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GOP Lawmaker Botches Bible to Punish Poor

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

Tennessee Republican Rep. Stephen Fincher provides an excellent case study on why context should never be disregarded when quoting from the Bible. In recent moves by Congress to slash $4.1 billion or more from food stamps (otherwise known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) over the next 10 years, Fincher quoted from 2 Thessalonians 3:10: For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work s…

A Nobel Prize for LGBT Civil Rights?

By Jay Michaelson

…s time of 14-year-old Philip Parker, a victim of bullying in his school in Tennessee. In both cases the religious and political sources of hateful rhetoric have deplored, condemned, and above all distanced themselves from these horrible and unexpected tragedies. Which is, in industry parlance, bullshit. Preachers preach because they hope people will take their words seriously, including words like “unnatural” and “abomination” (both mistranslation…

White Supremacy and Orthodox Christianity: A Dangerous Connection Rears Its Head in Charlottesville

By Katherine Kelaidis

…thodoxy. While the Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates may be relatively few in number, there is increasing evidence that Orthodoxy has become an integral part of the ideological and recruitment apparatus within some segments of the white supremacist movement. Importantly, these ideas and the converts to them are being tolerated, and frequently exploited, by much more powerful voices. This growing attachment to Eastern Orthodox Christianity among a seg…

The Revolujah! Will Be Performed: Reverend Billy’s Reality Joke

By Nathan Schneider

…Then he took me over to Lenny Bruce and to Sidney’s cousin Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams. Sidney stressed again and again that Lenny and Tom were secular artists whose personal spiritual lives were highly developed, while their artistic strategies regarded Americans—even the secular ones—as a people who created the meaning of their lives from the morality tales of the Bible. Sidney explained how The Fugitive Kind was a Jesus story, for insta…

Episcopal Church Removes Bishop Who Split Following LGBT Inclusion Vote

By Elizabeth Drescher

…de, “continues to be a constituent part of The Episcopal Church, even if a number of its leaders have departed.” Steps have been taken to reorganize the Diocese within the Episcopal Church under new leadership, but if history serves, it is likely that wrangling over church property, which Lawrence had moved to separate from the Diocese proper in order to block claims to real estate and other property, will soon follow. The Church continues to reso…

Freedom of Religion Means Freedom for All

By Lauri Lebo

…hing about this because it seemed, well, too obvious. But for a depressing number of people in this country, including folks who really should know better, apparently it isn’t. So here goes: If you don’t support religious freedom for everyone, you don’t support it. Yes. As I said, it’s obvious. Opposing religious freedom for one, takes it away from all of us. Yet, every time somebody lately protests the building of a new mosque—either in New York…

What Muslim Ban? A Religious Liberty Hearing in the Trump Era

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…quately screening out Muslims that “hate Jews,” Representative Steve Cohen—Tennessee’s first Jewish congressperson—called Islamophobia the “latest form of dog-whistle politics” and noted that he himself had received an increased number of “jabs” for his faith in recent months. Thus Trump’s EO on immigration has shed a clear spotlight on what many advocates and legislators mean when they use the phrase “religious freedom”—and what they don’t. Furth…

“Islam Is Not a Religion”

By Julie Ingersoll

…Murfreesboro, TN, in a suit filed to stop the building of a mosque there. Tennessee Lt. Governor and current gubernatorial candidate, Ron Ramsey took a similar position last spring. Without a doubt, these two instances represent disingenuous attempts to gain an edge in a political dispute. But the ambiguity in what counts as a religion creates a space for such rhetoric as well as for some profound miscommunication in contemporary debates about re…

Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” Has Replaced it)

By Eric C. Miller

…medical examination.’ During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the number of Christian schools opened by conservative evangelical Christians skyrocketed. By the early 1980s, evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell were claiming that evangelicals opened three new Christian schools every day, ostensibly because public schools had become anti-Christian. Yet this surge in Christian school growth coincided with public school desegregation. The…

A Church Group, a Lawsuit, and a Culture of Abuse

By T.F. Charlton

…Larry Tomczak—today a pastor at Bethel World Outreach Church in Brentwood, Tennessee—co-founded the Gaithersburg, Maryland church that would become Covenant Life in 1977. It was the first in what would become a network of 91 churches across 25 states and 17 countries. And it would launch the careers of several conservative Christian activists, including Lou Engle, whose ministry The Call has played a significant role in exporting American religiou…