This week marked a rather symbolic anniversary for my national “On Religion” column, which I have been writing now for (#GULP) a third of a century.
As you would imagine, I spend some time thinking about the subject for this week’s column: “Why 'religious liberty' has ended up inside quotation marks.” This column was also the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).
Anyone who has followed my work with GetReligion and “On Religion” will not be surprised that I chose to write about the First Amendment and and a highly symbolic religious liberty case (no scare quotes there) at the U.S. Supreme Court.
But hold that thought. I’d like to walk through what are, for me, four symbolic columns I have written in the past, as I head into year No. 34.
That first column in 1988 was rather newsy: “Pat Robertson, evangelicals and the White House.” Here’s the lede on that:
On the morning before Easter, Pat Robertson stood in a pulpit under an American flag and a banner that read, "King of Kings, Lord of Lords."
Alas, change the name of the candidate and that still sounds rather relevant, considering the state of warfare inside American evangelicalism these days (see this must-read Richard Ostling post).
On the 10th anniversary of the column — that seemed like a long time, back then — I focused on a classic book by sociologist James Davison Hunter (“Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America”) that has greatly influenced my work as a journalist and as a professor. The column opened by describing an interesting trend at political and religious rallies at that time: