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Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

By Daniel Schultz

…includes the ARC logo for identification purposes. I want to talk about Post’s story in some detail to inaugurate what I hope will be a series of columns dedicated to media criticism of religion journalism. We at Religion Dispatches certainly have for a long time analyzed the shortcomings—and successes—of the mainstream discourse on religion, particularly when it comes to what journalists and pundits get wrong or miss altogether about the complex…

Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…hin seconds—our security detail literally picked us up and moved us. I’m almo*]}*st losing my shorts, because I can’t hold on to everything. And then they just put us inside the press barricade, where uniformed police officers and state troopers were not doing a damned thing. At that point, projectiles started being thrown through Emancipation Park. We don’t know what they were, but we were told that these nazi groups were taking soda cans and putting…

Christian Epistle on Islamophobia

By Haroon Moghul

…and continue to be amazed with the similiarities that I never knew existed most my life. I was the one in the crowd that asked you about the your story and experience in Detroit [see: Jesus, Carpetbomb My Heart –ed]. I’ve quoted you below: In this time of reconstructing the way our world works, a polarizing and exclusive religious vision is not particularly relevant. America is also inescapably and increasingly diverse, and its domestic and foreig…

“One of Us”: Rick Santorum and the Politics of (Very Big) Family

By Kathryn Joyce

…Louisiana on March 21, when organizers asked people to say what they liked most about the ultra-conservative Catholic, homeschooling presidential candidate. Two days earlier, the 19-child Duggar family, famous for their reality TV show about large-family living, had released a folksy video in support of Santorum: “19 Reasons & Counting to Vote for Rick Santorum.” In it, Michelle Duggar drove home the same point as the Louisiana fan, giving as the…

Obstacles for Secularists

By Sarah Posner

…very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rituals, sacred texts, and physical spaces that all serve to bind the participants together. Atheism has none of these things—most of the time it’s an individ…

A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

By Chris Stedman

…s in the United States of America. Atheists are already in the minority in most parts of the country, constituting a small fraction of the religiously unaffiliated in the U.S., but it seemed I was to be an especially odd one out at this event. Or, as my mother once said with a laugh when I was off to speak in Mobile, Alabama: “It’s kind of hip to be a gay atheist [in Cambridge, Massachussetts]. Not so much most everywhere else.” I was scheduled to…

The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

By Ismar Volić

…the distorted agenda that results is carried out to the dissatisfaction of most Americans. Fanatical bases gather under banners of intolerance and exclusion while vast swaths of the population feel disenfranchised and removed from the political process. The connection between an ordinary citizen and the government that purportedly acts on their mandate has never been stretched this thin. Underpinning all this is a failure of mechanisms that run ou…

Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…as “ministerial”—and the case in fact involves a schoolteacher who taught mostly secular subjects—the decision effectively grants religious groups a degree of power over their employees that no other group can claim. There is much that is troubling in the Hosanna-Tabor decision. The balance between the right to free exercise of religion and the right of employees to equal protection under the law is not easy to strike, and this decision doesn’t a…

Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

By Haroon Moghul

…a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian-American Republican, I’m here to tell you we do exist. Awkward silence. The jarring discomfort between a discourse of intolerance on this very subject, and the presence of the object of such intolerance could only resolve itself in a tepid, sporadic, nearly embarrassed applause. It’s…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…nvoked by religious conservatives such as the Vatican, the US bishops, and most right-wing evangelical Christian groups. And even among religious conservatives, things are getting increasingly complicated: since 1982, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa authorizing them, sex-change operations have been not only allowed, but funded, by the Iranian government, apparently as a remedy for homosexuality. When the Catholic Church and it…