Thirteen senior Christian leaders in the region – representing the Eastern, Catholic, Anglican and Protestant traditions – have written a letter that calls on Christians
Presidential candidates of both parties this year are talking much more about their faith than in previous years. Is this good for the country? And does it even help the candidates? The Christian Science Monitor talks to analysts who say that it is not doing much good for anybody.
The War on Christmas has a glorious history. In 1645 Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan brethren took over jolly old England. Deciding that anything jolly was probably of the devil, they vowed to rid England of such decadent conceits as Christmas. Cromwell and Company banned Christmas and any festivities having to do with it. Not to be bested by their colleagues across the pond, Massachusetts Puritans criminalized Christmas, and, in 1659, the General Court of Massachusetts passed the Five-Shilling Anti-Christmas Law.
While there has been a great deal of commentary about Mitt Romney’s speech on faith in America, there is growing concern by some that the most disturbing aspect of the speech was that it expressly excludes the so-called faithless. David Brooks captured these concerns well in his New York Times column on Friday.
For much of its history, the United States has largely avoided the religious conflicts that have cost other nations countless lives. Our ability to escape such conflicts is grounded in the Constitution’s First Amendment, which requires government to maintain as neutral an attitude as possible toward religion, writes Ethan Fishman. Today, however, the Bush administration seeks to repudiate it.
“I would never denigrate any civilized response of anyone for harm he may have done or misbehavior he may have engaged in,” writes Gorman Beauchamp in The American Scholar. “But apologies offered by people to their contemporaries for actions taken long before any of them were born strike me as vacuous and more than a little exhibitionistic.”
Chris Comer, the Texas director of science curriculum claims that she was forced to resign from her position because of she had expressed views contrary to Intelligent Design.
Some significant voices on the right that are disillusioned about political engagement. David Kuo, former aide in the Bush White House, for example, talks about the need for Christians to “fast from politics” for a few years. David Helm, executive editor of the Christian Century disagrees.
For much of the last three years, Leah Daughtery has worked to bridge the gap between the Brooklyn church in which she was raised and her Washington day job, becoming the quiet architect behind the committee’s religious outreach program.
Americans are among the most religious people in the wealthy, democratic West. Yet we are not only comfortable, but proud, of the independence of church and state. Are we bound to fumble in our foreign policy if we cannot understand why the politics of equality, liberty, toleration, and democracy fit so uneasily with the explicitly religious politics of the Middle East? Closer to home, evangelical Christians remain one of the most powerful forces in American politics, and perhaps a dominant force in the Republican Party. Will they bring down the “big tent” if the GOP nominates a cosmopolitan pro-choice New Yorker or a Mormon? Is there, perhaps, a place for religious ideas on the American left?