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Coffeehouse Churches and the ‘Party-on Messiah’: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 3

By Mark Dery

…ouraged public displays of beatified passion and, more generally, a middle-class, white (read: toned-down) version of the exuberant call-and-response dynamic that has animated black Pentecostal churches and Southern white revival meetings for generations. On October 25, 1974, as on most Friday nights, Abba’s house band Hebron churned out folk-rock worship music, original tunes that gene-spliced David Crosby and King Crimson—a progressive take on w…

Georgetown Poverty Summit Impoverished on Women in More Ways Than One

By Patricia Miller

…credit and the need for employment to stabilize communities and the middle class, there wasn’t a single mention of the growing consensus about the devastating impact of unintended pregnancy on poor women and concrete solutions to address it. Instead, discussion of solutions mainly focused on the proper balance between the welfare state and public investment and “free market” solutions to poverty. When Dionne did tentatively raise the issue of “fam…

The World’s Most Influential Yoga Teacher is a Homophobic Right-Wing Activist

By Andrea Jain and Michael Schulson

…and-wellness sector that’s linked to India’s growing, global-facing middle class. The politician to whom he has tied his fortunes, Narendra Modi, is a neoliberal who is trying to accelerate India’s entry into the 21st century capitalist global economy. For all the traditionalism of their rhetoric, these guys are also playing a modern game. This is a very modern, very urban flavor of conservatism. It is not traditional. It thrives on nostalgia abou…

What the Fight over Allah says about the Future of Evangelical Christianity

By Richard Flory

…e believers” who can support and attend these schools, many will go out of business over the next 20 years. 3) The reduced number of evangelical colleges and seminaries will retrench and become more aware of policing their cultural/theological boundaries, doubling down on their more restrictive impulses. 4) Because of a general lack of hospitality and care and concern for “the other”— whether theological, gender, class or ethnic—evangelicalism ove…

The Gospel Gestalt: From Joyful Noise to Whitney Houston

By Douglas Harrison

…lunderingly, something like a post-racial take on the way matters of race, class, geography, and religion get mediated through gospel music (and I’d say these even if I weren’t a lifelong fan of Dolly Parton and an adherent to the purity-in-artifice approach to the Parton aesthetic around which the film is organized). Ultimately Vi comes to understand that she and the choir can embrace new sounds and styles without surrendering access to the gospe…

Repurposing the Gospel Aura: Eminem’s Chrysler Ad Borrows Some Spirit

By Douglas Harrison

…universal language of inspiration and transcendence that cuts across race, class, and history. This logic has proven remarkably adaptive to a range of postmodern pop cultural contexts: There’s the final chorus of Foreigner’s 1984 power ballad, “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” which features the New Jersey Mass Choir. The choir’s warm, expansive harmonies take a garden-variety power ballad (“I wanna know what love is / I want you to show me… / Aaaah wo…

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

By Julie Ingersoll

…whose views are abhorrent. In fact, I showed a clip from Jones’ show in my class last term. The validity of NBC’s choice will depend, in some measure, on the context with which the interview is presented. Will Jones just be given an opportunity to create a false, apparently respectable, impression with an audience who might not already be familiar with him? Or will they air segments like this or this that show him to be… well… unhinged? Will they…

New Mag Provides a Platform for Christians of Color

By Anita Little

…e planned to hold a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. He responds with, “Are they friends of yours. Set up a meeting.” There are so many other segments of the voting bloc that we can look at. We’ve looked at white evangelicals, poor or working-class whites, we get it. What about the poor or working-class blacks who also believed in the things Trump said? How about the Latinos who voted for Trump as well? It’s time to look at some of the…

“The Lord’s Standard of Morality” Promotes LDS Rape Culture

By Holly Welker

…vertent sight of a naked female thigh. Male missionaries, however, had gym classes scheduled throughout the day. They could and often did walk to and from their classes clad only in the skimpiest of shorts, their T-shirts in their hands or tossed over one shoulder. No one worried about the effect on young women of running into a gang of half-naked men—perhaps because we weren’t considered capable of any action that might endanger either them or us…

Without Bev Shea, No Billy Graham

By Douglas Harrison

…me Brother Billy persona was of course one powerful alternative for middle-class evangelicals who wanted to look up and away from Sister Aimee’s down-market unseemliness. Shea’s success distinguished itself for being both more explicitly commercialized than Graham’s, while also retaining all the bourgeois respectability so often found missing in the tawdriness of the Elmer Gantrified competition—the faith healers and the New Thought movement and t…