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

By Chrissy Stroop

Since 2016, I have been arguing here at RD that former president Donald Trump’s politics, and his appeal to White evangelical Christians, are best explained through the lens of authoritarianism. Pundits initially scratched their heads for entirely too long over how evangelicals could purport to follow Jesus and support Trump. The answer was always easy; he promised to do, and then did, what they wanted, which any disaffiliated former Christian sc…

Attacks on Tim Walz’s Lutheran Denomination are Undermined by Reality — I Mean, Is ELCA Even Exciting Enough for Controversy?

By Daniel Schultz

…tor-in-Chief of The Federalist, a right-wing publication with a history of promoting false information about the 2020 election, Covid-19, and climate change, showed no such restraint, proclaiming on Twitter: As a confessional Lutheran, I’m getting a lot of questions about Tim Walz possibly being Lutheran. FWIW, Walz is ELCA, an extremely left-wing sub-denomination. You may be familiar with the ELCA due to some of their congregations using the “spa…

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

By Daniel Schultz

Here at Religion Dispatches, we have an informal policy that “religion is as religion does.” Which is to say, we don’t try to adjudicate who is, for example, a “real Christian” and who’s not. If you label your beliefs and practices as “Christian,” and those beliefs are shared by a reasonable number of people, that’s the label we use. It’s not a perfect rule, but then heuristics are only ever meant to work well enough. I was reminded of this rule…

Rising Influence of New Apostolic Reformation Teachings is Ominous Sign For the US — Especially For LGBTQ Students

By Jonathon Sawyer

…The NAR-influenced Truth & Liberty Coalition, for example, is allied with Southern Baptist minister Rick Scarborough and his nonprofit Recover America, which is engaged with conservative activism on school boards in Texas. Recover America lists Houston’s Second Baptist Church as one of its partners in training “Biblical Pastors” and “their people” to confront “the darkness of the culture.” It’s through these amorphous alliances between today’s “m…

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

By Daniel Schultz

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…

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

By Annika Brockschmidt

During a 1977 series of interviews (for which he was paid handsomely), Richard Nixon, responding to journalist David Frost’s question about Watergate, uttered these fateful words: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” At the time, almost everyone in the legal profession, from lawyers to judges, firmly rejected the premise that the president was above the law. In fact, it was 50 years ago this month—July of 1974—that the…

Trump’s Fervent Christian Zionists Poised to Lead the Military — And US-Israel Relations

By Ben Lorber

With Trump’s second presidency, Christian Zionism may be returning to the White House stronger than ever before. His recent nomination of Mike Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense mean that militant, hardline Christian Zionists stand to be in control of the Pentagon and US military—and, of course, at the helm of the US-Israel relationship. After over a year of Democrat-backed Israeli genocide and belligeren…

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

By The Editors

…e July 4 tendency to be “jingoistically repellent beyond belief”). Laarman suggests that we “reinvent American civil religion in a way that fully acknowledges… the Founders’ ‘rejection of a role in the political body’ for African Americans—not to mention a wide range of other foul crimes against people of color, including the Europeans’ genocidal treatment of the First Nations.” Truth-telling without despair. Read the whole thing here….

Rising Christian Right Movement, New Apostolic Reformation, Emerged as a Mid-20th Century Splinter of White Supremacy

By Keri Ladner

…rally diverse coalition that promotes Christian Zionism as fervently as it promotes Christian nationalism in the US. And while the NAR’s philosemitism can itself be deeply problematic, it certainly isn’t as threatening as White supremacy’s conspiracy-laden antisemitism. However, as recently as the mid-twentieth century, the movements actually were the same. William Branham (1909-1965) was a revivalist and faith healer who served as a prominent fig…

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

By Robert P. Jones

Last week’s historic verdict is worth rehearsing. On May 30, Donald J. Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a crime. Twelve ordinary citizens unanimously found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to conceal hush money he paid to a porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair—all driven by a desire to protect his 2016 presidential campaign. Following the verdict, Speaker of the Hous…