Religion Dispatches
…from the government, they have merged with non-Catholic systems, and they participate in a wider nonsectarian system wherein insurance companies negotiate with them and ambulance companies work with them and medical students do residencies in their hospitals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your…
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…rtheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are willi…
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…eaning of religious freedom in the United States at its historical root, I participated in an effort, advised by experts and the staff of organizations concerned about religious freedom, to draft a model resolution that would accurately commemorate the core ideas and their centrality to our country’s approach to religious freedom. State Sen. John Marty (D-MN), who stared down a smear campaign by Project Blitz proponents and Fox News last year, is…
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…igion, even all Christian religions, it also had the authority to attack a particular religion or all religions. They realized that complete separation of church and state was the best way to promote true religion. Our original national motto speaks to the way that our religious, ethnic and racial diversity is a source of greatness: E Pluribus Unum–out of many, one. This is nowhere more true than in religion. Jefferson once explained that the norm…
Read More…evangelical purity culture as a queer black woman, and the organizers and participants in the counter-event amplified her piece. And the news media noticed, documenting the counter-event and taking the concerns of the conference’s mostly exvangelical critics seriously. The way the Wheaton summit was covered likely blindsided the conference organizers, who have been accustomed to controlling their media representation. Since then, exvangelical Twi…
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…or the justices’ clear preferences. Its language, which allows justices to participate in “a nonprofit civic, charitable, educational, religious, or social organization,” and even raise money on such an organization’s behalf, appears aimed at Clarence Thomas’ ties to the conservative Horatio Alger Association, which once allowed him access to the most elite circles of the conservative legal movement, with which he has stayed critically close, as t…
Read More…cutive? Sober-minded people don’t believe in magical outcomes. Yet a large part of the progressive community acts as though its work will be done if we can only just turn the page on Trump. These apocalyptic believers are only too happy to “resist” the manifest evils of Trumpism, but they are constitutionally averse to confronting the less obvious evils afflicting a nation that was founded on the violence of white settler colonialism and whose eco…
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…em with unearned power. Absent from their declaration is any commitment to participate in the tedious task of using their white cisgendered privilege to dismantle these same social structures. Racial discrimination is more than a bias disposition; it’s more than simply calling me a “spic.” Racial discrimination also includes the political pronouncements and positions they overwhelmingly defend by electing those committed to expanding white suprema…
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…ing, but rather four score and seven years later, in 1863. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1 of that year, conscriptions followed, as did some of the war’s bloodiest battles, including Chickamauga and Gettysburg. Brothers were killing brothers—more than 2 percent of the population, or about eight million Americans today, would die. Families and the country were being torn apart. Three men recognized this time of “na…
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…on this planet in our government.’ ” So once again, we are faced with an apparent paradox: why would white evangelical Christians stand cheek-to-jowl with such an un-Christian president? Perry has his way of explaining things, a “biblical” explanation. But another way of looking at it is so obvious as to be quite invisible: Donald Trump is as Christian as evangelicals are. That we ask the question at all may be part of the problem. We keep asking…
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