“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.” —Walter Savage Landor When English Protestants fled their native land during Mary’s reign, many of them ended up in John Calvin’s Geneva. Additional refugees found a home in other Reformed cities in southwestern Germany. Lutheran lands, by...
3531 search results for: American Religion
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Religion: A Christian Critique of American Foreign Policy
experience opposed to doctrine; freedom,rnto law; emotion, to the commandmentsrnof God; subjective criticism, to thernobjective authority of the Bible; arrogantrninnovations, to humble submission to thernWord of God. Men refuse their God-givenrnresponsibilihes, and women are illegitimatelyrnexalted to positions of authorit}’.rnFinally, we see the arrogant substitutionrnof illusions, dreams, prophesies,rnand visions to the written, inspired, andrninfallible Word of...
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Religion: A Christian Critique of American Foreign Policy
immoral, and viciously self-serving characterrnof much of American foreign policyrntoday. This attitude gives the policies ofrnthis great, but disfigured, nation their anti-rnChristian character.rnAn important difference between today’srnWestern atrocities and those of therncommunists and the Nazis is to be foundrnin the hypocrisy in which Allied brutalityrnclothes itself Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky, inrnhis masterly study of the nature of...
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Religion: A Christian Critique of American Foreign Policy
or l)t’en compared to Stalin, Mao, or PolrnPot, een though the ieiousness of theserntotalitarian leaders tar outstripped, at leastrnin numbers, the atrocities perpetrated b’rnthe Nazis.rnOne of the reasons for this strange partialitrnis the international character ofrnconnnunism. Both the defunct Cominternrnand the Gramscian New WorldrnOrder are explicith- “internationalist”rnmoxements aimed at the disintegrationrnof independent nations. Nazism, on...
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Religion: A Christian Critique of American Foreign Policy
VITAL SIGNSrnRELIGIONrnA Christian Critiquernof AmericanrnForeign Policyrnby Jean-Marc BerthoudrnMy last (and only other) visit to thernUnited States was early in 1986. Irnwas visiting the Capitol at the invitationrnof a friend who, at the time, was workingrnfor a Republican member of the Senate.rnIt was on the day of President Reagan’srnState of the Union Address, hi the silencernand...
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Protestant Politics, Religion, and American Public Life
Protestant Polities^ Religion^ and AmericannPublic Life by Mark Nolln”Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competitionnis as wholesome in religion as in commerce. “n—Walter Savage LandornUnsecular America, edited bynRichard John Neuhaus, GrandnRapids: Eerdmans; $8.95.nLess Than Conquerors: HownEvangeUcals Entered the TwentiethnCentury by Douglas W. Frank,nGrand Rapids: Eerdmans; $14.95.nWhen English Protestants fledntheir native land during...
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Protestant Politics, Religion, and American Public Life
40 I CHRONICLESnOn the level of polity, these differencesnin tone and tendency became muchnmore important. Luther was relativelynindifferent to questions of churchnorder because he knew how easilynecclesiastical propriety became spiritualnpride. Calvin acknowledged thensame reality, yet poured great energiesninto creating a truly godly church.nLuther counseled restraint in politics.nIt was better to suffer injustice from thenstate than...
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Protestant Politics, Religion, and American Public Life
repeated in the modern effort to bringnreligious reasoning to bear on publicnproblems. Neuhaus, while acknowledgingnthe problems Marsden describes,nis more concerned to drivenhome his twofold thesis: Holders ofntraditional Judeo-Christian beliefsnhave every right to a civil expression ofntheir views in public; modern secularistsnhave no right to make the publicnsquare off limits for religiously inspiredncontributions.nIn nearly 50 pages...
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Politics Is the New Religion
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they conform to its transformational vision. They...
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Solzhenitsyn and the Religion of Revolution
The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood more clearly than most that the revolutionary spirit born in France was a perpetual revolution, one that would spawn revolutionary movements across the political spectrum and around the globe. During his exile in the West from 1974 to 1994, he recognized that among these new political religions was...
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The Flawed Attempt to Make a Religion for the Right
In these troubled times of pandemics, racial conflict, and economic instability, disagreements over American conservatism may not sound particularly important. Yet, when “cancel culture” tactics are being applied to the right, the meaning of conservatism is no longer just an academic talking point. This hostile climate has rekindled robust debate on what exactly conservatism means....
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Who Is Really Killing American Democracy?
By a vote of 30-1 in the House, with unanimous support in the Senate, Juneteenth, June 19, which commemorates the day in 1865 when news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, has been declared a federal holiday. It is to be called Juneteenth Independence Day. Prediction: This will become yet another source of societal...
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Slavery and the American Founding
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is a series of articles published in 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans to arrive in America. In an introduction to the series, New York Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein claims that slavery “is the country’s very origin.” He writes: Out of slavery—and...
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Nietzsche and the American Right
In may of last year, C. Bradley Thompson published a piece in The American Mind entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans,” taking aim at the radical left and its cheerleaders at The New York Times, as well as the unfashionably reactionary right. Both, he argues, are fundamentally at odds with the political...
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‘American Capitalism’ Is the Enemy
Sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement, cities across the United States went up in flames last year, beset with looters, agitators, and killers. As leaves, and ashes, fell softly last autumn, homicide rates began to soar nationwide as $1 billion-plus in claims registered on the insurance industry’s books, making these riots the most destructive in American history. Even so,...
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The Puritan Legacy Birthed the American Creed
Right-wing critics of Christianity often quote from The Hour of Decision, the last work of a once widely read German historian of philosophy, Oswald Spengler. This short, graphically composed book was published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Although it has never been proven, there is a suspicion that the Nazi government disposed...
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Never Trumpers Call Quarantined Americans ‘Whiners’
Over the weekend, Never Trumper Erick Erickson put up a profanity-laced series of tweets in which he berated pro-Trump conservatives for criticizing the lockdown that has shuttered many businesses, closed down most churches, stopped most medical procedures and examinations, and isolated most Americans from friends and family for two months or so. According to Erickson,...
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The American Muse
[I]n populous Egypt they fatten up many bookish pedants who quarrel unceasingly in the Muses’ birdcage.” —Timon of Phlius, 230 B.C. For almost as long as there have been literary works, there have been literary canons, largely established by bookish pedants who do, indeed, “quarrel unceasingly.” The quarreling began early in the third century B.C....
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Spying on the American Remnant
As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting on cinder blocks in Houston’s West End, a community of people Larry McMurtry called...
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Are Abortion & Gay Rights American Values?
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
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The Iron Rod of American ‘Liberalism’
From the November 1988 issue of Chronicles. In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern...
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Is the American Century Over For Good?
“Politics stops at the water’s edge” was a tradition that, not so long ago, was observed by both parties, particularly when a president was abroad, speaking for the nation. The tradition was enunciated by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in 1947, as many of the Republicans in the 80th Congress moved to back Truman’s leadership...
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Graham Crackers, Corn Flakes, and Other Grrrrreat American Heresies
From the August 2002 issue of Chronicles. “Dad,” the inquisitive youngster is bound to ask, “where do corn flakes come from?” In today’s economy, where farms are something you drive by on your way to Disneyland, the most common answer might be “Kroger” or “the 7-Eleven” instead of “from the farm, son, from cornfields.” The...
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The Convenient Religion
Everyone in America today—right, left, or middle, if there still is one—can agree that the explosive political response to Donald Trump’s presidency is unprecedented in American political history. Liberals’ clinically hysterical reaction to the President’s plans for The Wall, to the travel ban, to his response to the Charlottesville affair, and to his cancellation of...
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An American In Great Britain
George Goodwin’s new book on Benjamin Franklin explores the 18 years Franklin spent in England working as a printer (1726-28) and as an agent representing the Pennsylvania assembly and other American colonies (1757-62, 1766-75). The author of this excellent book is an Englishman who offers fresh insights into the period from a British perspective. Benjamin...
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Faulkner in Japan: The “American Century”
In August of 1955, William Faulkner traveled to Japan. Based in the out-of-the-way mountain province of Nagano—which, until the 1998 Winter Olympics, enjoyed a benign anonymity in perfect proportion to its relative unimportance in world affairs—Faulkner lectured and temple-toured for two weeks, doing the bidding of the U.S. State Department, which had sponsored his trip. ...
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“Gunfire erupted”: Merry Christmas from the Religion of Peace
As in a number of cases involving minority criminals, mass media initially appeared reluctant to identify the perpetrators in the San Bernadino shootings that left fourteen people dead, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. The Los Angeles Times seemed to play down the agency of the shooters, with a by-now familiar description of gunfire...
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Maxims of American Life
What goes up must continue to go up and up. People love us for our good intentions when we tell them to be like us. If a few bad ones resist we can bomb them. We must be right because after every war our enemies want to move to the U.S. Whoever dies with the...
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American Samizdat
John Derbyshire is among the most prominent and prolific of writers of the paleo or nationalist right. I think of him as a Tory, and his writing as Swiftian. Some readers of this magazine are likely regular readers of his online essays, a selection of which, all culled from the year 2013, have been reprinted...
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The Great American Disintegration
When a former colleague sent me a snippet from The New Yorker of September 22, 2014—a piece called “As Big As the Ritz,” by Adam Gopnik—the attention therein given to two recent books on F. Scott Fitzgerald caught my eye, not only because I had already acquired one of them, but because I was repelled...
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1865: The True American Revolution
The standard opinion has it that, ever since they set foot on the new continent, the English settlers felt they were one people, Englishmen united by their common language, common origins, common enemies, so that it was only natural that their independence, once achieved, should lead them to the framing of one new national body,...
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Tongues of Fire: America’s Phony Religion of Immigration
One year ago, House Republicans were girding their loins to introduce legislation that would amnesty millions of illegal aliens. The “path to citizenship” was reportedly off the table, as GOP leaders, in an effort to please everyone (meaning no one), prepared to veer off onto the “path to legalization,” kicking the can of citizenship down...
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Tongues of Fire: America’s Phony Immigration Religion
We now add immigration amnesty to the arsenal of styrofoam clubs Republicans use for beating Democrats and driving voters to the polls. “We need immigration reform,” so we hear, “but the President has violated the Constitution!” For most Republicans, the “path to citizenship” is not a question of “if,” but of “when.” They talk of...
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Freedom From Religion
As the presidential campaign came to a close, religious questions sneaked surreptitiously into the national debate. The Democrats had an easy target: Governor Romney’s unusual religious affiliation, though since few Democrats know anything about any religion, particularly Christianity, they found it difficult to distinguish Mormonism from other not-quite-so-strange semi-Christian sects. Watching national commentators fumbling for...
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An American Family Covenant
“I used to say to my father,” he says, “‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” —Louis Auchincloss, interview with Trevor Butterworth, Financial Times, September 21, 2007 In January (one year after his death at the age of 92),...
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The Tragedy of American Education
Robert E. Holloway is a high school teacher in suburban Northern Virginia. He is probably considered a decent man by his neighbors, a competent educator by his peers, and a figure of some authority by his students. He is the embodiment of much that is wrong with this country’s education system, however: a bigot,...
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The Tragedy of American Education
Robert E. Holloway is a high school teacher in suburban Northern Virginia. He is probably considered a decent man by his neighbors, a competent educator by his peers, and a figure of some authority by his students. He is the embodiment of much that is wrong with this country’s education system, however: a bigot, a...
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When the Wolves Get Religion
Letter From Turkey The city of Istanbul reflects Turkey’s transformation over the past decade. Almost eight years after my previous visit I am greeted by an impressive new international terminal at the Atatürk International Airport—Europe’s seventh busiest—and by the massive office towers and apartment complexes surrounding it. According to ...
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Freedom From Religion
The recent “flap” over the Ground Zero Mosque is the meaningless debate we have come to expect from American political debates, which are a mere exchange of platitudes. The only interesting part is the common ground occupied by both sides. The left says that the First Amendment and the universal human right to enjoy religious...
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Secession and American Republicanism
When the American colonists seceded from Britain in 1776, Europe was shared out among great monarchies. Only Switzerland was republican, but Americans were determined to enjoy a republican style of government in the New World. The republican tradition went back over 2,000 years to the ancient Greeks and consistently taught that a republic must satisfy...
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The Democratic Religion
A half-century ago, a politically ambitious intellectual celebrity named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., defined liberalism’s role as that of offering solutions to problems and solving them. Even in the heyday of the Vital Center, that was far from a complete representation of liberalism’s self-perceived task. Today, when “advanced liberalism” (the phrase is James Kalb’s) is...
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Globalism vs. Americanism
Down at the Chinese outlet store in Albany known as Wal-Mart, Chinese tires have so successfully undercut U.S.-made tires that the Cooper Tire factory in that south Georgia town had to shut down. Twenty-one hundred Georgians lost their jobs. The tale of Cooper Tire and what it portends is told in last week’s Washington Post...
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An American Prophet
“A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” —Mark 4:4 A half-dozen biographical essays or theses have now been written on George Kennan, including John Lukacs’s recent and compelling George Kennan: A Study of Character (2007). This latest endeavor, by Lee Congdon, is...
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American Mojo
“America was, is, and—we pray—will continue to be the place where more than anyplace else, dreams actually do come true” —William J. Bennett The key phrase to notice in William Bennett’s statement is “more than anyplace else.” In recent years, a number of well-meaning patriots have taken up the theme of what is called American...
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Lunacy: Our State Religion
Americans, apparently, have nothing else to think about but the Moon Walk and the Madonna concert that have occupied so much of the front pages of newspapers—or what is left of them—and news websites. Of Madonna and the victim of her collapsing stage, all I can say is that the the photographs of the ungracefully...
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Dead Romans and Live Americans
“Libero Ingresso” says the little sign on the doors of an Italian shop. English speakers who know enough Italian to translate the words, Free Entrance, sometimes wonder if there was a time when Italian shopkeepers charged customers an admission fee, to be refunded, perhaps, if a purchase was made. It is just the sort of...
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Dead Romans and Live Americans
“Libero Ingresso” says the little sign on the doors of an Italian shop. English speakers who know enough Italian to translate the words, Free Entrance, sometimes wonder if there was a time when Italian shopkeepers charged customers an admission fee, to be refunded, perhaps, if a purchase was made. It is just the sort of...
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American Cant
Such is the Wickedness of some men, and the stupid Servility of others, that one would almost be inclined to conclude that Communities cannot be free. —Sam Adams Much American public discourse—the larger part—is made up of false impressions and invalid assumptions, what sensible people used to call cant, that are designed to disguise and...
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The American Dream
The presidential campaign that began the day after the previous one ended nearly four years ago seems increasingly like a dream. I suppose it is part of the American Dream—this belief that, of all the allures and temptations the world has to offer, the greatest is the presidency of the United States; the highest calling,...
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Great American Inventions
Decaffeinated coffee. (What’s the point?) The hula hoop. Political nominating conventions. Criminal athletes. The Celebrity, a meritless and insignificant person famous for being famous. The Celebrity as a political force. Purposeless voting. Patriotic balloons. Carnival tent religion. Mass-produced food and patented food crops. Mothers in combat. Euphemisms for war: Preserving the Union, War to End...