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Normalization is Control: Telling Stories to Survive

By Mariam Durrani

…for myself, my family, and colleagues. So I’ve been trying to draft a short 800-word article for Religion Dispatches, as my attempt to make sense of this current moment, not because I chose this as an anthropological project, but here I am. Here I am listening to Trump’s transition team drop words like Muslim registry or that there is a precedent for internment camps in American history. The news that the KKK has been dropping their newsletter off…

World Congress of Families Blessed By Georgian Orthodox Patriarch and George W. Bush; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…adrennial General Conference in Portland, Oregon. From May 10-20, more than 800 delegates will debate changes to church policy, including several that seek to lift longstanding bans on LGBT ministers and same-sex marriages. This is the first Methodist General Conference since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015. LGBT-affirming Methodists have failed to change church policy, with the denomination’s numerical strength now in the south –…

Trump is Helping the Economy… The Apocalypse Economy

By Jonathan Root

Jim Bakker misses his days as the head of Heritage USA—especially the amphitheater, the water park, and the train. On a recent episode of his TV show, the televangelist complained that the government had unjustly taken his Christian theme park away from him in 1989, after he was convicted of mail and wire fraud. But now things are looking up for Bakker. For the first time in years, he explained, “I can honestly say the vision I had fifty years ag…

The Fire This Time

By Anthea Butler

…holarship done this summer. Meanwhile, I try to hold it together to write a 800-word piece without crying and wanting to tear my hair out about the pain of my people. I’m not writing prophetic words to you anymore. You fix this shit. I’m done carrying the cross of America, its false promises of democracy and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black peo…

New Poll Reveals a Paradox in Evangelical Support for Donald Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…

Delillo and Doctor Strange: Orientalist Fantasy is Alive and Well

By Noah Berlatsky

…t a blank wall. Zero K‘s Artis may be an archeologist who has done digs in China, but Jeffrey is not Indiana Jones and Zero K is not a pulp adventure. Yet, throughout the novel, there are hints of the adventure that wasn’t—as if DeLillo’s exhausted vision of slack nothingness is being defined against a refused Eastern exotic. The Convergence is located in Kyrgyzstan; Jeffrey’s trip there is described as a series of blind journeys to indistinguisha…

Uncertainty About US Role In LGBT Human Rights Under Trump; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…uality seems to be advancing over the objections of some religious groups, China Post reports that YouTube “pulled an episode of the Defense Ministry’s TV show that features a soldier broken up with by his same-sex partner.” The official online version of the video was removed by YouTube after users flagged it on grounds that it violated community guidelines. Cached backups of the episode remain online. The Alliance of Crying for Hope (搶救台灣希望聯盟) b…

There’s Nothing Wrong with ‘Prayer’; But There’s Every Reason to be Skeptical of Pence’s Coronavirus Prayer Circle

By Chrissy Stroop

…host who recently declared that God would stop the coronavirus pandemic if China would convert to Christianity. Nor are they even Jason Seville, who in the face of the disaster wrote a self-aggrandizing piece for The Gospel Coalition on why he would be remaining in China, where he pastors a church. Nevertheless, the Zahnds and Merritts of the world could do much better in helping America move past this era of empty “thoughts and prayers” if they w…