Fundamentalism

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On threesomes and marriage

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The mainstream media really hasn’t done a very good job covering the heated debate over whether to extend the institution of marriage to same-sex couples. It’s been a problem for years and the coverage has been so amazingly one-sided that it’s surprising that all 30 states that have asked voters to define marriage as a heterosexual institution have done so. Part of it is that the mainstream media has long been an elite institution with views on homosexuality somewhat out-of-step with the general populace.


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Westboro worthy of newsprint?

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The Westboro Baptist Church must be the most objectionable Christian community in the United States. You know them from their “God Hates Fags” and “God Loves Dead Soldiers” posters and from their inability to find communion with pretty much any other Christians. They are a fringe organization, not simply “fundamentalists,” with less followers than countless minority religious groups spread across the country.


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That was the decade that was

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Hats off to Robert Pigott, religious affairs correspondent of the BBC, who takes on the ambitious question of how God has fared during the first decade of the 21st century. The series title of “What Have the Noughties Done for God?” may be too precious by half, but I cannot dismiss it as being forgettable.


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Apocalyptic fun

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Josh Levin, senior editor of Slate, wrote an epic series this week on the theme “The End of America.” The series begins here, and rolls on in eight segments and about 23,000 words. That’s not counting Slate’s embedded notes and thousands more words in The Fray. Slate also offered discussions on Facebook and Twitter, so the most obsessive readers easily could have devoted an entire week to debating Levin’s reporting.


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Wal-Mart Fundamentalists

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Normally I don’t look at book reviews since they’re just opinion pieces, more or less. But this New York Times review of books about Wal-Mart had some problems with how it handled religion. One of the books is To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton.


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Hey AP: You had it right!

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I think I am going to have to create a GetReligion list of “Big Ideas,” the concepts that drive what we do here. These two ideas would certainly be near the top, “Words have meaning” and “Ideas have consequences.”


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Praise the Lord and pass the severed heads

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If a headline by Time.com sounds too good to be true — “Drug Dealing for Jesus: Mexico’s Evangelical Narcos” — it’s because the article fails to deliver any serious evidence to back its claim. We’re told that members of La Familia Michoacana “purport to be devout Evangelical Christians” (that D-word should set off incredulity meters across the land) and that “They are also made to study a special Bible authored by the gang’s spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno, alias El Mas Loco, or ‘The Maddest One.’”


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