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Already Beatified by the Right for Surviving an Assassination Attempt, Must We All Pray for Donald Trump?

I had some finessing to do on Sunday. I filled in for a colleague the morning after the attempt on former president Donald Trump’s life, you see. Just about everyone in the congregation had heard about it by that point, and they expected me to say something about it. But what? My denomination may have a progressive reputation but that’s not always the case, and in our neck of the woods it can be difficult to parse just how not-the-case a given co…

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Election Reporters: Here’s Why Simply Descriptors Like ‘Christians’ Can Have Enormous Consequences

Here at Religion Dispatches, we have an informal policy that “religion is as religion does.” Which is to say, we don’t try to adjudicate who is, for example, a “real Christian” and who’s not. If you label your beliefs and practices as “Christian,” and those beliefs are shared by a reasonable number of people, that’s the label we use. It’s not a perfect rule, but then heuristics are only ever meant to work well enough. I was reminded of this rule…

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Rising Influence of New Apostolic Reformation Teachings is Ominous Sign For the US — Especially For LGBTQ Students

…vered” from demons. As noted earlier, “deliverance” among NAR adherents is coded language for exorcism, which is an even more noxious version of the psychologically (and often physically) harmful practice of LGBTQ conversion therapy, which researchers Sue Spivey and Christine Robinson have even referred to as “genocidal.” In 2016 conservative policymakers, who today push anti-LGBTQ legislation at an alarming rate, were not prepared to implement so…

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Editor’s Picks: Remembering the Broken Promises — and the Possibilities — on Independence Day

Independence Day doesn’t tend to cause as much dissonance as Thanksgiving, as much confusion as Juneteenth, and isn’t as widely reviled as Columbus Day (aka Indigenous People’s Day). Yet, while it “is not America’s birthday,” as Peter Laarman argued nearly a decade ago, Independence Day is every bit as apt as the holidays above to initiate—for better and certainly for worse—a discussion about what the American project actually is, what it was mea…

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The Supreme Court Cleared the Way for the ‘President-King’—The Right’s Prize for 50 Years of Planning

During a 1977 series of interviews (for which he was paid handsomely), Richard Nixon, responding to journalist David Frost’s question about Watergate, uttered these fateful words: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” At the time, almost everyone in the legal profession, from lawyers to judges, firmly rejected the premise that the president was above the law. In fact, it was 50 years ago this month—July of 1974—that the…

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Trump’s Fervent Christian Zionists Poised to Lead the Military — And US-Israel Relations

With Trump’s second presidency, Christian Zionism may be returning to the White House stronger than ever before. His recent nomination of Mike Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense mean that militant, hardline Christian Zionists stand to be in control of the Pentagon and US military—and, of course, at the helm of the US-Israel relationship. After over a year of Democrat-backed Israeli genocide and belligeren…

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Church Attendance is (Once Again) Correlated with Authoritarianism — So Why Do We Refuse to Acknowledge It?

Since 2016, I have been arguing here at RD that former president Donald Trump’s politics, and his appeal to White evangelical Christians, are best explained through the lens of authoritarianism. Pundits initially scratched their heads for entirely too long over how evangelicals could purport to follow Jesus and support Trump. The answer was always easy; he promised to do, and then did, what they wanted, which any disaffiliated former Christian sc…

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Attacks on Tim Walz’s Lutheran Denomination are Undermined by Reality — I Mean, Is ELCA Even Exciting Enough for Controversy?

…tor-in-Chief of The Federalist, a right-wing publication with a history of promoting false information about the 2020 election, Covid-19, and climate change, showed no such restraint, proclaiming on Twitter: As a confessional Lutheran, I’m getting a lot of questions about Tim Walz possibly being Lutheran. FWIW, Walz is ELCA, an extremely left-wing sub-denomination. You may be familiar with the ELCA due to some of their congregations using the “spa…

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Loyalty and Chaos Play a Role in Trump’s Nominations, But This Schoolyard Tactic May Provide a Better Explanation

Thus far much of the commentary about Trump’s cabinet and staff picks alternates between “He values loyalty above all else” and “He wants to generate chaos and break the federal government.” There’s significant truth in both statements. However, a more fundamental psycho-social program appears to be at work in Trump’s nomination of people like Matt Gaetz for Attorney General and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services—as…

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Nikki Haley’s Slavery Omission Typifies the GOP’s Tragic Pact with White Supremacy

Nikki Haley’s headline-generating incident at a town hall in New Hampshire is the perfect metaphor for the current Republican Party and its continued slide into open authoritarianism and White supremacy. At a recent town hall in New Hampshire, the contender for the GOP’s presidential nomination was asked by an audience member what she believed to have been the cause for the Civil War. In the video, a visibly shaken Haley paces around the stage, a…

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