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No Bible-as-State-Book for Tennessee as Legislators Suffer “Symbol Fatigue”

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…tions. Decades later, in 1927, the legislatures of seven states — Alabama, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Oregan, Texas, and Wyoming — decided they needed state birds thanks to the efforts of progressive women’s clubs and their connection to the Audubon Society. And so it went, until recent years, when legislatures have begun to experience symbol fatigue. Part of it may have to do with how state symbol initiatives have become handy ways of introducing…

Putin’s Violent Holy War Rhetoric Made it to the Christian Right Fringe — And There’s Reason to Believe it’ll Go Mainstream

By Thomas Lecaque

…w, Rick Wiles is a known entity—he’s the founder of TruNews, a pastor of a Florida church whose fundamentalist Christian platform has a long history of antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQIA+ messaging, and which rambles on in ever more hysterical apocalyptic tirades while begging for money and preaching extreme conspiracy theories. And while this kind of language is militant and weird, it’s not (yet?) a normative part of far-right evangelical d…

‘Late Night With The Devil’ Reflects the Role of Talk Shows in Sensationalizing the Satanic Panic of the 1980s

By Joseph Laycock

…dio learned of the story, reported in The National Jesuit News, a producer phoned Patzelt to ask if they could film his next exorcism. Patzelt refused, but he did appear on NBC’s The Tomorrow Show as part of a panel of priests discussing The Exorcist, which Patzelt dismissed The Exorcist as “a junky movie.” But he was able to parlay his appearance on network television into a speaking tour, traveling to Fordham and other universities around the co…

Ritual Killing v. Factory Farming, or, Are There Roosters in Heaven?

By Meera Subramanian

…’s religions have fallen away. In 1987, the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye in Florida’s Dade County banned animal sacrifice after it began plans to build a church where religious rites including animal sacrifice would take place. Six years later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the city ban violated the church’s religious freedoms. It was the same year that Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prevents laws that place…

Beyond Terry Jones’ Qur’an Burning

By Sarah Posner

…ing a boiling point, and it’s not just because of the plan of Gainesville, Florida pastor Terry Jones — plastered on the front page of more U.S. newspapers than his church has members — to burn the Qur’an on the 9/11 anniversary. The crisis is not the Qur’an burning itself. As Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America noted the other day, while the Qur’an burning is “hurtful” and “alarming,” millions of Muslims around the w…

How Mormonism Built Glenn Beck

By Joanna Brooks

…r, Beck was offered his own political talk radio show at WFLA-AM in Tampa, Florida, the job that put him on the road from “morning zoo” radio prankster to conservative media heavyweight. Spiritual narratives of the I-once-was-lost-now-I-am-financially-sound variety are commonplace within Mormonism, which, like most of American Protestantism, has never been allergic to wealth. The institutional culture of the Mormon Church is strongly corporate, do…

Christian Punk Meets American Pop; Evangelicals in the ’Burbs

By Brittany Shoot

…and articles that tried to claim Jesus as the original punk. A student in Florida was suspended from school for distributing the zine, in part because the principal misunderstood what the art signified—he was afraid it was blasphemous. The 700 Club featured the suspended student because they felt his religious rights were violated by the school. This was one of the moments where political and cultural activism intersected. You remain quite object…

Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Obama’s Faith-Based Initiative

By Sarah Posner

Kate Sheppard has a report at Mother Jones about the efforts of Florida Republican Cliff Stearns (who supports ending federal funding of family planning services) to push federal funding for ultrasound equipment for crisis pregnancy centers. Sheppard: Crisis pregnancy centers—often run by religious groups—received $30 million from HHS between 2001 and 2006 for abstinence-only programs and other projects, according to a 2006 House Energy and Comme…

Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuse for Perpetrators—or for Provocateurs

By Haroon Moghul

…lims, for whom the spectacle of violence against Islam—burned Qur’ans at a Florida church are inseparable in the minds of some from insults against Islam wrapped into techniques of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib—is cause for violent action. This is reprehensible, and clearly and openly un-Islamic. The Prophet Muhammad is famous in the Islamic tradition for being “a mercy to all the worlds,” so kind and gentle that he once rent his own garme…

Our Dance Clubs, Our Churches

By Peter Laarman

…ore the thing that was broken, the thing that was taken, by the shooter in Florida. Rivers of blood have been running where the rainbow lights are meant to bathe the dancing feet of God’s beloved and beautiful children. What was a place of grace is now a charnel house of utter horror. We in the LGBTQ community have been thinking this was finally “our time.” We were wrong. We need to feel our vulnerability again. And we need to join hands and heart…