Religion Dispatches
…Christians is not reason enough for a divorce and, more often than not, is code for “serious sin.” Pentecostals have a history of being strict about reasons to divorce, adultery being scripturally the only reason to do so. For those who divorce and who have a denominational affiliation through ministerial license, a divorce can mean, at best, additional scrutiny and at worst, stripping of ministerial credentials. Of course, that never has stopped…
Read More…ers listened to Sarah Palin’s convention address expecting heavy religious code, the scriptural allusions that have come to be standard fare in speeches by Republicans and Barack Obama. There wasn’t much—“a servant’s heart,” a prayer for her son sent off to war. But there was, for those with ears to hear it, a far more disturbing allusion: to Westbrook Pegler, a mid-century Rush Limbaugh, and then some. At the height of his popularity, he was more…
Read More
…in 100 years.” It isn’t a stretch to say that his invocation of “truth” is code for conservative Christian dogma; his real problem with Harvard—and academia in general—is that its scholars do not defer to such dogma. But there’s no need to stretch as Santorum explicitly linked higher education to the work of Satan in a 2008 speech (which has recently gone viral) at Florida’s Ave Maria University. The intimate connection between these views and his…
Read More
…eople that lead to unbought, transformative politics. We can ritualize hope by converting our places of worship and prayer into engaged networks of action. Where guns have been used to diminish the freedoms of individuals, we can ritualize hope by parading to the polls to embody freedom—an act of civic responsibility transformed into a spiritual act of remembering….
Read More…s of the military, and that is protecting us from our enemies. The Uniform Code of Military Justice also prohibits things like adultery, so as we look at this slippery slope we’re on, what is the next step? Will we see a move to strike down that prohibition as well? Jackson and others speaking at the press conference also repeated the charge that repeal of DADT will cripple chaplains who will be forced to “water down their teachings” or perhaps ev…
Read More
…First, Douthat warns of encroaching “scientism” which, in this context, is code for failing to believe the supernatural truth claims of Christianity. Second, paradoxically, Douthat perceives a tendency among non-religious people to embrace the mystical belief systems that he himself rejects, like astrology or wellness. (So much for scientism!) Yet we don’t see any actual evidence that these trends are as widespread among the deconverted as he sugg…
Read More…on proposed by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. David Fowler, head of the conservative Christian Family Action Council of Tennessee, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family, and is one of the bill’s primary lobbyists. In defending the bill’s language, he has tried to draw on comparisons to the famous Scopes monkey trial that took place 86 years ago in his state. “…[T]oday’s evolutionary…
Read More
…facto decisions about what counts as a religion and what doesn’t. The tax code makes implicit judgments about religious legitimacy in parceling out breaks to some groups and not others. Those rules, however, are fairly broad, and they don’t target certain religions as enemies of American society. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump made repeated promises to curb Muslim immigration to the United States and institute a registry of Muslims in the co…
Read More…tatutory protections against religious discrimination or to create a broad free exercise right to receive government grants without complying with applicable regulations that protect taxpayers.” Last year, civil liberties groups lobbied hard to have a non-discrimination provision included in VAWA. The resulting statutory language reads: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin…
Read More
…I included the people of Libya in my prayers, that they be given strength, freedom, and protection from harm. And then, kind of, sort of, in the nick of time, France, Britain, and the United States obtained a Security Council resolution—forwarded for debate by Lebanon, whose government was formed by Hezbollah, a convenient ally this time—and began devastating Qaddafi’s forces before they could effect a likely mass slaughter in Benghazi. But the ti…
Read More