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Category: Religion

The California megachurch pushing public schools to the far right

The California megachurch pushing public schools to the far right

The Daily Beast reports: Outside the California State Capitol last month, a fitness trainer turned school board president fired up the crowd at a parental rights rally, telling them they were all fighters in “a spiritual battle” for their kids and must answer the call from God. Sonja Shaw, who was elected to the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education last November with an assist from a local megachurch and its Christian nationalist pastor, didn’t equivocate in naming…

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The Christian home-schooler who made ‘parental rights’ a GOP rallying cry

The Christian home-schooler who made ‘parental rights’ a GOP rallying cry

The Washington Post reports: The message Michael Farris had come to deliver was a simple one: The time to act was now. For decades, Farris — a conservative Christian lawyer who is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement — had toiled at the margins of American politics. His arguments about the harms of public education and the divinely endowed rights of parents had left many unconvinced. Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group…

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Pope says ‘backward’ U.S. conservatives have replaced faith with ideology

Pope says ‘backward’ U.S. conservatives have replaced faith with ideology

The Associated Press reports: Pope Francis has blasted the “backwardness” of some conservatives in the U.S. Catholic Church, saying they have replaced faith with ideology and that a correct understanding of Catholic doctrine allows for change over time. Francis’ comments were an acknowledgment of the divisions in the U.S. Catholic Church, which has been split between progressives and conservatives who long found support in the doctrinaire papacies of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, particularly on issues of abortion…

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The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election

The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election

The Observer reports: In one corner of the ring stands Javier Milei, 52, self-described former tantric sex coach, outsider anarcho-capitalist and frontrunner in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections; in the other, his compatriot Pope Francis, 86, world champion of the poor, repeatedly derided by Argentina’s likely next president as “a fucking communist” and “the representative of the evil one on Earth” for promoting the doctrine of “social justice” to aid the underprivileged. Milei, a political unknown until 2020, has pledged to…

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Christianity Today editor: Evangelicals call Jesus ‘liberal’ and ‘weak’

Christianity Today editor: Evangelicals call Jesus ‘liberal’ and ‘weak’

The New Republic reports: The editor in chief of Christianity Today is warning that evangelical Christianity is moving too far to the right, to the point that even Jesus’s teachings are considered “weak” now. Russell Moore resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021, after years of being at odds with other evangelical leaders. Specifically, Moore openly criticized Donald Trump, whom many evangelical Christians embraced. Moore also criticized the Southern Baptist Convention’s response to a sexual abuse crisis and increasing…

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Robert Bellah, a socialist who insisted that democracy needs religion

Robert Bellah, a socialist who insisted that democracy needs religion

Matthew Rose writes: If Émile Durkheim helped Bellah understand American ideals, the German sociologist Max Weber helped him confront American realities. Bellah’s deepest criticism of individualism was that it undermined the very conditions that make it possible. Its vision of human beings as free to choose their own identities and commitments had not brought about a more creative or reflective society. It had resulted in people who were lonely, disoriented, and servile to the power of markets, states, and public opinion….

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The ‘shrinking Baptist convention’ is doubling down on the culture wars

The ‘shrinking Baptist convention’ is doubling down on the culture wars

David Siders writes: “Things have changed in America,” Tim Wilder, the pastor at a church in Osceola County, Fla., near Disney World, told me as we rode alone in a dark shuttle bus back from a day of meetings at the city’s convention center to a nearby hotel one night. “I believe we’re in an anti-Christian nation.” The next day, at the meeting site, Angela Mathews, a retired high school history and English teacher from Murphy, Texas, told me, “It’s…

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The movement that sees Trump as an instrument of God leading a spiritual war

The movement that sees Trump as an instrument of God leading a spiritual war

Stephanie McCrummen writes: Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami [Barthen] tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971. That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in…

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Christian nationalists worship God, guns and Trump

Christian nationalists worship God, guns and Trump

Susan Stubson writes: I first saw it while working the rope line at a monster-truck rally during the 2016 campaign by my husband, Tim, for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat. As Tim and I and our boys made our way down the line, shaking hands and passing out campaign material, a burly man wearing a “God bless America” T-shirt and a cross around his neck said something like, “He’s got my vote if he keeps those [epithet] out of office,” using…

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The religious landscape is undergoing massive change. It could decide the 2024 election

The religious landscape is undergoing massive change. It could decide the 2024 election

Ryan Burge writes: One of the most significant shifts in American politics and religion just took place over the past decade and it barely got any notice: the share of Americans who associate with religion dropped by 11 points. It’s a development of tremendous impact, one that will ripple across the political landscape at every level — and especially in presidential politics. Why? Because of what it means for the God Gap — the idea that the Republican Party is…

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Monist philosophy and quantum physics agree that all is one

Monist philosophy and quantum physics agree that all is one

Heinrich Päs writes: ‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolised by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped…

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Why are most of us stuck with a belief in the soul?

Why are most of us stuck with a belief in the soul?

David P Barash writes: Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul’. And yet, few ideas are as widespread and as deeply held. What gives? Why has such a bad idea had such a tenacious hold on so many people? Although there is a large literature on the costs and benefits – psychological and economic – of traditional religion, there is a dearth of comparable research on religion’s near-universal handmaiden, the soul….

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Ignoring antisemitism only makes it stronger

Ignoring antisemitism only makes it stronger

Toby Lichtig writes: Antisemitism is back in vogue. Books, plays, exhibitions, academic studies and New Lines magazine essays alike are grappling with this age-old hatred and why it continues to morph and flare up in our present day. As I write this piece in London, some of my fellow citizens are contemplating their evening plans to go see “The Doctor” at the Duke of York’s Theatre, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi,” which follows a Jewish medical…

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Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread among Americans

Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread among Americans

The Washington Post reports: At points in the past half-century, many U.S. antisemitism experts thought this country could be aging out of it, that hostility and prejudice against Jews were fading in part because younger Americans held more accepting views than did older ones. But a survey released Thursday shows how widely held such beliefs are in the United States today, including among younger Americans. The research by the Anti-Defamation League includes rare detail about the particular nature of antisemitism,…

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How the birthplace of Christianity in Mesopotamia endures

How the birthplace of Christianity in Mesopotamia endures

Rasha Al Aqeedi writes: In 2008, the Iraqi government declared the day of Christmas, Dec. 25, a public holiday. Despite being one of the few Muslim-majority states to acknowledge Christmas, the decision was, in many ways, overdue. Iraq is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, one that played a key role in shaping the country’s rich diversity and endured some of the most gruesome persecution at the hands of various rulers and actors. For the…

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How religion made us a successful species

How religion made us a successful species

Victor Kumar and Richmond Cambell write: For most of history, human populations were limited to small bands of around 150 members. After exceeding that size, a band would split and drift apart, the descendants forgetting their common ancestry. At some point in human history, however, bands were knit together into tribes—groups of groups—geographically distributed but linked by ethnicity, dialect, and common purpose. Tribes had an edge over bands because they enabled cooperation at a larger scale. One vital benefit was…

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