Religion Dispatches
…umbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it…
Read More
…was caught flat-footed, and hard pressed to understand how the majority of Americans in the 20th century could just ignore the clear-cut evidence, and wrap themselves tighter in the mythology. There is something right about these words. “Accommodation” is a civilized approach, at least when compared to “confrontation.” And I too, along with many other Christians, am hard pressed to understand how so many Americans can simply ignore the evidence fo…
Read More…e larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspect…
Read More
…s and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportion of Americans (irrespective of race) living in high-poverty neighborhoods was 15 percent. Further evidence of the growing social isolation of urban poor populations has been the resegregation of public schools. A 2014 report by The Economic Policy Institute states: “The typical black student now attends a school where only 29 percent of his or her fellow students are white, dow…
Read More
…hristian, just like Tony Perkins. Mr. Perkins, you don’t speak for me or a number of conservative evangelicals who are worn out and sickened by the same old battle cry you believe we should join. Many ask today, why should we join one side and fight against the other? Each time it’s the same banal response: For no other reason than that we should just fall in line against what extreme public figures deem a societal evil worthy to be fought against…
Read More
…rebellion and driving it to victory. Oddly, no professional historian has managed to tell the story as well and as thoroughly as non-historian Kevin Phillips tells it in his magisterial 600-page tome, The Cousins Wars (1999). Phillips notes that the fiercest American revolutionaries by far were New England members of the Dissenting churches (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists) whose forebears, in the preceding century, had battled the pr…
Read More
…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…
Read More…ation but to make a “Passover offering.” Seven is a biblically significant number, the number of completion and perfection, and in this spring of 2007 the Praise-a-thon began on Easter Sunday, the seventh day of Passover. If you make the Passover offering, Munsey claims, God will give you seven blessings: God will dispatch an angel to lead miracles; rid you of your enemies; bless you with prosperity; heal you; give you longevity; give you an inher…
Read More
…irector of the Office of Intellectual Freedom at the Chicago-headquartered American Library Association, told RD that the Project Blitz model bill “raises a lot of issues around the ability of individuals to access perfectly legal, constitutionally protected materials based on the values of one group in the community.” Contrary to Project Blitz disclaimers, in other words, this bill would allow conservative Christian values to determine what is le…
Read More
…er be licensed to deliver babies at hospitals in any state”; overall, “the number of abortions have increased dramatically.” Everywhere in America, men, women and children are likely to be confronted by, or exposed to, pornography. When the Federal Communications Commission lifted all “restrictions on obscene speech or visual content in radio and television broadcasts,” it freed television programmers to show “explicit portrayals of sexual acts” a…
Read More