“Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey are the worst kind of crises for people like Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen, who purvey their own versions of the prosperity gospel. This is a belief that says if you think positively and make affirmations, God will reward you with financial success and good health.”
― Anthea Butler
“Coldplay’s ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ video featuring Beyonce is already caught in a heated conversation about cultural appreciation of Indian religion and culture versus cultural appropriation of that culture for the western gaze.”
― Anthea Butler
“Spatial racism, the erasure of black faces in a predominantly white city, is in full effect in both Crown Heights and Center City Philadelphia. This racism demands that bodies that don’t conform to a mandated ‘white’ status quo can be redlined out of a space.”
― Anthea Butler
“Graham’s legacy is not as a maverick or a trailblazer. It is the legacy of a man who used Jesus as a tool to placate the masses so that the status quo of conservative white America could remain firmly in place.”
― Anthea Butler
“Evangelicalism’s moral values are now articulated by reality stars like the Duggar family, who Mike Huckabee embraced, and ‘Duck Dynasty,’ whose patriarch, Phil Robertson, endorsed Cruz. Palin herself, an evangelical darling in 2008, has had two reality TV shows: ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ and ‘Sarah Palin’s Amazing America.’”
― Anthea Butler
“Incidents of racial bias and implicit bias happen to African-Americans of every social class daily in America. White people seldom notice or dwell on these as they encounter the quotidian events of their day.”
― Anthea Butler
“’Amoris Latetia’ reiterates that Pope Francis is interested in changing both the tone and reception of people and families in the church to a more hospitable, less judgmental environment.”
― Anthea Butler
“Gentrification is stripping people not only of their homes but also of their dignity and their lives, and it is effectively whitening public spaces.”
― Anthea Butler
“What’s sometimes called the ‘browning’ of the American Catholic church is very much on the minds of many U.S. bishops – and the pope. Unlike evangelicals who have stayed strong in their support of President Trump, the USCCB knows that it cannot afford to lose their Hispanic and African American population because of a weak stance on racism.”
― Anthea Butler
“Pope Francis is calling for a better way to hold together complicated family lives in the midst of official church teaching without alienating people who have marital issues and family problems.”
― Anthea Butler
“Trump’s blatant racism and demonization of Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants also serves as a foil for white evangelicals. By othering these groups, Trump allows evangelicals to persist in their belief that white Anglo-saxon Protestantism is the default for true American Christianity and is best suited to lead America as a ‘Christian Nation.’”
― Anthea Butler
“As one of a handful of religion professors in the U.S. who study, write, and teach about conservative Christianity and politics, I am all too aware of the real meaning of the list and of its purpose. Promoted by Turning Point USA, the list is not simply designed to expose professors who discriminate; it is designed to silence and smear.”
― Anthea Butler
“Rightwing organizations like Turning Point USA or Leadership Institute spend considerable amounts of money and time to train students with conservative values how to ‘fight back.’”
― Anthea Butler
“In the past, candidates’ performances of ‘Christianity’ have been strong points for voters, but Trump’s ascendancy with evangelicals has eviscerated that expectation. Evangelicals, like other voters, can be very pragmatic about the issues they want addressed by the leadership they support.”
― Anthea Butler
“Evangelical women are also large consumers of evangelical media and ministries, and their support of these organizations is crucial. Should they shun both Trump and the predominately male evangelical leadership, it may have a ripple effect in these organizations’ fundraising abilities and their ministerial efforts.”
― Anthea Butler
“Trump has benefitted indirectly from a strong belief of evangelicals that the two terms of Barack Obama has led the country to the brink of destruction. Obama was bad enough in their eyes; having the Clintons back in the White House would be the end.”
― Anthea Butler
“Whether Trump knew it or not, his strong language tapped into evangelical beliefs about the ‘last days’ and America’s role in biblical prophecy.”
― Anthea Butler
“Trump, despite his divorces and ‘worldly lifestyle’, appeals to evangelicals because he is wealthy, powerful, and pays them lip service. They support him because they are tired of losing the culture wars and are addicted to the perks of power.”
― Anthea Butler
“Trump, despite his shallow depth of biblical knowledge, plays into both the apocalyptic end-time fears of evangelicals and their nostalgia for a ‘small town’ America.”
― Anthea Butler
“Voting for Trump will either hasten the return of Jesus, according to evangelical belief, or to allow evangelicals to regain political power in the White House. Either way, it is a win-win situation.”
― Anthea Butler
“In Pope Francis’s ‘Amoris Laetitia’ (The Joy of Love), an apostolic exhortation on Catholic family life, he does not make earth-shattering doctrinal changes with regards to divorced Catholics, same-sex married Catholics, or the church’s stance on homosexuality.”
― Anthea Butler
“Pope Francis has mentioned several times in public prior to ‘Amoris Laetitia”s release that lack of work was keeping young people from marriage. He has also riffed on married life and ‘mothers-in-law,’ but this document shows that, even more than a theologian, he is a pastor.”
― Anthea Butler
“The usual Republican suspects lined up to side with Trump, chastizing Pope Francis for insinuating that the candidate isn’t Christian.”
― Anthea Butler
“Protestants attacked Catholics during the 1844 Nativist riots in Philadelphia. Guess what that was about? Anti-immigrant sentiment. Back then, it was the influx of Irish Catholics into the city. Now, it’s Donald Trump clinging to a bygone notion of Protestant ascendancy and nativist sentiments, when mainline Protestantism is on the wane in the U.S.”
― Anthea Butler
“Trump’s defense of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism is gathering those who support him into a strong solidified base. Since the election of Francis, Republicans have been very wary of the Pope, attacking his liberal statements on homosexuality, global warming, and capitalism.”
― Anthea Butler
“’Hymn for the Weekend’ mixes cultural and religious practices, commodifying them into a banal but beautiful message of imagined solidarity.”
― Anthea Butler
“While Chris Martin has a deep interest in yoga spirituality, it does not make him an expert on how best to portray Desi heritage.”
― Anthea Butler
“The conversation of cultural appropriation versus appreciation is especially important for the NFL as it seeks to expand its fan base to London and all over the world.”
― Anthea Butler
“McCain courted in 2008 what I would call ‘fringe’ evangelicals, in part because evangelicals were skeptical of his commitment to values voters. McCain’s embrace of Palin came after having to scuttle endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley, charismatics who believed in Armageddon and fiercely supported Israel.”
― Anthea Butler
“The moment of true capitulation came when the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association quietly took Mormonism off the list of apostate religious groups.”
― Anthea Butler
“President Barack Obama cried during his announcement of new executive actions designed to curb gun violence in the United States by restricting the access to firearms of those who present a clear danger to themselves or others and improving access to mental health services for those in need.”
― Anthea Butler
“Our founding documents didn’t just protect the right to bear arms: they were designed to protect all the principles upon which America was founded – and the first among those were freedom of worship, peaceful assembly, and the right to free speech.”
― Anthea Butler
“Gun rights advocates – many whom also believe that the US constitution is divinely inspired and that the rights it enumerates are God-given – face a conundrum. Their very insistence that the government not restrict guns in public spaces or limit their sales in any way also obviously inhibit other Americans’ rights as covered by the US constitution.”
― Anthea Butler
“In a world where families are drowning on beaches to escape war, leaving the church because of sexual abuse, or denied access because of sexual orientation, the utopia that Pope Francis desires may be impossible for the church to attain.”
― Anthea Butler
“If there is anything that has broken the church’s relationship with families, it is the global sexual abuse scandal.”
― Anthea Butler
“The Chicago Declaration on Women in the Catholic Church, drafted in July of 2015 by Catholics for Choice, stated that it imagined a church where ‘women are respected for their choices about their health, welfare, and lives.’”
― Anthea Butler
“The pope’s instruction for priests to forgive may mean, in some cases, the difference between a woman staying in the Catholic Church or leaving for a more understanding and empowering church nearby.”
― Anthea Butler
“Forgiveness is a spiritual practice and biblical mandate from the New Testament that many American Christians engage in as a part of their faith.”
― Anthea Butler
“Forgiveness is enshrined in the Lord’s prayer – forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. These scriptures point to the power of forgiveness not only as a way to absolve transgressions but to ensure that the person extending forgiveness will be forgiven of theirs.”
― Anthea Butler
“Historically, narratives of forgiveness were part of both the anti-slavery movement and the civil rights movement in America. ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ for instance, was based loosely on the life of the Rev. Josiah Henson, who forgave his master that wanted to sell him and beat him after Henson begged him not to.”
― Anthea Butler
“Forgiveness became a big part of the civil rights movement, juxtaposed against the violence of protesters and law enforcement. King described forgiveness in one of his early sermons as a pardon, a process of life, and the Christian weapon of social redemption.”
― Anthea Butler
“Issues like immigration, police brutality, and other onerous laws put in place by local and state governments are prime avenues for active clergy to work with their parishioners on the issues that affect their daily lives.”
― Anthea Butler
“American Presbyterians, as a whole, have already lost a large percentage of their population since 2008, in part because of the creation of the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO) – which formed in 2012 as a response to the ordination of out gay men and lesbians within the PCUSA.”
― Anthea Butler
“Issues over same-sex marriage and LGBT people in the PCUSA are not new: there is a 40-plus year history of arguments and tacit agreements over the issue of sexuality in the denomination, and the first openly gay minister in the PCUSA was ordained in 2011.”
― Anthea Butler
“The decision to allow clergy to perform same-sex marriages at the discretion of the congregation poses challenges for seminaries training new pastors who come from denominations fundamentally opposed on biblical grounds to same-sex marriage.”
― Anthea Butler
“The text, ‘Is God a White Racist’, By Rev. Dr. William Jones, is still studied by theologians and academics and taught in institutes of higher learning. The book called into question the chief construction of black liberation theology: that God is on the side of the oppressed.”
― Anthea Butler
“What is the role of a public intellectual in the age of Twitter and soundbites? Is it to share your thoughts for the public good, or is it to curate the heaps of hate emails, tweets, and right-wing articles that trash your intellectual and social work?”
― Anthea Butler
“The University of Pennsylvania and my wonderful colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies have been routinely sent hate emails about me. Calls to fire me are numerous. Some have even come from within the university. The Penn Switchboard is flooded with calls, and the more conservative alums threaten to stop contributing.”
― Anthea Butler
“C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said, ‘Whatever grows a church is good’ and needs to be nurtured.”
― Anthea Butler
“One of the first books that outlined spiritual mapping was ‘Breaking Strongholds in Your City: How to Use Spiritual Mapping to Make your Prayers More Strategic, Effective and Targeted,’ published in 1993.”
― Anthea Butler
“In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favourite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don’t just read the Bible: you read devotional books and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed.”
― Anthea Butler
“Not every conservative Christian is a dominionist, but to say a movement doesn’t exist, as some pundits and journalists have, without even being able to say what it is in an op-ed is just irresponsible… The big story is that the religious right isn’t dead.”
― Anthea Butler
“Charles Finney, the great 19th-century revivalist and evangelical, would have had a hard time preaching a revival in America today. Finney’s brand of evangelical fervour, called the ‘new measures,’ emphasised saving souls and reviving worship by incorporating elements of personal testimony and music into church services.”
― Anthea Butler
“These 21st-century ‘teavangelicals,’ who represent a considerable segment of the Republican party, are vastly different from their 19th-century forebears. Nineteenth-century evangelicals were concerned with societal ills such as temperance, slavery, the rise of industrialisation and suffrage.”
― Anthea Butler
“The ‘teavangelicals’ of the 21st century have flipped the script, turning their ideas about Christianity, social responsibility, and care for the downtrodden into a mythology of Christian founding fathers.”
― Anthea Butler
“There is not one particular moment that can account for the shift from the social issue concerns of 19th-century evangelicals into the state of American evangelicalism today. Some historical moments are telling. The rise of biblical criticism in the 19th century forced evangelicals to make choices about what they believed about the gospel.”
― Anthea Butler
“The prosperity gospel and its purveyors are worldwide and account for the rapid growth of Pentecostalism, the global religious movement prosperity preachers come from.”
― Anthea Butler
“Bernice King, daughter of MLK, is an assistant pastor at New Birth.”
― Anthea Butler
“Black churches have long been targets of white supremacists who burned and bombed them in an effort to terrorize the black communities those churches anchored. One of the most egregious terrorist acts in U.S. history was committed against a black church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.”
― Anthea Butler
“The shooter’s choice of Emanuel AME was most likely deliberate, given the church’s storied history. It was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South, founded in 1818 by a group of men including Morris Brown, a prominent pastor, and Denmark Vesey, who would go on to lead a large, yet failed, slave revolt in Charleston.”
― Anthea Butler
“While the 1963 Birmingham church bombing is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings in the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11, 2001.”
― Anthea Butler
“The Charleston shooting is a result of an ingrained culture of racism and a history of terrorism in America. It should be covered as such.”
― Anthea Butler
“Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen are mirrors of each other. Both enjoy enormous support among evangelicals, yet they lack a command of biblical scripture. Both are among the 1 percent.”
― Anthea Butler
“Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Osteen’s brands are rooted in success, not Scripture. Believers in prosperity like winners. Hurricanes and catastrophic floods do not provide the winning narratives crucial to keep adherents chained to prosperity gospel thinking. That is why it is easy for both men to issue platitudes devoid of empathy during natural disasters.”
― Anthea Butler
“The survivors of Hurricane Harvey do not need empty tweets and platitudes from people like Donald Trump and Joel Osteen. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as we say in Texas, they are all hat and no cattle.”
― Anthea Butler
“In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.”
― Anthea Butler
“Graham promoted a white evangelical respectability that wanted to ‘put the brakes’ on the civil rights movement, and never really accepted women as equal to men. He may have been the country’s greatest evangelist, but he was also an apologist for the racist and sexist beliefs pervasive among white evangelical men in 20th-century America.”
― Anthea Butler
“Graham functioned as a megaphone for conservative biblical ideas that dovetailed with conservative politics, including family, sexual morality, and adherence to laws. He was not only an evangelist, he was also an enforcer: enforcing conservative white Christian social beliefs and evangelical ethical claims as ‘America’s Pastor.’”
― Anthea Butler
“Graham may have wanted integration, but instead, he promoted gradualism and provided absolution for racists hiding behind a Christianity attuned not only to Jesus but also focused on regulating behavior and black bodies.”
― Anthea Butler
“God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us.”
― Anthea Butler
“As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god.”
― Anthea Butler
“As a historian of American and African-American religion, I know that the Trayvon Martin moment is just one moment in a history of racism in America that, in large part, has its underpinnings in Christianity and its history. Those of us who teach American Religion have a responsibility to tell all of the story, not just the nice touchy-feely parts.”
― Anthea Butler
“When the good Christians of America are some of its biggest racists, one has to consider our moral responsibility to call out those who clearly are not for human flourishing, no matter what ethnicity a person is. Where are you on that scale? I know where I am.”
― Anthea Butler
“There are many photos of Catholic priests and nuns marching in the Civil Rights movement, most notably at the March on Selma, Ala. in 1965. However, the history of Catholicism in this country tells a different story.”
― Anthea Butler
“Many Catholic parishes were segregated prior to the Civil Rights movement, and the first large contingent of African-American Catholic priests would enter into the seminary in the 1920s.”
― Anthea Butler
“The American Catholic Church made statements on racism as far back as the 1940s and ’50s. ‘Colored’ Catholic girls could not live in the dorms at Catholic University – the bishops’ university – up into the 1940s.”
― Anthea Butler
“Black women care deeply about civic engagement, democracy, education, children, and justice.”
― Anthea Butler
“Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.”
― Anthea Butler
“While it is important that black women begin to receive the accolades and assistance they are due from the Democratic Party, they cannot be expected to continue to save white people from the poor choices they make – based not on moral values but party affiliation.”
― Anthea Butler
“If you’re a black woman at an Ivy League school, there is no free speech for me because they’re already pissed that I’m there.”
― Anthea Butler
“Judge Aquilina did what Michigan State University officials, USA Gymnastics, and the Karoyli ranch officials did not: Immediately believed the women who had been abused, validated their lives, and ended their perpetrator’s access to them and other victims.”
― Anthea Butler
“What often happens in a court of law is that, if victims do get their day in court, they are on trial as much as the perpetrators.”
― Anthea Butler
“In many cases, in order to protect organizations, administrators often move abusers around, discount victim statements, stonewall victims in administrative processes, and/or offer legal settlements with non-disclosure agreements to victims with the express intent of protecting the institution and ridding themselves of the victim.”
― Anthea Butler
“Judges can bring their own biases about sexuality in the courtroom, causing victims untold pain in the telling and retailing of their stories.”
― Anthea Butler
“For black Catholics, the papal visit is a time of anticipation but also a time of reflection on their difficult – but important – place within the Catholic Church in America.”
― Anthea Butler
“Despite a rich history of black Americans involved in the Catholic Church, invisibility is a big problem for black Catholics in America.”
― Anthea Butler
“I went to Catholic school and experienced racism firsthand from nuns and priests.”
― Anthea Butler
“My memories of Vatican II center on white parishioners turning away from me when I went to shake their hands at Mass during the sign of peace.”
― Anthea Butler
“If there is anyone who values free speech, it is a tenured professor!”
― Anthea Butler
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