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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

…trial of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who had lynched a fourteen-year-old African-American boy, Emmett Till, that he had made “ugly remarks,” to her. The jury took 67 minutes to find the two men innocent. Don’t believe your eyes; accept the racist myth of Black incivility. This is, at least implicitly, what Derek Chauvin’s defense attorney is trying to tell the jury. And what this time-honored strategy illustrates is that depictions of Black unruli…

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

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…am sympathetic to the instinct that animates Schulz, the suspicion that Americans love Thoreau mostly because selfish individualism is our national religion and he is one of its loudest—or at least most famous—defenders. But Schulz’s reading of the man’s writing is facile. Where Thoreau writes—responding to the townsmen’s critique of his selfishness—“I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises,” Schulz quotes i…

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

By Brad Stoddard

…e rise in mass shootings, to the murder of children and people of color (African Americans in particular), to the nation’s relaxed gun laws, and to what they perceive as political overall apathy unwilling to address gun-related violence. The collective interest in the AR-15 suggests that “America’s Rifle” will continue to occupy a unique place in American culture. For people who use AR-15s in horrific crimes, it perhaps symbolizes ultimate power 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

…Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Manseau has been writing with curiosity and verve about our spiritual ancestors for two decades now. A founder of Killing the Buddha alongside Sharlet, Manseau is a prodigious, prolific, immaculate prose-stylist who has explored everything from the Victorian combination of technology and occultism (The Apparitionists), to his beautiful account of…

Can Atheists Simply Ignore Theology?

By Eric Reitan

…’s naughty bits, and so it can’t be a garment. And so if we conduct an empirical test on the emperor and fail to detect any empirical properties consistent with his wearing pants, then he isn’t. To be a garment requires the possession of empirical properties. Take those away, and there is no garment. But belief in God isn’t primarily a belief about the contents of the empirical world. It is, rather, a certain holistic interpretation of our experie…

The Tyranny of Politeness

By Daniel C. Maguire

…te-sponsored wickedness and the canons of true politeness do not ban their use. When you use policy (rather than a gun) to kill innocent people, it’s called murder. When you ruin people by stripping them and their children of basic health care, that constitutes morally criminal assault. And make no mistake, when you boycott the inauguration (and promise resistance to) a presidency pre-announced as a compound of bigotry, misogyny, and the shredding…