This is the fourth in a November series produced by BNG on what it means to be “blessed,” a word so flippantly used that it often loses meaning. For those of us who grew up evangelical, the term “blessing” comes…
Should ‘real’ Christians really vote Republican today?
Numerous conservative pastors and commentators have declared to their flocks that true Christians must vote Republican if they are faithful. Chief among those is Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who told a conservative political action group this…
How Trump’s latest comments on Israel align with evangelical Zionism
Donald Trump is in the news again making negative statements about American Jews while flattering his evangelical fanbase. In my piece last week, I wrote about how the dispensationalist obsession with the end times led evangelicals to embrace the Christian Zionist…
For evangelical voters, there’s ‘no exception’ except when their candidate needs an exception
National Republicans are standing up to defend Herschel Walker after a bombshell report that the Senate candidate in the hotly contested battleground state of Georgia paid for a woman’s abortion in 2009. Something has radically changed in the value system of…
How Michael W. Smith, George W. Bush and one popular worship song expose the problem of Calvinist theology and politics
There is a reason why one of the most influential worship songs of the past quarter century expresses a truth that could turn evangelicalism upside down and yet has been repeatedly rejected and banned by conservative evangelical complementarian Calvinists. Growing…
As Trump rallies voters to hate immigrants, new research shows more evangelicals are listening to the Bible’s welcome
While Donald Trump continues to rally conservative evangelicals to his anti-immigrant campaign, new research from a conservative evangelical organization finds fewer Christians are buying what Trump is selling. As recently as a Sept. 17 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump vocalized…
The monarchy Christians
Mark Wingfield posted a query on Facebook that deserves a deeper look. He wondered about the evangelical response to the death of Queen Elizabeth. And he asked the simple journalistic question: Why? I venture a partial response. The evangelical support…
Womanhood, white Christian nationalism and Queen Elizabeth
On Thursday evening, church bells began to chime in Oxford, where I am living for much of this fall while on research leave from Baylor University. I’d planned a long writing day, but I simply sat, my front door open,…
The Social Gospel ghosts of Rauschenbusch and Roosevelt haunt evangelicals still
Lurking in the carnage of the cultural un-civil war, there lies the determined opposition of many Christians to the Social Gospel. Two powerful movements in the 20th century, one theological and one political, produced a furious opposition to the Social…