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The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

By Douglas Harrison

…, and then I say, thinking of all the ruined gay lives, this really is the number that no man can number. It’s also interesting to me that “Writing It Out” is followed by the section “War on the Children.” Such an organization suggests that the latter was a reaction against the former—that as these voices emerge, there’s this really virulent reaction culturally against them. And also it’s so very political. As the church has become more right-win…

Catholic Church Bans Gay Film: This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…was most strongly taken up by the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), a conservative Islamist party that has a small number of seats in the National Assembly. Reuters’ Alisa Tang reported on Tuesday on the climate of fear that has been created: LGBT activists, facing a barrage of homophobia and hate speech by Indonesian authorities, are setting up hotlines and safehouses, while “unfriending” people on social media and deleting website directories tha…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding with the “ticking time bomb” scenario. Can you justify torture if you know the prisoner possesses information about a dirty bomb that’s about to be detonated, or a second 9/11-style attack? The prob…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…hristian Right mounted a major effort to redefine religious freedom. Conservative evangelical leaders working in close—and I think underappreciated—alliance with leaders of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have reconfigured the Christian Right to wage the culture wars of the 21st century. Religious freedom is central to their strategy. I would go so far as to say that no understanding of the Christian Right is complete or even accu…

Liberty University’s In-House Conversion ‘Therapist’ Retires, But Will the Christian School Cease This Discredited Practice?

By Lucas Wilson

…so friendly, and was a very paternal figure. And I really think he took advantage of that nurturing quality.” Coomer and Milton’s memories of Emerick are strikingly similar to my own. In my one-on-one meetings with Emerick, he always asked me if I had “slipped up” that week—that is, if I had acted on my sexual desires. “Slip ups” could include anything from looking lustfully at other men to looking at pornography to flirting to, well, anything Em…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…e for polygamy. There already seems to be a very small (and possibly conservative evangelical) non-Mormon Christian effort to promote polygamy as a religious practice, as well as an active UU polyamory movement. If the polyamory/polygamy cause does indeed spread among Christians in the United States, the Reformation can provide resources to advance the cause. Polygamy may well make for a coalition of strange bedfellows drawn from across the religi…

Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…oric and was once named by Time magazine as one of the nation’s “25 Most Influential Evangelicals.” Marco Rubio so conflates Catholicism and Evangelicalism that he toggles back and forth between attending a Catholic church and a Baptist mega-church. Chris Christie who? By contrast, Jeb Bush’s brand of go-to-church-in-polo-shirts, cozy-up-to-powerful-bishops (who then turn a blind eye as you preside over a record number of executions) and occasiona…

The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

By Bruce Ledewitz

…t only would it be inappropriate, it would not work. A judicial decision invalidating Proposition 8 would only be met by a judicial removal campaign or impeachment proceedings. Courts lack the power of coercion. The authority of any judicial branch rests on public acceptance of the legitimacy of its decisions. Once that sense of legitimacy is lost, it cannot easily be reconstituted, which is why, faced with the likelihood of public resistance to a…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…al is a ritualized event. It happens with some regularity. You go to a revival meeting and the point of a revival is stir up individuals so they have some sort of new encounter with God; be it to be born again or baptized in the Holy Spirit. An awakening is not a revival. An awakening is not an individual or ritualized event, but a larger cultural event where the whole of a society or group of people become changed, transformed, reoriented toward…

5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Overthink the New Pew Data’s Impact on Politics

By Sarah Posner

…ng Republicans and Democrats. 3. Keep in mind that, politically speaking, evangelicals, and in particular white evangelicals, have been highly politically organized for decades. As the sociologist Lydia Bean documents in her book, The Politics of Evangelical Identity, through churches and parachurch organizations, evangelicals’ political views are shaped by a “narrative of Christian nationalism,” a “24/7 narrative” that “liberals basically destroy…