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Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…

Right Wingers Say “Gay” is Out, But Try Putting “Unnatural Vice” On a Bumper Sticker

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…eny minority of people may take away their right to tell gays and lesbians that God will send them to hell for all eternity — out of love, mind you. But, then again, anti-gay Evangelicals have a right to be afraid. After all, researchers say the actual number of Evangelicals may well be “as small as 7 percent of the total adult population.” Which means Evangelicals know just how effective a small number of people can be at taking away the rights o…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It drew a number of high-profile participants and attendees from anti-gay religious activists in the U.S. A centerpiece of the “Humanum” conference was a set of six videos, which it turns out were produced by Mark Regnerus, author of a discredited report on “family structures” that is still widely cited by anti-gay activists. Conservative activists, including Tony Perkins, Brian Brow…

‘Welcome to the War’: What a Creationist Conference Can Teach us About Evangelical Vaccine Resistance

By Caroline Matas

…st likely to indicate outright refusal to take a Covid-19 vaccine, while a number of other studies have also found that number hovering close to 25 percent. Journalists and academics alike have attempted to make sense of this discrepancy, pointing to existential fear, anti-intellectualism, and Christian nationalism as potential influences on American evangelicals’ vaccine antipathy. As a scholar of American evangelicalism and media, I am inclined…

Coffeehouse Churches and the ‘Party-on Messiah’: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 3

By Mark Dery

…less love for me—me, an insignificant speck among earth’s billions, yet He numbered the very hairs on my head—a wrenching feeling welled up inside: God’s love engulfing me, then overspilling my soul, a flood of love for all humankind. This was agape, the Greek word the early Christians used to refer to the unconditional love God felt for us, his children, and which we were supposed to feel for the world. Equal parts transport of sanctified rapture…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…

The Religious Case Against Religious Discrimination in Cakeshop Case

By Patrick Hornbeck

…like Phillips’s. But, as survey after survey has demonstrated, substantial numbers of Catholics, and to a lesser extent evangelicals as well, are not following their denominations’ leaders down this particular road, and there is a growing number of religious institutions that have embraced marriage equality and advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in the public square. Cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop make it clear that the boundaries of a national settleme…

Will the Pope’s Woman Problem Alienate Young Catholics?

By Patricia Miller

…has called women theologians “the strawberries on the cake,” along with a number of other comments insulting to women more broadly, which hasn’t helped minimize doubts on the part of many women about Francis’ ability to see them as full persons. Gina Messina-Dysert, author of the forthcoming Faithfully Feminist, noted that: Francis has made some important, positive comments about women and said it is time to reexamine the role of women in the chu…

Was Ghana Anti-Gay Scare Just Politics?

By Warren Throckmorton

…ed “to get rid of these people in the society.” Some observers believe the number of sexual minorities may have been inflated in order to whip up opposition to homosexuality which could advance the standing of conservative politicians. Graham Knight, a British blogger living in Ghana, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The…

Are You Rapture Ready?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…of a Broadway show. Jesus is about to make his big entrance only his final number will feature the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tom Evans, spokesman for Family Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Luke 17: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about…