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Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

By Patricia Miller

…ed to a few key numbers that I found interesting. Apparently, according to Commonweal’s Grant Gallicho, my reading of the numbers—which was more critical than his—amounted to an “extended raspberry.” Just to get a couple of housekeeping details out of the way. Obviously, my dogma/doctrine typo was just that, as was the difference in Francis’ and Benedict’s net favorability rating, which is 11 points, not 6. But my point remains. Given the near-con…

Gen Z’s Religious Affiliation Stats Are Confusing … But Only When Viewed From a Christian-Centric Perspective

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…

How Fitbit Helps a Conservative Evangelical College Monitor Students’ Bodies For Christ

By Jonathan Root

…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…

Single, But Married To Jesus

By Anthea Butler

…Having a husband meant that they could not give their ultimate all for the number one man on most African-American womens’ lips, and it’s not Denzel. It’s Jesus. For many women in churches like COGIC, being in love with Jesus means that most other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Bein…

Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…ounder of Prison Fellowship and Watergate felon Religion or Politics? It’s come up a number of times both in the book and in this roundtable; whether The Family is a religious or a political movement; “a political theology”? Randy wrote that: “The author parses this group as a political movement, but that scheme… doesn’t hold. What if he looked at The Family as a religious movement instead, as I think it is?” Jeff just said of the media: “There’s…

Rumors of the Suicide of the Liberal Church Are Exaggerated: A Response to Chris Hedges

By Mark Hulsether

…n times more people than watched the Democratic Presidential debates. That number, combined with 36 million liberal Protestants (with “growing irrelevancy”), is just a bit below the viewership for the Super Bowl. As to causes of decline, if we move to the margins of demonic institutions does this slow it down or speed it up? He calls for greater vitality on the left, and I agree that this is better than steering right or being tepid—but at best wh…

Religion and Resistance at the New National Museum of African American History and Culture

By Anita Little

…rt of reminder that there have always been African Americans in the Jewish community. We also have a number of artifacts from the Nation of Islam as well as other Muslim communities. So the museum reminds us there were African Muslims who were enslaved, making the Islamic experience part of the founding of America. Even though black history is dominated by the Christian voice, it is not the only voice that is present. We strive to tell the story f…

Fox News Controversy on Yoga and White Supremacy Reveals Problem of Yoga Discussion

By Andrea R. Jain

…tances. The interweaving of right-wing politics, capitalist economics, and commercial spirituality in all of these figures is alarming. Despite the shortcomings in their approach I applaud Gandhi and Wolff for adding nuance to an ongoing conversation about the appropriation of yoga. As they suggest, the problem is not with yoga per se, but with a more complex entanglement of nationalist or racist politics and capitalism, an economic system that th…

Obama’s AIPAC Speech Hardly a Change to Believe In

By Stephen Zunes

…, Palestinians, Jewish Americans and Arab Americans.” Betraying the Jewish Community Through a combination of deep-seated fear from centuries of anti-Semitic repression, manipulation by the United States and other Western powers, and self-serving actions by some of their own leaders, a right-wing minority of American Jews support influential organizations such as AIPAC to advocate militaristic policies that, while particularly tragic for the Pales…

A Twisted Love Story: How American Evangelicals Helped Make Putin’s Russia and How Russia Became the Darling of the American Right

By Katherine Kelaidis

…th most things wrong with the contemporary GOP, lies in the party’s almost complete takeover by evangelicals that began during the Nixon era. Throughout the Cold War, the official atheism of Communist countries and the suppression of religion behind the Iron Curtain became a rallying cry for the American Right in general and American evangelicals in particular, who made it their mission to save “Godless Russia,” seemingly unaware that before 1917,…