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Showing posts from July, 2018

Brief Book Note: Froese & Bader’s “America’s Four Gods”

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Here's a book that was on my shelf for about three years before I finally read it. It was one of those situations where I’d wanted to read it but didn’t really have a reason until I needed to put together some lecture material for a new class on Christianity and politics. So I read it, and I was glad that I did. Paul Froese & Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What We Say About God—& What That Says About Us (Oxford, 2010). This book isn’t especially dense, but it is very interesting and sheds fresh light on how religion and politics interact in the United States. It’s geared especially toward analyzing Christian God-talk, although the other Abrahamic traditions would fit more generally, but that accounts for the bulk of the US population. It also has interesting findings with regard to folks who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” or as belonging to no religious tradition (i.e., the “nones”), or as agnostic. Basically, those folks tend to fall u