Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States

Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States

Author: R. Marie Griffith

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2008-06-09

Total Pages: 750

ISBN-13: 0801895316

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This collection of essays from a special issue of American Quarterly explores the complex and sometimes contradictory ways that religion matters in contemporary public life. Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States offers a groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary conversation between scholars in American studies and religious studies. The contributors explore numerous modes through which religious faith has mobilized political action. They utilize a variety of definitions of politics, ranging from lobbying by religious leaders to the political impact of popular culture. Their work includes the political activities of a very diverse group of religious believers: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. In addition, the book explores the meanings of religion for people who might contest the term—those who are spiritual but not religious, for example, as well as activists who engage symbols of faith and community but who may not necessarily consider themselves members of a specific religion. Several essays also examine the meanings of secular identity, humanist politics, and the complex evocations of civil religion in American life. No other book on religion and politics includes anything like the diversity of religions, ethnicities, and topics that this one does—from Mormon political mobilization to attempts at Americanizing Muslims in the post-9/11 United States, from César Chávez to James Dobson, from interreligious cooperation and conflict over Darfur to the global politics surrounding the category of Hindus and South Asians in the United States.


Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars

Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars

Author: Darren Dochuk

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0268201285

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This volume reframes the narrative that has too often dominated the field of historical study of religion and politics: the culture wars. Influenced by culture war theories first introduced in the 1990s, much of the recent history of modern American religion and politics is written in a mode that takes for granted the enduring partisan divides that can blind us to the complex and dynamic intersections of faith and politics. The contributors to Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars argue that such narratives do not tell the whole story of religion and politics in the modern age. This collection of essays, authored by leading scholars in American religious and political history, challenges readers to look past familiar clashes over social issues to appreciate the ways in which faith has fueled twentieth-century U.S. politics beyond predictable partisan divides and across a spectrum of debates ranging from environment to labor, immigration to civil rights, domestic legislation to foreign policy. Offering fresh illustrations drawn from a range of innovative primary sources, theories, and methods, these essays emphasize that our rendering of religion and politics in the twentieth century must appreciate the intersectionality of identities, interests, and motivations that transpire and exist outside an unbending dualistic paradigm. Contributors: Darren Dochuk, Janine Giordano Drake, Joseph Kip Kosek, Josef Sorett, Patrick Q. Mason, Wendy L. Wall, Mark Brilliant, Andrew Preston, Matthew Avery Sutton, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Benjamin Francis-Fallon, Michelle Nickerson, Keith Makoto Woodhouse, Kate Bowler, and James T. Kloppenberg.


Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran

Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran

Author: Joanna de Groot

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2000-08-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0857716298

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This book offers a new interpretation to the social history of religion in Iran from the 1870s to the 1970s. It aims to situate the 'revolutionary' upheavals of 1977-82 in an extensive narrative context of historical developments over the preceding century, and to relate the 'religious' elements in that history to other social and cultural issues. In the author's analysis, Iran's revolution was complex, and contingent on a range of factors rather than a simple or inevitable outcome of the nature of the Iranian state or the nature of religion in Iran. The focus of the argument is on the human responses of Iranians to their experiences and problems in all their diversity and on the rich variety and complexity of relationships between religion and other aspects of life, thought and culture in the daily life of Iranians.


Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference

Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference

Author: Linell E. Cady

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0231162480

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Global struggles over women’s roles, rights, and dress have taken center stage in a drama that casts the secular and the religious in tense if not violent opposition. Advocates for equality speak of the issue in terms of rights and modern progress while reactionaries ground their authority in religious and scriptural appeals. Both sides presume women’s emancipation is tied to secularization. This volume upsets these certainties by blending diverse voices and traditions, both secular and religious, in studies historicizing, questioning, and testing the implicit links between secularism and expanded freedoms for women. Rather than treat secularism as the answer to conflicts over gender and sexuality, these essays show how it structures the conditions generating them.


Secular Faith

Secular Faith

Author: Mark A. Smith

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published:

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 022627523X

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When Pope Francis recently answered “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuality, he ushered in a new era for the Catholic church. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a pope to express tolerance for homosexuality. Yet shifts of this kind are actually common in the history of Christian groups. Within the United States, Christian leaders have regularly revised their teachings to match the beliefs and opinions gaining support among their members and larger society. Mark A. Smith provocatively argues that religion is not nearly the unchanging conservative influence in American politics that we have come to think it is. In fact, in the long run, religion is best understood as responding to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society—perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders do resist prevailing values and behaviors, but those same leaders inevitably acquiesce—often by reinterpreting the Bible—if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures. So powerful are the cultural and societal norms surrounding us that Christians in America today hold more in common morally and politically with their atheist neighbors than with the Christians of earlier centuries. In fact, the strongest predictors of people’s moral beliefs are not their religious commitments or lack thereof but rather when and where they were born. A thoroughly researched and ultimately hopeful book on the prospects for political harmony, Secular Faith demonstrates how, over the long run, boundaries of secular and religious cultures converge.


Religion and Politics in America

Religion and Politics in America

Author: Robert Booth Fowler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-04

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13: 0429972792

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this book focuses on religion and politics and the dynamic interactions between them. It helps to understand the politics of religion in the United States and to appreciate the strategic choices that politicians and religious participants make when they participate in politics.


Religion and Politics in the United States

Religion and Politics in the United States

Author: Kenneth D. Wald

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-03-04

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1442225556

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From marriage equality, to gun control, to immigration reform and the threat of war, religion plays a fascinating and crucial part in our nation's political process and in our culture at large. Now in its seventh edition, Religion and Politics in the United States includes analyses of the nation's most pressing political matters regarding religious freedom, and the ways in which that essential constitutional freedom situates itself within modern America. The book also explores the ways that religion has affected the orientation of partisan politics in the United States. Through a detailed review of the political attitudes and behaviors of major religious and minority faith traditions, the book establishes that religion continues to be a major part of the American cultural and political milieu while explaining that it must interact with many other factors to influence political outcomes in the United States.


Climate Politics and the Power of Religion

Climate Politics and the Power of Religion

Author: Evan Berry

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0253059070

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How does our faith affect how we think about and respond to climate change? Climate Politics and the Power of Religion is an edited collection that explores the diverse ways that religion shapes climate politics at the local, national, and international levels. Drawing on case studies from across the globe, it stands at the intersection of religious studies, environment policy, and global politics. From small island nations confronting sea-level rise and intensifying tropical storms to high-elevation communities in the Andes and Himalayas wrestling with accelerating glacial melt, there is tremendous variation in the ways that societies draw on religion to understand and contend with climate change. Climate Politics and the Power of Religion offers 10 timely case studies that demonstrate how different communities render climate change within their own moral vocabularies and how such moral claims find purchase in activism and public debates about climate policy. Whether it be Hindutva policymakers in India, curanderos in Peru, or working-class people's concerns about the transgressions of petroleum extraction in Trinidad—religion affects how they all are making sense of and responding to this escalating global catastrophe.


Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany

Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany

Author: David M. Luebke

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0857453769

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The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of “conversion.” One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change— conversion—had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies.