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How Religion Shapes (or Doesn’t) Our Views on Public Issues

By Daniel Schultz

…y .26. That should give you (digging for iTouch calculator) 4%. That’s the number of people who can be persuaded on religious grounds to preserve reproductive rights. Common ground on this subject does not work. The best you can hope for is to change the subject, and we all know how well that worked during the health care reform debate. (Conversely, .82x.26=.21, or nearly all of the Republican base.) Second: nobody gives a rat’s patootie about rel…

For Conservatives, the Future Looks Dim… and Gay

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…%) say they think engaging in homosexual behavior is a sin, while an equal number says it is not. Those who believe homosexual behavior is a sin overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage. Similarly, those who say they personally feel there is a lot of conflict between their religious beliefs and homosexuality (35% of the public) are staunchly opposed to same-sex marriage. The even split on the issue of whether homosexuality is a sin, interestingly, is ac…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…ation, apart from the first. That one is plain for all to see in the scary numbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really s…

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

By Anita Little

…on is: how do you separate out this story? For example, if we’re looking at 1968, and we’re studying the Black Panthers or Black Power, we tend to assume that story is different from 1964 with the story of Rev. Martin Luther King. But we forget the religious influence that happened in both of those. For me, all of this is really meshed together in how we talk about resistance. On these most recent killings, we’re on Twitter talking about police br…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…rmer colonies. Those who prefer a winter birthday might want to go for Dec. 15, 1791, the date on which the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the Bill of Rights. (I know: much too close to Christmas, doesn’t have a chance.) This “birthday” business matters because people who are utterly ignorant of their own history need to be slapped around a little. As well, people who seem to think that the British Empire’s response to the 1776…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

…ay says it more starkly: “Not to oppose hate is to endorse it.” When he was 13, in the early 1960s, Irigonegaray’s parents took him to the State Capitol in Topeka to show him where laws were made, impressing upon him the importance of preserving freedom and liberty for all. This was no ordinary sightseeing trip or civics lesson, his family had just fled Castro’s regime in Cuba. “Any time anyone is made less equal, we all are,” Irigonegaray says, n…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And it was white Catholics who were overwhelmingly in favor of Trump—60 percent versus 37 percent for Clinton, a stunning gap of 23 points. While Clinton did win Hispanic Catholics by a similar wide margin—67 to 26—t…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…cases surpassing Protestant opinion in terms of “liberalness” was the early 1980s. For instance, throughout the 1970s, Catholic support for abortion rights was “slightly lower than Protestant,” according to Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center, by about seven percentage points. However, “in 1982, for the first time, support for abortions for social reasons, such as poverty, not wanting to get married or not wanting more children, was…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…uple had killed the two youngest children. The way the eldest child died, a 14-year old boy named Benson, remains, according to the AP reports, “undetermined.” Why would Benjamin and Kristi Strack kill themselves and their children? The short answer: a “pending apocalypse.” But beyond that, no details. According to various reports, Kristi Strack had once been obsessed with Dan Lafferty, now imprisoned for his role in the murder of his sister-in-la…

Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…to be tested by the Tea Party’s mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war vete…