In God's Country

In this article in the current issue of The Nation, "Eyal Press writes that the secular left errs in casting religious people as its foes. Isn't alienating potential allies and confining ourselves to a small sect of like-minded believers what fundamentalism is all about?"

This is a very good article, more like something I would expect to find in Sojourners, not The Nation. Glad to see some some people wrestling with the issue of religion in America on a deeper level than just echoing tired, old partisan positions.

Here's an excerpt....

"Shortly after John Kerry's defeat in the 2004 election, an e-mail made the rounds among disgruntled Democrats suggesting that the United States be divided into two nations: the liberal coasts (where the educated, open-minded people live) and "Jesusland" (where the zealots reside). The only way to halt the retreat of modernity, it appeared, was for the cosmopolitan blue states to secede from the increasingly intolerant white evangelical heartland."

"One problem with this view is that a large number of evangelical Christians don't live in the Bible Belt. Another is that many of them aren't white. Some years ago, the Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara began taking pictures of places like La Sinagoga, a Latino church located in a run-down neighborhood of junkyards and metal shops in Brooklyn, and Emmanuel Baptist Rescue Mission, which is situated on a corner of Skid Row, Los Angeles, where drug dealers ply their trade. The photographs in Vergara's richly documented, visually arresting book, How the Other Half Worships, illustrate how indelibly religious most poor minority communities in America are, not least because in many blighted urban neighborhoods churches are the only viable institutions around."
...

"How...do pundits routinely equate biblical Christianity with right-wing politics when African-Americans, 'who are in nearly every respect as religiously conservative as whites,' nevertheless 'vote overwhelmingly for Democrats?' By, it appears, mistakenly assuming all Bible-believing Christians are reactionary white Southerners who write monthly checks to the likes of Jerry Falwell. As a survey by Religion & Ethics Newsweekly found, a majority of evangelicals actually hold an unfavorable view of Falwell. A large number appear to care more about jobs and the economy than issues like gay marriage and abortion..... Most hold views somewhere in the middle. These are the scary inhabitants of 'Jesusland' many analysts wrongly assume march in lockstep with the religious right."