The Religious Left In Modern America

Author : Leilah Danielson,Marian Mollin,Doug Rossinow
Publisher : Springer
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2018-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9783319731209

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The Religious Left in Modern America by Leilah Danielson,Marian Mollin,Doug Rossinow Pdf

This edited collection of exciting new scholarship provides comprehensive coverage of the broad sweep of twentieth century religious activism on the American left. The volume covers a diversity of perspectives, including Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish history, and important essays on African-American, Latino, and women’s spirituality. Taken together, these essays offer a comparative and long-term perspective on religious groups and social movements often studied in isolation, and fully integrate faith-based action into the history of progressive social movements and politics in the modern United States. It becomes clear that throughout the twentieth century, religious faith has served as a powerful motivator and generator for activism, not just as on the right, where observers regularly link religion and politics, but on the left. This volume will appeal to historians of modern American politics, religion, and social movements, religious studies scholars, and contemporary activists.

Author : L. Benjamin Rolsky
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2019-11-12
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231550420

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The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left by L. Benjamin Rolsky Pdf

For decades now, Americans have believed that their country is deeply divided by “culture wars” waged between religious conservatives and secular liberals. In most instances, Protestant conservatives have been cast as the instigators of such warfare, while religious liberals have been largely ignored. In this book, L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s through the story of how television writer and producer Norman Lear galvanized the religious left into action. The creator of comedies such as All in the Family and Maude, Lear was spurred to found the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in response to the rise of the religious right. Rolsky offers engaged readings of Lear’s iconic sitcoms and published writings, considering them as an expression of what he calls the spiritual politics of the religious left. He shows how prime-time television became a focus of political dispute and demonstrates how Lear’s emergence as an interfaith activist catalyzed ecumenical Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were determined to push back against conservatism’s ascent. Rolsky concludes that Lear’s political involvement exemplified religious liberals’ commitment to engaging politics on explicitly moral grounds in defense of what they saw as the public interest. An interdisciplinary analysis of the definitive cultural clashes of our fractious times, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left foregrounds the foundational roles played by popular culture, television, and media in America’s religious history.

Author : Frederick Clarkson
Publisher : Ig Publishing
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Political Science
ISBN : UOM:39015077129115

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Dispatches from the Religious Left by Frederick Clarkson Pdf

A visionary and groundbreaking collection of the leading voices of the religious left.

Author : Steven H. Shiffrin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2012-09-16
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780691156194

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The Religious Left and Church-State Relations by Steven H. Shiffrin Pdf

A constitutional law scholar argues that the religious left, not the secular left, is best equipped to lead the battle against the religious right on questions of church and state in twenty-first century America.

Author : Jack Jenkins
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2020-04-21
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780062936004

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American Prophets by Jack Jenkins Pdf

From one of the country’s most respected religion reporters, a paradigm-shifting discussion of how the Religious Left is actually the moral compass that has long steered America’s political debates, including today. Since the ascendancy of the Religious Right in the 1970s, common wisdom holds that it is a coalition of fundamentalist powerbrokers who are the “moral majority,” setting the standard for conservative Christian values and working to preserve the status quo. But, as national religion reporter Jack Jenkins contends, the country is also driven by a vibrant, long-standing moral force from the left. Constituting an amorphous group of interfaith activists that goes by many names and takes many forms, this coalition has operated since America’s founding — praying, protesting, and marching for common goals that have moved society forward. Throughout our history, the Religious Left has embodied and championed the progressive values at the heart of American democracy—abolition, labor reform, civil rights, environmental preservation. Drawing on his years of reporting, Jenkins examines the re-emergence of progressive faith-based activism, detailing its origins and contrasting its goals with those of the Religious Right. Today’s rapidly expanding interfaith coalition — which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and other faiths — has become a force within the larger “resistance” movement. Jenkins profiles Washington political insiders—including former White House staffers and faith outreach directors for the campaigns of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton—as well as a new generation of progressive faith leaders at the forefront today, including: Rev. William Barber II, leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays and co-chair of the nationwide Poor People’s campaign Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the Women’s March Rev. Traci Blackmon, a pastor near Ferguson, Missouri who works to lift up black liberation efforts across the country Sister Simone Campbell, head of the Catholic social justice lobby and the “Nuns on the Bus” tour organizer Native American “water protectors” who demonstrated against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop An exciting reevaluation of America’s moral center and an inspiring portrait of progressive faith-in-action, American Prophets will change the way we think about the intersection of politics and religion.

Author : Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert
Publisher : Temple University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Liberalism (Religion)
ISBN : 1439901015

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Voices of the Religious Left by Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert Pdf

Author : Frank Lambert
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2010-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781400824588

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Religion in American Politics by Frank Lambert Pdf

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when Federalist clergymen charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a "Christian nation," to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been part of American politics. In Religion in American Politics, Frank Lambert tells the fascinating story of the uneasy relations between religion and politics from the founding to the twenty-first century. Lambert examines how antebellum Protestant unity was challenged by sectionalism as both North and South invoked religious justification; how Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" competed with the anticapitalist "Social Gospel" during postwar industrialization; how the civil rights movement was perhaps the most effective religious intervention in politics in American history; and how the alliance between the Republican Party and the Religious Right has, in many ways, realized the founders' fears of religious-political electoral coalitions. In these and other cases, Lambert shows that religion became sectarian and partisan whenever it entered the political fray, and that religious agendas have always mixed with nonreligious ones. Religion in American Politics brings rare historical perspective and insight to a subject that was just as important--and controversial--in 1776 as it is today.

Author : Christopher Douglas
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2016-05-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501703522

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If God Meant to Interfere by Christopher Douglas Pdf

The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.

Author : David R. Swartz
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2012-09-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812207682

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Moral Minority by David R. Swartz Pdf

In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong—evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way—organizationally and through political activism—to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.

Author : Jon Harris
Publisher : Ambassador International
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781649600912

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Social Justice Goes To Church: The New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism by Jon Harris Pdf

"The infusion of social justice into the gospel may well be the most dangerous problem facing the church today. Yet, it is going unnoticed in far too many circles. Social Justice Goes to Church can serve as a wake-up call." —Samuel C. Smith, Ph.D. Chair and Graduate Program Director, Department of History, Liberty University In order to understand why so many evangelicals recently support left-leaning political causes, it is important to know a little history. In the 1970s, many campus radicals raised in Christian homes brought neo-Marxist ideas from college back to church with them. At first, figures like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Richard Mouw made great gains for their progressive evangelical cause. But, after the defeat of Jimmy Carter, the religious right stole the headlines. Today, a new crop of mainstream evangelicals has taken up the cause of the New Left, whether they know it or not. As pro-life evangelicals rush to support movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, it is important to realize they are walking in footprints already laid down. Their mission may be more successful, but it is not new. To understand where the evangelical social justice movement is heading, it is vital to understand the origins of the movement. Social Justice Goes to Church: The New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism answers, from a historical perspective, the vital question, "Why are American evangelicals moving Left?" “The great injunction to the Church was to preach the Gospel to the world, while not being of the world. Social justice neatly reverses this trend, preaching the ways of the world into the church. That is not its only critical reversal. The Gospel is about freedom from guilt and sin and bondage. Social justice seeks above all to apportion guilt and sin and bondage, enslaving entire demographics and requiring that they kneel before man in attrition. How important that a book of this nature should enter the fray right now. I applaud Mr. Harris for his excellent work in providing the practical means of identifying and repelling this fraudulent force, this ideological interloper, this dangerous false teaching.” —Douglas Kruger Author of Political Correctness Does More Harm Than Good: How to Identify, Debunk, and Dismantle Dangerous Ideas

Author : Anthony A. J. Williams
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2022-04-13
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781509542833

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The Christian Left by Anthony A. J. Williams Pdf

Christianity is often assumed to be pro-capitalist and socially conservative – in short, necessarily aligned with the political Right. But can this be straightforwardly true of a religion founded by a figure who drew his early followers from among the poor and downtrodden and spoke against the accumulation of earthly riches? In this book, Anthony A.J. Williams shows that this assumption is far from correct by giving an introductory overview of a tradition of socialist and radical Christianity that can be traced back to the communal ownership described in the Acts of the Apostles. Focusing on modern Christian Left movements, from Christian Socialism and the social gospel to liberation theology and red-letter Christianity, Williams examines the major challenges faced by the Christian Left today, both from within Christianity itself and from the secular Left. Does the Bible and Christian theology really support collectivism and universal equality? Can Christian radicalism remain viable in an age of identity politics? This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between religion and politics.

Author : Robert Ellwood,Harry Partin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2016-11-03
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781315507231

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Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America by Robert Ellwood,Harry Partin Pdf

This text explores the major new or unconventional religions and spiritual movements in America that exist outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Author : Michael Gerson,Peter Wehner
Publisher : Moody Publishers
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2010-10-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1575679280

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City of Man by Michael Gerson,Peter Wehner Pdf

An era has ended. The political expression that most galvanized evangelicals during the past quarter-century, the Religious Right, is fading. What's ahead is unclear. Millions of faith-based voters still exist, and they continue to care deeply about hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage, but the shape of their future political engagement remains to be formed. Into this uncertainty, former White House insiders Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner seek to call evangelicals toward a new kind of political engagement -- a kind that is better both for the church and the country, a kind that cannot be co-opted by either political party, a kind that avoids the historic mistakes of both the Religious Left and the Religious Right. Incisive, bold, and marked equally by pragmatism and idealism, Gerson and Wehner's new book has the potential to chart a new political future not just for values voters, but for the nation as a whole.

Author : Ronald H. Nash
Publisher : Zondervan
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Christianity and politics
ISBN : 0310210151

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Why the Left is Not Right by Ronald H. Nash Pdf

Just in time for this year's elections come this close and well-researched look at the ideas and activities of the religious left. Nash identifies the major players in the religious left, examines their recent public statements, and, from an evangelical Christian perspective, confronts thei positions and offers a defense for the religious right.

Author : Barbara A. McGraw
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 588 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2016-05-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780470657331

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S. by Barbara A. McGraw Pdf

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S. provides a broad, inclusive, and rich range of chapters, in the study of religion and politics. Arranged in their historical context, chapters address themes of history, law, social and religious movements, policy and political theory. Broadens the parameters of this timely subject, and includes the latest work in the field Draws together newly-commissioned essays by distinguished authors that are cogent for scholars, while also being in a style that is accessible to students. Provides a balanced and inclusive approach to religion and politics in the U.S. Engages diverse perspectives from various discourses about religion and politics across the political and disciplinary spectra, while placing them in their larger historical context