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Why Faithy Rhetoric Won’t Help Democrats

By Sarah Posner

…r from business interests who found useful allies in religious leaders who helped define American evangelicalism as being against a government-provided social safety net. That’s not a view inherent to evangelicalism, though, as Bean found in the Canadian experience. What lessons lie in Bean’s findings for political organizers seeking to mobilize progressive faith communities, which have “thinner” identity formation than their white evangelical cou…

Palestinian Orthodox Christians, Desperate for Help, Have Caught the Attention of Russia

By Katherine Kelaidis

In case you’re thinking that Ukraine is the only place in the world where Orthodox Christianity is entangled in a global hotspot, please turn your eyes to Jerusalem. Two days ago, following an eighteen-year struggle, members of the Israeli settler organization, Ateret Cohanim, with the assistance of police, took control of part of the Petra Hotel in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, drawing criticism from the city’s Christian leaders…

How Postwar Germany’s Witchcraft Trials Can Help Us Understand QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

By Monica Black

Doing research in a branch of the state library in Berlin a few years ago, I stumbled across a reference to a 1951 book called Are There Witches among Us? It had been published in West Germany by a former schoolteacher named Johann Kruse. The title puzzled me, and I assumed the book must be satirical: it couldn’t really be about fears of witches in post-World War II Germany. But surprisingly enough, it was. So I started researching what Kruse cal…

Sin is Not a Crime: A Conversation with Patrick Cheng

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…e with anti-gay Christians? There are some folks with whom dialogue is not helpful. Some people are so wrapped up in their own world that nothing you can say will help—and it will hurt them more. This model will not speak to the fundamentalist or those so deeply entrenched in the doctrine of blood atonement that they’re not going to be able to see this model—even though it’s ancient and in some ways even more beautiful than Western notions of sin…

A Plea to Jewish Leaders: Help Us Reject All Institutional Efforts to Convert Muslims and Other People of Faith

By Scott C. Alexander

…o extinction. And besides, they’re not one of our major competitors. Their numbers are so low and they’re not really trying to make inroads into our market. Who knows? In fact, if we play our cards right, we might be able to bring them on board as a wholly owned subsidiary. So maybe we should leave them be. My Jewish teachers have taught me that, at the core of the notion of “chosen-ness” is a profound responsibility to fulfill the biblically-atte…

A Note to Megyn Kelly & NBC: How to Talk About Conspiracy Theories

By Julie Ingersoll

…e the interview with context from people who study conspiracy theories and help us think clearly about them? Will they explain what’s wrong with them and explain their appeal? Will NBC use the opportunity to help people learn how to evaluate what they see on the internet for reliability—how to spot “fake news?” Rather than weigh in on the network’s decision, as a religious studies scholar I’d like to offer some framing from my Religion and Popular…

Dear Readers: Letter From an Anonymous Liberal Pastor in Trump Country

By Thomas Warming

…mother of our woman in Tehran. “Catholics ask their departed relatives to help them,” he said with a catch in his throat. “And we Protestants put that down. But if there was ever a time to ask my mother for some help, this is it.” He paused, as if to return to his pew. But then he looked back at me and said, “I will go with you to see the congressman.” Like many liberals since the election, I have been swinging between absolute terror and despair…

A Pastor’s Suicide: Addressing Mental Health in Black Churches

By Darnell Moore

…ed when the truth of one’s mental health history (one that the dead sought help in response to…a history of struggle that resulted in one’s own self-demise…a history that loved ones admit they wished they had known about prior to the act of suicide) is invisibilized. There is a type of violence that occurs when the noise of another’s pleas for help, regardless of the ways such pleas might manifest, are silenced. And while it might be the case tha…

How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power and Exclusion

By Eric C. Miller

…erful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my goal as writing the history of the present, telling the story of how gratitude came to be so clo…

The “Southern Cage”: How the Myth of the Redemptive Depression Keeps Blacks at the Margins

By Eric C. Miller

…s reformers to be an extension of what churches had been doing as they had helped patch together a limited safety net in the early twentieth century. Many southern cities did not offer municipal relief. Instead, denominations and municipalities provided institutional care: poorhouses, hospitals, settlement houses, orphanages, and so forth—all of them segregated, with far more resources for whites than for blacks. Local churches sometimes helped pe…