RELIGION IS NOT DONE WITH YOU

A critical examination of the pervasive influence of religion in daily life.

Though both Goodwin and Morgenstein Fuerst are scholars of religion, they denounce “bullshit takes on religion…that insist religion is always and everywhere good.” At the same time, they dispute the view that religion is retrograde and irrational: there’s a place for it, they insist, if perhaps not so all-encroaching as it is in American society. On that note, they observe, for instance, that Christianity effectively dictates the calendar, not just because it’s a Christian invention, courtesy of Pope Gregory XIII, but also because it deprecates holidays that are not Christian in nature. “Even working in liberal Massachusetts is not a guarantee your employer will be cool with you calling out of work as witchy,” they write of Goodwin’s Wiccan views. The authors go further still in their critique of religion-fueled patriarchy: if you privilege white male Christian worldviews over any other, they hold, you get Jan. 6, 2021. Religion shapes health care, as arguments over abortion highlight, and it shapes politics and policing. Noting that “nominally secular systems like laws and courts codify white Christian nationalism” even in the face of the Constitution’s establishment clause, they rightly observe too that no one is really free to opt out of the system: A Sikh with a turban cannot opt out of being looked at with fear and suspicion at the airport any more than someone named Ahmed can remove himself from candidacy for the no-fly list even were he to move to South Dakota and convert to Lutheranism. In all these ways, then, religion truly is not done with us, no matter how much we might want to be done with it.

A provocative, fresh way to look at the reach of religious belief in a supposedly secular society.