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Church Attendance is (Once Again) Correlated with Authoritarianism — So Why Do We Refuse to Acknowledge It?

By Chrissy Stroop

…nald Trump’s politics, and his appeal to White evangelical Christians, are best explained through the lens of authoritarianism. Pundits initially scratched their heads for entirely too long over how evangelicals could purport to follow Jesus and support Trump. The answer was always easy; he promised to do, and then did, what they wanted, which any disaffiliated former Christian school kid or survivor of evangelical homeschooling could have told an…

New Research May Explain the Weakness of Centrism and the Religious Left

By Daniel Schultz

…two sprawling coalitions that fear and loathe the other, and the side that best taps into that existential ego threat is likely to come out on top. Bitecofer’s not necessarily right, and she is only one voice among many in the complex conversation of election nerdery. But her views seems intuitively right to anyone coming out of left-blogdom in the last fifteen years, as I do. What we cynics have seen time after time is Republicans playing the fea…

John McCain: No God But Country

By Kathryn Lofton

…this analysis is not an inherently apolitical exercise, but it is, at its best, one disentangled from theological prescription. Somehow, without a God (but not, as we will see, without a powerful creed) John McCain has forged for himself a moral mode, a discourse, a rhetoric of righteousness. What, then, ought it matter whether he is or is not, technically speaking, Christian? It apparently matters to him, and to his opponent, and maybe it matter…

Pamela Geller in Brooklyn: Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Futility of Arguing with a Bigot

By Haroon Moghul

…on and the Defense of Our Freedoms.” (‘I’m not a scientist, but some of my best friends are canyons.’) You’ll have to RSVP. Stupid’s the coffee, and First Amendment’s the cake. 7:33 Geller can’t get in more than a sentence or two before the students applaud her with deafening conviction. They’ve decided to mock her with faux enthusiasm. At least, it’ll start so. It’ll end just as I predict it will: With Geller running away. 15 years ago, that’s wh…

Satanic Harmonies and Zoom Church: Readers Respond

By Daniel Schultz

…e “‘fanatical’ and ‘hateful’ ‘tribal’ Likud” and conservatives doing their best to throw blame on the left. All of this in sharp contrast to response to the tweet itself, which was much more directed at the offending extremist than to Likudniks as a whole. A.R. thinks this is the result of Maariv making a tempest out of a teapot. American media is certainly no stranger to this routine—outrage gets clicks, and in this age of negative partisanship,…

Interview with Karen Armstrong

By Andrea Bistrich

…e political issues are resolved. There is great common ground between the ideals of Islam and the modern Western ideal, and many Muslims have long realized this. At the beginning of the 20th century, almost every single Muslim intellectual was in love with the West and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. Some even said that the West was more “Islamic” than the unmodernized Muslim countries, because in their modern economie…

The Kids are Religious Right: Punk Rock & Pro-Life

By Justin Philpot

…ctively position themselves as separate from their peers, but it isn’t the best evidence to support her claim that Rock for Life is solely grounded in the evangelical movement. But for Sandler, the connection between religion and politics in Rock for Life can be explained in these terms. “Whether you’re praying in church or at a club, or screaming on a stage or at the doors of an abortion clinic,” Sandler writes, “it’s all just an articulation of…

A far-right protestor wears a MAGA tophat with a grim expression.

Conservative Evangelicals Aren’t Hypocrites, They’re Sadists

By Daniel Schultz

…h a rabid culture warrior like Mike Pence in the #2 role. But probably the best evidence for somebody like this would be the ICE raids in Mississippi last week. Here’s Trump the authoritarian carrying out his promise to keep them safe—and the result is a terrorized, deflated community. People notice that kind of thing, especially when their church is called on to assist the victims. And it may never work! All the evidence indicates that there’s a…

Barack Obama: High Priest-in-Chief?

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…American influence in the Middle East has been (and likely remains) in the best interests of the United States, certainly of Israel, and perhaps of the rest of the world. Bin Laden, however, disagrees. Vehemently. Violently. Nevertheless, this does not make the war—formally known as “on terror”—a religious conflict. To say that it is echoes the kinds of over-simplified religious ignorance we came to expect from the bumbling previous administration…

Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You Wouldn’t Know it From the Media

By Chrissy Stroop

…itself still has a diversity and inclusion problem, and maintains that the best way to address it would be for “‘allies’ to highlight the work of organizations like BN and encourage more support for us.” Since the removal of David Silverman as its president amid allegations of financial conflicts of interest and sexual misconduct in 2018, American Atheists has also been at the forefront of diversifying the secular movement in practicing and promot…