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Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…e founder’s Emerald level—a level less than 1/25th of one percent of Amway participants are able to achieve—before they uncovered company fraud and deception, and were hounded out of the organization. Scheibeler explains how Amway operates in his book Merchants of Deception: An Insider’s Look at the Worldwide, Systematic, Conspiracy of Lies That is Amway/Quixtar and their Motivational Organization. As the company grew, the DeVos and Van Andel clan…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…

Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

By Cody J. Sanders

…rom some persistent, internal state of depression or physical illness. The pain they faced had an external source: the cruel, unremitting, merciless pounding of daily humiliation, taunting, harassment, and violence. And all of this pain visited upon these young lives because of one thing they had in common: they were not heterosexual. These suicides are not acts of “escape,” or a “cop-out” from facing life. When LGBT people resort to suicide, they…

More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

By John Wigger

…ing the Christian television talk show format, which Bakker pioneered with Pat Robertson at the Christian Broadcasting Network in the 1960s, PTL’s private satellite network, launched in 1978, a year before ESPN, and the theme park, Heritage USA. The Bakkers signature television show, the PTL Club, was broadcast live, five days a week, with little scripting. Tammy once did an episode on a merry-go-round. One cast member threw up in the dog costume…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…penly racist administration would have meant an exodus from the Republican Party similar to the white exodus from the mid-twentieth century Democratic Party after it moved towards rights for Black people. There has been no exodus. Instead, liberals attempt to put a hat back onto the head of a reality they increasingly have difficulty denying. As a last resort they assist with another vanishing act: the invention of “Trump’s base.” His base is unde…

How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…global phenomenon, the editors conclude, and the troubling features of any particular part of the movement should not distract us from the integrity of the whole. Noll even ends the collection with yet another metaphorical flourish, suggesting that scholars no longer think of evangelicalism as a religious “World Series,” where events in the United States determine a victor, but as a “World Cup,” where an international diversity of teams are on dis…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…e? Why? Yes, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volumes I & II by Christopher Partridge. I first discovered Partridge because he has written on the modern vampire community. The term “re-enchantment” appears with increasing frequency, but it is usually invoked rather than defined. Partridge convincingly argues that secularization has actually created the conditions for new and meaningful forms of religiosity. This theory points to a common phenomenon…

Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

By Sarah Posner

…e current shari’ah scare. Former CIA head Woolsey, who served on the same CPAC panel as McCarthy and is also a contributor to the CSP’s “Team B” report, said at CPAC that the goals of radical Islamists are “roughly parallel to communists in the ’50s and ’60s… We’re in a war with terrorists but that’s not the end. We’re at war with those who want to impose shari’ah, this is our toughest fight.” It’s surely no accident, then, that President Obama (d…

UPDATED: Religion Has Been Framed; Covering the Aga Khan’s Visit

By Hussein Rashid

…view of history is untenable, and reads present day concerns back into the past. Even amongst those whom I believe know better, the rhetoric is normative. For example, Aslan says, “The Isma’ilis are Shi’ah who broke off from the main Shiite branch of Islam.” The fact that there is a larger number of non-Isma’ili Shi’ah does not make them the main branch. If the central belief of Shi’ism is the belief of Imamah, then the only group with a present,…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…on government ID cards and passports; • religious tests for citizenship or participation in civic life; • religious control of family law; • and religious control of public education. Almost half of the countries of the world have laws or policies that penalize blasphemy, apostasy, contempt of religion, or religious “hate speech,” according to the new analysis by Pew. Of the 198 countries studied, 32 (16%) have anti-blasphemy laws, 20 (10%) have l…