Search for "evangelical left"

Bush Era to Blame for Renewed Interest in Mainline?

By Paul Harvey

…ay that frustration with the perceived cultural and political dominance of evangelicals in the Bush era gave the subject extra urgency. “At the end of the second Bush term, there was widespread interest in thinking about a religious left,” said Leigh E. Schmidt, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis, and the editor, with Sally M. Promey, of the recent book American Religious Liberalism.“The idea was, surely there is something besides s…

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

By Daniel Schultz

…And that’s when it hits me: good. Good that they’re lumping the religious left [sic] in with the scary people who want to distribute the money differently and help poor people. Good that they’re lumping us in with the people who think such radical thoughts as: conservative religious nutjobs should not be given a free pass to run the nation, and gays and lesbians should enjoy equal protection under the law. Good that they think we’re a bunch of wi…

Dispatches From the Beltway: Horton Hears Progressive Religion

By Robert P. Jones

…passion Forum. Despite the fact that the Compassion Forum was hosted at an evangelical college (Messiah College) and that prominent evangelicals such as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention and the vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals were on the Compassion Forum Board (Perkins himself was invited but did not respond), Perkins issued a lengthy statement decrying the event. Perkins asserted: The bulk of last night’…

How a Bill O’Reilly Bestseller Helps Explain the Anti-Semitism Behind the Poway Shooting

By Tony Keddie

…ew Testament In the aftermath of the Poway synagogue shooting, a number of evangelical leaders responded that Christians need to confront and correct Christianity’s legacy of anti-Semitism. But their remarks often suggest that they’d rather explain it away than confront it. The evangelical pastor Chad Woolf, for instance, explains that he replaces “Jews” with “religious leaders” in anti-Jewish biblical passages, because “Saying ‘the Jews’ without…

The Church of Man-Love: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 7

By Mark Dery

…l catharsis when she entered a chapel and stumbled on an image someone had left behind, a picture of the wounded Christ that stirred her soul as no picture ever had, literally bowling her over, leaving her on the floor in “a great flood of tears,” overmastered by the feeling that “He was within me, or that I was totally engulfed in Him.”11 In American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, the historian of religion Stephen Prothero trac…

Israel at 60: Zionism’s Fatal Flaw

By Ira Chernus

…ted Jew), wrote in his classic pamphlet The Jewish State: “If only we were left in peace…” The ellipsis spoke more eloquently than words of the seemingly impossible dream of assimilation. Herzl immediately followed with the bitter premise of Zionism: “But we shall not be left in peace.” Anti-Semitism, he argued, was a permanent fact of life for the Diasporic Jew. Herzl’s close associate, Max Nordau, summed up their assessment for the First Zionist…

Addressing the Culture War Without Touching the Culture War

By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

…agating the myth that America had been founded as a Christian nation. Such evangelicals took their intellectual cue from the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Left Behind author Tim LeHaye who called for an all-out war against the “secular humanist” ideologies of the day. The clash of these titanic forces by the late 1970s, observes Marsden, led to the culture wars that remain with us to this day. Despite being driven by the hope of overcoming the im…

Ten Religion Stories That Went (Mostly) Missing in 2015

By Peter Laarman

…edral of St. John the Divine, the National Cathedral, etc. Out here on the Left Coast the famously progressive All Saints Church just gave up on a $50 million remake of its campus in the face of internal division and stiff resistance from preservationists who didn’t want to see a sleek Richard Meier building going up in the middle of the Pasadena’s historic Spanish Revival municipal center. If there is such a creature as Satan, and if this creatu…

Coming Out Twice: Sexuality and Gender in Islam

By Susan Henking

…lish translations of the book in Arabic or Turkish… if only my chapter was left out. To the great credit of the editor and publisher, these compromises were not made. The book today exists only in English, but my chapter is in an integral part of it, and stands unrepudiated, even if unpopular. At the same time, I became involved in a community-based support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and questioning Muslims….

Beyond Progressive Religion

By Ivan Petrella

…can and the Democratic Parties stress religion; now both the right and the left speak in Christian terms. Atheism is no help either. In a world that’s becoming more religious rather than less, atheism can’t be the answer. Advocates of atheism remain tied to the discredited secularization thesis, making them a minority condemned to insignificance except within circles ever more out of touch with global reality. In addition, their strident tone feed…