"(We Don't Need No) Color Code," is a raucous, righteous middle finger directed at Bob Jones University from Steve Taylor's 1984 "Meltdown" album. It's a fun, foot-stompin' anti-racism song. The album's producer, a long-time CCM recording whiz, even joins in on the call-and-response chorus. That guy? Turns out he was also a member of the KKK who eventually went to prison for his role in an attack on a Nashville synagogue. Read more
Say, "Most evangelicals support Donald Trump" and they'll say it's unfair to deny the vast diversity of political and theological views that constitute the broader whole of evangelicalism. Say, "It's possible to be both evangelical and gay" and suddenly you'll find that such diversity is not allowed. They'll inform you that it's impossible to be both gay and evangelical, and impossible to be both gay "affirming" and evangelical. Read more
"Ecumenical" is another bogeyman word in these books. Generally speaking, it should be read here as connoting "relativistic, truth-denying." Keep in mind also that Tim LaHaye is a longtime John Birch Society member, and that the main offices for the ecumenical National Council of Churches are in New York, in a building donated by John D. Rockefeller, and you'll begin to get a sense of how ominous and portentous this is meant to seem. Read more
Ten years ago, the National Association of Evangelicals was battered by a string of scandals. The association's president was forced to resign in 2006, and then two years later, it's vice president was forced out. First Ted Haggard got caught using drugs with a male prostitute, then Rich Cizik was revealed to be a registered Democrat. Horrified board members and constituents of the NAE didn't seem sure which was worse. Read more
Evangelical Christianity is a notoriously nebulous thing. Religious historians have long struggled to define the term. Pollsters still haven't figured out how to distinguish the category or to mark its boundaries. And all of their efforts are further complicated by the nature of evangelical Christianity itself, which is perpetually contentious and disputed -- a community marked by fierce intramural battles over who does and who does not legitimately belong to it. Read more
What does it mean to read Psalm 72 or Romans 13 in a time and place where there is no king and the people are sovereign? "Well actually ..." we rush to say, the people have never really been sovereign. That whole Gettysburg Address thing is just lofty rhetoric and the people have never actually had the power. So we're not responsible. At all. Read more
Jack Chick's cartoons were infused with the abominable fancy -- the idea that the supreme delight awaiting true believers in Heaven would be that they got to watch the eternal torment of wicked sinners in Hell. That was pretty much the essence of Chick's faith. He wasn't driven by his love for God or for God's love for us, but by the eschatological hope that one day God would settle all the arguments he was never able to win here on earth -- settle them with remorseless, bloodthirsty finality. Read more
"We come on the ship they call the Mayflower We come on the ship that sailed the moon We come in the age's most uncertain hour and sing an American tune ..." Read more
"Dr. Rosenzweig believes that some confluence of electromagnetism in the atmosphere, combined with as yet unknown or unexplained atomic ionization from the nuclear power and weaponry throughout the world, could have been ignited or triggered -- perhaps by a natural cause like lightning, or even by an intelligent life-form that discovered this possibility before we did -- and caused this instant action throughout the world." Read more
In 2011, only 30 percent of white evangelicals said that a candidate's personal morality shouldn't disqualify them from public office. In 2016, 71 percent of evangelicals say this. Plus some Aimee Mann. (Consider this post your discuss-the-debate and/or avoid-the-debate open thread.) Read more
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