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Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

…ogressive Satanic groups. These kinds of fractures are extremely common in new religious movements, but they are also painful for those involved. In covering this split, I have tried to honor the stories of all my interview subjects, but some may feel I wasn’t fair to one side or another. What alternative title would you give the book? The Devil and the First Amendment How do you feel about the cover? I like it a lot. There was a lot of anxiety ab…

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Whistleblower Alleges $100B Hoarding Scandal by LDS Church; But There’s An Easy Fix

…t the church from hoarding this wealth (though other provisions of the tax code do). Transparency would simply require the church to disclose the details of their cache. Sunlight does not burden religious liberty, it cures fraud and abuse. Asking for transparency from every nonprofit is perfectly legal, but Congress has not acted. In an era of congressional gridlock and where civil rights laws demanding equality are maligned as anti-religious libe…

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Catholic Anti-Nuke Activists Looking at 20 Years in Prison a True Test for Religious Freedom

…ons, such as a Sikh who successfully sued the Army in 2015 over a grooming code that would have required him to shave his beard and remove his turban. Justice, not to mention old wisdom about geese and ganders, demands that our judicial system should treat like cases alike. Either sincere religious conviction should be a defense, or it shouldn’t. There should be a healthy debate about the place and extent of religious exemption in contemporary, pl…

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Jerry Falwell Jr. Is Corrupt, but Liberty U’s Problems Go Far Deeper

…ntracts to family friends; and how he ordered his staff to violate IRS tax code. Falwell’s been able to get away with such behavior partly because he doesn’t fear his board of trustees, which is essentially just a collection of close friends of the family. As noted above, Mark DeMoss, the one trustee who did speak up in disagreement of Falwell’s endorsement of Trump, was immediately removed from the board—a testament to Falwell’s Trumpian fragilit…

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Is God a Winning Strategy for Democrats?

…Christians are better than Christianity. They employ their personal moral code, choosing the moral morsels from the Bible that square with their contemporary sensibility. The Bible does not portray Jesus as a liberal powerhouse. Or at least, not solely as the man liberal Christians claim. We need look no further than hell to prove this point. Americans possess an unparalled degree of religious liberty, but Jesus promises eternal torture if they e…

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Democratic Hopeful Pete Buttigieg Makes Faith 101 Misstep

…dominant tradition in modern Judaism. Nor do many Christians get that the New Testament sees Pharisees through a partisan lens, as it were. They were rivals to the nascent Jesus movement, and often their rhetorical targets. Second and more positively, Buttigieg speaks of the need to represent all comers, religious or not. Good on him for that. Much of the discussion around faith and politics brackets non-believers and the religiously unaffiliated…

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American Missionary Could Face Genocide Charges, But Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Have a Bigger Problem

…ident comes on the heels of growing threats to indigenous sovereignty by a new right-wing administration in Brazil. President Jair Bolsonaro assumed office in January after running a campaign largely hostile to indigenous rights. Bolsonaro supports assimilation of indigenous communities and opening their resource-rich reservations in the Amazon to commercial interests, including large-scale farming, logging, and mining. Although the Brazilian cons…

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Religious Freedom Battle Is Far From Over: Here’s What to Look for in 2019

…, when a federal judge in Wisconsin found the relevant portions of the tax code to be unconstitutional, but the three judges on the appellate panel did not tip their hand, although they showed few outward signs that they agreed. The regulation at issue is more than sixty years old, enacted in the 1950s to ensure that ministers at churches who could not afford to provide them with housing could nevertheless benefit from the same tax breaks as minis…

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Why White Women Are Leading Defenders of Kavanaugh

…e been buttressed by female voices. For the past 24 hours, the major cable news networks have pumped up air time of pro-Kavanaugh ads produced by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network (which is, coincidentally enough, run by Carrie Severino, a form clerk for Clarence Thomas). The most prominent ad features a respectable white woman waxing about how upstanding and morally unimpeachable Kavanaugh is. The not so subtle implication is that Kavanaug…

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Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

…square will never—and I mean, never—be enough. Not while they continue to promote leaders, policies, and theories that support white supremacy in the nation and encourage the idea that the body of Christ is segregated by race and class. To people of color who have spent centuries being shunned or diminished by white evangelicals, anything less than acknowledgment, and changed behavior, specifically from Bible-toting white men who’ve manipulated s…

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