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The Real Story Behind Rick Perry’s Secret Meetings with Pastors

By Sarah Posner

…in 2000. Kaylor wrote, “You were correct to connect the news about Perry’s phone call with Robison’s effort in 1980. In fact, the connection is much stronger.” Kaylor reported in June that although Robison denied that his group was supporting a particular candidate—in fact, the group was divided over who to support, as was the religious right leadership in 2008—the televangelist appears to be a prime motivator of Perry’s prayer rally scheduled for…

My Lowest Point

By Amina Wadud

…e’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed silent…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…, speculating, and damn, those kids are all doing x, y, and z on their cellphones, and it’s an outrage! Pew’s study of cellphone etiquette gives us one way to begin digging into a much larger set of questions: which norms do we, and should we, place around the use of digital tools? When are these opinions just personal preferences, and when do they take on a more explicit ethical dimension? When should we enforce them? Part of the problem is that…

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…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

By Johnny Townsend

…, the friend I’d gone to the party with said, “Ask the host for that guy’s number. He was really into you.” That was the first inkling I had that Gary was even gay. A week later we had our first date. In discussing our histories, we learned some intriguing facts. We’d both been pre-med students. We’d both earned English degrees. We had both been teachers. We’d both been bank tellers. Oh, and we were both ex-Mormon, having both served missions in R…

Why We Need a Public Black Theology for the 21st Century

By Vincent Lloyd

…School, Willie James Jennings at Yale Divinity School, and Brian Bantum at Seattle Pacific University have been rightly praised for their penetrating scholarship. They are interested in revisiting the fundamental ideas of Christianity in dialogue with Black literature and culture. While this is a welcome development, it remains to be seen how scholarship addressing deep and important questions of faith translates to a secular public, and particula…

Who Killed Mars Hill Church? There’s One Suspect Evangelicals Simply Aren’t Prepared to Interrogate

By Cavan Concannon

…as pastor of Mars Hill Church, a multi-campus megachurch in and around the Seattle area. Boasting membership in the thousands, Mars Hill was viewed widely among evangelicals as a promising new style of church planting. But the church was also beset by allegations, from insiders and outsiders, that Driscoll and those around him had fostered a culture of abuse. Driscoll resigned when these allegations reached a breaking point for church leaders. Sho…

What the Conservative Christian “Fake-Trans Bathroom Creeper” Has To Do With Suburban Anxiety

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…exurbs all…. Now, the shepherds are heading to big cities: Mark Driscoll’s Seattle, Louie Giglio’s Atlanta, and, of course, New York—home to Tim Keller, Eric Metaxas, Gabe Lyons, Carl Lentz, Greg Thornbury, Jon Tyson, and others. Perhaps the implicit fear here isn’t altogether wrong. Suburban conservative Christians may be on to something when they detect that it will be increasingly difficult for them to limit their business relationships to the…