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From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…ism of believing it to be nothing more than a liberal plot against God and country—and God and country’s designated representative, Donald Trump. Religious types aren’t the only offenders, either. Twitter was on fire over the weekend with sightings of young folks partying it up, apparently either in the belief that COVID-19 wouldn’t affect them, or in simple defiance of health experts: https://twitter.com/realkatiejow/status/1238937001463877632?re…

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…

More Thoughts on Media Coverage of Liberal Religion

By Sarah Posner

…han the Republican base, and includes a far more significant (and growing) number of unaffiliated voters, avowed secularists (who are both non-believers and religious people) and religious minorities. And because more of those people like the Establishment Clause and would shudder at religiously-directed public policy. Given that the Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath had the support of a variety of faith traditions, it’s a good question to ask why i…

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…

Sovereign Grace Sexual Abuse Lawsuit Just Got More Complicated

By T.F. Charlton

…ave taken place since I first covered it for RD back in early March. On May 14, a second amendment was filed to the suit: [The suit] adds three new plaintiffs, making a total of 11. Five plaintiffs are now using their real names, and the rest are pseudonyms. It accuses church leaders of conspiracy, negligence, misrepresentation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. On May 17, however, Maryland Circuit Court Judge Sharon V. Burrell dism…

Not a ‘Weenie-A** Lodge’: James Ray Trial Begins

By Johnny P. Flynn

…ss, and fifteen were reported to be suffering ill effects. In spite of the number of people who experienced difficulties during each of the eight fifteen-minute rounds, Ray contends he did not know that there were problems. In fact, Ray is accused of ignoring the pleas of those who wanted out; in one case an individual went out through the side of the sweat lodge to escape the heat. The prosecution played tapes of Ray before the sweat saying, “It’…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…

First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin

By Lewis Wallace

…ough Bernadette). Young Bernadette enjoyed regional fame until her death in 1879, and in 1933 she was canonized as a saint. The small village of Lourdes brings in an average of five million tourists each year. The site’s success as an attraction is partially due to its pop cultural currency: a 1943 film starring Jennifer Jones, Song of Bernadette, made the saint a star in the English-speaking world. But it also has a particular theological signifi…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…rch and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in the US ask Google “Why did God make me ugly?” and 103 ask “Why did God make me black?” The most common God-related question, asked over 25,000 times per month…

Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

By Patricia Miller

…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, 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 starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…