Reading Time: 3 minutes Christian Legal Society CEO David Nammo and Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Gregory S. Baylor have suggested that US judges are “being sucked into the deep polarization and tribalism that’s plaguing our culture right now.” According to Christianity Daily, both aired their views during an online event hosted by MyFaithVotes.org to mark America’s 70th National […]
National Day of Prayer
Posted inThe Secular
Christian nationalists: Jesus must rule US government
Reading Time: 4 minutes A disturbing New York Times article about the increasing fusion of U.S. evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics reveals a growing aspirational narrative thrusting Jesus front and center in American government. It is the opposite of what America’s founding fathers envisioned for their new, secularly governed democratic republic based on Enlightenment values. Yet, fundamentalist Christians since […]
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
The Gravitational Center of Evangelicalism is Not Jesus.
Reading Time: 10 minutes With a national Presidential election looming ever closer for Americans, this question of why one of our political parties is so shot through with racism is starting to gain more prominence–as well it should.
Posted inReligion
The Yoke is Not As Light As They Say, For a Reason.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Sometimes right-wing Christians can behave in ways that confuse outsiders to their culture. The National Day of Prayer (NDP) and its associated grandstanding may seem like yet another example of that confusing behavior, but it really isn’t. It fits in perfectly with their motivations and goals. Understanding the NDP can help us understand Christians themselves better–and better understand where their religion is going and why.
Posted inReligion
The National Day of Prayer: Crank-Calling the Red Bat-Phone to “God”
Reading Time: 10 minutes One of the biggest ways that overzealous Christians reveal that their religious grandstanding is, well, just a pretendy fun-time game is in how they publicly talk about and engage in prayer. One of the very last things they should be doing is letting that fact slip to the rest of us–but they show us, in so many ways, exactly how little they themselves believe the words they say. Here is one major way that we can tell that Christians don’t have much faith at all in prayer.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Why Right-Wing Christians Are Shocked About Losing.
Reading Time: 10 minutes When we look at the balance of news coming out about Christianity, one fact seems absolutely inescapable: the religion in general is starting to lose its privileged position in American culture. But for some reason, many Christians still act like they’re totally astonished and blindsided when they are confronted with this fact. Today I want to examine this tendency–because it shows us something important about what’s going on in right-wing Christian culture.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
The National Day of Grandstanding and How It Fails
Reading Time: 9 minutes Last time, I uncovered some interesting links between the National Day of Prayer (NDP) and the Red Scare manufactured by the Religious Right in the 1950s. Today I want to touch on how the “holiday” is practiced in the modern day. This manufactured holiday–such as it is–is nothing less than a perfect symptom of the coming downfall of the religion that its biggest proponents seek to protect and enshrine into power.
Posted inReligion
How the National Day of Prayer Grew Out of the Red Scare.
Reading Time: 9 minutes As I dug into the history of the National Day of Prayer, I remembered that old saying about how religion’s a lot like sausage-making in that you don’t ever want to view too closely the making of either one. This “holiday” was concocted in a perfect storm of Christian entitlement, persecution fantasizing, control-lust, naked opportunism, and desperation. There is absolutely nothing noble, loving, or (if I may be permitted to use the term) Christlike about how the National Day of Prayer came about, nor about how it is practiced today.