Although the official publication date for Jeff Sharlet’s new book is tomorrow, it’s actually been available a week or so now, and a copy has already made its way to me across the Atlantic. The book is a sequel to The Family, which I wrote a review of here.
The generic tagline understates the importance and uniqueness of Jeff’s contribution: this isn’t the familiar story of Tea Partiers and televangelists, but of a significant yet overlooked long-term religious factor in US politics. And with influence in Uganda and elsewhere, there’s more at stake than just “American democracy” . As Jeff himself puts it (page 89)
The fundamentalist threat of this book’s subtitle isn’t a barbarian at the gate. Nor is it an ideology that erects statues, a theology in jackboots. It’s far more practical than that… We’ve reached a point where piety and corruption aren’t at odds but are one and the same.
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[…] latest, “C Street,” refers to what Rachel Maddow calls “the cult house” and looks at the group’s ongoing influence, including “kill the gays” […]
This book is a non-starter because Christianity is no longer the ascendant religion in America.
Were I wrong about that, America’s security apparatus wouldn’t be spending 80% of its budget tracking and monitoring Islamists.
I,ve read excerpts and its prognostications remind me of that Whole Earth Catalogue shit from the late 60s and early70s that predicted the world would run out of fresh water AND oil by….1985.
Mr Sharlet is a victim of his own ideological blinkers and bias, blinkers that prevent him from acquiring an accurate portrait of what’s really happening.
And since he cannot/will not look at certain realities, he cannot engage in a proper analysis of the relationship between religion and American politics, and so his writings, thus, are basically useless.
Useless, that is, when they’re not downright dangerous, owing to the fact they risk distracting us and diverting us from attending to some very real clerical-fascist threats.
So telling that you posted this on the same day Europe was placed on a continent-wide terror alert.
Those violent Methodists, you know.
Christianity is no longer the ascendant religion in America. No, its just the religion of the majority of the population, most government, business and media leaders, the one which is recognized in that its annual sacred day is a government holiday, its weekly sacred day is one on which the mail isn’t delivered and government offices are closed, etc. Do you know what “ascendant” actually means?
Christianity is no longer the ascendant religion in America. No, its just the religion of the majority of the population, most government, business and media leaders, the one which is recognized in that its annual sacred day is a government holiday, its weekly sacred day is one on which the mail isn’t delivered and government offices are closed, etc. Do you know what “ascendant” actually means?
It’s people like you who make People Like Geert Wilders an absolute necessity.
It’s people like you who make People Like Geert Wilders an absolute necessity.
Yes, let’s line up behind a self-promoting populist demagogue trading on people’s fears to push an authoritarian agenda. What could go wrong?
As a Christian who is SICK of the self-appointed-leadership-of-the-religious-WRONG (Dobson, Bauer, et al) I devoured “The Family” and just came across “C Street” last night.
The teleSCAMgelists and their heretical puke is NOTHING compared to the power-worshipping fools who clandestinely (sp?) operate behind the scenes and manipulate most of the Biblically-illiterate Christians in America.