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Liberty University’s In-House Conversion ‘Therapist’ Retires, But Will the Christian School Cease This Discredited Practice?

By Lucas Wilson

…, since almost all students who matriculate to Liberty are above the age of 18, such a protection would not have applied. In truth, those over the age of 18 are protected under consumer fraud laws. But since Emerick always framed his services as “pastoral counseling”—a broad umbrella term that does not require a professional therapy license—and since there was no direct monetary exchange between Emerick and his “thousands of sons,” such laws would…

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…rest of the Muslim world. The majority of Muslim Americans are Sunni, while 16% identify as Shi‘a, 14% say they are “just Muslim,” and 4% are members of smaller communities such as the Ahmadiyya movement and the Nation of Islam. The 2017 Pew poll also reveals that the more things have changed in Muslim America, the more they have stayed the same. Muslims faced a lot of suspicion and discrimination in 1967, just as they do in 2017. In 1967, the Nat…

Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

By Warren Throckmorton

…, E.M., & Pattison, M.L. (1980). “‘Ex-gays’: Religiously Mediated Change in Homosexuals.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 137, 1553-1562….

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…ding Martin Luther. This case and other developments around polygamy in the 16th and 17th centuries are chronicled by John Cairncross. What Lyndal Roper has said about experimenting with marriage in the Reformation holds true for our time too. We have been busy overhauling our marital system at least as thoroughly as happened in the Protestant Reformation so we must ready ourselves for a debate on polygamy, as they had to. And the Reformation deba…

How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

By Cody J. Sanders

…the U.S. have reached 205,172 with 4,540 deaths caused by the virus. These numbers change by the hour. (Italy’s death toll is currently over 13,000.) In nearly every way, these statistics subvert the potential for a Good Death as most of us would imagine it. But we’re not the first to experience such disruption. The sudden death of the Good Death Drew Gilpin Faust describes the Good Death in mid-19th century America as a part of respectable middle…

Breivik’s Religious Pluralist Vision: A COEXIST Bumper Sticker Without the Crescent

By Michael J. Altman

…urdered more than 300 million individuals,” going so far as to divide that number up: “3/4 Hindu/Buddhist, Animist/Pagan 1/4 Christian/Jewish/Zoroastrian.” So, while it’s true that he borrows a lot of imagery and language from the Christian crusades, such a list of world religions indicates that Breivik also thought in terms of modern religious diversity. It wasn’t merely Christendom versus Islam, it was a world of peaceful religions defending the…

Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect their active members. The problem is, membership isn’t alone in its decline—it’s joined by baptisms and weekly worship attendance. Whoops. If anything,…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…le for the exemption. This will, Catholics for Choice argues, increase the number of employees of Catholic organizations who would be deprived of contraception coverage, even if they aren’t Catholic themselves (or are Catholics who dissent from the church’s opposition to birth control). HHS notes in its rule that “the exemption should not exclude group health plans of religious entities that would qualify for the exemption but for the fact that,…

Bill Gates’ Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine Enflame ‘Mark of the Beast’ Worries in Some Christian Circles

By Christopher James Blythe

…t buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name… his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” (Revelation 13:16-18) In the early twentieth century, this prophecy became linked to American fears of a powerful federal government. A 1943 letter to the editor of the Pampa Daily News was representative of this growing resentment coupling conspiracy with apocalypticism: We should count it dishonorable for…

Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

By Peter Laarman

…radation” was first used to describe the condition of enslaved Africans, by 1810 the term was also being applied to Native Americans. And while a number of enlightened whites believed that the natives of this continent had nobler natures than white people, the problem (again) was that they had been rendered dependent and degraded via their corrupting interactions with lower-class Europeans. Absent an aggressive program of “civilizing” these people…