Recently in Books Category

Demagogue's intellectual that he is, Newt Gingrich has a way of putting his finger on a problem that creates a problem for himself. To wit, here's what he had to say to David Brody the other day about threats to our civilization:

In a sense, our Judeo-Christian civilization is under attack from two fronts. On one front, you have a secular, atheist, elitism. And on the other front, you have radical Islamists. And both groups would like to eliminate our civilization if they could. For different reasons, but with equal passion.

Now no national politician has been more vociferous than Newt in backing efforts to prevent American courts from applying Sharia law, as Oklahoma voted to do last fall, lest radical Islamists get their way. But specifically prohibiting the application of Sharia among all religious arrangements that come before courts (e.g. Jewish halacha) is a blatant violation of the First Amendment's ban on singling out particular religious groups for disfavor.

To do it right, you'd have to do what the 19th-century Blaine amendments did: go after a specific religion (in those cases Roman Catholicism) by prohibiting aid to all religious schools (knowing that only the Catholics had their own school system). But if you ban the application of all religious law, then you play right into the hands of the secular, atheist elite. Oy, oy, what's a poor Newt to do?

Copies of our new book arrived today, and if you order right away you can get it for 25 percent off. You can think of it as kind of the Cliff's Notes version of the Greenberg Center's Religion by Region project--cheap at three times the price--but more importantly, it offers a new way of understanding the history of religion in contemporary American public life that integrates religious demography and regional culture into the narrative of national politics. In more ways than I can think, this blog has been informed and shaped by what we learned from the project of which One Nation, Divisible is the culmination.

David Domke and Kevin Coe have teamed up to publish a new book, The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. The book highlights the increase of religious rhetoric in recent years.

"On average, presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter mentioned God in less than half of their major addresses. Put another way, more often than not presidents during these years made no mention of God in important speeches. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush (through year six) all did so in more than 90% of theirs."

You can read more from the duo here on the WaPo/Newsweek OnFaith site. More in depth here, Domke's USA Today column.