Protestant Fundamentalists were consistently angry that religious radio time went to preachers associated with the more moderate/liberal Federal Council of Churches. When some organized around Billy Graham to create "evangelicalism" as we now know it, radio air time was one of their main goals.

The simple explanation is that many Christian traditions lean into Jesus as superhero and don't particularly care about Jesus as ethical teacher or model, even denigrating those emphases as misleading.

I think a lot of this rhetoric pretty directly follows from how Christian Zionism was the off-ramp that many US Christians took away from overt antisemitism. Now that they're "pro-Israel," there's not any hesitation about being theologically antisemitic and still viewing themselves as loving people.

They are not hiding it, people who don't see it at this point are choosing not to

We underestimate how much conservatism in the US has always been about gender/misogyny and reinforcing it at all costs. Every major issue since the movement emerged (anti-communism, segregation, anti-government, abortion, homophobia) has been a variation on "they're threatening your manliness."

one problem Abundance has is that the electorate is uhhhhh not actually that great at understanding housing markets

Practically speaking, these guys are actually making a pretty good bet that MAGA-sympathetic people will flock to their churches, given that religious behavior tends to follow political orientation in the US. Those of us who are horrified about this on a principled basis should remember that.

That video of Richard Dawkins and Ted Haggard will haunt me forever.

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

wrote on charlie kirk for the newsletter this weekend

The Supreme Court bans affirmative action in university admissions but is okay with racial profiling on American streets. That pretty much sums up white supremacy--heads I win, tails you lose, all legal.

Making it explicit

How did social gospeller Walter Rauschenbusch get into politics and social reform? In 1886, he was excited about the NYC mayoral campaign of Henry George, who he called a "single-minded apostle of a great truth." Land value tax could fix... Christianity.

The media is hiding the truth from you because reporting it honestly would be too dangerous for them. It would look like challenging the administration, which they have accepted is a dictatorial regime.

JD Vance said he doesn’t care if the US commits war crimes. Did it make the news? Donald Trump said he’s declaring war on Chicago. Did it make the news? Executive agencies keep posting Nazi blood-and-soil propaganda. Did it make the news?

It's surreal that this government is fairly unpopular, but we're still very close to it being true that "what you would have done under fascism is what you're doing now."

I still cannot believe so many people just went ahead and acted like this didn't happen.

All this "America first" and "100% American" stuff is just repetition of the ideology of the second (1920s) Klan. I honestly don't think it'll have nearly the same wide appeal as it did then, but clearly some of these guys are betting that it will.

I think the most confusing thing to me about our 48th president is that, with his emphasis on "heritage Americans" vs. "globalists," he is attempting to build his appeal on cultural resentment against himself and his own family in a way that I've only seen UK Conservative politicians manage to do.

A few months back I was telling people the 3rd term stuff was nonsense because we were going to end up with President Vance within a couple years. Still not absolutely sure, but kinda looking like it?

In a lot of ways, creationism was the original "doing my own research" that paved the way for what we're dealing with today with antivaxxers, etc.

"From my cold, dead hands," but with vaccine syringes

The US has tens of thousands of unnecessary violent deaths every year because we have and use too many guns and too many cars. On some level, I think this is because we never really ended the Confederacy and created buy-in to the common good as something worth giving up so-called independence for.

The simple truth is that children in the poorest places on earth died from lack of food and medicine because the richest country on the planet voted to shred their own Constitution due to annoyance over the prices of their chicken nuggie delivery services.

uhhhh

As much as it's true that younger people don't know how bad the Great Recession job market was, it's also true that there's a specific huge gap in entry level positions right now, like whole fields and industries that are not hiring any entry level workers, so they have some fair complaints, imo.

Pretty depressing that there are people who know what they're talking about and people who attract an audience, but there's relatively little overlap between the two.

Immigration is the central issue of our century and progressives must defend it or lose absolutely everything to fascism

Adorno: "No one who observed the first months of National Socialism could fail to perceive the moment of mortal sadness, of half-knowing surrender to perdition, that accompanied the manipulated intoxication, the torchlight processions and the drum-beating."

My housing politics is firmly rooted in our moral duty to welcome immigrants and refugees into our communities. Fulfilling that obligation requires actually building homes so these people can find places to live.

If you'll forgive me for sound like a broken record, this is why California's $24 billion investment in fighting homelessness yielded barely perceptible results.

there is a direct connection between NIMBYism and the anti-migrant turn in US politics (and you see it happening in Canadian politics too)

I think that more than anything else the academic job market probably kept me far away becoming a left NIMBY because I spent 2 years thinking about supply and demand every day. There really are situations where most people involved are going to lose out because they want a sharply limited thing.

It's kind of impressive how bad the political consequences of left-NIMBYism are: losing political representation to red states, losing the moral high ground on migration issues, and exacerbating homelessness. At least "developers" had to go to Texas and Florida.

They gaslit you all throughout the election.

Related: US evangelicals love Bonhoeffer's condemnation of "cheap grace" but forget how flagrantly it was and is given to enslavers, segregationists, and other defenders of racial hierarchy. For instance, both major leaders of the Great Awakening (Edwards and Whitefield) enslaved people.

The broader story, I think, is that they were so focused on "the family" (in the narrow sense of wanting socially reactionary judges appointed) that there were no longer any concerns about broad ideals like "compassion" and "freedom" that really mattered to some of these people 25 years ago.

I literally can't imagine a more unneeded book at this point than Preston Sprinkle's take on "what the Bible really says about women in leadership."

It still astonishes me how this was ignored by most of the people who were in a position to effectively say what they were doing and how dispicable it was. There should have been Republican politicians and evangelical leaders calling it what it was, but any moral fiber that was there is simply gone.

In November 2024, I made a list of things I thought the fascism theory of Trumpism predicted could happen.

I can't help but to think that a big part of James Dobson's legacy is the idea that homelessness can be cured through punishment.

I remember about a decade ago a lot of people were talking about the "retail apocalypse." Left-wing organizers were saying that we would need UBI to replace lost retail jobs in the US. Turns out, retail employment stopped growing but hasn't really shrunk: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USTRADE

As someone who had a nearly decade-long job that was replaced by AI several years ago, I'm not surprised. In most cases, using AI to automate work takes years of planning/training (machines often need more training than humans) and only succeeds if the work is relatively defined and repetitive.

I think part of my objection to the "Christian nationalism" framing is that it focuses attention on their religion and not on the much more salient fact that, in public life, they're assholes. Something like "Christians who are jerks about it" gets at the issues fairly well, imo.

A prominent NAR apostle is running for governor of California. Here are some notes on who Ahn is and what he might want politically.

Most lecturers at universities like Chicago would be eminently well-qualified to be on the tenure track at Chicago. The most salient difference between a lecturer and an assistant prof is luck—that a TT position in one’s field happens to open, that one is judged the best fit. /2

Turns out it's some kind of "imagined community"

Americans are being conditioned to think of crime as an urban issue. Ask why. Alabama's murder rate is far higher than New York City's. Urban crime is not worse than rural crime. It's just more visible. In cities everything is more visible. So be careful what you blame city leaders for.

"Relational pluralism . . . opened my eyes to how mainstream Christian theology, even in its inclusive forms, excludes other religious perspectives and paths from the kind of access to saving truth that it claims for itself." #Pluralism #Religion #Theology www.christiancentury.org/features/how...

It's definitely interesting that the Wall Street Journal is one of the few major US institutions bold enough to tell the truth at this point.