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Author: Richard J. Meagher
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558585
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
In this book, one of the first to take atheism seriously as a social movement, Richard J. Meagher examines the political history of American atheism and freethought. Meagher demonstrates how changes in resources, opportunities, and movement identity help explain the political mobilization of atheists in America.
Author: Richard J. Meagher
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558585
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
In this book, one of the first to take atheism seriously as a social movement, Richard J. Meagher examines the political history of American atheism and freethought. Meagher demonstrates how changes in resources, opportunities, and movement identity help explain the political mobilization of atheists in America.
Author: Isaac Kramnick
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254976
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
If the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects religious liberty, why doesn’t it protect atheists? God occupies our nation’s consciousness, even defining to many what it means to be American. Nonbelievers have often had second-class legal status and have had to fight for their rights as citizens. As R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick demonstrate in their sharp and convincing work, avowed atheists were derided since the founding of the nation. Even Thomas Paine fell into disfavor and his role as a patriot forgotten. Popular Republican Robert Ingersoll could not be elected in the nineteenth century due to his atheism, and the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton was shunned when she questioned biblical precepts about women’s roles. Moore and Kramnick lay out this fascinating history and the legal cases that have questioned religious supremacy. It took until 1961 for the Supreme Court to ban religious tests for state officials, despite Article 6 of the Constitution. Still, every one of the fifty states continues to have God in its constitution. The authors discuss these cases and more current ones, such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which address whether personal religious beliefs supersede secular ones. In Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic, the authors also explore the dramatic rise of an "atheist awakening" and the role of organizations intent on holding the country to the secular principles it was founded upon.
Author: Richard J. Meagher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498558570
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
In this book, one of the first to take atheism seriously as a social movement, Richard J. Meagher examines the political history of American atheism and freethought. Meagher demonstrates how changes in resources, opportunities, and movement identity help explain the political mobilization of atheists in America.
Author: Leigh Eric Schmidt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183112
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
A compelling history of atheism in American public life A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God. Yet village atheists—as these godless freethinkers came to be known by the close of the nineteenth century—were also hailed for their gutsy dissent from stultifying pieties and for posing a necessary secularist challenge to the entanglements of church and state. In Village Atheists, Leigh Eric Schmidt explores the complex cultural terrain that unbelievers have long had to navigate in their fight to secure equal rights and liberties in American public life. He rebuilds the history of American secularism from the ground up, giving flesh and blood to these outspoken infidels. Village Atheists demonstrates that the secularist vision for the United States proved to be anything but triumphant in a country where faith and citizenship were—and still are—closely interwoven.
Author: Stuart McAnulla
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317198336
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
New atheism is best known as a literary and media phenomenon which has resulted in the widespread discussion of the anti-religious arguments of authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, yet it also has strongly political dimensions. This book analyses the political aspects of new atheism and offers an analysis that is informed by insights from political science and political theory. The authors locate new atheism within a diverse history of politically-oriented atheisms. It is argued the new atheist movement itself contains a considerable variety of political viewpoints, despite coalescing around forms of secularist campaigning and identity politics. New atheist views on monotheism, public life, morality and religious violence are examined to highlight both limitations and strengths in such perspectives. Conservative, feminist and Marxist responses to new atheism are also evaluated within this critical analysis. The book rejects claims that new atheism is itself a form of fundamentalism and argues that the issues it grapples with often reflect wider dilemmas in liberal-left thought which have ongoing relevance in the era of Trump and Brexit. It will be of great interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of new atheism, political atheism, secularism, non-religion, and secular-religious tensions.
Author: Mark A. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627537X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
When Pope Francis recently answered “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuality, he ushered in a new era for the Catholic church. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a pope to express tolerance for homosexuality. Yet shifts of this kind are actually common in the history of Christian groups. Within the United States, Christian leaders have regularly revised their teachings to match the beliefs and opinions gaining support among their members and larger society. Mark A. Smith provocatively argues that religion is not nearly the unchanging conservative influence in American politics that we have come to think it is. In fact, in the long run, religion is best understood as responding to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society—perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders do resist prevailing values and behaviors, but those same leaders inevitably acquiesce—often by reinterpreting the Bible—if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures. So powerful are the cultural and societal norms surrounding us that Christians in America today hold more in common morally and politically with their atheist neighbors than with the Christians of earlier centuries. In fact, the strongest predictors of people’s moral beliefs are not their religious commitments or lack thereof but rather when and where they were born. A thoroughly researched and ultimately hopeful book on the prospects for political harmony, Secular Faith demonstrates how, over the long run, boundaries of secular and religious cultures converge.
Author: Michael Lackey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813033181
Category : African American authors
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This study of atheist African American writers poses a substantive challenge to those who see atheism in despairing and nihilistic terms. Lackey argues that while most white atheists mourn the loss of faith, many black atheists--believing the "God-concept" spawns racism and oppression--consider the death of God a cause for personal and political hope. Focusing on a little-discussed aspect of African American literature, this full-length analysis of African American atheists' treatment of God fills a huge gap in studies that consistently ignore their contributions. Examining how a belief in God and His "chosen people" necessitates a politics of superiority and inferiority, Lackey implicitly considers the degree to which religious faith is responsible for justifying oppression, even acts of physical and psychological violence. In their secular vision of social and political justice, black atheists argue that only when the culture adopts and internalizes a truly atheist politics--one based on pluralism, tolerance, and freedom--will radical democracy be achieved. Of primary interest to scholars of African American studies, this volume also will appeal to religious scholars, philosophers, anthropologists, freethinkers, and religious and secular humanists. A recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, Michael Lackey is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
Author: Ray Comfort
Publisher: New Leaf Publishing Group
ISBN: 0892217456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 18
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Book Description
Most atheists don’t know that there’s never been an atheist president, that no members of Congress are atheists, and that in seven states it’s illegal for atheists to run for office. Atheists are convinced that atheism is intellectual when it’s the exact opposite. There is nothing more foolish than believing the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything. Ray addresses this fact, at the same time showing that there is credible scientific evidence for God, and exposing what atheists are doing to the once great country. This is a book that you can give to your partying and boozy neighbor, your likeable but unsaved Uncle Fred, or the Christian mom who is grieved that her beloved church-going son has turned atheist. America is having a revival of atheism, and is being swallowed by moral darkness. This book is a small but powerful light. Written to help reach atheists because of the horrid reality of HellContains a clear gospel presentation to help Christians share the power of God’s graceHere is the book to give away to those who are wandering into the darkness of atheism.
Author: David Niose
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1137055286
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
A new group of Americans is challenging the reign of the Religious Right Today, nearly one in five Americans are nonbelievers - a rapidly growing group at a time when traditional Christian churches are dwindling in numbers - and they are flexing their muscles like never before. Yet we still see almost none of them openly serving in elected office, while Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and many others continue to loudly proclaim the myth of America as a Christian nation. In Nonbeliever Nation, leading secular advocate David Niose explores what this new force in politics means for the unchallenged dominance of the Religious Right. Hitting on all the hot-button issues that divide the country – from gay marriage to education policy to contentious church-state battles – he shows how this movement is gaining traction, and fighting for its rights. Now, Secular Americans—a group comprised not just of atheists and agnostics, but lapsed Catholics, secular Jews, and millions of others who have walked away from religion—are mobilizing and forming groups all over the country (even atheist clubs in Bible-belt high schools) to challenge the exaltation of religion in American politics and public life. This is a timely and important look at how growing numbers of nonbelievers, disenchanted at how far America has wandered from its secular roots, are emerging to fight for equality and rational public policy.
Author: David S. Gutterman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136339272
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
Profound demographic and cultural changes in American society over the last half century have unsettled conventional understandings of the relationship between religious and political identity. The "Protestant mainline" continues to shrink in numbers, as well as in cultural and political influence. The growing population of American Muslims seek both acceptance and a firmer footing within the nation’s cultural and political imagination. Debates over contraception, same-sex relationships, and "prosperity" preaching continue to roil the waters of American cultural politics. Perhaps most remarkably, the fastest-rising religious demographic in most public opinion surveys is "none," giving rise to a new demographic that Gutterman and Murphy name "Religious Independents." Even the evangelical movement, which powerfully re-entered American politics during the 1970s and 1980s and retains a strong foothold in the Republican Party, has undergone generational turnover and no longer represents a monolithic political bloc. Political Religion and Religious Politics:Navigating Identities in the United States explores the multifaceted implications of these developments by examining a series of contentious issues in contemporary American politics. Gutterman and Murphy take up the controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque," the political and legal battles over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Health Care Act and the ensuing Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision, the national response to the Great Recession and the rise in economic inequality, and battles over the public school curricula, seizing on these divisive challenges as opportunities to illuminate the changing role of religion in American public life. Placing the current moment into historical perspective, and reflecting on the possible future of religion, politics, and cultural conflict in the United States, Gutterman and Murphy explore the cultural and political dynamics of evolving notions of national and religious identity. They argue that questions of religion are questions of identity -- personal, social, and political identity -- and that they function in many of the same ways as race, sex, gender, and ethnicity in the construction of personal meaning, the fostering of solidarity with others, and the conflict they can occasion in the political arena.
