The Public Eye magazine has just posted my most recent article online.  I am posting a few excertps below (and more than the usual excerpts, since umm, its my article) but you will have to click over to The Public Eye to read the whole thing.

I take the view that it is important that we have a sufficient understanding of our own history, and an ability to articulate it (and its not as hard as it sounds, once you have a well-framed narrative -- four suggested books in the article) so that we can recapture the narrative of American history from the Christian nationalists whose views are seeping into public life and play a surprising role in electoral politics.

I address these points in the excerpts below, but there is much more in the whole article.

In the life of successful social and political movements, leaders, elections, and even institutions come and go, but the movement goes on. This has certainly been true of the religious right. The recent elections, for example, were a set back, and there is some shaking out going on:  but there is no evidence that the wider movement has peaked.

But I have opened here with a disgression.  This post is not about the religious right. It is about us.

One of the strangest and most disturbing of activities of the religious right in the U.S., is it's international alliance with the Vatican, the Mormon Church, and Islamic governments in the Middle East. While these entities might find themselves opposed on such matters as the war in Iraq, they form a united front in the fight against reproductive rights in the United Nations system.  

Pam Chamberlain of Political Research Associates has an excellent overview in the