William J. Schultz’s Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City tells a story that “brings together conservative religion, conservative politics, laissez-faire economics and the role of the military,” said Schultz, an assistant professor of American religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Focus, a 48-year-old mass media ministry, has long claimed the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. Truth Rising makes similar origin claims of Western civilization but says the West’s spiritual foundations are now threatened by attacks on human dignity as created in the image of God.
James Dobson, the Focus on the Family founder who turned “family values” into a household phrase and political rallying cry, died Thursday morning at age 89. The James Dobson Family Institute (JDFI) announced his death in an early morning email that said he had died “peacefully, following a brief illness.”
Broadcasts from the James Dobson Family Institute, the ministry Dobson founded after leaving Focus on the Family in 2010, offer listeners doom and gloom.
Pentecostal pastors laying hands on the president in the Oval Office. Prayers to open cabinet meetings. Hymn sings in the Roosevelt Room. Cross necklaces as faith-forward fashion statements. A prayer meeting at the Pentagon.
Focus and the activist groups it founded are celebrating more than court victories. Conservatives are sensing a shift in public attitudes as some corporations, law firms, nonprofits and Democratic leaders back away from their earlier support for LGBTQ issues.
“I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” President Donald Trump told Congress in March. “It’s back.”
Christian and conservative groups that fight abortion and gay rights in the U.S. and Europe are intensifying their work across Africa through conferences, activism and promotion of a “Declaration on Family Values” that express grave concern about sex education, birth control, the “normalization of abortion as a right” and “advocacy of gender identity ideologies.”
The second time around, President Donald Trump is upending established news media conventions. Representatives of right-wing outlets are called on to ask questions at White House briefings while mainstream reporters Trump has called the “enemy of the American people” are ignored.
“President Trump is Protecting America’s Children,” says a White House statement on efforts to halt transgender treatments for minors. Meanwhile, Trump’s drastic cuts to federal programs represent a “war on children,” says a 2,100-word report from ProPublica.
