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Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…ly change our everyday lives?” I met with filmmaker David Jones at a south Austin cafe to discuss his project as well as our public conversation about new religious movements. Jones explained that his fictional cult not directly based on Heaven’s Gate, but is inspired by it. Much like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), The Away Team is a fictional story that takes its cues from real life figures and movements. As research, Jones watched “Ex…

A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation

By Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné

…ir multi-national, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character. That said, the numbers of nations and people that we mention are sourced solely on the claims of the groups themselves. We have no way to independently verify these numbers, so they should be used advisedly. Simply put, the global vision of the NAR is based on their understanding of the Great Commission text of Matthew 28:18-20, with an emphasis on “discipling nations” (28:19). Internatio…

Week in Religion: More Praying in Texas, First Hindu Chaplain, Modest Muslim Weightlifter

By Michael J. Altman

There’s a lot of praying in Texas. Prayer is back at high school graduations after a court decision banning graduation prayers was reversed thanks to help from Gov. Rick Perry. Pentecostals in Texas are quite happy with “Prayin’” Rick Perry. Meanwhile, they’re less interested in prayer and more interested in God’s law in Tennessee. The state’s House of Representatives has passed a bill that urges all counties in the state to post the Ten Commandm…

Please Stop Using Islam to Critique the Abortion Ban: It Only Excuses the Very Christian, Very White Roots of Anti-Choice Movements

By Sajida Jalalzai

…etween the anti-abortion restrictions and Islam. Hashtags like #ShariaLawInTexas and #TexasTaliban, as well as political cartoons featuring burqa-clad women in black “pray[ing] for Texas women,” or embraced by fist bumping, bearded men (one in a turban and the other in a cowboy hat) have gone viral. These tags and images show how Islam and Muslims continue to be used in America as short-hand for misogyny, barbarism, and oppression. As a Muslim wom…

No Longer Content With Right to Opt Out, Conservative Christians Asking Courts to Eliminate Rights for Others — And They’re Winning

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…s be altered or shut down to accommodate their religious beliefs. In 2020, Texas father Alexander Deanda—represented by Jonathan F. Mitchell, the architect of Texas’s S.B. 8 abortion ban—filed a lawsuit in an attempt to obstruct Title X, the federal government’s long standing family planning program. Title X is a federal grant program created in 1970 by President Nixon to provide contraceptive and related healthcare to low-income and uninsured pat…

CPCs Hire Christians Only With Federal Funds? Thank Obama

By Sarah Posner

…(TANF), which are disbursed in block grants to the states. The program in Texas is outsourced to the Texas Pregnancy Care Network, a nonprofit formed in 2005 for the purpose of administering the contract. Vincent Friedewald III, a lawyer who joined TPCN as executive director in 2006, declined a request for an interview. However, he says on the TPCN website that he joined the group after conducting research that convinced him that “countless women…

When the Golden Rule is Used to Silence Dissent and Protect the Politically Powerful

By John Stoehr

…al is Ocasio-Cortez’s policy idea; it’s not anything more yet. Fact No. 2: Texas has nothing to do with her policy idea. Fact 3: Wind power accounts for 10 percent of energy production in Texas. Conclusion: West is smearing Ocasio-Cortez even as she’s trying to help. This is clear later when he writes that Ocasio-Cortez’s charity is not charity. What appears to be the Golden Rule is actually something sinister. West wrote: “What Texans found out t…

Texas Pastor: Christians Claiming “Religious Persecution” Are Actually Just “Selfish”

By Sunnivie Brydum

It’s not every day that a Baptist pastor based in Texas urges his congregants to be kinder and gentler when thinking or arguing about religious liberty. But that’s exactly what Mark Wingfield, an associate pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, did in his Monday column for the Dallas Morning News. Despite the conservative and legal hand-wringing, it’s not actually hard to tell the difference between “religious persecution and selfishness,”…

Beyond ‘Thoughts and Prayers’: How the Christian Right’s Politics of Providentialism Keeps America from Addressing Gun Violence

By Chrissy Stroop

…f the Republican Party is not pretty. In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican, seemed to place most of the blame for mass shootings on violent video games. This is a position that, while reductionist and deflecting from the fact that gun control is demonstrably effective, I cannot dismiss as quickly as I once might have in the aftermath of Gamergate and what we’ve learned about rampant misogyny and…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…search of property records show James and Betty Robison live in a “modest” Texas home appraised by Tarrant County tax-assessors at $742,800. They also own one or more multi-million-dollar homes in Silverthorne, Colo., and have access to their large Robison ministry ranch and lodge in East Texas built with donor money. As I wrote last year, despite Trinity’s extensive investigation, the results of which it provided to the Senate Finance Committee,…