The way most people think about religion and politics is only loosely linked to empirical reality, argues Ryan P. Burge in 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America. Instead, our thinking is based on anecdotes, a quick scan of news headlines, or worse, flat-out lies told by voices trying to push a religious or political agenda on a distracted public. Burge sees this fundamentally flawed understanding of the world around us and our misperceptions...

For 4 million slaves, emancipation was a liberation and resurrection story of biblical proportion, both the clearest example of God's intervention in human history and a sign of the end of days. In this book, Matthew Harper demonstrates how black southerners' theology, in particular their understanding of the end times, influenced nearly every major economic and political decision they made in the aftermath of emancipation. From considering what demands...

When over 900 followers of the Peoples Temple religious group committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and fear. Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals that originally inspired Peoples Temple members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased so that we can better understand what was created-and destroyed-at...

As we are bombarded almost daily with the latest news on the presidential candidates or the newest political scandal, we lose focus on the important, far-reaching platforms that we as Christians should be whole-heartedly a part of. Pastor Jackson believes that churches hold the answer to this loss of focus and addresses it at length in The Truth in Black and White. Breaking down the walls of partisanship and stereotypes to uncover the poisonous roots,...

America is no longer a majority white Christian nation. In this book, leading scholar Robert R Jones explains how this seismic change has profoundly altered the politics and social values of the United States. For most of the country's history, White Christian America -- the cultural and political edifice built primarily by white Protestant Christians -- set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But in recent decades new immigration...

"A provocative history of men who were worshipped as gods that illuminates the connection between power and religion and the role of divinity in a secular age"--

"We don't understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today's political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe....

For the decade that followed the end of the cold war, the world was lulled into a sense that a consumerist, globalized, peaceful future beckoned. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas-most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But, just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In...