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Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…residential candidates remain prominent and the movement has increased its numbers in the Congress and in state governments and functions as a major and sometimes the dominant faction in the Republican Party in many states. The Christian Right remains one of the most powerful movements in American history. I should add that the implications of these things are broader than may meet the eye. Donald Trump’s calls for restricting Muslims from traveli…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…l in 2014, month, is now available in English. The documentary features American anti-gay activist Scott Lively warning that in America most people oppose homosexuality but are too afraid of the powerful gay lobby to speak about it. Lively eventually appears on camera to rail against the LGBT-friendly “Queen James Bible,” which he calls “an abomination before God.” “There is no sacred ground for the homosexuals,” Lively says. “There is nothing tha…

How a Powerful ‘Ex-Gay’ Pastor is Chasing the Latino Vote

By Katherine Stewart

…cannot, that some of the fastest-growing varieties of evangelicalism in America are in the charismatic and Pentecostal vein, and these are explicitly multiracial movements. A number of the more farsighted leaders are therefore making a conscious effort to include and empower nonwhite individuals and groups. At the very least, they are doing what they can to collect their votes. Jim Domen is one such leader. A California pastor and the founder of a…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…researchers share the unsurprising finding that “young adults engage in a number of religious practices less often than do older Americans.” What they may mean to say is traditional religious practices: weekly attendance at religious services, weekly scripture reading, daily prayer, and weekly meditation. (My guess is as good as yours on the greater expected frequency of prayer in the survey.) The Pew survey design is problematic—and this is wher…

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…

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…if one wants to find water one should dig a single deep well instead of a number of shallow ones. So it embarrasses me somewhat to admit that although my language is Christian, my stories are Christian, my Scriptures are Christian and my baptism is Christian, in truth I live in the hinterlands of Christianity, just a short distance away from Buddhism’s border. I’m a Christian all right, but I can see Buddhaland from my house. It is my proximity t…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…discuss the possibility of forming a new Lutheran church body in North America. Those discussions resulted in the announcement of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), which will include disaffected “confessional” Lutherans from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Lutheran CORE will remain as a network for dissenting Lutherans not wishing to leave their current denominations. Lutheranism is at Heart a Reforming Tradition What are the issu…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…scientific evidence for these things, there are thousands of years of historical accounts that suggest otherwise. Science is great. I love science. But science only gives us a layer of truth. There are other methods out there besides the scientific method that can tell us a lot about the world we live in. There is the historical method, the philosophical method, the theological method, the linguistic method. All of these methods give us a way of l…

The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…aying that mainline Protestantism is in an extended period of at least numerical, if not spiritual, decline, and many commentators have taken the occasion of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church—still an important symbol of normative American religiosity—to mark the beginning of the End Times for liberal Christianity and perhaps religion in general. Others have strained mightily to see glimmers of hope even in the confusion and controver…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…e automatic types, he could have only carried so many bullets with him. Americans knew how to watch the number of reported casualties go up, but we lost our collective minds when we watched the number of confirmed active shooters in Paris go up. The images coming out of Paris in the immediate term were of a city devoured by chaos and fear rather than the stillness of carnage, more terrifying for their uncertainty. There was a brief lull in the dig…