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Books, reviews and author interviews

Events in Southern Ohio

by Holly in Cincinnati, The Moderate Voice, September 29, 2006

This concise posting contains summaries, local reports, and links to several recent programs about church-state separation in southern Ohio: A debate between Michelle Goldberg, author of Kingdom Coming and Phil Burress, a religious right leader in Ohio; a panel discussion featuring Rabbi James Rudin, author of The Baptizing of America; "a town hall meeting with "patriot pastor" Rev. Russell Johnson, chairman of the Ohio Restoration Project, and the Rev. Eric Williams, representing We Believe Ohio. Continue.

Be Not Afraid

Five books on the religious right raise necessary alarms about the movement’s ever-increasing power. But goodness, is the situation really quite this grave?

By Peter Steinfels, The American Prospect, September 12, 2006

Steinfels, a religion columnist for the New York Times, reviews Kingdom Coming, by Michelle Goldberg, Our Endangered Values, by Jimmy Carter, American Theocracy, by Kevin Phillips, and The Baptizing of America by James Rudin. He finds them alarmist and too focused on the hardliners among the millions of Christian evangelicals. Click here.

Michelle Goldberg posted a rebuttal on Talk2Action. Click here.

James Rudin: The Baptizing of America

Rabbi's Book Warns of Imminent Christianization

Senior interreligious relations specialist foresees threat to Constitution

Review by Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, JewsOnFirst

In his book, The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us, Rabbi James Rudin deems the prospect of an ascendant religious right the most urgent threat confronting us. Rudin, whose understanding of Christian trends comes from many years of interreligious relations work for the American Jewish Committee, predicts that the security Jews have drawn from the constitutional separation of church and state is about to end.

Also imperiled, writes Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak of JewsOnFirst in his review, is the sense of safety Jews acquired after the world absorbed the lessons of World War II. "For many Americans, especially American Jews and many of their liberal rabbis, still moored in that sense of safety, The Baptizing of America will come as a shock." Click here to read the review.

Rudin And The ‘Christocrats’

by James D. Besser, New York Jewish Week, March 17, 2006

"One of the architects of Jewish outreach to the Christian community has issued a scathing blast against an Evangelical movement he says has been hijacked by extremists determined to make America a Christian nation — by law.... The title of the book goes where no other major Jewish leader has gone before..." Go to the report

BuzzFlash interview: Rabbi James Rudin

The 'Christocrats' are here

BuzzFlash Interviews , BuzzFlash.com, Working for Change (Working Assets), February 15, 2006

"Rabbi James Rudin: I had to develop a term to describe the specific Christian conservatives who, in my judgment, are trying to change the basic structure of America after 220 years. I found that using words like 'fundamentalist' or 'extremist' or 'Christian conservatives' or 'Evangelicals' was inaccurate. In my own work – 35 years with the American Jewish Committee and Christian-Jewish relations - I’ve found that the overwhelming majority of Evangelical Christians are not committed to changing the basic relationship between church and state, and between government and religion. There’s a small percentage who are, so I searched for a name that would set them apart from other Evangelicals or Christian conservatives." Click here for the interview.

Michelle Goldberg: Kingdom Coming

Michelle Goldberg's Study of the Rise of Christian Nationalism, and Its Adherents' Strategy to Use the Courts to Further Their Agenda

By John W. Dean, Findlaw's Writ, August 25, 2006

If more Americans would read works like Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, the longevity of our democracy, as we know it, would be more assured. I say this because the more people who understand the thinking and agenda of the growing forces of "Christian nationalism," the less likely it will be that these forces will succeed. Not many people want to go where Christian nationalists want to take the country. Continue

Christian nationalists seek dominance

By Marilyn H. Karfeld, Cleveland Jewish News, November 11, 2006

Interview with Michelle Goldberg, who spoke in Cleveland. Click here.

BuzzFlash interview: Michelle Goldberg

Christian nationalism inside America's mega-churches

WorkingforChange, June 2, 2006

Michelle Goldberg took a close-up look at right-wing religion in America and has reemerged to tell others just what she found there - a hypnotic mix of Jesus, community, and ballot box activism. Her new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, explores the parallel universe that threatens our reality-based world, and indeed, could replace it. We can just hear Thomas Jefferson rolling over in his separation-of-church-and-state grave. Michelle Goldberg talked with BuzzFlash about Hitler, Scalia, Christian revisionist history, and Christian reconstructionism. Continue

Democracy vs. Theocracy

Two books -- one by a liberal and the other from a conservative -- warn that America is in danger of becoming a theocracy.

by Mark Potok, Intelligence Report (Southern Poverty Law Center),

Not since the 1920s, when the attention of the country was riveted by the Scopes "Monkey Trial," has the United States seen such a clash between mainstream secular society and literalist interpreters of the Bible. Between a quarter and a third of all Americans today are self-described Christian fundamentalists, many of whom reject the separation of church and state. It has become common for conservative politicians and even state Republican parties to declare that the United States is a "Christian nation." Never before have far-right religious ideologues had such access to power in Washington -- indeed, never has the country come closer to a religious government than what we have today.

This is the conclusion -- a difficult one to disagree with -- of both Kevin Phillips, a key Republican strategist, and Michelle Goldberg, a writer for the liberal magazine Salon.com. Phillips puts it like this: "The excesses of fundamentalism ... in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs, and the last two presidential elections mark the transformation of the GOP into the first religious party in U.S. history." Continue.

Jonathan Miller: The Compassionate Community

Jonathan Miller
The Compassionate Community:
Ten Values to Unite America
243 pages, Palgrave, $25.95

Candidate's book explores faith

Patrick Crowley, The Enquirer, January 2, 2007

By penning "The Compassionate Community: 10 Values to Unite America," Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Miller is tapping into two political trends: Pols writing books and Democrats embracing religion.

In the book, Miller, the incumbent state treasurer and a Harvard-educated lawyer, discusses the role religion and values should play in politics. He touches on policy and his own political experiences and background.

Miller also talks about his Jewish faith and how Democrats shouldn't be nervous about discussing religion and morality, something Republicans have had success with in Kentucky and across the nation. Continue

Bible-toting Bluegrass Boychick Eyes Kentucky Governor’s Mansion

By Jennifer Siegel, The Forward, December 15, 2006

Jonathan Miller -- the Jewish, Harvard-educated state treasurer who has recently all but declared that he will run for governor of Kentucky -- has already developed a sure-fire opening for his stump speech: He talks about Jesus Christ.

The Christian New Testament and the Jewish Talmud share a "really similar story," Miller recently told a group of New York City Democrats, after warming up the crowd with a perfunctory joke about the country ham and fried shrimp he is unwittingly served back home. The Jewish sage Hillel said, "‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do unto your neighbor,’" while "another great rabbi... Rabbi Jesus" also explained God’s law as "‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’"

It is a warm-and-fuzzy comparison that Miller, who at 39 looks and sounds like a tidy investment banker, made repeatedly as he recently toured the country in support of his new book, The Compassionate Community: Ten Values to Unite America. Soon, it will likely be recycled on in the wake of a patronage scandal, and several of the state's most prominent Democrats have recently ruled out taking him on in next November's gubernatorial election. This leaves Miller, the only state official who faces a term limit next year, as one of several younger Democrats feverishly scrambling to find a running mate in advance of publicly announcing a gubernatorial bid. Continue.

Chris Hedges: American Fascists

Chris Hedges
American Fascists:
The Christian Right and the War on America
256pp, Free Press, $25.00

Excerpt from American Fascists

The Christian Right and the War On America

Read Chapter One. Click here.

Author Argues Christian Right Hurts Democracy

Chris Hedges says "religious utopians... are slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny."

Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, January 25, 2007

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Chris Hedges warns against a radical minority within the Christian right. Hedges talks about why he believes the right is eroding Democracy in his new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Continue.

How conservative evangelists are trying to make the United States a Christian nation

By Jon Wiener, The Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2007

President Eisenhower famously said, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what that faith is." The people Chris Hedges writes about in his new book have a different view: They care a lot about the religion on which our government is based and they think it should be Christianity -- their version, of course. "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" is a call to arms against what Hedges sees as the efforts of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the operators of Trinity Broadcasting Network, among others, to turn the United States into a Christian nation. Continue.

Christian Empire

By Rick Perlstein, The New York Times, January 7, 2007

Of course there are Christian fascists in America. How else to describe, say, the administrator of a faith-based drug treatment program who bound and beat a resident, then subjected her to 32 straight hours of recorded sermons? Or American Veterans in Domestic Defense, the uniform-clad cadres who took former Chief Justice Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument on tour after a judge banned it from the Montgomery, Ala., judicial building? (American Jews, the group’s founder explained, are "a driving force behind trying to take everything to do with Christianity out of our system.") Whatever one’s definition of this most vexed of "f" words, in a time when the chief of staff for United States Senator Tom Coburn tells a reporter soon after the Terri Schiavo crisis, "I don’t want to impeach judges; I want to impale them," to flinch from examining the authoritarian impulses coursing through American life becomes a moral abdication. Continue.

Interview with Chris Hedges: The Christian Right’s War on America

by James Harris and Robert Scheer, Truthdig, February 8, 2007

Harris: James Harris sitting down with Mr. Robert Scheer, and special guest on the phone is Chris Hedges, the author of the new title "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." Chris is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, and a former correspondent for The New York Times. Click here to read the transcript or listen to the interview.

Jesus ‘Love-Bombs’ You

Chris Hedges, Truthdig, April 23, 2007

There is a false, but effective, fiction that one has to be born again to be a Christian. The Christian right refuses to acknowledge the worth of anyone’s religious experience unless -- in the words of the tired and opaque cliché -- one has accepted "Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior."

The meltdown, often skillfully manipulated by preachers and teams of evangelists, is one of the most pernicious tools of the movement. Through conversion one surrenders to a higher authority. And the higher authority, rather than God, is the preacher who steps in to take over your life. Being born again, and the process it entails, is more often about submission and the surrender of moral responsibility than genuine belief.

I attended a five-day seminar at Coral Ridge in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where I was taught, often by D. James Kennedy, the techniques of conversion. The callousness of these techniques --targeting the vulnerable, building false friendships with the lonely or troubled, promising to relieve people of the most fundamental dreads of human existence from the fear of mortality to the numbing pain of grief -- gave to the process an awful cruelty and dishonesty. I attended the seminar as part of the research for my book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." Kennedy openly called converts "recruits" and spoke about them joining a new political force sweeping across the country to reshape and reform America into a Christian state. Continue

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

We must attend to growing social and economic inequities in order to stop the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- or face a future of fascism under the guise of Christian values.

Chris Hedges, Alternet, February 8, 2007

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible. Continue

Chris Hedges on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America"

Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges, Democracy Now!, February 19, 2006

A new book by Chris Hedges called "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America" investigates the highly organized and well-funded "dominionist movement." The book investigates their agenda, examines the movement's origins and motivations and uncovers its ideological underpinnings. "American Fascists" argues that dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s.

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for many years where he won a Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" and "Losing Moses on the Freeway." Chris has a Master's degree in theology from Harvard University and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute - and he is here with me now in the studio. Continue

The holy blitz rolls on

The Christian right is a "deeply anti-democratic movement" that gains force by exploiting Americans' fears, argues Chris Hedges. Salon talks with the former New York Times reporter about his fearless new book, "American Fascists."

Michelle Goldberg, Salon, January 9, 2007

Longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, the former New York Times bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans, knows a lot about the savagery that people are capable of, especially when they're besotted with dreams of religious or national redemption. In his acclaimed 2002 book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," he wrote: "I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of Southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments." Hedges was part of New York Times team of reporters that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting about global terrorism.

Given such intimacy with horror, one might expect him to be aloof from the seemingly less urgent cultural disputes that dominate domestic American politics. Yet in the rise of America's religious right, Hedges senses something akin to the brutal movements he's spent his life chronicling. The title of his new book speaks for itself: "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." Scores of volumes about the religious right have recently been published (one of them, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," by me), but Hedges' book is perhaps the most furious and foreboding, all the more so because he knows what fascism looks like. Continue

Blame Satan! Hedges Sees Hypocrisy, Violence on Christian Right

By Susan Antilla, Bloomberg, February 6, 2007

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Forget Disney World and Epcot Center. You haven't seen anything until you've seen the Creation Museum set to open in Petersburg, Kentucky, this year.

It has a theater with seats that shake and machines that spray mist as God's six-day creation marathon is re-enacted. Museum scientists weave a yarn that has humans and dinosaurs popping up on the very same day -- the sixth, to be exact, which is when the Bible says God made all the land animals.

If you're studying up after your visit, creationists have answers to all your questions. Wondering how God managed to say ``Let there be light'' on Day One without making the sun until Day Four? Hey, no problem -- he's God, after all, so he made a temporary light to cover things until the official Day Four unveiling.

Chris Hedges recounts these and other, more alarming examples of the work of evangelicals in ``American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.'' Hedges, a former reporter for the New York Times and a Harvard Divinity School graduate, focuses on the evangelical movement known as dominionism, in his view a dangerous force that manipulates followers into a faith that is political, intolerant and loaded with the potential for violence. Continue.

Jimmy Carter: Our Endangered Values

Jimmy Carter
Our Endangered Values:
America's Moral Crisis
212 Pages,Simon and Schuster, $25.00

Jimmy Carter & the Culture of Death

By Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books, February 19, 2006

In 1972, I was asked by New York magazine to survey Southern reactions to the attempted assassination of George Wallace. On my list of people to call was Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. When I called his press secretary, Jody Powell (a name I had never heard before), I was told it would be better for me to come to Atlanta than to talk on the phone. (Powell was drumming up attention for his man, with a view to his running for president.) When I arrived there, Powell had arranged for me to fly with Carter in his little state prop plane to Tifton, a small South Georgia town where there was a meeting with local sheriffs. The sheriffs were unhappy with Carter's liberal racial policies, and Powell obviously thought it would be good for his reputation nationally to be seen as standing up against regional prejudice.

Carter used all his local ties to defang the critics -- the sheriffs did not openly turn against him -- and I was impressed. On the flight back, he said he wanted to drop off in the town of Plains and see how his peanut business was doing -- a homey touch the press would be treated to ad nauseam over the next two years. I do not remember any mention of his local church while we were in Plains. In fact, I cannot recall that religion was brought up in all our hours together. Perhaps he thought that was not something New York magazine readers would respond to. At any rate, I was surprised when, four years later, so much was made of his religion as he ran for president. It began when he was asked, while visiting Baptist friends, if he thought of himself as "born again." He answered yes --not surprisingly, since the Gospel of John (3:5) says that one must be born again to enter the kingdom of heaven, and Saint Paul says that baptism is being reborn into Christ (Romans 6:4). Reporters did not know this as a basic belief of Christians -- they treated it as an odd cult claim. Continue.

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

David Kuo: Tempting Faith

David Kuo
Tempting Faith:
An Inside Story of Political Seduction
304 pages, Free Press, $15, ISBN: 0743287126

A Loss Of Faith

Former White House Insider Tells Lesley Stahl Staffers Called Evangelicals "Nuts" And "Goofy"

Transcript of 60 Minutes segment, October 15, 2006

"...In his book, Kuo wrote that White House staffers would roll their eyes at evangelicals, calling them 'nuts' and 'goofy.'

"Asked if that was really the attitude, Kuo tells Stahl, 'Oh, absolutely. You name the important Christian leader and I have heard them mocked by serious people in serious places.'

"Specifically, Kuo says people in the White House political affairs office referred to Pat Robertson as 'insane,' Jerry Falwell as 'ridiculous,' and that James Dobson 'had to be controlled.' And President Bush, he writes, talked about his compassion agenda, but never really fought for it. Go to the 60 Minutes transcript, which also includes links to video clips.

Book says Bush just using Christians

‘Tempting Faith’ author David Kuo worked for Bush from 2001 to 2003

By Jonathan Larsen, "Countdown" producer, MSNBC, October 13, 2006

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities. Continue reading -- and see also MSNBC's associated links.

Putting Faith Before Politics

By David Kuo, The New York Times, November 16, 2006

SINCE 1992, every national Republican electoral defeat has been accompanied by an obituary for the religious right. Every one of these obituaries has been premature -- after these losses, the religious right only grew stronger. After the defeat of President George H. W. Bush in 1992, the conventional wisdom held that Christian evangelicals would be chastened. As one major magazine put it, Mr. Bush’s defeat meant that "time had run out on their crusade to create a Christian America." Yet in the next two years, the Christian Coalition grew by leaps and bounds; in 1994, it helped usher in the Gingrich revolution.

In 1996, after Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole, Margaret Tutwiler, a Republican strategist, declared that in order for Republicans to win, "We’re going to have to take on the religious nuts." Two years later, after Republicans failed to gain any ground on Democrats -- despite Mr. Clinton’s impeachment -- John Zogby, the pollster, concluded that "Christian absolutism" scared voters. Wrong again. Those same Christian "absolutists" helped sweep George W. Bush into office in 2000.

Jesus was resurrected only once. The religious right has been resurrected at least twice in just the past 15 years. Continue.

A Faith-Based Battle for Voters

By E. J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post, October 17, 2006

The very fact that it took David Kuo's book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," to put President Bush's faith-based initiative back into the news proves that the author's thesis is right.

His argument -- Kuo went on the record with it long before this book appeared -- is that the White House never put much money or muscle behind Bush's "compassionate conservatism." It used the faith-based agenda for political purposes and always made tax cuts for the wealthy a much higher priority than any assistance to those "armies of compassion" that Bush evoked so eloquently. Continue.

Book: Bush Aides Called Evangelicals 'Nuts'

White House advisors sought the support of conservative Christians but mocked them in private, writes a onetime administration official.

by Peter Wallsten, Published on October 13, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times via Common Dreams

A new book by a former White House official says that President Bush's top political advisors privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as "nuts" and "goofy" while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.

The former official also writes that the White House office of faith-based initiatives, which Bush promoted as a nonpolitical effort to support religious social-service organizations, was told to host pre-election events designed to mobilize religious voters who would most likely favor Republican candidates.

The assertions by David Kuo, a top official in the faith-based initiatives program, have rattled Republican strategists already struggling to persuade evangelical voters to turn out this fall for the GOP. Continue.

Kuo Charges Of Politicization Of 'Faith-Based' Initiative Is Supported By Americans United Research

AU Director's New Book, Piety & Politics, Details Effort By White House Office To Use Initiative For Partisan Purposes

News release, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, October 16, 2006

A key assertion by former White House staffer David Kuo — his claim that the “faith-based” initiative was used for partisan purposes — is supported by information in Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn’s new book Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom.

In the book, which was published Oct. 3, Lynn writes, “James Towey, until recently the head of the White House faith-based office, denies there is a political dimension to the initiative. Unfortunately for Towey, there is and he’s up to his neck in it. In 2002 and 2004 Towey made a series of campaign appearances alongside Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates whom polls showed were locked in tight races.” Continue .

Senator John Danforth: Faith and Politics

Senator John Danforth
Faith and Politics:
How the "Moral Values" Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together
265 pages, Viking Adult, $24.95

Danforth Warns of Christian Right but Says Tide Will Turn

By Peter Slevin, The Washington Post, September 28, 2006

CHICAGO. Sept. 27 -- The potency of the Christian right in the Republican Party is limited, former senator John C. Danforth of Missouri is telling audiences this month. A lifelong Republican moderate disturbed by his party's direction, he contends that the political center has a future.

Describing himself as a "a Republican for the old reasons," Danforth, 70, is promoting a new book that describes religion as a divisive force in the United States today and accuses the religious right and its political supporters of creating a sectarian party. Continue.

Kevin Phillips: American Theocracy

Book Review: Clear and Present Dangers

Review of American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips by Alan Brinkley , New York Times Book Review, March 19, 2006

"Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right." Click here

Theocons and Theocrats

by Kevin Phillips, The Nation, posted April 13, 2006 (May 1, 2006 issue)

An article adapted from Phillips's American Theocracy. Click here

Bush's wayward march

Interview with Kevin Phillips

By Bill Steigerwald, Tribune-Review, April 15, 2006

"Q: You say the last two elections have transformed the Republican Party into "the first religious party in U.S. history." How is this religious influence in politics and government hurting the country?" Continue

Democracy vs. Theocracy

Two books -- one by a liberal and the other from a conservative -- warn that America is in danger of becoming a theocracy.

by Mark Potok, Intelligence Report (Southern Poverty Law Center),

Randall Balmer: Thy Kingdom Come

Book review: Thy Kingdom Come, by Randall Balmer

reviewed by Peter Laarman for JewsOnFirst, July 18, 2006

Within the stream of new books critiquing the Religious Right and its malign influence in public discourse and public policy, few are as readable or as well-reasoned as this relatively brief cri de coeur by Columbia University historian of religion Randall Balmer. Because Balmer knows his history so well, he is particularly grieved by all the ways in which today's U.S. evangelicals betray the vision of their 19th century forebears, who agitated for social reforms including abolition, women's suffrage, the rights of workers, and universal high-quality public education. Continue

*Rev. Peter Laarman is executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting and is based in Los Angeles. Their website is www.ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org. Laarman is also editor of "Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel," reviewed here in May.

Jesus Is Not a Republican

By Randall Balmer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2006

Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College and himself an Evangelical Christian, is author of the forthcoming book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament, from which this essay is excerpted. Continue

You can find an interview with Balmer and an excerpt from his book at National Public Radio. Click here

Peter Laarman: Getting on Message

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."

Stan Moody: McChurched

Stan Moody
McChurched:
300 Million Served & Still Hungry
254 Pages, Just Write Books, Topsham, Maine, $18.95

Stan Moody is a Maine State Representative and pastor of the North Manchester Meeting House Church in Manchester, Maine. He is also the founder of the Christian Policy Institute, which calls itself a “voice for thoughtful believers.” During his first term in the legislature, Moody, an ordained Baptist minister with a Ph.D. in Theology, left the Republican Party for the Democrats. In his new book, McChurched: 300 Million Served & Still Hungry, Moody draws on both his political and religious vocations to critique the religious right's political use of religion. He writes:

It comes down to a simple formula. Those making the racket in the public square want to restore in America what they consider to be its former Christian roots. I call that group the Christian Right that has in recent years physically and philosophically merged with the Republican Party. Their approach is hardly distinguishable from any other political movement, and they are not averse to condemning others with biblical pronouncements that are familiar only to those in the Christian ghetto that passes as church.

The Christian Policy Institute website says that Moody calls this merger "an alarming development and an outright rejection of the Christian faith. You can see the table of contents for McChurched on the Christian Policy Instititue site by clicking here.

You can buy a copy of the book by clicking here.

Excerpt: McChurched: 300 Million Served & Still Hungry

When the Church Tires of the Desert: The Enemy Within

by Stan Moody, PhD; excerpt courtsey of the author

In this chapter, Moody focuses on the religious right's efforts to turn away from inclusiveness and equality in favor of majority dominance. He writes: "[T]he mantra that America was founded as a 'Christian nation' is a direct attack on the rights of people of any and all religions to worship freely. It is the intention of the Republican Christian Right to adorn the public square with Christian symbolism, to the exclusion of all other religions." To read this chapter (in PDF format), please click here.

Slouching Toward Armageddon

An essay by Stan Moody, PhD, www.christianpolicyinstitute.org, August 2, 2006

I believe that history will mark September 11, 2001, as the date that America lost its spirit, but for reasons that have little to do with terrorism. That was the date that galvanized American Evangelicals to merge with the Republican Party.

My moment of final departure from the faith of either came when a prominent Christian lady in my District told me, “Shut up and get behind the President.”

Things have gotten worse since then. Continue reading this PDF document.

Michael Lerner: The Left Hand of God

The politics of faith

Review of "The Left Hand of God, Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right" by Michael Lerner

By Ed Bacon, Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2006

"At the core of Lerner's argument is his description of two competing theologies.

"The theology of the 'right hand of God' gives conservative ideologues their religious credibility. This theology 'sees the universe as a fundamentally scary place filled with evil forces…. God is the avenger, the big man in heaven who can be invoked to use violence to overcome those evil forces, either right now or in some future ultimate reckoning….[T]he world is filled with constant dangers and the rational way to live is to dominate and control others before they dominate and control us.'

"The 'left hand of God' theology sees God as 'the loving, kind, and generous energy in the universe' and 'encourages us to be like this loving God.'" Click here to read the review.

What’s the Right Course for the Religious Left?

The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right By Michael Lerner

Michelle Goldberg. The Forward, October 20, 2006

Christian right thinkers often argue that secularism is itself a religion. Enlightenment rationalism, they’ll say, is based on the same kind of faith as biblical literalism. In their 2005 book “Lord of All: Developing a Christian World-and-Life View,” televangelist D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe write that every worldview “is based on some kind of assumptions and presuppositions that we probably have never proved…. Scientists operate by faith. Some have had the candor to admit it; others would deny it vehemently.” Evolution, Kennedy and Newcombe insist, is a religion that “is based upon belief in the reality of the unseen — belief in fossils that cannot be produced, belief in embryological evidence that does not exist, and belief in breeding experiments that refuse to come off.” Purporting to defend absolute verities, Kennedy and his ilk push an odd kind of relativism that allows them to dismiss inconvenient truths as the tainted product of hostile ideologies. This epistemological trick has been at the heart of many a right-wing crusade against the reality-based community.

Which is why it’s disheartening to see the liberal rabbi Michael Lerner endorse a similar way of thinking in his new book “The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right.” To be sure, Lerner isn’t opposed to the teaching of evolution, and he shares few of the religious right’s policy goals. His book is, as the title suggests, in part a manual for combating conservatism by building a spiritual left, and he has some penetrating insights into the pull that the evangelical right exerts over so many Americans. Unfortunately, though, he shares that movement’s anti-rationalism, faulting liberals for their over reliance on facts at the expense of faith. “The Left believes in the power of empirical observation to determine truth and guide decisions,” he writes disapprovingly. “They are captivated by a belief that has been called scientism.” Unbound by empiricism, Lerner proceeds to make specific policy proposals that seem at times wildly unrealistic. Then he preemptively attacks what he calls the “reality police” who might point out that they won’t work. Continue.

See also: Mark LeVine's review of The Left Hand of God in Mother Jones, posted March 24, 2006. (Click here.)

Lauren Sandler: Righteous

Lauren Sandler
Righteous:
Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Culture
254, Viking, $24.95

Jesus Rocks

A growing group of youthful believers is on a mission to redeem American culture.

Christine Rosen, The Washington Post, Ocotber 1, 2006

Ever since President Bush's 2004 reelection demonstrated the strength of so-called values voters, liberal activists have fretted about the Democratic Party's inability to capture the loyalty of a comparable purpose-seeking populace. As a remedy, some have urged Democratic politicians to embrace explicitly moral and religious language in their appeals to voters. In Righteous, journalist Lauren Sandler goes further: She urges her fellow liberals to embrace the tactics of the evangelical youth movement. An unlikely amalgam of Christian skateboarders, pierced and tattooed pro-lifers, hip-hop and rock musicians, and straitlaced Christian college debate champions, the movement includes creation-science buffs, former drug addicts and the sons of the well-known Christian evangelists James Dobson and Jim Bakker. Continue.

Zev Chafets: A Match Made in Heaven

Zev Chafetz
A Match Made in Heaven:
American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance
240 Pages, HarperCollins, $24.95

Onward, Christian Zionists

Do evangelical Christians love the Jews too much?

Calev Ben-David, The Jersalem Post, January 12, 2007. Ben-David is the director of The Israel Project's Jerusalem Media Resource Center.

Last year I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of evangelical supporters of Israel at the annual convention of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) in Washington. While there I bumped into the noted American-Israeli journalist Zev Chafets, my old editor at The Jerusalem Report, who in this crowd of largely southern and Middle-American WASPs looked about as inconspicuous (to paraphrase Raymond Chandler) as a shmear of shmaltz on a slice of Christmas fruitcake.

Zev told me he was there doing research for a book about what some see as the unlikely and potentially problematic pro-Israel convergence between evangelical Christians and the largely liberal American Jewish community.

As it is, I end up making a brief appearance in the finished product: "A consultant for a Washington-based Jewish advocacy outfit called The Israel Project, Ben-David opened the conference with a sophisticated PowerPoint presentation on how to counter Arab arguments and influence the mainstream media. His presentation left the audience cold. The people at the Marriot already supported Israel because the Bible told them to; they didn't understand why they needed additional ammunition." Continue.

Jews and Evangelicals: Support for Israel Isn't Everything

Op-ed by Abraham H. Foxman, Time Magazine (counterpoint to Zev Chafets op-ed) January 16, 2007

At a time when Israel is once again under siege — physically from terrorists and Iran's nuclear threat, and psychologically from Islamic extremists and other anti-Israel forces around the world — the pro-Israel perspective of Evangelical Christians is much appreciated. The theological reasons for why they stand with Israel, as a precursor to the Second Coming and Armageddon, take a backseat to current realities. The support comes voluntarily, and we welcome it, as long as it comes without a quid pro quo.

Still, none of this obscures our concerns about certain views among the religious right. Unfortunately, there are elements in the Evangelical community who would like to impose Christianity by government edict. Some openly call for the Christianization of America, claiming that America has always been a Christian nation and that all institutions should be Christianized. Others, less dramatically, are calling for policies that would amount to religious coercion. Continue.

Can Jews and Evangelicals Get Along?

Op-ed by Zev Chafets, Time Magazine (Counterpoint with Abraham Foxman of ADL)

In early November 2005, the Prime Minister of Iran stated his intention to wipe Israel off the map. At almost exactly the same time, leaders of the American Jewish community declared war on the Christian Right.

Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, issued the first call to arms. The Jews, he said, faced an organized, sophisticated coalition of enemies. He described as "openly arrogant" the supposed Evangelical goal: "To Christianize us, to save us!" Within a few weeks, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, leader of the liberal Reform Movement, America's largest Jewish denomination, and Rabbi James Rudin of the ultra-establishment American Jewish Committee, reprised Foxman's complaint.

Never before in U.S. history had Jewish leaders shown such bold hostility toward Evangelical Christians, the largest Protestant community in America and, by most measures, the most philo-Semitic and pro-Israel. In normal times, this would be paradoxical. In an age of jihad it was dangerously perverse. Continue.

Books from the religious right

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.

Religious freedom sometimes opens legal minefields

By Adam Behsudi, Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, North Carolina), March 13, 2006

A survey of expert and interested opinion of the increasing number of cases involving issues of church-state separation. Click here to read the report.

Book Review: The Christianizing of America

Without a Doubt

Review of Catholic Matters, by Richard John Neuhaus, by Damon Linker, The New Republic, March 24, 2006

"Neuhaus teaches traditionalist Christians that they need not choose between modern America and their theological convictions, because, rightly understood, modern America has a theological--and specifically Catholic--essence. He has pushed this position for nearly twenty years now--in books, in his magazine First Things, in sympathetic Washington think tanks, and even in the White House, where George W. Bush receives counsel on social policy from the man he affectionately calls 'Father Richard.' This is why Neuhaus's new book is so important: it gives us a detailed and up-to-date account of the kind of Catholicism that he is peddling, which he aims to inject into the heart of American public life," writes Damon Linker. He calls Neuhaus' prescription "a full-blown theology of radical obedience to Church authority." Click here for the review