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5 Key Moments From the Year of the ‘Exvangelicals’

By Chrissy Stroop

…brity pastor Max Lucado. Field paid the $25 fee for access to the summit’s live stream and live tweeted the entire thing. Henderson created a blog post for the occasion about how she had been affected by evangelical purity culture as a queer black woman, and the organizers and participants in the counter-event amplified her piece. And the news media noticed, documenting the counter-event and taking the concerns of the conference’s mostly exvangeli…

Gay Rights Org Delivers 150,000-Signature Petition to LDS Church

By Joanna Brooks

…d goodwill can prevail. It’s a remarkable statement after an eventful, sometimes brutal, and perhaps pivotal week in LGBT-Mormon relations. To be sure, the Church’s statement does not fulfill the HRC’s demands that Elder Packer rescind his talk. Nor does it expand institutional options for LGBT Mormons beyond celibacy, the closet, or excommunication. But it may in fact be the most important official statement on LGBT human rights and Mormon doctri…

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Red/Blue ‘National Divorce’ Looks an Awful Lot Like a Confederate Flag

By Thomas Lecaque and Joshua Call

…Greene isn’t serious about trying to secede in an imaginary framework of “live and let live.” Indeed, in the wake of persistent calls for violence against LGBTQIA+ (but in particular trans) people across the country, Greene’s suggestions that Wal-Marts in “Blue States” would be placing sex toys alongside children’s toys is yet another echo in the chamber of cries trying to target queer bodies in an increasingly hostile political landscape. The sc…

‘The Quiet Damage’ Details the Heartbreaking Effect of QAnon on Five American Families — But Critical Questions Linger

By Susannah Crockford

…d providing a sense of purpose and meaning—a mission even. People with humdrum lives can instead feel like digital soldiers fighting a war to save America. Why Does Q Take One Person But Not Another? While the aim to humanize those who engage with conspiracy theories is laudable and welcome, the treatment of why some resonate with those theories—while others in similar circumstances do not—retreads familiar ground. Conspiracy theories are, once ag…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…ls her ‘mission statement, if I have one,’” writes Rachel Syme in a recent New Yorker profile. On the track, Baker declares, “But I think there’s a god and he hears either way when I rejoice and complain/Lift my voice that I was made/And somebody’s listening at night with the ghosts of my friends when I pray.” This God is not an amorphous therapeutic deity of yesteryear nor a mostly ornamental cross in a photo shoot. This is the living Lord who he…

Premature “Gay Marriage Defeated” Post Removed from National Review

By Peter Montgomery

…nd boasting about the coalition that had defeated marriage equality in New York. Strangely enough, no news outlets were reporting the defeat of marriage equality. A few hours after NOM’s claim, CBS news reported that negotiations over the scope of the religious exemption—reportedly the sticking point for a number of Republicans in the state senate—were still moving forward. Looks like NOM’s eagerness to declare victory got a bit ahead of the facts…

Rick Santorum, Muslim Theologian and GOP Candidate, Would Bomb Iran

By Hussein Rashid

…o indication that any member of the religious council believes that to be true. The good news? Iran’s president does not have his finger on The Button, the religious council does. So, Ahmadinejad’s vision is similar to Bush’s, but without the access to nuclear weapons. Also, has Santorum heard of the “Left Behind” series? The belief that the end times are near and that people should be wreaking havoc is not unique to Ahmadinejad. But Santorum’s vi…

Secular End Times & Apocalyptic ‘Roosters’

By Gordon Haber

…he great upheaval and the scenario whereby we now go from this evil and corrupt world to the redeemed one.” Every millennial group, whether religious or secular, is marked by the transformation of “normal time” to “apocalyptic time”—when its followers eagerly anticipate the millennium, seeing signs and symbols everywhere in a state of “semiotic arousal” (similar to the way intellectuals are stirred by reading Umberto Eco to one another.) Landes en…

Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…alists believe that a righteous God must cleanse the earth of filth and corruption before Christ’s thousand-year reign on Earth can commence. Secular climate-change doomsayers may not use the term Gaia in their work or believe that Earth itself possesses consciousness, but they still tend to suggest that Mother Earth has been grievously wounded by the relentless abuse she has suffered—and that she will have her ways of striking back. • Each apoc…

Why Jason Collins’ Faith is Ignored… And Tebow’s Isn’t

By T.F. Charlton

…, writing for US News and World Report, complains that “the secular crowd, New York sports writers included, have never forgiven” Tebow for his public Christianity and that Tebow is being “chased off the ﬁeld in a ﬂurry of social media cat calls while Collins… gets the call from the president.” This, Roff concludes, is evidence of a “double standard” under which “gays increasingly get cultural acceptance while conservatives and Christians are trea…