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How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

…ew essay from each editor that seeks to steward evangelicalism’s future by way of its past. Marsden and Noll argue that growing evangelical movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America prove that the faith has not totally lost its way, while Bebbington explores the recent history of British evangelicalism in order to highlight the peculiar nature of the American scene. Evangelicalism is now a global phenomenon, the editors conclude, and the troubl…

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Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

…is not a change in orientation; it is a different, religiously legitimated way of realizing it. A False Equivalence Finally, future reporting needs to include the social and political changes within which these reorientation stories are told. Many listeners rightly criticized NPR for creating the false impression of scientific and therapeutic equivalence between pro- and anti-conversion therapy camps. That impression was created in part because th…

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There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

…ring who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christianity is of course traced back to the time of Jesus himself. The Palestinian weekend is Friday and Sunday. In addition to being the world’s most annoying and dissatisfying weekend schedule (there should be an award for that, or maybe financial compensation), the days reflect the primary religious affiliations of Palesti…

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New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

…ublic—even among progressive demographics. That, at least, is my grim takeaway from PRRI’s new report, “The Politics of Gender, Pronouns, and Public Education.” The overall positions of various demographics are mostly what you would expect them to be. The report singles out White evangelical Protestants multiple times as, unsurprisingly, America’s most singularly anti-trans demo. In 2021, for example, 86% of White evangelicals said there are only…

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The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

…ge, is the privilege—which is to say the power—to deny racist intent and always be taken at one’s word. To always be able to clutch one’s pearls and appeal in Scarlett O’Hara’s mint julep-inflected tone, Dearest me, we never intended to… and be believed. And remain a symbol of beauty in the world no matter how many scars are on Prissy’s back. Preventing that ‘eureka moment’ Republican officials’ voter registration purges and restricting the possib…

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Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

…stion, we’d be in for a workout. Because “what science says” is limited in ways that are not easy to understand. Responsible scientists know this, and they are marked by their reticence on non-scientific issues. There are those, however, who insist that what science says is obvious. But they’re selling something, something like atheism or creationism or some other extra-scientific bill of goods. The real question is twofold: “What do scientists sa…

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New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

…lowing this flawed research up into the proof it needs that you can “pray away the gay.” Aside from the obviously flawed methodology and the laughably small sample size, the biggest problem with this study is that all of the “therapy” given to these 98 poor souls was religiously-based—and more specifically evangelical Christian. The power of religious belief to sway one’s behavior cannot be overstated. People have convinced themselves of all sorts…

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Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

…aniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse…

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Arizona Supreme Court Rules Against Disenfranchisement — But Privacy Issues Remain

…hey were not correctly registered. There is no evidence that a significant number of the Arizona residents caught up in this bureaucratic mix-up are non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote. Chief Justice Ann Timmer justified the decision: “We are unwilling, on these facts, to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests.” Yet the controversy surrounding the voters caught in the citizenship and identification mix-up does…

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The Faith Outreach Canard

…Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes worked doing faith outreach on a number of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008 but not in 2010. In both the RNS interview and in an article on Huffington Post, Sapp argues for a causal link between lackluster faith outreach in this election cycle and Democratic losses; his conclusion: “the results were disastrous.” To support this argument, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally…

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