By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…dentity, a manhood purged of anything feminine. Consider the young purity crusaders I write about in chapter 13, “The Romance of American Fundamentalism.” They’re smart, hip, engaging kids; they scoff at the old Christian Right war chiefs, they live in Brooklyn and worship in Manhattan, they don’t like Bush—and they’re dedicated to an ideology that in its emphasis on “purity” above all is potentially farther right than anything Bush has ever dream…
…ate its alternative forms of knowledge. This alternative knowledge—the forerunner of today’s alternative facts— took the form of creationism and an alternative Bible scholarship demonstrating the Bible’s inerrancy and traditional authorship. This alternative educational and media ecosystem of knowledge was galvanized and mobilized when the Christian Right emerged in the late 1970s to influence the Republican Party. There were two long-term consequ…
…ate its alternative forms of knowledge. This alternative knowledge—the forerunner of today’s alternative facts— took the form of creationism and an alternative Bible scholarship demonstrating the Bible’s inerrancy and traditional authorship. This alternative educational and media ecosystem of knowledge was galvanized and mobilized when the Christian Right emerged in the late 1970s to influence the Republican Party. There were two long-term consequ…
…. Another, somewhat tangential group like Billy James Hargis of Christian Crusade and Carl McIntire of The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour wanted to win souls first, votes second. Though there was a lot of common ground between these two groups—they were committed anticommunists and anti-New Dealers—the organizational ties between them were quite thin. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Christian right was distinct from the conservative movement. That…
…ions any easy assumptions that a feminist politics must adhere to specific rules about the body—rules that are dictated by either religious authority, state authority, or by fellow feminists. It’s simpler, in some ways, to assume that religion and feminism are at odds. It’s easier to assume, perhaps, that religion is simply the provenance of those who use tools like pro-life politics to fight feminist agendas. It’s much more complicated to think o…
…v. Wade established a constitutional right to obtain an abortion, abortion politics have been linked with health care politics. This has played out in the variants of the Hyde Amendment, the opposition to the Clinton Health Security Act of 1993, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Evangelicals, in particular, have tempered the Left’s right-to-health care with a primary emphasis on “protecting the rights of the unborn.” This can be seen in the adv…
…he anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, claims that if churches played down politics and simply instructed their congregants “better” in matters of theology, right-wing politics would naturally follow. What I also initially wanted to address in that piece but ultimately had to leave out is how claims that an action or belief is entirely “apolitical” can serve the same ends. To take a recent example from the current news cycle, witness racist Fox Ne…
…ok also discusses the political economy of the “religionization” of global politics, which I’ll mention by way of conclusion. Today many scholars and practitioners interested in these topics in Europe, North America, and elsewhere see no way forward but to take their place in the burgeoning international infrastructure of religion and development, religion and humanitarianism, religion and legal reform, interfaith understanding, religious rights p…
…sites actually shape people’s responses to deep theological questions? Can search results and search engine optimization influence the beliefs of an individual confronting a difficult question? It’s hard to tell. But as people go online for answers to religious questions, fundamentalist and fringe religious groups do have chances to dominate the search results and stake out authoritative-sounding positions, regardless of their influence offline. Y…
…ianity News” channel that featured screenshots of the website and doctored CNN and Drudge Report headlines appearing to confirm the news played over ominous-sounding music. A “Christianity News Texas” blog post on April 2, written by Tribble, reported on the “Special Announcement.” The combination of these interlocking, seemingly credible sites and the shocking nature of the story itself generated a large amount of attention in just a few days. T…
