The Offering monitors have to start carrying baseball bats.
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Nah, the church is adapting to modern times. Using use RFID and NFC wireless communication to acquire credit card numbers from church-goers.
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In his book, American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips noted that the Southern Baptist Church served as a refuge for the Southern planter class values after the Civil War during Reconstruction and afterward. I find it telling that the other Protestant denominations did not keep their Southern designation. Methodists, however, created a Southern Methodist branch in 1940, and is notably ‘conservative’ in its political outlook. Episcopalians followed suit in 1962, both arguably in response to political and social advancement of Blacks, and the rise of serious threats to Jim Crow and the rise of Civil Rights.
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True, but I really hope the accusations aren’t true. As much as I am not a fan of religion, Father Pfleger always struck me as a rare kind of priest, very activist and involved.
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I used to think religion ruined politics. Now it seems like it’s more the other way around.
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Religion is such a powerful force in American life in all kinds of ways.
I appreciate TPM’s recognition of that fact by including work by writers such as Jennifer Butler, and I like Butler’s point that President Biden is building on the legacy of the Obama administration (and others) and bringing in people who are embedded in their communities and working on solving problems, often in innovative ways, to enhance human dignity, save lives, and ultimately make us more free.
I’m glad Biden has such a wide array of people talking to each other and to him. As Thomas Jefferson said, “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782). Jefferson’s yearning for freedom of religion was not an attempt to ban discussion of religion in the public square, and I think it would be foolish today to allow white Christian nationalists to dominate religious discussion in the U.S. any more than they already, dangerously, do.
I hope his advisors help lead Biden and the country in new and productive directions.
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The Methodists split in the middle 1840s over slavery. The “Methodist Episcopal Church, South,” that resulted stayed its own denomination until the two sectional denominations reunited in 1939.
As a mainline Protestant denomination, the Methodists are not notably conservative; they ordain women and have since the late 1960s, for example. The denomination seems on the verge of splitting over whether or not to welcome and affirm LGBT persons, with most American Methodists in favor, and the minority allying with Methodists in other countries, especially in Africa, to form a “Global Methodist” denomination.
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I’m a lapsed Catholic but see the need for some kind of religious, moral and or spiritual guidance. There’s something to be gained; the golden rule and various laws didn’t just appear for no reason. Unfortunately organized religion tends to also be an institution that supports the dogma and hegemony of ruling classes and many modern governments; the Vatican supported Mussolini for example.
In America you have many religions vying for attention for different reasons. That seems unique to me and a real problem. I blame the pilgrims. We have nothing like that in Canada. Not even in very much now in Quebec, which is still predominately Catholic.
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"Lard Be Praised!"
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Though many tried, they could not heal his malignant narcissism.
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“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
I read that somewhere…
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The problem is dealing with folks who refuse to believe that only Christians have any concept of morality. Too much brainwashing.
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Except those people aren’t “faith-based”, they’re reality based. So I’m not sure they’d fit in, just basing it on the name of the council, unless they come in under the radar under the rubric of neighborhood partnerships.
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I’d love hearing that 69% of Dems are atheists. Then we’d be making some progress.
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Freedom from religion would be a nice change.
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Right. Didn’t I hear Stacey Abrams, the daughter of two Methodist ministers, saying she wished that 69% of Dems were atheists the other day? Or was it Senator and Reverend Rafael Warnock? Or was it Representative John Lewis before his death? They were probably just recycling something MLK uttered.
I love and appreciate most everybody on these comment boards, and I’ve got my blind spots, too, but TPM never seems more myopically white than when the black church is ignored.
Biden knows who is actually in the Democratic Party, helping win elections, and I think he’s doing something that is politically astute and not a threat to anyone.
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kumbaya!!!
Not a threat? Consider this. Every President who automatically utters the words “and God Bless America” at the end of every major speech, like it’s some kind of requirement, makes it harder for an atheist to get elected to high public office in this country. And that’s just one example of how embedded the genuflection to religion is in American politics.
It’s everywhere, like the obligatory Priestly benediction before a major Senate hearing like the recent impeachment trial. WTF is that about?
Religious liberals have a blind spot about this. It doesn’t trigger the same response it does to atheists and anyone else who thinks it’s a problem…
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Amen!