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Exploring how religious faith and the quest for religious liberty has shaped public life in America for over four hundred years. God in America: A New Adam, PBS 2010
The Puritans fled religious tyranny in the old world to build a more perfect in the new. And how new waves of immigrants demanded their religious freedom. ibid.
The struggle to be free from belief. ibid.
The Franciscan priests saw no room for any other religion ... The Pueblos themselves saw things differently. ibid.
European religion would not survive unchanged in the new world. ibid.
[Anne] Hutchinson had a riveting story to tell: God had spoken to her directly … Hutchinson’s easy path to Heaven undermined Winthrop’s orderly society. ibid.
Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, were all Anglican colonies – dissenting faiths were treated with suspicion. ibid.
Like Anne Hutchinson, Whitefield had fallen afoul of a religious authority that distrusted any message that gave an individual power over their religious experience. ibid.
For Thomas Jefferson the new republic must be founded with religious freedom. God in America: A New Eden
Any preacher without a license could be arrested. ibid.
Jefferson met with Virginia’s leading Baptists who told him of their struggle to practise their faith. ibid.
Religion would not be guaranteed a place at the centre of public life. ibid.
A wave of revivals swept through South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. ibid.
Methodism was attracting more converts than any other denomination. ibid.
Two out of three church-goers were evangelical Protestants. ibid.
Many were Irish Catholics fleeing poverty and religious oppression. ibid.
[John] Hughes’s politicking paid off. ibid.
In the nineteenth century many Americans believed their country had been chosen by God. God in America: A Nation Reborn
At the heart of the Abolishionists’ movement was a former slave who had escaped to the north – Frederick Douglass. ibid.
Douglass had been converted at a Methodist revival. ibid.
Southern Methodists broke away and found the Methodist Episcopal Church South. ibid.
The north felt God favoured their cause. ibid.
The war dragged on and casualties mounted on both sides. ibid.
No longer accountable to anyone Wise’s ambitions were unleashed. He travelled the east coast ... America’s Jews must unite. God in America: A New Light
America was modernising. And all its religions would now have to face a changing world. ibid.
Briggs had set off an ecclesiastical bomb. ibid.
In 1914 the end days seemed to have arrived. ibid.
They called themselves the Fundamentalists. ibid.
Fundamentalists launched a nationwide campaign to ban the teaching of evolution in America’s schools. ibid.
John Scope was found guilty. Teaching evolution remained illegal in Tennessee and several other states. ibid.
As it confronted Communism, American would undergo a religious revival. God in America: The Soul of the Nation
In the Soviet threat Graham found a powerful new religious message. ibid.
As President, Eisenhower invoked faith as a weapon against communism, just as Bill Graham had done. ibid.
Billy Graham’s 1957 crusade in New York City. ibid.
Graham produced a film dramatising his message: The Decade of Decision. ibid.
It would take a series of Supreme Court rulings over several years to more fully define the role of religion in the public schools. ibid.
At the heart of the [civil rights] movement was the Black Church. ibid.
As the new leader of the bus boycott, King gave his first civil rights speech in a packed Montgomery Church. ibid.
King’s house is bombed. After the bombing a crowd of supporters gathered outside eager for revenge. ibid.
Billy Graham called for restraint saying King should ‘put the brakes on’. ibid.
King said he was preaching the Gospel of Freedom. ibid.
King assumed the mantle of an Old Testament prophet. ibid.
Jerry Falwell ... Pat Robertson was another young conservative tele-evangelist who had rejected political engagement. God in America: Of God and Caesar
In 1978 Falwell delivered his first sermon condemning abortion. ibid.
In the summer of 1979 Falwell, at the urging of conservative operatives, launched a political organisation he called The Moral Majority. ibid.
Ronald Reagan set out to capture their votes. ibid.
Pat Robertson – his Christian Coalition took a different course. ibid.
A majority of Muslims had voted for George W Bush. ibid.
In Los Angeles and across the country a new generation was redefining the evangelical political agenda with its own take on the Christian message. ibid.
Unless the Western world has an old-fashioned revival we are done for. Billy Graham
All religion depends upon revelation. All revelation is supernatural. Professor Harold Bloom
… although similar to the states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance … and as a rule, they carry with them a curious sense of authority. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience @ p414
Monstrous horrible things are happening in the land. The prophets prophecy falsely. The priests teach whatever they please. And my people love it! But when the End comes, what will you do? Jeremiah 5:30&31
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works?
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. Matthew 7:21-23
If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain.
Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. James 1:26&7
Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and Christians ... Whoever believes in God and the last day and does good, they shall have their reward from God. Koran 2:62