Religion Dispatches
Josh Duggar, the oldest son of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, stars of “reality” TV and the real life conservative movement, has resigned his position as executive director of FRC Action, the political action arm of the Family Research Council, after In Touch magazine reported that he sexually abused young girls, including, apparently, his sisters, as a teenager. In a statement to People magazine, Duggar, now 27, said: Twelve years ago, as a young…
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Over the last year or two, LGBTQ issues have erupted with increasing frequency at evangelical colleges and universities, including George Fox University where professor Michael Bevis recently was more-or-less forced to resign earlier this month after he refused to stay in his heterosexual marriage and “get therapy” after coming out as a gay man. A February incident at Wheaton College in Illinois where someone threw an apple at a student who dared…
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“Whenever the church gets in bed with politics, the church gets pregnant. And our offspring does not look like our Father in Heaven.” – J.D. Greear, Southern Baptist Convention President, June 15, 2021 Outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention J. D. Greear included this quip in his final presidential address yesterday at the convention’s Annual Meeting in Nashville, TN. The gathering has invited national scrutiny from Southern Bapti…
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In June 2015, I asserted here on RD that “we need to listen to the voices of those who have been harmed by the fundamentalist tendencies in evangelicalism,” and that “we need to center the voices of LGBTQ youth, such as transgender teen Leelah Alcorn who was driven to suicide by her evangelical upbringing.” Almost two years later, white evangelicals are demonstrably the demographic most singularly responsible for bringing us the disastrous presid…
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Today, America is still reeling from the news of the mass murder of eight people at massage parlors in Georgia. Many are rightly calling the shooting spree an act of white supremacist terrorism, as the victims targeted were Asian women. The moment I read that the man who confessed to the murders was the son of a youth pastor who told police he had a “sex addiction,” however, it struck me that we must not ignore the specifically evangelical Protes…
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If any game has more potential to offend than Cards Against Humanity, A Game for Good Christians just might be it. Inspired by the R-rated “party game for horrible people” in which players pair cards like “Hospice care,” “An endless stream of diarrhea,” or “A defective condom” with fill-in-the-blank statements like “I got 99 problems but ________ ain’t one,” A Game for Good Christians, released earlier this year, offers a scriptural twist: most o…
Read MoreRamadan means late-night football practices from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. in Dearborn, Michigan. Meanwhile, Whole Foods is defending itself after a Houston blogger posted an internal email that advised local stores not to promote their halal products during Ramadan. A collection of relics from Pope John Paul II, including a capsule of his blood, will tour Mexico this fall. Rev. Roy Bourgeois has been officially dismissed by his religious order, the Mary…
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While old-timers, like Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, are running about the nation’s capital trying to make some noise while the Senate Judiciary committee considers the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and a handful of pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates grapple with some of the so-called “common ground” raised by President Obama, several longtime anti-abortion groups are out recruiting and training young acti…
Read MoreMitt Romney’s delusional 2012 pollsters got nothing on apologists for last week’s Pew Poll that found no real “Francis effect” from the pope’s first year. According to Daniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to fin…
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Evangelical conference takes on torture On the same weekend that a little over two-thousand Christian Right leaders and supporters trooped to the nation’s capital for the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voter Summit, a group of concerned Christian leaders met in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss another pressing issue related to values; the use of torture. While the Washington gathering saluted the nomination of Sarah Palin, extolled the virtu…
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