Since June 1, I’ve been an intern at the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). Summer is now closing in and my university classes begin in just a few weeks. The end of my internship is near, and I can’t help but reflect on the eye-opening experiences and education gained about the shocking behind-the-scenes unorthodox […]
Some of my Christian friends tell me they can’t in good conscience vote for Donald Trump because, when faced with a choice between “the lesser of two evils,” the morally right thing is to choose neither one. They recommend voting for a third-party or write-in candidate. As a professor who has taught Christian ethics for […]
Eric Voegelin, one of the great political philosophers of the last century (1901-1985), professed no religion, but he recognized its falsifications. After extensively studying early Christianity, he found “Gnosticism” to render intelligible certain twentieth century movements like Nazism. Gnosticism, as he understood it, spins an ideology within which all reality becomes refashioned and so falsified. Gnosticism […]
Last Thursday as he wrapped up his hour-long speech in which he formally accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump thanked the evangelical Christians who supported his candidacy, helping make his quest for the nomination possible. Trump graciously said, …I would like to thank the evangelical and religious […]
PHILADELPHIA (RNS) To judge by public perceptions, and more than a few pundits, the Democratic Party is the default home of secularists and atheists, with practicing believers shunted to a side room only to be trotted out when a political event needs a gloss of godliness. But walking around the Democratic National Convention taking place […]
This week I’ve received many emails echoing the sentiments expressed by my friend Lana: Dear Matt, I’ve seen you write a few times this week that “Democrats can’t be Christian” or some such nonsense. I’ve come to expect horrible things from you but these kinds of statements are despicable even by your standards. You should […]
Donald Trump seems to be breaking yet another political tradition this election: the “God gap.” In previous US elections, polls consistently showed that a person’s level of religiosity—how important their faith is to them and how often they attend church—was one of the biggest predictors in how they would vote. The more religious an American […]
Bipartisanship in our country may be at a low point, but bipartisan moral inconsistency seems to be more prevalent than ever. Republicans and Democrats alike appear to follow Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen in believing six impossible things before breakfast. They laud their own party’s candidates and officeholders while castigating those of the other party by […]
At the age of 11, Olaudah Equiano — the son of an Igbo elder in what is now Nigeria — found himself in a slave ship’s cramped quarters. His autobiography describes the horror: “The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate… almost suffocated us… the air soon became unfit for respiration… and […]
Government policies that penalize marriage hurt lower middle class families the most, leading many to avoid getting married, a new study released Tuesday discovered. In an Institute for Family Studies and American Enterprise Institute joint report titled “Marriage, Penalized: Does Social-Welfare Policy Affect Family Formation?” scholars W. Bradford Wilcox, Joseph P. Price, and Angela Rachidi, […]
