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

By Lucas Wilson

…any mention of conversion therapy anywhere on Liberty’s website. As is common with most practitioners of conversion therapy today, despite their belief that sexual orientations and/or gender expressions can be changed, they don’t publicly advertise their ineffective and deeply damaging “therapy.” Another survivor of Emerick’s conversion therapy, a 2017 graduate who asked to remain anonymous, explained why it is that Liberty is not explicit about…

Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…a and Fernando Urias Amparo in spite of an order by Mexico’s Supreme Court more than six months ago that the men could marry. The couple had previously been denied based on claims of incomplete paperwork. This time, the excuse was that a premarital counselor the couple had been required to see refused to certify their participation complained that that the men “suffer from madness.” The counselor is the head of an anti-equality organization, the C…

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…esistance to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was the Nation of Islam’s most famous member, boxer Muhammad Ali. In 1967, Ali refused induction in the U.S. armed forces to protest the war, and as a result, was forced to give up his heavyweight boxing crown. In 2017, even though no Muslim American critic of U.S. foreign policy has the international stature of Muhammad Ali, the very presence of Muslims in the United States is seen by many to be a…

Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

By Warren Throckmorton

…dings with the 11 subjects (from page 1555, see below). Bussee was subject number two and Cooper was number one. Both Bussee and Cooper were rated as Kinsey 6 (exclusively homosexual) before change and a 0 (exclusively heterosexual) after change. Since there was no follow-up, this study has been used to support the proposition that gays could change to straight via religious mediation. For instance, not knowing any of this background at the time,…

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

By William E. Smith

…servative religious freedom efforts to religious claims made by polygamist Mormons and Muslims (although the problem posed by the nineteenth-century Reynolds case is oddly missing). Douthat, however, takes Silk to mean that “Republicans and churchgoers” (with churchgoers overtly coded as Evangelicals) are supporting polygamy in larger numbers, a strawman Douthat then refutes. Unlike Silk and Douthat, I welcome this nascent debate—one that really h…

How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

By Cody J. Sanders

…a zoological society, anthropologist Deborah Rose talked about the work of mourning: In short, mourning is a process of learning and transformation to accommodate a changed reality. Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here.…This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the…

Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…athon Monday that killed three and seriously injured over a hundred. But rumors abound. Most of the suspicions point toward right-wing extremist Christian Patriot groups. They are exactly the kind of movement that might be attracted to make its mark on a liberal anti-gun crowd on what many have noted is Massachusetts’ Patriots’ Day. The 26-mile course of the marathon was meant to honor the 26 victims of the Newtown school shooting, with a differen…

Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…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…

It’s Not About Cake: Anti-Gay Vendors Want a Constitutional Right to Discriminate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ited them from serving a certain kind of person. While there are outliers, most courts have allowed only a narrow religious exemption to universally applicable nondiscrimination laws. “The claims for religious exemptions have happened historically, and they’ve happened historically at moments of social change,” Melling explained. “When there are new laws passed to call for an end to discrimination in certain public spheres of this society, then we…

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

By Sarah Posner

…angelical Protestants, black Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Orthodox Christians. What are the potential effects of these changes politically? Before you do your secularist victory lap, here are five key considerations to keep in mind: 1. The first report on Pew’s data released today does not include its analysis of respondents’ religious intensity or orthodoxy, nor of the respondents’ political and…