A Congregational Remapping of Culture Wars

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Dale McConkey ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Moral Truth ◽  
Culture War ◽  
Liberal Politics

According to many, the United States is embroiled in a culture war between religious conservatives, who believe in a transcendent moral authority, and religious liberals, who hold that moral truth is historically and contextually conditioned. Amidst this conflict is a cultural anomaly called the evangelical left, which blends conservative theology with liberal politics. An ethnographic study of an evangelical left congregation suggests that their social and political action is neither liberal nor progressive. Instead, this congregation has created a local culture that resists and remaps the traditional boundaries of the culture wars. This remapping centers on the concept of conventional relationships, which envelops every aspect of their fellowship, including theology and morality as well as social action. Yet the relational focus of this fellowship is not a new or unique cultural formation, but rather a rediscovery of traditional Christian social action.

New Fronts in the Culture Wars? Religion, Partisanship, and Polarization on Religious Liberty and Transgender Rights in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 650-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremiah Castle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Culture War ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Original Culture ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Partisan Conflict

Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced religious and partisan conflict over cultural issues such as abortion that was described as a “Culture War.” Recent, highly salient battles over religious liberty and transgender rights have led the media to characterize these issues as “new fronts in the culture war,” thereby giving reason to revisit the culture wars debate. In this article, I test whether the public is polarized on religious liberty and transgender rights, as well as whether these issues share the same underlying structure of public opinion as traditional culture wars issues. Using a dataset from the Pew Research Center, I find that a substantial subset of Americans hold polarized views on these issues, and that religion and party are important factors in explaining that polarization. The results suggest that the religious and partisan divides that fueled the original “culture wars” remain an important factor in American politics.

Latina/o Religious Politics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felipe Hinojosa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Politics ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Family Choices ◽  
Personal Matter

Religion is at the heart of the Latina/o experience in the United States. It is a deeply personal matter that often shapes political orientations, how people vote, where they live, and the type of family choices they make. Latina/o religious politics—defined as the religious beliefs, ethics, and cultures that motivate social and political action in society—represent the historic interaction between popular and institutional religion. The evolution of Protestantism, Pentecostalism, and Catholic Social Action throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries illuminates the ways in which Latina/o religious communities interacted with movements for social justice.

What Progressive Efforts Tell Us about Faith and Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhys H. Williams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
The Media ◽  
Progressive Religion

In a concluding chapter, Rhys H. Williams assesses the ways in which attention to the complexities of progressive religion in the United States forces us to reassess longstanding theoretical understandings of religion, social movements, civic life, and political action. Drawing out key themes and questions that emerged from the volume, the conclusion examines the factors that have led to the low visibility of progressive religious social action in the media and academic research, and points to several conceptual and empirical benefits of taking progressive religion into account when studying American political life.

Aestheticism, Civil Society, and the Origins of Totalitarianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Mangrum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
New Critics ◽  
Second World

This chapter argues that ongoing concerns about the rise of totalitarianism led writers and intellectuals in the United States to oppose social-democratic institutions after the Second World War. Familiar accounts about opposition to these institutions center on conservative politics. In contrast, this chapter argues that liberal thinkers invoked forms of aestheticism to combat what they perceived as the possible rise of totalitarianism in the United States. In order to document this under-explored trend in American political culture, this chapter establishes connections across writing by Lionel Trilling, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, the New Critics, and the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. These figures in postwar cultural life invoked aestheticism in the arenas of literature, philosophy, political action, and economics as a prophylactic to the perceived intrusions of an activist-managerial state.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

Undocumented Status and Schooling for Newcomer Teens

2015 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 478-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine C. Allard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
High School ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Undocumented Students ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Transnational Identities ◽  
Undocumented Status ◽  
Professional Aspirations

In this ethnographic study, Elaine C. Allard describes and analyzes the characteristics and experiences of undocumented newcomer adolescents attending a US suburban high school. She considers the ways in which newcomer adolescents show agency in their border crossing, prioritize work over formal education, and express transnational identities. She contrasts their experience with the predominant narrative of DREAMers, undocumented childhood arrivals who are often characterized as migrating to the United States “through no fault of their own,” who prioritize professional aspirations through schooling, and who are “American in spirit.” Allard calls attention to a subgroup of undocumented students who may benefit from different approaches by educators and immigrant advocates.

A King Cyrus President

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Barrett-Fox
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Moral Majority ◽  
Open Coding

Religious right leaders and voters in the United States supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election for the same reason that all blocs vote as they do: They believed that the candidate offered them the best opportunity to protect and extend their power and create their preferred government. The puzzle of their support, then, is less why they chose Trump and more how they navigated the process of inserting Trump into their story of themselves as a “moral” majority. This self-understanding promotes and exploits feelings of entitlement, fear, resentment, and the desire to dominate to encourage political action. Because Trump’s speeches affirm these feelings, religious right voters were open to writing a plot twist in their story, casting Trump as a King Cyrus figure, as their champion if not a coreligionist. This article analyzes appeals to and expressions of entitlement, fear, resentment, and the desire to dominate from more than 60 sermons, speeches, and books by religious right authors, Donald Trump, and Trump surrogates. Using open coding, it identifies themes in how these emotions are recognized, affirmed, and invoked by speakers, focusing on Trump’s Cyrus effect.

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