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| PRRI, "Support for Nondiscrimination Protections for LGBTQ People, by Religious Affiliation, 2015-2021" |
An offering of interrelated articles commenting on the Senate vote to advance the Respect for Marriage Act and how religious groups — notably, the U.S. Catholic bishops — are dealing with this issue:
The second installment of Jemar Tisby's video series on the topic "White Nation Under God," about which I've posted previously, is now online. In this episode, entitled "How White Christian Nationalism Threatens Democracy," sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, authors of The Flag and the Cross, explain how white Christian nationalism threatens democracy by its willingness to "diminish democracy in favor of political rule by a small group of people who use authoritarianism instead of 'the will of the people' to govern."
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| Michael Gerson, 18 January 2014, photo by AvianMaid, at Wikimedia |
Journalist Michael Gerson died yesterday. He was 58 years old and died of kidney cancer.
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| Photo by Tyler Merbler from January 6 attempted insurrection |
Several days ago, I told readers about a new a new series of videotaped/podcast discussions about white Christian nationalism being offered by historian and religion scholar Jemar Tisby. The series is entitled "White Nation Under God." The first episode in this five-part series was broadcast on Wednesday, 11 November and is now available online. Its thematic focus:
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| Structural racism beliefs by party affiliation, 2022 PRRI American Values Survey |
Philip Bump comments on an ad just released by Steven Miller’s America First political group. Miller was an official in the Trump administration who played a key role in some of its most savage anti-immigrant policies. America First's ad claims that racism against white Americans is a bigger concern than discrimination against racial minorities.
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| Nick Anderson's cartoon commentary on the Pelosi attack — and more |
Jeff Brumley notes that, once again, white evangelicals turn out to be outliers on beliefs about race and American history in PRRI's latest American Values Survey. Brumley counts the ways:
Robert P. Jones explains the significance of key findings of the latest American Values Survey, released this past week by his PRRI group:
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| Photo of stack of newspapers by Daniel R. Blume, Wikimedia Commons |
As the 2016 election approached, it became clear that immigration and often-but-not-always submerged concerns about race were a strong motivation for his supporters. The great America for which his mostly White supporters were nostalgic was one in which there wasn’t a focus on or accommodation for discrimination against Black or gay people.
On Thursday, PRRI released its annual American Values Survey (AVS), asking questions that get at the heart of that political impulse. What it shows is that race, immigration and right-wing politics continue to overlap — and overlap in, at times, alarming ways.
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| Photo of Leslie Jordan by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, from discussion of his book How Y'All Doing?: MIsadventures and Mischief from a Life Well-Lived with Megan Mullally on the Main Stage at the National Book Festival, 3 September 2022; Library of Congress Life - 20220903SM2320, from Wikipedia, available for sharing via Creative Commons |
Because I've now left Twitter after Elon Musk acquired it — I refuse to do anything to enrich that man in any way — I'm going to switch back to this blog to provide the kind of religious-political commentary I was providing on Twitter. I will appreciate it if anyone who happens to read my postings here and thinks they're worth sharing would do so, so that I can re-establish an audience for the blog.
Brandon Tensley, "Millions of White voters are once again showing who they are":
One thing that this week has clarified is the lengths to which many White Americans are willing to go in order to protect their Whiteness, to centralize it, even after a summer that saw unprecedented support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Just in case you were concerned that this election wasn't crazy enough, and I know you were, here's the lieutenant governor of Idaho, featured in a demonstration with some militia crazies, waving a Bible and a firearm out the window of her truck.
I recently read Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (NY: Liveright, 2020), and thought the following passages were significant. Du Mez grew up in the household of a Christian Reformed theologian teaching at Dordt University, her alma mater, and knows the white evangelical world inside out. As her book notes, her own Christian Reformed church has in recent years moved inexorably in the evangelical direction, as have wide swathes of American white churches including the Catholic church — hence Amy Coney Barrett. She knows whereof she speaks, in other words, in Jesus and John Wayne.
Frank Cocozzelli, "A Catholic’s Case Against Amy Coney Barrett":
The issue with the Barrett nomination for me as a Catholic is quite simple: I choose to dissent from my Church on certain issues such as choice, birth control and embryonic stem cell research. Judge Barrett, on the other hand, follows a more orthodox approach to the Church.
That is her right to do so. It is also the Church's right to set such doctrine. But what concerns me is that she may use the power of the federal government to impose her particular Catholicism, one that is clearly not in sync with most American Catholics, on me and those that share my faith who look to the government to shield me from the excesses of Church hardliners.
A number of my co-religionists, the ones who are anti-choice have a peculiar habit of looking at the issue of abortion only through the lens of orthodox Catholicism. What of a SCOTUS justice that sees abortion as "always immoral"? That sounds like someone that is primed and ready to substitute her Church's particular teaching on the matter as the only true religious position on the matter.
I recently read Sarah Posner's new book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (NY: Penguin Random House, 2020). Reading it as Robert P. Jones's White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity comes out is in many ways a thoroughly depressing experience. I began reading Jones's book as I was finishing Posner's.
OUR LOCAL PAPER: The Houston Chronicle— Rogelio Garcia Lawyer (@LawyerRogelio) July 13, 2020
obituary section was 43 pages today.
Let that sink in.
Germany confronted its racist legacy. Britain and the US must do the same | Susan Neiman https://t.co/VrmrtGM2x2— 𝕎𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕒𝕞 𝔻. 𝕃𝕚𝕟𝕕𝕤𝕖𝕪 🌈 (@wdlindsy) June 14, 2020
We cannot have a just and decent present as long as we refuse to face our pasts.
Trump officials claim there is no systemic racism in policing as protests sweep US https://t.co/ms1pX6dd9a pic.twitter.com/k3ZnN4Au5G— The Hill (@thehill) June 8, 2020
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