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Does McCain Have the Religion Rhetoric Down?

By Ira Chernus

…will save civilization by fighting terrorists around the world, but as the culture hero who will save faith and religion here at home too. Wrapping God in the flag, especially in wartime, is a proven winner at the voting booth—except when American troops look like losers on the battlefield. Then there is the rhetorical risk of making God, too, look like a loser. Will McCain take that risk? Or will he count on God, a winner by definition, to shore…

McCain’s Prosperity Preacher

By Sarah Posner

…erial prosperity to all believers who have enough faith,” with even higher numbers of Pentecostals and charismatic Christians agreeing with that statement. Go to any Word of Faith church, tune in to TBN, or read reams of books written by Word of Faith evangelists, and you will find the movement’s trademark selective literalism of both the Old and New Testaments, picking out verses that seem—regardless of hermeneutics demonstrating otherwise—to rei…

New Data Strongly Suggest a Correlation Between Disaffiliation and Christianity’s Association with the U.S. Right

By Chrissy Stroop

…d Trump’s Christian nationalist presidency and the present, they certainly look like confirmation of Hout and Fisher’s thesis. That is, since the proportion of Americans who see religious faith as important for good citizenship and for their own identity declined across this period along with religious affiliation, the decline likely has something to do with rising identitarian Christian nationalist politics. Christian nationalism has become incre…

Why Belief in the Primacy of Language Leads to a Misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins, Islamophobia, and Politics

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…ested in the phenomenon of disagreement. What does it mean when two people look at the same information and they come to different conclusions? To me, that is in some way indexing how deeply ingrained our affective experiential priorities are—the prisms that stand between us and the world, that we can experience the same information in completely different ways. It connects to a lot of political questions. I think that a lot of the disagreement ab…

Hagee Hangs On

By Bill Berkowitz

…fast in his willingness to stand with Hagee. “It’s now necessary for us to look at the totality of (Hagee’s) views,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told Jewish Week in an interview. While the battle engages more participants, CUFI’s executive director David Brog claims that the pastor’s words were taken out of context, recently pointing out that the attack on Lieberman is an “unfortunate” example of people “…

The Problem We All Live With: Bearing Witness, But Never Finding Justice

By Emilie M. Townes

…re dangerous and an ominous threat if we do not know or understand them—so best to shoot first and not be held accountable later. It causes the anger and despair of watching folks get killed over and over again and deciding that the only response is to take up a gun and begin killing police officers as a warped retributive justice. We must stop and look at ourselves—all of us. Take an account of how we sanction or contribute to the madness that ha…

Media Hit Hard On Trump’s White Supremacist Appointee, But Which “Media”?

By Carmen Celestini

…ematic of the divide between the left and the right in America. We need to look at the media Trump voters were reading and watching and ask for accountability from those media sources. Trump himself understands this divide. After appearing on 60 Minutes for his first interview as President-Elect, Trump will appear on right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars to thank his supporters. Right-wing media has long been on the periphery. During…

The Corrections: Douthat Edition

By Evan Derkacz

…ver: …today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. One is tempted to point out that yes, it is true that had it adopted reforms urged on it by liberal theologians and pundits the institutional Catholic Church would look different: it might see greater equality among women and LGBT members, have avoided or at…

Pope Francis’ Concern for Jews is Genuine — But Until This Doctrine is Abolished He’ll Have Trouble Convincing Them

By Paul Knitter

…stern colonial powers. Such a reformation is also being urged by a growing number of Christian theologians and church leaders who propose a “theology of mutuality” rather than a “theology of superiority.” This is a pluralistic understanding of religious diversity that affirms both the real differences between, but also the limitations of, all religions. All religions therefore need to be fulfilled in each other through a mutual dialogue in which n…

Where Trump and Climate Deniers Seem Very Far Away: COP22 in Marrakech

By Donna Schaper

…ng about the United States government 25 hours per day. I also expected to look at the global climate crisis from the perspective of Africa, what we often call the bottom-up in my top-down kind of world. As usual my expectations were turned upside down. No one will talk to you unless you assure them very quickly that you did not vote for “him.” Every third protest sign exasperates about Trump and the climate deniers. The main message is that Afric…