Reading Time: 9 minutes Every summer, evangelical-watchers enter their equivalent of March Madness. Of the World Series. Of, dare I declare, the Super Bowl. That’s because every summer, the biggest evangelical denomination of ’em all, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), holds its Annual Meeting and releases its Annual Report. In every Annual Report, the denomination’s leaders share the SBC’s […]
Religious News
Posted inReligious News
A shared delusion led to an ‘exorcism’ that killed a 3-year-old girl
Reading Time: 3 minutes You may have seen the headlines: A 3-year-old girl was killed in an “exorcism.” The actual story is so much worse than that, though. At the risk of depressing you, I think there’s value in talking about what happened to her because it says a lot about the power of religion to override any kind […]
Posted inLaw
Louisiana Court drops charges against pastor who ignored COVID restrictions
Reading Time: 3 minutes Pastor Tony Spell, the head of Louisiana’s Life Tabernacle Church, has finally received the legal victory he’s been clamoring for. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 5-2 yesterday that COVID restrictions instituted by the state’s governor in March of 2020 were unconstitutionally applied to Spell, who repeatedly violated it to hold church services in the name […]
Posted inReligion
Fascism in India: The weaponization of religious custom
Reading Time: 8 minutes Where I live, Navidad and Semana Santa are significant religious affairs, times when the hustle and bustle of city life eases for a month and a week respectively: to observe Catholic customs, to be with family, or simply to travel to nearby towns and farms. One side effect, though, is the impact of reduced foot […]
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 inReligious News
Does a newly-discovered Hebrew tablet prove the Bible is older than initially believed?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Christians and Jews have been excited as of late due to an archaeological discovery that has caused quite a stir. A tablet, which contains the words of an ancient Hebrew curse has been found in Israel that pre-dates the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls, whose oldest fragments and scrolls date back to the […]
Posted inReligious News
Bible museum received $2.4 million from ‘Bill’ Hwang, an evangelist who committed wire fraud
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the same year the museum opened its doors, faith-based Hobby Lobby paid a $3 million fine in a Justice Department settlement for not exercising due diligence in acquisitions. The judgment directed the forfeiture of 5,500 clay tablets and other illegally imported items to the Iraqi government. Later, the man who launched the $500 million […]
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 inPolitics
Fascism in India: The global turn toward nationalist politics
Reading Time: 9 minutes Although I never needed to “deconvert” from a religious tradition, I was fascinated by New Atheism’s debate circuits at the turn of the century: The eloquence of its speeches. All those witty rejoinders. The rallying of knowledge from a range of disciplines to out-fact an opponent. It was easy to fall prey to the idea […]
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. […]