Reading Time: 4 minutes Maybe he’s an unreliable narrator. I don’t know. But he is interesting. He’s a colorful acquaintance of mine from Louisiana who has long called himself The Bayou Prophet. He left religion years ago but he kept the moniker of his earlier pious days and uses it at his singer-songwriter gigs. He likes to keep an […]
Deep South
Posted inNews
Mississippi governor names April ‘Confederate Heritage Month’
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a decision both shocking and utterly predictable, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves has designated April as Confederate Heritage Month. The legacy of the Confederacy is one of white supremacy, chattel slavery, militarism, and rebellion against the United States government. The Confederacy lost decisively on the battlefield against the Union, but descendants of the Confederates spent […]
Posted inPolitics
Why the church keeps getting Covid wrong
Reading Time: 5 minutes I live in the Deep South, and now that the Delta variant is here, I’m back to wearing a mask again wherever I go. School started back for us last week, and masks are mandatory because our district doesn’t have any wealthy white people bullying the school board into disregarding the pleas of every hospital […]
Posted inPolitics
Whitewashing Christian history in The Reason for God
Reading Time: 15 minutes To hear Tim Keller talk, you’d think the Christian church was responsible for every progressive social step forward that Western civilization has taken. In order to support this idea, Keller turns in chapter four of The Reason for God to address the developments of the Abolition movement and of the Civil Rights movement in the United […]
Posted inCulture, News, Politics, Religion
The Culture Wars Have Jumped the Shark
Reading Time: 9 minutes When I was in college and seminary, my professors were always sounding the alarm over the postmodern condition, warning us that the loss of a central guiding “worldview” in America would produce culture wars in which every group and cultural identity would spar with each other, fighting for greater control of the public sphere. Then […]
Posted inReligion
How ‘be not afraid’ endangers us all
Reading Time: 4 minutes I think I’ve finally put my finger on what’s beneath my frustration with my fellow Southerners during this global pandemic—I mean besides the mortal peril into which their continued science denialism is putting us all, both in the short term (see COVID-19) and in the long (see climate change). I was already exasperated with their […]
Posted inReligion
Are You Godless in Southeast Mississippi?
Reading Time: 2 minutes If you live in the Deep South like me, you always want to know when a group of freethinker types are getting together. And as it turns out, tomorrow morning (Sunday the 8th) at 11am I’ll be speaking at Our Home Unitarian Universalist Church in Ellisville, MS. If you’re looking for something to do tomorrow […]
Posted inEducation, Parenting & Family
Looking for a Kids’ Camp in Florida or South Carolina?
Reading Time: 2 minutes If you have followed Godless in Dixie for long, you know I’ve been a big fan of summer camps aimed at kids looking for non-religious alternatives to the church-sponsored kind that dominate my area of the country. For the last two summers, I’ve taken a week off to be a counselor at Camp Quest (now […]
Posted inPolitics
How the Church Became What Jesus Hated
Reading Time: 11 minutes While I’ve considered myself an atheist for nearly a decade now, sometimes I go back to church again just to remind myself of why I left it all behind in the first place. The experience rarely disappoints. The past two free weekends I decided to visit a church I had never been to before—even though […]
Posted inCulture, Religion, The Secular
My Struggle: A Black Atheist Wrestles with Anti-Intellectualism and Low Expectations
Reading Time: 4 minutes Guest post by James Murray A few months back after recording my podcast interview with Black Nonbelievers, Inc President Mandisa Thomas, I had the misfortune of experiencing the divisive nature of religion when an older cousin called me to discuss the interview. “I just don’t understand! Why don’t you believe?” she repeated, unsatisfied with the reasons […]