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Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…into face-to-face relationships. If the folks at Nielsen are correct, smartphones will continue to overtake, uh, dumb phones, making app-based connection and information-sharing a continuing growth area. Religiously-themed apps are certain to be an important part of that, but unless they grasp the digital trinity of social engagement, spiritual meaning, and incarnational potential that makes such apps truly worthwhile for believers and seekers. Th…

White Evangelical Leaders Already Distancing Themselves from the “81-Percenters”

By Neil J. Young

…s, that “an overwhelming number of evangelicals” voted for Trump. Instead, news media, including the The New York Times, Washington Post and Fox News, to name a few, all made clear time and again that a majority of white evangelicals supported Trump. It’s true that in prior election cycles the media has not been good about distinguishing “evangelicals” from “white evangelicals”—a confusion that scholars of American religion often pointed out—but c…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…was all undercover and I was just naïve. As a younger pastor, I was in a renewalist community and the gay people I knew there all regarded their same-sex attraction as a temptation they were trying to resist. I was just taking their story on its face and had no experience understanding about it; I inherited the traditional consensus on the question and never really examined it. It was probably in the early 2000s, when our church started in the col…

PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

By William E. Smith

…USA might adopt this rhetoric to affirm the position of its fairly sizable number of dissenting presbyteries, but is it really accurate? The word “tradition” tends to connote a sense of fixity and stability, an impression that “this is the way marriage always was,” leaving “gay marriage” to represent a sharp and dramatic historical rupture. Yet this way of thinking is only possible because of a certain historical amnesia. In fact, it would be far…

Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents

By Karl Giberson and Randall J. Stephens

…reasonable authority, have come to sympathize with and even celebrate Fox News’ most well-known anti-intellectual Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly, who pitted his understanding of science against that of Richard Dawkins in a recent show, is fond of scoffing, “sorry, professor, not buying it,” suggesting that expertise is really just opinion. A number of thoughtful evangelicals are alarmed at the surging anti-intellectualism within their ranks. And there a…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…o longer agreed with several of the fundamental tenets of Christianity, I knew that I didn’t belong in my church community anymore—particularly because the church I grew up in emphasized strict adherence to its doctrine. In short, I became a nonbeliever because I took very seriously Christianity and its truth claims, not because I found them laughable. Given that many people currently understand the term atheist to mean, as Blanchard put it, “mili…

Don’t Call It “Prayer Shaming”: Our Moral Failure Exposed

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…enured defense of guns. Andy Parker, father of Alison Parker, the Virginia news anchor who was murdered in August while reporting live, suggested that these invocations of prayers and positive thoughts are code words for deliberate political inaction by elected officials. The theological commentary on this shooting is what my grandmother would describe as “too heavenly minded and no earthly good.” These conversations about prayer reflect a graver…

Oklahoma Bill Would Violate Basic Freedoms, Rewrite the Ten Commandments

By Andrew L. Seidel

…the many differences between various Jewish and Christian sects in how to number and interpret these different sets of commandments. All of this I explain in my book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Seemingly small differences are magnified because Christianity has historically claimed to possess ultimate truth, so any deviation from an absolute truth is significant. Minor variations are further magnified by, as James…

Can The Religious Left Be Effective Again? Longer Answer: Quizás

By Daniel Schultz

…gh participation rates are increasing among these types of churches, they represent a small percentage of all churches. Fulton explains that a lot of this increase is due to the debates over immigration reform; but even factoring that in, Hispanic churches are becoming more politically active. The number of congregations might be few, but they may also be larger communities, representing a substantial number of people. In any case, the trend will…

Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

By Ann Gleig

…is that the rhetoric being used by Campus Reform and their ilk is far from new to me or fellow researchers working on racial justice in American Buddhism. Rather it echoes some of the white Buddhist backlash to racial justice work. A number of white Buddhists* have adopted the language of “invasion” and “infection” in an attempt to discredit long overdue racial justice initiatives in their communities. Popular Zen teacher Brad Warner, for instance…