Religion Dispatches
…uddhists are doing that—nor is it only spirituality vaguely conceptualized—New Agers with crystals, meditation retreats for the professional class. Instead, both old and new media have lit up the religious landscape, illuminating what is still an unconventional, and nebulous, but certainly increasingly capacious, understanding of the sacred in everyday life. Rock and roll can be religious, according to The Hold Steady; a recent Los Angeles Times a…
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…ny of FDR’s pro-worker initiatives, and the right’s focus shifted from the New Deal to the New World Order. Conservative organizations still roiled local waters. In the 1950s, populist movements fought secular humanism in California’s public schools, and in the 1960s, millions mobilized around Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. By the late 1970s, strong grassroots groups in California, the Ozarks, the Midwest, and the South came together in…
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…p called Lutheran CORE (formerly Coalition for Reform, now Coalition for Renewal) met in assembly in September of 2009 to discuss the possibility of forming a new Lutheran church body in North America. Those discussions resulted in the announcement of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), which will include disaffected “confessional” Lutherans from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Lutheran CORE will remain as a network for dissenting Lu…
Read More…terization of Mormonism as a “white God’s” plan “for whites” would come as news to millions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Asia, Latin America, and Africa who have claimed Mormonism as their own. Missionary proselytizing certainly entails its own racial problematics, and one will find in the annals of Mormonism as much racial chauvinism as you’ll find in the history of any other conservative American denomination….
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…ous or dogmatic reason. His words were valued in the same way as, say, the New Age ‘Law of Attraction’ (formerly known as New Thought): based on their supposedly demonstrable truth, not their religious authority. The devotion of Scientologists to Hubbard may have been weird, slavish, and naïve—but it wasn’t really religious. Or was it? Scientology was intentionally designed to comfort the afflicted, just like religion does. And, just like religion…
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…d Chasing Dreams explains that today the myth of a Celtic Church attracts “New Agers, post-modernists, liberals, feminists, [and] environmentalists.” While it’s true that many of these groups’ tales of their own origins are mythic—as with any religion, denomination, or sect—the mythic has always served a purpose: to generate usable history, helpful fiction. While Arnold J. Toynbee in the second volume of his landmark A Study of History describes a…
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Ralph Reed’s new book, For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump (published by Simon & Schuster in March 2020), doesn’t devote much energy to defending Trump’s moral character or articulating his role as an instrument chosen by God to save Christians. Instead, the notorious conservative lobbyist, evangelical apologist, and founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition doubles down on the toxic argument that Trump is an unlikely ally in the C…
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…e statues were less about honoring the Civil War dead than they were about promoting 20th century white supremacy). In some ways, it’s not all that different from the ideas that sold people on the first Crusade back in the 11th century. And it’s not all that different from the story we tell ourselves today, every time we enter another country for their “own good.” Sure, we went into Iraq on the basis of false information about WMDs. But in the rhe…
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…part. Don’t ever give in to—dare I say it—opening your heart. The presumed New York Times reader is similar, I think: basically secular, basically liberal, and basically intellectual. S/he probably drinks a lot of coffee, spends a good deal of money on food and clothing, and is, in essence, a good person. But anything New Agey or touchy-feely—in fact, anything more demanding than whining about neuroses on the couch of a ritzy psychotherapist—well,…
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…s an opportunity to make the world new. As Mother Ann would reflect on her new home in upstate New York, “I saw a large tree, every leaf of which shone with such brightness as made it appear like a burning torch, representing the Church of Christ, which will yet be established in this land.” Like so many other heterodox religious communities that proliferated in early America, Lee saw in the continent an opportunity for remaking society in a more…
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