Religion Dispatches
…r support,” read their letter, obtained by NBC News. Dateline, February 12, 1998: At a closed-door convention of conservative leaders in Arizona last week, James Dobson, who heads the multimedia ministry Focus on the Family, warned that if the Republican Congress continued to ”betray” conservative evangelical voters, he would abandon the Republican Party and ”do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible.” * * * * Dr. Dobson exco…
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…ized by upward mobility but by severe poverty and social isolation. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of persons living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40 percent or higher grew from 7.8 to 15.8 percent for blacks and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportion of Americans (irrespective of race) living in high-poverty neighborhoods was 15 percent. Further evidence of the growing social isolation of urban poor pop…
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…y different era of Reagan and Thatcher. Greece was deemed a bad risk in the 1980s and thus money was lent in Greece at nearly 10 percentage points higher than it was in northern Europe. Virtually no Greeks had credit cards in the 1980s; precious few had access to the kind of credit that made businesses big and profitable. And so, in the late 1990s, Greece cast its lot on the European Union, and turned itself into a pretzel to hit those 3% benchmar…
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…the evangelical milieu of my childhood and youth. It’s hard to find exact numbers here, but I’m confident that most evangelicals believe that Jews who never “accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior” go to hell when they die. Around the time I went to college, however, I was introduced to a seemingly more benign theological possibility; namely, that when Paul wrote “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26) he really meant every Jewish perso…
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…them and for everyone around them. The good news here is that significant numbers of the hesitant and resistant respond to faith-based approaches. And although PRRI estimates that about 13% of all Americans are “generally agreeable to QAnon theories,” those same people respond the best to those approaches. The study names six such techniques: A religious leader encouraging vaccine acceptance A religious leader getting a vaccine Religious communit…
Read More…misunderstanding. That’s been the case with my faith too. In the 1830s and 1840s, Mormons including my ancestors experienced intense religious persecution. Their homes were burned, their leaders tortured by mobs. Some were killed. So in the 1840s, Mormons packed up and traveled across the Great Plains in oxcarts, and when they could not afford oxcarts they pulled handcarts. They did what so many American peoples have done—they moved on and starte…
Read More…is, however, ain’t exactly clear—yet. Trump clearly has drawn substantial numbers of evangelical voters, and some support from evangelical spokesmen (including Jerry Falwell, Jr., and who knows how many local ministers or lay leaders). While Moore and others are on the front lines of the #NeverTrump movement, the Pew Research Center suggests that at least half of white American evangelicals think he would be a good President. Theories abound. The…
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…longside other figures about their social work? Does this money-talk muddy spiritual motives? Despite the study’s flaws and the Grims’ tendentious conclusions, this research is a good reminder that religious institutions handle so much cash. Religion journalists and scholars seldom look at the financial side of worship, and financial analysts don’t spend too much time thinking about faith. A dearth of data contributes in both cases, no doubt, due…
Read More…ys and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Even more surprising is an 11 percent jump in support of ending discrimination against gays and lesbians in military service by those who attend church on a weekly basis. In 2004, 49 percent of churchgoers supported allowing open service by gays and lesbians – now that number is 60 percent. There is much speculation about the jump in numbers in the conservative and church going communities. Some gay…
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…on. Even as American society grows more religiously diverse and increasing numbers prefer spiritual freedoms to affiliation with one religion, all it takes is one older white fundamentalist Christian proclaiming some message of violence or hatred to a create a media frenzy and get the world talking about theology on the fringes (which can, in the right political circumstances, take the fringe to the heart of the mainstream). Terry Jones is one rec…
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