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Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

By Sarah Posner

…ople who aren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal sch…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…l inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover country? As a cub reporter, I wrote about the greying mainline, their internecine squabbles and financial woes. But thirty years later, they’re still standing. Did we get it wrong or did we just forget to lo…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…atirizing religious rituals and sanctities and prophets” under articles 98, 160, and 161 of the Egyptian Penal Code. According to Egypt News Daily, the prosecution first sought to charge him in connection with disseminating Innocence of Muslims but when this accusation was proven false, they revised their strategy to target the content of Saber’s video blog. Though sentenced to three years and released on bail he was subsequently locked up due to…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…ends when I pray.” This God is not an amorphous therapeutic deity of yesteryear nor a mostly ornamental cross in a photo shoot. This is the living Lord who hears our prayers. But these ultra-devout performers share a peculiar space with a number of other artists whose personal faiths are inconsequential to their public personae but whose fluency in the holy plays out in, well, mysterious ways. Lana Del Rey’s catalogue runs deep with both religious…

Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

By Peter Montgomery

…ion” is itself a perversion of the Christianity of Acts 2 and the earliest years of Christianity. Ask any Amish person. To Beck and Barton, the question of President Obama’s beliefs about salvation is not only a theological dividing line between good and evil, but also legitimate political fodder because they say it is a source of his collectivist, even Marxist, worldview. And it demonstrates his lack of commitment to the “quintessential American…

Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

By Katherine Kelaidis

…hief among them contention over the pope’s claim to universal authority. A number of violent incidents over two hundred years, from both sides of Christianity’s two halves, helped solidify the separation. These included the Byzantine massacre of Catholics living in Constantinople in 1182, the sacking of Thessaloniki by Catholics in 1185, and their pillage of Constantinople in 1204. Finally, the establishment of Rome-allied episcopacies in traditio…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…week’s Pew Poll that found no real “Francis effect” from the pope’s first year. According to Daniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or wh…

Special Hell: Progressive Catholics Reckon With the Rise of Trump

By Patricia Miller

…esus’ commitment to the poor and marginalized. It threatens the last fifty years of progress with regard to civil rights, economic equity, a fair immigration policy, and especially a woman’s right to choose,” said Linda Pinto of CORPUS, an organization that represents married Catholic priests. For many Catholics this rejection of bedrock Catholic values—and what it means for the country as a whole—is the source of much of the anxiety around the el…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

By Peter Manseau

…any in 1961. Newsweek had been founded by an ex-Time staffer almost thirty years before, and perhaps as a filial rejection of a former employer’s concerns, in the beginning Newsweek published very little about religion generally, and less about Catholics specifically. It featured the pope on its cover only at those unignorable moments such as the death of Pius XI in 1939, and the election of Pope John XXIII nine years later. (The 1939 election of…