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#SorryNotSorry: What U.S. Christian Denominations Teach About Homosexuality

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

… American Baptist Churches USA (Mainline Protestant) Members (as of 2009): 1,310,505 In 1992, the American Baptist Churches USA General Board affirmed a one-sentence resolution on homosexuality: “American Baptist Resolution on Homosexuality”: “We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” In 2005, the board added the same language to its official identity statement. 54% of members believe homosexuality sho…

Mormon Group Digging for Scriptural City of Zarahemla in Iowa is a Portrait of Religious Nationalism

By Hanna Seariac

…eligious exuberance; the excavation is the product of a religious ideology with a legacy of religious nationalism and white supremacy. They may be using state-of-the-art equipment in the effort, but there’s nothing new about this toxic perspective….

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…aching. White Protestants (my peeps) have too often tended to cling to a by-your-bootstraps ethic of individual achievement, joined to a suspicion that there is something slightly sinister and foreign about union leaders and about the union concept of class solidarity. I grew up ten miles from the Kohler Company’s sprawling furnaces and factories in eastern Wisconsin during the seemingly endless and ultimately victorious struggle by the UAW to uni…

Pariah or Charmed Hero: America’s Obsession with Jews and Israel

By Shaul Magid

…That obsession led them, among other things, to construct the Jew as Christ-killer, anti-Christ and a pariah people. America (along with much of the Christian West) has thankfully righted that wrong even as they have yet to cure their obsession. In some way America seems to have retained the structure of the old negative stereotype despite, or precisely due to, their pledge of uncritical support for Israel. Has Israel become America’s golden calf,…

Trump’s Muslim Ban and the History of Stolen Citizenship in America

By Hussein Rashid and Murali Balaji

…ving in the United States, we were not sure if they were “white” or not. In 1922 the US Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States that being white meant being “Caucasian,” not just “not Black,” or “not Native American.” East Asians were promptly stripped of their citizenship, because they were not white enough for this country. South Asians believed that they were protected from this sort of decision. As the home of the Aryans, and thus of Cau…

Mitt, Moochers, and Mormonism’s “Other” Legacy

By Mary Barker

…t even this is an older story of rightward bias. The Church supported right-to-work legislation even before the dawn of the twentieth century. As early as 1886, the Deseret News opposed any binding union activities. The Apostle Joseph F. Merrill, speaking at the 1941 Conference, referred to closed shops as “Satan’s club,” and in 1965, the Prophet David O. McKay wrote to Mormon congressmen urging them to protect right-to-work legislation in the nam…

Disco-Reggae at Abu Ghraib: Music, the Bible and Torture

By Erin Runions

…eggae rendition of Boney M’s “Rivers of Babylon.” The lyrics are taken directly from the psalm, with its poignant opening lines: “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept.” No one has yet cried sacrilege over this detail of the still-emerging outrages of Abu Ghraib, or even really commented on it. Yet the deep ironies of this choice of music reveal much about a belief system that keeps the United States from facing torture. America as Both C…

United Methodist Church Votes Against Israel Divestment

By Shalom Goldman

…are sadly misguided. My voice willalways be raised in support of Christian-Jewish ties and against the anti-Semitism that all sensible people fear and detest. But this cannot be an excuse for doing nothing and for standing aside as successive Israeli governments colonize the West Bank and advance racist laws. It seems that Tuesday’s vote against the divestment motion was something of a landmark in Christian-Jewish relations. In a reversal of the…

“Project Blitz” Seeks to Do for Christian Nationalism What ALEC Does for Big Business

By Frederick Clarkson

…tors that the IGWT bills and the bills in Category 1 are, “kinda like whack-a-mole for the other side. It’ll drive them crazy that they will have to divide their resources out in opposing this… they won’t know what to do with this and it’ll be great!” Also included in Category 1 were resolutions declaring January 16th as Religious Freedom Day, which this year have been introduced in Michigan, Washington and New York, and passed both houses in Kent…

Americans United To Launch “Operation Inclusion” After SCOTUS Prayer Decision

By Sarah Posner

…g three notes from a song.” In Sussex County, Delaware, officials are, post-Greece, revisiting their policy of non-sectarian prayer, which resulted from a settlement of a lawsuit brought by AU, challenging their practice of reciting the Lord’s Prayer to open meetings. Samuel Wilson, a Republican County Council member, told the News Journal that the Greecedecision “was good news. It might not be for the atheist but it is for the believer.” “Some pe…