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LA Times: Why Are Christian Groups Allowed To Discriminate? Power and Privilege

To the editor: Op-ed article writers Rachel S. Mikva, Corey D.B. Walker and Reza Aslan are rightly concerned that what passes for religious freedom in the U.S. is highly selective. Yet they seem puzzled as to why this is so. Why, they ask, is religious freedom for some groups favored over other groups, and second, why is the deciding issue always about sexuality and procreation? Read More

Voices of Women and People of Color Must Be Part of Catholic Social Teaching Discussion

I have often heard John Carr, formerly of the U.S. bishops' conference and now Georgetown University, say that Catholics do not have a natural political home in either party. The flip side is that they might be able to offer a third way, Carr and other scholars say in the article. Both the left and right can find something to like — and dislike — in Catholic social teaching. Read More

White Christian nationalism and the next wave of political violence

Images such as a flag that said “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” seem new, but this mix of white, right-wing identity politics and nationalist Christianity has been stirring for many years. It’s hard to say exactly when this version of white supremacist Christianity — embedded within and supported by the Republican Party — began, but one important turning point was President Nixon’s commitment to the GOP’s Southern strategy to attract Dixiecrats disaffected by the Democratic Party’s commitment to the civil rights movement. Read More

Predictions 2021: An Uphill Struggle

As we do around this time each new year, we at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) are going to make some predictions for 2021. Even though the world seems pretty unpredictable of late. Well, actually, that doesn’t sound quite right. It was possible to foresee the political incompetence and malfeasance of the blessedly now-previous presidential administration, an outburst of racially inflected fundamentalist violence, resistance to science and the rise of American fascism. In fact, we predicted these events and phenomena last year, when we saw the early trends of the 2020s mirroring many of the cultural currents of the 1920s. Still, the dismal depth and shocking scope of those forces in 2020 (and the first days of 2021) were beyond our forecasting.  Read More