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The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

Over the past few days I’ve seen a number of references to “America’s Birthday” coming up on Friday. If a commercial advertiser wants to say this, fine (I guess). But I have spotted a couple of otherwise sober-minded writers using the “birthday” tag as well, and their ignorance is more disturbing. July 4, 1776, was in no way the birthday of anything. It was the start of a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the ti…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…riting in The Atlantic, PRRI’s Robert Jones gets at the truth behind these numbers: “there is more support for official Roman Catholic Church positions among white evangelical Protestants than among Catholics.” But, as he notes, this isn’t a new trend; it’s the result of a two-decade long effort to cultivate “a new evangelical flock to compensate for the loss of lay Catholic support on cultural issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.” The real…

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

By Kelly J. Murphy

…is no more than a platitude. Pick your apocalypse: zombie apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic worlds that crowd our television screens, movie theaters, and book stores, or, perhaps more traditionally, the apocalypse associated with the Second Coming. Think of the 2011 Family Radio Billboards: “He is Coming Again! May 21, 2011.” Or the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2015, police i…

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

By Anthea Butler

…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 veteran Allen West will be headed to Congress from Florida, despi…

Hobby Lobby: Key to a More Liberal and Less Religious America?

By Rebecca Sager

…te hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20% of all Americans claiming this status, and many point to the increased politicization of religion as the cause. This trend of legal victories will, in the long run, very likely create a more secular America. Recent data indicate that this process is already clearly under way. A poll just rel…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…se LGBT rights movement that continues to grow more visible. PFLAG Vietnam officially launched in Ho Chi Minh City in May 2011, and it has grown to include hundreds of members across the country. Vietnam’s first Pride parade took place in Hanoi a little more than a year later. A number of popular Vietnamese television shows now feature gay characters. The Vietnamese Ministry of Justice in June 2013 proposed a bill that would have allowed same-sex…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…ents. In this story a ruler invests in his servants, giving each of them a number of talents, or money. He then goes away to another kingdom. When he comes back he wants to know what they’ve done with their talents. Some had buried their talents, afraid of losing it. Some had lost the money, wasting their talents. But some had invested wisely and made more money. So the returning ruler rewarded those who had invested wisely and maximized their tal…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…, more specifically, social networking and new media technology. The sheer number of channels through which HPA staff and volunteers reach out to potential members is staggering. They include old-fashioned email lists, the HPA website, the HPA blog, the HPA Ning social network, meetup.com, myspace, Livestream, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. The HPA also offers many levels of involvement—everything from simply learning about the campaigns…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…