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Christianity

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    8/5/2022

    Trump Has Mainstreamed Christian Nationalism, Despite its History of Violence

    by Samuel Perry

    The Trump administration and the current wave of MAGA candidates have openly embraced Christian nationalist themes that were once confined to the far-right and white supremacist fringe. It's vital that the historical violence associated with these ideas is not forgotten. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/16/2022

    What Everyone Gets Wrong about the Evangelical-Abortion Connection

    by Gillian Frank and Neil J. Young

    A widely-accepted narrative holds that conservative Christian leaders pushed their followers to oppose abortion as a galvanizing issue when their first concern, resisting school desegregation, became politically unpopular. This obscures the movement building at the grass roots as Christians considered and debated the issue.

  • SOURCE: Religion & Politics
    5/17/2022

    Why American Christians "Back the Blue" so Fervently

    by Aaron Griffith

    Evangelicals within police forces and in the public at large have been encouraged to understand a scriptural mandate for police authority that often short-circuits consideration of other Christian obligations for justice, argues a historian of evangelical attitudes to law and order. 

  • SOURCE: Patheos
    4/27/2022

    What Makes a Conservative Christian College?

    by Andrea L. Turpin

    What does it mean when a self-identified "Conservative Christian" college determines that it has violated its own mission by teaching Critical Race Theory? Is the violation religious or political in nature? 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    3/30/2022

    The Lesson from Republicans' Embrace of "Classical Education"

    Calls for "transparency" in curriculum are working hand in hand with an agenda to divert public school funding to charter schools using a curriculum steeped in Christian nationalism. But liberals would do well to heed the connection these plans draw between education and citizenship, and parents' desire to connect them more firmly.

  • SOURCE: Christianity Today
    3/22/2022

    Why Have No Evangelical Christians Served on Supreme Court?

    Evangelicals are arguably the most politically engaged religious group in America, with strong views on issues before the court. Yet Ketanji Brown Jackson could become the first nondenominational Protestant to sit on the highest court. 

  • SOURCE: Current
    3/11/2022

    John Fea Interviews David Sehat on American Secularism

    "American secularism was the result of a layered religious conflict in the 20th century that played out in the courts and that left the U.S. Supreme Court with no option but the adoption of a secular order as a condition of social peace and political equality."

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    3/11/2022

    Why Does St. Brigid Get So Much Less Attention than Patrick?

    by Lisa Bitel

    "This year on March 17, when you’re wearing the green and singing “Dirty Ol’ Town,” take a moment to whisper thanks to St. Brigid, the compassionate, sensible, native-born patron saint of Ireland, and ask if Ireland’s premier patron saint should be a woman."

  • SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
    2/10/2022

    Missing from the Conversation on Christian Nationalism? Whiteness

    by Peter Laarman

    The extreme wing of the Christian right is attracting attention for its rhetoric equating freedom with their own power to determine the course of society. A minister argues that recent works in religious history show that it's a mistake to leave out the significance of white racial identity to that movement. 

  • SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
    1/26/2022

    Christian Dominionism, History, and the War on Abortion in Mississippi

    Mississippi's stringent abortion restrictions are the product of a decades-long, cross-denominational project of Christian Dominionism, the view that conservative Christians should control the institutions of society to advance what they consider "Biblical" policies. 

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    1/12/2022

    Online Christian Martyrs

    by Peter Manseau

    "Imagine if all the energy, resources, and marketing that have been used to inject ideas of martyrdom into issues of public health and safety had instead gone toward making real change."

  • SOURCE: Religion News Services
    11/29/2021

    Taylor Swift Takes a Familiar Path to Hell and Back

    by Peter Manseau

    "In its own way, “All Too Well” tells a story not unlike myths of yore. It dabbles not in mythology, per se, but in the so-called “monomyth,” popularized as “The Hero’s Journey” by the folklorist Joseph Campbell almost 75 years ago."

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    11/16/2021

    A Beautiful Mess: On “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”

    by Emily Suzanne Johnson

    "The people who made this film seem to care about its subject, but the film does not know itself well enough to be itself and love itself. Tammy Faye’s heart and soul just aren’t in it."