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The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…et of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and rigor of a formal social science study. That doesn’t make these repo…

The Lady Vanishes: Trump’s Communications Team Tries to Topple a Monument

By Spencer Dew

…sed one upper administration official of psychological pathology and attributed to another freakish autoerotic skills). The administration now has a problem of having fallen on the wrong side of a central image of American civil religion. Ronald Reagan called her “everybody’s gal.” In wartimes she’s carried a sword, placed an urgent phone call for financial help, and even scolded her citizenry. As a mascot for our country, she’s been given the fac…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…partment of Sociology at Princeton University. The Cubit recently reached out to him by phone to discuss Jimmy Carter, the “Nones,” and guidelines for interpreting poll data about religion. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Andrew Aghapour: How did polls become a significant tool for understanding American religion, and what made them so attractive? Robert Wuthnow: Broad commercial polling began in the 1930s, when George Gallu…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…rations are manipulating us with products and advertising—could have come out the mouth of anti-corporate leftist. For Weick, such political labels are probably beyond the point. What is the point is that this world is ruled by a satanic conspiracy. Though she would certainly not phrase it this way, Satan is Christine Weick’s god. He is the prime mover of her universe. Weick searches through the flotsam of our postmodern consumerist world for sign…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…ean it’s Putin’s effort to shore-up his constituency around is very vague but very Putin idea of traditional values, the Russian family, the Orthodox religion, and against the West. And nobody represents that alien West in Russia better than LGBT people do. Part of the reason for that is that, you know, there was never any conversation, public conversation about sexual orientation in Russia. While the Western world was having the sexual revolution…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…ics about finding our way back to the hotel. Find a marker to help you go out of Door Number One, the King Abd Allah Aziz door. He said, “there 101 doors in and out of the Haram”—so this meant we really needed to make note for simplest return. Later, when I took my circuit around the outside of the mosque and took photos of quite a few of the doors, I also made a mental note of some of the names. (Next time I’m in the mosque, I will find out for y…

The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…u can take to get to God. That’s a really strange idea. Religion is not about truth, it’s about security. The sort of thing I’m presenting is never going to be the majority view but it’s going to be the minority point of view for those who are bold enough to look at life as it really is and not to need a narcotic to get through it but as something that gives them the strength to embrace the radical insecurity of life, and I think that’s worth doin…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…filled with morality-play vignettes from childhood and recitations of the author’s meteoric rise to national prominence. But it was not nearly as bad as I feared—kind of endearing, actually, like a cute little puppy tap-dancing frenetically on the kitchen floor, eager for attention. The puppy piddled in the corner more than once, taking cheap shots at political adversaries (including McCain campaign apparatchiks) and using the annoying, sophomoric…

Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

By Shaul Magid

…redi charities and Israeli government subsidies for large families. The solution: develop Haredi communities in the territories where housing is cheap (through government subsidies), where they can maintain a lifestyle separate from secular Israel, and where their communities can continue to grow at an enormous rate. This is a particularly modern problem. The growth rate of the Haredi world is not solely the result of their big families. When you…

Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

By Peter Laarman

…ndout to a small minority of affluent college graduates is simply a myth. But even if you put all this aside, there is also the fact that these would-be spokesmen for working-class and blue-collar Americans aren’t actually speaking for working-class and blue-collar Americans. Then, with his usual acuity, Bouie drills right down to the real story of an epochal risk-shift and wealth-shift going back to the first resurgence of neoliberal thinking in…