scholarly journals Why Can't a Pastor Be President of a “Christian Nation”? Pentecostal Politics as Religious Mediation

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Haynes
Keyword(s):  
Christian Nation

Compromising Positions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Dorrough Smith
Keyword(s):  
National Health ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Values ◽  
Sex Scandals ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
Christian Nation

Compromising Positions argues that sex scandals aren’t really about sex. Rather, they are a form of cultural theater—a moment of highly visible, public storytelling—the purpose of which is to use specific racial and gendered symbols to create a collective sense of national worth and strength. To arrive at this conclusion, the book charts the ways in which attitudes about gender, race, and religion are woven together to create a certain sort of rhetoric about what America is, who is eligible to formally represent it, and what types of religiosity such leaders must display in order to legitimize their power. The book shows that Americans simultaneously condemn and excuse the sexual indiscretions of their politicians depending on the degree to which those politicians reinforce longstanding, evangelical symbols—many of which are heavily raced and gendered—that are associated with “American values” and a “Christian nation.” Such values include not just moral fortitude but also strength, courage, and conquest. The upshot is that sex scandals are less likely to occur at cultural moments when the public is open to reading a politician’s moral lapse as a symbolic form of national dominance. Put simply, when he is perceived as strong, domineering, and necessary for national health, many people will find ways to either forget his illicit sex or somehow read it as an American act.

scholarly journals Review on: Rod Dreher. The Benedict Option. A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. New York: Sentinel, 2017

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-152
Author(s):  
Павел Великанов
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Linear Scheme ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
American Society ◽  
Christian Nation

У Рода Дреера получилась сильная, понятная и мотивирующая книга. Это настоящий эталон миссионерской (в светском значении этого слова) литературы. За ярким предисловием следует достаточно объёмный, но совсем не скучный экскурс в историю западноевропейской философии, в котором эта самая история постепенно складывается в линейную схему. Как считает автор, с позднего Средневековья и по настоящее время западноевропейское (и, как производная от него, американское) общество движется исключительно по пути моральной деградации и отхода от религии. Но это не эсхатологическая картина «охладения любви», о которой говорил Христос Спаситель (Мф. 24, 12). Речь идёт о якобы существующем кризисе одной из человеческих культурных моделей, вполне преодолимом человеческим же усилием. Rod Dreher's book is strong, clear and motivating. This is a true benchmark of missionary (in the secular sense of the word) literature. A vivid preface is followed by a rather voluminous, but not at all boring excursion into the history of Western European philosophy, in which this very history is gradually formed into a linear scheme. According to the author, from the late Middle Ages to the present, Western European (and, as a derivative of it, American) society has been moving exclusively along the path of moral degradation and departure from religion. But this is not the eschatological picture of the "cooling down of love" of which Christ the Saviour spoke (Matthew 24:12). We are talking about the alleged crisis of one of the human cultural models, quite surmountable by human efforts.

Simple Hardworking Christian Folks, or the Self-Image of Contemporary Belarusian Kolkhozniks

2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-279
Author(s):  
Anna Engelking
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Field Research ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The Common ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Christian Nation ◽  
Source Materials ◽  
Insight Into

This article concerns the anthropological inquiry about collective identity of contemporary Belarusian kolkhozniks. The author had conducted her field research (1993-2011) in both west and east Belarus. Source materials consist of about seven hundred conversations with individuals overwhelmingly more than sixty years of age. By analyzing and interpreting their narrative, the author traced the implicit values, norms, rules, basic semiotic dichotomies, and distinctive attributes in search of an unbiased insight into the content, structure, and building process of collective identity of the subjects under study. She concludes that the dichotomies, constitutive for collective identity of kolkhozniks—“peasant” versus “lord,” “peasant” versus “Jew,” and “Christian” versus “Jew”—result in the self-definition of muzhik-kolkhoznik as a simple, hard-working man “from here” belonging to a “Christian nation.” Neither the nation nor motherland, state nor language, belongs to the principal values of this group, which are “working the land” and “faith in God.” As a result of the petrifaction of the old model of the serfdom manor by the Soviet kolkhoz system, in a Belarusian village we presently encounter one of the last European residuals of premodern mentality and social identity. The image of Belarusian kolkhozniks’ collective identity has little to do with the popular category of Homo sovieticus and with the common stereotype of the kolkhoz. The human subject of the author’s anthropological reflection shows up as a person dealing amazingly well with extremely difficult living conditions and the modern, vivid personification of the archaic Homo religiosus.

scholarly journals SHERWOOD EDDY, THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, AND THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN INTERNATIONALISM IN 1920S AMERICA

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL G. THOMPSON
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Christian Nation

By tracing the career of influential YMCA missionary Sherwood Eddy, this essay brings to light the origins of Christian internationalism in 1920s America. Far more than mere boosterism for Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, and far more than mere “pacifism” or Social Gospel “idealism”(reductive categories with which activism in the period is often associated), Christian internationalism in the interwar period was a movement defined by three broad and far-reaching impulses. First, it was characterized by the proliferation of new enterprises such as travelling seminars, conferences and publications devoted to reflection on the ethics of international relations. Second, it comprised a holistic, oppositional and radical political orientation that went beyond legalist internationalism and encompassed agitation against imperialism and racism. Third, the movement was premised on a fundamental critique of the idea of America as a “Christian nation”. Eddy's career highlights the unique importance of the missionary enterprise in giving shape to these impulses in the 1920s and beyond.

Religious factor in the political process in Zambia: mutual influence of religion and politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Liubov Prokopenko
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Ethnicity And Politics ◽  
Christian Nation

The article examines the problem of growing politicization in some religious confessions, primarily Christianity, in the process of democratization that began in Zambia in the early 1990s. Zambia is one of the African countries whose religious leaders have played a prominent role in social life throughout their history. It is especially noted that the proclamation of Zambia a Christian nation in 1991 by President Frederick Chiluba contributed greatly to the strengthening of mutual influence between politics and religion. In modern Zambia religious organizations adhere generally to neutrality, the liberal part of all confessional groups seeing their task in solving primary social problems. In recent decades there have been no pronounced ethnic and religious contradictions in the country which could contribute to an emergence of open bloody conflicts threatening internal security and stability. The article shows that with Edgar Lungu’s (Patriotic Front, PF) coming to power in 2015, Zambia was proclaimed a Christian nation again, which was enshrined in the new edition of its Constitution. The campaigns for presidential elections in 2015 and for general elec-tions in 2016 have shown that “religion-politics” discourse has become relevant in the political process, regarding primarily multiple rela-tionships between religion, ethnicity and politics. The country is on the eve of new general elections due in August 2021. In a difficult economic situation, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemics, Zambian government and Church officials are calling on voters to ensure peaceful electoral process.

The Great American Myths and a Different American Future

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Myths ◽  
American Creed ◽  
Christian Nation

The Great American Myths are the commonly accepted stories that, along with the American Creed, convey to most Americans the meaning of their nation. The first edition of Myths America Lives By identified five of those myths: the Chosen Nation, Nature’s Nation, the Christian Nation, the Millennial Nation, and the Innocent Nation. The second edition adds a sixth: the myth of White Supremacy. This chapter introduces the two primary arguments of this book—first, that the myth of White Supremacy is the primal American myth that informs all the others and, second, that one of the chief functions of the other five myths is to protect and obscure the myth of White Supremacy and assure us that we remain innocent after all. Most blacks understand that white supremacy is the primal American myth since they live with its real-life consequences. But those in positions of power are not forced to live with the consequences of this myth. As a result, for most American whites the myth of White Supremacy is like the air they breathe: it envelops and shapes them but does so in ways they seldom discern.

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