Reading Time: 6 minutes The quote below is apropos today for Kristi Noem, the governor of my state, South Dakota, and a visceral “critical race theory” opponent: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” This famous and consequential retort was leveled against rabid anti-communist U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) on June 9, 1954, by Joseph N. […]
Red Scare
Posted inHistory
What did Jews ever do to deserve such epic contempt?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Why do so many people around the world seem to hate Jews? This perplexed me as a kid when I first learned about the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in school and watched horrendous black-and-white films of Nazi bulldozers shoving huge piles of dead, emaciated Jewish prisoners into mass graves. And I was […]
Posted inReligion
Political Evangelicals Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Reading Time: 10 minutes Today, I’ll show you why these excessive political leanings can’t stop and won’t stop, ever, until their tribe is well and truly defeated.
Posted inReligion
The Power of Positive Thinking, Rethought
Reading Time: 11 minutes Today, let me show you what positive thinking looks like when it goes overboard and gets unhealthy — and why so many really awful people love it when positive thinking acts naughty like that.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Why Complementarians Hate No-Fault Divorce
Reading Time: 11 minutes Complementarianism is a sexist ideology held by mostly right-wing Christian culture warriors. One major plank of that ideology involves a vicious hatred of no-fault divorce. Today, I’ll show you what that plank looks like and why complementarians hold to it so tightly. Then, I’ll show you why, in their eyes at least, they really should hate no-fault-divorce.
Posted inReligion
The Dark Origins of the Anti-Abortion Culture War
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last time we covered the mismatch between those two types of goals in apologetics. But that’s not the biggest mismatch there is. That honor belongs to the Christian culture war against abortion. I’ll show you what the mismatch is, how Christians bought into one of the cruelest, most hypocritical, most patently-dishonest, and most callously-engineered causes imaginable, and how you can tell that their culture war has nothing to do with what they say it’s about. Today we’ll start with just how this culture war got started.
Posted inUncategorized
The Love/Life Principles Seminar of 1986.
Reading Time: 15 minutes I wanted to show you the roots of that cultural shift today, as we move into the holiday season, to show you why I’m so thankful that I got out of the religion while it was just ramping up its push to seize control of American culture. Today we look at the roots of courtship culture as revealed by the Love/Life Principles Seminar of 1986.
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
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.