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Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

By Peter Laarman

…Cato Christian get away with a bald-faced lie that comes directly from the Republican playbook. This is the canard, unsubstantiated anywhere, that relieving student debt represents a regressive upward redistribution of wealth, with uncredentialed working people subsidizing the college-educated elite. Jamelle Bouie, writing in the Times, had this to say about the “it’s regressive” smear: The idea that student loan relief is a handout to a small min…

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

By Peter Laarman

…an on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the United States. But recall that the votes against the One Church Plan and for the Traditional position came in at 56% and 53% respectively. White liberals can and and do blame the Global South churches for this outcome, although progre…

Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

By Joseph Laycock

…lues we profess. Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the public to think more critically about what “religion”…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…y import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin. A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husband, and asked him why he thought people had to be this way. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he replied. “Those who don’t see an order to the universe, and those…

The Same Toxic Christian Right Theology Supports Both the Online Bullying I Experienced and the Cruel Anti-Trans Policy in TX — And it’s Not Remotely Fringe

By Chrissy Stroop

…mmediate dehumanization occurring here is that I feature only as a prop, a cheap means to attack Du Mez through guilt by association, but it goes deeper than that. To Wolfe and his ilk, all that matters is that I’m transgender and vocally express my support for LGBTQ rights, including the rights of trans children to access age-appropriate medical care. They will never deign to mention that I have a Ph.D. in history and a long professional record o…

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

By Peter Laarman

…nt home town of Greenwich, CT, over the past four decades. This was always Republican territory, with investment bankers and white-shoe lawyers thick on the ground along the Gold Coast. The difference is that wealthy patricians of the Prescott Bush era actually cared about their neighbors; the old-time bankers invested in—and the CEOs ran—productive enterprises that created real jobs. In contrast, the Gordon Gecko types who dominate Greenwich GOP…

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

…ngoing need for journalists to take conspiratorial mindsets seriously when reporting on religion. That’s not a criticism of Jenkins—hardly any reporters engage this difficult terrain. Conspiracy thinking and faith aren’t necessarily identical, or even equivalent. But they come from the same spaces in our personalities hungry for meaning and purpose and belonging. Those spaces tend to be highly resistant to things like reason, argument, and evidenc…

On the 40th Anniversary of Hyde, A Theological Defense of Reproductive Justice

By Anita Little

…pews, you are not following the Jesus that I know. How does the denial of reproductive justice to low-income black women represent the two-fold oppression they often face not just from white politicians, but also from black male clergy? To answer that question, we first must acknowledge the history surrounding the bodies of women of color. Particularly, for black women, our bodies have never been our own. After we left enslavement, it became very…

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

By Annika Brockschmidt

…numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For years, Seehofer claimed falsely that there was no “structural problem” regard…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…questions that we had to answer from a technical perspective, in terms of preparing for this survey, was, ‘Who is a Jew?’” Pew eventually found that at least a million Americans identity as Jewish, but have no Jewish ancestry. As for those with Jewish ancestry, Smith asks, “if someone has a Jewish mother and grows up and converts to Christianity, is that person still Jewish, or not?” For survey purposes, Pew divided its respondents into a number o…