John Thune, the evangelical Christian elected to the U.S. Senate 20 years ago from South Dakota with the help of James Dobson, announced he wants to succeed Mitch McConnell as Senate GOP leader after McConnell retires later this year. McConnell…
Jai Shri Ram, or else: Hindu nationalism strangles India’s democracy
The world’s largest exercise in democracy begins April 19 in India — an enterprise so vast as to boggle the mind. Encompassing a million separate polling stations, employing 15 million election workers, spread over six weeks, the national parliamentary elections…
Can’t a solar eclipse just be a solar eclipse?
With echoes of “You’re so vain; you probably think the Bible’s about you,” today’s conservative American conspiracy theorists are raising money for Christian broadcasters by claiming the upcoming solar eclipse is a prophetic word from God revealed in the stars…
Here comes a progressive response to demagogic and authoritarian politics
As the 2024 election looms over us like a dark cloud, many Americans are fearful of the outcome. Will Donald Trump win a second term? Even asking the question has driven me to my Bible and my bourbon (Pappy Van…
Iorg gets a unanimous vote, and he’ll need that to do what must be done
By a unanimous vote of the 60 trustees attending today’s called meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, longtime Gateway Seminary president and one-time Home Mission Board-appointed church planter Jeff Preston Iorg was elected chief executive officer of the Nashville-based administrative arm of the SBC. Today’s meeting marked…
Second vote on Law Amendment will take the spotlight at this summer’s SBC annual meeting
When the Southern Baptist Convention meets in annual session in Indianapolis in June, one vote may be the most consequential in determining the future of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. And it will not be the vote to elect an…
Baptists and the history of American Bible translation
When the earliest Christians began to circulate writings expressing their unique faith, they made no concerted effort to tie the message of those writings in any essential way to the Greek language in which they were written. After all, the…
The evangelical campaign against abortion faces three big pushbacks this year
Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans have hotly contested emotional arguments. When it comes to the 2024 election, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds women of reproductive age (18 to 49), Black women and women who live…
How evangelical and Mormon deconstruction is playing out on TikTok and YouTube
Mainline and evangelical churches aren’t the only religious communities losing members these days. According to a new study published in the Journal of Religion and Demography, Mormonism is no longer followed by the majority of residents in Utah. Ryan Cragun, a professor…