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
For many conservative Republican Mormons, Trumpism is a deal-breaker. For most conservative Republican evangelicals, it's not. Mormon Republicans are balking at Trump's misogyny, bigotry, white-nationalism and ignorance. White evangelicals are not. That's why Evan McMullin's long-shot campaign is up-ending the polling in Utah but not in the Bible Belt states where white evangelicals dominate Republican politics. Read more
For a change of pace, here’s a post about something other than Donald Trump. Let’s talk about Sketch Erickson. Longtime readers here may remember some of my stories about Sketch. He was a regular on the white-evangelical/fundamentalist speaking circuit back in the 1970s and ’80s, who spoke to parents and to “young people” about the evils of rock music. Sketch was only one of several such speakers who regularly visited my Christian school for annual assemblies and chapel services. Some... Read more
Consent is necessary. This is the first, unavoidable aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. It starts with consent. But every time we repeat that simple, modest claim, we get denounced by so-called "conservatives" who go off on mighty rants condemning us as though we had said something very different. Those rants all rail against the idea that consent is sufficient -- that it is the whole, and only, aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. Read more
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