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“One of Us”: Rick Santorum and the Politics of (Very Big) Family

By Kathryn Joyce

…claimed, “We win if we just keep having children, ’cause we’re going to outnumber them!”—a staple argument of the Quiverfull movement. Weeks earlier, Santorum had transformed this rhetoric into policy proposal at a South Carolina Fuddruckers appearance with the Duggars, where he argued that low birth rates and a declining American population (also longstanding concerns among the Quiverfull movement) should be fought by tripling the child tax deduc…

Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

Why We Can’t Wait for a Majority to Grant Marriage Equality

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…” The auditorium erupted in applause and the man backed away from the microphone. My point had been made, and continues to be made in new polling data from the Pew Research Center on interracial marriage. The good news is that nearly two-thirds of those polled say it would be fine “if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group.” But, that’s a fairly recent thing. In 1986, only a third of the public…

Can Art Save Us From Fundamentalism?

By Philip S. Francis

…, is housed at the self-described “fundamentalist” Christian university in Greenville, South Carolina. It has the largest faculty of any of the university’s schools, and it is famed for its world-class Shakespeare productions, operas, museums and galleries. For many Bob Jones students and alumni, the arts go hand in hand with their faith, even if certain aesthetic experiences challenge them to revise aspects of their religious heritage. As one dev…

Accept Gays? Only If They Know Their Place

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…accepting lgbt folk as equal? When Elke Kennedy’s son Sean was killed on a Greenville, South Carolina street two years ago by a man who called him a “faggot” before hitting him in the face so hard it separated his brain stem from his brain, the one place she could not go for comfort was the church. In Crisis, a new book that features forty stories, including Elke’s, about the pain and trauma suffered by gay and lesbian people and their families, E…

Beyond ‘Thoughts and Prayers’: How the Christian Right’s Politics of Providentialism Keeps America from Addressing Gun Violence

By Chrissy Stroop

…here is a tract called “Killer Kids” produced by Liberty Baptist Church of Greenville, Michigan. A copy happened to be placed on my car windshield some years back when I was living in Tampa, Florida. The tract asserts, “Killer kids are the result of God being removed from education,” and objects to the teaching of evolution, claiming that, “If you teach children that they come from animals, then do not be surprised when they begin to act like them…

Bishop John Shelby Spong Declares Victory: Is it Premature?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…at judge that interracial marriage was wrong. Over the years though, those numbers began to move in the other direction until in 1991, only 41 percent would agree that interracial marriage is wrong. What changed in those years was the conversation. Biblical justifications for keeping people from marrying outside of their race began to wane as more and more interracial couples married and the sun still rose in the East and set in the West. Life wen…

Will Hate Crime Laws Redeem Us All?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ion of “deviance.” A dear friend of mine lost her son several years ago in Greenville, South Carolina. He was hit so hard by his assailant that his brain stem separated from his brain. He died in the hospital hours later. The last thing he heard was his attacker calling him “faggot.” He was only 20-years-old. His attacker spent only one year in jail and is currently out of jail and serving three years of probation. The passage this past week of a…