Chrissy Stroop

Compared to Donald Trump’s prior term in office, the current Trump administration looks different. The gleefully Nazi-saluting billionaire Elon Musk is front and center in an unprecedented and unconstitutional role. According to RD’s Annika Brockschmidt, he “appears to be functioning as an unelected

When you’re raised in an authoritarian Christian community you can never quite comfortably fit into, you learn early on about the ambiguity of language. Words like “love,” for example, mean very different things to a person who respects others’ bodily autonomy and a person who associates loving thei

I’ll confess something up front. I hate election postmortems. I’m not sure anybody likes them, especially after an election that may be catastrophic for one’s particular demographic. But given that, as usual, the Democratic leadership is already drawing all the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s def

Is it valid to be annoyed when, as your plane pulls up to the gate at your destination, a flight attendant tells you and your fellow passengers, just before deplaning, to “have a blessed day”? Perhaps this question wasn’t on your American controversies 2024 bingo card; it certainly wasn’t on mine

As a transgender person who grew up evangelical and is now an atheist, I feel the consequences of the “myth of Christian innocence” that profoundly shapes American society in ways that many Americans do not. Fully two-thirds of LGBTQ Americans are nonreligious (compared to about one-third of the gen

Since 2016, I have been arguing here at RD that former president Donald Trump’s politics, and his appeal to White evangelical Christians, are best explained through the lens of authoritarianism. Pundits initially scratched their heads for entirely too long over how evangelicals could purport to foll

As I watched this year’s Democratic National Convention live, there were moments when it became clear that Democrats were, and are, winning on messaging. “There’s no way Republicans can compete with this,” I said out loud multiple times as Doug Emhoff, Kamala’s husband, and Cole and Ella Emhoff, her

There are many factors that may determine whether incumbent president Joe Biden wins reelection this November. Whether the very Catholic president is visibly “religious enough,” however, is absolutely not one of them. If you’re one of my regular readers, this is probably as obvious to you as it i

I wanted to like God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, the new Rob Reiner-produced documentary on “the dangerous implications” of Christian nationalism. I wanted to like it in spite of the trailer’s focus on the ostensible “threat” of Christian nationalism to Christianity itself, a f

In a recent essay for The Atlantic, David Wolpe, a rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, sizes up former president and insurrectionist Donald Trump as follows: “the lavishness of his homes, the buildings emblazoned with his name and adorned with gold accoutrements, his insistent ego

For those who have been following it, the saga of the banned drag show fundraiser at West Texas A&M took a new twist on Wednesday when Andrew Seidel—a constitutional lawyer, RD senior correspondent, and vice president of strategic communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and

As Annika Brockschmidt has already detailed for readers of RD, the June 30 – July 2 Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia was, among other things, a Christian nationalist gathering. At one of its main events, which took place at the Museum of the American Revolution, attendees were treated to Chri

In recent years, the market share of Catholic hospitals—which unconscionably restrict healthcare options for all patients in accordance with Catholic dogma, which many patients don’t share—has grown to alarming proportions in the United States. About 1 in 7 U.S. hospital beds are in Catholic systems

Remember when transgender Americans seemed to be having a positive cultural moment? Former child actor and author Chaz Bono, Sonny and Cher’s transgender son, helped pave the way with a documentary about his experience that came out in 2011, the same year he was featured on Dancing With the Stars. I

For centuries, American evangelical Protestants have been obsessed with religious ‘revival.’ Fear of ostensible societal, moral, and religious ‘decline’ is the other side of the same paranoid Christian coin. The United States, deeply influenced by early Puritan settlers and other assorted Christi

One of the funnier developments in the ongoing drama around the “He Gets Us” campaign that aired pro-Jesus ads during the Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl has been the attacks from numerous evangelicals on social media who berate the PR messaging for being so “woke” it’s “unbiblical”: https://twi

Last week, Americans were forced to endure this year’s National Prayer Breakfast—the 70th since the unfortunate tradition, which ought to have been dropped as an embarrassing relic of early Cold War excess decades ago, was launched by the authoritarian Christian organization “the Family” in partners

When I attended K-12 evangelical Christian schools in the 1980s and 1990s, we didn’t call ourselves Christian nationalists; we just called ourselves Christians. As the pious Christians we were (compelled to be), we memorized Bible verses for assignments, attended mandatory weekly chapel services, an

Although the House of Representatives has yet to conduct any business due to a far far-right faction of Republican lawmakers denying the merely very right-wing California Representative Kevin McCarthy the speakership through 10 11 12 votes (and counting), a new Congress convened in Washington on Jan

Last week, the LDS Church formally came out in support of the federal Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), a legislative initiative that would repeal the notorious Bill Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and compel all American states to honor legal interracial and same-sex marriages—although it