Author: David Crump

Author, Speaker, Retired Biblical Studies & Theology Professor & Pastor, Passionate Falconer, H-D Chopper Rider, Fumbling Disciple Who Loves Jesus Christ

Study Shows Muslims Gave More to US Charity Than Other Americans in 2020

Shariq Siddiqui and Rafeel Wasif have an article at Religion New Service explaining the results of a recent study demonstrating that not only did Muslims give more money to charity in 2020 but that they also are more likely to volunteer their time to charitable causes than non-Muslims in this country.

Below is an excerpt:

Muslim Americans gave more to charity in 2020 than non-Muslims, we found in a new study. They are also more likely to volunteer, we learned.

Only 1.1% of all Americans are Muslim, and their average income is lower than non-Muslims’. But as we explained in our Muslim American Giving 2021 report, their donations encompassed 1.4% of all giving from individuals. U.S. Muslims, a highly diverse and quickly growing minority, contributed an estimated US$4.3 billion in total donations to mostly nonreligious causes over the course of the year.

As philanthropy scholars, we believe our findings are significant not only because this is the first time that we can see the size and scope of giving by this small and highly diverse community, but also because U.S. Muslims face a great deal of discrimination. . . 

. . . We found that Muslim Americans gave more to charity, donating an average of $3,200, in 2020, versus $1,905 for other respondents. They also differed from non-Muslims in many ways. For example, nearly 8.5% of their contributions supported civil rights causes, compared with 5.3% of the general public.

You can read the entire article here.

 

Conservative Hypocrisy Over ‘Packing the Supreme Court’

Republicans and other conservatives were seized by conniption fits when

AP Photo. J. Scott Applewhite

President Biden formed a commission to investigate the possibility of expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

Quite predictably, the committee has recommended that the court should not be expanded. So what else is new in D.C.?

What that committee, Republicans, other erstwhile conservatives, and establishment Democrats all fail to recognize, at least in public, is that the Supreme Court has already been successfully “packed” by Senator Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.

Millions of dollars of “dark money” has been invested in placing new justices on the bench that will predictably rule in favor of big-money, corporate interests.

The fact that some of these justices may also lean in an anti-abortion direction is a serendipitous coincidence for “pro-life” evangelicals who are generally so monomaniacally focused on their anti-abortion agenda that they give little thought to other issues at stake.

The Daily Poster has an important article entitled “How Dark Money Captured the Supreme Court” describing a recent report issued by three senior members of the Senate.

The report explains the pivotal role played by anonymous, big-money donors in the selection of the Supreme Court justices appointed by Donald Trump and the Republican members of the Senate.

Justice may still be blind — though that is debatable — but her sensitive nose can detect the sickening-sweet smell of money a mile away. And her hand is always held out for another corrupting contribution.

Here is the article. I strongly encourage you to follow the links and read the additional material you find there:

As Congress nears a deal on Biden’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill, a separate battle is quietly playing out within the Democratic Party over how to handle the extremism and minoritarian rule of the Supreme Court.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., published a report on the way that dark money and corporations have captured the Supreme Court.

The report lays out how an extensive network of right-wing groups — including the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and organizations in the Koch network — have worked to appoint judges who undermine voting rights and favor corporate interests.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the report is that three senators, including the Senate majority leader, are raising serious questions about the legitimacy of an institution that many Democrats are unwilling to confront.

For example, just two weeks earlier, the commission that Biden set up to examine court reform published draft materials of their own report. Those materials expressed skepticism about adding justices to the court, suggesting that it would be seen as a partisan move and undermine public trust in the court.

“Some commissioners believe that there is a real risk that the willingness of Congress to expand the size of the U.S. Supreme Court could further weaken national and international norms against tampering with independent judiciaries,” said the draft document on court expansion, even going so far as to suggest that court-packing may be evidence of “democratic backsliding.”

But, as the three senators’ new report on “court capture” argues, the country’s highest court is already being manipulated.

Whitehouse separately wrote a law review article last week about the influence of dark money and dark money groups’ use of amicus briefs to influence the court.

“The effects of this litigation strategy on our democracy are frightening: the courts are becoming an arena for enacting policies by judicial decree that are too unpopular to pass through democratically elected legislatures,” he wrote. “These coordinated efforts warp the judiciary toward anonymous, ultrawealthy donor interests, all without the public ever learning about the role of dark-money interests in shaping the law.”

Israel Presents Zero Evidence to Justify Its Accusations Against Six Palestinian, Humanitarian Groups

Perhaps you are aware that the Israeli government recently accused six Palestinian humanitarian organizations in Israel of providing money-laundering services for terrorist organizations.

Naturally, the official announcement offered no substantiating evidence but promised to produce it later.

Well, now we have it.

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, the “evidence” presented to the US Congress has nothing to do with the six organizations in question but a seventh, entirely different group all together!

Below is an excerpt from the article entitled “In Congress, Israel Justifies Palestinian NGO Terror Tag with Evidence on Unrelated Group“:

The Shin Bet representative tasked with briefing U.S. Congress on Israel’s designation of six Palestinian civil society NGOs as terrorist groups presented evidence on an unrelated organization.

The document had previously been presented to European diplomats in May in an attempt to convince them to stop funding the organizations. Sources who were shown it at the time said it did not convince them. According to sources, additional evidence was presented to the U.S. State Department and other officials with higher security clearances. 

The document discusses a total of seven organizations: Six are the civil society organizations that Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated as terrorist organizations last week. The seventh, the Health Workers Committee, was designated as an unauthorized organization affiliated with the PFLP in January 2020. 

The Health Workers Committee is at the center of a trial in an Israeli military court that will begin in a few days. Israel is charging four of their employees with membership in the PFLP and inflating receipts to divert donor money for the organization’s benefit.

Read the entire article here.

Worse yet, Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss uncovers Israel’s real tactics and

Philip Weiss, journalist

motivation behind its attacks against these six NGOs in particular.

First, spurious “confessions” were obtained through torture.

Second, all six organizations have cases pending before the International Criminal Court accusing Israel of crimes against humanity.

Weiss writes:

Israel acted against the groups because they have been giving information to the International Criminal Court– whose prosecutor began a criminal investigation of Israel this year under a complaint filed by Palestine five years ago.

But surely, this must be a coincidence…

Karen Swallow Prior Laments Evangelicalism’s Selective Tolerance

Karen Swallow Prior has a good article in the Religious News Service lamenting the often hypocritical and dangerously excessive quality of

Professor Karen Swallow Prior

“tolerance” among evangelical Christians.

Her article is called “Truth, Justice and the Torturing of Tolerance.”

Ms. Prior describes her own acculturation into the norms of lopsided church tolerance — heavily tilted towards favoring men and conservative politics.

My only disagreement is with her description of “some conservatives” being intolerant of others. Sorry, but in my experience intolerance describes “most” conservative evangelicals.

Below is an excerpt:

. . . Conservative evangelicals often call out the hypocrisy of progressives whose tolerance goes only one way. But some conservatives have also made tolerance a one-way street, failing to support the religious and personal freedoms of those who believe differently than we do.

Instead of offering rigorous and compelling arguments in defense of what we understand to be true, some simply take up the other side of the rope in a tug-of-war game of intolerance, making each side no different from the other side.

I have a lot to process and even confess about what I have tolerated in Christian institutions and among fellow believers. A lot of us do. Too many in the church have tolerated too much for too long.

To be sure, situations can be complicated. Motives and actions can be mixed. Facts can be disputed. Perspectives can differ. Pictures can be incomplete.

Nevertheless, some things are clearly and simply wrong. It takes wisdom to discern what should be tolerated and what should not. It also takes wisdom to know when to speak up and when to wait. It takes wisdom to understand when institutions are set up to perpetuate wrong rather than prevent it, to recognize when corruption is a feature, not a bug.

And it takes courage to tolerate no more what is wrong — and to speak up and act for what is right.

You can read the entire article here.

My New Book, Like Birds in a Cage, Is Now in Print and Available

I am happy to announce that my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021), is now available.

So place your orders now (please!) and share what you learn with your family and friends. Just click this link.

Rather than talk about my own book, allow me to share a few of the recommendations the book has received from other scholars in this field:

A keenly reasoned, comprehensive, full-frontal critique of Christian Zionism. Equally at ease interpreting St. Paul, critiquing ideologies of privilege, deconstructing Israel’s discriminatory legal regime, and narrating scenes of unarmed, tear-gassed villagers, David Crump mounts a formidable case against the troubling logic, and deadly deployment, of ethnocracy and territorial exceptionalism. This prophetic call to walk not where Jesus walked, but as Jesus walked, is more urgent now than ever.

Bruce N. Fisk, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East

This new volume by David Crump may be the most comprehensive critique of Christian Zionism by an evangelical author to date. As a former ‘insider,’ his unique perspective has delivered a tour de force by combining scholarly biblical exegesis of key texts the incisive theological analysis. His solid grasp of the relevant political and historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle adds context and texture to this wonderfully written book. I hope this volume will be widely read and reviewed across the evangelical spectrum by pastors, biblical scholars, students, and perhaps most urgently, evangelical politicians.

Don Wagner, author of Anxious for Armageddon

Like Birds in a Cage is destined to become a standard text on Christian Zionism in the USA. With devastating precision, Dave Crump exposes the cancerous nature of this deviant theology. For Evangelicalism to survive with any credibility, it must repudiate the justification of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Crump’s book provides not only the diagnosis but also the cure.

Steven Sizer, Founder and Director, Peacemaker Trust

This book is quite unique in the way that it combines a sound grasp of the history of Zionism, careful interpretation of the Bible, and first hand, recent experience of everyday life for Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank . . . My hope and prayer is that this book will help American Christians of all kinds to wake up to the very significant ways in which Christian Zionism has contributed — and continues to contribute — to this tragic conflict. They might then be more able to challenge their government’s policies.

Colin Chapman, author of Whose Promised Land?

Wise Christians Will Embrace Classical Liberalism

David French is a Christian, a political commentator, a former staff writer for the National Review, a columnist for Time Magazine, and senior editor of

David French

The Dispatch, a conservative news site.

He recently published an excellent piece entitled, “A Christian Defense of American Classical Liberalism,” in which he clearly and compellingly describes the equally malicious rise of authoritarianism from both the Right and the Left in America.

Both are dangerous in very similar ways. But, more than that, he explains why  Christian theology provides the church with the best framework for understanding these dangers.

Christian theology also offers the best framework for grasping the social and political benefits of classical Liberalism.

Below is an excerpt:

On the push and pull between ‘humans as made in the image of God and humans still trapped in sin.’

I’d like to introduce you to a term you need to know (indeed, many of you no doubt know it already). It’s “horseshoe theory,” and its short definition is relatively simple. As political movements grow more extreme, they grow more alike. Like a horseshoe, they bend closer together.

A classic example of horseshoe theory is represented by 20th-century European clashes between fascists and communists. It’s not that there aren’t differences between fascism and communism, it’s that in their totalitarian reality, the two competing regimes created quite similar conditions on the ground. 

Thankfully the American manifestations of horseshoe theory haven’t created anything remotely like the fascism and communism that led to history’s bloodiest war, but we’re seeing horseshoe theory emerge nonetheless, and its left-wing and right-wing manifestations have settled on the same target—American classical liberalism.

By “American classical liberalism,” I mean the specific structure of government created by the founding generation, modified and expanded through the Civil War Amendments, affirmed and extended through judicial precedent. While this constitutional structure is malleable enough to accommodate a wide variety of social, economic, and foreign policy choices, at its heart it is defined by a commitment to individual liberty, equality under law, and democratic government. 

On the left, the challenge most prominently comes from a series of critical theory-influenced ideologies that fundamentally reject that American founding (and American classical liberalism itself) as irrevocably stained and tainted (mainly) by America’s racial sins. Classical liberalism, in this telling, was the enabler of great injustice. 

Some definitions of critical race theory, for example, specifically reject liberalism, viewing liberalism as a “vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” This is why, for example, critical theory-influenced colleges often attempt to pare back commitments to free speech and due process on campus. These “liberal” commitments are perceived as oppressive to women and people of color, enabling “hate speech” or sexual predation.

On the right, the challenge comes most prominently from a cohort of mainly Christian intellectuals, many of whom were featured in an extended New York Times piece about the new right and some of whom are in a marriage of convenience with Trumpist populism. They perceive liberalism as both problematic on its own terms and inadequate to the task of resisting “woke” post-liberals on the left. 

Whereas critical race theorists root their objections to liberalism in its coexistence with American oppression, many Christian post-liberals (perhaps we can call them “critical religion theorists”) root their objections in liberalism’s alleged contributions to American immorality and godlessness, with a particular emphasis on abortion and the sexual revolution. 

You will find the entire article here. Take a look.

Glenn Greenwald: Civil Liberties Are Being Trampled by Exploiting “Insurrection” Fears. Congress’s 1/6 Committee May Be the Worst Abuse Yet.

Glenn Greenwald has published a lengthy, detailed analysis of the many ways in which the Democratic party is currently exploiting the Capitol Hill riot on January 6 to implement drastic government overreach and the curtailment of American civil liberties.

The mechanism for this overreach is the House Select Committee currently  investigating the January 6 riot.

I have excerpted the heart of Greenwald’s conclusions below. However, I encourage you to read the entire article at Greenwald’s substack space. It is truly impressive and deeply disturbing.

The article is entitled “Civil Liberties Are Being Trampled by Exploiting ‘Insurrection’ Fears. Congress’s 1/6 Committee May Be the Worst Abuse Yet.”

Below is the excerpt:

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) arrive for the House Select Committee hearing investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on July 27, 2021 at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

This congressional committee is designed to be cathartic theater for liberals, and a political drama for the rest of the country. They know Republicans will object to their deliberately unconstitutional inquisitions, and they intend to exploit those objections to darkly insinuate to the country that Republicans are driven by a desire to protect the violent traitors so that they can deploy them as an insurrectionary army for future coups. They have staffed the committee with their most flamboyant and dishonest drama queens, knowing that Adam Schiff will spend most of his days on CNN with Chris Cuomo comparing 1/6 to Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust; Liz Cheney will equate Republicans with Al Qaeda and the Capitol riot to the destruction of the World Trade Center; and Adam Kinzinger will cry on cue as he reminds everyone over and over that he served in the U.S. military only to find himself distraught and traumatized that the real terrorists are not those he was sent to fight overseas but those at home, in his own party.

But the manipulative political design of this spectacle should not obscure how threatening it nonetheless is to core civil liberties. Democrats in politics and media have whipped themselves into such a manic frenzy ever since 1/6 — indeed, they have been doing little else ever since Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 — that they have become the worst kinds of fanatics: the ones who really believe their own lies. Many genuinely believe that they are on the front lines of an epic historical battle against the New Hitler (Trump) and his band of deplorable fascist followers bent on a coup against the democratic order. In their cable-and-Twitter-stimulated imaginations, shortly following this right-wing coup will be the installation of every crypto-fascist bell and whistle from concentration camps for racial and ethnic minorities to death or prison for courageous #Resistance dissidents. At some point, the line between actually believing this and being paid to pretend to believe it, or feeling coerced by cultural and friendship circles to feign belief in it, erodes, fostering actual collective conviction and mania.

And when fanatics convince themselves that their cause is not only indisputably just but an imperative for survival, then any doubts or questions about methods and weapons can no longer be acknowledged. The war they are fighting is of such overarching importance and righteousness that there is no such thing as unjust or excessive means to achieve it. Just a cursory examination of liberal discourse is enough to see that they have long ago arrived at and flew past this point of sectarian zealotry. And that is what explains their overwhelming support for state and corporate censorship of the internet, increasing reverence for security state agencies such as the CIA and FBI, love for and trust in corporate media, and a belief that no punishment or level of suffering is excessive when it comes to retaliation against their political enemies, including but not only those who participated in any way in the 1/6 protests.

This is, after all, a movement that has long opposed the death penalty and whose more left-wing factions spent 2020 rioting in cities to protest police violence and chanting “Defund the Police!,” yet their only lament about Ashli Babbitt seems to be that she was the only pro-Trump “fascist” shot and killed by noble police officers on that day. They have pranced around for decades as criminal justice reformists, denouncing harsh prosecutorial strategies and judicial punishments, yet are indignant that people who put their feet on Nancy Pelosi’s sacred desk or vandalized the sacred halls of American power with their dirty and deplorable presence are not spending decades in a cage. They spent 2020 depicting police officers as racist savages, only to valorize the Capitol Police as benevolent public servants whom only barbarians would want to harm, then gave them an additional $2 billion to intensify their surveillance capabilities and augment their stockpile of weapons. Their fury that Trump officials did not end up spending decades in cages due to vague associations with Russians is exceeded only by their rage that pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol are being sentenced to months rather than years or decades in prison.

A political movement that operates from the premise that its cause is too important to be constrained is one that inevitably becomes authoritarian. That such authoritarianism is the defining feature of American liberalism has been evident for several years. And an investigative congressional committee that they control, aimed squarely at their political enemies, accompanied by demands that anyone resisting it be imprisoned, can only lead to very dark and dangerous destinations.

You can read the entire piece here.

Why Guy Saperstein is Leaving America, And Why I Often Consider It Myself

First a short biography of Mr. Saperstein:

In 1972, he founded a law firm in Oakland which became the largest plaintiffs civil rights law firm in America, in the process successfully prosecuting the largest race, sex and age discrimination class actions in American history. Guy also prosecuted False Claims Act cases against Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. regarding satellite surveillance systems, and against Raytheon, Boeing and TRW regarding the sham National Missile Defense Program. A former president of the Sierra Club Foundation once described by Bill O’Reilly as “a member of the nefarious Left-Wing Mafia,” he is the author of “Civil Warrior: Memoirs of a Civil Rights Attorney.”

Below is an excerpt of his article entitled “Why I Am Leaving America“:

After six decades fighting for social justice and enjoying the embodiment of the American Dream, this couple are moving on from a lost nation.

My wife and I have spent sixty years fighting for social justice in America and trying to be good citizens, me as a civil-rights lawyer who litigated — and won — the largest race, age, and disability employment discrimination cases in American history, and my wife as a teacher, social worker, healthcare activist and philanthropist. I retired at fifty-one, having built an enormously lucrative practice, never losing a case as I pursued legal restitution on behalf of clients who had gotten the short end of the stick.

I was the very embodiment of the American Dream. But over the decades, I’ve become convinced that America is in terminal decline and that the battle for justice and equity is hopeless. The reasons are multiple. 

America once led the world in innovation. No more. We don’t even have one mile of high-speed rail, unless you count Disneyland. China has 30,000, and counting. Which country do you think is prepared to prosper in the next century?

We can’t even keep our roads repaired. America’s roads are a mess, many as bad as any Third World country. In fact, that is what America is becoming — a Third World country.

The battle is lost. America is in terminal decline and nearly 75 million Americans seem to be willing to pull it down further. How can it be that so many millions voted for a man who failed in everything he ever tried—a man who started more than a score of businesses and every one failed, who cheated repeatedly on three wives before each marriage failed, who is despised by even members of his own family, who went out of his way nearly every day to show that he is a racist and a sexist, a man who has been caught, according to the Washington Post, in more than 30,000 lies in just the four years he was president, who cheated at nearly everything, including golf, how is it that such a man is held up as a paragon of virtue by nearly half of the electorate? Something has gone seriously off the rails. 

I can no longer bear the chest-thumping triumphalism of the No-Nothing Party. I can’t stand the self-congratulatory promotion of the hoary notion of American exceptionalism. People who think America is the greatest in all things are people who simply have never been anywhere else. America is not now — and has never been — a representative democracy and won’t be in my lifetime and probably not in yours, either. Biden won by 7.3 million votes — a smashing win, right? — but if just 43,000 votes in a few states had switched, Donald Trump would still be president today. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom could have received 49% of the vote in the recall election and have lost and some Republican hack could have received 18% and won. And because each state has two senators, 18% of the electorate elects 51% of senators. Explain that to Cleisthenes.

We now have an active right-wing attack on voting itself, much of it racially motivated, but imperiling us all. And then, alas, we have the filibuster, which has almost made America ungovernable.

I want out. I’m tired of waking up to some crackpot ranting that COVID is a hoax, or vaccines don’t work, or masks are an assault on freedom, or that the 2020 election was stolen and Joe Biden is not really President, or that January 6 was just a peaceful gathering of fun-loving people.

While Trump has been diminished, we are surrounded by his supporters — Americans who voted for one of the most despicable men who ever strut upon the American stage, most of his supporters continue to believe — with no evidence — that he won. Most prefer superstition to science, many would apparently rather die than wear a mask or take a vaccine, and tens of millions believe cockamamie conspiracies. These people are not going away.

This woebegone predicament is likely to get worse. Moreover, our priorities as a nation seem perilously upside down. We spend more than twice the amount for healthcare as any developed nation and get the crappiest healthcare system in the world because the medical Establishment — mainly the drug companies — has Washington in its pocket. And that includes Biden. 

We have among the worst economic disparities in the world — which are getting worse — a hollowed-out middle class, money overwhelming politics, and even the Democrats unable to do anything about any of this. . .

You can read the rest of the article here.

I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Saperstein is my kind of guy.

America needs many, many more principled, morally astute, courageous fighters for equality, justice, and peace like Mr. Saperstein. His pending emigration will be a great loss to this country.

The fact that he has come to the conclusion that America is hopelessly circling the drain; that our democracy is doomed; that the future looks increasingly bleak; that far from being a shining city on a hill, America has devolved into a neo-fascist corporate state, addicted to endless entertainment, violence, and self-gratification; that any and all efforts to slow our national decomposition — if not reverse it altogether — are a hopeless waste of energy doomed to failure presents us with the tragic lessons learned by a man who has spent his entire adult life fighting in the trenches on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, and the dispossessed.

I happen to agree with his conclusions. And I often think about moving to another country myself.

However, unlike Mr. Saperstein, I have never expected to see substantial outbreaks of justice and equity in my lifetime. Perhaps I am too much of a cynic. Or maybe I just take the Christian doctrine of original sin too seriously.

Nevertheless, apparent failure here and now can, indeed, become extremely depressing. Even to cynical believers in human sinfulness like me.

But I cannot allow such disappointments to become debilitating; they never provide a reason for throwing in the towel.

Because I am always, first and foremost, a citizen of the kingdom of God. That is where my loyalty lies, not in the US of A.

I have been placed in this country as a witness to God’s kingdom even as I, along with Mr. Saperstein, watch America’s rampant, rampaging imperialism, militarism, and economic exploitation ravage its citizens together with everyone else in the world who happens to possess something that America wants for itself.

And I do see small glimpses of the righteousness of God’s kingdom here and there, flashing narrow, intermittent shafts of eternal light into very dark, otherwise hopeless, places.

So, even though part of me wants to flee with Mr. Saperstein, I can’t.

I will continue to wait and to work and to “fight the good fight” in the land where Jesus’ placed me as I wait for His return.

I pray that you will, too.

Is There a Connection Between Evangelical ‘Conversion’ Stories and the Right-Wing Emphasis on Personal Freedom?

Rebecca L. David, history professor at the University of Delaware and author of the new book, Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics thinks the answer is Yes.

Her recent article in History News Network is entitled “How Evangelical Conversion Narratives Feed the ‘Free Choice’ Rhetoric at Your School Board Meeting.”

I have excerpted the article below:

. . . Religious conversion, an especially transformative sort of personal decision, is fundamental to these politics of “freedom” and “choice.” White evangelical Protestants, in particular, have crafted an argument for conversion as the paramount choice or decision, creating an identity that determines an individual’s spiritual as well as political beliefs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, evangelical Protestantism was a still-marginal movement on the cusp of greater popularity and power. Evangelical leaders realized that born-again conversions could meld the ideas of being saved, privileging whiteness, and opposing LGBTQ rights.

This history of born-again conversion and American politics helps explain why a surprising number of public comments against school mask mandates include tirades against LGBTQ-inclusive curricula.

Many of the individuals and groups organizing in opposition to mask and vaccination mandates are tied to conservative evangelical and Christian nationalist groups. Taught that they are defending American values and fighting a tyrannical, coercive mandate by un-Christian authorities, they rise to defend what they believe is their Constitutional right to disobey public health policies. . .

. . . The particular mix of born-again conversion, anti-gay animus, and the defense of American “freedoms” emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The overwhelmingly white leaders of conservative evangelical organizations widely criticized the social movements of the era, from Black civil rights to women’s and gay liberation. Looking for ways to exert greater influence over American politics, they landed on a narrative that merged the idea of choosing Christ and defending freedom.

White evangelical leaders recognized that one way they could gain legitimacy was by showcasing the startling conversions of ex-cons and iconoclasts. A fast-growing evangelical media industry celebrated these converts and promoted their stories. Christian publishers and broadcasters plugged the California hippies who became Jesus People and the conversions of notorious political operatives such as Charles (“Chuck”) Colson, the convicted former aide to President Richard Nixon. Prominent born-again conversions were upheld as proof of evangelicalism’s legitimacy.

Evangelical leaders leaned on the concept of choice to distance themselves from contemporaneous expressions of religious fervor in new religious movements. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, for one, found youthful followers among many of the same seekers who flocked to mass baptisms in the Pacific Ocean. Evangelicals stressed the profound differences between being “brainwashed” into a “cult” and being born again. One experience was the result of coercion; the other, of choice. . .

You can read the entire article here.

Yes, Children Can Be Infected with Covid, Including the “Long Haul” Variety

Ido Efrati has an important article about “long haul covid” in young children in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Please, don’t listen to the anti-vaxers and anti-mask folks who continue to spread dangerous misinformation about young children being immune, or only susceptible to a very mild form of covid-19.

It’s not true. It has never been true.

Efrati’s article is entitled “The New Frontier: Israeli Hospitals Contend with ‘Long Covid’ in Children.”

I have excerpted the article below:

At the “long COVID” clinic at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva, about 150 children are being treated, but several hundred more are on a waiting list. “Demand is high and the wait is more than half a year, because we monitor and test everything for each patient,” says Dr. Liat Ashkenazi-Hoffnung, an infectious-disease specialist.

The clinic began operating in November, several months after similar clinics were opened for adults. The symptoms the doctors see are varied, from shortness of breath (the most common complaint), muscle pain, headaches, fatigue, disordered sleep, chest pain, hair loss, and digestive disorders, to the loss of taste and smell, weight loss, difficulty concentrating, memory loss and the exacerbation of tics in children who suffered from them previously. About 60 percent report reduced daily functioning because of the symptoms.

“What’s interesting, is that in some of the children, it really appears as a direct continuation of severe illness but in very many of the children, there is a severe illness, followed by a lull of several months and only then do the symptoms of long COVID begin,” says Ashkenazi-Hoffnung.

According to her, the persistence of the symptoms varies. “There are children for whom it takes half a year or more. For example, we had a boy here who was a competitive swimmer and came down with long COVID and was very anxious and in pain. After half a year he went back to swimming and even broke a personal record.”

However, she also says that there are “a few children here who, a year after the illness, haven’t recovered, and they have symptoms that are affecting their day-to-day functioning. There are cases in which it lasts for more than a year.”

. . . Another phenomenon, which was first reported in April of 2020 is multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, of which about 100 cases have been reported in Israel. The syndrome usually appears eight to ten weeks after the illness, even among children who had light cases. It starts out as stomach aches, a rash and a fever and can develop into life-threatening damage to the heart. It requires hospitalization, and in most cases cardiac damage remains after recovery. . . 

You can read the entire article here.