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The Demographic that Should Keep Rove Awake at Night

By Katherine Stewart

…ation. That said, lack of religious affiliation is also common among Asian Americans: while 42 percent of Asian Americans identify as Christian, 26 percent report themselves as religiously unaffiliated, in a significant increase over the general population, and 73 percent of Asian Americans voted for Obama. Like any group of this size, the religiously unaffiliated aren’t monolithic. About a third self-identify as atheists, while the rest say they…

Safety Not Guaranteed

By Jeanne Carstensen

…e red wine in plastic cups by candlelight, I learned that the proprietor had recently been convicted of starting a fire in the building during a bout of depression. The hurricane had made things worse, but he was going to lose his business anyway. This man, whom I had just met and who would be in jail in a few days, refilled our cups. “Thank you for your support,” he said. We drank a toast. None of this was on the map, exactly, but it was what I…

Seen Andrew Sullivan’s Expose-Style Footage of the LDS Temple? Now Read This.

By Joanna Brooks

…rabbis. The difference in Mormonism is that there is no dedicated priestly class. All observant adult members are eligible to participate and wear the equivalent of priestly vestments. The earliest forms of the LDS endowment were introduced in the 1830s by Joseph Smith. Matthew Bowman, author of The Mormon People: The Making of An American Faith (Random House, 2012), describes the endowment ceremony as instituted in 1842: The men were washed and a…

Electionpocalypse, Part I (Christianity)

By Sarah Posner

…ire the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the Birmingham jail, Romney was tormenting boys with…

A History of the Unaffiliated: How the “Spiritual Not Religious” Gospel Has Spread

By Matthew S. Hedstrom

…lly books, has had significant consequences for the religious lives of all Americans, especially the unaffiliated. First, it has enhanced the tendencies within American religion toward a therapeutic understanding of the spiritual life. The profit-oriented commercial presses that came to dominate religious publishing naturally pursued the largest market possible for their goods, and seized on the non-creedal, nonsectarian, and psychologically moder…

Missouri Pastor Goes Viral on Gawker: ‘Separation of Church and Hate’

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ry. Plus, if marriage is viewed as a sacrament, then why is it the state’s business to determine what a sacrament is? I believe not only in the separation of church and hate, but also in the separation of church and state. What were you doing when you found out the speech had gone viral, and what has been the most surprising thing about the reaction? I was having dinner with my family and my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. To be honest—as lame as thi…

Most U.S. Catholics Back Marriage Equality, But Knights of Columbus Pour Millions into Opposition

By Peter Montgomery

…campaigns. How do progressive Catholics respond to the combined forces of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the money machines that are the Knights of Columbus and NOM? “What we have on our side is the belief of the majority of American Catholics,” says Dignity’s Duddy-Burke, noting that more than half of American Catholics support marriage equality. She says “It is not consistent with the gospel for any segment of the church to be using…

Did Billy Graham Really Tell Romney He’d ‘Help’?

By Evan Derkacz

…omney, whom I considered a friend. I have followed Mitt Romney’s career in business, the Olympic Games, as governor of Massachusetts and, of course, as a candidate for president of the United States. What impresses me even more than Governor Romney’s successful career are his values and strong moral convictions. I appreciate his faithful commitment to his impressive family, particularly his wife Ann of 43 years and his five married sons. It was a…

Death Without Religion

By Gordon Haber

…h of the profit motive. “The transplant industry is a $20-billion-per-year business,” he reminds us. Well, so is weight loss and self-storage. Teresi does raise some troubling points about the “lowly status of the organ donor.” The District of Columbia, for example, allows doctors to “pre-harvest” organs without donor cards or family consent. Thus tourists who have the misfortune of dying in D.C. can end up as spare parts. Ultimately, though, The…

Is the Episcopal Church a Bain Capital Investor?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…copal Church” was an initial investor in Bain Capital: So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn’t get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church’s pension fund to invest, but I didn’t. I figured it was bad enough that I might…