A Houston megachurch has been in the news due to member concerns about the ways its bylaws were amended and governance was effectively removed from the congregation and entrusted to a small group handpicked by the senior pastor. While this…
In conversation with George Mason
Retirement is one of the strangest words in the Christian vocabulary. We know how CEOs retire, athletes retire and politicians retire. They shake a few hands, kiss a few babies, give a farewell speech, collect a plaque engraved with their…
Is Nolans’ Odyssey woke or a worthy warning?
Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey hit theaters last week in a big way, raking in $264.1 million globally and becoming Nolan’s biggest debut weekend ever. The long-anticipated film features a star-studded cast with Matt Damon leading the charge…
In 3 charts: White Christian nationalists’ love of ICE and concentration camps
As the empirical evidence for the threat white Christian nationalism presents to pluralistic democracy has mounted over the past decade, various insider defenders of conservative white Christianity — and even some mainstream white Christian theologians — have alleged the term…
When we — Baptists and Methodists — were all evangelical
It may now seem surprising to many United Methodists, and even more Baptists, that for most of our histories in the United States, all Methodists and Baptists were regularly designated as evangelical denominations. The most important reason is that both…
Reflections on In the Twilight of the Christian West
One of the things I love about my job is that I get to read many manuscripts before they enter the public arena. This is usually a request for an endorsement. Last year, I had the opportunity to consider Harvard…
Trump’s war on ‘woke’ targets federal grants and foreign relations
President Donald Trump is trying to reengineer America by making his anti-woke MAGA ideology the test for what the government does here and around the world. The U.S. could be both less safe and less healthy if he succeeds. At…
Men-only gyms seek to protect Christian men from lust
White conservative Christian men are rising up all over the nation to take their place at the top of their families, churches and communities. We’re witnessing their rise to power through the Rededicate 250 events where men like Mark Driscoll called on…
5 takeaways from PRRI on the 2026 midterms
Last Friday, PRRI launched a new project, Data and the 2026 Midterms, connecting the treasure trove of demographic, political and public opinion data in the PRRI American Values Atlas to the key races that could determine which party controls one or both houses…
Democratic Socialists’ wins rattle Democrats, rouse GOP
Democratic Socialists are on a roll with two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the mayor of the nation’s largest city and three June primary winners in New York and Colorado. The wins led President Donald Trump to criticize…
Lindsey Graham and the history of ‘widow’s succession’
When U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham died unexpectedly at the age of 71, the immediate political question was who might become his replacement. In more than two decades in the Senate, Graham became a powerful force — lionized as a “giant…
AI is being used to abuse children, and we can do something about it
Last May, congress passed the Take It Down Act, requiring websites to remove “nonconsensual intimate visual depictions” of identifiable individuals. This includes both real and AI-generated content. But this law only addresses content publication, not the various ways in which…