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But ‘Natural’ is Better, No? ‘How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science’

By Andrew Aghapour

…cross religion, science, and society. I reached out to Levinovitz over the phone to discuss organic food, birth control, alternative medicine, and the role of naturalness in explaining COVID-19. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. When did the concept of “natural” first grab your attention? When I was working on food I noticed that people often use “nature” and “natural” as their justification for whatever it was that they happe…

Even Tougher Questions to Ask Mormon Presidential Candidates

By Joanna Brooks

…down with the two Mormon candidates in the 2012 race, this is what I’d ask: 1. In 2008, LDS Church leaders solicited $25,000 donations from wealthy Church members for California’s “Yes on 8” anti-marriage-equality campaign. High-ranking Church leaders even scheduled phone calls with individual members to make the ask in person. Did Church leaders solicit an individual contribution from you to the Yes on 8 campaign or any other anti-marriage-equal…

Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

By Wendy Norris

…the Earth.” The cracker barrel-styled reading of Acts—and of I Corinthians 13 at the prayer meeting the week before where 150 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a c…

With Release of Pentagon Report, UFO Narrative Belief System is Suddenly Supported by Military Witness Testimonies

By Diana Pasulka

…oogle uses of unreliable information, shown as the result of a search on a phone, reads, “ufo filmed traveling 106 mph.” This new algorithm will allow regulation of user generated witness testimonies. We’ve had witness testimonies for a long time. Is it really suddenly okay to talk about UAPs? Closer examination of this question reveals that it is only okay to talk about certain sightings—those ensconced within a military framework, and new algori…

Gay Marriage: Religious Right Cranks Up the Fear

By Bill Berkowitz

…r Marriage Sunday’ on September 21 and a ‘family voting weekend’ on October 18 and 19, when people will be encourage to vote by absentee ballot.” According to the report, Ron Luce from Teen Mania Ministries and others “talked about plans to organize 300,000 youth and their families for an October 1 simulcast, and using them to reach 2.4 million. A representative of the Church Communication Network, a satellite network that has downlink equipment i…

“Symbolic” Personhood Bill Could Kill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…o-life, conservative state. Senator Crain’s office did not return repeated phone calls, but according to The Daily Beast, he “said the bill is simply a statement that Oklahoma is ‘pro-life.’” Senate Pro Tem Brian Bingman said much the same thing, according to Reuters, offering that “Oklahoma is a conservative pro-life state—we are proud to stand up for what we know is right.” Well, yes, it feels very good to be proud of things, doesn’t it? Might I…

Lila Rose Targets Planned Parenthood with Lies

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…posed.’ How is that different from lying? If one day she tells people she’s 15 and pregnant by a 23-year-old, and another day she tells people she’s 13 and pregnant by a 31-year-old, how is that not lying?” (Arguably, Rose’s most creative defender in that thread was JLS, who speculated that “perhaps Lila Rose was speaking in parables.”) It happened here, a year earlier, at Rebelution—which is evangelical in flavor, affiliated with the Household of…

It’s Marketin’ Time!

By Luis Amate Perez

…Jean Claude Van Damme. Back in November of 2009, I spoke with Frank on the phone. He lives in Texas and managed to squeeze my call into a 15-minute window, between his training and a “meeting,” which might have been for either Jesus Didn’t Tap, his chain of Rising Sun Karate schools, or one of the other projects he has in the pipeline. As he told it, one day Frank and a partner “did statistics on Christian numbers” and decided that it was a huge m…

The Brutality of the American Eden

By Paul Harvey

…Revolutionary era, evangelical Christianity was at a relative low point. In 1780, few could have predicted the explosion of democratic Christianity that would so deeply imprint American culture by the 1830s, replacing Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a secular rationalist Republic with something more akin to a Methodist millennium. A more critical examination might have also told the story, from the underside of that millennium, that while American ide…

“Giving Godhead”: A Bloody Vision of Religion’s Deepest Influence

By Spencer Dew

…armed against. War in the name of faith is a recurring theme, as with cell-phone videos of beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dichotomy is spread wide, with ISIS on one end and the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it i…