Religion Dispatches
…data: 50 percent of white evangelicals say they believe capitalism and the free market are at odds with Christian values. According to the survey, white evangelicals are more likely to say the free market and Christian values are at odds than black Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and religiously unaffiliated Americans. On first glance that seems difficult to accept given white evangelicals’ overwhelming electoral support for the Repu…
Read More…onsequential things. They matter. Sure, in the modern world we do have the freedom to choose our guiding stories. And, here in postmodernity, we do have theories that relativize and contextualize, making that choice seem arbitrary. But none of this means that, once we’ve chosen an idea, it exists in a vacuum, tickling our minds and having no effect on things like, say, funding for scientific research, or the rights of children to have a public edu…
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…hrist.” She goes on, “We came to Jesus, because we were bound, we were not free. But Jesus paid the ultimate price to set us free for all of eternity.” No, there’s simply no tenable case to be made that Boebert is not a “real” Christian. She is very much a Christian. She is also a terrible person. And if we can’t get it through our heads that it is very possible to be both of those things at the same time, we will never effectively counter the cor…
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…ple for ignoring those advice guides, though, or for asking for a ceremony free of Bible verses and prayers. It seems likely that if they did, some straight couples wouldn’t qualify for marriage at the Hitching Post. At the same time, the 15 same-sex couples that have been turned away by the Knapps might have been fine with those things, but they still wouldn’t have had a wedding traditional enough or Christian enough for the Hitching Post. In the…
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…real thing. And this transcends politics. It’s not as if liberals are any better at serving the poor than conservatives. You talk about these very progressive congregations using “charity” or of “doing good” to distance themselves from those they’re serving. I think the desire to be good gets expressed in different ways. I have a friend, a volunteer at our food pantry, who sleeps in the street under a bridge and is here at 7:30 in the morning bec…
Read More…s connection to a controversial clergyman, but McCain was getting off scot free for his link to an equally (or perhaps even more) controversial right-wing preacher, Rev. John Hagee, whose support he sought and whom he publicly thanked last year for his “spiritual guidance to politicians like me.” Finally, the outrages of Hagee pushed the McCain campaign one step over the line, leading to the formal break. But one interesting piece of this story ha…
Read More…se of Religion” that people “sometimes fear the Bible will be destroyed by freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Let it perish if such be the case. Truth cannot fear the light, nor are men so mad as to forsake a well of living water. All the free thinking in the world could not destroy the Illiad; how much less the truths of the Bible, which … has already endured the greatest abuse at the hands of its friends, who make it an idol, and would ha…
Read More…gious groups can be very newsworthy, of course, particularly when the line between self-destructive or harmful behavior and unusual but largely harmless traditions is blurred. In the most extreme examples, shining a spotlight on a dangerous religious movement, such as that of Jim Jones or Heaven’s Gate, is not only newsworthy, but a call to give protection and a voice to those who have none. So feel free to serve douse those Cheerios in soy milk o…
Read More…r not having a beard is a central element of Islam. And I realize that the free exercise in question need not be “central” to any religion for it to qualify for RFRA or RLUIPA protection, under current jurisprudence. What I’m trying to highlight is the erasure of a distinction between a plaintiff’s sincere belief (which is a question of fact, whether or not a court chooses to investigate it) and the question of whether a burden is substantial, whi…
Read More…eby returning this power to itself). As such, this is a matter not only of free enquiry—the very lifeblood of the modern academic enterprise, with all the attendant risks of excess and of failure that such enquiry entails—but of free speech itself. The very gag-rule to which international public health organizations were subject until very recently is now to be replicated at the college level right here at home. These legislators have come dangero…
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