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The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…in defense of Trump is that he has kept his promises to protect Christian “freedoms” (read: privileges), so he could not by any means link Trump to an emperor notorious for blaming the Great Fire of Rome on Christians. Incidentally, linking Trump to Nero would also have given credence to the meme that went viral around the same time that Reed’s book came out. After Trump retweeted a curious meme of himself playing the violin back in March, a numbe…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war veteran Allen West will be headed to Congress from Florida, despi…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…is no more than a platitude. Pick your apocalypse: zombie apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic worlds that crowd our television screens, movie theaters, and book stores, or, perhaps more traditionally, the apocalypse associated with the Second Coming. Think of the 2011 Family Radio Billboards: “He is Coming Again! May 21, 2011.” Or the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2015, police i…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…ritical opposition? But it’s the bishops and Evangelicals—at nearly 60% opposed—who are the hardcore opposition to the mandate and who fostered outrage over the supposed violation of religious freedom that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s a case where the numbers matter, but many people don’t seem to pay all that much attention to them….

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…ad passionate religion at its heart was able, eventually, to give us total freedom of religion, including freedom from religion for those whom we might well regard as the ultimate Dissenters. Application to this year’s Independence Day commemoration: No, in July of 2014 we don’t face the urgent threat of an established church, but we do face an ongoing and brutal struggle with those who treat freedom of religion as the opportunity to impose their…

What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

By John Stoehr

…Calif., and every other one like it; and, let’s see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more. All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, between His chosen and everyone else deserving of eternal damnation. (They deserve what’s coming to them, in other words.) For the chosen, anything is possible. For God’s enemies, G…

The Demographic that Should Keep Rove Awake at Night

By Katherine Stewart

…first election in which one party defended a woman’s right to reproductive freedom without apology or hesitation; and this season also saw the passage of a number of same-sex marriage ballot initiatives, as well as the election of the nation’s first openly lesbian senator. Some on the right could scarcely believe that this is what America really wants. “Millions of Americans looked evil in the eye and adopted it,” wrote Liberty Counsel’s Mat Stave…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…s copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it was ranked number 9 in the “Top 50 Books the Have Shaped Evangelicals” by Christianity Today, alongside works by C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Francis Schaffer, and Rick Warren. Her influence is well noted in her obituary by Kate Shellnutt at Christianity Today. Through Elliot’s book, evangelicals latched on to the deaths of these five young men, and their story became a galvanizin…

By The Numbers: Jeb Opposes Francis on Climate Change at His Peril

By Daniel Schultz

…happening, or if it is, it’s natural causes, or they’re just not sure. The numbers attributing warming to human activity rise among moderates and liberals, of course, but they’re not going to vote for Jeb anyway. There is one number Bush might want to worry about, though: 85. That’s the percent of Hispanic Catholics who think climate change is a real problem: For a guy who’s been touting his potential to draw Spanish-speaking voters into the Repub…