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Exclusive: Christian Right Bill Mill, Project Blitz, Hasn’t Gone Away, It’s Just Gotten More Secretive

By Frederick Clarkson

…me as the old playbooks, advises legislators to engage in political sleight-of-hand in the framing of legislation, the CPCF’s about page remains unambiguous about their intentions. Their mission, they say, is to unite “government leaders at local, state and federal levels, as well as everyday citizens” to restore “Judeo-Christian* principles to their rightful place.” To carry this out, they say, “We support legislators who promote policies that up…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…ion, Afghanistan, banking, and a range of other issues. But in terms of day-to-day operations, they exhibit perfect message discipline. They find no fault at all with the fact that the person now in charge of faith-based programs at White House, Joshua DuBois, first showed his chops as Obama’s religious outreach coordinator; so that this president’s re-tooled Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is in reality just one more channel f…

The Forgotten Struggle Over Gender and Bigotry in Christianity

By Stephen J. Patterson

…s. When you are baptized, like I was, on the eve of puberty, it is a coming-of-age ceremony, a rite de passage—again, a common practice across cultures. Sometimes, though rarely, an adult is baptized. Then it signals a religious conversion, the culmination of a profound personal transformation. I rambled. “But what do you think it means?” he asked. It was a fair question. I had just seen my own children baptized. “It means,” I said, “you’re a chil…

Gays Attacked in Uganda After Mag Publishes Info

By Jody May-Chang

…eabouts of many homosexuals who, they told Yiga, they will be “visiting one-by-one [on a] warning mission.” Warned not to go to the police, and that they had better cooperate on the next “visit,” the gang threatened to come back to steal the family’s belongings and smash all the doors and windows. “[Since that night] I have been scared for my life,” Yiga told RD. Yiga’s pastor, the one person he could turn to, was out of the country on a five-week…

Religious Freedom Historian John Ragosta on “Religious Freedom”

By Frederick Clarkson

…d upon it to for 140 years to define religious freedom [since Reynolds vs. United States, 1879], but it played a critical role in development of the First Amendment and in the way the states defined religious freedom. It was far better known in the nineteenth century when historians, students, newspaper editors and politicians regularly turned to the Statute to understand religious liberty. Jefferson was very clear that you can’t use religion or r…

Republican Gomorrah Documents the Christian Right Takeover of the GOP

By Chip Berlet

…t this paradigm in sociology classes in the late 1960s. As participants in 1960s left-wing social movements garnered their sociology doctorates, the scholarly paradigm shifted with dramatic speed. First, scholars discovered no evidence that left-wing social movements demonstrated the madness of crowds or collective mob lunacy. It wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that academics including Sara Diamond (Rogin was a mentor), Jerome Himmels…

None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

By Elizabeth Drescher

…number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I need to believe in God to say that I pray? No. I just pray. I focus my intention on the gratitude I have for a meal, or a friend, or a member of my family. Maybe it’s instinct…

Jewish Past/Israeli Future: A Review of The Invention of the Jewish People

By Shalom Goldman

…ttempting to demonstrate the Khazar origins of Eastern European Jewry, Mr. Sand—a self-described post-Zionist who believes that Israel needs to shed its Jewish identity to become a democracy—aims to undermine the idea of a Jewish state. Remarkably, the New York Times published an article titled “Book Calls Jewish People an Invention” without mentioning the call for political change that is at the heart of the book. Patricia Cohen, the author of th…

Should We Expect to See a Rise in Christian Nationalist Violence in the US?

By Nilay Saiya

…ning the state with Jesus Christ first.” Taylor failed to mention that the United States is a Christian-majority country where Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists collectively comprise only about four percent of the total population. Similar sentiments have been expressed by a number of other prominent politicians with Christian nationalist inclinations, including Florida governor Ron Desantis, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Colorado congr…

Obama Fumbles on Uganda at National Prayer Breakfast

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…a for having the courage to confront those responsible for the heinous anti-gay bill in Uganda, said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. We hope that the President’s laudable stand makes it clear to Family members in the United States and Uganda that the world is watching. Religion can no longer be used to justify bigotry, intolerance and persecution anywhere on the face of the earth. UCC pastor and blogger Rev. Chuck Currie gushed,…