In an exclusive interview with Religion News Service run last month in publications across the country, President Donald Trump said in a written statement that he no longer identifies as a Presbyterian and now sees himself as a nondenominational Christian.
“We make our own history,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “The course of history is directed by the choices we make and our choices grow out of the ideas, the beliefs, the values, the dreams of the people. It is not so much the powerful leaders that determine our destiny as the much more powerful influence of the combined voice of the people themselves.”
Religion is messy, says Lee Hale, a reporter at KUER, the National Public Radio station in Salt Lake City. And for many Americans, especially young people like the 30-year-old Hale, that messiness is something to celebrate, not sweep under the carpet.
“You cannot understand our history as a country until you understand the history of the church.” That’s how Mark Charles — a Navajo pastor, speaker and author — began his presentation to a room full of missionaries in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, gathered this summer for their annual meeting.
When white supremacist groups announced plans to hold a demonstration in the nation’s capital to mark the one-year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, many were concerned the day would descend into violence as it did in 2017.
The part of tax law that prohibits houses of worship from engaging in explicit political activity will remain intact for now, despite concerns that Republican lawmakers would try to repeal it in the latest massive federal spending bill they released this week.
The church was festooned with a green wreath above the altar cross and rows of red and white poinsettias. But the lights were dim and the candles were ready, along with small packets of tissues placed strategically in each pew.
Thirty years ago Bassem Giacaman, whose large extended family has lived in this town for generations, immigrated to New Zealand with his parents and siblings in search of a life far away from the turmoil of the Middle East.
