During Thanksgiving week, I watched two movies: Wicked and Gladiator II. Both movies reminded me of evangelicals up to their television satellites and steeples in secular politics. I watched the citizens of Oz pour into the streets, singing, “The wicked…
Here’s why the new Texas school curriculum is so very, very bad
Last week I spent a day in Austin, Texas, to testify for the second time against the new (and newly named) “Bluebonnet Learning K-5 Reading Language Arts” curriculum. Despite significant opposition, the Bible-infused curriculum was approved, which should be unsurprising…
Meddling with Methodism and domesticating the Baptists
American religious historian Nathan Hatch famously argued that when you scratch beneath the surface of piety and polity that distinguishes them, Baptists and Methodists are actually more alike than they appear because the same cultural forces of democratic populism shaped…
Antioch Declaration exposes a rift among neo-Calvinists
Within the ranks of the far-far-right of American neo-Calvinism, a rift has appeared that some call generational and others see as a rebuke of the patriarchs of patriarchal theology. The latest evidence of this rift is production of a lengthy…
It’s Pete Hegseth’s theology that ought to concern us
You may or may not like Pete Hegseth’s politics, but it’s his theology that ought to concern you more. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as U.S. Secretary of Defense has ties to one of the most chauvinistic and vitriolic…
Hegseth’s nomination fits the TheoBro pattern creating abuse culture
Given the state of their churches, it makes total sense that conservative evangelicals would elect a president who has a history of bragging about sexual assault. And it also makes sense that this sexually abusive president would nominate five people…
Here’s a Mike Huckabee connection with the Holy Land you didn’t know
President-elect Donald Trump named Mike Huckabee as his choice to be the United States ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, of course, was a Southern Baptist minister before getting involved in rightwing media and politics. His faith has been a central feature…
Hillsdale College’s shadowy fundraising and American exceptionalism curriculum
One month before the election, I was forwarded an email originally sent from an organization called “Backing America.” The email was presented by Backing America as “a message from our sponsor.” The sponsor, Hillsdale College, wrote asking for tax-deductible contributions….
Dispirited Christians must prepare to stand in the gap, historians urge
“We’re obviously in a very different space than we were in the last two times we had this conversation,” Robert P. Jones said to open the third “Faith and Democracy” tour event with historians Diana Butler Bass, Jemar Tisby and…
Sunday came for Tony Campolo
Tony Campolo, an influential Christian pastor, professor, author, speaker, social activist and adviser to President Bill Clinton, died Tuesday, Nov. 19 at age 89. He was surrounded by family at Beaumont at Bryn Mawr, the Philadelphia retirement community where he…
Before you pack up and leave the US, consider this
Here in the UK, members of the Facebook group American Women Living in Scotland help one another navigate issues of immigrant life, like how to wrangle a mammogram out of the NHS if you’re under age 50, which grocers are…
New Bonhoeffer film offers a mixed bag of emotions
The task of offering an analysis of the movie Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin has been complicated for me because the promotion for the movie shows Dietrich Bonhoeffer with a gun in his hand. My attempts to recover from this misleading…