural right” in the sense the Virginia Statute warned. Of course, women didn’t share in this natural right at the time—but the right to believe differently than the rich and the powerful as codified in the Statute and the First Amendme…

Are Atheists The New Campus Crusaders?

By Katherine Don

…s become an important community for them. “It has now become more acceptable for people to state that they are questioning or no longer religious” says Hashman. “We are dedicated to free inquiry and freedom of expression, and that can come off as abrasive, but we believe it necessary for a free and democratic society.”…

The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

By Saba Soomekh

…000 Iranian Jews fled the newly forming Islamic country and flocked to the United States, with Los Angeles having the highest concentration of Iranians in the United States. This is where my story begins. It was 1978 and my parents knew they had to leave Iran. They knew that the country was no longer a safe place for them. Unlike Iranians who tried to leave post-’79, our emigration was not dramatic. We applied for a green card and immediately left…

McCarthy, Born Again and Retooled for Our Time

By Sarah Posner

…s; that white Southerners, not blacks, were the persecuted minority in the United States; and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist agent. The cover of Hargis’ 1964 book, The Far Left, showed a weeping Statue of Liberty, dripping with blood, speared by a sword with a hammer and sickle handle. The purpose of the book, Hargis wrote in the introduction, was to expose not just communists, but also “those organizations and men who have aided and…