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The Conservative Christian Case for Separation of Church and State

By Jimi Jobin

…politicians can appeal to spiritual leaders and gain their endorsement because the opportunities for abuse and ambition are too rampant. The same quid pro quo corruption that taints those tempted by lobbyists will await pastors when their support can yield inexhaustible American power. This is why America has passed laws to preserve the dignity and purity of the pastoral office, exchanging tax exemption (a unique phenomenon in the world) with the…

Unbuckling the Bible Belt: “Nashville” and the Nones

By Carrie Allen Tipton

…n Americana soundscape for what Nashville country actually sounds like—because the show’s version of the country industry sounds way better than the reality. In crafting a “pure” country music scene unfolding in a mythical Nashville, ABC adopts a deep and gutsy ironic stance, because in reality, the roots/alt-country community has set its face like flint against mainstream country, and a pop sound won a long time ago. Like the idealized, calcified…

Derek Chauvin’s Defense, in Keeping with a Long Racist Tradition, Seeks to Criminalize George Floyd

By Alex Zamalin

…who was murdered in 2012 by a neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, because he was presumed to be a menace by virtue of wearing a hoodie and strolling through a gated community. As Zimmerman told a 911 dispatcher, “these assholes always get away.” Or the Black birder, Christian Cooper, in Central Park in the summer of 2020, who was falsely accused by a white woman of “threatening” her. His threat? Asking her to keep her dog on a leash. Recall i…

Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…eeder.” Thoreau’s point was that the capitalist’s philanthropy wasn’t much better. The hypocritical cover of philanthropic enterprises remains in use today. The travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux wrote earlier this month in the New York Times about communities across the South where factories have closed as jobs went overseas, a shift that has been broadcast as part of an effort “to uplift impoverished people” around the world. But such heroi…

Buffalo and Uvalde Both Appear to Have Involved the AR-15, the Rifle Revered by the Christian Right

By Brad Stoddard

…will continue to occupy a unique place in American culture. For people who use AR-15s in horrific crimes, it perhaps symbolizes ultimate power capable of taking life. For people who criticize what they deem America’s obsession with firearms, the AR-15 symbolizes everything wrong with said obsession. For many Christians, however, the AR-15 is God’s preferred firearm, best wielded by God-fearing Christians ready to enforce God’s laws on Earth. The c…

Blaming the Listener: NPR’s Non-Apology

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…information in the beginning of the piece rather than the end, would have better served our listeners because it would have given them more context to understand what they were hearing.” Schumacher-Matos puts a fine point on it by concluding: “Spiegel and Gudenkauf clearly worked hard on this story. They simply made some wrong assumptions about what most of us know about sexuality and conversion.” But they should have worked harder—the fault here…

Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…motivations we can associate with religion, and so you’re offering a much better, more useful set of motivations than the previous theorists of religion whom you’ve mentioned. Where I’m hesitant is that you claim you’ve found a set of psychological universals, and here’s my reason: we know that culture affects biology, that there’s a give-and-take between our psychology and our environment. Some of our fundamental desires aren’t just biological,…

Ritual Killing v. Factory Farming, or, Are There Roosters in Heaven?

By Meera Subramanian

…Court ruled unanimously that the city ban violated the church’s religious freedoms. It was the same year that Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prevents laws that place an undue burden on people’s ability to express their religion. The religious methods of slaughter such as the Jewish shechita and the Islamic dhabh remain in most countries, though that is slowly changing. The Dutch parliament recently passed a bill requ…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…th up close… [so that] The only way for us to satisfy our shock or hurt, caused by the gaping disparity between what we say about death and how it actually arrives, is to spend more time with the dying.” Bringing to bear her own experience as a hospice volunteer, and discussions about topics ranging from euthanasia to the Death Positivity Movement, The Good Death shows how the best of the New Religion Journalism understands that faith is inextrica…

Can Atheists Simply Ignore Theology?

By Eric Reitan

…, the way that we can answer whether the poor emperor’s fruits are hanging free. So how do we address this kind of question? The answer, I think, is that we have to “try on” alternative interpretations to see which offers the best fit with the whole of human experience—not merely with what we experience through our senses, but also with the broader and ultimately more important dimensions of our lived experience, including our moral and aesthetic…