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Unbuckling the Bible Belt: “Nashville” and the Nones

By Carrie Allen Tipton

…country. As John Jurgensen accurately noted in the Wall Street Journal, “‘Nashville’ is dominated by intimate, acoustic numbers that would fall into the category of ‘Americana.’” No great shock this, since T. Bone Burnett was the program’s music producer in the first season, followed in Season 2 by Buddy Miller, a co-producer from Season 1. Burnett’s and Miller’s tracks draw on the songwriting talents of alt.country luminaries Patty Griffin and L…

Is the Bible Too Holy to Be Tennessee’s State Book?

By Adam Shapiro

…ade, transported, and sold. And much of that making and selling happens in Tennessee. Nashville is the home of several of the nation’s largest Bible publishers. Hotel nightstands around the U.S. are filled with Bibles produced by Nashville-based Gideons International. Major publisher B&H Publishing is also based there, and even though Thomas Nelson is a subsidiary of New York-based Harper Collins, its offices are in Nashville. It’s hardly unusual…

Why Natural Disasters Were Perfect Timing for Anti-LGBT Nashville Statement

By Kristel Clayville

…attempts to reaffirm the “natural” or “Godly order” of the world (like the Nashville Statement), along with increased scapegoating of marginalized communities for their role in putting the U.S. in the path of God’s wrath. To be clear, like other writers on RD, I also think the Nashville Statement is stupid and unnecessary. And as a lesbian minister, I’m also out of fucks to give about what evangelicals think about sexuality. The last of my fucks e…

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…di Gras. It’s also part of the national and international fascination with Louisiana’s disaster streak. Had 1,836 people (1,577 in Louisiana) not died during Hurricane Katrina and had the population of New Orleans not decreased by almost 30 percent (a majority African American), there would be no Beasts of the Southern Wild. Also, by coincidence, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil blowout occurred on the first day of shooting the film in April of 2010….

What in the Name of the Crusades are Tennessee Evangelicals Doing in Kurdish Iraq?

By Bill Berkowitz

…financial forces behind the religious right—Mike Reynolds* got wind of the Nashville, Tennessee-based America 21, a nonprofit political action committee that hopes to bring America to God by encouraging “moral leadership from our churches” to be heard “in the halls of Congress and across this nation.” According to Reynolds, an investigative reporter whose work on the religious right has been featured in Rolling Stone, US News & World Report, and 6…

Louisiana Students Must Choose: Religion or Science

By Lauri Lebo

…this divide that has made her state a hotbed for the religious right. The Louisiana Family Forum, a state affiliate of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family draws much of its support from northern evangelical conservatives and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal caters to it with his support of creationist causes. Forrest tells me this as we’re driving around where she lives over the weekend, a place east of Baton Rouge, on a stretch of land that had been…

A 14-Point Rebuttal to The Nashville Statement from a Straight Cis Christian Man

By Eric Reitan

In the wake of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s “Nashville Statement,” RD published commentaries by Daniel Schultz, who called the manifesto “less of a theological statement than a Facebook post,” and Candace Chellew-Hodge, who argued that “this kind of damage has only been done to the LGBT community because we have given them the authority to do it.” Below, Eric Reitan opts for the point-by-point rebuttal that, we felt, might be o…

No Bible-as-State-Book for Tennessee as Legislators Suffer “Symbol Fatigue”

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…as simply meant as a recognition of the importance the Bible has played in Tennessee’s history. But why does Tennessee—or any state, for that matter—need to have a state book, wild animal, beverage, wonder dog, etc.? Interesting story, that. Apparently, you begin to see modern state flags and designated state flowers around the time of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition. States wanted their own flags to f…

Creationist Rumblings in Louisiana

By Lauri Lebo

…indal have enabled the LFF to pull off. Throughout it all, the citizens of Louisiana have remained almost completely silent. With a few commendable exceptions, the scientific community has done the same. Will they finally do something this time to stop the assault on science and public education? Science education watchdogs have been waiting for one of Louisiana’s school districts to implement creationism into science class in response to the law….

Oil Spill Blues: Prayer, Science, and Grassroots Activism

By Lauri Lebo

…reds of people filled the Grand Caillou Recreation Building in tiny Dulac, Louisiana. Women and men greeted each other like long-lost sisters and brothers, standing arm in arm as they exchanged news. In the rich cultural melange that is Louisiana, many, older people mostly, chatted warmly in French Acadian, but the formal prayer and chants were in their native Indian tongue. The past five years have been difficult ones for the Nation, whose people…