CHURCH & STATE | Cross Purposes

The Symbol of America’s Majority Religion Can’t Memorialize Non-Christians The Washington, DC, suburb of Bladensburg, Maryland, is home to a forty-foot-tall cross that sits along a busy intersection. It occupies land owned by the state... Read More
CHURCH & STATE | Values Void: How the Religious Right Learned to Love Sex Offenders

After the infamous Access Hollywood audiotape emerged in October 2016 on which Donald Trump boasts about how easy it is to sexually assault women when you’re rich and famous, the leaders and followers of America’s... Read More
CHURCH & STATE | The Kavanaugh Nomination: How Screwed Are We?

The late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was no fan of the separation of church and state. In 1985, when the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a school prayer case called Wallace v.... Read More
Betsy DeVos Wants You to Pay for Someone Else’s Religion

President Donald Trump’s cabinet is full of men and women who simply aren’t qualified to do the jobs they’ve been assigned. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of US Secretary of Education... Read More
Are We Headed for One Christian Nation under Trump?

Much has been written about the religious right’s support for President Donald Trump, a serial philanderer, habitual liar, and admitted sexual assaulter of women. I’ve written about this topic myself and, like a lot of... Read More
Not-So-Civil Religion: The Long-Running Fraud of “Ceremonial Deism”

I occasionally meet with delegations of visitors from overseas as part of a program run by the US State Department. The visitors, usually government officials, academics, or religious leaders, are curious to learn about the... Read More
Can American Democracy Survive Trump’s Reign of Lies?

My mother was a fan of Simon and Garfunkel, and I grew up hearing a lot of their music. I came to appreciate the folky duo as well. One of my favorite songs by the... Read More