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Trump the Totem: Like Other Fascist Leaders, Trump has Turned from Man to Symbol — And That’s the Danger

…his sex scandals, he doesn’t confuse male and female.” Also, see “From Fox News to the Far(ther) Right — Calls for Violence and Retribution Follow Trump Verdict“] Sociologists have used the term “totem” to describe the way symbols come to have a powerful unifying effect among groups. This week, it struck me that this passage in Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life vividly captures the internal dynamics of the circus-like Trump e…

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Editor’s Picks: Remembering the Broken Promises — and the Possibilities — on Independence Day

Independence Day doesn’t tend to cause as much dissonance as Thanksgiving, as much confusion as Juneteenth, and isn’t as widely reviled as Columbus Day (aka Indigenous People’s Day). Yet, while it “is not America’s birthday,” as Peter Laarman argued nearly a decade ago, Independence Day is every bit as apt as the holidays above to initiate—for better and certainly for worse—a discussion about what the American project actually is, what it was mea…

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The Supreme Court Cleared the Way for the ‘President-King’—The Right’s Prize for 50 Years of Planning

…raditional conservative distrust of concentrated government power. But the new generation of conservative activists, who had no firsthand memory of those fights, began to associate unchecked presidential authority with their desire for lower taxes, a more aggressive stance against Communism, and domestic policies that advanced traditional social values. To them, Congress was the bastion of liberal Democrats and liberal values, and the executive br…

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The ‘Jezebel Spirit’ Isn’t (Just) Bible-Based Misogyny, it’s a Literal Demon — So What Happens When They ‘Stop Tolerating’ It?

…ce that Jezebel represents. But for those who agree theologically with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, the truth is far more complicated and threatening. The NAR is a grouping of loosely-affiliated charismatic churches and religious leaders—often termed “prophets” or “apostles.” As Frederick Clarkson writes, it is “the largest religious movement in recent American history, [and] has unabashed, undemocratic, and well documented politi…

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Already Beatified by the Right for Surviving an Assassination Attempt, Must We All Pray for Donald Trump?

I had some finessing to do on Sunday. I filled in for a colleague the morning after the attempt on former president Donald Trump’s life, you see. Just about everyone in the congregation had heard about it by that point, and they expected me to say something about it. But what? My denomination may have a progressive reputation but that’s not always the case, and in our neck of the woods it can be difficult to parse just how not-the-case a given co…

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Election Reporters: Here’s Why Simply Descriptors Like ‘Christians’ Can Have Enormous Consequences

…or horseshoes and hand grenades. Thus we had paragraphs like this from Fox News: Trump emphasized the importance of Christian voters in the upcoming election, urging the crowd to take to the polls for early voting in their states and to show up on Election Day. “Christians have to vote, you know. I don’t want to scold you but you know that Christians do not vote proportionately they don’t vote like they should. They not big voters,” Trump said. “I…

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

…rmation: A version of this thesis appeared recently in a highly-circulated New York Times article, which made the bold claim that ‘Trump is connecting with a different type of evangelical voter’ beyond ‘the churchgoing, conservative activists who once dominated the G.O.P.’ Despite its zombie-like resurrections since Trump’s rise to power, the assertion that unchurched White evangelicals are the most supportive of Trump is not supported by the prep…

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Ted Haggard’s New Church: Gay-Friendly?

…ly “welcomed” us. I hope that no gay or lesbian person makes the mistake of believing that Haggard has changed and is really “welcoming” them to his new church. Meet the new charlatan, just the same as the old charlatan….

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In a New Manifesto Framing ‘Wokeness’ as Religion John McWhorter Sounds Like Moses Condemning Israel for Worshipping Golden Calf of Black Power

…e of analysis that I find more troubling. McWhorter deems wokeness to be a new religion. Had he simply declared wokeness a new ideology or simply stayed with his third-wave antiracism construct we could have simply debated the merits of his argument. Yet his declaration of wokeness as religion serves not as honest assessment of religious thinking in the form of social justice activism. Instead, religion is invoked as a ready-made punching bag for…

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RDNews: Oct 20, 2008

…ion claims that it promotes “Constitutionalist Judicial Nominees,” told OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, that the “Ten Commandments would be removed all over the place. ‘Under God’ would be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. The death penalty would be banned. There’d probably be constitutional rights to all sorts of new things like human cloning and physician-assisted suicide. Racial preferen…

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