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Global Religious Right Asks ‘How Far Can We Get?’; And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…t Russia fought against Chechen separatists were not, after all, victorious, and, by some unspoken pact, Kadyrov is merely exercising de facto independence? After all, Kadyrov’s gaudy displays of tradition trumping law may be an important mechanism of keeping separatism at bay by signalling, to the constituencies that matter, that Chechnya has something even better than independence: its traditions trump Russian law, while 81 percent of its budget…

Conservative Hardliners at Synod Prompt Question: “What Are We Doing Here?”

By Patricia Miller

…ach for the divorced and remarried (or for the cohabitating, or gay couples, etc.), but 3) also doesn’t condemn any propositions or approaches to these issues, and simply calls bishops and pastors to further study, experimentation, and debate, and to a “courageous accompaniment” of couples living contrary to the church’s teaching on sexuality and marriage. All that to basically certify what’s been more or less the status quo? With the more progres…

Single, But Married To Jesus

By Anthea Butler

…woman’s net worth is $31,500. Married white women: $167,500. This is story, folks, not the lack of marriage for black women. Most of these women don’t have a house either, because they were offered subprime loans that had balloon mortgages, putting them into bankruptcy. So yes, I am calling out “evangelical” black churches on this one. By relentlessly pushing marriage and prosperity as the only gospel message, idolizing “the pastor and the pastor…

Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…y RD colleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A….

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…se materials. TFN then asked me to examine the accumulated boxes of syllabi, tests, handouts, lecture notes, and PowerPoint presentations for academic quality and evenhandedness toward diverse religious sensibilities (full disclosure: I was compensated for my efforts, though I’m otherwise unaffiliated with TFN). I was interested in the extent to which schools succeeded in meeting the bar set for them by federal district courts; namely, that discus…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…and other social media sites to suppress extremist content from public view, a number of questions arise. Some are practical: how many Twitter employees speak or read Arabic or Urdu or Farsi, etc.? Should these requests be given preferential treatment over other offensive content like child pornography or threats of rape? Who makes that decision? How many people can a company be expected to employ to review these requests when they have other legi…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…picted Jesus as having blue skin, for example, like the Hindu deities Shiva, Rama, and Krishna. Janet McKenzie’s “Jesus of the People” seems to depict Jesus as both genderfluid and mixed-race. Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ,” possibly one of the most recognizable images of Jesus in the world, depicts Jesus as unmistakably white. In short, Jesus is very much “a messiah in our image.” But the real issue with Metaxas’s tweet has nothing to do with…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…us’s Second Coming. Would he come to initiate the start of a new millennium, a 1,000 years of peace and prosperity, or would he come at its conclusion? Fundamentalists and most evangelicals believed that Jesus is going to come back before the millennium. From there they determined that there will be signs or indications that tell us we’re approaching the Second Coming. They believe the Bible had laid out these signs, the sequence of events that wo…

Obama’s Gay Marriage Support Shocks Black Church

By Anthea Butler

…issue head-on on The Ed Show, calling the church out, I long for a reasoned, sustained, and engaged conversation on this issue. When the Eddie Long scandal broke, I hoped that it would be the beginning of the end of homophobia in the black church. Of course, this has not happened. Perhaps it is time for some of the pastors preaching against same-sex marriage to look to their own houses first. Same-sex marriage is not the biggest sexual issue in th…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

…of four children to flee their father’s madness; a path four grandchildren, so far, have followed. While growing up hiding my sexuality in Topeka 666 may have made me feel like the Antichrist, the stories of Nate Phelps convince most people he really was in Hell. After walking out on his 18th birthday, Nate Phelps continues to deal with the affects of growing up on the wrong side of his father’s wrath more than 30 years later. Often felt in the f…