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Secular Summit 2025
Please join us January 4, 2025 for the Secular Summit! This annual event draws members and supporters from around Arizona for a day of education, advocacy, inspiration and activism, all centered on the theme of building bridges within the secular community and beyond.
Speakers include Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy; Talia Lavin, author of Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, a panel discussion featuring faith leaders committed to fighting Christian nationalism, Rep. Stephanie Stahl-Hamilton (D-21), our Secular Star Awards, and more. Food included!
This year’s event will be hybrid – both in-person and over Zoom; we’ll meet at Shadow Rock UCC: 12861 N. 8th Avenue Phoenix, AZ 85029.
Click here to watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Matthew D. Taylor is a religious studies scholar and expert in independent charismatic Christianity and Christian nationalism. He is the author, most recently, of The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy (October 2024), a book that tracks the Christian leaders who have been central to galvanizing Christian support for Donald Trump and were also heavily involved in the January 6th Insurrection. Taylor is also the creator, writer, and narrator of the Charismatic Revival Fury audio-documentary series on the Straight White American Jesus podcast and author of Scripture People: Salafi Muslims in Evangelical Christians’ America (2023). Taylor holds a PhD in religious studies and Muslim-Christian relations from Georgetown University and an MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. He has served on the faculty of Georgetown University and of George Washington University, and is currently a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.
Talia Lavin is the author of the critically acclaimed books Culture Warlords and Wild Faith. She is a journalist who has had bylines in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and more. She writes a newsletter, “The Sword and the Sandwich,” which is featured in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024.
