Sarah Posner

Welcome to the FDL Book Salon on Robert Jones’ new book, Progressive and Religious: How Christian Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders Are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. It’s a really interesting and engaging read, and offers some valuable insights into how politically progressive religious people find the source of their progressive values in their religious traditions.

By now you could mention the name John Hagee and immediately most people would quickly associate it with the term “great whore.” The reference, of course, is to Hagee’s now-notorious exposition on the Book of Revelation in which he describes the institution of the Catholic Church as a lascivious woman astride a horse in the biblical story on the end of the world. Like all Hagee sermons, this one hardly serves as a model for scholarly exegesis. But the emphasis on Hagee’s clumsy diatribe misses a larger point: that Hagee was describing the Book of Revelation in terms that demonstrate how he thinks it is a real description of church history, a real forecast of the end of the world, and, as a result, a template for U.S. foreign policy.