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Trendwatch: Thieves Taking the Christ out of Christmas. Literally.

By Daniel Silliman

…the real reason for the Christmas season.” While no one tracks the actual number of baby Jesus thefts every Christmas season, in 2013 nativity robbery and vandalism was reported from California to Minnesota to New Jersey to New York, where the theft was investigated as a possible hate crime. One Boston crèche has been robbed three times in nine years, according to the Boston Globe. A New York security company garnered a bit of publicity by offeri…

Silver Bells and Atheist Billboards

By Steve A. Wiggins

…Christmas cascading laundry list here, or this essay will never end.) The numbers tell the story. The academic study of religion has become an industry. So has the church. No matter how badly clergy want their lives to be “a calling,” they are actually jobs for which they are paid and receive medical coverage, retirement plans, and financial security (more or less). It is the way of the market. Why are they playing “Silver Bells” when I step into…

“Do Not Be A Stupid Idiot!”: Religion and Resentment

By Daniel Schultz

…e errors in column after column—which is exactly why most people who don’t buy into the WND perspective simply mock and move on. But something about this piece by Linda Harvey caught my attention.. Lord knows it gives plenty of fuel to the “what the hell are they on about” fire. The piece—”Sodom, We Have a Problem”—is all over the place, from the decline of mainline Protestantism to same-sex marriage to acceptance of the transgender community to s…

A Test for Trump—And the Religious Right

By Sarah Posner

…best positioned candidate to handle immigration. That’s a pretty stunning number given Moore’s very public rejections of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and is indicative of one kind of split among these voters. But voters who will self-identify as “born again” or “evangelical” to a pollster are not a monolith. As Warren Smith argues at WORLD magazine, “watching Joel Osteen on TV doesn’t make you an evangelical.” Smith calls the evangelical supp…

Church Synod Recap: Micromanaging the Morals of Others

By Mary E. Hunt

…Easter dinner like a good boy priest, quite another to invite the guests, buy the food, cook the meal, entertain, and do the dishes as an adult member of a family. I am not suggesting that everyone has to live the same way, but I am underscoring that the voters in this case had little standing on the topic they chose to consider. I would hesitate to vote in a parallel synod of priestly celibacy about which I have no experience. Until this unworka…

Historian: Evangelical Trump Fandom is No Deviation

By Neil J. Young

…. In the coming years, it’s an open question regarding how much the courts buy their appeals to operate businesses as “religious” places deserving of certain legal protections. That they are appealing to a secular idea, namely religious freedom, is instructive and interesting but not out of step with their forebears, especially those in business. A business history of conservative evangelicalism shows that evangelicals have long treated spiritual…

Goodbye to Amy Winehouse, Living Celebrity Dead

By Mathew Schmalz

…and desolate. Offerings at her shrine are a material currency in which we buy back some of that dark energy—an energy found in the freedom of contradiction. When I first lived as a student in India 25 years ago, I went to a temple dedicated to the Goddess Kali in Jaipur at which a special offering was presented. My Indian host family told me to not come home without the offering, sweatmeat, available in stalls near the temple. As I ascended the s…

Dear Readers: Letter From an Anonymous Liberal Pastor in Trump Country

By Thomas Warming

…o stand up to the authoritarian drift of this administration. Or will they buy into the same politics of white resentment that got them hoodwinked into voting for Trump the first time? I don’t know. I just know that like that time with the Syrians, the extremists running the show these days make it hard to live my faith sometimes. They make it hard to stand up for the right thing. Pretty ironic, considering all their rhetoric on religious freedom….

From Bad to Worstest: How Liberals Should (And Should Not) Talk About Values

By Daniel Schultz

…rth!” Nobody gives a shit, and you just gave away all your moral ground by buying into a conservative frame. Besides, do I really have to tell you how weak “Liberals have values too!” is? Worser: “All Christians can surely agree on the value of…” Wrong. They don’t, and they don’t think you’re a Christian. (Also, not everybody’s a Christian.) Worstest: “On this special day, we must all strive to live up to the ideals of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King…

“The Camp Is a Ceremony”: A Report From Standing Rock

By Marion Grau

…college food services. Later, when I was a grad student in New Jersey, the international students on campus staged our own improvised Thanksgiving, with our own cultural foods, mostly to stave off the sense of being left out of the celebration. As a foreigner, one is often left out of the traditions that most signify a culture. The only positive I have found in my years in the US is being introduced to pumpkin pie—and even that was an acquired tas…