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      Roger Stone and Michael Flynn under fire over rallies ‘distorting Christianity’

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      Roger Stone and Michael Flynn under fire over rallies ‘distorting Christianity’Prominent Christian leaders accuse Trump allies of spreading misinformation about 2020 election and Covid, while distorting Christian teachings at ReAwaken America events A growing number of prominent Christian leaders are sounding alarms about threats to democracy posed by ReAwaken America rallies where Donald Trump loyalists Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and rightwing pastors have spread misinformation about the 2020 elections and Covid-19 vaccines, and distorted Christian teachings.The falsehoods pushed at ReAwaken gatherings have prompted some Christian leaders to warn that America’s political and spiritual health is threatened by a toxic mix of Christian nationalism, lies about Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, and ahistorical views of the nation’s founding principle of the separation of church and state.The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faith | Ruth BraunsteinRead moreSeveral well-known Christian leaders, including the president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners and the executive director of a major Baptist group, have called on American churches to speak out against the messages promoted at ReAwaken America rallies that have been held in Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, California, South Carolina and other states.Other tour rallies, some of which have been held in religious spaces, are slated for New York and Virginia this summer and some local Christian leaders are being encouraged to publicly voice concerns about the dangerous rhetoric and messages they convey.“This ReAwaken tour is peddling dangerous lies about both the election and the pandemic,” Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners, told the Guardian. “Jesus taught us that the truth will set us free, and these lies hold people captive to these dangerous falsehoods. They also exacerbate the toxic polarization we’re seeing in both the church and the wider society.”Taylor added he was deeply concerned about “a conflation between Christianity and a nationalistic form of patriotism” at the “tour rallies which are promoting a more overt form of Christian nationalism”.Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which has organized Christians against Christian nationalism, said: “Christian nationalism is a threat to the church because those peddling it wrap this ideology in biblical language and imagery. Christian nationalism is wrong as a matter of Christian ethics. The Bible is not confined to a nation much less a party or list of policy positions.”She added: “The ReAwaken America tour is a gross distortion of Christianity and it’s up to Christian leaders in the areas the tour visits to speak out against this ideology.”The ReAwaken tour’s pro-Trump political messages mixed with Christian nationalism was on display at a two-day gathering in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in May that drew Flynn, Stone, Eric Trump and the rightwing pastor Mark Burns, who is running for a House seat in the state.Stone revved up the crowd with at times bizarre conspiratorial claims. “There is a satanic portal above the White House, you can see day and night. It exists. It is real. And it must be closed. And it will be closed by prayer,” he said.The “portal”, Stone told a rapt crowd, first appeared after Joe Biden “became president and it will be closed before he leaves”. Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, was convicted on three counts including obstruction during the Russia meddling investigations, but he was pardoned in late 2020 by Trump, who had earlier commuted his sentence.Burns, an ardent Trump backer, drew applause at the rally with blistering attacks on the LGBTQ community, top congressional Democrats, and even the GOP senator Lindsey Graham, a strong Trump ally.Known for his penchant for mixing religious messages with politics, Burns told another ReAwaken meeting in Ohio in February that God would “raise up armies” to help conservatives “shut down” Democratic-run America.“Are you ready to fight with me? Shout yeah!” Burns loudly exhorted the crowd. “Are you ready to stand with me? Shout yeah!”But retired Lt Gen Flynn, a staunch ally of Trump’s who told the rightwing network Newsmax in December 2020 that Trump should deploy the military to “rerun the election” in swing states Biden won, is the tour’s most highly promoted draw.At a ReAwaken event in Texas in November, for instance, Flynn sparked strong criticism by claiming that America should have just “one religion”.“If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” Flynn said. “One nation under God and one religion under God, right? All of us, working together.”At the South Carolina rally, Flynn proclaimed that the US has a “biblical destiny”, and posited that the US was built on a “set of Judeo-Christian principles”.Flynn’s views alarm Taylor of Sojourners. “Flynn has a warped understanding of religion and American history,” Taylor said.The ReAwaken tour was launched by a conservative Oklahoma talkshow host and entrepreneur named Clay Clark in tandem with Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s first national security adviser. Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russia’s ambassador before Trump took office, but in late 2020 Trump pardoned him.The Trump loyalist and multimillionaire Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, told the Guardian last year the America Project, an advocacy group he founded that boasts Flynn as a special adviser and spokesman, put up “tens of thousands of dollars” to help launch the rallies in 2021, and that he has attended some himself.Flynn’s central role at the ReAwaken events was cited in a hard-hitting April op-ed in the Times of San Diego by the Rev Melinda Teter Dodge.“Tragically, late last month, proclaimed church leaders and religious zealots descended upon San Diego county, and twisted this scriptural truth for specific political purposes. In speaking to thousands of vulnerable attendees, this group spewed dangerous falsehood after falsehood about Covid-19 and the 2020 election,” she wrote.“The event at a church in San Marcos was the latest stop on disgraced, retired General Michael Flynn’s ‘ReAwaken America Tour,’ a nationwide series of megachurch engagements featuring a who’s who of far-right religious extremists, Trump aides, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and other reckless figures. At every stop along the way, the Christian nationalist tour has left in its wake a trail of dangerous disinformation that leads to bigotry, hate, and, at its most extreme, violence.”Teter Dodge added that a “staple” of the tours has been Pastor Greg Locke, “who has made a name for himself by peddling QAnon conspiracy theories from his pulpit, and even kicking people out of his church if they wore a mask. More recently, Locke has taken up the latest cause célèbre among the radical far-right – book burning.”Looking ahead to the fall elections, Taylor of Sojourners worries that the rhetoric of the ReAwaken events threatens voting rights.Taylor said he was “particularly alarmed by the ways this tour is promulgating and providing religious cover to the big lie that the last election was stolen. This big lie is eroding trust in elections and being exploited to justify and fuel efforts to erect new barriers across the country that restrict the right to vote.”TopicsUS politicsChristianityMichael FlynnReligionRoger StonenewsReuse this content More

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      Trump White House overrode Covid guidance for churches, emails show

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      Trump White House overrode Covid guidance for churches, emails showCDC planned to suggest in 2020 that religious communities hold services online but key passages were struck out Donald Trump’s administration overrode Covid-19 guidance to religious organizations, according to newly released emails, which would have encouraged churches to consider virtual religious services rather than in-person worship.In May 2020, as coronavirus cases and deaths surged, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent the White House a draft of its planned guidance to faith-based communities, seeking approval for publication.At the time coronavirus cases were increasingly being reported in churches across the US. Cases would continue to soar in places of worship in the following months.In response, the CDC planned to suggest that religious groups restrict in-person attendance at services, and instead hold them online.When that guidance arrived at the White House, however, it prompted discussions which ended up with important passages being struck out. In an email exchange with Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, Paul Ray, the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, suggested a series of edits.“The new CDC draft includes a significant amount of new content, much of which seems to raise religious liberty concerns. In the attached, I have proposed several passages for deletion to address those concerns,” Ray wrote.“If these edits are acceptable to you all, we could tell CDC, as early in the morning as possible, that they are free to publish contingent on striking the offensive passages.”In her reply, Conway thanked Ray for “holding firm against the newest round of mission creep”.In another email chain, Trump officials expressed dissatisfaction with CDC recommendations – which had already been posted online – which suggested that faith communities should consider holding services online.May Davis, a legal adviser to Trump, wrote to Paul and other officials that “problematic guidance is still online”. Davis attached suggested edits to the CDC guidance, which she said “removes all of the tele-church suggestions”.Davis added: “Though personally I will say that if I was old and vulnerable (I do feel old and vulnerable), drive through services would sound welcome.”Representative James Clyburn, chairman of the select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, which released the emails, said in a statement that the Trump administration had “prioritized politics over public health”.“As today’s new evidence also makes clear, Trump White House officials worked under the direction of the former president to purposefully undercut public health officials’ recommendations and muzzle their ability to communicate clearly to the American public,” Clyburn wrote.On Friday Gene Dodaro, head of the Government Accountability Office, is due to testify before Congress about a GAO report which found staff at the CDC and other public health agencies witnessed “political interference” during the response to the pandemic.TopicsTrump administrationCoronavirusReligionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Cancel culture is real but it’s not the ‘woke mob’ you should worry about | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Cancel culture is real but it’s not the ‘woke mob’ you should worry aboutArwa MahdawiBooks deemed anti-church or containing LGBTQ issues are being banned across the US at a terrifying rate by the conservative right Hello, my name is Arwa Mahdawi and I would like to cancel myself, please. I have a book to sell, you see, and it would seem that the easiest way to drum up a lot of free publicity these days is to declare yourself the latest victim of cancel culture. Suddenly everyone is inviting you on the telly to wax on about how you’ve been cruelly silenced by the woke mob. “Nobody can say anything any more!” the usual pundits lament in their 972nd piece on whether cancel culture has gone too far. “Free speech is dead! It’s just like Nineteen Eighty-Four!”I don’t know if Big Brother is going to let me share this, but I have something terribly shocking to tell you about cancel culture. Here we go: you should definitely be worried, but it’s not the woke mob you need to be worried about. A depressing amount of energy is being expended on arguing whether calling someone out for using language a lot of people perceive as bigoted is “cancel culture”. But, while endless arguments rage about the intolerant left, free speech is under a terrifying assault from the right.Want to know what real cancel culture looks like? Well, just sit back and look at the unprecedented surge of book banning efforts happening across the United States. Last year, for example, a county prosecutor’s office considered charging library employees in a conservative Wyoming city for stocking books about sex education and containing LGBTQ themes. Around the same time, Moms for Liberty, a rightwing advocacy group, tried to get a number of books banned from Tennessee schools because they contained content that disturbed them. They deemed a book about Galileo to be “anti-church”, and were outraged that a book about Martin Luther King contained “photographs of political violence”.More recently, a school board in Tennessee banned Maus, Art Spiegelman’sPulitzer prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its classrooms. Their reasoning? It contained eight swear words and a picture of a naked cartoon mouse. Yep, you read that right. What upset these people most about a book detailing how Jewish people were gassed to death in concentration camps by Nazis were some curse words.Let’s be clear: there is nothing particularly novel about uptight school boards in conservative areas getting worked up over material they deem offensive. However, what is happening in the US at the moment is a lot scarier than a few over-involved parents clutching their pearls over naked mice. As the American Library Association noted last year, there has been a “dramatic uptick in book challenges and outright removal of books from libraries.” The free-speech organisation, PEN America, has voiced similar concerns. “It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” the organisation’s chief executive recently told the New York Times.It’s not just school boards trying to police what kids can read about: it’s politicians, too. Last year, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, introduced proposed legislation that would let parents sue schools for teaching critical race theory to kids. To be cute, he called this the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E) Act. Now, Florida is trying to pass a bill that critics have nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would let parents sue schools or teachers who bring up topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity. (Just a little reminder to everyone that DeSantis loves describing Florida as a beacon of freedom, in what he deems to be an increasingly authoritarian America.)In an interview with the Washington Post last week, Spiegelman warned that what is happening now should be seen as a “red alert”. Maus being banned was no anomaly, but “part of a continuum, and just a harbinger of things to come”. What can I say? If it’s the “woke mob” that scares you after all this, then you must be fast asleep.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      TopicsCensorshipOpinionFreedom of speechLibrariesUS politicsLGBT rightsReligioncommentReuse this content More

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      The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faith | Ruth Braunstein

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      The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faithRuth BraunsteinSome sociologists believe that the rising number of non-religious Americans is a reaction against rightwing evangelicals. But that’s just part of the story What if I were to tell you that the following trends in American religion were all connected: rising numbers of people who are religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) or identify as “spiritual but not religious”; a spike in positive attention to the “religious left”; the depoliticization of liberal religion; and the purification and radicalization of the religious right? As a sociologist who has studied American religion and politics for many years, I have often struggled to make sense of these dramatic but seemingly disconnected changes. I now believe they all can all be explained, at least in part, as products of a backlash to the religious right.Since the religious right rose to national prominence in the 1980s, the movement’s insertion of religion in public debate and uncompromising style of public discourse has alienated many non-adherents and members of the larger public. As its critics often note, the movement promotes policies – such as bans on same-sex marriage and abortion – that are viewed by growing numbers of Americans as intolerant and radical.In a 2002 article, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S Fischer argued that a significant trend in American religion – the skyrocketing number of people disaffiliating from religion – could be partly explained as a political backlash against the religious right. In the two decades since this article was published, a wealth of additional evidence has emerged to support its general argument. Sociologists Joseph O Baker and Buster G Smith summarize the sentiment driving this backlash: “If that’s what it means to be religious, then I’m not religious.”While pathbreaking, this research has been relatively narrow in its focus. This is because it has typically started with the puzzle of the rising “nones” and worked backward in search of a cause, landing on backlash against the religious right. I wondered what would happen if we flipped this question around, and started with the rise of the religious right and public concerns about its radicalism. We could then consider the varied ways that backlash against it has manifested, including but not limited to the rise of the “nones”.Backlash, after all, can take many forms. The kind of backlash that has led people to disavow religious affiliation in general is what I call a “broad” form of backlash. In this form, backlash against a radical form of religious expression leads people to distance themselves from all religion, including more moderate religious groups that are viewed as guilty by association with radicals. This is a common pattern within social movements, where moderates often worry that radicals will discredit their movement as a whole.But this is not the only plausible form that backlash can take. One can also imagine a narrower, more targeted, backlash against the religious right itself, in which people do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups. Evidence of this form of backlash abounds. It can be found in rising numbers of people who identity as “spiritual but not religious”. These individuals are not rejecting religion altogether; they are embracing a new category of religiosity, one viewed as unpolluted by its association with radical conservative politics.‘Identity crisis’: will the US’s largest evangelical denomination move even further right?Read moreSimilarly, those who associate with the religious left do not discredit religion in general, but promote what they view as a more pluralistic form of public religious expression. Since Donald Trump was elected president with the support of religious conservatives, typically low-profile groups on the religious left received a surge of positive attention as observers saw in them a means of checking the power of the religious right. As a column by Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times: “Progressive Christians Arise! Hallelujah!”Finally, new research finds that people who are both religious and politically liberal are intentionally distancing themselves from the religious right by depoliticizing their public religious expression – a development worthy of much more attention.Finally, backlash is not a one-way street – the experience of being the object of political backlash has led to a counter-backlash among the conservative Christians who comprise the religious right. White evangelical Christians believe that they are being illegitimately persecuted and are increasingly invested in the boundary between the perceived morally righteous and their enemies. Religious conservatives not committed to Trump and the Republican party are being pushed out. Those who remain are not only deeply loyal to a shared political project, but less likely to encounter internal checks on radical ideas.Even as this group is shrinking by some measures, recent data suggests that growing numbers of nonreligious and non-Protestant Americans are adopting the label of “evangelical” – not as a statement of their religious identity, but as a statement of their political identity as rightwing Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump. Together, these counter-backlashes seem to be driving this movement toward deeper political radicalism.Backlash against the religious right has had ripple effects far more widespread than previously recognized. These dynamics are effectively reshaping American religion and politics, and show no signs of stopping.
      Ruth Braunstein is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the director of the Meanings of Democracy Lab. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionReligionEvangelical ChristianityChristianitycommentReuse this content More

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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court

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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court Linda Greenhouse does a fine job of raising the alarm about the conservative conquest and what it means for the rest of us – it’s a pity she does not also recommend ways to fight backLinda Greenhouse’s byline became synonymous with the supreme court during the 30 years she covered it for the New York Times. She excelled at unraveling complex legal riddles for the average reader. She also had tremendous common sense – an essential and depressingly rare quality among journalists.The Agenda review: how the supreme court became an existential threat to US democracyRead moreBoth of these virtues are on display in her new book, which chronicles “12 months that transformed the supreme court” after the death of the liberal lion Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the obscenely rapid confirmation of her conservative successor, Amy Coney Barrett.As others have pointed out, Barrett’s ascension was the crowning achievement of a decades-long project of the American right, to pack the highest court with the kind of people who delight in telling graduating students things like the proper purpose of a legal career “is building the kingdom of God”.Barrett is also the sixth Catholic appointed to the court. Another, Neil Gorsuch, was raised Catholic but now attends the church of his wife, who was raised in the Church of England.Greenhouse describes the Federalist Society as the principal engine of this foul project. Founded in the second year of the Reagan administration to change the prevailing ideology of the leading law schools, its 70,000 members have become the de facto gatekeepers for every conservative lawyer hoping to serve in the executive branch or the judiciary.Most students of the judiciary know that all 226 judges appointed by Donald Trump were approved by the Federalists. But until I read Greenhouse’s book I never knew that every one of the 500-plus judges appointed by the two Bushes also earned the Federalist imprimatur.“Its plan from the beginning was to … nurture future generations of conservative law students” who years later would form the pool from which “conservative judges would be chosen”, Greenhouse writes.She also adds the telling detail that makes it clear that this situation is even worse than it appears. After Gorsuch thanked a Federalist banquet “from the bottom” of his heart, after his confirmation to the supreme court, the then White House counsel, Don McGahn, told the same gathering it was “completely false” that the Trump administration had “outsourced” judicial selection to the Federalists.“I’ve been a member of the Federalists since law school,” said McGahn. “So frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”Greenhouse’s main subject is the impact on the law of the replacement of a celebrated progressive, Ginsburg, with the anti-abortion and anti-contraception Barrett. A meticulous examination of the most important cases decided during Barrett’s first term demonstrates how the new justice contributed to Chief Justice John Roberts’ determination to “change how the constitution” understands race and religion.The centuries-old wall between church and state is being eroded and government efforts to promote integration – or prevent resegregation – are under steady attack.Roberts’s opposition to important sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act goes all the way back to his service in Ronald Reagan’s justice department in the early 1980s. As chief justice he made his youthful scorn for the virtues of integration into the law of the land, writing a majority decision invalidating the plans of Seattle and Louisville to consider race to prevent resegregation of public schools. By a vote of 5-4 the court ruled the consideration of race violated the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.Roberts’s opinion declared that the school systems’ “interest in avoiding resegregation was not sufficiently ‘compelling’ to justify a racially conscious remedy”.For most of the country’s history, the establishment clause of the constitution has prevented the government from “endorsing or coercing a religious practice or viewpoint”, Greenhouse writes, while “the free exercise clause requires the government to leave believers free to practice their faith”.But Roberts and his allies have thrown things upside down, turning the free exercise clause “from its historic role as a shield that protected believers from government interference into a sword that vaulted believers into a position of privilege”.Greenhouse is a woman of convictions. Even as a reporter, she was famous for taking part in a march supporting abortion rights. In a previous book she bragged of contributions to Planned Parenthood. But none of her critics could ever find any evidence that her stories in the Times were slanted by her personal beliefs.That objective stance was entirely appropriate when she was a daily reporter. But book writing is different. After doing such a good job of describing the decades-long rightwing campaign to produce a court whose views are increasingly at odds with the majority of voters, Greenhouse doesn’t endorse any ideas about how to remedy the situation.Supreme Ambition review: Trump, Kavanaugh and the right’s big coupRead moreShe shows no enthusiasm for the idea of expanding the number of seats on the court, which was championed by Pete Buttigieg and others during the 2020 election, and she doesn’t even support the idea that 83-year-old Stephen Breyer should feel any pressure to retire during the current Congress, to make sure Joe Biden can appoint, and a Democratic Senate confirm, a liberal successor.Similarly, Greenhouse never suggests Ginsburg was wrong to stay in office until her death, rather than retire during Barack Obama’s time in office so that she wouldn’t be replaced by someone like Barrett.Unwilling to regulate dark money’s vicious role in our politics, and happy to eviscerate the most basic protections of the Voting Rights Act, the court is increasingly tethered to religious rightwing orthodoxy.Greenhouse does a superb job of describing how we got here. What she lacks is the passionate imagination we need to re-balance an institution which poses an urgent threat to American democracy.
      Justice on the Brink is published in the US by Random House
      TopicsBooksUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsPolitics booksReligionreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump ally Michael Flynn condemned over call for ‘one religion’ in US

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      Trump ally Michael Flynn condemned over call for ‘one religion’ in USReligious freedom is enshrined in first amendmentIlhan Omar: ‘These people hate the US constitution’ Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, was widely condemned after calling for the establishment of “one religion” in the US.‘Terrifying for American democracy’: is Trump planning for a 2024 coup?Read moreReligious freedom is enshrined in the first amendment to the US constitution, which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.Regardless, at a rally staged in San Antonio on Saturday by the Christian “nonprofit news media network” American Faith, Flynn said: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God.”In response, the Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, said: “These people hate the US constitution.”Mark Hertling, a retired general and media commentator, called Flynn, himself a retired general, “an embarrassment to the US army”.“His words are disgusting,” Hertling said.On Sunday, the veteran reporter Carl Bernstein told CNN that Flynn, as one of the “knaves and fools and dangerous authoritarian figures” with whom Trump surrounded himself in and out of office, was “saying out loud things that have never been said by an aide or close associates to the president of the United States”.Bernstein added: “It should be no surprise to know that Michael Flynn is saying the kind of things that he is saying, but what’s most significant here is that much of the Republican party … something like 35% in in exit polls said they favour Trump because Christianity is being taken away from them. “So Michael Flynn is not that far away from huge numbers of people in this country.”Flynn is no stranger to controversy. Fired from a senior intelligence role by Barack Obama, he became a close aide to Trump before resigning as national security adviser after less than a month in the role, for lying to the FBI about contacts with Russians.Flynn pleaded guilty to one criminal charge under Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow, a plea he sought to withdraw before receiving a pardon from Trump.He has since emerged as an influential figure on the far right, linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory and appearing to advocate armed insurrection.In San Antonio, Flynn called the indictment of another Trump ally, Steve Bannon, over the investigation of the Capitol attack, an “abuse of freedom of speech” – another first amendment freedom.The Capitol was attacked on 6 January by Trump supporters seeking to overturn his election defeat. Flynn is himself the subject of a subpoena from the investigating House committee. On Friday, he told Fox News he had nothing to hide.In Texas, Flynn called the House investigation “a crucifixion of our first amendment freedom to speak, freedom to peacefully assemble”.Bannon may not be only Trump ally indicted over Capitol attack – SchiffRead moreHis remarks about religion attracted support from a prominent contender in a vicious party fight for a Republican Senate nomination in Ohio.Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer, tweeted: “We stand with General Flynn.”Mandel’s own religion has been the subject of debate and controversy. In September, the Forward published an op-ed which asked if he was “obscuring his Jewishness” in order to appeal to far-right Christian voters.In response, Mandel described himself as a “Proud American. Proud Jew. Proud Marine. Proud Zionist. Everything Democrats hate.”Mandel’s religion was the subject of a controversial attack ad from another Republican hopeful, Mark Pukita, who denied charges of antisemitism.Amid criticism of his support for Flynn, Mandel said “freedom of religion [is not equal to] freedom FROM religion”. He also said: “America was not founded as a secular nation.”TopicsMichael FlynnDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansReligionnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden v US Catholic bishops: Politics Weekly Extra

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      Last week Catholic bishops in the US voted to move forward with plans that could result in Joe Biden being banned from receiving communion because of his stance on abortion. Jonathan Freedland speaks to former congressman Tom Perriello about the decision and its potential impact on voters

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Last week the US Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to move foward with plans to draw up new guidance on the eucharist, which could see President Biden being banned from receiving communion due to his stance on abortion. Why are they doing this? And what impact will it actually have? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Tom Perriello, the executive director of Open Society Foundations US about a piece he wrote last week condemning the move by the bishops. Archive: Getty; CNN; YouTube Listen to Comfort Eating with Grace Dent Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      ‘Identity crisis’: will the US’s largest evangelical denomination move even further right?

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      Thousands of Southern Baptists from across the US are heading to Tennessee this week to vote for their next president, a choice laced with tension that could push America’s largest evangelical Christian denomination even further to the right and potentially spark an exodus of Black pastors and congregations.Each of the three leading candidates for president presents a unique vision for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and will help guide the Protestant denomination through the thorny issues it currently faces – declining membership, deep divisions over acknowledging the existence of systemic racism and fresh accusations of mishandling sexual abuse allegations.The denomination, which is more socially conservative than the general American public on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, would become even more politically aligned with Republican party if it were to elect the Georgia pastor Mike Stone as its next president. On the other side, the Alabama pastor Ed Litton has called for more distance from politics, and has the support of prominent Black Southern Baptists, who are part of a minority group that has been crucial in shoring up the SBC’s dwindling membership. Landing somewhere between Litton and Stone is the seminary president Albert Mohler, a former “Never Trumper” who endorsed Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign.Barry Hankins, a historian at Baylor University who studies evangelicalism, said that the SBC seems to be going through an “identity crisis”.“There is a strong faction that wants to be in lock step with the culture wars of the Republican party and a smaller group that wants to maintain a more independent witness within American culture,” he said.Southern Baptist messengers, who represent their churches at the meeting, can only vote for the next president by being physically present on the convention floor. After last year’s meeting was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, more than 16,000 people plan to attend the 15-16 June conference at Nashville’s Music City Center, which would make the event the SBC’s biggest annual meeting in 25 years.The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 by pro-slavery Baptists in the south who believed it was moral for missionaries to own slaves. Despite this history, SBC missionary efforts since the 1950s have seen the number of Black churches in the denomination slowly increase, with a growth spurt after 1995, when the denomination apologized for condoning slavery and systemic racism.Today, 14 million members attend the SBC’s network of more than 47,000 churches. Though the number of Black churches in the SBC is still relatively small, reaching nearly 3,400 in 2020, the SBC has been so successful at planting churches in communities of color or recruiting existing non-white congregations that – even though the number of white churches is declining sharply – the denomination’s non-white churches have been growing.Jéan Ward, a 49-year-old Black Southern Baptist pastor and church planter from Atlanta, first joined the SBC about 10 years ago, attracted by its commitment to evangelization in urban areas. He told the Guardian that other church planting networks he had worked with didn’t give him the resources and autonomy he needed to start a successful church plant in the Atlanta communities he was seeking to reach.“I love the fact that within the Southern Baptist Convention, when it comes to mission, they hands down the work together with that, even though there are some variances that happen,” Ward said.However, the tensions emerging at the upcoming annual meeting suggest that some white Southern Baptists believe that acknowledging these new members’ views and life experiences threatens the SBC’s dominant culture – which is still overwhelmingly white and conservative.As white evangelical Protestants become increasingly tied to the Republican party, they have come to expect their churches to align with their political ideology. One of the issues that has been seized on by prominent conservative commentators and politicians – and will probably be a key issue for many of the messengers flocking to Nashville – is critical race theory (CRT), a lens through which scholars seek to understand how systemic racism persists despite the legal victories of the civil rights era.Donald Trump lashed out at CRT in a memo last September, ordering federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege. (Joe Biden rescinded that ban shortly after taking office.) More than 20 states have recently introduced or passed legislation to ban the teaching of CRT in public schools.At the last annual meeting, Southern Baptists addressed the theory by passing a resolution, a non-binding statement that acts as a powerful symbol.The statement on CRT, known as Resolution 9, affirmed that Southern Baptists seeking to address social ills don’t need to turn to anything but the Bible for guidance. At the same time, it stated that CRT can be a useful tool with which to analyze human experiences.The resolution acknowledging CRT’s usefulness prompted a backlash. Stone, the Georgia pastor running for president, has the endorsement of the Conservative Baptist Network, a group formed last year in response to concerns that the SBC is caving to “worldly ideologies” such as CRT.Stone has proposed a resolution for the annual meeting that unequivocally condemns CRT, calling the framework “neo-Marxist” and “incompatible with scripture”. He said earlier this year: “Our Lord isn’t woke.”Ward believes the rejection of CRT discounts the lived experiences of Black Americans who have had to work harder to achieve the same successes as their white cohorts. CRT isn’t creating new divisions, but pointing out those that already exist, the pastor said.“One of the worst things you can say to a person is, ‘I don’t see color,’” Ward said. “If you don’t see color, you don’t see my identity.”Ward, who is also the executive director of the African American Fellowship for the Georgia Baptist Convention, said an anti-CRT resolution could threaten the SBC’s recent success in recruiting existing Black churches into the fold and planting new churches in Black communities. Several prominent Black pastors have recently disaffiliated from the denomination over the issue. While Ward isn’t planning to leave if an anti-CRT resolution passes, he said a few Black pastors in Georgia are talking about doing just that.An anti-CRT resolution would mark “the beginning of the end of the SBC”, Ward warned. He also suggested that it could have repercussions outside the denomination.“I honestly believe this is a political move so that critical race theory can be killed on a national level,” Ward said. “If churches are saying CRT is ungodly and shouldn’t be adhered to, that then affects decision makers that lead corporations, who will then push it that way.”Mohler, president of Kentucky’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has shown a willingness to acknowledge historical racism, commissioning a report in 2018 documenting his seminary’s past ties to white supremacy and slavery. But the report didn’t include plans to rectify or collectively repent for the seminary’s racist past. Mohler has also spoken out against CRT, initiating a joint statement with five other SBC presidents last November that prohibited professors from teaching students about the theory. That statement from the seminary presidents – who are all white – drew heavy criticism from several Black Southern Baptist leaders.Litton, however, signed a statement last December acknowledging that systemic injustice is real and urging “collective repentance”. He has the support of Fred Luter, the SBC’s first and only Black president.Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist and the executive director of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center, said he was hopeful that Southern Baptists would listen to the concerns of Black leaders at the annual meeting. Failing to do so could have serious consequences, he said.“I think if the SBC comes out with a resolution or a president seen as not listening to the concerns of African Americans, you may see a significant exodus of them from the convention,” Stetzer said.CRT is not the only issue likely to be debated at the convention. In May, another prominent figure in the denomination, Bible teacher Beth Moore, announced that she no longer considered herself Southern Baptist. For years, Moore had been calling out misogyny within SBC circles and advocating for survivors of sexual abuse. She has also faced backlash from fellow Baptists for preaching to mixed audiences of men and women.While Southern Baptists affirm that women have key roles to play in the church, the denomination’s core doctrinal statement insists that the Bible does not allow women to serve as pastors. The ban on female pastors was added in 2000, with Mohler’s support. This position was recently challenged by one of the largest SBC churches, California’s Saddleback Church, which ordained three women as staff pastors in May.Mohler, Stone and Litton all agree that the ordination of female pastors contradicts core Southern Baptist doctrine. Mohler even claimed women pastors are the reason for declining membership of liberal churches.“Liberal theology is the kiss of death for any church or denomination,” Mohler told Religion News Service in May. “Little remains but social justice activism and deferred maintenance.”Whether or not Saddleback will be disfellowshipped from the SBC for ordaining women remains up to messengers to the annual meeting, Mohler added.The problem of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up within the denomination has toppled several prominent leaders. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle documented hundreds of credible accusations against SBC pastors, Sunday school teachers, deacons, and church volunteers – some of whom eventually found jobs at different churches.Calls for accountability emerged again this year after letters written by Russell Moore, former head of the SBC’s public policy arm, were leaked online. (Russell Moore and Beth Moore are not related.)One letter suggested that the SBC’s executive committee, which runs the business of the convention, had resisted reforms and bullied an abuse survivor. Russell Moore specifically called out Stone, the committee’s chairman at the time, for delaying reforms in a closed-door meeting in May 2019. Russell Moore resigned from his position at the denomination’s public policy arm in May and appears to have left the SBC altogether.Stone, who says he is a survivor of sexual abuse himself, has called Moore’s accusations “slanderous”, “ungodly” and “outrageous”. On Thursday, leaked audio recordings from that meeting appeared to corroborate Russell Moore’s accusation that executive committee leaders prioritized the denomination’s image over abuse survivors’ concerns. In response to the leaks, the executive committee announced it had hired a firm to perform an independent review of its handling of sexual abuse issues. Some survivors are still concerned about whether the investigation will be truly independent from the executive committee’s control.Christa Brown, a longtime advocate for abuse survivors in Baptist circles, said she did not have faith in the SBC’s ability to address the issue.“The juxtaposition of nice-sounding talk with a lack of any care or action feels duplicitous and lessens any possibility of trust,” Brown said. “It is yet another way of being re-victimized and exploited.”In a statement, Ronnie Floyd, the committee’s current president, said: “The Convention was – and still is – divided over methods of response to sexual abuse. However, the SBC is not divided on the priority of caring for abuse survivors and protecting the vulnerable in our churches.”Stetzer believes the election, resolutions and motions that emerge from this year’s annual meeting will determine the SBC’s future. He said it was important for Southern Baptists to wade through these tough issues of race and abuse before concentrating on the church’s ultimate mission – evangelism.“You have to deal with the bad before you can get to the things we want to focus on,” he said. “We have to address issues of abuse and poor leadership and simultaneously choose a path that enables us to hear out concerns about CRT while listening to the voices of African American leaders.” More