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Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…us into saying the Pledge of Allegiance, hands on hearts, before they force-marched us off to Vietnam. My Country, Right or Wrong; Support Your Local Sheriff; and God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It were all products of the same Pavlovian conditioning, I decided; religion was just another cog in the machinery of social control. The House of Abba Jesus, like the Jesus of Superstar and the Jesus Freaks, was poles apart, an anti-establishment…

A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

…to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can. If Coates is right that reparations at least partially correlated with German societal and cultural reckoning, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was…

‘Welcome to the War’: What a Creationist Conference Can Teach us About Evangelical Vaccine Resistance

By Caroline Matas

…e speaker list and book offerings were a who’s who of anti-vaccine and anti-mask-mandate evangelicals. All conference registrants received a book defending gender complementarianism by John MacArthur, a pastor who has denied the very existence of the pandemic and whose church has made headlines for defying California’s bans on large gatherings. During his closing remarks, Ken Ham lauded Louisiana State Representative Mike Johnson—who has vocally o…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…gance, and felt somewhat ashamed. We are always so ready to pounce when non-Western women are threatened. Indeed, as scholar Lila Abu-Lughod points out, even Americans who are not feminists—often on religious grounds—seem ready to fight wars in the Middle East, ostensibly in order to “save” oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, I tend to agree with Muslimah Pride that the freedom to strip is far from the pinnacle of women’s liberation. (I much prefer…

The Religious Right Goes Global with “Demographic Winter”

By Kathryn Joyce

…meuppance has a name, one being fervently hawked among a group of Christian-right “pro-family” activists hoping to spark a movement in secular Europe. It’s called the “demographic winter,” a more austere brand of apocalypse than doomsayers normally trade in, evoking not a nuclear inferno but a quiet and cold blanket of snow in which, they charge, “Western Civilization” is laying itself down to die. How so? Europe is failing to produce enough babie…

It’s Bring Your Gun to Church Day

By Bill Berkowitz

…k community, Lowery’s relationship with Moon dates back at least to the mid-1980s when Moon served an eighteen-month sentence for tax fraud, obstructing justice and committing perjury. At the time, Moon’s Unification Church tried—and were somewhat successful—in lining up supporters in minority communities, particularly among African American clergy, by claiming that Moon was being persecuted because of racial and religious intolerance. In the inte…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…als argue that at least part of that is due to the divided field where anti-Trump voters can choose from a number of alternatives. But that interpretation only underscores the larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so f…

Aliens in America

By Amir Hussain

…lims had graduated from university or done graduate studies (as compared to 25 percent of non-Muslims). This negative portrayal in spite of the facts is not surprising. Very few Muslims are involved in the television industry. Kamran Pasha, who was a producer for Sleeper Cell, is one of the few. Not surprisingly, it was Sleeper Cell that included positive images of Muslims. Last year’s hit Canadian show Little Mosque on the Prairie, along with Ali…

Refusal of Interracial Couple Shows How Slippery the Slope of LGBTQ Refusal Really Is

By Heron Greenesmith

…n, compared to 70% of Americans overall. There aren’t current data on state-by-state support for interracial marriage, but while 18% of all newly married people in urban areas are married to someone of a different race, only 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Mississippi are married to someone of a different race, the lowest percentage in the country. And the Mississippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of inter…

Pope Francis Praised for ‘Civil Unions’ Comment, But Justice Begins at Home—In the Vatican

By Mary E. Hunt

…ivil unions was in the new documentary “Franceso” directed by Russian prize-winning, Emmy-nominated director Evgeny Afineevsky. It reads: “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it. What we have to have is a civil union law—that way they are legally covered. I supported that.” I highly recommend the film—the theology less so, t…