…aders worldwide. We expand God’s kingdom by helping to build relationships between revival leaders, ministries, and organizations around the globe, and to equip them to transform their spheres of influence. Global Legacy has been rebranded as the Bethel Leaders Network. It’s clear that one who’s regarded as an apostle or belongs to an apostolic network is not necessarily always part of the most Wagnerian segment of the NAR. The fact that the term…
…inked efforts of NAR networks, it’s become a potent far-right symbol and a coded emblem for an extensive spiritual warfare campaign, all of which became entwined with the Trump Administration and Trump 2020 Campaign. […] In the helter-skelter season between the 2020 election and the January 6 attempt to forcibly interfere with the result, the Appeal to Heaven flag had become a ubiquitous symbol adopted by charismatic Christians to exhibit their fa…
…esting, charging and imprisoning gay people under article 347 of the penal code for years.” The brutalization and imprisonment of LGBT persons in Cameroon is rampant in the villages, not just the big cities. A woman who works with a human rights organization in Cameroon told me recently that she gets at least “four calls a week” from LGBT persons in the rural areas, typically reporting familial abuse, abuse by the authorities, jailing and subseque…
…omosexual agenda.” On Wednesday, World Vision’s U.S. board tucked its tail between its legs, called its decision a mistake, and reverted to its original policy “requiring sexual abstinence for all single employees and faithfulness within the Biblical covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.” The board thanked Christians who objected to the decision and asked for their forgiveness. We are brokenhearted over the pain and confusion we have cau…
…law. And we do not share the kind of moral code that could exact penalties between those of the state and those of the employer or marketplace. This is a strange thing about our moment in history. The story of Oedipus reminds us that banishment and ostracism were once standard practices for protecting a community from the danger and rupture implicit in certain kinds of crimes. Early Christians who lapsed from their moral code in particularly serio…
…ons with tax exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Those changes were set in motion after record amounts of campaign spending by (c)(4) groups in 2012, and tea party complaints that their applications for (c)(4) status were improperly denied for partisan reasons. Although Congressional Republicans tried to make a scandal of the application process, further congressional investigation showed both conservative and progr…
…also promoting intelligent design. As is their modus operandi, they switch between intelligent design and coded phrases like “teach the controversy” when it serves their purposes. For an example of their promotion of intelligent design in public school science class, see their 1999 booklet Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook. Also, in the case of Dover, Discovery initially sent pro-ID DVDs, such as Signature in…
…des, but exploded in 2003 with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which, more than anything, showcases Brown’s muddled if provocative incorporation of the Gnostic worldview into the novel. Fans of The Da Vinci Code don’t need to go out and purchase Robinson’s translation, they can simply read the Gnostic texts online at the Gnosis Archive. Or, if they’re interested in other early contenders for New Testament inclusion—the Gospel of P…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…politics is almost irresistible.” Indeed, he succumbs, dividing the world between good liberals and “tacky” conservatives, the distinguished and the sophomoric. When confronted by evidence that these categories are not so hard and fast as his inner social scientist would like, he falls back on a rhetoric that constructs a reasonable middle by dismissing all to its left and its right as paranoid. For Randy, the center always holds. But the center…
…shrouded in secrecy, came into the spotlight after Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code hit the New York Times bestseller list. The novel suggested that the women in Opus Dei are “forced to clean the men’s residence halls for no pay,” and remarked upon the broad subjugation of women in the order. And while the novel is fictional, the alleged “misconceptions” that arose in the fallout of the media attention surrounding The DaVinci Code provided much of the…
