A stern warning that those who push for the intrusion of religion into public life do so at the peril of both.
A slender but thoroughly argued case for reinforcing the wall between church and state.
Balmer, a historian of evangelicalism in America and professor of religion at Dartmouth, is firmly on the side of a truly secular public sphere, trusting in the wisdom and logic of the “establishment clause,” the portion of the First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of an official or officially endorsed religion. There are good reasons for that clause, including the fact that the Puritanism and Quakerism of the Northern states were much different from the Anglicanism and breakaway Protestantism of the Southern ones. Rather than allow the state to impose a religious preference on its population, writes the author, the models to follow are those of Roger Williams, William Penn, and Thomas Jefferson, the last of whom protested that to tax a citizen in order to support an established church “is sinful and tyrannical.” Fast-forward to the rise of the religious right, which “mobilized not, as commonly supposed, to battle abortion, but rather to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions such as Bob Jones University.” As an instrument of emergent White nationalism, the religious right has been well served by the current administration and Supreme Court, which, in a 2020 decision, allowed people like the current secretary of education to feast on funds diverted from public coffers and given to private religious schools. The “religious liberty” that the religious right seeks is less about the diversion of funds and more about the imposition of discriminatory measures against putative enemies and the suppression of the rights of minorities. The irony in all of this, notes the author, is that evangelical churches in particular have flourished in this country precisely because not oppressed by an official religion: “This has lent an energy and dynamism to religious life in America, a vitality unmatched anywhere in the world.”
A stern warning that those who push for the intrusion of religion into public life do so at the peril of both.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-58642-271-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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