by | Aug 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
These Tennesseans are finding ways to live without adding to the landfill. But they aren’t finding a lot of “zero waste” company.
Zach and Sadie McElrath’s six-year-old daughter saw something at a store that caught her eye: a slingshot. But they didn’t buy it for her because it would have ultimately produced landfill waste. Instead, their daughter is figuring out how to make a slingshot with a stick and rubber bands from around the house.
The McElraths, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, live a “zero waste” life. What they do throw away is compostable, except for the rare cases when they end up with items that have to go to the landfill, such as an Amazon envelope or a bag from frozen berries. They take their trash to the curb once or twice a year, even as a family of five with children ages 9, 6, and 2.
Both parents work—Sadie as a nurse practitioner, and Zach as a software engineer at a start-up. Even with their full life, they find the zero-waste life doable and even freeing, not having to think about buying things like slingshots.
“Other people might not be as extreme as we are,” said Sadie. “But everybody can do something.”
The McElraths have been living this way since 2017, and they haven’t found many other Christians interested in zero waste over the years. They find more zero-waste efforts coming from faith groups like the Unitarian Universalists. But they have been seeing more interest among Christians in their circles in doing things like composting.
This tracks with national data on evangelical attitudes about the environment compared to other faith groups. Evangelicals are the religious group least likely to see climate change as a serious problem, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. And a University of Florida study found a generational divide among evangelicals over that …
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by | Aug 23, 2023 | Uncategorized
The former like the young billionaire’s conservative politics. The latter worry about his connections to radical Hinduism.
At 38 years old, Vivek Ramaswamy stands out among his fellow Republican presidential candidates for his age alone. The self-made billionaire has further set himself apart by saying he would ban social media for children, proposing to raise the voting age to 25, and espousing controversial views on 9/11. But when running in a party with a strong evangelical Christian wing, perhaps his most unique characteristic is his Hindu faith, which Ramaswamy has proudly discussed.
“Am I religious? Yes, I am. I am Hindu. I am not Christian. And we are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values,” he said in an interview with NewsNation that aired last week. “But here is what I can say with confidence: I share those same values in common. I believe I live by those values more so than many self-proclaimed Christian politicians.”
White evangelical leaders who are considering other GOP candidates than former President Donald Trump are divided on whether a leader whose faith doesn’t stem from Judeo-Christian traditions can effectively lead a nation they believe is rooted in these principles. But in interviews with CT, Indian American Christians expressed apprehension about a leader in the White House who admired Narendra Modi and would further give radical Hinduism a foothold in the United States.
“God is real”
In March, Ramaswamy appeared on CBN where he compared the current state of America to the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. David Brody, who conducted the interview, told The New York Times last month, “The lazy narrative that he’s Hindu so he can’t appeal to evangelicals, I don’t buy it at all.”
Ramaswamy, who grew up in Cincinnati, frequently points out that …
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by | Aug 23, 2023 | Uncategorized
Four issues on evangelicals’ minds as the Republican presidential race moves forward.
Americans will get their best look yet at the slate of candidates vying for the GOP nomination in 2024 during the first Republican presidential debate and a pre-recorded interview with former president Donald Trump, both airing Wednesday night.
Evangelicals remain a key constituency for the Republican Party and for Trump in particular, who leads in most polls. But the political landscape has changed in significant ways in the four years since the last campaign, so when it comes to the big issues, evangelical voters have some new questions for the Republican field. This is the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was overturned, since Russia invaded Ukraine, and since Trump’s indictments.
Eight GOP contenders will take the stage for the debate in Milwaukee, among them Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; former vice president Mike Pence; former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, both from South Carolina; and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and newcomer to the political scene. (Trump is skipping the debate in favor of a pre-recorded interview with the erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson.)
Here are four things evangelicals will likely be watching for on Wednesday night:
Abortion
The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last year was celebrated as a historic victory for the pro-life cause. But the aftermath has shown that both Republicans and the pro-life community were unprepared for what came next.
The issue of abortion is now in the hands of state governments, and the response has varied. Some, like Florida under the leadership of DeSantis, have enacted strict abortion limits, while others have expanded access to the procedure. In several states, abortion has ended on the ballot, leaving the matter …
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by | Aug 22, 2023 | Uncategorized
A recent poll suggests evangelical voters trust the former president more than religious leaders. But this problem isn’t new.
The four-bar graph of the CBS/YouGov poll results, which made the rounds on social media this week, was undoubtedly crafted to go viral, and go viral it did.
The chart showed that Republican primary voters who plan to back former president Donald Trump in 2024 find him to be the most trustworthy—ahead of conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own families and friends. Fully seven in ten said they feel that what Trump tells them is true, but only four in ten felt religious leaders merit the same trust.
Zoom in on white evangelicals who support Trump, and the numbers are even more dramatic. These figures weren’t included in the main CBS report, but Kabir Khanna, deputy director of elections and data analytics at CBS, posted them on his own account.
Here, the percent who trust religious leaders moved up a bit, to 50 percent. But the percent trusting Trump moved up by a larger margin to 81 percent, the same number as the widely cited (if not wholly accurate) count of white evangelical votes for Trump in 2016.
This is not great poll data, as I’ll explain in a moment. And as journalist Josh Barro observed, there’s “a bit of drawing the bullseyes around the gunshots here—the finding is that people who trust Trump trust Trump.” But there is some substance in this graph. It’s another chapter in the story of an American crisis of church authority, and that’s a tale which predates Donald Trump and will require our attention long after he leaves the political scene.
There are several problems with the data, and …
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by | Aug 22, 2023 | Uncategorized
The six-year-old CSB translation has recently climbed to the No. 2 spot on monthly bestseller list.
One of the newest major Bible translations on the market may be securing its place among the most popular.
The Christian Standard Bible (CSB) was the second most-sold Bible translation for three out of the past four months, according to data compiled by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA), coming in behind the New International Version (NIV) and ahead of the English Standard Version (ESV).
The CSB came out in 2017, published by Lifeway’s B&H Publishing Group as a revision of the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). It was designed to offer a happy medium between readability and biblical accuracy, a translation philosophy referred to as “optimal equivalence.”
“The CSB has that undefinable sense of buzz,” said Mark Ward, senior editor at Logos’s Word by Word blogand a popular Bible YouTuber. “The consensus seems to be that it managed to nail the balance of English readability and word-for-word accuracy that American Christians are looking for.”
With more churches switching to the CSB—in some cases, buying Bibles in bulk for their pews—and the release of popular editions such as a Tony Evans Study Bible and an award-winning kids Bible, it’s among the fastest-growing translations, climbing from fifth or sixth place on the monthly bestseller lists in prior years to second in May, June, and August of 2023.
It reached 10 percent of the market share within the first five years, and now has reached around 13 percent, said Andy McLean, publisher for Bibles and reference at B&H, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
“We’re seeing more churches adopt it, more individuals use it for personal …
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