Boston Review How Religion Shapes Politics
political leaders from Trump to Putin routinely invoke religious authority to justify their worldly ambitions. Meanwhile, intense debates over social rights such as abortion and same-sex marriage turn on differing religious beliefs and interpretations of religious freedom. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-faith-based-discrimination/
The Gospel of Oil : Oil’s grip on U.S. society is as much religious as economic, a new history shows. Kim Phillips-Fein https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kim-phillips-fein-anointed-oil/ As historian Kim Phillips-Fein writes in her review of Darren Dochuk’s Anointed With Oil, a study of the “wildcat Christianity” practiced by turn-of-the twentieth century oil entrepreneurs: “By looking at the oil industry, we can learn something about the ways that capitalism relies on moral systems.” It is not economic logic alone but rather “the twin passions for wealth and Jesus that have brought us to our current dependence on fossil fuels.”
A Servant Heart How Neoliberalism Came to Be James G. Chappel https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/james-chappel-servant-heart-religion-neoliberalism/ James Chappel shows in a review of four books focused on the rise of neoliberal governance. “The advent of neoliberalism often seems to accompany religious revival,” It “never comes to power under its own unattractive guise but always under the wing of a quite distinct, and often religious, moral economy.” Indeed, as Chappel observes, “Faith-based organizations share with neoliberalism an allergy to government funding and an insistence that poverty and addiction are personal, spiritual failings.”
But religion can be a utopian force of liberation as well, inspiring righteous struggle and solidarity. This is especially evident when oppressed people wield theology in their battles for rights and recognition, as Panashe Chigumadzi and Cornel West demonstrate in their intellectual biography of Desmond Tutu. Situating Tutu’s religious thought in the context of a 1970s debate between representatives of Black and African theology, Chigumadzi and West show why his theology of reconciliation remains an important touchstone for those committed to Pan-African and global visions of justice.
Other essays on this week’s list explore the intersection of religion and politics through a variety of topics, including the displaced antisemitism of “don’t say gay” laws, how Trump exploited the pre-existing Islamophobic policies of Bush and Obama to bolster his anti-Muslim agenda, lost Jewish utopias, Christianity’s historical relation to liberalism, and more.
Salman Rushdie and the Neoliberal Culture Wars Far from a metaphysical battle between fanaticism and tolerance, the Rushdie affair exemplifies the marketization of hurt sentiments. Faisal Devji https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/salman-rushdie-and-the-neoliberal-culture-wars/