Donald Trump, the Christian Right and COVID-19: The Politics of Religious Freedom

This paper examines the issue of religious freedom in the USA during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020–2021, during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021). It contends that the ability of state governors to close religious places of worship illustrates both the limits on the power of the president and that public health can take supremacy over religious freedom in today’s America. The paper is organised as follows: first, we identify the importance of religious freedom for the more than 20 million Americans who self-classify as Christian evangelicals. Second, we assess the transactional importance that President Trump placed on Christian evangelicals’ religious freedom. Third, we look at one kind of Christian evangelicals—that is, Christian nationalists—to see how they regarded restrictions on their religious behaviour caused by COVID-19. Fourth, we briefly examine several recent legal cases brought against the governors of California and Illinois by the Liberty Counsel, the leading Christian evangelical legal firm in the USA. Led by Matthew Staver, Dean of the Liberty University Law School, Liberty Counsel regularly represents Christian nationalists who challenge state-imposed restrictions on religious gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.

Megachurches and the Reinvention of Southern Church Life

The phenomena of megachurches—churches with approximately two thousand in weekly worship attendance—is especially prevalent in the South. Not only is the South a region of many churches, but the likelihood that a given person attends a large congregation with giant screens, many services, ministries, programs for all ages, and perhaps even multiple locations is higher than anywhere else in the U.S. Not everyone in the South attends a megachurch but because so many do the strong megachurch model affects the general experience of church attendance and belonging, even in small churches. To examine southern megachurches in their variety, this chapter visits four churches that introduce important aspects of this innovative form: Bellevue Baptist Church just outside Memphis, Tennessee; Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, a church that grew the nation’s largest Christian college, Liberty University; New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, associated with the prosperity gospel; and, St. Andrew AME, a neighborhood church that has grown into a multifaceted resource for its largely impoverished neighbourhood in south Memphis.

Fundamentalist U

Why do so many conservative politicians flock to the campuses of Liberty University, Wheaton College, and Bob Jones University? In Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America’s culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, and a proper American, all within the bounds of biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools have thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. If we hope to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to understand this influential network of dissenting institutions. Plus, only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America’s continuing culture wars. After all, our culture wars aren’t between one group of educated people and another group that has not been educated. Rather, the fight is usually fiercest between two groups that have been educated in very different ways.

The Numismatic Finds from the Qumran Plateau Excavations 2004‐2006, and 2008 Seasons

This article contains the preliminary report of nine coins, ranging from the second century b.c.e. to the fourth century c.e., that were found during the 2004‐2006 and 2008 seasons of the 2002‐2008 excavations at the Qumran Plateau, carried out under the direction of Dr. Randall Price of Liberty University with the assistance of Israeli archaeologists Dr. Oren Gutfeld and Yakov Kalman.