Religion Dispatches
…ing their children to do the same, they could win the culture wars through numbers alone. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? My main concern about these convictions is not so much the plans for Christian dominion that Quiverfull authors and homeschooling ministries discuss, but rather that in the service of these ideas, many women are subjecting themselves to an often punishing lifestyle. Quiverfull is not just about the…
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…14 of which have passed, according to Blitz Watch. Whether the dip in the number of bills introduced is attributable to Covid-19, the toxicity of the Project Blitz brand, or some other combination of factors is hard to say. In 2020 and 2021, 24 of the bills introduced involved displays of In God We Trust in public buildings or on license plates, while 16 were largely about religious exemptions and state versions of the federal Religious Freedom R…
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…o, like those men of old, know what to do.” DeMoss has collaborated with a number of her fellow speakers before. In 2002, she edited a compilation of essays on submission and headship entitled Biblical Womanhood in the Home, which drew contributions from Kassian, Hunt, and other complementarian matriarchs, such as Dorothy Kelley Patterson, who with her husband, Paige Patterson, created the homemaking degree and curriculum introduced at Southwester…
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…ts, a hidden “plan of the ages” emerges. According to their decryptions, a number of events will transpire just before the apocalypse. These include a return of the Jews to Palestine, a decline in morals, religious apostasy, and the consolidation of independent nations into one super-state led by a seemingly benevolent leader who is actually the Antichrist. During the last 100 years, evangelicals have witnessed more and more evidence of these prop…
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…ncy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quackery and scammers could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a harsh cleaning product had adverse effects. A 1936 book by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D. called Facts and Frauds in Feminine Hygi…
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…limited to procreation; that it was acceptable to limit family size for a number of reasons; and that it was licit to use the naturally occurring sterile period to do so. Enter Catholic physician John Rock. By designing a contraceptive that used hormones already present in a woman’s body to mimic the natural infertility of a pregnant woman, he hoped the Vatican would find a theological basis to approve the method. In 1958, when the Pill was alrea…
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…back against that corruption, the deep state and all the rest.” Given any number of other statements by Johnson, this comment may seem unremarkable. But the transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of…
Read More…or point to evidence that a new religious left may be asserting itself. A number of progressive Christian blogs, such as Street Prophets and Faithful Democrats are afire with discussion of a different kind of marriage between religion and politics that emphasizes peace and justice issues instead of socio-moral concerns. In the baffling 2008 presidential primary season, Republican candidates aligned with the religious right failed to make much hea…
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…dst dinosaurs. Bible institutes and Christian colleges continue to grow in number and size, with at least some of them offering degrees in biology and science education in creation-friendly environments. Most of this activity occurs within the nation’s conservative Christian subculture largely invisible to those outside it. When creationists reach beyond the church to challenge the teaching of evolution in public schools—as they have in Kansas, Pe…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
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