{"id":7043,"date":"2004-07-11T22:08:30","date_gmt":"2004-07-11T22:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/allen_v_reich.html"},"modified":"2004-07-11T22:08:30","modified_gmt":"2004-07-11T22:08:30","slug":"allen_v_reich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/allen_v_reich.html","title":{"rendered":"Allen v. Reich"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlotte takes on Robert Reich in the LA Times<\/a><\/p>\n

\nIn a column titled “Bush’s God” in this month’s American Prospect magazine, Robert Reich, secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, declares that religion is a graver threat to America than terrorism. Reich predicts that the great battle of the 21st century won’t be between terrorists and the West but between “those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority \u2026 between those who believe in science, reason and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.”<\/p>\n

Reich isn’t the only one anxious about religion invading politics. Last year, Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, complained that Bush was sending a secret message of solidarity to fellow Christians when he used the phrase “wonder-working power” \u2014 taken from a Christian hymn \u2014 in a sentence praising Americans’ faith and idealism in his State of the Union address. And in a review of several books on the president’s family for the current New Yorker magazine, David Greenberg contends that because the inspiration of God and the Bible “is purely personal or subjective, it’s not open to debate \u2014 and decisions based on it become immune from scrutiny.” In other words, it’s downright undemocratic for the president to mention God in public.<\/p>\n

There’s an obvious response to Greenberg’s argument: Given that we’ve got a presidential election in November, offering voters a chance to boot out the Bible-thumping president if they wish, where’s the threat to democracy?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charlotte takes on Robert Reich in the LA Times In a column titled “Bush’s God” in this month’s American Prospect magazine, Robert Reich, secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, declares that religion is a graver threat to America than terrorism. Reich predicts that the great battle of the 21st century won’t be between terrorists…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAllen v. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}