Elisabeth Becker-Topkara, postdoctoral beau for the Religion and Its Publics projection, recently published a piece in the Washington Mail service on the demand for a Muslim-Jewish alliance in the Usa, and on what small steps may be possible moving forward, given the common threats they face. Here is an extract and a link to the full article:

Muslim and Jewish Americans face heightened levels of violence in our land. Hate crimes confronting Muslims and Jews alike are on the rise. During the mortiferous Unite the Correct rally in my city of Charlottesville, neo-Nazis marched with automobile guns chanting "Jews volition not supplant united states of america." A recently thwarted plot aimed to slaughter children, women and men in the peaceful New York enclave of Islamberg. Months ago, the single well-nigh mortiferous attack on Jews in U.S. history transpired, the killing of 11 congregants at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue. And our government has instated an unapologetic ban on immigration by some Muslims.

Amid this hatred, debates about the U.South.-State of israel alliance wrap Jewish and Muslim Americans into an international conflict at the cost of domestic unity. And we simply can't afford that.

Read the full article here: Blinded by the Israel-Palestine conflict, American Muslims and American Jews overlook the demand for domestic unity

February 13, 2019

In early on December of last yr, the crowdfunding website Patreon banned 2 accounts for using racist speech. One account belonged to Carl Benjamin, a star of the self-proclaimed rationalist and skeptical community who created YouTube videos nether the username "Sargon of Akkad." (The other account belonged to Alt-Right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.) Benjamin had risen to prominence on YouTube by producing content mocking creationists, only he eventually allied himself with the Gamergate movement and targeted feminism as his central foe. At the fourth dimension he was banned, Benjamin earned $12,000 a month from supporters on Patreon, and his YouTube channel boasted over 800,000 subscribers.Patreon's ban sparked outrage from certain parts of the organized atheist community. Sam Harris quit Patreon in protest, arguing that it was wrongly engaged in censoring valid political speech. Chris Steadman, a former humanist chaplain at Harvard and Yale, expressed concern from a dissimilar angle, noting with alarm that a visible minority of American atheists now overlap with the extreme political correct.

Philosopher John Gray's book Seven Types of Atheism is not principally focused on contemporary organized atheism; it deals with the so-called "New Atheists" consisting of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris in a single chapter. Yet Greyness'southward book is an important work precisely because it offers a reminder that atheism does not fit a single political or philosophical mold. Equally Grayness argues, "there are many atheisms with conflicting views of the world" (p. three). Grayness devotes each of his seven brief chapters to a different type of atheism as articulated through philosophers and writers, though he rightly does not intend his book to be a representative business relationship of all kinds of disbelief that exist. He takes clear sides, rejecting those views that drag science and humanity to replace theism or express anger at an absent-minded deity, only he personally embraces "atheisms that are happy to live with a godless world or an unnamable God" (p. seven).

Grey'southward often critical analysis provides an of import alternative to the largely triumphalist narratives of progressive atheists present in historical works, like Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism or R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick's Godless Citizens in A Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life. Greyness makes clear that "atheism has no specific political content, and many atheists have been virulently anti-liberal" (pp. 20-21). While he has no objection to observing that some atheists did back laudable policies, his brief contrarian account seems to specially revel in exposing the most regressive side of atheism and its connections with irrationality and pseudoscience.

Gray includes accounts of many thinkers that volition not surprise readers – look to find Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Marquis de Sade. Near all of the figures included are American or European men. The one exception to this is the special attention the book devotes to Ayn Rand, whom Grey persuasively argues is "one of the most popular atheist writers [of the twentieth century], and the only ane who had a lasting touch on contemporary politics" (p. 47). Grey understands Rand as promoting an adulterated version of Nietzsche's philosophy, and equally the leader of a cult of personality that regulated almost every aspect of her followers' lives. Rand's influence as a political figure has been taken more than seriously by academics in recent years in works similar Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market place: Ayn Rand and the American Right, but it is extremely rare to see her evaluated as an atheist thinker. Given that Rand still has prominent followers in positions of power in the United States, including Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Grey's intervention is welcome. Yet even with the importance that he assigns her, Grey may actually have underrepresented the debt gimmicky atheist thought owes to Rand. For case, 1 of her followers, George H. Smith, used her Objectivist epistemology in his book Atheism: The Case Confronting to develop many of the arguments for atheism that still circulate online.

A central argument of Seven Types of Atheism is that atheism is not some kind of moral reverse of faith, and indeed atheism oft employs God-surrogates like a faith in the concept of humanity or the potential of science. Both religious and atheist worldviews can exist moderate or lead to fanaticism. Grey compares Anabaptist-controlled Münster, Germany in the sixteenth century, an example of farthermost brutality by a theocratic government, with the Bolshevik repression of their ain citizens, an atheist instance of millennial enthusiasm leading to atrocities. This is a compelling indicate, simply it risks seeming reductive because it brushes over the numerous historical discontinuities between these events. The lack of such qualifications is ane modest downside of the book'due south brevity. It would have been useful if Grey had more than thoroughly best-selling comprehensive scholarship on these events, such equally Yuri Slezkine's House of Authorities: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, which arrive at similar conclusions.

The last two chapters reveal the kinds of atheism that Grayness finds nigh appealing, which are united by the idea that human reason is also limited to envision God. Information technology seems reasonable to question whether some of the thinkers he discusses, such as Baruch Spinoza, are really atheists at all. Grey anticipates this objection, making the point that "a articulate line between atheism and negative theology is not hands drawn" (p. 147).  The inclusion of such boundary figures does a expert job of conveying Grey's bespeak that theism and atheism are not always equally antithetical every bit popularly understood.

Seven Types of Atheism is a provocative and curt read that skillfully makes its point that atheism is non a uniform phenomenon. To know that someone does not believe in a god explains only the barest details of their atheism, only as knowing that someone believes in God conveys little nearly their religion. Equally atheism becomes more mutual in the United States, it will just become increasingly apparent that atheists are in all political parties, and on all sides in contemporary debates.

Isaac Barnes May is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the Academy of Virginia.

November 8th 2022 – Russell Moore, leading evangelical critic of the close alignment of white evangelicals with President Donald Trump, delivered the Luce Lecture on Religion in Public at UVA. In his lecture, Dr Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, cited cynicism rather than secularism as a major problem for his faith. He said many wonder whether it has become "just another bluecoat of tribal belonging," and called for a refocusing on God and the cross at the center of American Evangelicalism. Watch the full video here:

November 9, 2018

The alt-right is a specific political and social ecosystem that has many nodes. The best article that explains this universe is Joseph Bernstein'sBuzzfeed piece from 2017, "Alt-White: How the Breitbart Machine Launched Racist Hate." With bear witness from a trove of leaked emails and documents, Bernstein maps all parts of the alt-right universe; how they are continued; and deliberately have orders from Steve Bannon to infiltrate, normalize, and make racist and gendered hate mainstream. About all the major nodes of this universe are attached to specific iterations of the medieval past. Their message is intended to incite vehement racism, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, Islamaphobia, and anti-Semitism. The alt-right is interested in using the medieval European past because it sees this historical epoch as a space of pure white religious and racial culture. I volition discuss two unlike examples of how they use, abuse, and exploit ideas of white medieval religions in gild to push their tearing racist vision.

Odinists and Wolves of Vinland

The Odinists, frequently called the Wolves or Sons of Vinland, claim their organized religion is based on a medieval, pre-Christian Scandinavian belief that worships the god Odin and is organized into warrior gangs. They practice a form of toxic masculinity based on their ideas of how the barbarian warriors of medieval Northern Europe functioned as a violent warriorcomitatus. Their faith, based on a infidel medieval Scandinavian religion, enacts "group rituals (including animal sacrifice) and concord fights between members to test their masculinity." They take been regularly connected to Aryan and alt-right violence, such as Jeremy Christian's May 2022 assault in Portland, Oregon.

Odinists accept been identified as violent white supremacists for several decades. Their ideology centers on using a non-Christian religion to claim not just a pure white cultural by that they can link up, vis-à-vis Vinland (the failed medieval Viking settlement in North America described inThe Vinlands Saga), only a warrior culture they can align with their visions of toxic and racist masculinity that undergirds men's rights activism (MRA). They have more recently gotten push back from Swedish live activity role-playing groups, including Vikings confronting Nazis, and academics who point out that the Vikings were non a pure white maritime civilization but were much more than akin to the practices of multiracial pirate culture of the early modernistic period.

Odinism and the Sons/Wolves of Vinland are vehement white supremacist groups that fetishize and glorify their reddish-picked version of the medieval by and peculiarly a pagan, Northern European medieval non-Christian religious past. They are not interested in addressing the actual practiced organized religion of Ásatrú, which Iceland has recognized equally a formal, faith since 1973. In fact, the current theology and practice of this pagan Viking organized religion is doctrinally LGBTQIA-supporting, inclusive to all (regardless of civilization, race, gender, sexuality, etc.), rejects militarism, and has called out whatsoever white supremacist, MRA, genocidally racist version of pagan religious practice based on the medieval Viking by outside of Iceland, as one that does not attach to their theological and doctrinal interpretation—"Ásatrúarfélagið rejects this as a misreading of Ásatrú."

#DeusVult

The side by side medieval religious frame used, driveling, and weaponized by the alt-right is the medieval Cosmic crusader. The Crusades were an ongoing set of memes during the 2022 election as well every bit during Brexit, in which #DeusVult has get a rallying cry. The #DeusVult arose from 4chan, meme culture, and video game civilization. Video game culture is the gateway for the public to the medieval historical past. The distorted return of the Crusades and the Christian Crusader in imagining the West as the defender of autonomous Christian values was redeployed after 9/11 past George West. Bush and his administration's War on Terror. For a host of different alt-correct groups, it specifically evokes an idea of a militaristic and racially-motivated defence of the Christian West against a racist fantasy of Islam and Muslims. All of which is historically inaccurate. The white supremacist apply of #DeusVult and a render to medieval Catholicism is to invoke the myth of a white Christian (i.e. Catholic) medieval past that wishes to ignore the actual demographics and theological state of Catholicism today, let alone the doctrinal practices of contemporary Catholicism.

As the Pew Inquiry Center has tabulated that 67 percent of the globe'south Catholics in 2010 were not from the Global North, so 67 percent of the globe'southward Catholics were non-white. That statistic is compounded with the 2022 statistic that 41 percent of the United states' Catholic population were racial minorities. Nosotros tin firmly country that Catholicism today has a substantial, if not majority population, of non-white Catholic practitioners in the U.s. and around the globe. All the same, the alt-right's vision of this medieval Catholic past is used now to uphold white genocidal and violent hate. For example, in Jan 2022 Alexandre Bissonnette, a French-Canadian university student, shot and killed six people in a Quebec City mosque. The #DeusVult meme and imagery used became a manner for Bissonnette to place as a violent Islamaphobic white terrorist.

Merely equally this recent tweet shows, the connection between the medieval crusader and alt-right fascist violence is made explicit when a "crusader" dressed in medieval costume deliberately comes to harass and assail the antifascist Blackness Bloc at Kent Land University. He calls himself the "Based Crusader," and his medieval dress appears to highlight how much this vision is virtually inhabiting some imagined, white religious medieval by that aligns with the fierce xenophobia, toxic masculinity, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism of the alt-right.

This alt-right vision of the medieval Catholic by has ignored fifty years of Vatican Two, let alone the long history that created a global Catholicism that is made up of over 67 percent non-white Catholics. They take also ignored the consequent statements from Pope Francis that reject Trump and his numerous policies every bit non "Christian," let lone aligned with the theological frames or doctrines of the contemporary Catholic Church (on the outcome of refugees, imitation news, truth, family separation, Jerusalem, etc.).

What the alt-correct has done is pull from the medieval past what will align with their vision of a violent white supremacy in order to merits religious space. They are non practicing whatever class of theologically-informed, doctrinally-sanctioned version of a contemporary religion. They are too deliberately ignoring the majority practitioners of this religion (whether it is the Icelanders or the racially various majority in Catholicism). Instead, they are practicing a grade of religiously-inflected medievalism that is based on medieval cosplay, video game culture, and internet memes.

Dorothy Kim is an assistant professor of English at Brandeis Academy who specializes in medieval literature.

This post originally appeared on the Berkley Forum, a blog by the Berkley Eye for Religion, Peace, and World Diplomacy at Georgetown University. The postal service is a response to a recent conference, co-sponsored past Religion and Its Publics and the Berkley Centre, entitled Christianity and the Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship. Full video of the conference, cleaved into three panels, is available from C-Span here: Christianity and the Alt-Right in the past, Christianity and the Alt-Right in the present, and Christianity and the Alt-Right in the future.

November 7, 2018

The official representatives of American evangelicalism take been almost uniformly opposed to the Alt-Right—issuing statements, condemnations, and disavowals. Since the alt-right protest in Charlottesville in 2017, in which one counter-protester was killed,Christianity Today,for example, has had a drumbeat of denunciations of the alt-right, with interviews and stance from Christian commentators, both people of colour and white, who have expressed themselves as appalled in every way. The Gospel Coalition has also repeatedly condemned the alt-right, with long manufactures explaining what is wrong with its theology, its politics, and its reasoning. Indeed, months earlier Charlottesville, in June 2017, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution condemning the alt-right—although this only happened afterwards the resolution had initially died in committee.  At that place are numerous other examples.

But the issue is more complicated, and understanding information technology requires more than attending to the statements of evangelical leaders. To unpack how the alt-right'south virulently racist politics might seem plausible to white evangelical Christians whose leadership is busily denouncing those very views, we need to understand the development of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stances that are common today amongst white evangelicals. (Of course, not all evangelicals are white, and the percentage of evangelicals of color is going up, but I focus on white evangelicals here.) If nosotros want to unpack the racial politics of conservative white evangelicals, we demand to understand more than most what Paul Harvey has described as the "folk theology" of race and identity. Harvey was referring to the theological arguments that undergirded support for segregation amongst white American Christians in the mid-century twentieth century, such as the specious notion of the "expletive of Ham," simply his approach to the ordinary theologies of race is useful for understanding the appeal of the alt-right today.

For more than l years, there has​ been a cultural narrative virtually the global persecution of Christians that has infused a slap-up deal of evangelical culture and activism. In the immediate post-WWII catamenia, that was largely a discourse nigh Christians as persecuted by communism. After the stop of the Cold War, evangelicals in the Usa and globally focused their missionary attending and their political concerns on the "10/40 Window"—an surface area between 10 and 40 degrees latitude in which information technology was said that people were "enslaved" by Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam. That was linked to another evolution: increasingly, as American believers came to realize that the demographic eye of Christianity lay in the Global S, and as they (like everyone else) had increasing access to information about the residual of the world, they paid more attending to news about Christians in the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere. Often, in Christian media and on evangelical websites similar OpenDoors.org, or in the yearly International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, the news focused on the ways that believers elsewhere suffered for their faith.

This recognition and comprehend of Global South "persecuted Christians" as role of the global Christian community has a number of effects. It certainly has increased support for Christian communities that are facing violence or threats in the Middle Due east and Africa. And sometimes it has led American believers to attend to the multiple crises affecting Global Due south communities, including needs for make clean water or healthcare. But information technology also has the effect of helping Americans to identify themselves, as Christians, as part of a globally oppressed or marginalized group. Thus, nosotros can arrive at the shocking reality that, in 2017, 57 percentage of white U.South. evangelicals told pollsters that they believe American Christians confront a cracking deal of discrimination today, while only 44 percent said the aforementioned was true of Muslims. That is, the thought of Christians as victims on the international phase encourages a sense of aggrieved marginality amidst white American evangelicals.

Feeling that one is part of a persecuted customs might exist a long way from joining the alt-correct, but we do know how the alt-right and the populist right in Europe uses this, plays upon it, and amplifies it—with the anti-sharia law campaigns and the attacks on Muslims who are running for Congress.

The alt-right can count on people to find something compelling in narratives of their own victimization. There is a resonance, I'm arguing, between a Christian evangelical embrace of the issue of Christian persecution and the demonization of Muslims that is office of thecommon sense of the alt-right.

We have to look at this reality—and I recall conservative Christians need to look at it likewise. It is not enough forChristianity Today or the Southern Baptist Convention to condemn the alt-right, as important as that is. It is likewise important for evangelicals to consider the parts of their ain self-conception and their own folk theology that are portable into the logic of alt-right racism and anti-Muslim hostility.

Melani McAlister is an associate professor of American studies and international affairs at George Washington Academy.

This postal service originally appeared on the Berkley Forum, a web log by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. The mail is a response to a recent conference, co-sponsored past Religion and Its Publics and the Berkley Middle, entitled Christianity and the Alt-Correct: Exploring the Relationship. Total video of the conference, broken into three panels, is available from C-SPAN here: Christianity and the Alt-Right in the by, Christianity and the Alt-Right in the present, and Christianity and the Alt-Right in the future.

November seven, 2018

While others have offered reflections on the alt-right from the standpoints of political science, sociology, and American history, my perspective is perhaps a scrap different. While those fields tend in a descriptive direction, the piece of work of the Christian theologian is often unembarrassedly normative in character. Such normativity will be on full display in this short slice. It forms an initial endeavour to help Christians, and mayhap some others, formulate a theological response to the alt-right—ane that (a) acknowledges that its distinctive combination of anti-Semitism and anti-black/anti-chocolate-brown racism has precedent in the Christian tradition; (b) reckons with the difficulty of formulating an constructive rhetoric and witness in response; and (c) understands the limited authorization of ideas in the political sphere.

My get-go point: Christians shouldn't succumb to the temptation to remember of the alt-correct as a baffling, strange, incomprehensible "other"—a political flare-up that is entirely conflicting to the Christian tradition. Christians must instead accept and acknowledge that our religious tradition connects with, and in fact gives intellectual back up to, the racial imaginary of the alt-right. To be sure, there are inspirations for the alt-right, and prominent figures inside it, who repudiate Christianity. Think of Alain de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droit; retrieve of Richard Spencer's (painfully sophomoric) reading of Nietzsche. But it would be churlish to ignore the fact that the alt-right draws on a long tradition of Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. It does exactly that, and sometimes quite explicitly. Furthermore, the fashion the alt-right blends anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism with anti-blackness/anti-brown racism finds striking parallel in the history of Christian idea.

Scholars such as J. Kameron Carter and Willie Jennings testify instructive on this point. Carter argues convincingly that the racial imagination of modernity is grounded in the attempt to detach Christian identity from its Jewish roots. Jews existence viewed as "racial others" is the fatal cast of the die: it forms the showtime footstep towards a "racialized chain of beingness" that culminates in an credo of white supremacism. Jennings's thought heads in a like direction. The colonialist and racist currents that swirl inside Western modernity are animated by Christianity's long history of anti-Judaism.

So here's a difficult truth. When alt-correct demonstrators chanted "You will not replace us" and "Jews volition not supervene upon us" in Charlottesville, and when similar sentiments are voiced in chatrooms, bars, schoolyards, churches, and regime offices—sometimes with mortiferous outcome, as the contempo events in Pittsburgh evidence—nosotros have to acknowledge that information technology is a tradition forged, at least in function, past Western Christian thought. And inasmuch as Christians, especially those of us who are white, inherit and benefit from this tradition, we have a responsibleness to contest it. We have to own a mutual past, even as nosotros claiming the alt-right in the nowadays.

My 2d point is the identification of a quandary. Put simply: I don't know what kind of religious rhetoric and witness is best suited to challenge the alt-right. One choice is prophetic denunciation—treating white nationalism, neo-Confederate politics, and neo-Nazism as idols that must exist smashed. (If y'all want inspiration for this stance, Karl Barth is a good bet). Some other option is to attempt to out-narrate the alt-right, to overpower them with a celebration of Jewish, Latinx, black, queer, and immigrant voices. Withal another option is to focus attention on figures on the religious left (think of William Barber, Traci Blackmon, Jennifer Harvey, and others) and to work towards changing the theo-political culture of the Us.

Now, none of these options (and at that place are of course more) are mutually exclusive, and each has its claim. Nevertheless I worry that established modes of expression and activity do not have much traction with respect to the alt-right, and that Christians need to develop new forms of rhetoric and witness to contend with this threat. The alt-right, afterward all, is non a political bloc or party. It stands somewhere between an assemblage, a mood, and a motility; it comprises a mess of neo-Confederate groups, free-floating white supremacists and anti-Semites, former and new neo-Nazis, pseudo-intellectuals, and—final merely certainly not least—online trolls. Crucially, too, many who associate or empathise with the alt-right have no interest in mainstream political or religious life. They've taken what Richard Hofstadter famously called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" to an entirely new level, with "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness … conspiratorial fantasy" and "apocalyptic … expression" forged in the furnace of online chatrooms and boutique websites.

In fact, even though religious critiques of the alt-right are desperately needed, those critiques might well strengthen an entrenched narrative of victimization. Just as some evangelicals thrill to the (false) idea that Christians are a beleaguered minority in the West, so the alt-right entertains the (false) idea that whites alive with their backs against the wall. The "war on Christmas" and the "state of war on whites" form two sides of a paranoid, self-serving, counterfeit coin.

So here'southward some other hard truth. If contesting the alt-correct means something more than than outmuscling information technology—that is, if contesting this assemblage, movement, and mood requires fostering some kind of repentance and conversion among its adherents, and then that their message is contested non just from the "outside" but undone from the "inside"—I worry that nosotros don't yet know how to proceed, either rhetorically or in terms of faith-based organizing.

Tertiary and finally: Christians need to be careful not to overestimate the ability of ideas when it comes to the alt-right. It is e'er tempting to suppose that sharp thoughts can change the globe. A bit of consciousness-raising, a nicely turned thesis, deft penmanship: these are assumed to exist the drivers of religious and political change. But we mustn't fall victim to naïveté. Amongst the various forms of soft ability now in circulation, theological arguments are downright squishy, and certainly no match for diverse modalities of hard ability. So, granted my get-go two points, I would encourage Christians—particularly Christian theologians, like me—to attend once more to the tradition of Christian realism. Reinhold Niebuhr one time wrote that the "preservation of democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of lite must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice." These are timely words.

Christians can and must reckon with the renewed vigor of the far-right, and Christian theologians tin can and must exercise our role to disrupt, undermine, and ignominy it. Merely such work will merely have a meaning bear upon when it is complemented with tough-minded, concrete, local contestations of white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and then-chosen "race realism," and neo-fascism—the whole toxic, ugly mess gathered nether the name of the alt-right.

Paul Dafydd Jones is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and the co-director of the Religion and Its Publics projection.

This post originally appeared on the Berkley Forum, a blog past the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. The post is a response to a contempo conference, co-sponsored past Religion and Its Publics and the Berkley Center, entitled Christianity and the Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship. Full video of the conference, broken into 3 panels, is bachelor from C-SPAN hither: Christianity and the Alt-Right in the past, Christianity and the Alt-Correct in the present, and Christianity and the Alt-Right in the time to come.