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Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

…debt peonage in his time and place. Stefani McDade begins her Christianity Today roundup of evangelical responses by reporting on the top four Bible verses being cited by online Christian commentators in response to Biden’s move. The top four verses popping up on her screen were all from the Hebrew Bible—or the Old Testament as CT prefers to call it. Then McDade cites the reactions of three guys. The first, an Anglican priest from Indiana, is all…

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Mormons’ Puzzling Indifference to Easter

…irst Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. And that’s today.” The elders rolled their eyes at each other. “Where’d you hear that?” one asked. “My Chaucer class,” I said. “The early Christians put Easter as close as possible to a full moon so people could still have light at night to go on pilgrimage.” (FYI: a literature degree can be very useful in writing about religion, and vice versa.) They laughed. “Sister Welker, that may…

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Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

…capitalism and the military industrial complex and bore no resemblance to today’s praise songs. What did my friends and I do when we saw the photo of Jerry Falwell? We laughed. He seemed a buffoon, and we couldn’t believe that anyone would ever take him seriously. We had no idea what lay ahead. This all came back to me because of another article in the New York Times—a piece published on April 6—“The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right…

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The Non-Existent Tea Party-Religious Right God Gap

…ts back to one that many speakers, including Reed and Gingrich, emphasized today: that not only did God ordain a limited role for government, God, and not the government, is the source of individual rights. “God gives you sovereignty,” said Gingrich, and “the government doesn’t define rights.” In other words, if the government tells you to buy insurance under the individual mandate, it’s not only infringing on your God-given rights, but exceeding…

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How Not to Oppose the National Day of Prayer

…U.S.C. § 119 from law. But this year the American Humanist Association is promoting an opposition effort that is fundamentally misguided. Rather than call for its elimination, the AHA wants the annual observance to be replaced by a new “National Day of Reason.” According to its official website, a National Day of Reason would, of course, “celebrate reason,” but it would also “raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty…

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How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…

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The People’s Temple, the Black Church, and the Tragic Legacy of Jonestown

…sed visibility of the black atheist community. Is that growth we’re seeing today influenced by the way the Bible was historically used to justify the degradation of black people? I absolutely think that is the motivation for many African-American nonbelievers. That the whole Curse of Ham lore, the justification of slavery, the justification of rape and commodification of black women’s bodies— all of that plays a big role in the embrace of atheism…

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Huckabee Launches Videos to Teach Kids About American Exceptionalism

…r children a historically accurate and unbiased education that allows kids today to enjoy and understand our history, and build their pride in our great nation.” Learn Our History’s messages are all geared to promoting the idea of American Exceptionalism, and from the clips, they appear to be delivered with all the subtlety and Cold War fervor of the movie Red Dawn. From Learn Our History web site’s Frequently Asked Questions: What does it mean th…

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Disaster Theology: Blame and Powerlessness in Japan

…, “I hate to say, ‘I told you so’—but I told you so!” Fortunately, we know today that tsunamis are caused by earthquakes and other forms of seismic activity, and that seismic activity is caused by a shift in tectonic plates. We can’t predict exactly when they’re going to shift, but we are increasingly certain that they don’t do so in response to the immorality of the people in the countries where they occur. There are plenty of evil people living…

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Colorado Springs Massacre Captures the Christian Nationalist ‘Monster In The Mirror’

…nationalism dates back to the pilgrims, my series examines how features of today’s God-and-country ideology owe a particular debt to the obsessions that transfixed the popular culture of Britain in the 1890s: the supposed “hordes” of immigrants diluting the nation’s racial stock; melancholy over the putative “weakness” of a once-great nation; panic over non-straight public expressions of sexuality; a sci-fi tinged apocalypticism, in which heroes a…

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