The Myth of American Freedom

The myth of American religious freedom

He is also the author of The Jefferson Rule: From the previous edition: Wonderful, important, and refreshingly iconoclastic. This excellent book advances an interesting twist on the traditional legal interpretations of the free exercise clause and makes a compelling case for a careful reexamination of our assumptions regarding its history More than any other book I have read over the last six months, I find myself continuously referencing this analysis.

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It should be widely, and carefully, read. A knowledge of Sehat's argument would elevate the substance of contemporary political debates about the separation of church and state, about religious tests for political office, and about finding common moral ground. Sehat gives little comfort to today's advocates of a greater role for religion in public life, but he also calls into question the historical foundation of most defenses of a sharp church-state separation.

This smart, provocative book invites a wide and attentive readership.

Unlearning the myth of American innocence – podcast

University Press of New England. Outline Index Book Category Portal. In other projects Wikiquote. Running from Office Jennifer L. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale.

Hollinger, President, Organization of American Historians, Vann Woodward and Edmund Morgan. Just as they destroyed myths about liberty, slavery, and segregation, Sehat now devastates the idea that the United States was born, reared, and raised in religious freedom. He shows that, instead, control and power have long dominated American religious history. This is a rich and sad saga that delves brilliantly into law, politics, and reform.

Deeply researched and passionately argued, The Myth of American Religious Freedom transforms how we think about religion and the United States.

Unlearning the myth of American innocence

Blum, author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

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Academic Skip to main content. Choose your country or region Close. Something like scales fell from their eyes , and when they arose anew, they had been baptised by the fire of political violence.

Income inequality isn't just about justice; it's about freedom, too. One view of freedom minimises the state's role in an individual's life and maximises markets so that individuals are free to risk whatever they want to risk to be whatever they want to be. Another view sees the obligation of the state to hedge against the risk of the marketplace so that individuals can feel secure enough to be what they want to be. Obviously, the libertarian view favours someone who can afford risk; the socialist view favours someone who can't.

One view has confidence in the market while the other is skeptical. One view sees income inequality as natural while the other sees it as politically oppressive. Emmanuel Saez, an economist from UC Berkeley, tried to quantify that oppression. He found that during the first year of the recovery from the crisis 93 per cent of incomes gains went to the 1 per cent.

The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Updated Edition

Such an uneven recovery can help explain the recent public demonstrations against inequality. Moreover, income for the 99 per cent grew by 20 per cent from , but during the Bush years, it grew by only 6. It's worth saying again that this is not a natural occurrence of the free and open marketplace.

The upward redistribution of wealth is the concrete result of politics and policy - one might even say socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else.

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"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John. In the days after Hurricane María tore across Puerto Rico, looking for news, I visited the website of the major daily, El Nuevo Día, and was.

Or should I say authoritarianism for everyone else. It's ostensibly an effort to better prepare communities in case of another attack. But, as Stephan Salisbury reported recently, there has been a cultural transformation, too. So it's tempting to say two currents conspired to increasingly limit the freedom of individuals in the land of the free.

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One is the funnelling of wealth upward so that the top 10 per cent owns and controls half the wealth. The other is the organising of state violence to protect the oligarchy in case anyone gets wise to what's happening. Perhaps there's a third: These collided in an instant in November. New York City cops, under the orders of a billionaire mayor to clear out Zuccotti Park, suppressed the rights of thousands of Americans who had been protesting the oligarchy's power over their lives. Not only was the state reacting to the threat of collective action; it was defrauding the public of its contractual right to use the park after having paid for it.

Given all this, I sense the depth of Zinn's line about "the full-force of the capitalist state". Occupy protesters aren't just facing local police; they are facing an entire system bent on breaking dissent and protecting the status quo. And I sense this is why Eugene Debs became a radical after experiencing such political violence. How can you play by the rules when the 1 per cent writes, and keeps rewriting, the rules? The only way to fight back is to fight back against the entire system.

Noam Chomsky on George Orwell, the Suppression of Ideas and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

In , Debs visited three socialists in jail for dodging the World War I draft. Afterward, he walked across the street to give an impromptu speech that enraptured onlookers for hours. Because of this speech, Debs was eventually found guilty of violating the Espionage Act, a deeply un-American set of laws that are still in effect in fact, the Obama administration is using the laws against Bradley Manning, who leaked secrets to WikiLeaks.