Religion Dispatches
…ious group invested more heavily in the fight against marriage equality in California than members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who make up 2% of California’s population but who are estimated to have contributed between 50%–70% of the $40 million raised by the Yes on 8 campaign and the majority of its on-the-ground volunteer labor force. Today, a vocal minority of Mormon progressives are celebrating the Court rulings. Said S…
Read MoreThe Supreme Court’s refusal to consider an appeal of California’s 2012 ban on conversion therapy is the clearest sign yet that even a Neil Gorsuch Court is unwilling to allow religious practitioners to engage in objectively harmful behavior—at least when it comes to minors whose care has been entrusted to licensed mental health professionals. The summary rejection of the appeal effectively affirms the lower court’s ruling that California’s law wa…
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…s Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin. Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation. These shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone who knows anything about evangelicalism, and in this sense the research definition is unremarkable in terms of content. What is remarkable is the upshot. The stated hope is that the definition will provide a b…
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…s, but the inexcusable delays and denials by German police, and their consequences for German and European politics. If however you want to know how what happened might be used to advance another agenda, consider Douthat’s column. Douthat describes the terrible assaults in Cologne as not the fault of several dozen youth, but Arab and Muslim culture entirely, the kind of conclusion we’d expect from a Pamela Geller, or a Tommy Robinson. Not a New Yo…
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…entary on Moyn, the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff cuts to a more fundamental ambiguity in “human rights.” He distinguishes between the concept of a human right as such and particular instances of that concept. The concept of a human right is the concept of a universal right, an entitlement that is held by every human being simply in virtue of being human. Instances are a subset of these rights—for instance, the right to marry or the right to a…
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…s but also a legal means for law-abiding undocumented immigrants to pay a penalty, stay here, and work. To back up this policy, he cites Ronald Reagan, the most popular Republican president in recent history. As England’s markets grew increasingly unregulated, Adam Smith’s critique sharpened: capitalism without morals, he wrote, makes workers dull, destroys communities, vitiates morality, fosters anonymous cities, and allows the flamboyant rich to…
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…somehow managing to ignore the most salient sociological finding: that frequent church attendance among White Christians consistently indicates higher support for Donald Trump. These articles and think-pieces are written by people who should know better. And when you identify an area in which people who should know better insist on being wrong, you know you’ve hit on something that speaks to their deep-seated emotions, values, and fears. I’ve sai…
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…s. What I am saying, in short, is that the Kim Davis affair is an epiphenomenal event in the slow process of secularizing the religious marriage license and marriage more generally in the U.S. Correction: an earlier version of this story linked Apostolic pentecostalism with the Calvinist-based Christian Reconstructionist movement. The traditions share an emphasis on the primacy of the Bible over civil law, but they differ both historically, as Sar…
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…s. Images of hard-working and non-threatening gay couples with their children enhance that audience identification even further. I’m interested in your observation that religion is a “malleable tool” where marriage debates are concerned. Right now the UCC church in North Carolina and the “Sister Wives” family in Utah are using a “religious liberty” argument to oppose bans on same-sex marriage and polygamy, respectively. In doing so, they turn a po…
Read More…to even require a “pass”–there’s little sympathy in the opinion for the challenges faced by women entering abortion clinics, even if the challenges are from kindly grandmothers like the plaintiff in McCullen. While Scalia complains that abortion opponents are having their rights “suppressed,” there is little sympathy in the majority opinion for the rights of women to enter a doctor’s office free of harassment, even if it is delivered out of purpo…
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