Opinion
James Dobson, the Christian family psychologist and media mogul who became one of the key architects of the Religious Right, has passed away.
At his height, Dobson’s influence was vast. His Colorado-based organization Focus on the Family helped build American evangelicals into a political monolith. He enjoyed access to the highest levels of Republican administrations—so much so that the New York Times dubbed him “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader” in 2005. He served on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board in 2016 and supported his re-election bid in 2020.
As a former strong-willed child, I’ve had the notion of James Dobson’s mortality in the back of my mind for the last half-decade or so.
I was not expecting a few tears to fall at the news of his death at age 89, but they showed up anyway. Even though this guy hadn’t hurt me for decades, it felt like a relief. I know he inflicted damage on millions of others that might never fade, but his death made it feel like Earth had just become a little less cruel.
When I am acclimating myself to my neighbors, one of the things I enjoy doing is asking them how they came to be my neighbors. You never really know people’s backgrounds, and it’s always interesting to see people light up at the opportunity to tell you a bit about themselves. Very often, both in Washington D.C. and my home state of Texas, I’ll run into people from Ethiopia.
When I went to college in Austin, I got to know a lot of people whose families came from Ethiopia. In getting to know them, I learned about the conflicts that have forced people to leave their homes and to obtain protection under Temporary Protected Status in 2022 due to the nation’s ongoing wars and humanitarian crises. The TPS designation allows migrants to temporarily live in the U.S. when they cannot return to their countries safely, often due to dire circumstances. For the people I met from Ethiopia, TPS offered an escape from physical danger and a chance to thrive here in the U.S. while working to end the conflict back home and caring for their loved ones as best they can.
“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” Scott Kupor, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said in a statement last month.
Kupor was positively commenting on a July memorandum to federal agencies that explains that federal employees are allowed to, for example, hold prayer circles and discuss their religious beliefs with colleagues. The memorandum even goes so far as to say that civil servants can “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.” According to Kupor, “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths.”
In July, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced an intention to revoke the Endangerment Finding. This 2009 ruling is the EPA policy that says greenhouse gases harm people—a finding that gives the EPA the authority to regulate climate-warming pollution.
If successful, the revocation would enshrine climate change denial as the official policy of the U.S. government and make it much harder to regulate fossil fuel emissions. The authors of the report cited to legitimize this move are a veritable all-star team of five climate-change-denying scientists, an extreme minority who contract the 97% of global scientists who believe humans are causing climate change. The absurdity is compounded by timing: Zeldin’s announcement came in the midst of the summer “Danger Season” when heat waves, floods, fires, and hurricanes leave millions reeling from weather crises exacerbated by climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 98% of people living in the United States have faced an extreme weather alert since May 1, with over half of those alerts exhibiting clear, scientifically established connections to climate change.
“Have you seen the Sydney Sweeney ad?”
That was the caption of a post on X featuring President Donald Trump on the roof of the White House, shouting down to onlookers about a now infamous American Eagle marketing campaign.
It’s only the latest in an endless parade of very stupid events, most of which are barely worth the time it would take to recap. To boil this story down to the essential points threatens to dissolve the whole affair, but the long and short of is that Sydney Sweeney posed in an American Eagle jeans ad with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” The campaign launched a small culture war flare-up between those who saw something insidious in proclaiming that a pretty blonde, white girl has “great genes” and those who thought such criticisms were “woke.”
Immigrants are being disappeared. Journalists are being threatened. Protesters are being criminalized. The poor are abandoned. The sick are left behind. Wars still rage. Democracy is crumbling.
The world feels increasingly precarious, and various crises are compounding and multiplying. What moral responsibility do religious institutions—especially seminaries—have at this time?
Given Christianity’s sordid history when it comes to antisemitism, we have a responsibility to reaffirm our commitment to combating antisemitism. But we must be vigilant to resist the lie that this commitment requires our silence on Palestine or Palestinian human rights. As journalist Peter Beinart told Sojourners in April, there is a “sense of guilt and anxiety that exists about Christian antisemitism,” and it “is leveraged sometimes by pro-Israel leaders … It’s much easier to level accusations of antisemitism than to actually have an honest conversation about how you justify a system that the country’s own human rights organizations are calling apartheid.”
The way to address antisemitic violence is not, as our current and previous administrations have suggested, by silencing Palestinians or those advocating for a free Palestine.
I was researching an article I was writing for Sojourners recently when I noticed something odd: The AI Overview answer that was being generated kept shifting, even though my search query did not.
For those not familiar with Google’s relatively new AI Overview technology, AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results pages for certain queries. According to Google, AI Overviews use generative AI to provide quick, easy-to-read answers to Google searches by compiling information from multiple sources, including web pages, news articles, and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
The verse that radicalized me will be a familiar one to Sojourners readers. It can be found in Matthew 25: “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”
“Radicalization” is a popular topic. When I say I have been radicalized, I don’t mean that I’ve been shaped by a rigid set of beliefs that draws hard lines between who’s in and who’s out. I mean that I’ve been transformed by the teachings of Jesus, which challenge me to practice a radical form of love for others.
I don’t believe that government regulation and intervention is the answer to every problem.
I also have no problem acknowledging — and condemning — instances where our government has created policies that prioritize corporate profits over the health of the American people. For example, thanks to the efforts of agricultural lobbyists, the government continues to subsidize corn and wheat, thereby incentivizing their use in cheap, ultra-processed foods that are linked to worse health outcomes. The opioid crisis is another complex and particularly tragic example of government prioritizing powerful corporate interests over Americans’ health.
Some of these same themes recently appeared in “Make America Healthy Again,” a new report led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. But while I share a healthy skepticism about corporate influence on federal health care policy, I am alarmed to see vaccine skepticism and outright anti-vaccine attitudes enshrined at the highest levels of government, especially within entities responsible for overseeing public health. And I’m especially grieved to see how bad Christian theology and warped notions of religious freedom are used to fuel that skepticism and its deadly consequences.
On July 7, the IRS made waves when it reversed its longstanding guidance that churches must avoid partisan speech under the Johnson Amendment of the U.S. tax code.
What does this new IRS guidance mean for political engagement among progressive churches?
When Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary, the political establishment didn’t quite know what to do.
Headlines described Mamdani’s win as “stunning,” “electrifying,” an “upset,” and even a “miracle.” Right-wing critics responded with predictable vitriol, labeling Mamdani a “communist,” “terrorist,” and a “little Muhammad.” These attacks were aimed both at his politics and his identity as an Indian American, a Muslim, and a socialist.
But what was most remarkable about Mamdani’s successful campaign wasn’t necessarily Mamdani himself. Rather, it was the working-class support behind his campaign that captured people’s attention.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security shared a propaganda video on the social media site X.
The one-minute video opens with footage of helicopters taking off, and a man with a thick Southern accent says, “Here’s a Bible verse I think about sometimes. Many times.” As people in military fatigues don masks and ready weapons inside the helicopter, the man quotes Isaiah 6:8: “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’”
Everyone loves the story of Jonah and the whale. It’s got it all: drama, danger, whales — or at least “a big fish” as any Bible nerd will point out. And a tidy little lesson at the end about the importance of obeying God.
But the story’s post-whale coda is where things get really interesting. After Jonah finally reaches Nineveh — albeit by a very roundabout route — he obeys God’s command to call the city to repentance. Mission accomplished, he finds a spot outside the city walls with a good view, settles in, and waits for God to smite them. He’s hoping for fire and brimstone and is disappointed when none come. God spares the Ninevites.
When I talk to clergy in my circles, morale is low. It seems like each day brings another new low in the American experiment. One pastor I spoke with said, “I can go to protests, but what is the point? The people in power don’t care, and it doesn’t change anything.”
That got me thinking: What is the point of protest? For me, at least, participating in protests is about living in alignment with my values and bringing the considerable privilege that religious leaders have to bear on unjust situations.
In 2002, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland released a post-apocalyptic horror movie that would redefine the zombie genre forever. 28 Days Later was not only ambitious for its experimental cinematography and reliance on relatively obscure actors, but also because of its critical commentary on violence and militarism. Boyle and Garland have partnered up again for the newest installment in the 28 Days Later film series, with the release 28 Years Later (now playing in theaters).
There’s nothing wrong with a gross and scary zombie movie that just stops there, but the 28 Days Later film series offers more than jump scares and blood-barfing, fast-moving zombies, which are called “infected” in the films.
In Washington, a new piece of legislation glides forward on patriotic branding and moral ambition. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as it’s called, promises economic growth, national renewal, and family empowerment. But beneath the shimmering language of prosperity lies a troubling philosophy — one that recasts the U.S. citizen as a market participant above all else and reshapes public policy into a liturgy for the god of the economy.
Several sections of the bill emphasize that a person’s economic output should be what determines their worth and the benefits they receive for living in the United States. Food assistance under SNAP is now contingent on proving one’s usefulness in the workforce, and access to Medicaid is framed as a reward for monthly productivity. Colleges are penalized based on their graduates’ loan repayment rates, reducing education to a measure of economic return, while student aid is calculated not by need but by the expected value of a student’s future earnings. Even newborns are cast as future market participants, with state-seeded “Trump Accounts” designed to train them in contribution and market value from infancy. These provisions redefine public goods not as a matter of justice or care, but as a transactional reward for economic performance.
If it’s not obvious: I genuinely enjoy celebrating July Fourth. Yet I know that many Americans — including Christians who share my commitment to social justice — have a far more complicated relationship with the holiday. And I get that reluctance. So often, celebrating Independence Day is wrapped in a weaponized, politicized form of patriotism which allows no room for critiquing the real harms and contradictions of our nation. But I think it’s a mistake for us to cede patriotism to those who turn it into a poisonous blend of nationalism and ethnocentrism, fixated on blood and soil and fueled by fear of “the other.”
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on June 17. At a lower Manhattan courtroom, Lander and his staff were attempting to escort a migrant after his court hearing. Seen repeatedly asking ICE agents to produce a judicial warrant, and asserting that they couldn’t arrest an American citizen, Lander was roughly detained and later released, the most recent in a string of Democratic politicians arrested by federal authorities.