MAGA, White Evangelicals, and the Objection to Kamala Harris
Trump established his political career with the Obama birther conspiracy, which alleged that President Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the US and was, therefore, an illegitimate president. Since then, discrediting Black and Brown people’s full human standing, particularly women’s, has been a central feature of his presidency, as shown when he told “the Squad” to “go back” to wherever they came from; three were born in the US, and the fourth, Ilhan Omar, found asylum in the US as a child. Similarly, the Trump campaign attempts to chip away at Kamala Harris’s legitimacy as a presidential candidate with messaging underpinned by the white South’s historic veneration of manliness, suspicion regarding anyone who is not white, and fear of anarchy.[1] Trump’s ads against Harris and, through her, Joe Biden, contain elements of traditional, religion-laced white supremacy and sexism, which attempt to attract Trump’s white, evangelical Christian base through rhetorical […]
Continue ReadingPrince, Seventh-Day Adventism and the Apocalyptic Threat of the 1980s
In the light of his recent death, it is important to note how Prince’s music contributed to public discourse about religious norms and eschatological hopes. Prince’s most successful period as a recording artist came during the 1980s, and his lyrics throughout this decade reflect a contemporary escalation in discussions of the apocalyptic.
Continue ReadingShadows in History: Religious and Intellectual History in Higher Education
The final post in the ‘Teaching America’ series is by Professor Raymond J. Haberski Jr. (Indiana University School of Liberal Arts) , author of God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945, (Rutgers University Press, 2012) , who discusses his approach to teaching intellectual and religious history in higher education.
Continue ReadingAmerica’s First Muslim Convert: Alexander Russell Webb
The Nineteenth Century was a period of unprecedented religious innovation within the United States, writes John L. Crow (Florida State University). It was also at this time that America started looking east and paying attention to the religions of India, China, and Japan. By the end of the century, the first American Buddhist organization was founded by Japanese missionaries in California. It was during this period when so many eyes were looking east that Alexander Russell Webb found Islam.
Continue ReadingThe religious life of Malcolm X
Considering the profound impact Islam had on the life of Malcolm X, particularly in shaping his political views and changing his ideology of racism, Preeti Bath argues, it is an aspect of his life that needs to be further researched in order to truly understand the religious journey of Malcolm X (Malik E Shabazz), from an atheist to a minister for the NOI to a Sunni Muslim.
Continue ReadingAs American as Apple Pie: U.S. Female Converts to Islam
As U.S. citizens who understand American cultural and societal norms, American female converts to Islam are in a good position to serve as advocates and agents for change, not only for themselves, but also on behalf of their fellow Muslim Americans. These American voices are offering a challenge to both the greater non-Muslim American community and the Muslim American community in clearly articulated, individual voices saying: I am a ‘real American’, I am a ‘real Muslim’, I am ready to have the conversation. You bring the vanilla ice cream – I’ll bring the apple pie.
Continue ReadingRacializing “Muslims”: Constructing a Muslim Archetype
More recently scholars, including those focusing on European Muslims, have incorporated the racialization framework to complement, rather than replace, Orientalism and Islamophobia to explain how Muslims experience prejudice and discrimination. This paper reinforces the racialization framework by arguing that in the United States Muslims have become victims of race-based violence through the construction of visible archetype of “Muslim” utilizing symbolic markers such as name, dress, phenotype, and language (Naber 2008). How do we explain the experiences of Muslims, who are ethnically, nationally, racially, and phenotypically diverse, in terms of racism?
Continue ReadingContemporary Pakistani American Women Writers: Writing their own stories, finding their own voices
Instead of presenting homogeneous views of the Pakistani American experience of immigrant or second-generation women, each of the authors articulates the need to be different in order to define and decide the lives of their women characters in their respective fiction. They present the Pakistani identity as well as the influence of Islam in the lives of their protagonists, not as a central element, but as another trait that adds to the individual characters. They, therefore, voice unique lives and present diverse stories that reflect select stories of the Pakistani American women’s experience in and among the Other in the US.
Continue ReadingReading Islamophobia in Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran”
One of the more subtle platforms from which RLT promotes its unique Islamophobic agenda is the recurrent rendering of Islam as tantamount to Marxism and Communism in their alleged totalitarianism, strategies, and end results. In her discussion of the political milieu that dominated the immediate post-Revolution sociopolitical landscape in Iran, Nafisi’s memoir is predisposed to equate the predominant Islamic movement of the time with those of the Marxist and Communist parties.
Continue ReadingGod and the Revolution: Christianity, the South, and the Communist Party of the USA
In an article written for the Financial Times in October 2013, the journalist Robert Wright claimed that “[o]rganised labour has never taken hold in the American South, where unions are viewed with suspicion”. He quoted Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who argued that this was reinforced by Southern religion.[1] This perception also permeates much of the historiography of the region.[2] There is clearly some valid evidence for this interpretation, including Irving Bernstein’s belief that, since mill owners’ paid ministers’ salaries, religion could be used to tamp down labour activism.[3] As the Nobel Prize-winning American author Sinclair Lewis wrote during the Depression: employers controlled “the whole human train, down to the clerical caboose”.[4] Nevertheless, I believe that a more nuanced examination is required. Religion in the American South was, after all, remarkably varied.[5] With that in mind, this article looks at what may appear […]
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