Redeeming America

Redeeming America
Author: Michael Lienesch
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1469617234

This balanced and comprehensive study of Christian conservative thinking focuses on the 1980s, when the New Christian Right appeared suddenly as an influential force on the American political scene, only to fade from the spotlight toward the end of the decade. In Redeeming America, Michael Lienesch identifies a cyclical redemptive pattern in the New Christian Right's approach to politics, and he argues that the movement is certain to emerge again. Lienesch explores in detail the writings of a wide range of Christian conservatives, including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye, in order to illuminate the beliefs and ideas on which the movement is based. Depicting the thinking of these writers as a set of concentric circles beginning with the self and moving outward to include the family, the economy, the polity, and the world, Lienesch finds shared themes as well as contradictions and tensions. He also uncovers a complex but persistent pattern of thought that inspires periodic attempts to redeem America, alternating with more inward-looking intervals of personal piety.

Redeeming Democracy in America

Redeeming Democracy in America
Author: Wilson Carey McWilliams
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2011-05-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 070061785X

Wherever we turn in America today, we see angry citizens disparaging government, distrusting each other, avoiding civic life, and professing a hatred of politics and politicians of all stripes. Is our situation hopeless? Wilson Carey McWilliams wouldn't think so. McWilliams, one of the preeminent political theorists of the twentieth century, was closely identified with an ambitious intellectual enterprise to reclaim and restore democracy as a source of national veneration, inspiration, and salvation. Better than most of his contemporaries, he understood and illuminated the major sources of the political malaise that afflicts our nation's citizens. For him, the key to reinvigorating our republic depends on our ability to reclaim the "second voice" of American politics-the one that emanates from our literature, churches, families, and schools and speaks out on behalf of community and civic responsibility. The writings gathered here cohere into McWilliams's most mature and most developed philosophical statement-the distillation of a distinguished career of thinking about the American experiment. From insights into "The Framers and the Constitution" to reflections on "America as Technological Republic," he shares a love for an older tradition of democracy, one based upon the active self-rule of self-governing citizens. "Protestant Prudence and Natural Rights" and "On Equality as the Moral Foundation for Community" may force readers to adjust their understandings of American politics, while "Democracy and the Citizen" and "Political Parties as Civic Associations" will resound for observers of the current political scene, regardless of party. Carey McWilliams not only offers a prescient analysis of the current crisis in American citizenship and governance but also shows us what sources within the American tradition might exist to save us from our worst selves. His broad and iconoclastic approach to American politics should appeal to both conservatives and liberals-to anyone, in fact, who cares about the state of democracy in America.

Redeeming American Political Thought

Redeeming American Political Thought
Author: Judith N. Shklar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 1998-02-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780226753478

A collection of thirteen essays on American political thought.

Redeeming America

Redeeming America
Author: Curtis D. Johnson
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN:

In the absence of a state-supported religion, the years 1820-60 saw tremendous expansion and influence of the Evangelicals in the United States. Johnson discusses the many ways in which these Evangelical sects attempted to shape American society. Generally drawn along socioeconomic lines, there were three major groups: Formalists (Congregationalists, Presbyterians), Antiformalists (Methodists, Baptists), and the African American groupings. Johnson discusses in serviceable but tedious prose how these groups varied in their beliefs on biblical authority, rebirth, the Second Coming, and Perfectionism. Slavery also divided Southern from Northern Evangelicals. By the time of the Civil War, changes in American society had altered the character and composition of the Evangelicals, and they were never again as powerful.

Religious Responses to Marriage Equality

Religious Responses to Marriage Equality
Author: Luke Perry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2018-05-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351798855

The Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) ended a 20-year political battle over same-sex marriage in the USA. The ruling in favor of a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to marry reflected growing social acceptance and political rights for gays and lesbians. At the same time, America remains a deeply religious country and many religious organizations have long opposed same-sex marriage. How do religious organizations interpret, process, and respond to shifting attitudes and public policy toward the LGBT community? Examining how religious groups in America have responded theologically and politically to the legalization of same-sex marriage, the book provides case studies from across the American religious spectrum to explore how each group understands same-sex marriage and has reacted theologically, socially, and politically to its new standing as a constitutional right. Each case study focuses on formal statements made by church leaders, incorporates original data gathered from interviews with regional and local religious authorities, and analyzes existing polling data of adherents at large. Offering a comprehensive examination of religious responses to marriage equality in the USA, this book will interest scholars and students in the fields of religion and politics, civil rights, social change, and public policy.

New Directions in American Religious History

New Directions in American Religious History
Author: Harry S. Stout
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0198027206

The eighteen essays collected in this book originate from a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. Leading scholars were invited to reflect on their specialties in American religious history in ways that summarized both where the field is and where it ought to move in the decades to come. The essays are organized according to four general themes: places and regions, universal themes, transformative events, and marginal groups and ethnocultural "outsiders." They address a wide range of specific topics including Puritanism, Protestantism and economic behavior, gender and sexuality in American Protestantism, and the twentieth-century de-Christianization of American public culture. Among the contributors are such distinguished scholars as David D. Hall, Donald G. Matthews, Allen C. Guelzo, Gordon S. Wood, Daniel Walker Howe, Robert Wuthnow, Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, Harry S. Stout, and John Higham. Taken together, these essays reveal a rapidly expanding field of study that is breaking out of its traditional confines and spilling into all of American history. The book takes the measure of the changes of the last quarter-century and charts numerous challenges to future work.

Countercultural Conservatives

Countercultural Conservatives
Author: Axel R. Schäfer
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2011-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299285235

In the mid-twentieth century, far more evangelicals supported such “liberal” causes as peace, social justice, and environmental protection. Only gradually did the conservative evangelical faction win dominance, allying with the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and, eventually, George W. Bush. In Countercultural Conservatives Axel Schäfer traces the evolution of a diffuse and pluralistic movement into the political force of the New Christian Right. In forging its complex theological and political identity, evangelicalism did not simply reject the ideas of 1960s counterculture, Schäfer argues. For all their strict Biblicism and uncompromising morality, evangelicals absorbed and extended key aspects of the countercultural worldview. Carefully examining evangelicalism’s internal dynamics, fissures, and coalitions, this book offers an intriguing reinterpretation of the most important development in American religion and politics since World War II.

An Unpredictable Gospel

An Unpredictable Gospel
Author: Jay Riley Case
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2012-01-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199772320

Jay Case examines the efforts of American evangelical missionaries, arguing that if they were agents of imperialism they were poor ones. Western missionaries had a dismal record of converting non-Westerners to Christianity.