Religion Dispatches
…he county. Fellow UCC minister Barry Lynn (executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State) worries that religious liberals may inadvertently emulate the religious right by seeking to impose religiously-driven political views on the rest of society, and thereby become “left-wing theocrats.” How do you explain to voters how you relate your values to politics and public policy? If I ever felt that my role as an elected offi…
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…et pools of money buying Southern elections is a problem. SCOTUS’ Citizens United decision changed the rules of the game, making it easier for big money to play partisan politics. As John Nichols has said in his book, we are more and more a “dollarocracy.” But we remind our progressive friends who are not up on their Southern history: Poor and jobless people of all races have never had money. That’s the definition of “poor.” But if Harriet Tubman…
Read More…f we accept the insinuation and ultimately the adoption of shari’ah in the United States.” That’s right, Frank Gaffney, speaking on the grounds of the United States Capitol with his band of fear-stoking propagandists. Gaffney is right. The Constitution is under attack. The panic that the Constitution is so weak that it would collapse under the weight of a few contracts providing for alternative dispute resolution, or wither from upholding the Free…
Read More…argeted, and a cynical president used the attacks as a pretext to rush the United States into two irrelevant and ill-considered wars. And surely the most reprehensible consequence of 9/11 was the use of torture against those the president deemed “enemy combatants.” But Americans themselves, sooner or later, rise to their better selves and come to embrace the principles of toleration and respect for minorities encoded into our charter documents and…
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…nearly two-thirds of which are pentecostal. These numbers bear out in the United States, where around 25% of Hispanics identify as Protestant. “Among Hispanic Protestants overall,” Pew writes, “two-thirds either say they belong to a traditional Pentecostal denomination (29%) or describe themselves as charismatic or Pentecostal Christians (38%).” Pinning down precise numbers for LLDM is almost impossible. The church claims to have more than three…
Read More…od in the way of same-sex families being able to travel as a family to the United States.” Thinking Strategically At least two gatherings in the past week focused on the strategic promotion of LGBT equality abroad. On Friday, December 6, in Washington, D.C., the Center for Transatlantic Relations, which is part of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, hosted a presentation called “LGBT Rights: A Geost…
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…of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, which states that they are promoting the “Judeo-Christian heritage” of the country as they see it. (Though, of course, little in the vision can be construed as “Judeo.”) The original U.S. motto since 1782, E Pluribus Unum, which still appears on the Great Seal of the United States, much better reflects the founding aspirations of unity amidst diversity. But that’s no longer the goal of the national m…
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…ber of 68% of the “unaffiliated” believing in God or a higher power in the United States. That drops to 30% in France (233). According to that previous Pew research, one reason more people identify as “unaffiliated” now is that people who used to skip church and not really believe anything in particular simply felt a social pressure to identify with a religion anyway. Now, more people feel comfortable simply naming what they were already doing bef…
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…irst marriage in Utah—Groom: 23 Bride: 21 *Median age at first marriage in United States—Groom: 26.8 Bride: 25.1 Marriages contracted so early face significant challenges, so it is good that the Mormon church does not forbid divorce, although the fact that Mormon couples often begin having children soon after marriage (and typically have larger families than the rest of the U.S.) does something to inhibit divorce. Even still, “Utah’s divorce rate…
Read More…tty safe to assume that a significant number of “Concerned Citizens of the United States” are Mormon. But so too are a significant number of undocumented immigrants living in the American West. As we’ve reported here at RD, the Church’s strongest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almost 4.5 million Mormons worldwide are Spanish-speaking. Economic downtimes and anti-immigrant outcry go hand-in-hand in American histo…
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