Religion Dispatches
…After all, Timothy McVeigh did not plan to be caught. Only a series of coincidences led to his capture. But why would terrorists go to the trouble (for them) and the awful experience (for us) to commit a horrendous act of terrorism and not take credit for it? Wouldn’t they want everyone to know what cause was being promoted? Not necessarily. Anonymous terrorism is actually fairly common. In my own studies of terrorism related to religion, I have…
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…ly clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect their active members. The problem is, membership isn’t alone in its decline—it’s joined by baptisms and weekly worship attendance. Whoops. If anything, the analysis quoted above minimizes the problem. To understand why, you need to know something about geography. In short, they call it the Southern Baptist Convention for a reason. The church…
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…uire businesses serving the public to provide services without regard to a number of protected characteristics—including, in Washington and Colorado, an LGBT identity. (Washington updated its statewide non-discrimination law to include sexual orientation and gender identity in 2006, and Colorado followed suit in 2008.) Those laws, duly enacted by state legislatures, are what Masterpiece Cakeshop and Arlene’s Flowers are really looking to undercut…
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…as Boston clergy leader John Eliot told his fellow Congregationalist eminence Jeremy Belknap, the problem with emancipation was that slavery assaulted and undermined an individual’s morals and outlook: slavery “degraded” its victims. In 1795 Belknap was invited by St. George Tucker, a Virginia slaveholder who anathematized slavery, to share his wise counsel on what could be done for the South’s former slaves upon their emancipation. Belknap in tu…
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…the prophecy of the mark of the beast drew on anxieties over global governance, surveillance, and technology. In the early 1980s, Mary Stewart Relfe’s books, When Your Money Fails: The “666 System” is Here (1981) and The New Money System 666 (1982), popularized the idea that the Uniform Product Codes (i.e. UPCs or barcodes) were the mark of the beast and would one day be tattooed on human bodies. A trend of ironic barcode tattoos popular in the ea…
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…usively composed of ethnic Greeks. Focused on their own ethnic political concerns, including the position of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in the modern Turkish state and the preservation of the Greek language in America, the GOA has remained a relatively inhospitable environment for converts, a feature not terribly great for Christian evangelism but which probably offers a something of a firewall in the current climate. This sugge…
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…acting the number of people Strongly Opposed to same-sex marriage from the number Strongly In Favor. Not surprisingly, since the Unitarian-Universalists only had 6 percent opposed, their position on the chart hardly budged at all. Other groups traveled a little more. Mainline Baptists, for example, strongly disapprove just a little more than they strongly approve. Evangelical Baptists, on the other hand, really, really dislike same-sex marriage, a…
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…icants for these jobs. Second, who pays for this kind of busy work? This nuncio is reported to have had a “stately residence and access to a beach house.” I suppose it gets a little lonely rattling around the mansion, and God knows what went on in the beach house. But mostly this is one of those Catholic matters where following the money is the soundest approach. Mansions and beach houses are not free, so obviously Catholic money is keeping his su…
Read More…s.” The report called Christian Identity “the most unifying theology for a number of these diverse groups and one widely adhered to by white supremacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism and an ideology that condones violence against non-Aryans.” If I were to do some hair-trigger analysis here, I might think Tony Perkins was defending neo-Nazis, Aryan Nation, and the Klan. Maybe Perkins should have…
Read More…lieve that nefarious outside forces murdered everyone than to accept the concrete evidence that insiders were responsible for what happened. Hateful enemies rather than loving parents perpetrated the atrocity. Forty years later, the deaths in Jonestown seem neither meaningful nor arbitrary. They are evil insofar as fundamentally decent human beings inflicted great horror and suffering on other human beings, and on themselves. Aristotle’s definitio…
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