Religion Dispatches
Every so often, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunches Google search data for the New York Times and comes up with some fun statistics about, say, the anxieties of pregnant women (“can pregnant women eat shrimp?” is a popular search query in the US) or the ratio of heart-related to penis-related searches (67:100 for those keeping score). This Sunday, Stephens-Davidowitz turned his attention to God. Some of the patterns he documents are predi…
Read MoreIn Monday’s New York Times, I wrote a fairly innocuous sentence that was upsetting to some: “Islam is as American as the rodeo.” The comments I received would not surprise anyone who writes about religion (among the printable: “Why don’t you go see ‘American Sniper’ and model yourself after a man who understood the reality of radical and not-so-radical Islam…”), but they did provide a window into the violent notions underlying the rising tide of…
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…many of the criticisms that rolled in from Christians.” If Pinkston’s involvement with “He Gets Us” was public information before, no one seems to have come across it despite numerous efforts to shine light on the forces behind the initiative, and this revelation is a big deal. Once Pinkston outed his relationship to the “He Gets Us Campaign,” it didn’t take bloggers long to sound the alarm about the sordid history of Pinkston’s involvement with…
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This coming Saturday, March 25th—one week after a hysterical all-caps social media post in which he declared that he “will be arrested on Tuesday” and called on supporters to “protest, take our nation back!”—Trump will host his first formal rally of the 2024 presidential campaign season at the Waco Regional Airport. The location is, in theory, all about the positive Trump vibes in Texas. As his campaign staff wrote, “It is undisputed that Texas i…
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To quote the apparent president elect: Wrong. That’s for all the white evangelical commentators so eager to protect the evangelical brand they argued time and again that evangelicals, “real” evangelicals, evangelicals who attend church regularly, etc, wouldn’t support Trump. According to exit polls, white evangelicals supported Trump in similar or greater numbers than Romney (even evangelical pastors were poised to vote for Trump): In fact, if th…
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…ed notions of “bodily purity.” And for all their efforts to distance themselves from the excesses of purity culture, not to mention white evangelical racism—no matter whether they couch their claims in lofty-sounding theological rhetoric or seemingly “objective” appeals to history—what Keller, Mohler, French, and the rest are really doing with their vigorous insistence that heteronormativity is “basic Christianity” is upholding unjust social hiera…
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…se situations are not nuanced. And so do they care if the Asian people involved are Korean or Vietnamese or Japanese, et cetera? They don’t. What they hear is their president, Donald Trump and other leaders saying things like ‘Chinese Flu’ and ‘Kung Flu’ and so, or ‘China Virus.’ And so they lash out and they take their aim at Asian people. All of this leads me back to Christian nationalism. What I wrote on Twitter this morning was “Purity culture…
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…ess, of fighting on the side of the good against an evil cabal. People involved in new age spirituality are also fed by a sense of self-righteousness, a form of purity culture, that they make the right choices with their clean diets and spiritually superior practices. Therefore when bad things happen, there must be someone else to blame, and they have the right to punish evildoers. They only need to take a small step to find themselves in explicit…
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…nce since 2010, the torrent of bills introduced this year is staggering and 2021 is on track to be the most hostile year on record toward women. These laws are not just interfering with women’s access to abortion care (which would be bad enough!) but are actively harming women by shutting down clinics; using scare tactics to threaten and pressure them into not having abortions; and codifying narrow, theologically-driven ideas about when life begin…
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…spinning a “deceitful narrative” of the case. After the Institute got involved, the coach was not content with accommodations that protected the religious freedom of students, but instead demanded to use the power of his office, which gave him access to a captive audience of school children, to pray with those school children. If the Court gets this case wrong, the religious freedom of every public school student in the country is in jeopardy. In…
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