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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…

Mormons Fight Marriage Equality in Mexico; Is Catholic Church Italy’s Anti-Gay NRA?; Nigerian Anglicans Cut Ties With UK Diocese; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…expand same-sex marriage, which is already legal in some states and Mexico City. KUTV reports that the Church, which played a significant role at last year’s World Congress of Families summit in Salt Lake City, asked local bishops to have DeHoyos’ remarks read at the more than 2,000 LDS congregations in Mexico. The U.S. Consulate in Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, will fly the rainbow flag for the month of June. Italy: Gay historian…

This Year in Satanism

By Joseph Laycock

…ed consent materials. JULY In July, Adam Daniels––a Satanist from Oklahoma City who is not affiliated with the Satanic Temple––announced that he would hold a black mass in September in the city’s civic center. This was met with a surge of petitions and protests from outraged Christians. Among conservative Catholics, a narrative had formed of how Catholics bravely defeated the Satanists behind the Harvard black mass. Some protesters seemed envious…

Fact-checking Scripture: “Those who do not work should not eat.”

By Daniel Schultz

…rbids eating fruit from a new tree until its fifth year? Arrington doesn’t fare much better. For one thing, it would be easy to read his response as at the very least implicitly supersessionist: You can quote the Old Testament, but I have New Testament scripture! As Dewey points out, this bit from 2 Thessalonians is a favorite conservative justification for cutting social benefits. It’s also a gross misinterpretation of the passage: The passage, w…

Millennials Put Off By Rigid, Judgmental Religion Offered … More Orthodoxy

By Daniel Schultz

…ness—are the ones that do best. That’s even true! Conservative churches do fare better these days than liberal ones, though the sociologists tell me that’s mostly the result of their later adoption of birth control. The cultural trends are the cultural trends, even if they do take longer to catch up with some groups than others. It makes a certain surface amount of sense, then, that Shrum would argue that churches should stick to the demands of ho…

The Nones are Alright: An End-of-the-Year Open Letter to Pearl-Clutching Pundits

By Chrissy Stroop

…eresting to note that both evangelical and mainline Protestants are losing numbers, while Catholics are holding steady at 21% of U.S. adults according to Pew, which is where they were in 2014. Protestants now make up 40% of the adult population, a decline of four percentage points over a five-year period. In light of the above, would it be too much to ask for a change to the way elite pundits and journalists approach American secularization in 202…

A ‘Vows’ Piece in ‘The Times’ Shows How Doctrinaire Christian Celibacy Has Become Compared to its Ancient Roots

By Joseph Amar

…Style section of the New York Times was a notable departure from the usual fare of wedding and anniversary announcements. Titled ‘Far From Galilee, a Joseph-and-Mary Sort of Marriage,’ (or ‘One Chaste Marriage, Four Kids, and the Catholic Church’ in the online version) the article concerned the highly unusual decision of the author’s parents to forego sexual intimacy for a period of nine years in what is euphemistically referred to as a ‘Josephite…

‘Landmark’ Speech From LDS Leader on LGBTQ Rights and Religious Freedom Was More Like a Sunnier Groundhog Day

By Aly Marino

…oric was less overtly hostile and marginally more inclusive than his usual fare—a low bar, to be sure—and parts of it could almost pass for expressions of actual empathy. These broad statements that hinted towards inclusion may seem notable, but there’s little reason to believe there’s anything of substance behind them. And there’s ample reason to believe that Oaks merely gave us the illusion of tolerance. Perhaps most notable, on the positive sid…

Tim LaHaye’s World: We’re Living In It

By Jason C. Bivins

…here’s something going on”—is precisely what has become standard political fare in recent decades, building on earlier iterations of the apocalyptic and the conspiratorial to become the mundane. I am not claiming that the things LaHaye built and did and wrote have had some kind of causal role in any of the actual events swirling in this agonistic America. But we live in Tim LaHaye’s world. The facts of his life are well-known. Detroit-born, WWII v…

Apocalypse Now and Then: How a Biblical Genre Shapes American Politics

By Christopher Douglas

…“creation science” from public schools, even as evolution became standard fare. They have watched feminism challenge gender roles, and the Supreme Court legalize abortion and mixed-race marriage and then same-sex marriage. They feared losing their children to a more pluralist religious landscape tolerant of decades of changes in sexuality, dress, drugs, music, and pornography. Decentered, they have lost real privileges and the ability to compel t…