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LGBT Christians Respond to Southern Baptists’ Call For Kindness, Understanding

…Moore and other conference leaders appeared to be caught off guard by the number of LGBT Christians and supportive Christian advocates, some Baptists, who not only attended the entire conference, but also respectfully and publicly responded to Moore’s call to kindness and understanding and offered to meet with conference leaders at the venue. Although there were evidently no face-to-face meetings with Moore, about a dozen LGBT Christians and LGBT…

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The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

Over the past few days I’ve seen a number of references to “America’s Birthday” coming up on Friday. If a commercial advertiser wants to say this, fine (I guess). But I have spotted a couple of otherwise sober-minded writers using the “birthday” tag as well, and their ignorance is more disturbing. July 4, 1776, was in no way the birthday of anything. It was the start of a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the ti…

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The Messiah is Not Coming

…umbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it…

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A Match Made in Hell: Demons Have Become a Serious Force in US Politics — But We’ve Seen This Show Before

…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…

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Bonnaroo Dispatches: Stages

…oday. No one is going to judge you.” Recent studies suggest that while the number of young Americans who consider themselves religious or spiritual remains roughly constant, their spiritual practices are changing. They are more likely than their parents to consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular practice, or the version of the religion they practice boils down to injunctions to a vague sense of morality, fairness, and happiness, what…

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Bonnaroo 3: With a Buzz in Our Ears

…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…

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Faith-Based Bailout Part 3

…t markets. The subtext of story number one, which will likely become story number two in the next day or so, is the partisan sniping that has already consumed the issue. A conservative core of House Republicans now claim, with a semi-straight face, that a partisan floor speech from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually turned them against a bill they came prepared to vote for. The speech “was” partisan—in the extreme, and far too much so for my tast…

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Hobby Lobby: Key to a More Liberal and Less Religious America?

…te hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20% of all Americans claiming this status, and many point to the increased politicization of religion as the cause. This trend of legal victories will, in the long run, very likely create a more secular America. Recent data indicate that this process is already clearly under way. A poll just rel…

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Mormon Tabernacle Choir Will Usher In the Trump Era

…hite evangelicals; the Utah College Exit Poll, however, with a much higher number of Mormon participants, put the number closer to 45 percent. Both figures are well below previous Mormon voting percentages for the Republican candidates, but they indicate that at least half of Latter-day Saints were willing to stomach Trump’s apparent moral deficiencies. This turn of events has historical precedent. Though the LDS Church’s political affiliation was…

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Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

…olleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America.   Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days.   Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith…

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