Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Hood Fitting

Ms. Ruth personally sews one robe a day. She works 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She has 1 to 3 helpers at times. The person to be fitted measures themselves, fills out the tailoring chart, and mails in the order. It takes 4 to 6 weeks for delivery. Here she puts the final touches on a red Klan hood.

Child Wears Klan Robe

A young child wears a new white Klan robe made by Ms. Ruth.

MoJo Photo Blog: Aryan Outfitters, April 9, 2008
Aryan Outfitters
Meet the Ku Klux Klan’s seamstress of hate couture.
Photos and text by Anthony Karen
Audio produced by Peter Meredith and Gary Moskowitz

Coming from five generations of Mississippi Ku Klux Klan members, 58-year-old “Ms. Ruth” sews hoods and robes for Klan members seven days a week, blessing each one when it’s done. A red satin outfit for an Exalted Cyclops, the head of a local chapter, costs about $140. She uses the earnings to help care for her 40-year-old quadriplegic daughter, “Lilbit,” who was injured in a car accident 10 years ago.

The following is a photo essay about Ms. Ruth by New York photojournalist Anthony Karen, a former Marine who has spent several years photographing members of the Ku Klux Klan. The essay includes audio of interviews with Karen and Ms. Ruth.

The prophetic anger of MLK - Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2008

After 1965, the civil rights leader grew angrier over America’s unwillingness to change.
By Michael Eric Dyson

ON THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, few truths ring louder than this: Barack Obama and Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. express in part the fallen leader’s split mind on race, a division marked by chronology and color.

Before 1965, King was upbeat and bright, his belief in white America’s ability to change by moral suasion resilient and durable. That is the leader we have come to know during annual King commemorations. After 1965, King was darker and angrier; he grew more skeptical about the willingness of America to change without great social coercion.

King’s skepticism and anger were often muted when he spoke to white America, but they routinely resonated in black sanctuaries and meeting halls across the land. Nothing highlights that split — or white America’s ignorance of it and the prophetic black church King inspired — more than recalling King’s post-1965 odyssey, as he grappled bravely with poverty, war and entrenched racism. That is the King who emerges as we recall the meaning of his death. After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those “legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve” Northern ghettos or to “penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation.” In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 “were at best surface changes” that were “limited mainly to the Negro middle class.” In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks “are now making demands that will cost the nation something. … You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then.”

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם. March 29, 2008: Make the World a Better Place » Evangelicals: ‘Killing’ Jews With Christian Kindness

A group called World Evangelical Alliance bought a full-page N.Y. Times ad (at least $120,000) this week. A bigger waste of money I’d have a hard time conceiving. Nearest I can tell, the basic message is: “Jews, we love you. But we don’t love you enough to stop proselytizing you or converting you. In fact, we really don’t care what you think of that, since it’s more important to us to keep doing this than it is to respect your wishes that we not do so.” And the real kicker was the evangelical signatories who insisted that converted Jews like Jews for Jesus and messianic Jews are still authentic Jews who despite becoming Christian have a right to call themselves Jews for the purpose of insinuating themselves into the lives of unsuspecting Jews they seek to convert.

The ad is quite a performance. Full of fake love and respect attempting to conceal presumptuousness and condescension toward Jews. The odd thing is that the ad pretends it is directed as a friendly communique to Jews. I actually took it as a declaration of war. So if it was supposed to say anything positive toward Jews it failed miserably on that score. In truth, I think it was meant more for an evangelical audience to reconfirm their certainty that they are right in their efforts to convert the Jews.

The ad begins well enough:

As evangelical Christians, we want to express our genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people. We sadly acknowledge that church history has been marred with anti-Semitic words and deeds; and that at times when the Jewish people were in great peril, the church did far less than it should have.

We pledge our commitment to be loving friends and to stand against such injustice in our generation.

But it quickly goes downhill:

• At the same time, we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and Scriptural expression of our friendship toward Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
• We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World (Acts 4:12).

Eric Foner, A Massacre and a Travesty - washingtonpost.com, March 23, 2008

Unbeknownst to most Americans, our nation’s history includes home-grown terrorism as well as attacks from abroad. Scholars estimate that during Reconstruction, the turbulent period that followed the Civil War, upwards of 3,000 persons were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. That’s roughly the same number of Americans who have died at the hands of Osama bin Laden.

In the last generation, no part of the American past has undergone a more complete scholarly reinterpretation than Reconstruction. Once portrayed as a tragic era of rampant misgovernment presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers and ignorant former slaves, Reconstruction is today seen as a noble, if flawed, experiment in interracial democracy, an effort to provide free blacks with land, education and political rights. The tragedy is not that Reconstruction was attempted, but that it failed.

Media Matters - Buchanan on Obama’s race speech: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

In a March 21 syndicated column headlined “A Brief for Whitey,” conservative commentator and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan asserted, “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.” Buchanan was discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s March 18 speech addressing race and controversial comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright. He continued, “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.” Buchanan then asserted that “no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.” Later in the column, Buchanan added: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Sharlet, Teenage Holy War, The Revealer, April 12, 2007

This is how you enlist in the Army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and then 4,000 kids scream, “We won’t be silent anymore!” Then the kids drop to their knees, still but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off “harlots and adultery”; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. “Gimme what you got!” she shouts. They dance — hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting. Then they’re ready. They’re about to accept “the mark of a warrior,” explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England. Nearly three centuries later, these 4,000 teens are about to become “branded by God.” It’s like getting your head shaved when you join the Marines, Luce says, only the kids get to keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse, and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.

“When you enlist in the military, there’s a code of honor,” Luce preaches, “same as being a follower of Christ.” His Christian code requires a “wartime mentality”: a “survival orientation” and a readiness to face “real enemies.” The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the “techno-terrorists” of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. “Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world,” Luce writes, “so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today’s culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real.”

Luce is forty-five, his brown hair floppy, his lips pouty. On the screens above the stage, his green eyes blink furiously. “The devil hates us,” he exhorts, “and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!” Luce considers most evangelicals too soft, too ready to pass off as piety their preference for a bland suburban lifestyle. He hates what he sees as the weakness of “accepting” Christ, of “trusting” the Lord. “I want an attacking church!” he shouts, his normally smooth tones raw and desperate and alarming. He isn’t just looking for followers — he wants “stalkers” who’ll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness.

Despite Landmark Changes in N. Ireland, Trust in Police Still Lags - washingtonpost.com, March 9, 2008

BELFAST — The two young men, in their teens or early 20s, one of them with fresh bruises on his face, walked up the Shankill Road on a busy Friday afternoon in January, carrying placards that read, “I’m a thief and a burglar.”

For an hour, people poured out of shops and pubs to watch the young men, who had been caught breaking into an elderly woman’s house. It had been a while since they had seen what is known here as a “walk of shame,” the kind of rough justice doled out by illegal paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland’s three decades of sectarian violence.

“I would love the paramilitaries to come back,” said Julie Lester, 42, who described watching with delight as the housebreakers were publicly humiliated. “There’s a rise in crime and drugs and we have nobody to turn to. I have really no faith in the police.”

Nearly 10 years after the landmark April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland is still struggling to create a police force fully trusted by the province’s divided Catholic and Protestant communities.

AP, Paisley’s aide seen as heir in N. Ireland - The Boston Globe, March 6, 2008

BELFAST - The favorite to become the new Protestant leader in Northern Ireland is Peter Robinson, who first gained international attention two decades ago by leading a mob attack on an Irish border village.

While he since has grown into one of Northern Ireland’s most polished and formidable politicians, many people wonder whether the likely successor to the charismatic Ian Paisley will be as willing - or able - to keep governing alongside Roman Catholics in the fledgling power-sharing administration for this British territory….

Britain and Ireland devised power-sharing as the best way to bring both sides’ extremists together in compromise and consign to history the 1968-98 conflict that left more than 3,700 dead. Robinson, 59, first grabbed widespread notice in 1986 when he led a mob that smashed up an Irish village and beat up two police officers.

Era Ends in N. Ireland as Paisley Says He’ll Retire - New York Times, March 5, 2008

LONDON — Ian Paisley, the 81-year-old Protestant evangelist who spent decades in implacable opposition to a compromise settlement of Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence before agreeing last year to join Irish nationalists in a power-sharing government, announced Tuesday that he will resign in May as the province’s first minister and as the leader of the Democratic Unionist party he founded.

The resignation was not a surprise; Mr. Paisley told associates months ago that he planned to leave office sometime this year. Political commentators in Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, said the announcement was prompted partly by the approach in May of the first anniversary of the deal that made Mr. Paisley a partner in government with Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader who was previously a senior commander of the Irish Republican Army.

The I.R.A.’s campaign of armed resistance made it Mr. Paisley’s nemesis in the years when he barnstormed across the province condemning any deal that opened the way for power-sharing with the Catholic minority. For decades — first as the founder of a splinter evangelical church, the Free Presbyterians, and later as founder of the Democratic Unionists, who functioned as the church’s action wing — his style was characterized by his fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

But aides who have watched as Mr. Paisley and Mr. McGuinness have governed together say there has been a remarkable absence of rancor between them. Though Mr. Paisley is first minister and Mr. McGuinness is deputy first minister, they govern as effective equals under the complex power-sharing arrangements reached last March. Mr. McGuinness, 52, has taken care to show deference to Mr. Paisley, reaching out a hand on more than one occasion to help steady him on public occasions.

Mr. Paisley’s announcement brought a flow of valedictory compliments from British and Irish political leaders. The former British prime minister Tony Blair told the BBC: “In the final analysis, he made it happen. The man famous for saying no will go down in history for saying yes.”

Ironically, Mr. Paisley’s resignation appears not to have been hastened by any disillusionment with the nationalists, who he has depicted as having accepted “British rule,” but by growing fractiousness within his own Democratic Unionist Party.

Powerful elements within the party have remained unreconciled to the deal with the nationalists, and its standing has slipped among Protestant voters, who gave the Paisley party its first election victory in 2003. In January, it lost an important by-election, and there was widespread talk in party ranks of a move to oust Mr. Paisley.

Media Matters - Will MSNBC devote as much coverage to McCain’s embrace of Hagees support as it did to Obamas rejection of Farrakhan?, Feb. 28, 2008

Also on February 27, John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas –who has made numerous controversial statements about, among other things, homosexuality, Islam, Catholicism, and women — endorsed Sen. John McCain for president.

On the September 18, 2006, edition of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, host Terry Gross said to Hagee, “You said after Hurricane Katrina that it was an act of God, and you said when you violate God’s will long enough, the judgment of God comes to you. Katrina is an act of God for a society that is becoming Sodom and Gomorrah reborn. ” She then asked, “Do you still think that Katrina is punishment from God for a society thats becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah?” Hagee responded:

HAGEE: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults 28% have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today 16.1% is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%.

Richard C. Lewontin, The Wars Over Evolution - The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005

1.The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explanation. One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools.

The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to account not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The Evolution–Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By Genes Alone with the second.

AP, Vatican Toughens Sainthood Procedure - washingtonpost.com, Feb. 18, 2008

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is making it tougher to become a saint.New procedures were announced Monday calling for more “rigor” and “sobriety” by bishops when deciding to begin the process of beatification and in determining the required miracles.

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Vatican’s sainthood office, recently suggested that the Vatican was overwhelmed by causes following the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, who elevated more people to sainthood than all his predecessors combined.

Saraiva Martins said there are more than 2,200 beatification and sainthood causes pending.

FTMP_NDH_conclusion.pdf (application/pdf Object), TMPR, 2008

Across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a cross-section of Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic clerics - and occasionally their religious organisations - gave material support to radical right and fascist movements. While comparative research on this phenomenon is in its infancy, a few claims made be made, however tenuously, bearing directly upon the case of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941].

In the new Yugoslav state, like elsewhere in interwar Europe, political Catholicism and its lay institutions (most notably Catholic Action) were of recent vintage. These movements came to prominence in no small measure as a proactive response to many of the same perceived decadences of modern life that fascism, likewise, arose to combat in the
wake of World War One: Marxism and materialism, liberalism and individualism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism. This amorphous movement may thus be regarded as fellow-travellers of fascism, with an important article of faith separating their paths: the Christian God (in an extensively elaborated and ‘revised’ understanding) came first for clerics intervening in politics where, for fascists, the nation became a partially-revealed, ersatz god.

Peter Steinfels, Religious Right May Be Fading, but Not the ‘Culture Wars’ - New York Times, February 16, 2008

On every side, one can read obituaries for the religious right.

Jim Wallis’s new book, “The Great Awakening,” carries the subtitle, “Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.” E. J. Dionne Jr.’s book, “Souled Out,” is subtitled “Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right.” The subtitle of David P. Gushee’s new book, “The Future of Faith in American Politics,” poses “The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center” against that of the religious right.

Sometimes stated outright and sometimes between the lines is the hope that the decline of the religious right will ease what Americans have come to know as the culture wars.

There is no question that many evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics have grown disenchanted with both the political agenda and what they see as the strident style of the organized religious right. Some have been convinced, by their own Scriptures and by new leaders, that poverty, human rights, genocide, sex trafficking and global warming must be no less matters of Christian concern than abortion, homosexuality and embryonic stem-cell research. Even more have reacted against their faith being enlisted in partisan politics.