Religion Dispatches
…g for him,” the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Writing on the Fox News website, Robert Jeffress, the Texas megachurch pastor who in 2011 called Mormonism a “cult,” maintains, “No Evangelical I know is expecting Trump to lead our nation in a spiritual revival.” But, he goes on, President Barack Obama has “drastically lowered the threshold of spiritual expectations Evangelicals have of their president. No longer do they require their presid…
Read More…ionaries were discouraged if not outright forbidden from doing things like community service-and because we were told that however much it felt like a soul-killing waste of time, it was actually one of the most important, worthwhile activities we could engage in, a message that, quite frankly, produced a lot of cognitive dissonance and unhappiness. I think this is a positive development all around, and hope that the church moves soon to expand the…
Read More…h of a reality. Boston University professor David Frankfurter, in his award-winning 2006 book Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, argues that, when we apply the most rigorous standard of historical scholarship to allegations of Satanic evil conspiracies and rituals like that of the “black mass,” we find that “no evidence has ever been found to verify the atrocities as historical events” (212). Moreover, Frank…
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…recently to talk with Religion Dispatches’ Candace Chellew-Hodge about his new book, and his ancient model. LGBT Christians love to talk about grace, but the topic of sin can be painful for us. Why do we need to talk about sin now? In some ways I feel like this conversation is Queer Christianity 201 and not 101 because so many of us in the LGBT community have been so deeply hurt by sin talk that I feel like it doesn’t allow people to come closer…
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…rd same-sex desires that is revealed in much poetry and literature from pre-19th-century Islam. She says, for example, that “poetry with homoerotic themes was composed in all of the major literary languages used by medieval Muslims.” The Qur’an, Rashid adds, acknowledges that some men are not attracted to women; and Geissinger writes that there is evidence that even among those surrounding the Prophet Mohammed, men with female characteristics were…
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…e religiously-driven political views on the rest of society, and thereby become “left-wing theocrats.” How do you explain to voters how you relate your values to politics and public policy? If I ever felt that my role as an elected official would force me to violate my understanding of what it means to be a Christian I would resign my office. I want people to know that and understand that my values and principles come before politics. But I also w…
Read More…erns of child sexual abuse within its own ranks in the 1990s after several high-profile child sexual abuse cases resulted in multimillion dollar payouts to victims and their families. The Mormon Alliance, a grassroots Mormon organization that monitored abuse within the Church, published a study documenting negligence on the part of local members and leaders in addressing abuse—and even the excommunication of some victims and accusers. In 1995, the…
Read More…nce to “Kool-Aid.” Since the Jonestown massacre in 1978, “drinking the Kool-Aid” has become shorthand for claiming that a particular group has no agency and that its views are therefore unworthy of consideration or debate. The area where RSE holds its retreats is described as a “compound,” which has become a popular term for any facility that “cults” own since the Branch Davidian siege in 1993. Terms like “cult compound” invoke a military register…
Read More…oom full of future clergypersons, I found myself excited by the new and eye-opening things we had been learning about Christian history and theology. “So,” I asked my classmates. “When you get into the pulpit, will you be teaching your congregation all the great things we’ve learned here?” There was a collective gasp. The stared at me and crinkled their noses like I had just let out a huge, smelly fart. “No!” one gasped as she held a hand to her c…
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…t least to the politics reporter. What Trump meant was that in the real day-to-day discourse of politics, the second-and-third-hand rehashed retail accounts on cable news that he pays attention to and that form the common political conversation of the moment, Hillary’s religion hasn’t been present. He was right about that. He was speaking to a context where religion does count to that common conversation—he was talking to a group of politically-in…
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