Religion Dispatches
…rcent” of Americans want a taller, thicker border wall, but no one onstage today challenged his claim. Among other dubious claims that cannot be objectively debunked was Bannon’s assertion that Trump is the “greatest public speaker since Williams Jennings Bryan,” the late 19th-century Democrat and fervent populist who also had a penchant for gold. To his credit (and our panic), Bannon was surprisingly straightforward about his ideological goals fo…
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…ose people who are living that lifestyle as they’re living it in our world today would [sic] REPENT and turn from that lifestyle.” As the CT report cited above notes, the “He Gets Us” website is working with Gloo, a Koch-connected company that uses big data to help churches target the vulnerable for outreach and conversion. The report also mentions that “He Gets Us” promotes Alpha, a global initiative launched in the UK known for its homophobic vi…
Read More…50, about one in five Americans will be foreign born, up from one in eight today. … Hispanics also have historic ties to the Democrats, if not as strong as blacks’ ties. But they are as strong or stronger in their support for active government, the safety net, and generous government service provisions. And the issue of immigration looms large, with Democrats viewed overwhelmingly as the most favorable party to immigrants. In the same Gallup analy…
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…le-bound religion of his contemporaries, was a kind of teaching in itself. Today, when the Sermon on the Mount has long since left the summit for the sermon pulpit, we are apt to forget what Jesus and his disciples would have understood implicitly: that location is everything. A sermon like that, which teaches us to love our enemies and treat our neighbors as ourselves, just doesn’t make sense under any roof but the sky. But now so much has change…
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…the American Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg blasts the authors because they: promote conspiracy theories; they demonize proponents of arms control, ecumenicalism, abortion rights and everyone else disliked by the Christian right; and they justify assassination as a political tool. Their anti-Jewishness is exceeded by their anti-Catholicism. Most basically, they reject the very idea of open, democratic debate. In the world of Left Behind, there exist…
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…estants (57%) and White Catholics (59%)—say that if the election were held today, they would vote for Trump. These levels of support from White Christians are virtually unchanged from 2016 and 2020. Like other successful authoritarian leaders, Trump has uncanny political instincts. Ever since he rose to power, his MAGA mantra has been conjuring a vision of an ethno-religious, White Christian state. His use of the phrase “poisoning the blood of our…
Read More…tinctly unhelpful. So to be specific, Crouch says this: We at Christianity Today believe Christians are absolutely free to use marijuana (where legalized). And, when it comes to pot in our particular cultural context, we think it would be foolish to use that freedom. For the CT editors, the moral quality of marijuana use seems to depend entirely upon the “cultural context” in which it occurs. And since our particular context is not conducive to ma…
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…was not at all good. The Jews who first conceived of heaven as we know it today were under assault, literally, from their Greek rulers. Christians, at the beginning, were a marginal band, derided by the pagan majority. Islam was established in a uniquely inhospitable part of the world by people who hoped to rectify the social order: to turn the “have nots” into “haves.” For all these groups, heaven—a very specific heaven—was a reward for staying…
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…ervescence,” could lead individuals to act with emotional abandon, what we today might call extremism. To threaten the totem, particularly in front of large groups (such as on national television!), is to call into question the foundations of society. “When a belief is shared unanimously by a people, to touch it—that is, to deny or question it—is forbidden,” Durkheim wrote. People kill or die for their symbols: The soldier who dies for his flag di…
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…ess to divorce and suffrage. While the stakes are not exactly the same for today’s debates over polygamy, there’s quite a bit of rhetorical and political continuity between the nineteenth-century anti-polygamy cause and today’s. Claims that same-sex marriage and polygamy are social experiments that will adversely affect children serve to limit women’s (and other people’s) options. Sheff discovered, for instance, that triads with one woman and two…
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