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The Curious Case of Mormons and LGBT Rights

By Alan Michael Williams

…des in Salt Lake City, Boise, and other cities for the first time in large numbers, carrying banners that read “Mormons Building Bridges” (MBB). Donning Sunday attire and holding signs with messages of love, MBB forbade signs that criticized Church teachings—namely the notion that same-sex intimacy is a sin. Erika Munson, the founder of MBB, has assured me that the marches were a grassroots affair not in any way directed by Church leaders, but giv…

Single Greatest Idea Ever: On the 150th Anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species

By Lauri Lebo

…wer people accepted evolution than in the United States.) According to Ron Numbers’ The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, in the wake of the publishing of Origin, Christians in America were, for the most part, able to make peace with Darwin’s theory and evolutionary principles. It wasn’t until the early 1900s, when a series of religious pamphlets, “The Fundamentals,” were published arguing for the acceptance of the B…

“Muscular Christianity” Not to Blame For Driscoll: A Response

By Jessica Johnson

When I began attending Mars Hill Church in 2006, its main facility in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood was headquarters and clubhouse—a 20,000 square foot renovated hardware warehouse seating over a thousand where young guys loitered in the parking lot and rock music from worship band practices thundered outside after gospel class. On Sundays, the sight of security guards monitoring the entryway with the impassive self-importance of club bouncers w…

Dear Timothy Keller: The “Evangelical” Problem isn’t Pollsters

By Jessica Johnson

…s multiculturalism as a prop to distract from the racism and sexism that African American voters, who turned out in record numbers during the Alabama Senate election, rebuked with their ballots. Devon Crawford, a 24 year-old divinity student at the University of Chicago, traveled home to vote against Moore because his version of Christianity “sanctifies the truth-making power of white men” and is “really just a masquerade for white supremacy.” Why…

Court Rules Against Texas Education Employee Forced To Resign Over Forwarded Email

By Lauri Lebo

…ess, who testified about the Wedge Document, an internal memo in which the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading proponent of intelligent design, outlined a public-relations strategy to destroy “scientific materialism” and affirm the idea that human beings are created in the image of God. After Comer forwarded the email, Lizzette Reynolds, a TEA hire who had worked as an advisor to Gov. George W. Bush, recommended that Comer be f…

Is Downward Dog the Path to Hell?

By Andrea R. Jain

…ith Christianity. And whether it’s Christians against non-Christians or Americans against non-Americans what it boils down to is, “you’re either with us or against us”—a strategy with nationalist dimensions. And sure enough, for Mohler and other evangelical opponents of yoga, part of the problem is that it comes from India. In discussing yoga’s roots in India, he characterizes it as “almost manically syncretistic.” Mohler warns that if that syncre…

Denying Darwin: Another Peculiar American Institution

By Lauri Lebo

…at reason and rationality provide the solutions to the problems of the empirical and political worlds. The other tradition is that of the Puritans, who came to America to escape religious persecution in their former land, but who, on arriving, began to persecute everyone else who did not agree with them. Fair and Balanced Even though it has a national church—the Church of England—and lacks the strict interpretation of separation of church and stat…

Blame Muscular Christianity for Driscoll Fiasco

By Hollis Phelps

…riod of time from his pastoral role at Mars Hill Church, the megachurch in Seattle that he co-founded. Even from an outsider’s perspective, Driscoll’s gradual fall from grace has been painful to watch. Driscoll, of course, has always been controversial, which to his followers is part of his allure. But with the exception of his most stalwart defenders, recently his actions and overall persona have become almost impossible to defend. Here on RD Bec…

The Leadership Crisis at the End of the Megachurch Era

By Benjamin Dueholm

…and authoritarian rules. Mark Driscoll, the butch young fellow who built a Seattle-area megachurch, was celebrated for his strongman style, which included using juvenile language against people whose sexual orientations and gender expressions he didn’t approve of (up to and including depictions of Jesus as “a guy I could beat up”). When he was widely and credibly accused of being a domineering egomaniac, his church swiftly fell apart. These models…

Are You Doing Your Part in the Baby War?

By Katherine Stewart

…n, over the long haul, move government policy in one direction. Founder of Seattle’s Mars Hill megachurch Mark Driscoll, whom Sandler wrote about in a previous book, said, “We are in a city with less children per capita than any city but San Francisco….and we consider it our personal mission to turn that around.” What that means for the women in his church, who are instructed to assume a “submissive” role within marriage, is predictable. “My life…