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Opting for Lucy Over Linus: Watching The Great Pumpkin in the Age of Trump

…it’s less likely to be true. I can appreciate why someone would make that bet. The Great Pumpkin promises not just candy, but toys, maybe money. Linus’s adoring companion Sally seemed to me like the person whose faith is less sincere, but who nevertheless represents many believers as they actually are: tentative, conflicted, self-interested. After a year in which I followed the obsessive investigations into the mind of the Trump voter, my sympath…

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Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” Has Replaced it)

…r rationales to sustain enrollment. The school found a winning strategy in promoting family values. LCA portrayed its mission as supporting Christian families and promised to shape young men and women who knew their place. A 1975 promotional brochure for the school advertised, “we have no hippies” and “you can tell our boys from our girls without a medical examination.” The relative lack of explicit racial rhetoric in the family values movement wo…

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How Herbalife’s Gospel of Health and Wealth Fuels a Billion-Dollar Deception

…world of prosperity gospel preachers, whose claims about the relationship between faith, donations to the church, and personal well-being strike many outsiders as a straightforward, money-motivated swindle. In the business of hope, there’s already very little overlap between the legal and the ethical—and, it seems, little clarity on where the legal marketing ends and the illegal stuff begins. What’s clear is that dreams are good business. It’s fi…

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Country Trumpkins

…the country and have decided to remain, or return after a few years away. Between the two groups, the self-understanding of the community becomes defined over and against urban life, for good reasons (wanting a small, caring community) and bad (wanting not to live next to black people). All of this can be dealt with, but change comes slow in rural areas. Think generations, rather than years, much less the lightning pace expected by the wired worl…

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Hillary Clinton Feeds the Trolls

…a vocal right-wing fringe movement (like Farage’s UKIP) that has limited access to political power than to have a quieter right-wing fringe movement that, by taking over a mainstream party, actually has a shot at national office. I suspect Clinton and her campaign made a good bet. Better to face things head on than to pretend they don’t exist, especially when so much is on the line. But the issue remains thorny. Faced with new, muscular expressio…

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Maybe Trump Should Pray About His Problems With Religious Voters?

…Jews, like members of all the other religious minorities, recognize a bad bet for religious freedom when they see one. They see how Trump treats Muslims, Mormons, and Hispanics, and they know his commitment to them is thinner than his actual hair. Anyway, you might say it’s only one state, but it’s also the one state with a sizable Jewish population and an uncertain outcome. There’s no way Trump is winning in New York or New Jersey, and if he doe…

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Lincoln, Clinton, and Trump: From Strategy to Spin to Straight-Up Bullshit

…cks the coalition-building skills that a certain bending of the truth can abet. He is willing to insult those whose support might help him actually gain power. The link between politics and politeness—both of which draw on artifice to smooth over conflict—is one he both understands and repudiates. As suicidal as it has proven to be, his refusal to change his behavior to appear more “presidential” has a certain integrity to it, which his supporters…

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Friending Pope Benedict on Facebook?

…express obsolete ideology? Or would blogging help the pope realize that some of his teachings are a wee bit outdated? What next, Pope Benedict on Facebook? If so, you can bet your mortgage that plenty of “good” Catholics will be editing their profiles before they ”friend His Holiness.”…

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Are You There God? It’s Me, Donald: A President at Prayer

…ious liberty thing. Liberty is fabulous, the best. All Americans should be free to take religious liberties. Oh, and that Turnbull guy, is he serious? I’m supposed to care about what Australia thinks? Gimme a break. Gonna talk about that tomorrow. Gonna say that I know how to play rough, gonna tell them all that fighting the bad guys won’t be pretty for a while. Let’s see if the Sunday School types at the Hilton tomorrow are ready to face reality….

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Gorsuch Confirmed… But Don’t Get Too Bent Out of Shape

…d now requires a simple majority vote in the Senate, those who believe in civil rights, individual autonomy, and the equal balance of power in a democratic republic had better get our houses in order and find a better strategy for opposing the next great threat to our way of life….

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