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Commentary and Analysis

Continued from main page, "Commentary on the Religious Right" (Go back)

FOF At Odds With Other Evangelicals Over Environment Vs Gay Marriage

by The Associated Press. 365Gay.com, September 8, 2006

While many evangelicals are taking a greater interest in the environment, particularly preventing global warming, the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family have warned followers away from environmental activism. Click here.

Republicans and Evangelicals

Yes, this marriage can be saved.

by Marc Ambinder, The Weekly Standard, September 18, 2006

SPOOKED by the political might of religious conservatives, secular liberals and faithful Democrats are taking comfort from some recent headlines.

In June, Alabama Republicans laughed at a gubernatorial bid by Ten-Commandments-defending judge Roy Moore. In July, Ralph Reed, the quintessential New Right candidate and the architect of the Christian Coalition, lost his first bid for public office, a primary race for lieutenant governor of Georgia. White House aides now publicly downplay the influence of "values voters" in the 2004 election, and Republicans in the House of Representatives whizzed through much of their "American Values" initiative this summer with a few perfunctory press releases. The New York Times was astounded (and delighted) to report the existence of pastors who depart from Republican orthodoxy. And Democrats are discovering that some evangelicals are concerned about poverty and climate change and don't take their political marching orders from Pat Robertson or James Dobson.

So are evangelical candidates losing their political appeal, or are religious conservatives shifting their allegiance from the GOP? Neither, really. Continue.

Book Review: Getting on Message

Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel, by Rev. Peter Laarman, Editor

Reviewed by Claire Gorfinkel for JewsOnFirst.org, May 4, 2006

As American Jews, the notion that "we live in a Christian country" is filled with complexity and irony. Christianity pervades our lives like the air we breathe, and some times - particularly Christmas and Easter times - we can't avoid being overwhelmed by the blurring of Christianity with mainstream commercialism...

But in the 21st Century, with the Christian Right appropriating our text while seeking our conversion and relishing our destruction in the Armageddon that they welcome, it is no longer sufficient to duck out of town (or go to a Chinese restaurant) during their holidays. We are called upon to be more vigilant, for ourselves and for others who are victimized by their pervasive, self-righteous, authoritarian, militaristic acquisitiveness and their demonization of poor people, immigrants, gays and lesbians, women, liberals, and everyone else who does not identify as "born again."

Thus it is with great hope and pleasure that we may turn to Getting on Message; Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel edited by Rev. Peter Laarman. Here, we Jews who care for the First Amendment - and presumably the expansion of economic justice and human rights - can discover our counterparts in opposition to an increasingly Christianized right-wing country. Continue

Please note: Rev. Laarman is executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting.

Reviewer Claire Gorfinkel's publishing company, Intentional Productions, focuses on "stories of courage ... human responses to adversity and evil."

Middle America: Welcome to the centre of the USA

Rupert Cornwell, Independent online, May 19 2006

Cornwell visits the "dead center" of the US, Kansas, to report on "malaise" reflected in the Republicans' declining polls. He writes:

... the state is a cameo of the political tensions gnawing at the entire country - so much so that a book, What's the Matter with Kansas? last year became a national bestseller. But the title of the British edition, What's the Matter with America?, was even more indicative. What has happened in down-home Kansas, for the author Thomas Frank, illustrates what is happening everywhere in the US. The conservative Republican movement, led by Ronald Reagan, that gained its grip on Kansas, has gained a grip on the country, argues Frank, by luring erstwhile Democrats to vote for the party of the rich and big business, persuading them to place conservative cultural values ahead of their basic economic interests...

But proof perfect of Thomas Frank's theory of political inversion in Kansas came the evening before. I was having dinner in the Topeka Steak House, a rough and ready place a few miles east of town, where customers roll up in their pick-up trucks and SUVs and most are on their way home by 8 pm. I was reading What's the Matter with Kansas? over a decent ribeye steak when my waitress saw the title and asked what it was about.

"Oh," I replied, "It says that ordinary people in Kansas have been duped into voting against their economic interests when they back Republican candidates." But the waitress, a mother of three called Linda McGinty, was having none of it. "Democrats just support programmes to keep themselves in power," she told me. What about the evolution row, I asked. "I feel we shouldn't teach about Darwin unless we teach about intelligent design," she replied, adding that she herself was a creationist. "This country was founded according to God's law, and we did so well. Now we're going the other way, and look what's happening."

Click here to read Cornwell's thoughtful article.

9/11 and God's Sport

Bill Moyers, Cross Currents, Winter 2005

In an address to Union Theological Seminary, Bill Moyers argues for Christian realism, permitting us to honor the "inner skeptic." Moyers gives examples of what isn't Christian realism, including General William Boykin; the Ohio Restoration Project, the Christian right's take over of the Republican Party, America for Christ, and Pastors and Businessmen.

Moyers writes: "You could see this pathology [of holy war] play out in General William Boykin. A professional soldier, General Boykin had taken up with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members apply military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning warriors 'to the spiritual warfare for souls.' After Boykin had led Americans in a battle against a Somalian Somali warlord he announced, 'I know my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol.' "Click here to read more.

The 'American Inquisition'

Opinion article by James Reston Jr., USA Today, April 17, 2006

"Through the mist of time, the Spanish Inquisition has come down to us as one of the most barbarous periods in all of history. Its viciousness peaked in the late 15th century, during the reign of the messianic "Catholic kings," Ferdinand and Isabella.

"Paranoia gripped Spanish society as the Inquisition coincided with a Christian war against the Muslims of southern Spain. Clandestine trials, secret prisons, rampant eavesdropping, torture, desecration of Islam's holy books, and gruesome public executions created an atmosphere of pervasive terror. Suspects were assumed to be guilty, with no recourse to a defense, to a jury, or to a legitimate court...

"It is not surprising that a leader, who believes that his Christian God chose him to be president at this moment in history and that his Almighty speaks directly to him, should preside over this American Inquisition. Bush's messianic bent came to light vividly in June 2003, when he announced that his God had inspired him to go fight those terrorists and to end the tyranny in Iraq. What, one wonders, is his God telling him now about the chaos?" Continue

The Framers and the Faithful

How modern evangelicals are ignoring their own history.

By Steven Waldman, Washington Monthly, April 2006

Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet, and a Washington Monthly contributing editor, writes that 18th Century evangelical Christians were the strongest voice for writing church-state separation into the Constitution.

Both secular liberals who sneer at the idea that evangelicals could ever be a positive influence in politics and Christian conservatives who want to knock down the “wall” should take note: It was the 18th-century evangelicals who provided the political shock troops for Jefferson and Madison in their efforts to keep government from strong involvement with religion. Modern evangelicals are certainly free to take a different course, but they should realize that in doing so they have dramatically departed from the tradition of their spiritual forefathers.

Read Waldman's essay.

Democrats ought to fight fire with fire to woo voters

Column by Sylvester Brown, St. Louis Post - Dispatch, April 18, 2006

"Poor, poor Democrats. Will they ever regain control of the White House, Congress or Senate? Is it possible for states like Missouri to beat back the wave of political dogma that's ushered so many Republicans into state offices? Sometimes I wonder.

"The contest is no longer waged on the battlefield of reason and sound ideas. The weapons of the day are emotions and faith. Republicans have mastered the idea that they, and they alone, can save America from evil terrorists and godless liberals who lurk, fangs bared, ready to snatch our freedoms, our lives, our faith." Continue

Book review: Crediting Jesus For All Of Western Civilization

The Reason for Everything

By Alan Wolfe, The New Republic, January 18, 2006

Alan Wolfe calls Rodney Stark's The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success " the worst book by a social scientist that I have ever read." Wolfe terms Stark's methodology flawed and ridicules his thesis that Christianity alone fostered the achievements of Western civilization.

Reading Stark's book, it is important to remember that no major voice in American religion speaks in such triumphalist terms these days... Rodney Stark writes in an age of reason to advance the cause of prejudice. I am all for challenging conventional wisdom, but sometimes wisdom, even of the conventional sort, has its virtues. Christianity has brought some great things into the world, but not everything it brought has been great. Other faiths made their contributions to reason as well. Wise people know this; blowhards and bigots do not.

Click here to read Wolfe's review.

Essay: Desert Faith

Essayist Richard Rodriguez reflects on what unites and divides some religions

By Richard Rodriquez, Online News Hour, Public Broadcasting System, October 10, 2005

So unprecedented is our religious age of divisions and alliances, we lack the proper lexicon. We speak of fundamentalism when we describe the new Christian super churches in America's suburbs, but a church like Lakewood in Houston, the largest superchurch in the country, is exactly the opposite of fundamentalists. It has exchanged theological precision for when everyone is welcome, feel uplifted, Christianity.

Rodriguez's essay does not find a grand conclusion. But it prompts many considerations. Please click here to read it.

FIRST PERSON: A democracy Jimmy Carter cannot support

By Morris H. Chapman, Baptist Press News, November 11, 2005

Morris H. Chapman, a columnist for Baptist Press, which describes itself as the "daily national news service of Southern Baptists," takes issue with many of the points that former President Jimmy Carter makes in his new book, Our Endangered Values. For example, Chapman writes:

Carter makes the outlandish claim that by encouraging women to submit to their husband's servant leadership, as taught in Scripture, conservative Christians somehow want to subjugate women like those in some Islamic nations.

In the article on the family in the SBC's statement of faith, he apparently missed the language about "equal worth" of the husband and the wife before God, or the statement that the wife "being in the image of God as is her husband" is "thus equal to him." He also ignored the charge to husbands that they should love their wives to the point of dying for them as Christ sacrificially loved the Church.

Please click here to read the column

US celebrates its most misread freedom

By Jane Lampman, The Christian Science Monitor, January 18, 2006

"It may be America's most important gift to the world. It began 220 years ago this week. Yet many Americans, it seems, still don't understand what it entails. It's the country's unique experiment in religious freedom, rooted in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

"As the first historic act in the experiment - the 1786 Virginia Statute Establishing Religious Freedom - is celebrated in Richmond Wednesday, many see that lack of understanding as a challenge for the growing religious and ideological diversity in the United States." Click here to read the report.

A Church-State Solution

By Noah Feldman, New York Times Magazine, July 3, 2005

In this essay, Noah Feldman suggests bridging the growing abyss between right-wing evangelicals and those wishing to preserve church-state separation with a compromise: by "legal secularists" conceding to what he calls "values evangelicals" on public displays of religion, and evangelicals agreeing that government would not fund religious institutions. As Feldman puts it, "offer greater latitude for religious speech and symbols in public debate, but also impose a stricter ban on state financing of religious institutions and activities."

JewsonFirst believes Feldman's proposed solution is indicative of the unremitting pressure that the religious right has applied to our society. We have not seen any fundamentalist Christian proposals to trade public prayer for school vouchers. Click here to read the essay.