Monthly Archives: July 2021

Its finally here. The trailer for the movie you didnt know you didnt want: Gods Not Dead 4 (technically titled Gods Not Dead: We The People).

Its hard to tell what the movie is about, given that 90% of the trailer is all the America stock footage the producers could find, legal clichs like You are out of order!, and an obligatory cameo from Jeanine Pirro.

But the few seconds of substance suggest the film centers around a battle over public education guidelines that directly impact homeschooling Christian families. While claiming to be a storyabout religious freedom, its really about Christian families trying toavoid some bare minimum level of oversight. Just listen to the dramatic music when a social worker visits a homeschooling family to check their environment, as if looking out for a childs best interests is some kind of federal overreach. Given the way Christian legal groups have opposed any kind of checks on homeschooling parents, allowing ignorance and abuse to go unnoticed, that sort of oversight would actually be pretty damn useful.

Theres also an angry Christian parent who says to the main character, Religion has been removed from our schools. Theyre teaching kids that they dont need God! which is not a thing that actually happens. So at least the film series is consistent in spreading misinformation.

All of that seems to culminate in a battle in Congress where David A. R. White who played the same character in Gods Not Dead: A Light in Darkness gives a not-exactly-Sorkinesque monologue about how our government is of the people, by the people, for the people. (Everyone in the crowd claps and cheers as if theyve never heard that phrase before.)

Honestly, Im not even sure who the token atheist is in this movie. Is the franchise even about God anymore? The new film is just a way to milk the title of the first film to sell some other kind of Christian propaganda. White couldve spent two hours literally beating a dead horse on camera, called it Gods Not Dead: The Horse Gets It, and that film would be less subtle than the one thats about to be released.

Theres also no self-awareness of how white evangelical Christians have harmed our nation in recent years. I mean, just look at this poster:

Christian Nationalism helped fuel the January 6 insurrection, yet that image shows a Christian Nationalist looking at Congress with reverence. This film was made for an audience full of the kinds of people who tried to take over that building using violence, and yet White is using his platform to spread more lies about how Christians are victims in our society.

Last December, when White announced the movie for the first time, he said it was loosely inspired by the classic Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which Jimmy Stewarts character gets appointed to the Senate, then stages a filibuster for all the right reasons.

But White is no Jimmy Stewart, and Christian persecution in the U.S. still isnt real.

The only question is how well this movie will do.

Just to recap this history of this franchise, the first Gods Not Dead truly was a phenomenon, making more than $64 million during its run in theaters in 2014. The sequel, which came out in 2016, made over $24 million. That likely covered all the production costs and then some, but it wasnt a blockbuster by any means.

Gods Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, the third film in the series? It made just over $7 million. Not even close to the other two. (One YouTube commenter who watched the new trailer wrote, I hated the first two, clearly not realizing there even was a third film.)

Another way of analyzing the success of a film is looking at how it did in its opening weekend.

Gods Not Dead made $9,217,013 in 780 theaters (an average of $11,817) its first weekend.

Gods Not Dead 2 made $7,623,662 in 2,419 theaters (an average of $3,151).

Gods Not Dead: A Light in Darkness made $2,689,677 in 1,693 theaters (an average of $1,588).

How bad is that? Kirk Camerons Saving Christmas made more money per theater on its opening weekend, and that movies one of the worst rated films in IMDbs history.

All of that is to say: No one needed a fourth Gods Not Dead film. Considering the decline of the franchise and the struggles in the movie theater business right now, theres an open question of how badly this film will do. (Someone should start a pool and take bets.)

Whatever the case, the movie will be in theaters sometime this fall, courtesy of the Christian film studio Pinnacle Peak Pictures, formerly known as Pure Flix Entertainment. But lets be honest: You already know everything you need to know about it.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

Original post:

The God's Not Dead 4 Trailer Is Out and the Franchise Isn't Even Trying Anymore - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Two giant questions leaped off the page as the interpreters of American religion began reading the latest data dump from Public Religion Research Institute July 8: How could this data about mainline Protestants be correct, and why is the data about the nones so different from what previously has been reported?

PRRI, which is the new kid on the block in terms of religion polling, has amassed a sterling reputation for releasing accessible data that interprets current trends, such as attitudes about the 2020 presidential election and attitudes about race. PRRI founder Robert P. Jones has drawn extensively on his firms research in his books, including his most recent acclaimed publication, White Too Long.

The other big names in religion polling are Gallup, Pew Research and Barna Research, with Gallup being the elder statesman of the group. But there also are two other sources of religion data that most laypeople are not aware of sources that provide much of the raw data that scholars and statisticians crunch and interpret in hundreds of ways. These are the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study.

One of the biggest stories of religion news in recent years has been the rapid growth of the nones.

Think of these last two sources as data wholesalers. Theyre the equivalent of manufacturers who produce the products that end up on your grocery store shelves, although you as a consumer only interact with the grocery store and pay no attention to the wholesalers behind the curtain.

Thats the background to provide understanding of the latest polling from PRRI, which already has made headlines around the nation. Many of those headlines have focused on a reported increase in mainline Protestants or a reported decline in the percentage of Americans who identify as religious nones.

PRRIs cell phone and landline phone survey of 50,334 persons over the course of an entire year (2020) found that growth of the nones is slowing. Nones are those who when asked on other surveys what their religious affiliation is skip all the normal answers and instead chose none of the above.

In his new book, Burge uses previously published data, including from the General Social Survey and Pew, to report that the nones currently comprise 34% of the U.S. population up from just 5% of Americans in the 1970s and 22% in 2008. Thus, this has been dubbed the fastest growing religious group in America.

According to this perspective, atheists and agnostics each represent 6% of the population, while 21% of Americans identify as the more common type of none people whose religion is nothing in particular.

The new PRRI data, however, calculates that religiously unaffiliated Americans comprise 23% of the population, including the nothing in particular (17%) and those who identify as atheist (3%) or agnostic (3%).

Thats an overall comparative 4-point drop in the fastest-growing religious group in America. And it counts atheists and agnostics at half the strength of other surveys.

PRRIs answer is that the growth of the nones reached its peak in 2018 and now is settling back to slightly lower numbers.

PRRIs answer is that the growth of the nones reached its peak in 2018 and now is settling back to slightly lower numbers. If true, thats a spot of good news for the institutional church in America, which has been losing adherents by the thousands every year and fretting over how to reach the nones.

As the PRRI data have been public only a week, complete answers to questions about how one survey compares to another are not yet available. However, you can be sure this will be a topic of intense conversation and writing in the days to come.

One important note: PRRI points out that the increase in religious disaffiliation has occurred across all age groups but has been most pronounced among young Americans. And even though the likelihood of an 18- to 29-year-old being a none has dropped 2 points, the unaffiliated group still accounts for 36% of the young adult population the largest percentage of any age group.

More vexing and controversial is PRRIs report on mainline Protestants: The slight increase in white Christians between 2018 and 2020 was driven primarily by an uptick in the proportion of white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants and a stabilization in the proportion of white Catholics. Since 2007, white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants have declined from 19% of the population to a low of 13% in 2016, but the last three years have seen small but steady increases, up to 16% in 2020.

Ryan Burge, the professor who studies the nones, weighed in on this one. His message: Wait a minute; dont get too excited about this. His reason for caution: Internal data from all the mainline denominations continues to show precipitous declines in membership and participation.

Sidenote here: Perhaps youre wondering who is a mainline Protestant. Thats a good question with a complicated answer.

Historically, the mainline has included the so-called Seven Sisters, which are the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church in America, American Baptist Churches USA, the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ. Plus a few other smaller groups. Depending on whos counting.

A notable distinction for Baptists is that American Baptist churches are counted among the mainline but Southern Baptist churches and most Black Baptist churches are not. Southern Baptists typically get counted among evangelical churches. Newer Baptist groups such as the Alliance of Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship seemingly fall between the cracks of statistical categories.

Burge explains that most religion researchers think of three kinds of Protestants (and by the way, theres a whole separate conversation to be had about whether Baptists are technically Protestants anyway). Those categories are evangelical, mainline and historically Black Protestants.

The wholesale data that researchers like Burge have used to chart a continued downward path for the mainline shows its share of the American market to be about 12%, down from 30% as recently as the 1970s. And the combined data reported by those denominations also parallels the same dramatic declines.

This analysis alone indicates that there are six million fewer members of these seven traditions than just a decade ago. Its hard to conceive of a situation where these denominations are losing hundreds of thousands of members each year, yet the overall mainline tradition is growing in size.

How, then, to account for the new PRRI data that shows a small but steady increase in the mainline?

The answer most likely is found in how the survey questions are asked, Burge said. Other surveys, including the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, use a series of branching questions in their polls that take respondents down a path of answering are you this or that? and then are you this or that?

PRRI uses a different, and also valid, approach. The first question is about broad religious tradition, Burge explained. This includes response options like: Protestant, Catholic, Mormon or atheist. Then, respondents are asked if they identify as evangelical or born-again or not. If they say that they are Protestants and self-identify as evangelical, then they are evangelicals. But, if they say they are Protestant but dont identify as evangelical, then they are mainline. Using this approach compared to the denominational strategy can lead to slightly different estimates.

However you slice the data, though, there is one clear and unmistakable conclusion, Burge said: The largest traditions in the mainline are losing members at an incredibly rapid rate.

Coming tomorrow: The new PRRI data digs down to a county-by-county level to offer some of the most localized insight on religion politics available anywhere.

Link:

New national survey flips the narrative on mainline Protestants and the 'nones,' but why? - Baptist News Global

(RNS) Popular activities for this (mostly) vaccinated summer include: visiting heavily populated beaches, hanging out indoors with crowds of more than 50 and debating biblical Greek translations on the internet.

On TikTok, more than 49 million users have viewed the hashtag #deconstruction a buzzword chiefly among evangelicals and former evangelicals who are re-analyzing the traditional faith they grew up in.

The hashtag #BibleTranslations has roughly a half million views, leading to earnest advice on selecting a Bible translation or lighthearted videos poking fun at the King James Version. But a dynamic subsection of creators is using the platform to debunk what they see as dangerous misinterpretations of biblical texts.

Some of the deconstructionists of TikTok are progressive Christian pastors with theology degrees. Others have studied their way out of the churches they grew up in and are now religiously unaffiliated. Still others are sharing scraps of knowledge they have picked up in the telephone game of the internet. But whether atheist or Christian or somewhere in between, this corner of biblical TikTok is united over a shared nerdy obsession with getting words right.

Explaining the nitty-gritty details of ancient Greek and Hebrew in Christian Scriptures may not seem like viral content, but on TikTok, its algorithm fire.

Here are three of the most popularly deconstructed words on the video platform.

One of the biggest trends in the biblical translations of deconstructionist TikTokis breaking down the many meanings packed into the word hell.

JeGaysus, a creator with a devoted following of 180,000, offers his literary critique on Gehenna a word often translated as hell in the guise of a rainbow-scarfed Jesus.

Watch video here

Hell is often presented as a big, scary reason not to leave Christianity you dont want to wager on eternal life and be on the losing end. At least, thats how Jesseca Reddell felt (Motherofdogs on TikTok). For Reddell, learning more about the different meanings behind H-E-double-hockey-sticks helped her get over her fear of eternal damnation if she left her church. Share with your traumatized friend, the video caption suggests.

Watch video here

There are many ancient traditions about the afterlife. Scriptural descriptions of the bad place are often intertwined with secular ideas that were popular at the time. So one big question deconstruction advocates pose is what word is actually behind the English translation, hell. Maybe Gehenna? Possibly Tartarus? Could be Hades or even Sheol?

Ricky Brock Jr. has a bachelors in theology, which he puts to use responding to his followers questions about the afterlife. Here, he explains some of the origins of the concept of hell in order to help a commenter overcome their fear.

Watch video here

The Greek words that are translated in contemporary English as homosexuality or homosexuals are just as hotly debated as hell among TikTok scholars.

The Rev. Karla Kamstra offers a little ditty to summarize her thoughts on where the word homosexual can be found in the Bible.

Watch video here

Many creators, like Kamstra above, focus on the Greek word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 6:9 arsenokoitai. They point out controversies in the history of its translation and the different ways to interpret the word. The ancient Greek word gets trotted out in daily internet beef, like in Macy Schultzs video below:

Watch video here

Andrew Harrison Cox has seminary training and now works at a justice ministry in Florida. His videos, like the one below, point out the gap between the cultural phenomena Paul refers to and how we talk about homosexuality today.

Watch video here

Others flesh out passages such as Romans 1:26 with more cultural context. Heres the passage (NIV translation, just for the record):

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

But, according to one TikToker, Pauls referring to specific acts happening in pagan temples as part of idolatrous worship.

Watch video here

These biblical deconstructionists of TikTok have landed on a single conclusion: They are in fairly firm agreement that, according to the Bible, homosexuality is not a sin.

Andrew Harrison Cox preaches that message to try to dispel the anxiety his followers express.

Watch video here

The father of lies provides nearly limitless fodder for TikTok theologians looking to undo some common misconceptions. Creators discuss the different titles in the Scriptures that have become names for the Prince of Darkness we know and loathe today.

Deconstructing the story of the devil also attracts creators who dont normally dedicate their feeds to biblical interpretation or deconstruction content. Such as Logan Ford, 25, who claims Lucifers origins were a typo.

Watch video here

And some, like Jeff Baker, pastor and co-founder of Chosen Family Church, manage to cram a semesters worth of biblical criticism on scriptural imagery for Satan into a 60-second video:

Watch video here

If youre looking for a crash course in pop biblical criticism, enjoy stoking online arguments over ancient texts or just hope to learn a little Greek in 60 seconds, maybe open TikTok and start scrolling.

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Three of the most mistranslated words in Scripture according to TikTokers - Religion News Service

Matt Powell, the hate-preacher and Creationist who appears to have dedicated his life to making atheists look smart, has done it again.

Fresh off of his claim that evolution is racist because it supposedly teaches that we evolved from African Americans even though there are African Americans that are still alive today yes, hes really that dumb Powell is back with a new argument to disprove evolution using toddler logic. (Or, as Creationists call it, Ph.D.-level thinking.)

(In case he deletes that video out of embarrassment, heres a mirror.)

His argument goes like this.

1) Evolutionists often say they want to save endangered species. (Yes.)2) That means there are species going extinct. (Yes.)3) But according to evolution, species should be getting created all the time through natural selection. (Yes, but not the way he thinks.)4) Therefore, by trying to save the animals, evolutionists are admitting that evolution will never invent these new species through natural selection. (Oh Christ)

Checkmate, atheists says the guy who doesnt understand chess.

Its true that species go extinct all the time and thats unfortunately accelerating. We may want to save them for a variety of reasons, ranging from purely aesthetic reasons to preserving a particular ecosystem. Theres also an argument that every living thing has a unique genetic identity that could be useful to understand for reasons we cant quite fathom just yet; if theyre gone for good, we miss out on all that potential knowledge.

Its not that natural selection wont produce new species in the future; of course it will. Its doing that as we speak, slowly and imperceptibly. The problem is that evolution doesnt work quickly and were (almost certainly) never going to get those exact species back no matter how long we wait.

Theres a famous thought experiment in the world of evolution: If we could start over, would we evolve the same way? Certain traits (like sight) would undoubtedly emerge again. But humans? Looking and sounding like we do right now? Probably not.

If certain rhinos or elephants disappear and that could happen we wont live to see those animals suddenly emerge out of nowhere or whatever Powell thinks evolution demands.

He doesnt understand the topic, so he makes up his own definition of how evolution works in a way that no evolutionary biologist would ever accept, then doubles down on his own misunderstandings. And he presents himself as an expert in every video even though hes not even a student who could get a passing grade in a basic science class.

The end of the video features even more of his unearned Christian cockiness. He tries to trash atheists for not having a perfectly defined purpose to their life and then does some weird Creationists word-twist:

what [atheists are] admitting is that theyre making up or make-believing a purpose for life. They dont think there actually is any purpose, and so they say, Well, Ill just make up purpose.

Thats make believe, folks! These people are make-believers!

Leave it to the Adam-and-Eve-were-the-first-two-humans-alive people to mock atheists for making things up when all were doing is accepting reality.

Listen, Matt: Find some new friends. Find anyone who cares about you enough to stop you from embarrassing yourself. Take some time off and learn about the thing you so desperately want to disprove. Because right now, you sound like an Introduction to Physics student who insists every astrophysicist is getting the universe all wrong.

Get some humility. Or at least run your scripts by someone who understands the topic before you etch your ignorance in stone.

See the original post here:

Creationist: The Fight to Save Endangered Species Proves Evolution is a Lie - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

ANTHEA BUTLER HAS spent the bulk of her career studying the influence of white religion on Black people. Formerly a Pentecostal evangelical, she studied to become a pastor before switching paths and taking a job at the University of Pennsylvania teaching religious studies and Africana studies. Shes the ideal person to write a book like White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, in which she explores the deep-rooted racism prevalent in white evangelical culture, from the 19th century and the Southern Christian defense of slavery to Trump evangelical voting bloc today.

A relatively quick read that favors direct arguments over academic jargon, her book implores the reader to see the path of racism inherent in the history of white American evangelicalism. Like Butler, I was raised in a Pentecostal home in the heart of the South and later left evangelicalism entirely. I read the book from that perspective: Ive watched my communitys dominant culture use a veil of respectability to cover inherently racist beliefs.

Butler sets the stage boldly by defining evangelical in a political rather than theological frame:

Evangelicals are, however, concerned with their political alliance with the Republican Party and with maintaining the cultural and racial whiteness that they have transmitted to the public. This is the working definition of American evangelicalism. American print and television media have embraced and promoted this definition, and the American public has accepted it.

The more moderate people who supported slavery argued that, at the very least, the Bible didnt prohibit the institution. The president of the College of William and Mary, Thomas R. Dew, said:

With regard to the assertion, that slavery is against the spirit of Christianity, we are ready to admit the general assertion, but deny most positively that there is anything in the Old or New Testament, which would go to show that slavery, when once introduced, ought at all events to be abrogated, or that the master commits any offence in holding slaves. The children of Israel themselves were slave holders, and were not condemned for it.

Once slavery became illegal, evangelical bigotry shifted into issues like segregation, communism, and immigration. Most white evangelicals remained neutral or affirmative on Jim Crow laws. During the Civil Rights movement, protests for equal access to public education, housing, and transportation were tied to the vague threat of communism. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders were regularly smeared with this label, and evangelicals dismissed their integration efforts because of it.

Evangelicals called their entire congregations to fight back against integration and civil rights. W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and personal friend of famously pro-segregation Senator Strom Thurmond, said at a Southern Baptist conference in 1953: True ministers must passionately resist government mandated desegregation efforts because it is a denial of all we believe in.

And what is it that they believed in? They believed in keeping white people separate from Black people and maintaining white supremacy at all costs.

Of course, evangelicals knew there was some drawback to being seen as explicitly racist, especially as progressive causes and figures became more popular. Until Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, evangelicals had not yet officially tethered themselves to the Republican Party. After schools were desegregated, many evangelicals sent their kids to private schools, where they quietly practiced racial discrimination until the IRS began pulling their tax-exempt status. It was this 1971 policy that got right-wing thinkers of the time (like Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich) to unite with pastors like Jerry Falwell Sr. and politicians like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in a political campaign. They would encourage their audiences to flood politicians with letters declaring their opposition to the policy.

Falwells Moral Majority also stood united against abortion, homosexuality, and pornography, as well as political issues like the Equal Rights Amendment for women. They outlined a specific Southern strategy focusing on economic issues, which Republican consultant Lee Atwater discussed plainly in an interview:

By 1968, you cant say [racial expletive] that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like uh, forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff, and youre getting so abstract. Now, youre talking about cutting taxes, and all these things youre talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. [] We want to cut this is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than [racial expletive].

But Butler believes it was the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, our first Black president, that was a turning point in evangelical racism and eventually resulted in Donald Trumps election in 2016. Obama had been born to a Kenyan man who was raised in Islam (though later converted to Anglicanism before becoming an atheist), so both Islamophobia and racism were in full effect for evangelicals. Butler believes Obama underestimated this:

Obamas nave belief that Republicans, and evangelicals by default, would play fair was a major miscalculation on his part not just in the campaign but in his presidency. By March 2008, questions were already being raised about Obama having studied at a madrassa as a youth in Indonesia, and rumors were circulating about him not being an American citizen. These rumors eventually morphed into the birtherism campaign, which claimed that Obama was a Muslim and was not an American citizen because his father was Kenyan.

Graham worried about the increasing levels of civil disobedience deployed in the civil rights movement. He had hoped to see the movement continue to advocate for change via the justice system, not through civil disobedience, even if it was nonviolent. Eventually, Graham began to take tougher stances against Kings efforts. He was especially disdainful after the March on Washington in August 1963, when he made the aforementioned remarks about Kings Dream speech that it would take the second coming of Christ before we would see white children walk hand in hand with Black children.

But armed with accurate history, one definitely has a better chance of convincing white evangelicals. After all, I was once a card-carrying Republican and an active Pentecostal myself. Christianity Today ironically, the magazine founded by Billy Graham seems somewhat motivated to impress the issue of racial reconciliation between Black and white evangelicals, even finding themselves criticized by Franklin Graham for their stances. But thats only the tip of the iceberg. If white evangelicals really want to address the harm that white supremacy has done to their politics and religion, it must be more dramatic. They cannot be afraid of hurting their racist friends feelings, and they cannot attend churches where conservative opinions matter more than Black lives.

At the end of the day, Butler just wants you to see white evangelicalism for what it is no more excuses, no more covering up its history as a racist institution. She lays bare the ways that white evangelicals have actively driven the worst of the United Statess most racist history, including slavery, dehumanization, the KKK, lynchings, segregation, whitewashed history, and the criminal justice system. They cant hide from their past or the way that it cements their beliefs and ideals in the present. But what will white evangelicalism look like in the future? Thats a question best left to the white evangelicals themselves and one that neither Butler nor I can answer. At some point, they are going to have to choose what, and who, they support.

Originally posted here:

All the White Churches - lareviewofbooks

The city of Chesapeake, Virginia is about to slap In God We Trust stickers on all city-owned vehicles in a bizarre attempt to force unity using the most divisive thing imaginable: religion.

On Tuesday, members of the City Council unanimously agreed to the roughly $87,000 plan which would see the decals added whenever the vehicles go in for their next scheduled maintenance appointment.

In April, Councilman Don Carey asked the department to look into placing the decals on vehicles.

Carey said he wanted decals on city vehicles to quell divisive rhetoric and begin to unify people along racial and political lines.

If you look around, you can see that the state of our country, the state of our city is crumbling from a social fabric standpoint, Carey said Tuesday night.

If the social fabric is crumbling, then the way to repair it doesnt involve an $87,000 slap in the face by an elected official to Muslims, atheists, and everyone else whos not a conservative Christian. How pathetic for Carey to suggest this unnecessary fix and how irresponsible for every other council member to go along with it.

Its not like every speaker at the city council meeting spoke in favor of the idea either. They were warned!

But at least one speaker said the motto isnt fully representative of the country and that it should be modified to say In God Some of Us Trust.

The sad thing is theres not much of a legal remedy here since Christians can just hide behind the Its the national motto! excuse. Public shaming and pointing out the utter uselessness of this performative gesture is pretty much all weve got.

(Image via Facebook. Thanks to Brandon for the link)

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Chesapeake (VA) to Add In God We Trust to Vehicles to Stop Divisive Rhetoric - Friendly Atheist - Patheos