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

By Daniel Schultz

…lone, 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 attendance. Whoops. If anything, the analysis quoted above minimizes the problem. To understand why, you need to know something about geography. In short, they call it the S…

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

By Michael J. Altman

…stan beginning in 1000 CE constituted a genocide of Hindus living there. A number of Vyas’ articles circulate on conservative Hindu websites and forums claiming various Hindu genocides at the hands of Muslims in different historical periods. For Breivik, Vyas provides an example of Muslim violence and imperial expansion. Breivik returns to South Asia again and again for examples of Muslim violence such as the Hindu Kush article to portray right wi…

Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ause 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, of course, is that they do not want to say anything that might help authorities locate them and bring them to justice. The manifesto of the Unabomber contained a sufficient number of…

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

By William E. Smith

…d a second wife. He did so, moreover, only after getting the approval of a number of important Protestant theologians, including Martin Luther. This case and other developments around polygamy in the 16th and 17th centuries are chronicled by John Cairncross. What Lyndal Roper has said about experimenting with marriage in the Reformation holds true for our time too. We have been busy overhauling our marital system at least as thoroughly as happened…

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,…

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

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…Muslim Americans surveyed said that the media’s coverage of Muslims is unfair. Even as the 2017 Pew poll shows a Muslim American population that is critical of anti-Muslim prejudice, media bias, and some government policies, it also reveals a remarkably hopeful community. There was no polling of Muslim Americans in 1967, but historical research on Muslim Americans has revealed something similar. Despite all the negativity surrounding the image of…

Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth

By Katherine Don

…cacy is “probably the only grassroots movement that includes roughly equal numbers of pro-life and pro-choice individuals. We often hear shock from legislatures, saying they have never before seen these two groups come together on the same piece of legislation.” Shaye Miller, previously the member chairwoman at Nebraska Friends of Midwives, says that the issue usually gets quickly “dropped” when abortion is brought up amongst midwifery advocates….

New Report: Muslim Terrorism a ‘Minuscule Threat’

By Hussein Rashid

…the span of a decade. Per annum, it is 0.001%. If we take a more realistic number of 4 million American Muslims, the numbers become 0.005% over a decade, or 0.0005% per year. Last year there were 14,000 homicides in the U.S., and with a population of 300,000,000, that’s about 0.0005% of the population are murderers. The report ends with this sage advice: “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terr…

The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

By Andrew Aghapour

…human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribute artificial intelligence across multiple hardware…

More than Half of Mississippi GOP Primary Voters Believe the President is Muslim

By Sarah Posner

…ondents believe interracial marriage should be illegal; 24% of evangelicals did. Sixty-six percent of respondents in Mississippi do not believe in evolution; among evangelicals that number jumped to 74%. Of all the respondents, 29% believe interracial marriage should be illegal; among evangelicals that number was 33%….