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I think all of these [Christian rock stars] who find the courage to share their truth make a huge impact, and if everyone in contemporary Christian music and the church was honest about their own truth, their own questions, and their own beliefs, I think we would progress a lot quicker.

God tells you not just the way you should be, but the way you actually are, and if you accept that, you will be blessed. If you step outside of it, you’re just asking for trouble. So arguing against this structure asks conservative white evangelicals to rewire their entire sense of reality.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina and the “federal flood,” as locals call the disaster, the new New Orleans is as much the product of decades of antiwelfare ideology in local and national governments as it is of the unique circumstances of the disaster.

Though conflicts between religious groups and the civil authorities often result in a violent outcome, activists and scientists in Hawaii have thus far managed to avoid the violence with some surprisingly simple techniques.

Thinking of these killers as “lone wolf” actors makes it easier to dismiss them as demented individuals, hapless victims of bad parenting, self-destructive misfits, or erratic evil doers. But we need to see these “lone wolf” white supremacists for what they are—members of “wolf packs.”

In order for the GOP leadership to continue to do nothing on guns they need loyal foot soldiers to deliver messaging that appeals to their base. What this messaging, familiar to those of us who grew up in the Christian Right, tells us about the “soul” of the Republican Party is not pretty.

Morrison’s witness to language’s power to both destroy and create has been on ample display in our current season of American blood-letting. In 1993 Morrison warned of “Tongue-suicide,” which is “common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is … human.”

I’m a preacher and I can say with near certainty that 99% of the sermons preached yesterday morning didn’t get close to the level of truth-telling that’s needed. Nor will the compulsory “thoughts and prayers” pronouncements, nor the words spoken at memorial services over the next days and weeks.

Attitudes about sex have come to signal a person or group’s attitudes about modernity itself. Arguments about gender roles, birth control, abortion, sex education, and LGBTQ rights have become central to the religious and political identity of American Christians.