Religion Dispatches
…eep South Center connection was crucial as many of its leaders are African Americans who reside in the New Orleans East neighborhood where the Vietnamese community is found. New Orleans East is a historically and predominantly African-American region—the largest in the city—so the prospects of cooperation between the two communities was vital. “Both communities have been willing to be in a relationship; it’s just that [the] process has needed assi…
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…onalism came out. That book was about religious fundamentalism in domestic American politics, but while researching it, I was struck by how the movements I was covering were branching out into global issues. In a way, the American anti-abortion movement has had more of an impact abroad than at home. The Supreme Court has limited the movement’s scope of action here, so Republican presidents have rewarded their base by giving them tremendous influen…
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…and Uganda. Critics accused Engle’s event of being the next in a series of American evangelical efforts to persecute homosexuals in Uganda and feared that Sunday’s gathering would help rally attendees behind the proposed legislation. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, introduced last October by parliamentarian David Bahati, had its origins in a March 2009 visit by three anti-gay American evangelists—Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Sch…
Read More…us is the subtle promise that believing in the American Dream makes you an American. Being American, after all, isn’t an ethnicity. Nor is it a matter of subscribing to a particular creed. It isn’t even a matter of being born in a particular geographical location. No less a “real American” than John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. So what is the American identity? If William Cavanaugh is right, it’s a convenient fiction designed to bind…
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…bove timelines, should shock precisely no one. Christian nationalists, who number at least half of surveyed Americans, believe that America’s exceptional blessings depend on policing spiritual, geopolitical, and racial boundaries. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, authors of the book Taking America Back for God, found in a recent study that Christian nationalism was usually a “top predictor” of whether a person “find[s] nothing racist about calli…
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…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…
Read More…as investigative. I thought that I would review the alignment between the American military and American religions, a subject on which Jon Ebel has written eloquently. Instead I found something else. That “something else” is as much about what the American public needs to hear about religion as it was about what McCain felt or thought about religion. On August 30, 2018, John McCain’s family found some form of ritual rest for his body at the North…
Read More…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…
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…paign, and founded a platform called #iExitLeft, seeking to convince Hindu-Americans to leave the Democratic party for the far-right.² The Americans4Hindus PAC, also founded by Hindu supremacists, was established in late 2019 by another set of Hindu far-right leaders with the explicit purpose of punishing the Congressional Progressive Caucus for some of its members’ positions on human rights violations in India. Another VHP of America affiliate, V…
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…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…
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