E.J. Dionne, TruthDig.com

Anyone who still doubts that the evangelical Christian world is going through a political revolution was not watching Pastor Rick Warren’s presidential forum over the weekend (August 16-17). The era of reducing Christianity to a narrow set of ideological commitments is over.

Just a few years back, who would have imagined that Barack Obama and John McCain would hold a discussion of this sort in a church? Who would have thought that the session would be moderated by an evangelical pastor who was emphatic in counting both the Democrat and the Republican as his “friends”? Who would have predicted that in such a setting, the issues of abortion and gay marriage would not dominate the pastor’s queries?

Oh, yes, and who would have anticipated that the passions of the pastor in question would be engaged not in the divisions created by the culture wars but in the imperative of civility in politics and the plight of the world’s 148 million orphans? Here’s betting that the next president will help those orphans find homes.

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Both Tyson Foods and RWDSU seemed a bit surprised by the vitriolic community response to a negotiated contract that addressed both worker and employer concerns.

Kim Bobo, Religion Dispatches

On Friday, August 1, the Shelbyville Times-Gazette ran a story entitled "Tyson drops Labor Day holiday for Eid al-Fitr" that unleashed a firestorm of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment, both of which seem far too prevalent for a nation built by immigrants and priding itself on the freedom of religion.

The story was based on an a press release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) announcing that its new contract included a paid holiday for Eid al-Fitr, which is the most important Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. Eid al-Fitr, often called just Eid, is as important to Muslims as Christmas or Easter is to most Christians. The Times-Gazette article explained that the negotiated contract gave workers Eid as a holiday in place of Labor Day.

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Robert Robinson brings gospel music to the masses across the Midwest

Courtney Lewis, Minnesota Monthly

Photo by David Ellis

There are bigger things in life than Robert Robinson, but the stocky gospel singer has a way of putting everything else out of mind—except, of course, for God. When Robinson sings “O Holy Night,” fans break out in tears. With his angelic voice and cherubic figure, Robinson has been called “the Pavarotti of gospel.” It’s not the music alone that motivates him—though it is what propelled his 15 years with Lorie Line and appearance with Aretha Franklin, Jermaine Jackson, Barry Manilow, Kenny Loggins, Prince, and such local favorites as the Steeles and Sounds of Blackness. The message of gospel—songs pulled from the Bible, lyrics of praise and worship—has enabled him to find his greater purpose.

This past year, Robinson’s love for gospel music led him to stop touring and return home to focus on the Twin Cities Community Gospel Choir (TCCGC), which he founded in 1990. He initially juggled commitments, but now is solely dedicated to the choir, which recently wrapped up a holiday concert tour—Robinson’s first without Line.

The religious has right co-opted the language of feminism and the sexual revolution to try and make you feel bad about sex.

Dagmar Herzog, Perseus Books, in AlterNet.org

AlterNet.org Editor's note: From the book Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics by Dagmar Herzog. Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008

The Religious Right is a capacious tent in which many agendas and approaches have found a home. There are conservative evangelicals who promise worldly prosperity and success (if only you trust enough in God's plans). There are others who gird themselves for Armageddon. There are the vehement defenders of "Merry Christmas" and school prayer and the enemies of evolution and intellectualism and "liberal elitism." There are highly intellectual (and themselves elite) members of the Religious Right. There are those who see the culture clash with neofundamentalist Islam as the current big threat, and those who work to justify the ongoing war in Iraq as a properly Christian cause. There are those who raise money for and organize tourism in Israel in the expectation that at the End of Days a majority of Jews will convert to Christ. But right-wing evangelicalism achieved power in American politics primarily through its sex activism. And in fifteen years of steady effort, it managed to undo the most important achievements of the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s.

The Christian Right is adamant about their hatred of abortion and same-sex marriage. Now they're adding undocumented immigrants to the list.

Tarso Luís Ramos and Pam Chamberlain, PublicEye.org

If the September 2007 Values Voters Summit is anything to go by, the Christian Right is now nearly as worked up about illegal immigration as about abortion and same-sex marriage. At that political gathering—sponsored annually in Washington D.C. by such key groups as the Family Research Council and attracting grassroots activists from across the country —the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector used fuzzy math as he told a packed room that low-skilled immigrants from Latin America actually drain, rather than bolster, the U.S. economy. A parade of Republican presidential hopefuls there to court support from right-wing Protestant evangelicals attempted to outdo each other with the aggressiveness of their border security plans and the severity of their proposed policies towards immigrants.

Even former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who once charged, “Some antiimmigrant Republicans are guilty of demagoguery and racism,” took a much harder line on this occasion—equating the issues of abortion and illegal immigration: “Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce. It might be because for the last 35 years we have aborted more than a million people [each year] who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holo-caust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

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