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Prisoners In the Hands of an Angry God: A Conversation About Religion and Reform

By Andrew Aghapour and Stephanie Gaskill

…. Why doesn’t a person’s religious denomination give us insight into their politics? Shouldn’t your beliefs about morality and ultimate truths be a good predictor of your political views? Those are somewhat different questions, I think. A person’s religious denomination doesn’t necessarily tell you all you need to know about their actual beliefs. People can identify with specific denominations for reasons other than theology, like family tradition…

Dreaming Beyond the Madman: Reflections on the Revolution in Libya

By Haroon Moghul

…ddle East, giant Libya, a nation the size of Alaska with fewer people than New York City (6.3 million), is savaged by violence. The country is split in two, though some army units continue to pummel peaceful protesters while foreign mercenaries fire live ammunition at anyone who moves. In the chaos, which began in mid-February, the rebellious east has liberated itself from Qaddafi’s authority, centered in the west (in Tripoli, in fact, of the “sho…

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

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…er Ed Stetzer asked, after images of rioters carrying Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President and other such banners filled the news. “What happened? Why were so many people drawn to somebody who was obviously so not connected to what evangelicals believe by his life or his practices or more?” The sentiment is a familiar one. The mix of astonishment, bewilderment, and concern it contains has come to define people’s reaction to the unwavering sup…

The Theology of Westboro: The “World’s Meanest Church” Is More Than Picket Signs

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…have advanced degrees. Many people in the church are athletes, especially runners, who compete on the local level, and Topeka, Kansas, where the church is located, is a city of over 125,000 people—not a big city but also not a rural backwater. Also only one church member—founding pastor Fred Phelps, who died over a year ago—was from the South. Our decision to depict anti-LGBT bigots using these stereotypes reveals some larger cultural prejudices….

Obama’s Bunker-Busters to Israel

By Sarah Posner

…to be used against Iran’s underground nuclear sites.) In his 2006 book, Jerusalem Countdown (filled with the apocalyptic fervor that Matt Sutton discussed in his Times op-ed today), Hagee advocated for the use of such weaponry against Iran, arguing that it would unleash the chain of events leading to the Second Coming: “If Israel bombs Iran’s eight nuclear sites with laser-guided, bunker-buster bombs, it could easily launch Ezekiel’s war, as desc…

In ‘The Evangelical Mission to Spread The Gospel to Muslims’ a Journalist Tells a Global Story About Evangelical Missionaries and the Spread of Right-Wing Ideology

By Daniel Schultz

…the good news, from a post-Civil War influx of Confederates to Brazil to crusades against the beast of communism to the emergence of a new beast in need of conversion: Muslims. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tell us about this network of missionaries, which, as I understand it, sort of flows from the US into Latin America and out across the world? Brazil at first received a few missionaries. There were some Presbyterians f…

Reagan’s Religion in Politics Legacy

By Sarah Posner

…Ronald Reagan’s major enduring legacy on religion in politics: not pastors endorsing politicians, but politicians endorsing pastors. Continuing….

The Ultimate Dirty Politics or Bipartisan Opposition to the Tea Party?

By Julie Ingersoll

…cratically-oriented polling firm) tests the numbers in a two-way race with Rubio facing either Crist or Meek. Rubio still beats Meek, but a hypothetical contest between Crist and Rubio is a dead heat. The Crist campaign denies having any part in trying to coax Meeks to withdraw. But yesterday Crist added to the list of Democrats who have defected from supporting Meek when he secured support from the Palm Beach Democratic People’s Choice PAC. Just…

‘Bad Faith’ Reveals This isn’t First Rodeo for Racism and Religious Right

By Rita Nakashima-Brock

…heir bogus “morality” created the template for the current anti-democratic politics of the die-hard evangelical Trump base. We now see what the last half-century of the Religious Right pursuit of power has reaped as it’s being tested by the worst pandemic in a century. Their voter base rejects information from medical experts, refuses to mask or be vaccinated, turns to taking disinfectants and potentially dangerous drugs with no scientific support…

Rejecting the Binary: Why Left v. Right Doesn’t Work

By Eric C. Miller

…is distributed by political operatives and marketers that is accepted as true. Sometimes it takes a great deal of effort to research an issue and find out the complexities about it. With a sound bite culture, the facts become obscured and people make decisions based upon falsehoods and superficial understandings of an issue. Often, people think that if they find out the facts a clear-cut answer will emerge, but more often than not, further examin…