The Public Eye Magazine

The Public Eye, Spring 2013

Muslim communities across the United States have watched with trepidation to see what the fallout from the Boston Marathon bombings will be. Likewise, civil libertarians have anticipated that the Justice Department and the FBI would seek ways to suspend normal criminal procedures, on the basis that they need to gather intelligence about terrorist organizations. Similar discussions took place in 2010, following Faisal Shahzad’s attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square.

A network of conservative Roman Catholics and Evangelicals is using a “religious liberty” framework to attack same-sex marriage, access to contraception and more using a narrative of “religious liberty”. Where did this narrative come from?

The New Apostolic Reformation is a Christian Right movement that is different from previous evangelical movements. It is rapidly gaining influence in the United States and around the globe, and it aims to advance a right-wing social and economic agenda.

James Ault is a writer and documentary filmmaker based in Northampton, MA. His first film, Born Again (1987), focused on the life of a fundamentalist Baptist church in Worcester, MA. He later wrote a book about the same church, Spirit and Flesh (2004), which The Washington Post called “the best single-volume explanation of why American fundamentalist Christianity thrives among certain people.”