After covering the “crack-up” of the Republican Party in American Carnage, award-winning journalist Tim Alberta explores “the crack-up of the American evangelical church” in The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Four years…
Baptists were for separation of church and state before they were against it
For a Baptist to oppose separation of church and state feels like disowning one’s own mother without cause. What more could Thomas Jefferson have done for Baptists than pen the First Amendment with John Leland, a Baptist preacher, looking over…
To claim the label of Christian nationalist or not?
Who is a Christian nationalist? And should some people be proud to be called such a name? I, like a majority of BNG readers, am convinced Christian nationalists are a threat to democracy. I have been listening to them make…
Now Robert Jeffress says the Ten Commandments are important
Robert Jeffress, after seven years of supporting a politician who routinely breaks most of the Ten Commandments, now wants to speak a word in favor of the commandments. In a Fox News opinion piece, “God’s Cure for the World’s Chaos…
Jesus and Muslim students at prayer
Jesus took a whip and drove the money changers from the temple. This doesn’t suggest he would have interrupted Muslim students at prayer. A teacher at Franklin Academy Charter School in Pembroke Pines, Fla., however, interrupted Muslim students during prayer…
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…
Jeffress says he’s not a ‘Christian nationalist’ but America was founded as a ‘Christian nation’
America was founded as a “Christian nation” but that has been subverted since 1947 when “we allowed the liberals, the left, the progressives, the humanists, the atheists to pervert our Constitution into something the founders never intended it to be,”…
Let’s be clear: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not about the rapture and Russia in biblical prophecy
As soon as “Russia” and “war” are mentioned in the same sentence, all the premillennial, rapture, tribulation, Armageddon believers are on high alert. The Rapture Index (yes, there is such a thing) is at 186. The all-time high for the…
Taking out the 2021 trash talk
Country singer Tim McGraw may not have known the social theory that informed his 1995 hit, I Like It, I Love It. As the song’s title hints, something has happened to McGraw that has changed his usual ill-mannered, trashy ways….