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Dinos and Demons and Swedes, Oh My! It May Be Cartoonish, but Evangelical Radicalism Isn’t Just a Sideshow

By Chrissy Stroop

…voters who voted for Trump as a rough approximation—will assent to, or at best excuse, the claims. In authoritarian communities like the white evangelical one I grew up in, certain sacrosanct “Truths” become markers of in-group identity. Members of these communities build up infrastructure—in this case Christian publishing houses, bookstores, alternative cultural products, Christian schools and curricula, etc.—in order to generate pseudo-intellec…

RDBook: The End of the World As We Know It

By Gabriel Mckee

…end language. Elsewhere the cause of the apocalypse is ambiguous—something best illustrated in Gene Wolfe’s “Mute,” in which two children watch news reports about a mysterious disaster on a television with no sound. They know the world is falling apart, but they don’t know how or why. Despite this parade of nightmares, there’s a pervasive sense of optimism in these stories—an optimism that, paradoxically, lies at the heart of all post-apocalyptic…

Evangelical “Sexual Purity” Is Not About Sex—It’s About Power

By Sara J. Moslener

…nation in distress and claiming that evangelical Christianity can not only best explain the crisis, but save us from our demise. Is there anything you had to leave out? For a long time I considered writing an addendum about post-purity evangelicals. This is a concept introduced by Abigail Rine who wrote in The Atlantic about the growing number of evangelicals and former evangelicals who’ve been recounting their experiences with sexual purity. Many…

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…al destruction of government property. I was deep into magic tricks at the time, sometimes carrying a deck of cards in my pocket, and I had seen magicians make coins disappear. But this was no illusion. I knew this was not only a waste, but technically illegal—one of the innumerable bits of trivia I knew about the world because of my father, who seemed to know something about everything. My love for relics and talismans coexisted with a love for c…

RDBook: Power Belongs to God

By Nathan Schneider

…mply we, they will stay them, not cowering at being explained away. At his best, Jeff Sharlet reveals the power and presence of American fundamentalism where it isn’t often noticed. He places it in our common story, where it should be—among us, our neighbors, and ourselves. Yet at times he writes as if, after all that, we can treat it simply as an enemy. Look for Religion Dispatches’ upcoming roundtable with Jeff Sharlet, Randall Balmer, Diane Win…

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

By Johnny Townsend

…yman, about a gay Mormon missionary in Italy, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011, and my latest, Marginal Mormons, just received a starred review from Kirkus.) I also marched with the Mormons for Marriage Equality contingent this year in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade, amazed to see compassionate Mormons with signs proclaiming “Sorry we’re late!” I belong to Affirmation, an organization for LGBTQ Mormons. I still have my triple combination on a…

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

By Gordon Haber

…lly to a logic that treated the relative ‘Jewishness’ of a teaching as the best test of its truth or falsity.” Marcion, Tertullian, Justin, Origen and Jerome differed on crucial Christological and scriptural questions; still most identified any hint of carnality as “Jewish” and accused their opponents of “Judaizing.” Augustine took the trope even further, arguing in Against Faustus that the Jews were the living exemplar of falsity, “proof to belie…

Satanists Want You to Respond to the Pandemic with Compassion. And Reason.

By Joseph Laycock

…the pandemic? Definitely the Fifth Tenet: Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs. We have to defer to scientists on this, especially the projection models of epidemiologists. We also have to reject conspiracy theories, including blaming the current crisis on the Obama administration. Any others? As we become frustrated over the respons…

King as Inspiration, Not Guide

By William D. Hart

…ou and me, he was buffeted by circumstances he did not choose. He made the best choices that he could (most of the time) given the circumstances, acting the way everyone acts: from compulsion, from character and disposition, from habits that had been cultivated over a lifetime. The reasons came later, after the fact, when the heat of the moment had passed, and in calm repose he could reflect and give an account, retrospectively, of why he did what…

Santorum’s War on Satan… er, on Higher Education

By Eric Reitan

…nd if we’re going to compete in the world market, we both have to have the best equipment and the best training. But Santorum doesn’t care about the facts, because attacking Obama on higher education is really just a pretext for pushing what is, for him, a more urgent message—namely that higher education should be viewed as a problem, not an opportunity. Although he currently frames this message in the Tea Party language of “liberal professors” an…