Academics do a curious job of treating religion. This point was brought home to me powerfully last week when I attended the excellent conference of the Urban History Association (UHA), meeting in New York City. (Very fortunately, we all escaped before the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy). Beyond the generally high standard of the individual panels and papers, UHA is a splendid opportunity to gauge the state of the art in a major (and critical) field of the profession. But even... Read more
Guest post by Miles S. Mullin II, of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s J. Dalton Havard School for Theological Studies As Election Day approaches, most coverage of the presidential campaign focuses on the policy differences between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney. Certainly these differences deserve careful attention. But there’s a biographical similarity that the media has badly neglected: their quintessentially American stories of personal achievement keyed by religious commitment. Without question, Mitt Romney had a privileged upper-class childhood as the youngest son... Read more
I recently read Ron Sider’s excellent The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World. If you have not read it yet, you should. If you have the time, I would strongly encourage you to read it before voting next week. Sider’s book is not meant to be a voting guide, but as I read it I could not help but think about the things that I should consider when I choose a... Read more
A couple weeks ago I wrote about “Paleo Evangelicals as Reluctant Republicans,” and I am grateful for the number of responses I have received here, on Twitter and on Facebook indicating that I had “pegged” (as the Institute for Religion and Democracy’s Bart Gingerich put it) many readers’ political convictions. Luke Moon, also of the IRD, issued a thoughtful rejoinder to my piece, wondering whether the Republican evangelical base ever really argues that voting for Republicans advances the Kingdom of God.... Read more
How should we interpret Hurricane Sandy, blowing near Salem, Massachusetts, in the days before Halloween? Might it be read providentially, as it could have been read by the colonists who made the place famous by their treatment of witches? Or is it really an enhancement of Halloween, tempestuous winds to make the party spookier and spirited? Halloween is one of the local specialities of eastern Massachusetts. In popular American observance Halloween means witches, and Salem has them on offer.... Read more
If you don’t understand what’s happening in the Muslim world, you’ve probably been following the US media. There certainly are people in this country who are naïve on the subject of terrorism, and play down the menace of Islamist terrorist movements to a ludicrous extent. I am certainly not one, and have published fairly extensively on the reality of such groups and the means needed to destroy them. But having said that, I am also aware of the outrageous bias... Read more
The idea that Mormonism is a cult is beyond absurd, unless by cult one simply means a religion that one does not like. In recent days, observant reporters noticed that after Billy Graham’s recent meeting with Republican candidate Mitt Romney, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association removed “Mormons” from a list of non-Christian cults. The included groups on the list ranged from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Unitarians (it was news to me that the liberal descendants of New England’s Puritans have formed... Read more
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln stood before the crowd at the United States capitol building to deliver his second inaugural address. Lincoln was addressing a nation nearing the conclusion of a long and bloody Civil War that took 600,000 lives. The speech was far from triumphant. It was a meditation on one of the most tragic moments in American history. It would have been easy for Lincoln to cast scorn and punishment down upon the defeated Confederacy. This, after... Read more
In last week’s column, “Paleo Evangelicals as Reluctant Republicans,” I argued that there are many conservative evangelicals who do not feel quite at home with today’s Republican Party. Some have undoubtedly balked at wholesale commitment to the Republican Party’s general election nominees in ’08 and ’12 because they were not evangelicals. John McCain had some evangelical influences but was not particularly articulate about his own faith, while Mitt Romney is not a Protestant, much less an evangelical. So should the... Read more
Although debates about morality should not be based on quantitative evidence, in practice they tend to be. At a time when homosexuality is so central to religious and cultural controversies, some weight attaches to the numbers involved. Gay rights advocates favor higher statistics for the gay and Lesbian population, to magnify the impact of discrimination. Opponents lean to lower numbers, to present the issue as one that affects a strictly marginal population. Over the years, estimates for the gay/Lesbian population... Read more
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