Reading Time: 4 minutes The Christian Academy of Louisville in Kentucky told students to write letters urging a fictional gay friend to renounce homosexuality. The assignment, which was due on Thursday, came to light after a parent of one of the students shared screenshots of the rubric with a friend, who then posted them online. The assignment was apparently […]
Hemant Mehta
Hemant Mehta is the founder of FriendlyAtheist.com, a YouTube creator, podcast co-host, and author of multiple books about atheism. He can be reached at @HemantMehta.
Posted inLaw
A Christian official in Kirksville (MO) wants to revive public invocations
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Kirksville City Council in Missouri is considering bringing invocations back to their meetings a year after an atheist convinced them to switch it to a moment of silence. It’s happening because a new council member with Christian nationalist tendencies thinks his religion needs to be injected into the start of meetings. The saga began […]
Posted inLaw
Canada’s government rejects motion to end daily prayer in House of Commons
Reading Time: 5 minutes An attempt to get rid of the ritualistic prayer that opens up House of Commons sessions in Canada’s Parliament was voted down yesterday despite strong arguments against the tradition. The history of the House of Commons prayer The 30-second prayer that opens up those sessions has been around since 1877. It was only minimally modified […]
Posted inPolitics
Evangelical pastors shouldn’t be shocked that their churches are now MAGA cults
Reading Time: 5 minutes In news that won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention, even though evangelical Christian churches are losing members as a whole, the ones that are growing seem to be the ones that fully embrace MAGA cultism, QAnon conspiracy theories, and effectively serve as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Some of their leaders are […]
Posted inPolitics
Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin: ‘Christ will reign’ if I’m elected governor
Reading Time: 2 minutes For over a year now, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin has been broadcasting her Christian nationalist fantasies to the nation. She’s publicly spread COVID misinformation, promoted pseudoscientific responses to the virus, and publicly condemned the mild restrictions placed by Gov. Brad Little (a fellow Republican) — and she’s done all this in the name of […]
Posted inLaw
A rural Kansas town voted to remove ‘In God We Trust’ from police cars
Reading Time: 3 minutes If you visit the Facebook page of the Haven Police Department in Kansas, which oversees a rural town just outside of Wichita, you might wonder if it was being run by a government agency or a local church. That’s because it posts things like this, promoting Christianity in overt ways: Another post quotes Psalm 46:1: […]
Posted inPolitics
GOP Senate candidate admits he wants to block access to birth control
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is already leading Republican candidates to consider what other aspects of sex they can shut down. In Arizona, U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters already announced his desire to block access to birth control… even for married couples. But it’s an open question about whether he […]
Posted inLaw
Pastor Jack Schaap, who groomed a teenage girl for sex, is out of prison
Reading Time: 7 minutes Pastor Jack Schaap is out of prison. I didn’t think I’d be saying that until his scheduled release date next February, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons now says he’s a free man. Schaap (which rhymes with “cop”) was a church leader whose fundamentalist preaching stood in stark contrast to the crime he eventually committed. […]
Posted inLaw
The Supreme Court should stop taking religious beliefs so seriously
Reading Time: 3 minutes With a conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court, it’s no surprise that the justices are handing victory after victory to the Christian Right. This week was dominated by the revelation that conservative Christians were about to achieve their biggest victory ever after decades of reshaping the Court (and dismissing all the people who’d be hurt […]
Posted inRacial justice
Christian school promises ‘swift action’ after racist video goes viral
Reading Time: 3 minutes On Tuesday night, a racist video began making the rounds on Twitter, allegedly featuring members of the baseball team from Grace Christian Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee. It showed a student wearing a KKK hood, sitting on a chair with the “Grace” logo on it. Off-camera, someone shouts, “Who do we hate?” The boy in the […]