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‘We’re all in this together’: The Perils of Kumbaya Rhetoric

By Peter Laarman

Talk is cheap, and sentimental talk cheapens public discourse in dangerous ways at a time when total sobriety is required. Eight weeks into a public health and economic catastrophe, the facts before us should be sobering enough: Disease and death in this pandemic overwhelmingly afflict communities of color (e.g. despite making up just a third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbe…

Holding Out for a Hero: New ID Book Aims to Save You From Despair of Evolution

By Kriti Sharma

…els, the chances of getting a Shakespearean sonnet from randomly arranged words, the chances of finding this exact spot with a randomly dropped pin, and so on. Undeniable could have been compressed into an article, but it is bulked up by the same argument made repeatedly, as if hoping that the point will become more convincing through repetition. What is remarkable is not even how many times Axe repeats the same argument, but how many times this s…

Why The Advocate‘s Choice of Pope Francis for Person of the Year is a Mistake

By Anthea Butler

…c teaching on homosexuality—defined by that tradition as ‘intrinsically disordered,” While I very much appreciate the change in focus and tone from Pope Francis, I would caution everyone: “don’t get it twisted.” Pope Francis is still the Cardinal Bergoglio who opposed same sex marriage in Argentina. If I had to pick my person of the year for the intersection of religion with LGBT justice, it would be a neighbor of mine, Rev. Frank Schaefer of Leba…

Turn on the News: Some Abortion Opponents May Opt For a New Vaccine, But Behind Their Skepticism it’s Often a Different Story — of Disinformation, Conspiratorial Thinking, and White Nationalism

By Daniel Schultz

…fizer or Johnson & Johnson doses currently available in the U.S. But that word “some” is doing a lot of work here. As Jenkins points out, only about one-in-ten Americans claim religious objections to COVID vaccination. That figure comes from a PRRI poll, which doesn’t break down the objections any further. Meaning, we don’t know how much of that 10% is rooted in concerns over abortion. It could be that people are balking because they see vaccinati…

How To Control Your Ungodly Urges… On a Budget!

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…because I’m about to describe a kind of rhetorical genius so intense the words might singe your retinas with their brilliance. (pauses while the readership of RD collectively finds their protective eyewear) Some on the right wing (leading lights like Rush Limbaugh, for example) responded with the unprecedented, totally creative, really-takes-an-intelligent-person-to-come-up-with-it tactic of calling Fluke, and her friends, sluts who can’t control…

Hajj Journal: Tawaf: How I Fell in Love…

By Amina Wadud

…lowed to pray two rakats anywhere directly out from the actual station. In order to pray our two, and to be safe from a stampede of hajjis, we needed to be further out. Fortunately, we were still close and yet safe. We also took turns, such that one of us stood guard over the other—double safe. Anyway, I really got used to the necessity of the jostle and the necessity of the inconvenience. But still, I would draw the line: jostle there, but not in…

Seeking Broad Appeal to US Christians, ‘God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism’ Glosses Over Critical Context

By Chrissy Stroop

…with the assumption that evangelical support of Trump is rooted in a wrong ordering of religious and political identities.” Jethani’s convenient binary is thus, in Miller’s words, “off from the start,” but it’s one echoed repeatedly in God & Country. Shortly after Jethani is introduced, a voice behind the camera asks Catholic religious sister and social justice activist Simone Campbell, “Is Christian nationalism Christian?” to which she replies, “…

With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

By Peter Laarman

…it’s been 45 years since my own denomination, the United Church of Christ, ordained its first openly gay minister, and there’s no doubt that respect for reason played a major role in its conversion to a gay-positive position. Rejecting reason and common sense, only the American Baptists* and the United Methodists still take the view that committed gay relationships are unacceptable. It is surely no coincidence that both of these bodies have a stra…

This is Not a Religion Column: Christian Candidate Quiz Bowl

By Jeff Sharlet

…cy, longing not for the will of the people but for the strong hand of the Lord. But its ethos has been with us since the beginning. If the proto-fundamentalists at the Constitutional Convention who tried to dedicate the new nation to Christ failed to overcome the spirit of Jefferson and the maneuvering of Madison—the architects of the wall of separation between church and state—they nonetheless were able to seed history with a thousand little piet…

Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

By Willie James Jennings

…see his actions as extraordinary evil. But Dylann Roof’s act was not extraordinary evil, it was quite ordinary evil, the evil deeply embedded in the racial architecture of America. This young man yielded to the mind bending incoherent frustration born of whiteness, a frustration that has always misdirected its anger at black people first, and then other people of color and Jewish people, all of whom are imagined as thwarting the full achievement…