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Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…se members. In 2013, the SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect their active members. The problem is, membership isn’t alone in its decline—it’s joined by baptisms and weekly worship attendan…

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…d hold federal, state, and local law enforcement to account when an entire community comes under suspicion based on religious and racial profiling rather than a body of evidence. As long as Muslims are disproportionately targeted for criminal investigation, anti-Muslim bias will be perpetuated. By the end of 2016, Muslim terrorists were responsible for 123 of the 240,000 murders in the United State since 9/11. Yet counter-terrorism remained the nu…

Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

By Warren Throckmorton

…dings with the 11 subjects (from page 1555, see below). Bussee was subject number two and Cooper was number one. Both Bussee and Cooper were rated as Kinsey 6 (exclusively homosexual) before change and a 0 (exclusively heterosexual) after change. Since there was no follow-up, this study has been used to support the proposition that gays could change to straight via religious mediation. For instance, not knowing any of this background at the time,…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…age. And this is not to even mention the ever LGBT-supportive Metropolitan Community Church. This brief and incomplete recap of the rise of same-sex marriage among Protestant Christians in the United States reveals something important. Even though almost no American Christians support it (outside of some smaller LDS sects that currently practice polygamy), there is no reason to think they could not come to do so, and to do so as rapidly as they di…

How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

By Cody J. Sanders

…ary time―a kind of historical hinge point in our relationship to death and community. Could the unwelcomed ubiquity of death rupture our contemporary hesitation to discuss death openly, making death-talk less taboo? Rather than a typical American avoidance of any serious talk about death, will we turn toward one another in collaborative dialogue about end-of-life questions and advance directives, funerary rituals that honor our connection to the e…

Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…rrorists go to the trouble (for them) and the awful experience (for us) to commit a horrendous act of terrorism and not take credit for it? Wouldn’t they want everyone to know what cause was being promoted? Not necessarily. Anonymous terrorism is actually fairly common. In my own studies of terrorism related to religion, I have found that many if not most of the perpetrators do not make any public statement following the act. Part of the reason, o…

Breivik’s Religious Pluralist Vision: A COEXIST Bumper Sticker Without the Crescent

By Michael J. Altman

…urdered more than 300 million individuals,” going so far as to divide that number up: “3/4 Hindu/Buddhist, Animist/Pagan 1/4 Christian/Jewish/Zoroastrian.” So, while it’s true that he borrows a lot of imagery and language from the Christian crusades, such a list of world religions indicates that Breivik also thought in terms of modern religious diversity. It wasn’t merely Christendom versus Islam, it was a world of peaceful religions defending the…

Speaking for Hinduism in the Absence of a Conversation

By Murali Balaji

…F—or any group or individual that writes for Huffington Post—cannot censor comments. In fact, he did get his comment published. For the record, HAF never called for a ban and vigorously condemned any form of academic censorship. To conflate HAF’s position with Batra is both laughable and offensive, because it lumps together an expanse of criticism—intellectual and irrational—as one. Shukla’s call for academic integrity in the AAR—which was vetted…

The Family Research Council’s Mistaken Identity

By Sarah Posner

…adical far right, described in the FBI’s Project Megiddo report as “a vast number and variety of groups, such as survivalists, militias, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Christian Identity churches, the AN and skinheads.” The report called Christian Identity “the most unifying theology for a number of these diverse groups and one widely adhered to by white supremacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism…

5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Overthink the New Pew Data’s Impact on Politics

By Sarah Posner

…analysis, “despite the continued growth of religious ‘nones‘ within the population as a whole, the share of the electorate with no religious affiliation also is little changed compared with other recent midterms (12% in both 2010 and 2014).” Political organizing and turnout matter far more than numbers….