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As We Survey the Damage of Yesterday’s Violence, What Will Christian Nationalist Politics Look Like in 2021? New Report Offers Clues

By Chrissy Stroop

…Justice” and the not-so-apolitical after all “Jesus 2020,” the release of American Atheists’ new report serves as a timely reminder not only of the serious threat that Christian extremism represents to American democracy, but also that the spectacular drama that’s been unfolding on the national stage this year is only part of the story. Many crucial church-state separation battles are won and lost at the state level. To be sure, state-level cultu…

The Invention of a Corporate Christian America

By Andrew Aghapour

…ciation of Manufacturers to the cause and creating brand new ones like the American Liberty League. But Americans dismissed their naked paeans to capitalism as just business looking out for its own self-interest. (Democratic leader Jim Farley famously joked that they ought to call the American Liberty League “the American Cellophane League” because it was a DuPont product that you could see right through.) Realizing that the direct approach hadn’t…

The Only Thing Evangelicals Will Never Forgive Is Not Hating the “Other”

By Frank Schaeffer

…trate the liturgical practices led by largely anonymous priests. The North American evangelical/fundamentalist brand of Christianity is the religious version of the American civil religion: consumerist individualism. Today’s “Stylites” are more often found in private jets, but they still have followers who conflate holiness with success American style—in other words, as measured by money, possessions, numbers, and (above all) celebrity status. The…

The Most Ridiculous Responses to the Vatican’s Call-out of the Catho–Christian Right

By Patricia Miller

…ve come to characterize the U.S. church: Over the last decade, however, as American Christianity has weakened and American politics become ever-more-polarized, the Catholic position in the United States has become more difficult and perplexing. The Democratic Party, whose long-ago New Deal was built in part on Catholic social thought, has become increasingly secular and ever-more-doctrinaire in its social liberalism. The Republican Party, which un…

Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem with Popularization

By Kathryn Lofton

…exclusively on her exploratory admiration for and curiosity on symbols of American ambition. For this, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has proclaimed Vowell an “American original” who is “somehow simultaneously patriot and rebel, cynic and dreamer, and an aching secularist in search of a higher ground.” The aching secularist has found storied higher ground in The Wordy Shipmates, where she applies her anti-cool cool to the tale of seventeenth-ce…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…of American Jewry, there are moments of polite incredulity. To wit: 34% of American Jews think that “a person can be Jewish if they believe that Jesus was the messiah.” In other words, a full third of Jewish Americans think that followers of Jesus Christ—i.e. Christians—can also be Jews. Jews and Christians have been othering each other for centuries, and, theologically speaking, Jesus isn’t messiah material for religious Jews. So, at first glance…

Church Attendance is (Once Again) Correlated with Authoritarianism — So Why Do We Refuse to Acknowledge It?

By Chrissy Stroop

…quite bring themselves to do that, they should, at the very least, embrace American nones, atheists, and agnostics—nonreligious Americans—as a valid constituency that deserves a seat at the table in the public sphere. Unfortunately, hegemonic Christianity and the legacy media’s efforts to protect Christian privilege make it more likely that we will instead continue to be treated like second-class citizens—at least where politics and the press are…

Mormons Fight Marriage Equality in Mexico; Is Catholic Church Italy’s Anti-Gay NRA?; Nigerian Anglicans Cut Ties With UK Diocese; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…reports BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder. Armenia: Folk dancing group kicks out gay American Kyle Khandikyan, a 23-year old American living in Armenia was kicked out of a folk dancing group after the instructor learned that he was gay. Khandikyan, who currently lives in Yerevan and first came to Armenia through Birthright Armenia as a volunteer with PINK Armenian, was told by the instructor that he did not belong to this “nation,” that he was “not Armenian…

American Prosperity Gospel Makes South Sudan “Ripe for Exploitation”

By Anthea Butler

…ar, the believers at this Pentecostal church also consume the preaching of American Pentecostal media stars like T.D. Jakes and Benny Hinn. Anytime someone says, as a woman interviewed for the program did, that Benny Hinn is the man because he’s on TV, well, that’s an issue. Add in the prosperity gospel, and you have a potent mix that will surely change the scope of how Christianity will become appropriated in tandem with the political in South Su…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…hed a new and vital dictionary that has had long lasting influences on the American populace. In the “Introduction” to his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, the polyglot, erudite Webster examines the “Origin of Language,” beginning with a synopsis of how God gave a divine decree to Adam to name the animals. In other words, the origin of language begins with Adam. Moreover, Webster hoped his dictionary would be a “useful instrument…