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Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You Wouldn’t Know it From the Media

By Chrissy Stroop

…ted fact that the social and political polarization that pervades these not-so-United States is asymmetric and significantly worse on the political Right. Not coincidentally, that side of the proverbial aisle consists largely of the conservative, mostly white Christians from whom the newly nonreligious are fleeing. These same conservative Christians, directly encouraged by their defeated president and a host of powerful Republican leaders, attempt…

Oklahoma Bill Would Violate Basic Freedoms, Rewrite the Ten Commandments

By Andrew L. Seidel

…the many differences between various Jewish and Christian sects in how to number and interpret these different sets of commandments. All of this I explain in my book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Seemingly small differences are magnified because Christianity has historically claimed to possess ultimate truth, so any deviation from an absolute truth is significant. Minor variations are further magnified by, as James…

Harry Reid vs. Islamic Cultural Center

By Joanna Brooks

…pokesman, after Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle demanded he take a position on the matter. It’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Cent…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…tory. One teacher’s treatment of Genesis focused on ways to reconcile young-earth and old-earth theories by suggesting that each of the six days was unusually long, or that a lengthy gap elapsed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2-3. Another teacher’s resource materials included a religious tract claiming that NASA had discovered a missing day in time that proved Joshua 10’s story of the sun standing still. One district’s slideshow on archaeology’s verifi…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…ters, who aren’t necessarily economically struggling the same way that blue-collar voters are, the Affordable Care Act loomed large. Just over 80 percent of Trump voters said the ACC “went too far.” As Olga Khazan reported in The Atlantic, it’s upper middle-income voters who don’t qualify for premium subsidies but saw their health insurance rates rise substantially under Obamacare who are the most dissatisfied with the law. As conservative comment…

Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

By Lynne Gerber

…ckfire when people stop making positive changes in their lives because the number on a scale doesn’t change. In terms of ex-gay ministries I think it is the perception that people who engage in these ministries are in deep denial and are self-deluded. Some probably are. But many whom I spoke with who have been in these ministries for years or decades foster no illusions about having become heterosexual. What they do know is that they have made a s…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…But only 2 percent of American Catholics go to confession regularly. Three-quarters of them only go once a year, if ever. Mercy is depicted in our media not as divine intervention, but as human instinct. After the Catholic Church published Humanae Vitae in 1968, the Vatican’s disapproval of birth control meant that the vast majority of Catholics who used it—and continue to use it—no longer felt the church was an authority on sexual matters. This…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…ism in the 1960s and the 80s and the 90s and 2010. In 2010, writing as a 91-year-old, he believed this message was one of the most important things he could leave behind on this earth. In this book he says the signs are now clearer than ever. He’s written a lot of books, but five on apocalypticism? I don’t know that he’s covered any other topic in five books. At the same time, I want to be very clear: postwar evangelicalism grew far more diverse t…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…on Adam to name all the plants and animals in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:19-20) helps humans to understand their surroundings and their place in the newly created world. So, too, the renaming of Abram as Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14) expresses his new, covenantal relationship to God and marks the future trajectory of his lineage. Indeed, in many religions, choosing a name that expresses a close coherence between self-identity and religious identity and…

Demonized and Demonizing No More.

By Joanna Brooks

…e abstract and conceptual rejection of God, it would seem that that the God-concept is still functionally alive for atheists. Perhaps. I think that may be the case for many atheists who rank their atheist identity high on the list of ways in which they’d describe themselves. But I suspect that the silent majority of non-theists, who could perhaps be described as “apatheists”—people not engaged in the atheist movement, who are largely apathetic ab…