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What’s Wrong with the Controversial Businessweek “Mormon Money” Cover?

…hostile mainstream and by necessity engendered by their western isolation. Today, that drive is motivated—as I’ve heard discussed among leading figures in Mormon Studies this week and as was hinted at in the Church’s own statement and a Deseret News editorial today—by the need to create an endowment capable of sustaining the global physical infrastructure of Mormonism (temples, churches, universities) even as the bulk of the Church’s population sh…

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The Bleeding Heart of Muslim Europe

…Take Ataturk, father of an ostensibly Central Asian nation; he was born in today’s Macedonia, his features strikingly and suspiciously Slavic—blond hair and blue eyes. The 1990s war awakened many of these connections, and as Turkey in many respects challenges Ataturk’s legacy (especially his late 19th-century romantic European nationalism), the older truths of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage gain visibility. Not to resurrect empire, but to rediscover th…

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In Marriage Decision, An Ode to Love and Four Provocations

…faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.” It’s not surprising, then, that the American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp said in a statement this afternoon,”Today’s opinion creates the Church of the Supreme Court, with President Obama serving as its High Priest.” That’s undoubtedly only the beginning of the overheated rhetoric to come. The majority opinion, though, gamed out all these arguments. “Man…

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Come Out From Among Them

…in America has improved considerably since Tharpe’s and Cleveland’s time, today the resistance within evangelical popular culture toward non-heterosexuals may be, if anything, intensifying in far more overt and punishing ways than in times past. While Cleveland dominated gospel music for two generations despite the open secret of his homosexuality, the only performers today who have been as widely known to be gay, while also maintaining a career…

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Obama and the Unbelievers: The Future of Secularism

…e people are nonbelievers. But most of them probably are. According to USA Today, this group—the unaffiliated—represent one of the “fastest-growing segments of the population.” Their percentage of the electorate has already grown from 9% in 2000 to 12% this year. It may even be that the category of unaffiliated underestimates the voting power of nonbelievers. The same Pew Forum study also reported on another question in national exit polling—how o…

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

…the Bible). This approach to race is known as two-seed theory, and it was promoted by none other than William Branham, the Latter Rain leader. In fact, Branham was ordained into ministry by Roy Davis, the National Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Today’s NAR leaders seem untroubled by Branham’s associations with White supremacism and laud him as an early prophet of their movement. One former elder at Bethel Church, a NAR powerhouse in Redding…

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Religion and Science: Toward a Postmodern Truce

…(second) generation attitude toward science and religion. The Battle Lines Today So much for intergenerational histories in the abstract; the juicy stuff always lies in the details. When we survey the opposing armies, what do we see? The forces of science: Those who start from the standpoint of science fall into three main groups: the New Atheists, who argue that the mere existence of religion is a threat to science and weakens it; the “privately…

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‘Religious Liberty’ and the Origins of the Evangelical Persecution Complex

…ed of Hargis: “any comment short of adulation is considered a smear . . .” Today’s conservative evangelicals see any straying from what they consider God’s plan for America as a kind of national apostasy—the liberty of Bible believers was and is under threat. In this fear they bear the imprint of Hargis and his contemporaries. In January of 1963, for example, the Christian Crusade organized an anti-Communist rally in Boston. With vocal opposition…

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International “Religious Freedom” Agenda Will Only Embolden ISIS

…vocacy is considerably more complex than is suggested by such accounts. To promote religious rights is to promote a particular mode of governing social diversity that implicates religion in complex and variable ways, depending on the context. Legal and political advocacy for religious freedom tends to mask other contributors to social tension and conflict, amplify and entrench the religious divisions it seeks to manage, and force political authori…

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TED-Evangelism Harkens Back to a Forgotten 19th-Century Tradition

…but what we have here, mostly, is a particular aesthetic (“The TED talk is today a sentimental form,” Nathan Heller writes in The New Yorker). Wright describes this aesthetic in frankly spiritual terms. TED talks, he told me, are in keeping with “a kind of civic religion of aspiration and self-reliance and communal progress.” When I brought up this hope-and-progress energy with Vanderbilt historian Paul Stob, a scholar of intellectual culture, he…

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