"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up," G.K. Chesterton said. That's good advice. But Chesterton's maxim works backwards as well as forwards. If we come to know that there's no good reason for the fence -- or only bad reasons for it -- then we're obliged to take it down. Read more
Defending the status quo of the prevailing culture by accusing those trying to change it of "cultural accommodation" is self-refuting nonsense. It makes no sense -- particularly when coupled with the narrative/assertion that says those seeking change are dangerous revolutionaries. Those two things cannot both be true. These people cannot both be radical revolutionaries threatening to overthrow the prevailing culture and also squishy conformists so desperate to be affirmed by that prevailing culture that they will redefine themselves to accommodate it. Read more
"Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." Read more
This is like one of those time-loop paradoxes from a time-travel sci-fi story. God intervenes to compel Loretta to pray for God to intervene to save Buck. Was someone else praying for God to "prompt" Loretta to pray? And, if so, was that person praying on their own, or were they also responding to divine prompting? How many loops and layers are at work here? Read more
I ask for help casting the movie based on televangelist Paul Crouch's FBI file. Plus: affirmative consent, advertising upselling, the Devil's advocacy, 15 yards for a Muslim Tebow, convertible grace, and subsidiarity -- it's on us. Read more
Watching Ricky Jay perform will teach you what magic tricks are supposed to look like, but no matter how closely you watch him, you won't ever learn how the trick is done. To learn that, you need to watch someone who isn't a master at the craft. The clumsier and more inept the magician, the more you'll be able to see how the trick works. That's why it can be instructive, sometimes, to check in with our old friends at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Read more
Half a point to Robert Oscar Lopez for trying to inject a bit of variety into right-wing, sky-is-falling hyperbole. Just calling everybody Hitler all the time gets a bit dull, doesn't it? Let's see more culture warriors follow his lead and branch out. Read more
The fundamentalist retreat, according to this narrative of history, meant a withdrawal from society, from politics and from public life. That retreat lasted for several decades until the post-war rise of the "Neo-evangelicals" -- a term meant to hark back to the glory days from before the great split in which evangelicals had devolved into either fundamentalists or modernists. Read more
Bebbington Schmebbington. American white evangelicals no longer identify themselves according to the kinds of religious temperaments described in David Bebbington's "quadrilateral" of biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism. That's not how the tribe defines or enforces its own boundaries. Those boundaries have become political and defiantly partisan -- anti-abortion, anti-gay, Christian nationalism, and a belief in "small government" in the Atwaterian sense of the term. Read more
Santorum's invocation of "Baptist ministers" above shows that he doesn't understand that history. And it shows that he doesn't understand what Baptists are or where they came from. Read more
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