Dispatches From the Culture Wars – People’s Opioid Edition

Pogrom on Sharia; Religious left hook; Hell on Earth; Southern Baptism schism; The Lee myth

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Some Trump Supporters Want a Holy War

By Ishaan Tharoor
June 11, 2017
Washington Post

On Saturday, anti-Muslim activists held a number of sparsely attended protests across the United States. The ostensible reason for the demonstrations was opposition to Islamic law, or sharia, a cause that animates the lobbying organization that called the marches. But critics of that group, which has close ties to the Donald Trump campaign, argue that its anti-sharia posturing is a smokescreen for much broader hostility toward Muslims — a charge that can be similarly leveled at President Trump's administration.

Religious Liberals Sat Out of Politics for 40 Years. Now They Want in the Game.

By Laurie Goodstein
June 10, 2017
New York Times

Across the country, religious leaders whose politics fall to the left of center, and who used to shun the political arena, are getting involved — and even recruiting political candidates — to fight back against President Trump’s policies on immigration, health care, poverty and the environment.

Politics, Culture or Theology? Why Evangelicals Back Trump on Global Warming

By David Gibson
June 9, 2017
Crux

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The Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations have been some of the loudest voices in calling for action to protect the environment. Why, then, did many Evangelical Christians support Donald Trump’s move to leave the Paris Climate Agreement? New research indicates that on environmental issues, at least, conservative Christian theology may be the driving force behind the sharply divergent views of evangelicals.

How Trump is Highlighting Divisions Among Southern Baptists

By David Waters, Holly Meyer and Amy McRary
June 10, 2017
USA Today

Pulpit-and-pew level tensions straining the faith, fellowship and funding in the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
Those tensions — racial, sectional, but mostly generational — have been forming for more than a decade, thanks in large part to the rise of social media and Millennials, and will be on full display this week when the convention holds its annual meeting in Phoenix.

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

By Adam Serwer
June 4, 2017
The Atlantic

To describe Robert E. Lee as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.