Religious Right Research Articles

Tony Abbott and Abortion: Miscalculating the Strength of the Religious Right

In the context of analyses of the rise of the religious right, this article examines the passage and outcomes of the ‘abortion debate’ from 2004 to 2006. It analyses the reasons for the then Health Minister Tony Abbott's pursuit of the issue, and his strategies to place abortion on the public agenda, through his encouragement of church lobbies and conservative allies in parliament. Although it is commonly argued that the influence of right-wing Christian lobbyists is growing, this exploration of the abortion debate indicates that this influence is limited, and that it was misunderstood and overstated at the time by politicians like Abbott, and by many political commentators.

The Religious Left in Contemporary American Politics

The religious right's prominence and clout in American politics are by now well known, but is there any semblance of a religious left to counterbalance it? This article presents an investigation of whether the elite-level building blocks of a religious left are in place in the contemporary United States. Using social movement theory as a point of departure, I analyze the extent to which existing religious left organizations might make use of cultural, material, and opportunity-structure resources. I present a typology of the range of organizations in existence and consider whether these organizations have sufficient capability to marshal the resources it would take for the religious left to reassert itself on the American political stage.

God‐botherers and other true‐believers: Gandhi, Hitler, and the religious right – By F.G. Bailey

God‐botherers and other true‐believers: Gandhi, Hitler, and the religious right – By F.G. Bailey

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Liberal Tradition and Obama's Counterterrorism Policy

Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of “Change We Can Believe In.” One of the biggest changes many anticipated with his election was a dramatic break with the previous administration's counterterror policy. There were good reasons for thinking that this would be the case. George W. Bush was a Republican who took his cues from the most conservative elements of his party, including neoconservatives, the religious right, and other proponents of an assertive stance of U.S. global primacy and a forward-leaning posture in the war on terror. Conversely, Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat who opposed the Iraq War and seeks to “reset” America's relations with other countries around the world by recommitting the United States to a more moderate approach to waging the war against al-Qaeda, including measures such as adopting a more multilateral foreign policy, closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, ending the practices of extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation, and showing a greater respect for civil liberties domestically.

The Deeper Roots of Faith and Foreign Policy

To the obvious relief of many, it appears that the wave that carried the religious right to power in the United States has crested. Though domestic issues such as health care or the environment threaten to enfiarne partisan and ideological tensions in US politics, the religious right does not seem to be playing a conspicuous role. Moreover, while the issues near and dear to Christian conservatives, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, continue to be relevant, they are not dominating the national agenda as they once did. In this sense, the end of the George W Bush presidency, the failure of Mike Huckabee's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, and the disastrous performance of the vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, have signalled a major shift in the American political landscape. Christian conservatives no longer seem to hold the balance of political power in America. In fact, for the first time in a generation, whether they even hold the balance of power within the Republican party is a matter of debate. And finally, of course, there is the election of Barack Obama, an ecumenical Protestant who is liberal on matters both political and theological.Does this mean the end of the religious right's influence on US foreign policy? Possibly - at least for now. But does this also portend the end of the religious influence on US foreign policy? Hardly. The presence of religion in American public life is too broad, deep, diffuse, and diverse to be reliant upon any single person or group. Indeed, the key to understanding the everpresent ideological and moral bases for US foreign policy - with which even realists have had to contend - lies mainly in a better understanding of an American religious tradition that cannot be reduced to simple stereotypes about evangelicals and fundamentalists. This is best illustrated by delving into the mindset of foreign policy figures, some of whom are not usually thought of as especially religious or pious. For those outside the United States trying to grapple with the often confusing path of US foreign policy, this is one of the least understood but most important lessons of history.BACKWARDS CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS?The story of the religious right's political rise and fall is straightforward enough. Until fairly recently, evangelicals and fundamentalists had been the most rigorous adherents to the doctrine of separating church from state, for it protected them from government regulation. As society's traditional economic and social outsiders, they felt they had much to fear from the state. This antistatism explains the religious right's conservative stance on other matters of public policy, such as welfare and taxation. But it also helps to explain why many Christian conservatives deliberately separated themselves from worldly concerns, such as politics. They would focus on God and, as the Bible enjoins, render unto Caesar the more secular concerns of governing this world on earth.This longstanding separation of conservative religion from conservative politics began to erode in the 1970s. Reacting to the liberalism and moral relativism of the 1960s - and especially to the sexual revolution in gender relations that led to relaxed attitudes towards homosexuality, abortion, sex, and birth control - and building on decades of grassroots growth, Christian conservatives felt they could no longer allow secular politicians to set the national agenda. Moreover, as the industrial base of the northeast and midwest rusted from within and its people fled for the suburbs, warmer temperatures, lower taxes, and more socially conservative values of the south and west, Christian conservatives discovered that they had moved from society's margins to its very centre. Similarly repelled by what they saw as the anarchy of the 1960s, many Americans who had never before considered themselves especially religious began to gravitate to conservative Protestant churches. By the 1990s, no longer was it correct to speak of a Christian conservative subculture - evangelicals had become part of the mainstream. …

Making sense of Pakistan

Pakistan's transformation from a country once projected as a model of Muslim enlightenment to a state now threatened by an Islamist take over dominates the headlines. Many account for the change by pointing to Pakistan's controversial partnership with the United States since 9/11; others see it as a consequence of Pakistan's long history of authoritarian rule, which has marginalized liberal opinion and left the field open for inroads by the religious right. Farzana Shaikh argues that while external influences and domestic politics have unquestionably shaped the direction of change, the country's social and political decline is rooted primarily in uncertainty about the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of 'being Pakistani'. She shows how this has pre-empted a consensus on the role of Islam in the public sphere, which has encouraged the spread of political Islam. It has also widened the gap between personal piety and public morality, corrupting the country's economic foundations and tearing apart its social fabric. More ominously still, it has given rise to a new and dangerous symbiosis between the country's powerful armed forces and Muslim extremists. They have been rival contenders in the struggle to redefine the meaning of Pakistan but their convergence, enhanced by internal and foreign conflicts, has led to the militarization of society and the Islamization of the military. Drawing on her earlier work on the origins of Pakistan, Shaikh demonstrates how the culture and ideology that constrained Indo-Muslim politics in the years leading to Partition in 1947 have left their mark on the country. In this broad yet discriminating study, these insights from history are skilfully deployed to better understand Pakistan's troubled present.

Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (review)

Reviewed by: Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity James G. Gilmore Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity. By Charles Marsh. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008; pp. x + 246. $14.95 paper. For scholars studying the relationship between American Christianity and political life, the months leading up to the Iraq War provide some fascinating material. Leading American evangelical Christian figures openly proclaimed from the pulpit that the military invasion of Iraq was a clear moral imperative and that it was the duty of American Christians to support their nation's leadership and their decision to go to war, even as mainline Christian denominations, the Roman Catholic Church, and non American Christians of all traditions were virtually unanimous in unequivocal condemnation. Lines between religiosity, nationalism, and militarism were blurred by an evangelical movement that seemed to conflate America's cause with Christianity's cause. Charles Marsh's contention in Wayward Christian Soldiers is that the lead-up to the war in Iraq represents a flashpoint in the political history of American evangelicalism and should serve as a wake-up call to an American evangelical movement that has become too enmeshed with American nationalism. Drawing on the work of theologians throughout the history of Christianity, his personal experiences growing up the son of a Baptist minister in the South in the 1960s, and Christian scripture itself, he makes the case that contemporary American evangelicalism has lost sight of the social meaning of the Christian message and has thus sacrificed a global, historical, and traditional approach for a nationalist, worldly, and theologically loose one. In short, Wayward Christian Soldiers is written by an evangelical to an evangelical audience, and it represents theological criticism, not rhetorical criticism. Nevertheless, as such it presents opportunities for public affairs scholars, particularly those interested in religion and politics, to engage criticism from a different angle. Marsh urges evangelicals to "enter a season of quietness" in which they reevaluate their politics and theological viewpoints (18). American evangelicals' loudness, Marsh writes, has drowned out the true messages of Christianity. Marsh urges American evangelicals to listen to the global church and its concerns about how American policies are affecting the Christian message—to pass what he calls (after John Kerry's debate line in 2004) the "international test" (165). He urges American evangelicals to return to the [End Page 659] history and tradition of Christian theology and see the religious weaknesses of the nationalist tendencies of the religious right. As a reader with a background in theology and evangelical culture, I found this message refreshing, timely, and well argued. Rhetoricians, however—particularly rhetoricians without a religious background—may find the book difficult to approach. Wayward Christian Soldiers critically engages American evangelical discourse, but does so from the perspective of the theologian rather than the rhetorician. This in itself does not weaken the book's argument, which I found well reasoned and deep in its use of the Christian theological tradition, but it does mean that the book will function differently for the public affairs scholar than it will for the book's primary audience of evangelicals. For example, Marsh assumes that his audience, as evangelical Christians, will agree with him on certain foundational points: the authority of Scripture, the normativity of the Christian theological tradition, and the importance of a personal salvation experience. Nonevangelical readers may be taken aback by these assumptions, particularly his insistence upon the importance of spreading the Christian gospel, but I would argue that these assumptions are necessary for him to establish common ground with his primary audience so that he may present his argument as a critique from within rather than from without. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theological leader of the church movement that opposed the nationalism and racism of the state churches in Nazi Germany, looms large in Wayward Christian Soldiers as a counterpoint to the American evangelicals. Marsh constructs Bonhoeffer as an example of what he thinks Christianity should be—resistant to easy ideologies of nationalism, continually engaging Christian theology and listening to God, willing to martyr himself rather than support a corrupt Nazi regime—and then presents the American evangelicals as unwilling to live up to his example...

The Personal Is Not Political: The Progressive Conservative Response to Social Issues

The American religious right is often taken as the paradigmatic illustration of how conservatives responded to contestation over social issues such as same-sex rights and abortion. This article establishes that the response of Canadian conservatives – as expressed by the Progressive Conservative party – was quite different. The Progressive Conservatives held to a norm, grounded in their party's version of conservative ideology, that rendered partisan mobilization on social issues illegitimate. Rather, the party treated such topics as moral issues on which decisions, if they had to be made at all, ought to be made on grounds of personal conscience. The norm helped limit social conservative mobilization in Canada until the early 1990s, when the Reform Party replaced the Progressive Conservatives as Canada's major right-wing party.

The Jurisprudence of the Christian Right: Teachings from Regent and Liberty University Law Schools

No issue is more hotly contested in the culture wars than the proper place of religion in public life. On the one side are those who insist that religion is a purely private matter with no place in government. In contrast are those who hold that government should adhere to religious principles and that certain religiously grounded imperatives are so necessary to the human condition that they should be binding on everyone. Prominent among the latter forces is the Christian right. Right wing Christian lawyers are deeply engaged in the most divisive church-state controversies and issues confronting American society today, including abortion, same-sex marriage, prayer in the schools, vouchers for private schools, and religious displays in civic places. The legal branch of the religious right is an especially interesting expression because it labors under certain constraints that do not apply to the others. Because its schools seek to train lawyers for successful practice and seek accreditation from the American Bar Association, they must develop and present their views in carefully reasoned ways that meet the standards for legitimate legal training. Because its lawyers aim to prevail in negotiation and litigation, they must frame their arguments in ways that are persuasive in the highly structured and decidedly secular atmosphere of the courts. Hence if one wishes to find the most sober and rational positions emanating from the religious right on the issues that rend society today, one can do no better than to look to its legal wing.

The battle over school prayer: how Engel v. Vitale changed America

It has become known to many as the moment when the U.S. Supreme Court kicked God out of the public schools, supposedly paving the way for a decline in educational quality and a dramatic rise in delinquency and immorality. The 6-to-1 decision in Engel v. Vitale (1962) not only sparked outrage among a great many religious Americans, it also rallied those who cried out against what they perceived as a dangerously activist Court. Bruce Dierenfield has written a concise and readable guide to the first - and still most important - case that addressed the constitutionality of prayer in public schools. The 22-word recitation in a Long Island school that was challenged in Engel v. Vitale was hardly denominational - not even overtly Christian - but a handful of parents saw it as a violation of the First Amendment's proscription again the establishment of religion. The case forced the Supreme Court to take a stand on Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state. When it did so, the Court declared that by endorsing the prayer recitation - no matter how brief, nondenominational, or voluntary - the Long Island school board had unconstitutionally approved the establishment of religion in school. Writing with impeccable fairness and sensitivity, Dierenfield sets his account of the Engel decision in the larger historical and political context, citing battles over a wide range of religious activities in public schools throughout American history. He takes readers behind the scenes at school board meetings and Court deliberations to show real people wrestling with deeply personal issues. Through interviews with many of the participants, he also reveals the large price paid by the plaintiffs and their children, who were frequently harassed both during and after the trial. For a long time, opponents of the decision have loudly claimed that it was based on a distorted reading of the First Amendment and deprived Americans of their right to practice religion. Dierenfield shows that the polarizing effect of Engel - a decision every bit as controversial as Roe v. Wade - has reverberated through the subsequent decades and gained intensity with the rise of the religious right. His book helps readers understand why, even in the face of this landmark decision, Americans remain divided on how divided church and state should be.

Religious Freedom and the Constitution , and: Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America (review)

Reviewed by: Religious Freedom and the Constitution, and: Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America Matthew L. Harris (bio) Religious Freedom and the Constitution. By Christopher L. EisgruberLawrence G. Sager. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 333. Cloth, $28.95.) Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. By Ellis Sandoz. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. 230 pages. Cloth, $39.95). Ever since the Supreme Court announced in 1947 that the separation of church and state was enshrined in the Constitution, there has been a [End Page 481] powerful separationist impulse within the Court. It began in the 1940s; picked up steam in the 1960s with the prayer and Bible cases; then came to a crescendo in the 1990s and twenty-first century with such cases as prayer at school graduation ceremonies, Ten Commandments in courtrooms, and most recently, prayer at high school athletic contests. In each of these cases, the Court removed religion from the public sphere but, in doing so, the justices struggled to understand the nature and meaning of the First Amendment. If their divided opinions tell us anything, it is that they could not agree on how much was too much religion in the public sphere. Scholars have not been much help either, at least in offering the Court a clear roadmap of what church and state meant to the Founders. Witness in recent years the rancorous debate among scholars, as they have argued and debated the religious origins of the nation’s founding. During the last decade, scholars on the right have forcefully maintained that “the United States during the Founding Period was a Christian nation” (James Hutson, Forgotten Features of the Founding: The Recovery of Religious Themes in the Early Republic, Lanham, MD, 2003, 126), while scholars on the left have steadfastly asserted that it was founded as a secular society. What provoked the debate was the publication in 1996 of Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore’s The Godless Constitution, in which the authors, both Cornell University professors, offered a blistering attack on the religious right, vigorously challenging their assertion that the nation was founded on Christian principles. It was not a Christian founding, Kramnick and Moore argued, but a secular one—one where the Founders wanted to keep the church and the state separate. In their own right (and without fully acknowledging it), the two books under review have added to this debate. Ellis Sandoz, a political theorist by training, reveals the major role that Protestant Christianity played in the formation of the American republic. In Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, he posits a Christian nation where American republicanism was nurtured and sustained “under Providential guidance” (xi). According to Sandoz, republicanism was rooted in key texts of Protestant civilization, including common-law constitutionalism, Latin and Greek classics, and most especially the Bible. The Founders, he argues, were well-versed in Biblical language, which influenced them as they fought a revolution and wrote a constitution. To make his case, Sandoz rummages through the Founders’ speeches and writings, culling certain quotes to support his thesis. We are told that George Washington and [End Page 482] John Adams called for official days of prayer and fasting during their presidencies, Benjamin Rush and Samuel Adams frequently quoted Jesus in their public and private writings, and officials at the Continental Congress were thoroughgoing Christians who attended church during their time in office. All of this, presumably, is proof that, in Tocqueville’s words, the men and women who founded America “brought a Christianity which . . . can only [be] describe[d] as democratic and republican. . . . It was religion that gave birth to . . . America. One must never forget that” (3, 80). The problem with Sandoz’s argument is that he selectively quotes from the Founders’ writings, ignoring their letters, pamphlets, and public statements that would undercut his position. He loves to cite the “Christian” Founders—Benjamin Rush and Samuel Adams, in particular—but he rarely deals with the more “secular”-minded ones, namely Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, or James Madison. Similarly, he does not address interpretations that differ from his. He shows no awareness, for example, of Kramnick or Moore’s arguments, Derek Davis’s...

Sin in the city: Chicago and revivalism, 1880-1920

Long before today's culture wars, the Great rocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women. Sin in the City examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how sermons and street activism negotiated that era's perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. While most studies of this movement have focused on its male leaders and their interactions with society, Thekla Ellen Joiner raises new questions about gender and race by exploring Third Awakening revivalism as the ritualized performance of an evangelical social system defined by middle-class Protestant moral aspirations for urban America. Rather than approaching these events merely as the achievements of persuasive men, she views them as choreographed collective rituals reinforcing a moral order defined by ideals of femininity, masculinity, and racial purity. Joiner reveals how revivalist rhetoric and ritual shifted from sentimentalist identification of sin with males to a more hard-nosed focus on females, castigating loose whose economic and sexual independence defied revivalist ideals and its civic culture. She focuses on Dwight L. Moody's 1893 World's Fair revival, the 1910 Chapman-Alexander campaign, and the 1918 Billy Sunday revival, comparing the locations, organization, messages, and leaders of these three events to depict the shift from masculinized to feminized sin. She identifies the central role women played in the Third Awakening as the revivalists promoted feminine virtue as the corrective to America's urban decline. She also shows that even as its definition of sin became more feminized, Billy Sunday's revivalism began to conform to Chicago's emerging color line. Enraged by rapid social change in cities like Chicago, these preachers spurred Protestant evangelicals to formulate a gendered and racialized moral regime for urban America. Yet, as Joiner shows, even as revivalists demonized new forms of entertainment they used many of the modern cultural practices popularized in theaters and nickelodeons to boost the success of their mass conversions. Sin in the City shows that the legacy of the Third Awakening lives on today in the religious right's socio-political activism; crusade for family values; disparagement of feminism; and promotion of spirituality in middle-class, racial, and cultural terms. Providing cultural and gender analysis too often lacking in the study of American religious history, it offers a new model for understanding the development of a gendered theology and set of religious practices that influenced Protestantism in a period of enormous social change.

Hippies of the religious right

This volume demonstrates that the Christian Right has a surprising past. Historical analysis reveals that the countercultural movements and evangelicalism share a common heritage. Shires warns that political operatives in both parties need to heed this fact if they hope to either, in the case of the Republican Party, retain their evangelical constituency, or, in the case of the Democratic Party, recruit new evangelical voters.

Gay Marriage as a Religious Right: Reframing the Legal Debate over Gay Marriage in the United States

The definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman has origins in sectarian religious views of marriage. Nevertheless, proponents of gay marriage have not yet fully explored the religious discrimination inherent in public policies that embrace this sectarian definition of marriage. Instead, advocates of gay marriage have largely relied on “equal rights” arguments or claims based on substantive due process and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to make the case that gay marriage should be legalized. In an effort to address the religious underpinnings of arguments against gay marriage, this article will consider the implications of using a “religious rights” as opposed to an “equal rights” framework to analyze the debate over gay marriage. This piece will examine pertinent U.S. legal cases related to religious freedom, particularly Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and their applicability to the argument that gay marriage can be framed as a religious right. It also will conside...

Modern Day Moabites: The Bible and the Debate About Same-Sex Marriage

AbstractWith the debate about same-sex marriage raging in the United States, this paper asks whether the canonical scriptures of Judaism and Christianity offer any justification for blessing same-sex unions. It looks to the ways that the Bible is used by proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage. It analyzes the hermeneutics of the religious left and the religious right, particularly as they grapple with the "clobber texts" of Lev. 18:22 and 20:13. It then turns to the biblical book of Ruth, which critic J. Hillis Miller describes as having "been alienated from itself, translated from itself" through new uses. The paper puts the book of Ruth to yet another new use/misprision, using it as a prooftext to support same-sex marriage. The book has already been upheld by lesbian readers of scripture because of the intimate relationship between the protagonists, Ruth and Naomi, but this paper "misreads" the text differently. Ruth describes how a marriage made between an Israelite and a Moabite brings about the line of King David, one of the most important figures in the Bible and the man from whose line the Messiah is expected to come. The biblical law, however, is unequivocal: Moabites are not permitted to enter into the community of Israel. Juxtaposing the levitical laws (ostensibly) prohibiting homosexuality with those banning Moabites from Israel, this paper argues that the religious left could hold up the book of Ruth as a biblical model for allowing marriage that seems explicitly forbidden by biblical law.

The Undesirability of Religion and the Improbability of God’s Existence: A Review Essay

Is atheism good for mental health? Absolutely if you think, like Richard Dawkins, that religion is but a form of insanity. His latest book, The God Delusion (2006) purports to be a frontal attack on religion in all its forms, Christian or Muslim, polytheistic or trinitarian, fundamentalist or moderate alike. He takes issue not only with creationism and the religious right, considering them, as many European mainstream or liberal Christians do, an aberration. For Dawkins, religion itself is an aberration, no matter in what form or guise it might appear. Religious education, for him, is a form of mental child abuse. The attack is carefully orchestrated, the evidence assiduously gathered, the arguments tirelessly expounded. The message, of course, is not entirely negative. Dawkins strives not only to abolish religion but to raise consciousness for secular humanism or, as he prefers to call it, atheism. He hopes to convince readers that religion can be abandoned, that it is not too late to turn their backs on their childhood indoctrination and start breathing the fresh air of science. The whole case is presented in language that is rhetorically powerful and wittily entertaining, passionately engaged and eminently readable. Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), an evolutionary biologist by trade, is one of Britain’s leading intellectuals and arguably the most outspoken secular humanist today. Recently, he has been selected as one of the world’s one hundred most influential people by Time magazine (BEHE 2007), while in a poll organised by Prospect and Foreign Policy he was elected, after Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco, among the top three public intellectuals in the world. He studied at Oxford, taught in California in the 1960s and worked with Nikolaas Tinbergen, who later won the Nobel Prize. He first acquired international renown by his book The Selfish Gene in 1976, which, still in print, has been translated into more than two dozen languages and followed by numerous best-selling titles. A Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature (since 1997)

Religious Exemptions to Equality

The political role of religious value systems poses a great challenge in the perspective of safeguarding women’s citizenship rights. This applies to all the contexts where religious law defines civil, political and social rights and obligations in a manner that systematically promotes differential treatment of women and men, girls and boys. It also applies within the framework of secular laws that protect religious freedom such that discrimination becomes a religious group right. My concern in this article is with the limits to equal citizenship that this latter kind of religious accommodation may pose. I discuss some well‐known commonalities between claims to group accommodation which follow from multiculturalism’s minority‐rights reasoning, and claims to accommodation which, quite independent of ‘minority’–‘majority’ statuses, follow from interpretations of the right to freedom of religion. Such accommodations are of particular relevance to the Norwegian state/religion regime, which forms the ‘case’ under discussion here. One specific aspect of citizenship is thus in focus: the contestations over the legal protection of women’s rights to non discrimination, when confronted with the protection of the right to religious freedom.

Frontlines and Interstices in the Global War on Terror

ABSTRACTIn the context of the ‘global war on terror’ and related debates about development and the new imperialism, this essay looks at the involvement of religious absolutist militias in humanitarian aid following the Kashmir earthquake in 2005. By analysing how organizations which are considered ‘terrorist’ are simultaneously working with and fighting against US ‘Empire’, the essay considers the form of the Pakistani ‘development’ state, its geostrategic importance and how this relates to a religious absolutist militia infrastructure. The transformation of (often violent) religious right groups since the 1990s into development and welfare agencies is considered within the broader context of new ‘hypergovernance’ processes unleashed within ‘Empire’. Some general comparisons are also made between the processes of juridical hypergovernance that international humanitarian and human rights NGOs initiate in the ‘South’, and those created by violent groups of the religious right. Both reflect contending strategies for the management of populations by bodies having ambitions on a planetary scale.

The Rhetorical Presidency of George H.W. Bush (review)

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Presidency of George H.W. Bush Kenneth S. Zagacki The Rhetorical Presidency of George H.W. Bush. Edited by Martin J. Medhurst . College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006; pp. ix + 207. $40.00. As scholars busy themselves making sense of George W. Bush's rhetorical presidency, they could easily lose sight of the current president's father and his own rhetorical legacy. Fortunately, Martin J. Medhurst will not let this happen. His latest edited book, The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush, represents a thorough, engaging rhetorical analysis of almost every aspect of the elder Bush's rhetorical activity as president of the United States. Each chapter combines standard rhetorical methods with careful archival research to provide fresh and insightful looks into the first Bush presidency. The thesis that runs throughout is that, rhetorically speaking, the Bush presidency failed largely because Bush himself not only showed "no appreciation of the role of rhetoric in the actual formulation of policy, he did not appreciate the inventional and judgmental aspects of the art" (4). When Bush entered office in January 1989, he believed that "he was no Ronald Reagan and could not hope to duplicate Reagan's role as the 'Great Communicator'" (3); and he separated politics from government, the former of which he associated with rhetoric and the latter with the more principled art of creating "broad, consensus-building activities undertaken for the common good" (10). These factors, combined with several other rhetorical "blunders" (98), made for a Bush White House incapable of effecting "prudential action in ways that were both recognized and appreciated by the public at large" (4). What were the blunders? Each succeeding chapter supplies answers to this question. Catherine L. Langford examines Bush's struggle with the "Vision Thing," at which he was rhetorically "inept" (20). The underlying difficulty was that Bush did not "create a public narrative that was simple, repetitive, familiar, and artistic" (21). Bush's narrative shortcomings revolved around his inability to identify clear enemies responsible for America's ills and an empowering "agency" that "commissioned presidential action" (32). The result was that Bush, unlike Reagan, failed "to fashion a narrative that captured the nation's attention or moved its people to action" (32). Roy Joseph investigates the "eloquent symbols and metaphors" (83) in Bush's "New World Order" speeches, arguing that although the president articulated the goals of his vision, he consistently failed to demonstrate how to achieve them or what, precisely, his "vision" was. This omission left others to define a vision for Bush, thus transposing "what could have been a unifying rhetorical idiom . . . into a free-for-all interpretative utterance" (96–97). Holly G. McIntush explores Bush's stance as "the education president" and finds his rhetoric on the subject wanting. Indeed, although the president [End Page 534] sent two major education initiatives to Congress, "his actions lacked focus and were not adequately linked to the goals set forth in 1990 or to the reasons the public was urging reform" (107). Using archival material well, McIntush examines these initiatives and the rhetorical failures associated with them—namely, that Bush did not connect his specific education proposals and their goals to improvements in the American economy. Bush's rather uneven relationship with the religious right is the subject of Amy Tilton Jones's chapter. She shows how Bush's speeches to religiously conservative audiences tried to firm up this relationship. Based on archival material of speech drafts, she analyzes problems associated with humor in religious addresses and closely examines how Bush supplied moral-religious justifications for the first Gulf War. The most informative part of this chapter deals with the 1992 Republican National Convention and the assortment of "harsh, embattled" (163) speeches delivered by the likes of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Marilyn Quayle, which, juxtaposed with Mary Fisher's oration about treating HIV victims humanely, made for an overall rhetoric "that lauded family values, morals, and inclusions but in reality . . . combined contradictions and exclusion" (165). Wynton C. Hall performs an important service by challenging political scientists who downplay or overlook the important role of rhetoric, especially when chief executives frame issues like economics. Analyzing...

Ella Thea Smith and the Lost History of American High School Biology Textbooks

Two influential articles published in the 1970s suggested that pressure from Christian fundamentalists, subsequent to the Scopes trial of 1925, forced American high school biology textbook authors and publishers to significantly limit discussion of the topic of evolution. The conclusions reached by these studies have become foundational for historians examining the interplay between science and religion in the United States in the twentieth century. However, a reexamination of key twentieth century biology textbooks suggests that the narrative that the treatment of the theory of evolution was held hostage to anti-rational cultural forces is largely a myth, created first as part of a public relations effort by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) to differentiate, defend, and promote its work, and later as part of an attempt by scholars to sound a warning concerning the rise of the religious right. A focus on this narrative has not only allowed biologists to sidestep uncomfortable questions regarding the race-biased and class-biased assumptions embedded within the concept of evolutionary progress, it has also limited reliance on the texts in question as reliable reflections of the cultural assumptions of educators and scientists. A reexamination of the most popular American biology textbooks from 1907 to 1963, particularly the work of Ella Thea Smith, provides evidence in support of these contentions.