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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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