Religion | Praxis

Among Whites, There’s a Strong Correlation Between Racial Antagonism and Trump Support

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign effectively bucked what the political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders adroitly termed the Republican Party’s electoral temptation of race — using implicit racial appeals to win over racially conservative voters without appearing overtly racist. Trump’s play instead was to make several explicitly hostile statements about minority groups. Trump has been willing to go where most Republican presidential candidates haven’t. That might have made anti-minority sentiments a more potent force in the 2016 GOP primaries than in primaries past. That’s plausible, because campaign appeals…

What Does ISIS Want? The Group Has Released a Manifesto to the West

Editor’s note: The following essay was released by the self-described Islamic State in its English-language online magazine, Dabiq, around July 25, 2016. As it is not available in text form, we are reprinting it for educational purposes. Shortly following the blessed attack on a sodomite, Crusader nightclub by the mujahid Omar Mateen, American politicians were quick to jump into the spotlight and denounce the shooting, declaring it a hate crime, an act of terrorism, and an act of senseless violence. A hate crime? Yes. Muslims…

Criminal Penalties for Blasphemy and Apostasy Are Still Commonplace, Even in Western Nations

Apostasy and blasphemy may seem to many like artifacts of history. But in dozens of countries around the world, laws against apostasy and blasphemy remain on the books and often are enforced. […] A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that, as of 2014, about a quarter of the world’s countries and territories (26%) had anti-blasphemy laws or policies, and that more than one-in-ten (13%) nations had laws or policies penalizing apostasy. The legal punishments for such transgressions vary from fines to death. We counted…

Khizr Khan, Father of Fallen Soldier, Rebukes Trump’s Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

Given that Hillary Clinton’s Senate vote, on October 11, 2002, to authorize the invasion of Iraq might have been what cost her the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2008, it was remarkable that the most powerful speech on her behalf on Thursday night in Philadelphia came from the father of an American soldier who was killed in that war. However, the words of Khizr Khan — a Pakistani Muslim immigrant, whose son, Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple…

Just 58 Percent of Americans Think Churches Can Help Solve Social Problems

Religious leaders and institutions have taken part in efforts to address important social issues throughout American history, from slavery to civil rights to today’s advocacy in areas such as reducing poverty. But Americans appear to be growing more skeptical of how much of a difference churches and other houses of worship make in tackling social concerns. A majority of U.S. adults still say religious institutions contribute either “a great deal” (19%) or “some” (38%) to solving important social problems. But the combined figure of 58%…

Donald Trump and the Twilight of the Religious Right

The evangelical divide over Trump has been widening for months, but it was only in recent weeks that the pro- and anti-Trump camps definitively split, with an increasing number of conservative evangelicals coming out forcefully against the candidate whom GOP consultant Rick Wilson once called “Cheeto Jesus.” The breaking point came on June 21, when Trump—ironically in an effort to appease the religious right—met with nearly a thousand evangelical leaders and announced a 25-person “evangelical advisory board” to help him reach conservative Christian voters. Almost…

Steve King Isn’t Just a Racist, He’s Completely Ignorant of the History of Western Civilization

Following a Monday appearance on MSNBC, Iowa Congressman Steve King is finally getting some of the attention he deserves. Although he supported Ted Cruz in his state’s caucuses, King is in many ways a forerunner of Donald Trump. During a panel discussion segment led by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, King was challenged by Esquire writer Charlie Pierce about the fact that delegates at the Republican National Convention were overwhelmingly older and white. The congressman took umbrage at and mounted a strange and irrelevant defense over…

To Stop Aspiring Muslim Terrorists, Help Their Families Stop Them

Yet for all his faults and demagoguery, Trump has repeatedly emphasized a point which many of his rivals and critics are perhaps a little too eager to gloss over—namely that in many instances, a would-be terrorist’s family, friends or religious advisors know that their loved one is heading down a dark path, but fail to report it. Trump’s insinuation, of course, is that friends and family fail to contact law enforcement because they are, themselves, sympathetic to ISIS or al-Qaeda and want to see terror…

The Beginning of the End for House Saud

Between the crash in the price of oil and the Kingdom’s flailing war with the neighboring Houthis, the Saudi’s fortunes have taken a precipitous turn for the worse. Both crises have been handled with the impressive ineptitude, long trademarked by the House of Saud. Their scheme to bankrupt their geopolitical and economic rivals, Russia and the U.S. fracking industry respectively, via flooding the oil market with cheap crude, has backfired gloriously. The war in Yemen has likewise become an unmitigated disaster, an enormous economic drain on…

Deicide and the Protestant Deformation

Matthew Rose’s great First Things essay about the infamous 1966 “Death Of God” cover story in Time magazine is only available online to that magazine’s subscribers, but I think I can quote enough of it here to give you its gist. Rose discusses the tenets of “Death Of God” theology — that is, how a group of liberal Protestant theologians in the 1960s came to believe and to proclaim that being faithful to Christ meant teaching that God is dead. The Time cover story was…

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