A small radio rested in my grandmother’s kitchen — one of those gadgets stained by time and the touch of hands that saw a day’s labor before sunrise. On it played nothing but Country Gold. As pintos simmered on the…
What if even a profane message carries truth at its core?
Editor’s note: This article is about profanity and therefore necessarily includes some profanity and substitutes for profanity. A graduate assistant at Louisiana State University, Marcus Venable, has become a casualty in the unending “culture wars.” He has been fired…
4 places to put your tithe money if you no longer attend church
You’ve tithed all your life to a church, dutifully giving that 10% “back to God” as you were taught. But then something happened. A loved one came out. Or you came out. Or Trump got elected. Or the pandemic happened….
This church wanted an examination of its history, not just a coffee table book
The Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church didn’t want the typical chronicle or hagiography when it asked historian Andrew Gardner to write its congregational history. “And we didn’t want a coffee table book of nice pictures,” said Senior Minister Marcus…
That’s not even the most interesting thing about me
I’m not usually the person who walks around every day wearing Pride merchandise. In fact, I tend to wear all black clothing the majority of the time, a holdover from the “emo kid” fashion influence of my teens. So standing…
2023 was the year the evangelical obsession with Pride month turned violent
I toted my brood of children through Target, as Kevin DeYoung suggested, when suddenly I noticed the display of Pride T-shirts. At first, I thought it was nice that my LGBTQ neighbors would receive kind messages like “Free Mom Hugs” and “You…
More people are ‘detransitioning’ from church than from transgender identity
Pose is a TV drama series about New York City’s ball culture, an LGBTQ subculture in the African American and Latino communities throughout the 1980s and 1990s. One of the characters is Pray Tell (a gay Black man). He cries, “Ronald Reagan will not say the word AIDS….
After decade of debate, Whitworth University welcomes LGBTQ faculty
The Presbyterian Church (USA) approved ordaining practicing homosexuals in 2010. Now, the PCUSA-affiliated Whitworth University has joined the small number of Christian colleges welcoming gay faculty and adding “sexual orientation” to its nondiscrimination policy. “Aligning our hiring policy language with…
An interview with Kelsey Morrison, evangelical academia’s latest homophobia victim
On June 2, soccer coach Kelsey Morrison was fired and immediately escorted from the campus of Geneva College, an evangelical school near Pittsburgh. Her offense was two posts on Instagram. In this exclusive interview with me for Baptist News Global,…
Semler’s new song ‘Faith’ tops Christian music charts on iTunes
In a tweet on June 29, queer Christian artist Grace Aldridge, known professionally by their stage name “Semler,” shared a screenshot of the iTunes music charts for that day. Their new single, “Faith” was the No. 1 song on Christian…
Embracing a queer spirituality would have freed me from years of anguish, self-doubt and self-loathing
I was a junior in college, studying religion and serving as a youth minister when I first encountered the Southern Baptist Convention’s vitriol against women. Although a Southern Baptist church employed me, a not-yet-out queer woman, as a youth minister…
Supreme Court says evangelical web designer doesn’t have to serve same-sex couples
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Lorie Smith, an evangelical graphic artist who says she wants to create wedding websites and is “willing to work with all people” but not same-sex couples. Her free-speech case was based…