Religion Dispatches
…support is being generated by those outside the church fold simultaneously resolves a paradox and absolves the church. It’s time for the zombie hypothesis—that Trump’s evangelical support is due to a growing number of unchurched White evangelicals—to finally be laid to rest. Letting that biased theory go will allow us to have a clearer understanding not only of our politics but of our churches….
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…, and then I say, thinking of all the ruined gay lives, this really is the number that no man can number. It’s also interesting to me that “Writing It Out” is followed by the section “War on the Children.” Such an organization suggests that the latter was a reaction against the former—that as these voices emerge, there’s this really virulent reaction culturally against them. And also it’s so very political. As the church has become more right-win…
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…angelical leadership towards immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Chance’s rhetoric and aesthetic performance would have read very differently had this been the BET Awards or the NAACP Image Awards. The challenge of perception would have been canceled by the racial context. In other words, Chance’s effusive display of religiosity wouldn’t have made me second-guess it if the audience was mostly black. In those black spaces, Christianity doesn…
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…young people, according to Bolling. While it’s true that “there are differences and distinctions in the spectrum of spiritual, but not religious to atheist that comprises the nones,” Bolling observes, “they are rejecting religion, to some degree. Politicians, community leaders, celebrities, and corporations need to understand this younger generation doesn’t want religion pushed in their faces, won’t stand for religious nationalism, and doesn’t wan…
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…eher, National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru and Fox New’s Brit Hume. Each referenced, as evidence, a 2-year-old blog post which they reported as new. As William Saletan, who wrote the original post on Slate later noted, each of these people misrepresented “after-birth abortion” as a “new thing.” The 2-year-old post actually reported on one article in an academic journal that was making an argument, possibly just for the sake of argument. The piece said…
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…ill a widely accepted norm. According to a recent article on The Root, an increasing number of black girls are being sold into prostitution and sex trafficking, while “in both the international and national anti-trafficking movements, black girls who are victims of prostitution are invisible.” In a review of the new book Girls Like Us by sex trafficking activist Rachel Lloyd, writer Rinku Sen notes, the black and Latina girls with whom Lloyd work…
Read More…eny minority of people may take away their right to tell gays and lesbians that God will send them to hell for all eternity — out of love, mind you. But, then again, anti-gay Evangelicals have a right to be afraid. After all, researchers say the actual number of Evangelicals may well be “as small as 7 percent of the total adult population.” Which means Evangelicals know just how effective a small number of people can be at taking away the rights o…
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…fellow believers of their compatibility. Their efforts are evident in the increasing number of books, conferences, and organizations—such as Francis Collins’ BioLogos—that have formed around the topic. Cracks are likewise showing in what once was understood as a unanimous and uncritical evangelical support of Israel as epitomized by a 2006 New York Times headline noting that, “For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy.’” Just la…
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…he Global Right’s war on reproductive rights.[25] The parallels are not coincidental. Since the establishment of the World Congress of Families (WCF) in 1997,[26] the U.S. Christian Right has worked closely with Russian Orthodox leaders, politicians, and conservative oligarchs to export the idea of “the natural family”—a White, Christian, heteronormative two-parent household with children—across Eastern Europe and the West through a series of inte…
Read More…is even a question shows just how toothless the Democratic-religious alliance is (and, indeed, Obama’s alliance with other elements of his non-corporate base, to boot, but that’s another story). After all, the Democrats are the ones who reject hard-hearted conservative theocracy and embrace—Glenn Beck be damned—social justice religion, right? That a prominent liberal Washington insider and social justice-minded Catholic like Dionne has already es…
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