Faith In America Research Articles

From religious liberty to faith in America: JFK, Mitt Romney, and the rise of the religious right

ABSTRACT In 1960, John Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president, appeared before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to address concerns about what the election of a Catholic would mean for Protestant America. His speech was a classic defense of the separation of church and state and the right to privacy in matters of religion. In 2007, in his first, unsuccessful run for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney gave a similar speech trying to explain how his Mormon faith would inform his term in office. The speeches had similar purposes, with each candidate trying to calm fears about his faith, but the differences between them are striking and reveal much about the changing role of religion in presidential politics over those forty-seven years. The most consequential change in the intersection of American religion and politics between these two speeches was the emergence of the religious right and its place as a part of the Republican Party’s base. Where Kennedy faced a more generalized Protestant resistance to his candidacy, Romney had to deal with a conservative faction within the Republican Party that had embraced a specific policy agenda. Kennedy was thus able to appeal to broader American values such as religious liberty and church/state separation, while Romney, to win the nomination, had to support policies that weakened his appeal in the general election.

Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light

Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light

Toward a Practical, Civic Piety: Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, and the Race for National Priest

Abstract In 2008, two of the leading presidential candidates emerged from controversial, outsider religious groups—Mormonism and the black church tradition. Dogged by ongoing questions from the media, each candidate produced a high-profile public address. In this article, I argue that Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” craft competing visions for American civic piety. Drawing on recent literature in the area of practical piety, I read the speeches as evidence that civic piety may be more than a subordinating, pragmatic agreement between church and state. It may instead be read as a spiritually substantive space of cultural identity formation. I further conclude that the 2008 election reveals a contested piety in the midst of transition, and that this transition points in a relatively well-defined direction for American civil-religious culture.

Mitt Romney's Paralipsis: (Un)Veiling Jesus in “Faith in America”

Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled “Faith in America.” This article argues that Romney's use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture.

Review of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Journey West: The Course of Human Solidarity, Negar Mottahedeh, editor, and of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in America by Robert H. Stockman

'Abdu'l-Baha in America. By Robert H. Stockman. Bahai Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 2012; 413 pp.'Abdu'l-Baha's Journey West: The Course of Human Solidarity. Edited by Negar Mottahedeh, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2013, xiii + 196 pp.It would be no exaggeration to say that Abdu'l-Baha s travels in Europe were a major event in the history of the Baha'i Faith. historic journeys to the West, Shoghi Effendi states, and in particular His eight-month tour of the United States of America, may be said to have marked the culmination of His ministry, a ministry whose untold blessings stupendous achievements only future generations can adequately estimate (God Passes By 291). A faith born a mere half-century earlier in Persia virtually unknown beyond its cultural confines suddenly entered the Western stage, proclaiming its message of unity of mankind, universal peace, equality of races sexes, harmony of religion science, universal education, essential unity of religions.The events of those two years were recorded, however incompletely, in the Bahai magazine Star of the West in Mirza Mahmud Zarqani's detailed chronicle, Kitab-i-Badayi'u'l-Athar, known in its English translation as Mahmud's Diary. The significance repercussions of Abdu'lBaha s Western travels were emphasized in the relevant chapters of Shoghi Effendi's God Passes By admirably treated in Hasan Balyuzi's biography, Abdu'l-Baha. Allan Ward's 239 Days: Abdu'l-Bahas Journey in America, provided a welcome guide to a memorable journey that found a prominent place in the memoirs of individuals too numerous to mention, who met Abdu'l-Baha became his devoted disciples.Robert H. Stockman's Abdu'l-Baha in America is a straightforward account from the day Abdu'l-Baha received the invitation to visit the to the day He embarked on His return voyage. Stockman is no novice at writing on the history of the Faith. His biography of Thornton Chase, the first American Baha'i, is an important contribution, throwing light on the person in the wider context of his life times. His two volumes, The Bahai Faith in America, beginning with its origins on this continent in the late nineteenth century continuing to Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 journey, make Stockman's latest book in a sense a sequel to his earlier works.As he had previously demonstrated, Stockman is a thorough researcher who carefully analyzes his sources that include institutional documents, speeches, private correspondence, published unpublished memoirs, a large number of newspaper magazine articles, many of which had not been studied before. Access to the archives of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States opened to him a treasure trove of information that is both new valuable. Throughout his book he pays attention to details that add to the authenticity of his narrative. He corrects, for instance, a number of chronological mistakes in the otherwise reliable Zarqani's Mahmud's Diary, mistakes that may have been caused by the problem of dealing with more than one calendar when he was writing his chronicle.Stockman is constantly aware of the environment in which Abdu'l-Baha moved. The comparison he makes between the messages of Abdu'l-Baha those of several prominent Oriental sages shows the differences both of the messages of their effects on American society. Attention to context enriches Stockman's narrative raises question that other historians will have to address.In Abdu'l-Baha in America Stockman gives a panoramic view of Abdu'lBaha's coast-to-coast travels multifarious activities: a meeting with a former president of the United States a visit to the homeless in the Bowery; dinners at embassies wealthy homes; speeches at universities, including Stanford, Howard, Columbia, as well as at churches synagogues, at peace societies, at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, at private homes; in addition to uncounted conversations with individuals of all classes, ethnicities, beliefs. …

The Other Heading of America: Derrida and Emerson on the Future of an Illusion

I. THE NEW AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM Over past half-century, American Studies has departed from romantically inclined reception of its canonical authors, and moved towards ideologically entrenched rejection of American idealism. According to Richard Rorty's stark assessment of this situation in Achieving Our Country (1998), New Left, or what he calls School of Resentment, has become a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left, rather than Left which dreams of achieving our (35). He traces utopian aspirations in American letters from Walt Whitman to John Dewey, both of whom he describes as anti-absolutists who nevertheless managed to retain romantico-pragmatic faith in America. He claims they viewed the United States as opportunity to see ultimate in finite, human, historical project, rather than in something eternal and nonhuman (17). He explains, wanted that utopian America to replace God as unconditional object of desire. They wanted struggle for social justice to be country's animating principle, nation's soul (18). Critics of New Left, however, at least according to Rorty's polemical account, have not only dispensed with utopian dreams of past, they have lost all hope for future of their country. He observes, associate American patriotism with endorsement of atrocities: importation of African slaves, slaughter of Native Americans, rape of ancient forests, and Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists (7). Donald Pease, founding figure and leading proponent of New American Studies, would seem to fit Rorty's bill. In his recent book, The New American Exceptionalism (2009), he even suggests, might be said to begin when country becomes patriotic fiction for its (166). (1) Such reduction of patriotism to bellicosity hardly does justice to twin phenomena in question, yet this does seem to be grand gesture of his magisterial case study of American fantasy life from Cold War to present. Offering Lacanian account of of real that was visited upon American people on September 11, 2001, Pease remarks, crises of magnitude of 9/11 are always accompanied by mythologies that attempt to reconfigure them within frames of reference that would generate imaginary resolutions to these crises.... [M]yths give closure to traumatizing historical events by endowing them with moral significance (156). The trauma of 9/11 figures as yet another instantiation of what he calls primal of American Exceptionalism: catastrophic site of interpretation so devastating for imagination that it not take place except through traumatizing displacement of all other representable spaces (17). This mythological moment produces surplus fantasy of an inaccessible place that could only be accessed retroactively, which symbolizes lost plenitude of that never existed. Pease explains that events like 9/11 trigger obsessive compulsion to retreat from scene of disaster and back into fantasized womb. The Bush administration simply borrowed tools of trade provided by Cold War romanticists--most notably myth of Virgin Soil, which effaced atrocities committed by early settlers, and thus secured for American people illusion of their radical innocence--in order to help institutionalize Homeland Security State. Pease provides brilliant genealogy of various permutations this national mythology has undergone over past four centuries, but he does so only to arrive at disheartening conclusion that by time of 9/11, America had already lost whatever moral higher ground it may have wished to recuperate from out of wreckage of its formerly glorious but always already fabricated virginity. The apparently Rortyian end result of his psychoanalysis of national state fantasy is that American dream is only ideological mystification of radical evil of human condition; American Exceptionalism is synonymous with history of genocide, slavery, and oppression; and American patriotism means little else besides love of war. …

Dealing with the Bomb: Nonproliferation, Missile Defense, and the Quest to Develop Usable Weapons

In recent years, the US government has elevated the stature of nonproliferation in the realm of international affairs. For instance, on April 8, 2010, in Prague, US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New START Treaty. Quickly ratified, the treaty will drastically reduce the number of both US and Russian deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Nonproliferation and the prevention of nuclear terrorism also received the highest priority in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. These initiatives are the latest in a long chain of US efforts since 1945 to come to grips with the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons. Three recent books examine different aspects of this conundrum. In his study, Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present, Shane J. Maddock, a professor of history at Stonehill College, examines Washington's efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons since 1945. Having an abiding faith in America's industrial might and technological innovation, both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman believed that the United States could maintain a nuclear monopoly for many years. To a certain degree, their faith in the nuclear monopoly made sense on scientific and geopolitical grounds. During World War II, the United States was in an advantageous position vis-à-vis other countries to build an atomic bomb, as the country possessed the world's largest industrial base, a geographic location beyond the reach of enemy bombers, and an unparalleled body of nuclear scientists, many of whom fled Hitler's new order in Europe. By contrast, the Axis Powers, along with the Soviet Union and Britain, could not afford to divert resources to a hypothetical weapon while they were in the throes of an existential conflict. Moreover, the territories of all of these countries were subject to invasion and repeated bombings, which rendered large-scale research facilities vulnerable to destruction.

The End of Innovation?

As we've struggled to navigate the Great Recession, innovation has become a central concern. Politicians and economists both suggest that the only way out of the current bleak outlook is to innovate our way out, and President Obama's administration has made innovation initiatives a rhetorical centerpiece of its economic program. These discussions all reflect a certain faith in America's ability to innovate, but they also express a particular anxiety. Declines in the key indicators of economic growth seem to correlate with declines in RD the article asserts that the sluggish economy is responsible for the apparent lag, suggesting that companies are putting the brakes on innovation projects until the prospects are better. …

No Jack Kennedy: Mitt Romney's “Faith in America” Speech and the Changing Religious-Political Environment

In December of 2007, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney traveled to Texas to give an address on religion and politics. The speech was heralded by many as Romney's “JFK moment.” This study explores the campaign religion speeches of Kennedy and Romney by considering various issues concerning context, audience, and content of the two speeches. Guiding this analysis is Roderick Hart's work on the civil-religious contract and Kenneth Burke's work on dramatistic analysis, which are utilized to demonstrate that—despite the media's proclamations—Romney's speech represented a stark shift from Kennedy's rhetorical approach. Implications are drawn concerning the differences between the two speeches and an understanding of the confessional political style guiding the intersection of religion and politics today.

Mitt Romney, "Faith in America," and the Dance of Religion and Politics in American Culture

This essay examines the interplay of religion and politics in the 2008 Republican primary. It does so by using Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech as a lens for analyzing, interpreting, and commenting upon the place of religious discourse in American politics. Romney's speech functioned as a sort of Rorschach test through which various segments of the voting public read their own beliefs, values, fears, and prejudices. By examining audience response to Romney's speech across the elite media, I isolate the beliefs and attitudes of these media elites and their readers toward religion in the public sphere. I then subject those beliefs and attitudes to critical examination.

Confronting Antisemitism in America: Louis Marshall and Henry Ford

Louis Marshall served as president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) from 1912 until his death in 1929. In that capacity, he became the man to whom Jewish issues of the time were referred.' He brought to that task both a passionate commitment to the well-being of the Jewish people and a blend of principle and pragmatism that reflected his long experience as a lawyer, his faith in America's constitutional democracy, and a deeply considered view of the status of Jews in America. American born, he felt confidently at home both as an American and a Jew. He moved easily between his role as a busy and successful lawyer and his representation of Jewish institutions and the causes they embodied. Most notably, in a period of increasingly outspoken antisemitism, Mar shall gave vigorous expression to the view that the protection and promo tion of Jewish interests in America required neither self-ghettoization nor self-denial but rather the skillfull and tenacious invocation of undeniably American values—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, respect for human equality and diversity. Articulating Jewish communal interests in terms that resonated with America's self-proclaimed aspirations, he was neither timid nor insecure but vociferously refused to recognize any legiti mate distinction between the rights of Jews and all the other minorities of which America is composed. In doing so he shaped the strategy that guided the Jewish community through the 20th century and down to the present day. Marshall's response to a particularly dramatic antisemitic challenge, the campaign against American Jews by Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent, provides an illuminating case study. On May 22, 1920, the Dearborn Independent, a weekly journal owned by Ford, published the first of the extended series of antisemitic articles for which it soon became infamous. The first two issues were on Marshall's desk almost immediately. The gravity of the situation was clear to him.

Faith in America: changes, challenges, new directions: v.1: Organized religion today; v.2: Religious issues today; v.3: Personal spirituality today

Faith in America: changes, challenges, new directions: v.1: Organized religion today; v.2: Religious issues today; v.3: Personal spirituality today

Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions, 3 vols. by Charles H. Lippy, Editor

Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions, 3 vols. by Charles H. Lippy, Editor

Memoranda during the war

In December of 1862, having read his brother's name in a casualty list, Walt Whitman rushed from Brooklyn to the war front, where he found his brother wounded but recovering. But Whitman also found there a new world, a world dense with horror and revelation. Memoranda During the War is Whitman's testament to the anguish, heroism, and terror of the Civil War. book consists of journal entries extending from Whitman's arrival on the front in 1862 through to the war's conclusion in 1865. Whitman details his encounters with soldiers and doctors, meditates on particular battles and on the meanings of the war for the nation, and recounts his wordless though peculiarly intimate public exchanges with President a man Whitman saw often on the streets of Washington and by whom he was deeply fascinated. book offers an astounding amalgam of death portraits, anecdotes of battle, last words, messages to distant loved ones, and remarkably restrained and muted descriptions of pain, dismemberment, and dying-all of it, however grim, suffused with Whitman's undiminished enthusiasm and affection for these young soldiers. And throughout, we find Whitman laboring with heroic determination to sustain and nourish his once-ardent faith in America and American life, even as the nation unleashed unprecedented violence upon itself. book also includes Whitman's famous speech The Death of Abraham Lincoln, selected poems, and a letter to the parents of a deceased soldier. Edited and introduced by Peter Coviello, Memoranda During the War is a powerful portrait of a nation at war written by one of our greatest poets.

Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the Liberal Imagination

MICHAEL NOWLIN Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the Liberal Imagination Irving howe's 1963 essay "Black Boys and Native Sons" is today remembered primarily for occasioning Ralph Ellison's eloquent rebuttal , "The World and the Jug," a vigorous argument on behalf of African American cultural vitality and the African American artist's creative autonomy. From our historical vantage point, Ellison seems to have trumped Howe, for critics have generally followed Ellison in judging Howe presumptuous and narrowly prescriptive (ifnot inadvertently racist). But Howe's essay might be better remembered as a rather bold defense of Richard Wright and call for an African American literary opposition at a moment when Wright's critical stature was at its lowest, and when the notion of an African American literature was virtually inconceivable to the most sophisticated literary critics of the day, both within and without the academy. Howe used the highly select recognition afforded first Wright, and then Ellison and James Baldwin at the expense of Wright, as the surest gauge of national cultural tendencies he assumed to be deeply political. In effect, his subject was the politics of canon formation. Published in his own venue Dissent, which though anti-Communist sought to keep socialist political possibilities alive in the wake of McCarthyism, "Black Boys and Native Sons" articulated divisions within a loose community of white, largely Jewish, New York-based intellectuals that the consensus-oriented political and aesthetic culture of the early Cold War era was threatening to render insignificant . This entailed challenging the modes of modernist aesthetic resistance espoused in particular by the once radical Partisan Review, and a seemingly widespread willingness on the part of adversarial intellectuals to embrace the possibilities of Americanism.1 Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 2, Summer 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 ??8 Michael Nowlin The deeper target ofHowe's essay manifests itself in its third section. In their ostentatious rejection of the protest novel and "a narrow naturalism ," in their acceptance ofboth a tragic human condition and their guarded faith in America's possibilities, Baldwin and Ellison were squarely in line with "the outlook so many American intellectuals took during the years of a postwar liberalism not very different from conservatism " (Selected Writings 126-27). That "postwar liberalism," peculiarly harnessed to a modernist canon, got one of its most influential elaborations in Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950), which, though devoid of a single reference to an African American writer, helped establish the terms for debunking Richard Wright, despite the ironic fact that Trilling had favourably reviewed Black Boy when it came out in 1945.2 Of particular importance was Trilling's devastating judgment against Theodore Dreiser and left-wing naturalistic fiction— and more pointedly, against the "liberals" who acclaim such fiction— that formed the nucleus of THe Liberal Imagination's opening essay, "Reality in America." In the section that revised his 1946 review of Dreiser's The Bulwark for the Nation, Trilling argued that a taste for Dreiser precluded a proper recognition of the rarer achievement of Henry James, and thus signaled a politically dangerous indifference to the freedom encoded in aesthetic, which for Trilling were intellectual, distinctions. "Dreiser and James," wrote Trilling: with that juxtaposition we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet. . . . the difference between James and Dreiser is not of kind, for both men addressed themselves to virtually the same social and moral fact. The difference here is one of quality, and perhaps nothing is more typical of American liberalism than the way it has responded to the respective qualities of the two men. (Liberal io-n) Behind the Wright and Baldwin-Ellison opposition of Howe's essay, I would argue, lies the Dreiser-James opposition. Thirteen years after The Liberal Imagination appeared—with a 1950s brand of liberalism akin to conservatism in mind instead of a 1930s liberalism open to Communist fellow-traveling—Howe tried unsuccessfully to turn the tables on Trilling by arguing that the sorry state ofAmerican liberalism is typified by its uncritical response to Ellison and Baldwin.3 The Liberal Imagination 119 Howe had good reason to charge the new African American literary lions...

Eli Lederhendler, Who Owns Judaism? Public Religion and Private Faith in America and Israël

Eli Lederhendler, Who Owns Judaism? Public Religion and Private Faith in America and Israël

American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960

In this celebration of contemporary fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.

Rethinking the Legacy of the Liberal State in Latin America: The cases of Argentina (1853–1916) and Mexico (1857–1910)

The predominant interpretation of nineteenth century Latin America is to see the failure of constitutional democracy in the region in terms of the inability of liberal elites to break with an authoritarian past. Against these views, we argue that the divorce between liberalism and democracy in Latin America was the unintended outcome of the institutions created by the liberal elite in response to the problems of territorial fragmentation and factional conflict that emerged after the fall of the Spanish empire. Using the cases of Argentina and Mexico, we support this proposition by focusing on the creation of a centralised form of government and a system of electoral control by the ruling elites as the main factors that through time prevented the evolution of the liberal regime into a competitive democracy.There is no good faith in America, nor among the nations of America. Treaties are scraps of paper; constitutions, printed matter; elections, battles; freedom, anarchy; and life, a torment.Simón Bolívar

American Voudou: journey into a hidden world

Voudou (an older spelling of voodoo)—a pantheistic belief system developed in West Africa and transported to the Americas during the diaspora of the slave trade—is the generic term for a number of similar African religions which mutated in the Americas, including santeria, candomble, macumbe, obeah, Shango Baptist, etc. Since its violent introduction in the Caribbean islands, it has been the least understood and most feared religion of the New World—suppressed, out-lawed or ridiculed from Haiti to Hattiesburg. Yet with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston's accounts more than a half-century ago and a smattering of lurid, often racist paperbacks, studies of this potent West African theology have focused almost exclusively on Haiti, Cuba and the Caribbean basin. American Voudou turns our gaze back to American shores, principally towards the South, the most important and enduring stronghold of the voudou faith in America and site of its historic yet rarely recounted war with Christianity. This chronicle of Davis' determined search for the true legacy of voudou in America reveals a spirit-world from New Orleans to Miami which will shatter long-held stereotypes about the religion and its role in our culture. The real-life dramas of the practitioners, true believers and skeptics of the voudou world also offer a radically different entree into a half-hidden, half-mythical South, and by extension into an alternate soul of America. Readers interested in the dynamic relationships between religion and society, and in the choices made by people caught in the flux of conflict, will be heartened by this unique story of survival and even renaissance of what may have been the most persecuted religion in American history.

On Common Ground: World Religions in America

Combining text, video, graphics and music, this CD-ROM maps the diverse culture of faith in America. From a Hindu temple near Boston to the nation's oldest Islamic center in Iowa, it surveys Christian, Jewish, Jain, Sikh, Buddist, Islamic, Zoroastrian, African-American, and Pagan communities.