Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Christian right”
Stamping my feet on the frozen ground of the National Mall on a bitter cold morning in January 2009, I didn’t think we had gathered to welcome a climate president. Foremost in my mind, at that time and in that place, were the seemingly endless war in Iraq, the reeling economy, and the uneasy footing of marriage equality. As with …
When Donald Trump won and private prison stocks surged, an unexpected cheer came from downtown Manhattan. It’s a great time to be in the jail business. A new report by the progressive advocacy group In the Public Interest reveals the troubling ties between Wall Street and the private prison industry, including hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and revolving …
Americans have now entered into one of the most sickening and dangerous periods of the 21st century. Trump is not only a twisted caricature of every register of economic, political, educational, and social fundamentalism, he is apogee of a warrior culture committed to rolling back civil rights, women’s reproductive rights, and all vestiges of economic justice and democracy. Trump is …
What does the love of Jesus have to do with Trump? How to explain his overwhelming support from evangelical voters, who—for more than three decades—have formed the bastion of the Christian right? According to a Pew June 2016 survey 89% of evangelical voters wanted a President with strong religious beliefs. Trump cannot even pretend to qualify. A number of analysts, …
The widespread disdain for Donald Trump and the fear of what his presidency might mean have led to an abandonment of any sense of objectivity by many Trump opponents and, most notably, the mainstream U.S. news media. If Trump is for something, it must be bad and must be transformed into one more club to use for hobbling his candidacy. …
Back before 9/11 indelibly linked Islam with terrorism, back before the top association to “Catholic priest” was “pedophile,” most Americans—even nonreligious Americans—thought of religion as benign. I’m not religious myself, people would say, but what’s the harm if it gives someone else a little comfort or pleasure. Back then, people associated Christianity with kindness and said things like, “That’s not very Christian …
On Monday, presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke to a self-professed conservative Christian group. We live in a time of perpetual war, and Sanders—who sometimes touts his 2002 vote against authorizing the invasion of Iraq—apparently couldn’t bring himself to raise the subject of war with people who profess to be followers of the Prince of Peace. In his speech at …
As an unprecedented shift in public opinion brought about the legalization of gay marriage, a vigorous counter-current has been intensifying under the banner of “religious freedom”—an incredibly slippery term. Perhaps the most radical definition of such freedom comes out of the relatively obscure tradition of Christian Reconstructionism, the subject of a new book by religious studies scholar Julie Ingersoll, Building God’s …
The academy is entering a dangerous time. Academics now find themselves entering a time when a more comprehensive politics that deals with the rise of authoritarianism through a variety of related fundamentalisms–economic, religious, political, and educational–is being overlooked as a result of an emerging limited and depoliticizing politics of civility and trauma. This is not meant to suggest that dehumanizing …
Probably the most infamous cases of mass mind control involves religious cults, with the People’s Temple Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, South America being the most tragic. In 1978, Jim Jones, most likely suffering from megalomania, forced 912 followers into committing mass suicide. Attempts to rescue the followers, ultimately by a member of the US House of Representatives, ended in the representative’s …
