Tag Archives: christian

Tennessee Gubernatorial Nominee Explains Why He Wants to Send Governor to Electric Chair

Mother Jones

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Charlie Brown for Governor

They did it again. On Thursday, Tennessee Democrats picked a statewide candidate with zero political experience. His campaign platform is based on sending incumbent Gov. Bill Haslam (R) to the electric chair. Charlie Brown, a retired engineer from Oakdale whose name is misspelled on his own Facebook page, may owe his victory in the gubernatorial primary to appearing as the first name on the ballot. But he gives full credit to God. “I got down on my knees and prayed about it,” he told Mother Jones, when asked about his campaign strategy. “That hit you pretty hard, huh? That took you for a loop, huh?”

In 2012, anti-gay activist Mark Clayton, who also had no political track record won the nod to take on GOP Sen. Bob Corker. His name was also the first name listed on the ballot. Clayton initially filed to run against Haslam this year but was rejected by the state party. The state party did not, however, unite behind a more experienced candidate to challenge the popular Haslam.

The 72-year-old Brown did not raise money or campaign actively for the seat. Instead, he sent two letters to the editor to every major newspaper in the state, outlining his plans for Tennessee, which included bringing back teacher tenure, restoring benefits for civil servants, spending his gubernatorial salary on large deer for hunters, and raising speed limits on the interstate highways to 80 mph “because everyone does anyway.” (Brown says he has been pulled over for speeding, but “not lately.”) “Let me give you something: My main interest is to put the Bible back in school,” he said on Friday. “You can write that down.”

“I’d still like to put his butt in that electric chair and turn it on about half throttle and let him smell a little bit,” Brown said of Haslam. “You can print that if you want to.”

Shortly before the election, he says a higher power intervened on his behalf. “I was sitting on the interstate waiting on a guy,” he said, “and something hit me just like that, and it said to get down on your knees to pray. I got down right there on the interstate. There’s a wide place, where there’s a pullout. There wasn’t anybody there. And I got down and asked the Lord to get me through this thing and he did. Now listen, I’m not no preacher, I’m just a Christian. I’m just a sinner saved by grace. I’m just like everybody else.”

Brown said he would update his Facebook after he got off the phone (it has since been taken down), and plans to campaign more actively in the fall, but downplays the uphill challenge he faces.

“I’m gonna campaign big time!” Brown said. “They said I was unknown—I’ve been in the newspaper for years under Peanuts!”

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Tennessee Gubernatorial Nominee Explains Why He Wants to Send Governor to Electric Chair

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Watch: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s Emotional Speech on Child Migrants

Mother Jones

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70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

On Friday, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick announced a plan for his state to temporarily shelter up to 1,000 unaccompanied children who have recently fled to the United States as part of the ongoing border crisis. He cited America’s history of giving “sanctuary to desperate children for centuries,” the “blight on our national reputation” when we refused to accept Jewish children fleeing the Nazis in 1939, and his Christian faith as reasons for the decision. “My faith teaches,” he said, fighting back tears, “that if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him but rather love him as yourself.” The Joint Base Cape Cod and Westover Air Base are the two facilities being considered as possible locations.

Notably, Patrick has said “maybe” to a 2016 run for president.

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Watch: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s Emotional Speech on Child Migrants

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Conservatives Are Freaking Out Because Comic Books Are Getting Too Real

Mother Jones

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Before the penultimate issue of “Life With Archie” had even hit newsstands Wednesday, conservatives were preparing their outrage. As had been previously announced, Archie met his maker in Issue #36, heroically taking a bullet meant for his friend Kevin Keller. Keller, the series’ first gay character, has been a lighting rod for controversy since first being introduced in 2010, prompting Singapore to ban the series. After his boyfriend was murdered in a mass shooting targeting gay people, Keller was prompted to run for political office on a strictly pro-gun control platform. Archie’s death appears to be a heroic, selfless act at the end of the lighthearted redhead’s saga, but conservatives are in an outrage—because his killer was a homophobe.

Archie Comics/AP

Christian Toto of Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood doesn’t want his kids exposed to the issues Archie presents: “There’s a sense in conservative circles that there are fewer and fewer places they can enjoy, stories their kids can read or movies they can see without being force-fed a message.”

Rod Dreher of the American Conservative responded to the news of Archie’s death by saying it “seems like everybody is gay in pop culture today,” and expressing concern that just “2 percent” of the population is engulfing the media.

Hot Air, a conservative news blog, had this to say about Archie’s last episode: “Sticking Archie Andrews in the middle of an assassination narrative is like redoing ‘Goofus and Gallant’ so that Goofus is a meth head. When you lose the innocence, you lose part of the charm.”

Before It’s News weighed in on the issue in an opinion piece: “The formerly healthy, all-American Archie Comics franchise has gone to extremes to corrupt children with a depraved liberal sexual/political agenda.”

The news swept Twitter and Facebook too, where conservatives even parodied Archie’s final chapter with a cartoon featuring even more liberal agendas that could have replaced the ending:

Though Archie Comics Publisher Jon Goldwater told the New York Daily News that the super-charged ending “had nothing to do with politics,” this is not the first time Archie’s political storylines have raised conservative ire. In Issue #10 of the Kevin Keller series, Keller confronts a woman upset about him kissing his boyfriend in public. “I don’t mind promoting my work and talking about issues,” writer and artist Dan Parent*, who created Keller, told Comic Book Resources. Though he claims he doesn’t want Archie to be a billboard for gay rights, he admits that “serious issues” sometimes come up in a quality storyline and that the kiss was an important part of a discussion about “tolerance and acceptance.”

The Archie death is not the only cartoon that’s been criticized for its progressive qualities. Conservatives are also freaking out about Marvel Comics’ decision to transform powerhouse hammer-wielder Thor into a woman, and the Council of Conservative Citizens nearly imploded when black actor Idris Elba was chosen to play a Norse God in Marvel Studios’ Thor. Marvel’s recent decision to make the next Captain America black is being described as “ridiculous” over Twitter, and Christian conservative groups threatened to boycott a gay Green Lantern in 2012.

The root of the Archie conservative ire appears to be the imposition of a political agenda. Maybe what they’re really worried about, though, is that their lily-white heterosexual fantasyland is officially too unrealistic, even for comic books.

Correction: This post originally said that Dan Parent wrote “Life With Archie” #36. The writer was actually Paul Kupperberg.

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Conservatives Are Freaking Out Because Comic Books Are Getting Too Real

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Heathens are still greener than Christians

Cleanliness is next to godlessness?

Heathens are still greener than Christians

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Pope Francis issued a rousing lamentation about the “sin” of environmental destruction over the weekend. But is that message getting through to his Catholic flock? And are other Christians stepping up to protect God’s green earth?

Pacific Standard reminds us that “much has been written about the ‘greening’ of Christianity” during the past two decades. Indeed, much as been written about it right here at Grist. But writer Tom Jacobs points to new research published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that found “no clear evidence of a greening of Christianity among rank-and-file Christians in the general public between 1993 and 2010.” From the Pacific Standard article:

A research team led by Michigan State University sociologist John Clements reports attitudes about the environment among American Christians have remained fundamentally unchanged between 1993, the year the “green Christianity” movement began, and 2010.

“The patterns of our results are quite similar to those from earlier decades, which documented that self-identified Christians identified with lower levels of environmental concern than did non-Christians and nonreligious individuals,” the researchers write ...

Expanding on a study they released last year, the researchers compared data from the 1993 and 2010 editions of the General Social Survey, an ongoing, large-scale measure of societal trends. They found that, at both points in time, self-identified Christians were less likely to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors than other Americans.

Godspeed to all the green Christian activists out there. You’ve got a lot of converting to do.


Source
The ‘Greening’ of Christianity Is Not Actually Happening, Pacific Standard

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Heathens are still greener than Christians

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Hobby Lobby Funded Disgraced Fundamentalist Christian Leader Accused of Harassing Dozens of Women

Mother Jones

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For a decade or so, Hobby Lobby and its owners, the Green family, have been generous benefactors of a Christian ministry that until recently was run by Bill Gothard, a controversial religious leader who has long promoted a strict and authoritarian version of Christianity. Gothard, a prominent champion of Christian home-schooling, has decried the evils of dating, rock music, and Cabbage Patch dolls; claimed public education teaches children “how to commit suicide” and undermines spirituality; contended that mental illness is merely “varying degrees of irresponsibility”; and urged wives to “submit to the leadership” of their husbands. Critics of Gothard have associated him with Christian Reconstructionism, an ultrafundamentalist movement that yearns for a theocracy, and accused him of running a cultlike organization. In March, he was pressured to resign from his ministry, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, after being accused by more than 30 women of sexual harassment and molestation—a charge Gothard denies.

More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.


Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers


The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent


Why the Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore


How Obama Can Make Sure Hobby Lobby’s Female Employees Are Covered


Hobby Lobby Funded Disgraced Fundamentalist Christian Leader Accused of Harassing Dozens of Women

The Institute traces it origins to 1964, when Gothard designed a college seminar based on biblical principles to help teenagers. The ministry says it was established “for the purpose of introducing people to the Lord Jesus Christ” and to give individuals, families, businesses, and governments “clear instruction and training on how to find success by following God’s principles found in Scripture.” The group, which operates what it calls “training centers” across the United States and abroad, says more than 2.5 million people have attended its paid events, which have brought in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Gothard and the Institute have drawn support from conservative politicians, including Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. The Duggar family, the stars of the reality show 19 Kids and Counting, have been high-profile advocates of Gothard’s home-schooling curriculum and seminars. (One of Gothard’s alleged victims has called on the Duggars to break with Gothard and the Institute.) Don Venoit, a conservative evangelical who has long been a critic of Gothard, contends that Gothard’s approach to Christian theology emphasizing obedience to authority creates a “culture of fear.” In 1984, Ronald Allen, now a professor of Bible exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary, observed that Gothard’s teachings were “a parody of patriarchalism” and “the basest form of male chauvinism I have ever heard in a Christian context.” He added, “Gothard has lost the biblical balance of the relationship between women and men as equals in relationship. His view is basically anti-woman.”

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Hobby Lobby Funded Disgraced Fundamentalist Christian Leader Accused of Harassing Dozens of Women

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Belgium Might Not Be a Country by the Next World Cup

Mother Jones

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When the Belgian soccer team takes the field today against the United States, it could be for the last time—and not just for this World Cup. By the time the next Cup kicks off in 2018, Belgium may not exist at all.

Belgium was an invention of the 19th century: culturally and linguistically, it’s divided cleanly between the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. Brussels, the capital of both Belgium and the European Union, is right in the middle. Recently, politicians in Flanders—which became wealthier than industrial, coal-mining Wallonia in postwar Europe—have pushed for independence, leading to serious strife between the country’s two largest political parties.

Those parties, the Dutch-speaking New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) and the French-speaking Christian Democrats, failed to form a government last week when Flemish leaders walked away from coalition talks. The last time Belgium couldn’t form a government was in 2010; it took the parties 18 months to finally do it. The N-VA is a separatist party whose support has skyrocketed in Flanders; in Wallonia, right-wing politicians are asserting ties to France, and French National Front leader Marine Le Pen—who has compared Muslim immigration to Nazi occupation—said her country would welcome the Walloons “with pleasure.”

The crisis happens to fall during one of the Belgian soccer team’s best World Cup showings. The Red Devils won all of their group stage games and are favored to knock out the United States for a spot in the quarterfinals. The team’s success is providing a rallying point for the country, if only for a short time. The team is made up of players from both Flanders and Wallonia; as a Belgian journalist told Yahoo, “When the national team plays everyone gets behind them, everyone supports them…No one is thinking about politics when the team is playing. Everyone is together and united.”

Right now, there’s no scheduled vote on separation in Belgium—like the one happening in Scotland later this year—but the situation could escalate. So while Belgian fans will cheer on their Red Devils in Dutch and French today, when it’s time to fly home, those cheers just might turn into arguments.

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Belgium Might Not Be a Country by the Next World Cup

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Campus Christian Groups Should Be Allowed to Remain Christian

Mother Jones

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I think I’m over the stomach bug that laid me up this weekend, so let’s get back to this blogging thing. Today, the New York Times informs me that university Christian groups are losing official recognition because they won’t agree to allow anyone, regardless of religious beliefs, to become a group leader:

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership.

At most universities that have begun requiring religious groups to sign nondiscrimination policies, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic and mainline Protestant groups have agreed, saying they do not discriminate and do not anticipate that the new policies will cause problems. Hillel, the largest Jewish student organization, says some chapters have even elected non-Jews to student boards.

Apparently this was sparked by a court decision that ruled it was OK for public universities to deny recognition to student groups that exclude gays—including Christian groups. I’m fine with that. But requiring Christian groups to allow non-believers to lead Bible studies and prayer services and so forth? That seems pretty extreme. I have to admit that if I were a member of a campus Christian group, I’d have a hard time believing there were no ulterior motives at work here.

As for the Jewish/Muslim/Catholic/etc. groups that “do not anticipate” problems, I hope they’re right. But this is the kind of thing that’s ripe for mischief-making. I can easily imagine a bunch of campus halfwits who think it would be the funniest joke in the world to join a religious group en masse and then elect an atheist president. These are 19-year-olds we’re dealing with, after all.

But maybe not. Perhaps that requires too much sustained effort. Nonetheless, if it were up to me, I’d allow Jewish groups to remain Jewish and Christian groups to remain Christian if that’s what they want to do. It’s hard to see the harm.

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Campus Christian Groups Should Be Allowed to Remain Christian

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Boko Haram Has Been Terrorizing Nigeria for Years. Why Did We Just Start to Care?

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the April kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram, fearsome images of the militants—in army fatigues and turbans, brandishing automatic weapons and rounds of ammo—have been splashed over the front pages of the international press. But the Al Qaeda-linked group has been slaughtering Nigerians by the hundreds since 2009. They’ve also kidnapped scores of women and children and attacked dozens of schools over the past year, with little attention from the Western media. Why did the foreign press decide to start paying attention now?

Part of the reason is the sheer scale of the kidnapping. According to the latest numbers, nearly 300 schoolgirls were abducted on April 15 from Chibok boarding school in the northern Nigerian state of Borno. Last year, Boko Haram abducted handfuls of children, as well as Christian women, whom the group converts to Islam and forces into marriage. The group attacked 50 schools last year too, killing more than 100 schoolchildren and 70 teachers. The number of kids taken during the raid on the Chibok school is staggering, however. “It is the largest number of children abducted in one swoop in the country,” says Nnamdi Obasi, a senior Nigeria analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit conflict resolution organization. “Certainly not a minor incident that could be ignored.”

But it’s not just the shock value of the Chibok school attack that’s put a recent spotlight on Boko Haram. The group has terrorized the country on this scale before, having killed thousands over the past five years. In November 2011, the militants attacked police facilities in the northern state of Yobe, killing 150. That year, the group also carried out a brazen attack on the UN compound in the capital city of Abuja. In January 2012, coordinated bombings by the Islamist militants in the city of Kano killed about 150. And in July of that year, the group attacked multiple Christian villages in the north, killing more than 100. Those attacks prompted obligatory reports by the likes of the New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC.

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Religious Conservatives Tend to Be Pretty Old

Mother Jones

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There’s nothing surprising here, but Brookings has a new report out about the fate of religious progressives in the political arena (short version: things don’t look too hot), and it includes the data on the right about the demographics of religion in America.

Bottom line: religious conservative are old. Nearly two-thirds are over 50. Conversely, the unaffiliated are young: two-thirds are under 50. But what does this mean? There are two possibilities:

Religious conservatives are a dying breed. Once the boomers start dying off, so will the Christian Right.
Religious folks get more conservative as they get older, so these demographic numbers won’t change much over time. When the Gen Xers pass 50, they’re going to start attending megachurches too.

Take your pick.

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Religious Conservatives Tend to Be Pretty Old

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Who Started the Culture Wars, Anyway?

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago Paul Waldman wrote about Persecuted, a new movie that features a Christian evangelist who gets framed for murder by an evil senator and then spends the rest of the film running from government agents. It all sounds pretty silly, and it’s come in for plenty of mockery on the left. But after watching the trailer, I have to say that it didn’t sound much sillier than plenty of other movies and TV shows I’ve seen. In Hollywood, evil businessmen have done a lot worse than this to environmental activists and the CIA has done a lot worse to national security whistleblowers.

So fine. Why not make a silly movie about a persecuted evangelist instead of a persecuted journalist trying to expose the CIA? It’s not my cup of paranoid thriller tea, but all of us enjoy being paranoid about different things. And I was happy to see that, unlike many lefties, Waldman concedes that right-wing Christian paranoia isn’t completely ridiculous:

But liberals should acknowledge that for more fundamentalist Christians, there’s a genuine feeling that underlies their fears. In many ways, the contemporary world really has turned against them. Society has decided that their beliefs about family—in which sex before marriage is shameful and wicked, and women are subordinate to their husbands—are antiquated and worthy of ridicule. Their contempt for gay people went from universal to acceptable to controversial to deplorable in a relatively short amount of time. If you are actually convinced that, in the words of possible future senator and current congressman Paul Broun, “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old,” then modern geology is an outright assault on your most fundamental beliefs. And so is biology and physics and many other branches of science.

And it’s not just changing culture. Over the last half century, various branches of government have also taken plenty of proactive steps to marginalize religion. Prayer in public school has been banned. Creches can no longer be set up in front of city hall. Parochial schools are forbidden from receiving public funds. The Ten Commandments can’t be displayed in courtrooms. Catholic hospitals are required to cover contraceptives for their employees. Gay marriage is legal in more than a dozen states and the number is growing rapidly.

Needless to say, I consider these and plenty of other actions to be proper public policy. I support them all. But they’re real things. Conservative Christians who feel under attack may be partly the victims of cynical politicians and media moguls, and a lot of their pity-party attempts at victimization really are ridiculous. But their fears do have a basis in reality. To a large extent, it’s the left that started the culture wars, and we should hardly be surprised that it provoked a strong response. In fact, it’s a sign that we’re doing something right.

As far as I’m concerned, the culture wars are one of the left’s greatest achievements. Our culture needed changing, and we should take the credit for it. Too often, though, we pretend that it’s entirely a manufactured outrage of the right, kept alive solely by wild fantasies and fever swamp paranoia. That doesn’t just sell the right short, it sells the left short too. It’s our fight. We started it, and we should be proud of it.

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Who Started the Culture Wars, Anyway?

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