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Birtherism, Conspiracy Theories, and the “Christian Nation”

By Sarah Posner

…across, and bogus information has a way of jumping to the top of Google’s search pages. That fragmentation is happening at a time of intense partisan anger and economic angst. First, the birtherism campaign and the other conspiracies, largely attributed to the left (although not exclusively) are not comparable. They are largely marginalized by the mainstream media, which has otherwise given wide swaths of time to Trump and others — and the covera…

Junior Falwell Unmasked Conservatism; Let’s Thank Him For It

By John Stoehr

…f national emergency related to the outbreak, undermining his and Cotton’s search for a scapegoat for his sake.) Falwell’s demagoguery isn’t what we should be thankful for. What we should be thankful for is his confessing, without appearing to know it, that a pillar of “principled conservatism” in the United States is no pillar at all. Not in practice. Once you see that this pillar rests on a bed of sand, rather than constitutional bedrock, you st…

Confront Death by Avoiding Fritos: The Gluten Lie, Fad Diets, & Foodie Faith

By Michael Schulson

The numbers are hard to pin down, but roughly 1.1 million Americans keep kosher in their homes. Around 15 million are vegetarian. Meanwhile, according to a 2013 survey, more than 100 million Americans are trying to cut down on gluten, and (as of 2014) more than 10 million households are gluten-free. Simply put, gluten avoidance is the reigning dietary restriction of our time. The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat Alan Levinovitz Rega…

Is Coverage of Liberal Religion a Media Fail?

By Sarah Posner

…o Google News; even though the event took place just this past weekend, my search yielded just 36 results, mostly in local news outlets. This one example obviously doesn’t prove any broader argument about media coverage of religion. Coverage isn’t just driven by orientation or ideology, but often by resources, editorial judgments, space considerations, and whether a story makes compelling copy. Seven faith traditions participated in that gun sabba…

History in the Making: Religion, Race and Gender in the Presidential Election

By Peter J. Paris

…ntity, he, too, concluded years ago that he was a black man from Hawaii in search of his full identity as an African American. The extent to which African Americans would accept him was in doubt for quite some time. Now, I know of no black person who has sold two best-selling books describing his/her racial identity. Clearly, religion and race have been in the foreground of American history long before the beginning of this republic. The question…

Damn You Auto-Correct: Creationist Edition

By Lauri Lebo

…ht into the toilet, FTE editors quickly went through the manuscript with a search-and-replace word processor option, taking out “creation science” and replacing it with “intelligent design”. Really. That’s all they did. But when the Kitzmiller legal team went through the earlier creation science version of Pandas and compared it to the intelligent design one, they noticed that other than those small wording changes, practically nothing else had be…

Laugh at Tucker Carlson’s Tanning Testicles Doc All You Want, But the Bulging Muscles and Potent Sperm Imagery is a Fascist Dream

By Annika Brockschmidt

…sm, invoking a mystical Indo-European-Aryan heritage. Traditionalism is in search of a supreme spirituality or religiosity and is deeply attracted to Eastern mysticism. It’s cross-religious—some traditionalists are Sufis, others Russian Orthodox, others don’t belong to any fixed religious community. But one thing connects them all: They believe that we’re in the fourth age, in the “Kali Yuga”: the age of destruction. That means the world—degenerat…

How Will We Teach About Sikhism After the Tragedy?

By Laurie Patton

…ss to the Sikh temple in Oak Creek Wisconsin is still restricted as police search for clues to the unspeakable violence that occurred there last Sunday. But across the country, other Sikh temples are responding to the shooting not by shutting their doors, but by opening them. The Sikh temple in San Jose held an open house and gave out free head coverings. Over five hundred people gathered for a vigil at the gurdwara in Plymouth, a suburb of Detroi…

Mumbai, Five Months After: Searching for a Coherent Stance on Religious Violence

By Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

…s violence. And only then can the implication of religious identity in the search for social justice be understood. If the Mumbai attacks were not India’s 9/11, it was because of the sheer particularity of each event—as Laurie Patton wrote in these pages shortly afterward, it was Mumbai’s sense of place that the attackers sought to destroy. Mumbai’s sense of place remains after the tragedy (as, of course, New York’s did then); and that, regardless…

Billy Graham Is Probably Not the Author of His Own “Final Chapter”

By Elesha Coffman

…barely mentioned it,” Wacker told the Charlotte Observer. Indeed, a Google search on “Billy Graham” and “hell” yields few results that are not related to the recent book. Several articles that do turn up criticize the evangelist for soft-pedaling the idea. For example, The Baptist Pillar (“Canada’s Only TRUE Baptist Paper”) once stated that “Billy Graham has declared his allegiance with the blasphemous apostasy of our day” by preaching that hell m…