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‘Christian Warriors’: Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?

By Chip Berlet

…ana (the former Secretary General of NATO and the Secretary-General of the European Union) was the Antichrist, and that the US government merely played a supporting role in Satan’s evil End Times gambit. As Robert C. Fuller observed in his classic Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, the candidates for the starring roles vary over time in fundamentalist eschatological analysis. Some see Islam as the religion of the false pr…

Water Water Everywhere

By Amina Wadud

…where the rivers already flow underneath. In the desert and in places like Europe (and much, much later, North America), the daily wash was not heard of for centuries. Into this desert, the Qur’an is revealed, and with it the mandate to take up a state of ritual purity in order to perform the five-times-daily prayer. If you think about it, that really must have been a big thing. I also think that desert location clarifies some of the particulars f…

Douthat’s Sinister Subtext

By Syreeta McFadden

…and compulsory pressures for assimilation by immigrant groups from Eastern Europe, a great many whom were Jewish. And to boot, he dismisses the plurality that already existed on these shores in the fact of the transatlantic slave trade and the native population present at the birth of our nation. Discussing the proposed construction of the Cordoba House project in Lower Manhattan, Douthat writes: There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what la…

Crying Witch: Learning From the O’Donnell “Dabbling” Debacle

By Spencer Dew

…be dehumanized and demonized. As Fox argues, “The old nature religions of Europe were persecuted for hundreds of years, and part of a tactic for suppressing the pagan practices of old was to label them Satanic or demonic.” While O’Donnell didn’t say anything about Wicca, per se, her more recent “kill the witch” comments will surely distance her further from pagan communities used to dealing (especially around Halloween) with this confusion betwee…

Whose God in America?

By Marian Ronan

…on US religious history. I cannot deny, though, that many Christians from Europe, Catholics included, treated the native peoples abominably. As God in America proceeded, however, I became increasingly annoyed. We moved from the Franciscans to the Puritans, with John Winthrop ostensibly treating Anne Hutchinson as badly as the Franciscans had the Pueblos. But it seems there were no indigenous people at all in New England in those days; or else the…

Good News Bad News

By Amina Wadud

…hat have some semblance of democracy coupled with freedom of speech, or in Europe. Nothing much to speak of in Australia; and a very skewed (almost always) politically charged discourse in the U.S. or North America. Here’s the basic idea: Islam is a system which continues to grow or progress. Those who refer to it only as something static and unchangeable may even be the majority, but actually it is changing. Those who are part of the change, or a…

The Kaaba: Center of the Universe

By Amina Wadud

…taly) and I took the train in to see the Sistine Chapel. Cathedrals across Europe, temples across Asia, synagogues, natural formations used for worship the world over, and of course, mosques, mosques, mosques. But what makes a place sacred? I like the interpretation of the word sacred as “set apart.” There is the everyday ordinary, and then, there is the non-ordinary: that which we set apart, or that sets us apart. Ever go into a huge sanctuary an…

It’s Up to You, New York… To Oppose Islamophobia

By Randall Balmer

…hey choose New Amsterdam? The Netherlands was the most tolerant society in Europe in the seventeenth century, and that tradition of tolerance marked New Netherland as well. When Pieter Stuyvesant, director-general of the colony for the Dutch West India Company, sought to suppress Quakerism, the citizens of Flushing protested. The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, one of the earliest calls for religious disestablishment in America, insisted on freedom…

In Qur’an Burning We’re All Losers

By Julie Ingersoll

…Europe. Those efforts were buttressed, and their effects documented, by a number of polls over the last two years that showed American Muslims to be diverse, educated, assimilated, successful, and mainstream (both politically and religiously). For immigrant Muslims, America has represented freedom. Especially prized by them, according to the polls, has been America’s commitment to religious freedom. One such immigrant Muslim told the Times “In no…

Beck Plus God Does Not Equal X

By Anthea Butler

…their ancestors didn’t get here on the Mayflower but rather on a boat from Europe in the 19th or early 20th century, they are full-blooded Americans. They too can possess the special claim that this is God’s nation, and they are a part of its divine destiny. What Glenn Beck sells is a hope that many of a certain theo-political belief can—wait for it—cling to: that God has not forgotten them in the midst of America’s melting pot. He capitalizes on…