Two images crowd into my mind. One is of President Donald Trump sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by a group of evangelical leaders. The other image is the cover artwork of Margaret M. Mitchell’s The…
Shirtless J6er spews white supremacist lies about Texas teen’s killing
White supremacists are attempting to make the tragic murder of a North Texas teenager about Black-on-white crime, and the grieving father of the white victim isn’t playing along. What began as a bizarre tragedy that made headlines all across the…
Elon Musk dismantles evangelical ‘family values’
“Family values” have returned to eugenics, the practice of selective breeding of humans to improve their genetic composition. The new champion of eugenics, now known as the pro-natalist or genetic-determinist movement, is Elon Musk. “Family values,” a political weapon of…
Aaron Renn’s Three Worlds and the Negative World of conservatives’ own making
There are two sides to every breakup. This includes the split between Christianity and American culture. Conservative commentator Aaron Renn has created a taxonomy for understanding the country’s transition from what he terms Positive World, where being a Christian was…
If Republicans harm Social Security, they will pay for generations
The American public is having economic nightmares. Anxiety grows over the price of eggs, uncertainty about tariffs, inflation and tens of thousands of workers being fired. At the apex of the anxiety sits the proposed 2025 federal budget. If the…
Remembering the ‘People’s Pope’
My reflections on the papacy of Pope Francis, who died at the age of 88 in Rome on Monday, April 21 — less than a day after delivering brief Easter Sunday greetings to worshippers in St. Peter’s Basilica — are…
Trump, Harvard and Bob Jones University: The resurrection of racism
Donald Trump’s threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University may be novel, but it is not new. It is, in fact, a resurrection of a previous kind of discrimination. There’s one other time in American history when a…
Inequality rises while social services fall
The top 10% wealthiest share of the global population reportedly holds 50% of total wealth, and the recent actions of the Trump administration could make that disparity increase. As reported by Statista data journalist Katharina Buchholz, the United States currently…
For United Methodists, politics isn’t partisan; it’s gospel
This is the last in a five-part series on the newly adopted Social Principles of The United Methodist Church. “Politics” often gets a bad rap in American churches, not least because it’s confused with “partisanship.” For United Methodists, politics…
Trump officials cite Harvard Divinity as one of university’s ‘schools of concern’
Easily lost in the flurry of news about Harvard University refusing to bend the knee to the Trump administration is that Harvard Divinity School is one of the “programs, schools and centers of concern” cited by the administration as having…
How Charlie Kirk went from college dropout to Trump influencer
From BNG’s coverage earlier this year, first published April 15, 2025: It seems Charlie Kirk — the Millennial founder of the Christian nationalist powerhouse Turning Point USA — is everywhere these days. He was part of a handful of…
If higher education enrollment is headed for a cliff, what will happen to Christian colleges?
In the post-World War II economy, higher education has become one of the most powerful, desired and politicized elements of modern life. But it may be facing a severe existential threat. In 1940, only 5.5% of the U.S. male population…