Religion Dispatches
Drew Brees touched off a major controversy last week when he told Yahoo Finance that, “I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America.” https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1268206174073126915 The next day he apologized on Instagram writing that “I made comments that were insensitive and completely missed the mark on the issues we are facing right now as a country. They lacked awareness and any type of c…
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Far right religious conservatives have long attempted to export or shore up their values abroad. In recent years, Russia has become a target for such activism, in which both American and Russian participants use each other in curious ways. Americans can use the trip to gain publicity while holding up the “exotic” Other in order to point out what they perceive as Western civilization’s moral failings—creating propaganda for the home audience as we…
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Since late December, 2019, when retiring editor-in-chief of Christianity Today Mark Galli published his infamous “Trump Should Be Removed from Office” editorial, there’s been a great deal of buzz in the pundit class over whether Trump, after a highly publicized impeachment trial, needs to be concerned with possible defections in his white evangelical base. From an analytical standpoint, the buzz is mere noise, horse race politics nonsense from pe…
Read More“I Disagree With You but I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler.” This is one of the posters promised when Jon Stewart made his “big announcement” last night. Stewart and the Daily Show will host the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” 10.30.10 on the Washington Mall. In a hilarious parody of Glenn Beck, Stewart urges moderates to join him for “a Million Moderate March,” suggesting that a small minority of Americans have taken the public discussion hostage b…
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Fundamentalist Christian support for President Trump is a commonly known, if poorly understood, political dynamic in the United States today. That support sometimes takes surprising shape to outsiders—as when, last year, President Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White strode the White House grounds, exorcising the demonic opponents of the President. Dedicating the White House as “holy ground […] by the superior blood of Jesus,” White “released an…
Read MoreThose Bastards! From the Department of When Satire Becomes Reality: Trey Parker and Matt Stone have built a career on the conviction of being equal-opportunity offenders. No one escapes skewering on their long-running cartoon South Park: Mormons, Hollywood liberals, Canadians, Satan, Christ, physically disabled comedians. So for its 200th episode last week, South Park creators took on the Muslim belief that depicting the image of the prophet Muha…
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Guns in the Pews: Christian Security Network at Your Service On February 11, Fox News reported that the Arkansas House of Representatives had “approved a bill allowing concealed handguns in churches, despite hearing arguments that lawmakers should put their faith in God, not guns.” The bill, which easily passed in the House and is headed to the Senate, “removes churches and other houses of worship from the list of places where concealed handguns…
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President Donald Trump recently led a ceremony on National Prayer Day, just a day after his lawyer admitted in a television interview that, contrary to previous declarations, the president had indeed paid off an adult film actress to keep quiet about a purported affair while his third wife was pregnant. Questions about the payment from journalists to the president were met with calls of “shame” by attending evangelicals—shame on the journalists f…
Read MoreThe Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is asking for help from the state’s Supreme Court in the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8. At issue, according to the Bay Area Reporter, is whether the organization that sponsored Prop. 8 has standing to defend it in court, a question of critical importance since state officials refused to defend the law on appeal from the district court’s ruling that it is unconstitutional. The issue of whether Protect…
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Religious texts can now be searched, hyperlinked, downloaded, spliced, copied, truncated, emailed, text-messaged, recited with video accompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them. Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the…
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