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Category: Religion

Proud Boys and other far-right groups raise millions via Christian funding site

Proud Boys and other far-right groups raise millions via Christian funding site

The Guardian reports: A data breach from Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has revealed that millions of dollars have been raised on the site for far-right causes and groups, many of whom are banned from raising funds on other platforms. It also identifies previously anonymous high-dollar donors to far-right actors, some of whom enjoy positions of wealth, power or public responsibility. Some of the biggest beneficiaries have been members of groups such as the Proud Boys, designated as a terrorist group…

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Americans who belong to a house of worship are now a minority

Americans who belong to a house of worship are now a minority

Ed Kilgore writes: It’s Holy Week for Christians and Passover for Jews; there are also two Hindu holidays this week. But as Gallup reports, the percentage of Americans who belong to houses of worship where such days in the religious calendar are observed has been rapidly falling in this century. For the first time since Gallup began compiling religious membership statistics in 1937 (when 73 percent of Americans belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple), a minority — only…

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Rev. Rick Joyner calls on Christians to arm themselves for civil war. His children would be on the other side

Rev. Rick Joyner calls on Christians to arm themselves for civil war. His children would be on the other side

Nicholas Kristof writes: The Rev. Rick Joyner is a famous evangelical leader who has called on Christians to arm themselves for an inevitable civil war against liberals, whom he suggests are allies of the devil. But this is the awkward part: His five children would be on the other side of that civil war, as he and his kids all acknowledge. Just as America is torn asunder by politics and polarization, so is the Joyner family. The Joyners love each…

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Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea?

Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea?

Shadi Hamid writes: The United States had long been a holdout among Western democracies, uniquely and perhaps even suspiciously devout. From 1937 to 1998, church membership remained relatively constant, hovering at about 70 percent. Then something happened. Over the past two decades, that number has dropped to less than 50 percent, the sharpest recorded decline in American history. Meanwhile, the “nones”—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion—have grown rapidly and today represent a quarter of the population. But if secularists…

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Pope Francis and Ayatollah Sistani hold historic, symbolic meeting in Najaf

Pope Francis and Ayatollah Sistani hold historic, symbolic meeting in Najaf

The Associated Press reports: Pope Francis and Iraq’s top Shiite cleric delivered a powerful message of peaceful coexistence Saturday, urging Muslims in the war-weary Arab nation to embrace Iraq’s long-beleaguered Christian minority during a historic meeting in the holy city of Najaf. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said religious authorities have a role in protecting Iraq’s Christians, and that Christians should live in peace and enjoy the same rights as other Iraqis. The Vatican said Francis thanked al-Sistani for having “raised…

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Martin Luther rewired your brain

Martin Luther rewired your brain

Joseph Henrich writes: Your brain has been altered, neurologically re-wired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain. What accounts for these neurological and psychological changes? You are…

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The Christian prophets who say Trump is coming again

The Christian prophets who say Trump is coming again

Julia Duin writes: Perched on a cream-colored armchair, Johnny Enlow, a 61-year-old, California-based Pentecostal pastor with short-cropped gray hair, a trim beard and Tom Selleck-style mustache, looked into the camera and prophesied that Donald Trump would become president again. Not in 2024. In 2021. “The January 20 inauguration date doesn’t really mean anything,” Enlow said in the January 29 video, which has gotten north of 100,000 views on YouTube. According to Enlow, more than 100 other “credible” Christian prophets around…

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Raphael Warnock is the man to bring the gospel back into public life

Raphael Warnock is the man to bring the gospel back into public life

Rev. Otis Moss III writes: On a Sunday morning in 1989, during my freshman year at Morehouse College in Atlanta, I listened to a sophomore chapel assistant named Raphael Warnock. Extraordinarily composed, Warnock delivered from the pulpit a thoughtful, powerful sermon — one that challenged us, as people of faith, to “sound the trumpet” on behalf of children forgotten at the doorstep of America’s promise. When he finished, we all rose to our feet in applause. Warnock once again stands…

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How Einstein reconciled religion to science

How Einstein reconciled religion to science

Brian Gallagher writes: Not long ago, I heard an echo of Albert Einstein’s religious views in the words of Elon Musk. Asked, at the close of a conversation with Axios, whether he believed in God, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla paused, looked away from his interlocutors for a brief second, and then said, in that mild South African accent, “I believe there’s some explanation for this universe, which you might call God.” Einstein did call it God. The…

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How Amy Coney Barrett’s religious group helped shape a city

How Amy Coney Barrett’s religious group helped shape a city

Adam Wren writes: In 2002, when Amy Coney Barrett moved [to South Bend, Indiana] to begin her academic career, she joined the faculty at the law school where she’d been a student, attended Notre Dame football games and eventually joined a Primal Fitness gym where she’s currently known for her fierce pullup workout. She also connected with one other local community: People of Praise, a charismatic Christian group founded here in 1971. Many aspects of her life dovetail with a…

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‘Christianity will have power,’ Trump promised

‘Christianity will have power,’ Trump promised

Elizabeth Dias writes: They walked to the sanctuary in the frozen silence before dawn, footsteps crunching over the snow. Soon, hundreds joined in line. It was January 2016, and the unlikely Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, had come to town. He was the boastful, thrice-married, foul-mouthed star of “The Apprentice.” They were one of the most conservative Christian communities in the nation, with 19 churches in a town of about 7,500 people. Many were skeptical, and came to witness the…

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White supremacy across America is sustained by white Christianity

White supremacy across America is sustained by white Christianity

Robert P. Jones writes: Over the last several weeks, the United States has engaged in a long-overdue reckoning with the racist symbols of the past, tearing down monuments to figures complicit in slavery and removing Confederate flags from public displays. But little scrutiny has been given to the cultural institutions that legitimized the worldview behind these symbols: white Christian churches. A close read of history reveals that we white Christians have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the…

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White supremacist ideas have historical roots in white American Christianity

White supremacist ideas have historical roots in white American Christianity

NPR reports: When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in January 2000, he knew it was where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks helped launched the famous bus boycott, but he didn’t know some other details of the city’s role in civil rights history. The more he learned, the more troubled he became by one event in particular: the savage attack in May 1961 on a…

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Conservative Christians see ‘seismic implications’ in Supreme Court ruling

Conservative Christians see ‘seismic implications’ in Supreme Court ruling

The New York Times reports: For conservative Christian groups, Monday’s Supreme Court ruling protecting the rights of gay and transgender workers was not only the latest sign that they are losing the American culture wars over sexuality. It also caused widespread concern that it could affect how they operate their own institutions. Many faith-based organizations, like schools or nonprofits, do not allow L.G.B.T. people to work there, citing religious beliefs that sex should only be between a man and a…

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What early Christian communities tell us about giving financial aid at a time of crises

What early Christian communities tell us about giving financial aid at a time of crises

Apostle Paul and his followers collected aid, likely for early Christians. Giovanni Paolo Panini /Hermitage Museum via Wikimedia Commons By Cavan W. Concannon, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Sometime in the late second century A.D., Christians in the city of Rome organized a collection to send to the followers of Jesus in the city of Corinth. Modern-day scholars don’t know what the crisis was that prompted the donation – it could have been…

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The road to coronavirus hell was paved by evangelicals

The road to coronavirus hell was paved by evangelicals

Katherine Stewart writes: Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown. At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core…

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