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Are Conservative Churches Really Winning by Being More Orthodox?

By Daniel Schultz

…t Catholics tend to be more fertile than mainline Protestants, the topline numbers mask a complex underlying situation. According to the Pew Forum’s Religious Landscape Survey, since 1972, Catholics have been about 25% of the total population in the United States. However, white Catholics have been in serious decline during the same period. It’s only lopsided margins of Catholics among immigrant groups (especially Hispanics) that has propped the C…

Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

By Sarah Posner

…en list of Christian right leaders. Given that Wallis and Hunter are close spiritual advisors to the president, if one does consider them part of the Christian right, then one should conclude that Obama has had a most remarkable right-leaning spiritual evolution from Chicago to Washington. Considering Newsweek chose this list to represent the increasingly “diffuse” movement, it missed much of what makes it tick. The people on the list represent a…

Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

By Brock Bahler

…ileged rights to Native American land, including the Monroe Doctrine and an 1823 Supreme Court decision in the case of Johnson v. McIntosh, which declared that the “discovery” of America by Christian nations gave them the “sole right of acquiring the soil.” As Steven Newcomb, cofounder of the Indigenous Law Institute, has noted, the 1826 Tennessee Supreme Court decision Cornet v. Winton upheld the Christian colonialist underpinnings of the Johnson…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…etings claimed that because an alleged act of abuse was committed against a 17-year-old in 1995, the allegation should be thrown out. At the time of the alleged abuse, the canonist argued, canon law held that the age of majority was sixteen. But review boards were not established to serve a canon-law function. Their role is simply to determine whether there is good reason to believe an alleged act of abuse took place against a minor. What if the N…

The Faith Outreach Canard

By Sarah Posner

…ent, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally saw a 14 point drop in White Protestant support, 14 point drop with White evangelicals, and a whopping 20 point decline with Catholics. But there are two major problems with this argument: first, it’s factually inaccurate — the numbers are simply wrong. While Democrats experienced significant losses compared to the last mid-term election in 2006, which was a good year for Democr…

And What of the Non-Jewish Jews?

By Shaul Magid

…ancestry generations ago, a Jewish spouse, Jewish friends etc. In terms of numbers, Jews by religion or no religion make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, but if you add “People with a Jewish affinity” it rises to 2.7%, so that this category of people who are not considered Jews by the Jewish community but identify as Jews is nearly 25% of the Jews by religion or no religion, those we conventionally call “Jews.” The fact that there are so many Ameri…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…either in one “ovotestis” or with one ovary and one testis). An increasing number of public and commercial health insurance companies now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at leas…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…with data about the brain. These studies were especially common in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when medical researchers and scholars of religion started training neural imaging technologies on the brains of meditators, shamans, and mystics with the hope of isolating neural circuitry that was uniquely religious. Research in this vein continues to this day, often with the goal of offering empirical support for otherwise subjective accounts of re…

Conservative Christians Insist the Toxic Theology Portrayed in the Duggar Family Doc is ‘Fringe’ — But is it Really All That Different?

By Caroline Matas

…Harris, one of the key architects of the U.S. homeschooling movement in the 1980s and the brother of Joshua Harris, whose 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye made waves in American evangelical purity culture. Alex Harris—a lawyer who has clerked for both Justice Anthony Kennedy and then-Judge Neil Gorsuch—tweeted that he participated in the docuseries to tell the story of his own family’s involvement in the movement to “take America back for God” an…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

…if lost or stolen, but only if you first write down each and every serial number. Then you have to keep this information somewhere that’s not the same somewhere you keep the checks. But then they really do NOT spend just like cash—especially abroad where we meet and mix with people in their own places. Such places are not subject to our being guests there. So I do tend toward keeping travel cash in an odd place. (No, I’m not gonna share with you…