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Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war veteran Allen West will be headed to Congress from Florida, despi…

Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…olleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith…

Mike Johnson isn’t Just Your Average Christian Right Avatar — He’s Influenced by Fringe Movements Unfamiliar to Most Political Analysts

By Annika Brockschmidt

……] We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.” Johnson currently supports a nationwide abortion ban, opposes gender affirming health care for children and has tried to pass a statewide “Don’t Say Gay” law modeled after Ron DeSantis’ draconian example in Florida. In 20…

Single, But Married To Jesus

By Anthea Butler

…other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married. Yet the chu…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Union Busting for God: Catholic Colleges Invoke “Religious Freedom” to Violate Catholic Teaching

By Kaya Oakes

…ova University Christian ethics professor Gerald Beyer and attorney Donald Carrol wrote in the National Catholic Reporter last year, while the NLRB is reluctant to force Catholic institutions to do something contrary to church teaching, “when a Catholic university abridges the right to unionize of its adjunct faculty, it violates its own tradition’s teaching.” In an email, Beyer said that “Catholic social teaching is unequivocal: workers have the…

Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…al networks and institutions, such as bars and clubs, gay men were able to care for the sick, start educating one another about HIV/AIDS, and save their own lives. Gay men created not just political alliances, but alternate forms of kinship, out of their ways of relating to each other sexually. Lesbians have done this as well. Religious people continue to struggle within their communities to integrate their understanding of their traditions with t…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ietnam: Openly Gay US Ambassador Set to Take Post Ted Osius, an openly gay career diplomat, was confirmed as US Ambassador to Vietnam two months ago; the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers spoke to him as he was preparing to take his post; his husband and son will join him. Osius’ ambassadorship also comes against the backdrop of a Vietnamese LGBT rights movement that continues to grow more visible. PFLAG Vietnam officially launched in Ho Chi Minh…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…

‘My Name is Legion’: Sources and Forces of White Supremacy in the U.S.

By R. Drew Smith

…hate group and white supremacist group content has skyrocketed—even as the numbers of those groups have themselves noticeably increased. For example, the number of known hate groups is reported to have increased from roughly 600 in the year 2000 to 930 in 2014. Moreover, major television networks such as Fox TV have ushered hate content and white supremacist content into the media mainstream, featuring racialized rhetoric that ranges from disparag…