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New Book Reveals How Faith is Like a Covert Operation for the Bush Family

By Frederick Clarkson

…rently been vetted and groomed to shape the Bush approach to the religious right. “Instinctively,” Baker writes, “he [Poppy Bush] was uncomfortable with pandering to the masses, and uncomfortable too with ascribing deep personal values to himself. For that matter, he didn’t like to reveal much of anything about himself, which was partly patrician reserve and partly perhaps an instinct reinforced by his covert endeavors over the years.” If Poppy wa…

‘New Evangelical’-Progressive Alliance? Not So Fast

By Sarah Posner

…independently choose to carry an unintended pregnancy to term is just the right thing to do? Reproductive rights advocates have long supported the latter formulation. But Pally’s suggestion that “especially effective programs include pairing a pregnant woman with a local family to serve as her ‘family’ and help out as needed” are laughably paternalistic. How many women would decide against an abortion because a local family was, as Pally imagines…

How the Christian Nationalist Version of ‘The American Story’ Enabled Georgia’s Anti-Black Voter Restriction Law [Audio]

By Bradley Onishi

…just MLK, but everything’s sort of attached to the African-American Civil Rights Movement—you now say, Oh, well, man, that was really important that that happened. I’m glad that’s behind us. Right? And: glad we’re not racist anymore. Or you take a president in Barack Obama whom you hated because he’s Black and how dare a Black man rise above himself to become president of the United States. But now that he is: hey, we’re in a post-racial society,…

Political Reporters Start Reading Religious Right Books

By Sarah Posner

…e “soldiers for Christ,” appeared to be the anointed one of some religious right godfathers, and drew the wrath of the late Robert Novak, no less, because of his ties to Christian Reconstructionism. Or that John McCain wrapped his arms around Rod Parsley and Hagee, or that even Rudy Giuliani sought and gained Robertson’s blessing. And that was just ’08; it’s all been going on much longer than that. While GOP candidates’ cultivation of conservative…

The Supreme Court Cleared the Way for the ‘President-King’—The Right’s Prize for 50 Years of Planning

By Annika Brockschmidt

…hey argued, was actually an invalid attempt by Congress to encroach on the rightful power of the president. Thus, if the White House didn’t like the interest rates set by the board of the Federal Reserve, or if it didn’t like how an “independent counsel” was prosecuting a case, the president should be able to remove such officials at will—even though statutes say that such officials cannot be fired by the president. It will come as no surprise tha…

Scalia’s (Not Very Catholic, Right Wing) Originalism

By Patricia Miller

…ad “now determined that liberties exist under the federal Constitution—the right to abortion, the right to homosexual sodomy—which were so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that they were criminal for 200 years.” The fact that these things were “criminal” because the Constitution was written by (presumably) straight men who controlled politics, society and business didn’t matter. Scalia’s views regarding abortion were frequent…

Bruni on Bachmann

By Sarah Posner

…lunged into politics nonetheless. We routinely place her in the “religious right,” a phrase that frustrates me, tidily linking a certain set of political beliefs with profound devotion. We talk much less frequently of any “religious left,” and that disparity implies that a seriously faithful person is most likely to land on just one end of the political spectrum. Last time I checked, “religious right” was not a phrase that evoked images of piety,…

How Donald Trump Has Exposed Rifts in the Religious Right

By Sarah Posner

…nd Scott Walker), one preacher (Mike Huckabee), and one longtime evangelical hero (Ben Carson) in the race. He has managed to display a deep rift in the religious right without even being part of the religious right himself—possibly the most telling thing of all….

Will Sarah Palin Ruin The Religious Right’s African-American Outreach?

By Sarah Posner

…Republicans don’t use Sarah Palin as a benchmark.” As I’ve reported, the religious right is working hard — through the Frederick Douglass Foundation and other organizations — to reinvent itself as a racially diverse movement. But as much as Palin is adored by religious right activists, it’s always appeared that she operates outside much of the religious right infrastructure, shunning big events like the Values Voters Summit. To the extent that inf…

Richard Land Steps Down, But Not Out of the Culture Wars

By Aaron Weaver

…d give the SBC a public witness that stood in consistent opposition to gay rights, abortion rights, and even many forms of birth control. A once moderately pro-choice denomination was transformed into a “pro-life” denomination largely under Land’s leadership. He also narrowly defined “pro-life” for evangelicals to mean strictly “anti-abortion,” eschewing the more expansive understanding of that concept offered by the Catholic Church. …