Religion - Politics
It is common for employers to engage in activities, such as all-staff prayers or religious-themed holiday programs, which can lead nonreligious employees and employees of different religions to feel unwelcome. Many employers do not know about their obligation under Federal law to provide reasonable accommodations based on religion in the workplace, such as accommodating work schedules or dress codes. While most employers train staff on accommodations under other Federal civil rights laws, similar training for religious accommodation is frequently absent.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act – which was enacted by Congress in 1993 as a measure to protect the rights of religious individuals and communities that may be burdened by government activity – further conversations may be needed to ensure the actions of the Federal government do not unnecessarily impede religious exercise and expression.
Bakers like Jack Phillips in Colorado or Aaron and Melissa Klein in Oregon refused to sell wedding cakes to same-sex couples. In July 2015 GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) came out with a new video, highlighting a straight Iowa couple who operates a wedding services business and refused to do business with a same-sex couple. They they decided to stop providing wedding services altogether, rather than start serving gay couples. It was a marked contrast with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who used her presidential launch video to draw attention to same-sex couples who were about to get married.
Conservative power in the United States, financed and organized by Christian fundamentalist sects, the Catholic Church, and conservative corporate and political leadership, has become more threatening and potentially destabilizing of progressive democratic principles and practices. Powerful interlocking political, financial and social forces are arrayed against women in many Southern and Western states.
In the Bible Belt, Christianity is not confined to Sunday worship. Christian crosses, messages, paraphernalia, music, news, and attitudes permeate everyday settings. Consequently, Christian fundamentalist dogma about homosexuality - that homosexuals are bad, diseased, perverse, sinful, other, and inferior - is cumulatively bolstered within a variety of other social institutions and environments in the Bible Belt.
Religious discourse has now become a vehicle used by politicians and legislators to advance conservative ideology and morality. Charismatic evangelists preached from the pulpits of their mega-churches via television denouncing President Obama as the Anti-Christ and women who obtain an abortion as murderers or "baby killers" tantamount to felons. Such clerics and their churches also regularly violated their non-profit status by explicitly promoting political candidates by name and adopting specific political positions in their weekly sermons. The controlling influence that these wealthy theocrats exert on public opinion and community social norms is an unchecked abuse of power.
Tammy Faye Bakker was a diminutive and elaborately coiffed gospel singer who, with her first husband, Jim Bakker, built a commercial empire around television evangelism only to see it collapse in sex and money scandals. She and Mr. Bakker, an Assemblies of God minister, worked as traveling evangelists in the early years of their marriage. He preached; she sang and played the accordion. They began their television career in the mid-1960s, joining Pat Robertson’s fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network as the original hosts of “The 700 Club.” In 1989, Mr. Bakker was convicted of federal charges that he had bilked followers out of $158 million by offering lifetime vacations at Heritage USA while knowing he could not provide them and that he had diverted about $3.7 million to support an opulent lifestyle.
Almost 50% of Americans believe in creationism over evolution and many legislatures and school boards have considered whether to teach creationism. One of the most frequently recurring controversies in the fields of science and education over the past one hundred and fifty years has been the tug of war between those who in general accept the principles of evolution and natural selection laid down by naturalist Charles Darwin in his seminal work The Origin of Species and those who insist on the more or less literal truth of the creation account as given in the first couple of chapters of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian Bible.
While some describe the principle of evolution as “just a theory,” the scientific definition of a theory is far more rigorous than may be commonly understood. There is little or no debate among credible scientists about whether evolution has taken place. There is a spectrum of beliefs within creationism from literalists, who believe the universe is no more than 6,000 years old, to theists, who believe evolution occurred, but not by a random process.
Evolution is the unifying theory of biology. It also may be the most well-supported scientific theory that is rejected by a large proportion of Americans (e.g., Miller et al., 2006 blue right-pointing triangle). This high-profile controversy will be familiar to any instructor teaching evolution in the United States. Student misconceptions regarding natural selection are remarkably resistant to instruction.
Students frequently have a hard time understanding how complex traits, such as the vertebrate eye, have evolved through a combination of random mutation and natural selection. Darwin anticipated this. He wrote in Chapter 6 of the Origin of Species: “To suppose that the eye … could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” Darwin then went on to explain how such complex structures could evolve via natural selection through the accumulation of small changes.
Although evolution provides credible and reliable answers, polls show that many people turn away from science, seeking other explanations with which they are more comfortable. Alternative perspectives are offered by advocates of various kinds of creationism, including "intelligent design." The theory of intelligent design (ID) is the idea that some features of the natural world, such as the internal machinery of cells, are too "irreducibly complex" to have resulted from unguided natural processes alone.
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