Inventing America's God

Feed Your Brain: These events feature authors, scholars, and luminaries from many fields that expand our knowledge and understanding of the world and the people who inhabit it. CFI's naturalistic approach to wisdom holds that there is no issue exempt from examination and discussion.

Gain a better understanding of America's political faiths as author Tom Mates leads a lively discussion of politics, religion, and American History, introducing his new, first book, A Judeo-Islamic Nation: The Evolution of America's Political Theology. Mates will re-acquaint us with this familiar yet poorly understood religion.

     During the past 30 years of religious political activism, activists have relentlessly claimed that religion is a vital source of moral absolutism. But the personal nature of religious belief belies this claim. Christians differ widely in their political views, and all of them have a strained relationship with the Gospels. Christian belief is so relativistic that throughout most of its history it hasn't really been Christian at all.

     The religious tradition to which our political evangelicals belong is based in the originally Jewish notion of a chosen, self-governing people in a promised land. This civil religion has been combined with an outward-looking and at times aggressive universalism to become something best described as a Judeo-Islamic faith: a religion far removed from the impractical, pessimistic belief system described by Jesus and Paul. Over the course of American history, this strong, flexible faith has continued to evolve.

     Mates is a Materials Scientist at the University of California - Santa Barbara and technical director of the Materials department's analytical laboratories. His interest in religion dates back to the heyday of the Moral Majority in the 1980s. He earned his bachelor's degree in engineering, with honors, from Alfred University in New York , and went to work at IBM, ultimately completing a master's degree at MIT and a doctorate at Cornell University, both in the field of Materials Science. Several of his articles on religion and society have appeared in Free Inquiry and The Humanistmagazines.