Religion

by Ryan P. Burge, Eastern Illinois University It’s been just over two weeks from election day, and the hot takes about what groups were the most important for Joe Biden’s victory have already filled up social media. I did a number of media appearances in the days after election day where I pointed to the …

By Hemant Mehta Miracle Meadows School, a Seventh-day Adventist-run alternative school in Salem, West Virginia, made headlines for all the wrong reasons back in 2014. The year-round school encouraged parents to send kids there if they were dishonest, defiant, or experiencing “spiritual disinterest.” And many parents did, in part because the staff members were said to …

By Michelle Boorstein One week after a bombshell Vatican report about the rise of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, U.S. bishops debated the report’s import Monday at their biannual meeting, with some saying it left out the role of money, others saying it shows the bishop-picking process needs fixing, and still others disagreeing about whether it showed …

By John Stoehr On Monday, the Times ran an article as significant as it was generally overlooked. It was a short interview with Matthew Sheffield, a key architect of the right-wing media apparatus that not only spreads “alternative facts” but maintains an “alternative reality” that millions of Americans inhabit. “I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of …

By Nancy LeTourneau Paul Ewell, a business professor and dean at Virginia Wesleyan University, wrote on Facebook recently that anyone who supported Biden for president is “ignorant, anti-American and anti-Christian.” Donald Trump was so impressed with the sentiment that he retweeted the quote with a one word commentary: “Progress!” We have, of course, become somewhat immune to that kind …

By Hemant Mehta On Monday, conservative Rod Dreher wrote about why Millennials were abandoning evangelical Christianity. Someone whose kids walked away from the faith, Dreher said, blamed Donald Trump and the MAGA-ness of so many churches, but Dreher didn’t believe that was the full extent of it. He posted a letter from a different reader that offered even more suggestions: …

By Devin Dwyer Houses of worship from Nevada to New York, chafing at attendance restrictions imposed by state governors during the coronavirus pandemic, are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on their behalf as a matter of religious freedom. Two Orthodox Jewish synagogues in New York this week joined the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn in asking the justices to …

By JTA and Gabe Friedman Madison Cawthorn, the newly elected congressman from North Carolina who was criticized for selfies he took at Hitler’s vacation retreat in Germany, is a zealous Christian. And the 25-year-old firebrand conservative and part-time preacher is trying to convert Jews and Muslims. In an interview with Jewish Insider published Monday, Cawthorn, a rising …

By Tom Gjelten Key government policies on religious freedom and discrimination, once set through legislation, are increasingly dictated by presidential orders, meaning they shift capriciously from one administration to the next. In 2014, advocates for LGBTQ rights cheered when President Barack Obama unilaterally issued an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating in their hiring practices on …

By Yonat Shimron When it comes to mass incarceration, American evangelicals are complicated. So says Aaron Griffith in his new book, “God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America.” On the one hand, evangelicals led the charge for greater law and order in the postwar era, with the National Association of Evangelicals favoring …

By Emma Green Andy Stanley’s evangelical megachurch was empty on Election Night, with only a few cars in the Disney World–style parking lot out front. North Point Community Church and its nine satellites in the Atlanta area have been mostly closed since the coronavirus pandemic began in March. When Stanley decided to cancel in-person worship until …

By Scott Gordon A high school senior who was expelled from a conservative Christian school in Colleyville for being gay says he wants to start a conversation to help other young people like himself. Devin Bryant, 18, a senior at Covenant Christian Academy, was kicked out in August after he came out as gay, Bryant …