From “Fundamentalism Spring Eternal for GOP,” at Washington Post by The Revealer founding editor, Jeff Sharlet:

Social conservatives, particularly of the Protestant variety, want out of 2012 what they’ve wanted since H.L. Mencken handed them a shellacking at the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925: respectability. Christian conservatives have either dominated American politics or shouted loudest in opposition for three decades, but the movement’s inferiority complex runs deep. Eighteen years after the fact, fundamentalist pundits still cite a description of fundamentalists in The Washington Post as “largely poor, uneducated, and easily led.”That the characterization is snobby — and inaccurate. It’s also old. But as a movement, these religious social conservatives can’t seem to win enough validation – also known as power – to make them feel better. Exhibit A: The sense of wounded grievance fueling Michele Bachmann’s campaign.

Hate the sin, love the sinner says a coalition of Christian groups, including the Vatican, who’ve compiled a new rule book for treating non-Christians with tolerance while still trying to convert them.

A San Francisco woman charges that Abercrombie & Fitch, purveyor to the young and bare-skinned, fired her for wearing a head scarf.  Apparently allowing her to work in the stock room in a scarf wasn’t “reasonable religious accommodation.”  So who was she offending?  The brand’s “natural, classic American style.”

Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce has a new article in the May 9 print edition of The Nation. You can read it online here.  You can listen to Nation editor Betsy Reed and Kathryn talk about the evangelical adoption movement here.  An excerpt from the article:

As a way for conservative evangelicals to reclaim the social gospel message from liberal churches, adoption is a perfect storm, too, seemingly defining antiabortion activism as more truly “prolife”—or “whole life,” as one Bethany staffer coined it—while providing a new opportunity, as recent orphan theology texts explain, to spread the gospel. In Reclaiming Adoption, Cruver bluntly declares, “The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.”

Want to keep your church out of fraud and the headlines? Learn how to legally and constitutionally establish your mission as a business? Attend a webinar by The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA)!

by Becky Garrison

Rob Bell, a bestselling Christian author and founder of Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids became a top trend on Twitter last week after Justin Taylor posted a blog article titled “Rob Bell: Universalist?”  Taylor, vice president at Crossways International, a Christian educational non-profit, based his commentary on select chapters of Bell’s forthcoming book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived that were sent to him and on a promotional video produced to accompany this book’s release on March 29th. Those who picked up on Taylors’ post included bestselling author and Reformed pastor John Piper, who tweeted a succinct “Farewell, Rob Bell.”

The bulk of those generating the ensuing online buzz appear to have reached their conclusions regarding Bell’s book not based on the book itself, which few have actually had the chance to read, but on a position they’ve already taken in the ongoing battles between reformed and progressive (aka emergent) evangelicals. Bell’s detractors claim that he’s abandoned “biblical Christianity” and the belief that only Christians can enter heaven. Instead, he’s charged with adopting universalism, a concept which states that everyone will eventually be saved.  In other words, critics claim, what’s at stake is nothing short of Bell’s soul and those of his followers and readers.

From Tim Muldoon’s article at WaPo’s On Faith blog, “Faltering and Leading: The Conservative Moment,” in which Muldoon assesses David French’s fawning assessment of the state of the Conservative movement (only evangelicals need work harder!) and finds it almost very satisfactory:

If there is a hopeful note in this ancient and new story of the relationship between faith and culture, it is this: no longer is the story limited to a single narrative. There are three strands (Catholic, Evangelical, and Mormon) that French points to in his article, but there are surely others. Many contemporary Jews and Muslims, for example, are equally concerned that American laissez-faire attitudes toward sex, and therefore toward abortion, marriage, and many other social issues are toxic to a society. Further, the convergence of these narratives around social issues offers fruitful directions for interfaith conversation, when once upon a time those conversations foundered on the rocks of doctrinal disagreement.

Newsweek‘s religion editor, Lisa Miller, contributes to the recent conversation about Sarah Palin’s “feminism,” but instead of parsing definitions (see also here and here for that), Miller tells us why evangelical women see Palin as a saint:  they hunger for a contemporary role model.  Miller opens the article with a recount of Palin’s Trig story as told in Going Rogue:

For a split second, Palin—already at the limits of her time and energy—stops to consider the chaos another baby will create in her life. These are really less than ideal circumstances, she thinks. And then the inconceivable. I’m out of town. No one knows I’m pregnant. No one would ever have to know.

Billy Graham’s children may not agree where he’ll give his next – and likely last – sermon: in a Charlotte stadium or in a chair with a video camera. But the elderly evangelical patriarch thinks he’s got one more in him.

Ruth Graham told the AP that her father “is doing great” and that “he says God’s given him a timeline for his death. (Preaching next year) is within his timeline. He does not feel that this is the year he’s going to go to heaven.”

(h/t Religion News Service

Richard Bartholomew at Talk to Action looks across the pond to the increasing connections between conservative British politicians and evangelicals, pointing us to a number of recent British articles that map organizational and financial support offered to the Tories this election cycle by “pro-family,” corporate, and blatantly Christian organizations. Writes Jamie Doward for The Observer, Cameron’s bid for prime minister and some 37 other candidacies have been linked to Christian organizations like the Centre for Social Justice, Conservative Christian Fellowship, Christian Legal Centre and the American Alliance Defense Fund, funded by Erik Prince, founder of the now-infamous private security firm Blackwater.