In the Fall of 2019, the secretive Christian Right state legislative campaign, Project Blitz, became even more of a secret. When RD first reported on Project Blitz in April 2018 the website featured their…
On October 28, 2017, the now infamous “Q” posted for the first time on 4chan in a chat thread titled “Calm before the Storm.”[1] The thread’s title seemed to reference a puzzling statement President Trump…
The city of Spokane, Washington sits at the eastern edge of the state—a mountain range and a cultural world away from the Pacific coast. It looks eastward to Idaho and Montana, and south to Eastern Oregon, where far-right secessionist movements have…
One of the myths that Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) discovered in her research is the “conceit that the Religious Right, fundamentalism, and…
Even amid Trump’s defeat, the 2020 election proved that the Christian Right may still be the most powerful, best-organized faction in American politics. The popular stereotype notwithstanding, the election demonstrated that the Christian Right is…
The Family Research Council (FRC), a leading organization of the Christian Right has long featured Christian nationalist ideology in its materials and events — including speakers at its annual political conference, the Values Voter Summit…
Be Aware of Outreach by Evangelical Homeschooling Organizations
With so many schools closed across the country and so many parents working from home to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, families are desperate for resources. In response, homeschool organizations like the conservative evangelical-affiliated…
The story on NPR’s website first introduces the Buckley-Becker family with a beautiful portrait of the young, middle-class, White couple and their children. In the photo, the father, Paul Buckley, holds their toddler son Mason, whom he and his wife…
Strategy Call Reveals a Shift to Stealth Mode Amid Escalating Rhetoric
Randy Forbes, the founder of the Christian Right state legislative campaign Project Blitz, recently told affiliates on a recorded conference call that they are “trying to respond to attacks on faith,” which he described as a problem of “geometric…
The five-part, original Netflix documentary “The Family,” is about a secretive, international religious network that has profoundly influenced governments in the U.S. and around the world for many…
Trump’s election was less an aberration than a reflection of changes in the New Right coalition, which brought business elites, evangelicals, and neoconservatives together under the Republican umbrella in the late 1970s and has underpinned the party…
The Christian and business Right has been steadily building political, policy and legislative capacity in the states since the 1980s. Since 2016, a Christian Right state legislative campaign called Project Blitz has become part of this …
In recent years, this advocacy work has come to represent a critical mass (though not a majority) of students on many evangelical campuses who are vocally pressing for change. But resistance to that change has built as well, drawing not just on…
It’s notable that anti-trans feminists are employing similar racist dog-whistles that have been used by the Right for centuries to create out-sized fear and outrage among their constituents and followers to justify the out-sized time and energy…
In the 1980s, the Moral Majority helped usher in an era of politicized Christianity in the United States. The breadth of Christian Right activity since then, from the evangelical Right, to fundamentalist homeschooling, to cross-denominational…
Evangelical “purity” culture, roughly defined, is the belief that Christianity requires sexual abstinence before (heterosexual) marriage, especially for girls and women, and promises sexual fulfillment to those who save sex until marriage.
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), founded in 2002 in opposition to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) support for adoption by LGBTQ couples, was cited in one of several articles published by right-wing news outlets in late…
This September, Lyons spoke to David Neiwert, researcher and author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, about his new book.
In a private session intended to set language for gender equality policies and to brief non-governmental organizations on U.S. priorities for women’s issues, a senior advisor from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Bethany Kozma…
On November 6, Massachusetts voters will decide several ballot measures, including Question 3, which asks voters to overturn public accommodations protections in the Bay State based on gender identity.
On October 21, The New York Times reported receiving information from the White House that details how the Trump Administration proposes to impose a multi-agency re-interpretation of “sex” under several civil rights laws to mean “[t]he sex listed on…
How Christian Persecution Became White Supremacy’s Newest Disguise
On Election Day, White evangelicals turned out in force for Trump, with over 80 percent voting for the Republican ticket. Their game-changing status became undeniably clear, but so did an unsavory truth about their “values voter” identity. For all…
The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank that claims to be “the most influential conservative group in America.” Its mission is to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited…
Last March, on a cold, early spring afternoon in New York City, a bright orange tour bus wended its way from Trump Tower, down Second Avenue, eventually parking in front of the United Nations’ glass-walled Secretariat Building. Wrapped around the…
How the Vatican's Position on Gender Threatens Human Rights
In September 2016, Sharon Slater of the U.S.-based Christian Right group Family Watch International issued a special appeal to a crowd of African conservatives, including Kenya’s Catholic Conference of Bishops, which was sponsoring the gathering.…
Steven Anderson is a virulently anti-LGBTQ preacher from the United States, who has compared gay people to ax murderers and Adolf Hitler, believes that all gay people should be executed, and admitted he would reject his children if they were …
DSM is an ex-gay ministry that promotes homophobia under the guise of offering counseling, support, and healing for “men and women seeking Jesus in light of unwanted same-sex attractions.”
Human Life International (HLI) is a Catholic organization with a long history of vicious and hyperbolic attacks on LGBTQ and reproductive rights. It opposes contraception, in-vitro fertilization, comprehensive sex education, and abortion in all…
The Center for Family and Human Rights, known as C-Fam, is a fierce and active opponent to LGBTQ rights and has considerable international influence, particularly in the United Nations.
MassResistance is a Massachusetts-based anti-LGBTI group with an expanding global presence. The group supports activists around the world in combatting LGBTI equality “without compromise.”
While casting themselves as ambassadors of goodwill, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) are global purveyors of a rigidly right-wing political and social agenda. By vastly expanding the U.S. Christian…
CitizenGO describes itself as a “community of active citizens who work together, using online petitions and action alerts as a resource, to defend and promote life, family, and liberty.” The right-…
CitizenGO Africa recently announced that Nairobi, Kenya would be the first city on the continent to host the so-called #FreeSpeechBus. The bus, infamous for its explicitly anti-transgender messages, will likely roll through Nairobi in conjunction…
The depth and breadth of White evangelical support for Donald Trump before and since his election has perplexed most observers. But a team of sociologists, freshly-analyzed data in hand, may have the answer that has eluded journalists, scholars, and…
Religious freedom is a central issue of our time.
It has figured prominently in recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a major theme of the presidential election of 2016. And it has been a major theme of the Christian Right in both…
Paul Rosenberg recently published an essay at Salon that challenged the myth that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation. The occasion was the then-forthcoming annual celebration of Religious Freedom Day, which commemorates the…
Originally published in 2011, the Culture Impact Team Resource Manual—which includes, among other things, sample voter guides and instructions for church-based voter registration drives—has served as the primer for church-based, Christian Right…
Twenty-five years ago, the Roman Catholic Church offered a rare acknowledgment of error. It admitted that it was wrong to have condemned one of the great fathers of modern science, Galileo Galilei. In 1632, Galileo was summoned to Rome and forced to…
Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore –– arguably the most openly theocratic candidate to run for a major office in the U.S. in modern times –– almost won. This, despite credible allegations of child sex abuse, a reputation as a serial…
Throughout history, people have used religion to justify a myriad of injustices. In the United States, for example, some Christians used their faith to defend slavery and segregation, citing scriptural references as moral justification for the…
A return to an earlier constitutional order, in which the federal government’s ability to regulate corporations and protect the public interest is severely constrained, is the end toward which decades of right-wing investments have been …
As Donald Trump exited the stage after addressing the 2016 Values Voter Summit (VVS) in Washington, DC a year ago, the Rolling Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” blasted from the speakers. The audience gathered together for the Family…
A raft of state-level legislative and regulatory restrictions on access to abortion followed the “wave election” of 2010. But a closely related trend has gone less noticed: the increasingly successful movement to bar or discourage the practice of…
The hundreds of Southern Baptist and conservative Reformed leaders who initially signed the recent Nashville Statement, have always opposed all forms of sexuality and gender expressions outside of heterosexual marriage. But in the face of broad…
How Prison Ministries Prioritize Salvation Over Justice
As bipartisan reform efforts have steadily drifted rightward, the heavy hand of evangelicals in prison reform efforts has created new kinds of problems. In the eight years I spent researching my book, God In Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison…
What might have seemed to most to be normal, if unusually acrimonious, political aggression was in fact a classic example of a right-wing strategy developed in the late 1980s: Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). Trump’s rhetoric and policies rightly…
The U.S. Christian Right's Endorsement of Authoritarian Leaders
On Friday, August 4, Paul Kagame celebrated a landslide victory in Rwanda’s presidential election, securing his third seven-year term as the small, East African country’s leader with nearly 99% of the vote. It was an unsurprising result, given that…
On July 24, 2017, the Family Research Council (FRC), a right-wing political advocacy group based in Washington, DC, issued an Action Alert to its members, enlisting their support in denying healthcare to military personnel who are transgender. FRC…
As was outlined in part one of this series, evidence shows that American corporate entities are taking advantage of the U.S. Christian Right’s pre-existing relationships with political, religious, and business leaders in Africa in order to advance…
As with anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion culture wars, the exportation of American economic ideologies to the Global South (and the strategies and tactics employed to impose them on others) has a long history of violence and destruction. From Nestle’s…
In 2015, the United States and China – the two biggest emitters of greenhouses gases in the world – were among 195 countries to ratify the Paris climate accord with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Less than two years later…
PRA first reported on the World Congress of Families (WCF) in 2000, noting its role within the coalition of Christian Right groups that was beginning to emerge as a well-organized and influential force at the United Nations. Writing for The Public…
The Right-Wing International, a Crisis of Democracy, and the Future of the European Union
One of the more striking features of the 2016 U.S. election was the convergence of the rhetoric and talking points of President Donald Trump and his supporters with those of the Kremlin. And in the tangled and ongoing investigation of Russian…
In early April, reports of atrocities being committed against LGBTQ people began to emerge out of Chechnya, a small, independent republic of the Russian Federation that is predominantly Muslim. Novaya Gazeta — an independent Russian newspaper —…
Dr. Paul McHugh, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University (and former director of the school’s Department of Psychiatry as well as the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital), has positioned himself as a go-to source for…
From “school choice” schemes and the neoliberal privatization movement to the influence of the Christian Right on curriculum and school policy, public education is a key battleground.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is an international legal organization serving at the frontlines of the Christian Right’s effort to redefine religious freedom and insert its anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice agenda into every element of government and…
The role of conservative think tanks in the modern resurgence of the Political Right has been a topic of interest to progressive activists for decades. However, academia had failed to produce a full-length historical study of conservative think…
During the presidential campaign and since assuming office, Donald Trump has repeatedly promised the Christian Right that he would make religious freedom a priority. In an apparent bid for their support, Trump made clear that he would advance the…
The right to believe differently from the rich and the powerful is a prerequisite for free speech and a free press. Separation exists not to limit religious expression, but to safeguard against creeping religious supremacism and the theocratic…
Many are called but few are chosen during any presidential transition. That’s why it’s illuminating to consider who Donald Trump has chosen from the parade of possibilities for his transition team and senior administration appointments so far— and…
To read press coverage about it, one might think that religious freedom is a concern only for religious and political conservatives, and not one of the most liberatory ideas in history. One would also think religious freedom and civil rights are at…
In a single two-day period this summer, the United Nations Human Rights Council gave advocates for LGBTQ equality their most significant victory yet at the UN and simultaneously gave antiLGBTQ “traditional” family proponents a major win in their…
Oral argument on motions for summary judgment in Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Lively, a federal lawsuit in which Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), is suing Scott Lively, a U.S.-based anti-…
Last week, about a hundred people gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, for the African Regional Conference of Families, a regional conference for the World Congress of Families (WCF). The WCF, a U.S.-based international coalition of Religious Right groups…
In June 2014, TIME magazine declared that the U.S. had reached the “transgender tipping point” and was venturing toward trans inclusion as its next “civil rights frontier.” That month’s cover featured Laverne Cox, a Black transgender actress famous…
Next week, the World Congress of Families (WCF) will host a regional conference in Nairobi, Kenya. For several years, PRA has tracked and reported on the WCF’s role in the U.S. Religious Right’s global export of homophobia and sexism, and the…
Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological camp, means, or timetable, God has called conservative Christians to exercise dominion over society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.
In this current political moment of heightened anti-trans targeting, when school boards and legislatures across the country are debating whether or not transgender people should be allowed access to public facilities, one wedge of particular note…
LGBTQ people have long been under siege in Georgia, where intolerance against a range of progressive social issues runs deep. And recently, conservative activists from outside the country are starting to take note.
Both in the U.S. and in countries all over the world, Warren has garnered tremendous amounts of political power and uses it to leverage influence at every level.
Religious liberty is already a central feature of the 2016 election campaign. But the Unites States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) intends to enlarge and escalate the debate when it wages its fifth annual Fortnight for Freedom this …
The 2016 Republican presidential campaign has transformed American politics, likely forever. Everyone is making adjustments, but two recent illuminating episodes suggest that some Christian Right leaders are finding the changes to be unusually…
A slate of anti-LGBTQ laws and policies is sweeping across the country with transgender and gender-nonconforming people squarely in the crosshairs. While violence and oppression continue to wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of trans people,…
Russian Social Conservatism, the U.S.-based WCF, & the Global Culture Wars in Historical Context
Social conservatives have been focusing on the family for a long time, and Russians have frequently been at the forefront of the fight for “traditional” values. In more recent times, Russian conservatives were central to the founding and operations…
Historians may someday see the 2016 election season as the turning point in how our society understands the Dominionist movement that is seeking to recast society in its own image.
This week, Franklin Graham—son of famed evangelical Billy Graham and current president of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and Samaritan’s Purse—begins a 50-state tour of the United States. The “Decision America Tour” will…
Mixed with the systemic ingredients of anti-trans violence, which put trans women of color especially at the life-threatening nexus of white supremacy, heterosexism, and misogyny, is a cadre of Christian Right actors who are effectively fueling the…
As 2015 winds to a close, Michiganders–especially working people and LGBTQ folks–are reeling from right-wing assaults on both their pocketbooks and their civil rights. I am referring to the one-two punch of new laws passed during the summer…
Religious Freedom Day provides an opportunity for us to think dynamically about the meaning of religious freedom in our time – even as the Christian Right seeks to redefine it beyond recognition.
Koch-funded theologians have developed a scripture-based argument to address populist anger over economic inequality, blending the Christian Right’s traditional Calvinist hierarchies with an economically Darwinist framework that says it is correct…
From its headquarters in Rockford, Illinois, WCF pursues an international anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ agenda, seeking to promote conservative ideologies—and codify these in regressive laws and policies—that dictate who has rights as “family,” and who…
On July 30, 2015, the College Board, creators of college-level curricula and testing for high school students, released an update to its Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) course. The revision came after what had already been a two-year battle…
In this post-marriage equality moment, the Christian Right is increasingly turning its attention toward the anti-LGBTQ battles it feels more confident about winning, specifically focusing on transgender communities. To bolster their arguments and…
One of the leading exporters of U.S.-style culture wars—the World Congress of Families (WCF)—is hosting an international gathering of right-wing scholars and activists in Salt Lake City, Utah later this year. It will be WCF’s first major conference…
How the Philanthropic Giant Legitimizes Faith Healing
Templeton has sought to create a rapprochement between science and religion. This article traces the impact of the Foundation by exploring a slice of its influence on research into the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements.
One of the underreported aspects of the current smear campaign against Planned Parenthood is the coarsening and polarizing of our civil discourse that usually accompanies discussions of the culture wars. This has been especially glaring because the…
Anti-abortion Catholic Democrats have long sought to cast their cause as progressive, but their actions have taken them into common cause with the Religious Right. This tendency has been on display during the brouhaha over the publication of the…
President Obama may not have continued George W. Bush’s over-reliance on religious organizations to carry out the functions of government. But six years into the “most transparent administration,” the activities and budget of the White House…
Jonathan O’Toole—an American anti-choice activist based in Nakuru, Kenya—makes no secret of his opinions about President Obama. “I hate Obama, I hate his guts,” he told me in a recent interview. “I’m against him. I’m his enemy.”
