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Cruz Backs Bishops on Religious Liberty Claims

By Patricia Miller

…ditionally construed—freedom of worship and the right to hire and fire like-minded co-religionists in actual ministerial positions—but the right to use institutions tangentially related to the church to make cultural pronouncements about the moral unacceptability of non-procreative sex. And the baseless charge about abortion coverage isn’t an accident. It’s no coincidence that the most successful religious liberty claims to date—Hobby Lobby, Littl…

How (Not) to Understand Romney’s Time as an LDS Bishop

By Joanna Brooks

…h a process of discernment that does not include open participation by rank-and-file congregation members. Officials at LDS Church headquarters must approve candidates for bishop. Responsibilities of the bishop include counseling, hearing confessions, and interviewing members to determine their worthiness for congregational responsibilities or participation in religious ordinances. Bishops assess socio-economic needs of local members and may offer…

US Catholic Bishops Jump on Anti-Trans Bandwagon With Gratuitous Vote to Amend Healthcare Directives

By Chrissy Stroop

…mend that providers refer certain patients with gender dysphoria for gender-affirming surgery. But when right-wing activists brought this fact to the attention of the bishops, they quickly asserted their authority and put the kibosh on the whole thing, forcing the system, SSM Health, to change its guidance. The key point here is that the bishops found the previous gender-affirming guidance to be out of compliance with their ERDs without having to…

To Get Through This Time We’ll Have to Shred the ‘Racial Contract’ and Choose Solidarity Over Sacrifice

By Christophe D Ringer

…ving lives and saving the economy. The road to this moral and spiritual cul-de-sac began with Trump’s declaration that the “cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and conservative radio host Glenn Beck quickly rallied behind the idea and boldly claimed that, as older Americans, they were willing to sacrifice their lives instead of the country. The moral outrage was swift and it seemed as if the idea would onl…

Guns, God and Government — The Coming of White Minority Rule?

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…s that could cause maximum damage and fatalities. The proliferation of high-powered semi-automatic weapons along with a steady erosion of gun control measures in the very states that hold the key to continued GOP rule means that an armed reactionary populace is ready to enforce the divine dictates they believe they’re called to uphold in an apocalyptic showdown between God’s chosen and the godless forces of socialism and critical race theory. Ther…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…its MUST be accounted for! When Worlds Collide Ultimately, I think, the not-a-disease notion of pregnancy is a lot like the Watchmen/My Little Pony mashup in the sense that it depends upon radically different discourses colliding into each other in counterintuitive ways. Specifically, we have: Classical Christian notions of nature, borrowed from Greek philosophy. Briefly, the idea is that something’s nature—what the thing really is, in the most fu…

How Christian Theology Created the Need to Assert that Black Lives Matter

By Beatrice Marovich

…ath: Political Theologies for Living & Dying. I was working on the book in March 2020, and this comment from Baldwin has been haunting me for the past three years since the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since, that is to say, the denial of the value of Black lives coincided with the denial of the gravity of a pandemic. “White Americans do not believe in death,” Baldwin wrote. “And this is why the darkne…

Have White Evangelicals Finally Lost Control of the Narrative?

By Chrissy Stroop

…o grievances about how “the world” views evangelicals are evangelical stock-in-trade. No matter how positively evangelicals are portrayed in the media, they will never be satisfied that it’s positive enough. Right-wing partisans in general have very successfully used false claims of “unfair treatment” to silence their critics and shift political discussion in their favor in recent decades, and evangelicals’ whining and badgering has surely been pa…

Is Religion Wrecking Our Air?

By Jay Wexler

…rticle in the New York Times, for instance, reported on the case of a three-year-old who suffered mercury poisoning when her family moved into a Rhode Island apartment that had been the site of ritual mercury use by a former tenant many years earlier. ### Excerpted from When God Isn’t Green: A World-Wide Journey to Places Where Religious Practice and Environmentalism Collide by Jay Wexler (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with Permission from Beacon…

How Mormonism Built Glenn Beck

By Joanna Brooks

…ervative media heavyweight. Spiritual narratives of the I-once-was-lost-now-I-am-financially-sound variety are commonplace within Mormonism, which, like most of American Protestantism, has never been allergic to wealth. The institutional culture of the Mormon Church is strongly corporate, down to the dark suits, white shirts, and red or blue ties church leaders wear instead of vestments; Mormonism’s most powerful public figures like Mitt Romney, J…