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What the Hail: Satanists Got Busy in 2018

By Joseph Laycock

…d a storyline in which Anton LaVey–who founded the Church of Satan (CoS) in 1966–had faked his own death and was conducting human sacrifices to aid the Antichrist. CoS was rightly offended as their founder rejected all criminal activity and did not believe in Christs or antichrists. On Twitter, CoS traded barbs with American Horror Story actress Kathy Bates. CoS and TST have become bitter rivals. Unfortunately, their shared experience of being exp…

2018: Wave Goodbye to Another Year in Religion

By Daniel Schultz

…standing ovation from his congregation after confessing to sleeping with a 17-year-old member of his youth group when he was 22. Eventually, though, he resigned, citing a new understanding of his victim’s perspective; which is to say, that she was in fact the victim in this case, not him. It was also revealed that the 2016 Clinton campaign fired its evangelical “faith guru” Burns Strider for sexual harassment of at least two other staffers. Evang…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…e could simply call out the numbers to cue support from those on our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arg…

Pastor Convicted in Lisa Miller Child Kidnapping Case

By Peter Montgomery

…d that as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…al to a Canadian mother (who had come to India as a Christian missionary in 1946) and an English-Burmese father who reared him as an evangelical Christian, in 1989 at the age of 34, Mendies was found guilty of “proselytizing” (in this case, placing bibles in Nepali hotel rooms) and spent six months in Kathmandu’s Central Jail, where he shared a cell with 17 other prisoners. Nepal’s intensely complicated political heritage has been aptly described…

Presidential Pep Talks and the Religion of Fear: How did an Uncontroversial Speech Become a National Controversy?

By Eric Reitan

…as no national controversy. Parents weren’t inundating administrators with phone calls threatening to pull their kids from school in order to protect them from Bush’s efforts at political indoctrination. But this time that’s exactly what happened. And in response to the controversy and the barrage of outraged parental phone calls, many school systems decided it was safest not to air the speech at all. Others required that alternative activities be…

Conservative Christians Oppose New ‘Inter-Religious’ University

By Philip Clayton

Claremont School of Theology caught national attention on June 9 with the announcement of a new inter-religious university. Beginning in the fall, students at this Methodist seminary will study side by side with students from the Academy of Jewish Religion in Los Angeles and the Islamic Center of Southern California. The San Diego Jewish Journal calls it “the world’s first multi-religious graduate school.” Of course, Claremont is not alone. Hartf…

Double Helix: Who’s Your Daddy?

By Arri Eisen

…selling like hotcakes. According to the Web site, complete with the iconic 1-800 number and attractive female operator with headset, the IDENTIGENE test is “Fast. Accurate. Confidential.” It’s not the speed, accuracy, nor confidentiality that worry me so much (although plenty of problems lurk therein). It’s more the information itself, its power, and in what context it is received. Personally, I’m not too interested in the test for myself. I know…

Are Atheists Taking 1st Amendment Suits Too Far?

By Gordon Haber

…it also helps wealthy pastors line their own pockets. For example, between 1993 and 1995,Saddleback Church paid Rick Warren a housing allowance of around $80,000 per year, which (probably not coincidentally) was most of his salary. The IRS guideline, however, was that clergy can only claim “fair market value” of the home, and the rental value of the house in question was $60,000 a year. The IRS wanted Warren to cough up the taxes on the differenc…

“Stress Test” a Con: Obama Still Coddling Banks

By Peter Laarman

…dulous “reporting” of the whole affair in the corporate media. Only a tiny number of outlier critics—like Simon Johnson—are given any air time at all. Everybody else, from NPR to Fox News, goes right along with the cute “stress test” metaphor, forgetting that the so-called patient being “tested” is actually an 800-pound gorilla that needs to be put into a cage if not shot dead outright. Johnson pointed out this morning that today’s news non-event…