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The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

…futations of Barton’s bogus empiricism.  I’ve considered these questions a number of times recently in observing historians struggling to deal with the popularity of figures such as David Barton, who bowdlerize history but get the kind of attention few actual historians receive for their work.  To What Effect? These debates go back a long way. When I was in college at a Baptist denominational school in Oklahoma, the biology professor, a man about…

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Pastor Convicted in Lisa Miller Child Kidnapping Case

…d that as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s…

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

…eased its 2017 annual report. It was the first report in which Russia was classified as a “country of particular concern,” defined as a country whose governments engage in or tolerate “particularly severe religious freedom violations that are systemic, ongoing, and egregious.” So far, Putin’s increasing suppression of non-Orthodox religions has not noticeably dimmed the enthusiasm with which U.S. anti-LGBT activists like Brian Brown have cultivate…

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Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

…, they are demographically much like the rest of White Americans, working class and middle class with a significant stratum of middle class professionals—professors, lawyers, chiropractors, etc.—as their leaders. And, these are not a string of disconnected organizations sharing only a common set of hatreds. Rather, this is a single movement, with a common set of leaders and interlocking memberships that hold a complete and sometimes sophisticated…

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RD10Q: The Fight Against Feminism

…lth and Human Services’ radical expansion of conscience clause regulations last fall, or some interesting “biblical womanhood” events, such as the True Woman Conference in Chicago. Also since completing the book, I’ve met and had more conversations with Christian women who are working to challenge some of the tenets of the Quiverfull and patriarchy lifestyles, whose voices I would have liked to include with those of other dissenters in the book. W…

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Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

…s in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a seminary, but they were often quite jarring for faculty and…

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RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

…Rick Warren signed a statement of concern about global warming, joining a number of the new breed of evangelicals, much to the chagrin of the old guard like James Dobson. The press began to talk about the expanded agenda of the “new evangelicals,” an agenda not limited to the old shibboleths of abortion and opposition to gay marriage. The Five Non-Negotiable Issues Despite all the above, on a number of issues critical to women’s lives, he remains…

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Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

…—was not uncommon. Meanwhile, women in states like Connecticut, one of the last holdouts when it came to Comstockian contraceptive laws, would travel across state lines to get access to birth control. Poorer women or those without informational resources found themselves with unwanted pregnancies. Some carried to term pregnancies they neither wanted nor could afford. Others sought to terminate such pregnancies, a highly risky proposition in a pre-…

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The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Contraception Reversal

…control from the Vatican II proceedings, which were already dealing with a number of controversial doctrinal issues, and had no real intention of changing the policy on birth control. Originally there were no lay members on the commission, but when they were added they were all married Catholic couples drawn from conservative Catholic family organizations who could be expected to mirror the hierarchy’s position on contraception. The commission stu…

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Trump the Totem: Like Other Fascist Leaders, Trump has Turned from Man to Symbol — And That’s the Danger

…back against that corruption, the deep state and all the rest.” Given any number of other statements by Johnson, this comment may seem unremarkable. But the transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of…

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