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Top Ten Religion & Science Stories of 2009

By Lauri Lebo

…ligion-meets-science stories from the Year of Darwin: 1. “Junk Science” in Texas Classrooms In April, fundamentalist Christian members of the Texas Board of Education inserted intelligent design code words into its science education requirements. The wording includes directing students to analyze and evaluate “sudden appearance” in the fossil record and analyze the “complexity of the cell.” The language prompted creationist and pro-intelligent des…

Alleged Fort Hood Shooter Is Muslim. So What?

By Sarah Posner

…that detail emerged, the internet was aflame with speculation — based on Hasan’s name, of course — that the shootings had something to do with Hasan’s religion. Of course that leads many to jump to conclusions: did religion cause him to pull the trigger? Is a terrorist in our midst? As John Nichols wrote in the Nation last night: No one knew on Thursday whether stress, fear, anger over mistreatment, mental illness or a warped understanding of his…

New Book Reveals How Faith is Like a Covert Operation for the Bush Family

By Frederick Clarkson

…with an array of CIA covert operators, Bay of Pigs veterans and right-wing Texas oil industry characters linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Baker shows that Bush was actually in Dallas on November 21, 1963, and was probably there on the day of the assassination as well. Baker draws no particular conclusions from the fact, except to document, describe, and underscore the great lengths he took to conceal it. Watergate: Baker asserts tha…

Gimme That Old Spice Religion

By Frederick Clarkson

…days on the staff of the Home School Legal Defense Association; he heads a Texas-based organization called Vision Forum, which produces and markets books and other materials for conservative Christian homeschoolers. But to describe Vision Forum as ‘conservative’ does not tell the half of it. Phillips is a follower of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement whose seminal figure is Calvinist theologian R.J. Rushdoony, who died in 2001. Rushdoony’s v…

Believe in Evolution?: Let’s Have a Show of Hands!

By Julie Ingersoll

…crazy.” This was apparently in response to a report that fellow candidate, Texas Governor Rick Perry, told a boy in New Hampshire that evolution is “a theory that’s out there. It’s got some gaps in it.” He continued to explain that “in Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools. Because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.” According to the Washington Post, Huntsman’s tweet was retweeted hundreds…

Can Romney Win by Embracing his Mormon Masculinity?

By Joanna Brooks

…hismo standoff between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, and that the bow-legged Texas governor would inevitably prevail. After all, as I’ve argued before, Mormon men do masculinity differently than their non-Mormon rivals. And last night, that difference (as well as as some clear gaps in Rick Perry’s preparation) worked to Romney’s favor. Perry came out of the gates strong, then got bogged down in sexually transmitted disease (his executive order to v…

Close Encounters With Roy Moore

By Sarah Posner

…mpeachment of Supreme Court justices over the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down Texas anti-sodomy laws. He decried Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down laws banning the sale of birth control, because the justices “made it up, “referring to privacy rights. (Ditto Roe v. Wade, of course.) The Supreme Court, he concluded, “does everything to undermine” the Constitution. Moore was particularly disgusted with President Obama’s…

Ted Cruz’s McCarthyism and the Christian Right

By Sarah Posner

…erful Jane Mayer recounts an Americans for Prosperity rally she covered in Texas two and half years ago, at which now-Texas Senator Ted Cruz “accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there” in the early 1990s. The revelation of these baseless, McCarthy-esque accusations sheds light on the origins of Cruz’s baseless, McCarthy-esque questioning of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel. (The bes…

Will Declining Numbers of White Evangelicals Change the Senate?

By Sarah Posner

…d look no further than Congress to recognize that there may be strength in numbers, but numbers alone do not automatically translate into strength.” And numbers alone do not automatically translate into weakness. The religious right spent decades building get-out-the-vote operations and candidate recruitment and training grounds. Those efforts do not vanish with demographic changes, particularly if evangelical turnout is outsized compared to other…

A Former Christian Coalition Activist Tells All

By Sarah Posner

…nce disbanded, the Maranatha Christian Church. When the couple returned to Texas twelve years later with their two children, they arrived during the heyday of the Christian Coalition takeover of the state Republican Party. White became executive director of the Capital City Christian Coalition in Austin, and the Christian Coalition’s lobbyist in the state capitol. “I was brainwashed,” she says. Now divorced for sixteen years, remarried and bearing…