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Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…r the number of people to anticipate. Right now, we anticipate 100 Mormons participating. I hope it will grow. This is an invitation for people to be proactive. I know Pride is on a Sunday, and it’s a big deal for people to miss church. I understand that. This is an invitation to worship by walking, to worship by using our bodies—Mormon theology has a very specific place for bodies; our spirits came to earth to get bodies—and we are physically put…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…e runner-up to Miss Alabama. But beneath the façade, Jennifer was falling apart. The pageant world and the evangelical world demanded that she conform her body, her behavior, her choices and her personality to a certain kind of unrealistic “perfection.” This led to troubling amounts of anxiety and damaging, inequitable relationships. At one point, a boyfriend raped Jennifer, sending her into a tailspin of post-traumatic stress. Part of her felt at…

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

Yes, It Can Be Hard to Be an Atheist in America; Now We Have the Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…other words, regions you’d expect to be highly religious were reported by participants to be so. In addition, “While nonreligious beliefs may be casually accepted in states like California and Vermont, nonreligious people living in states like Mississippi and Utah have markedly different experiences.” “Stigma and Community Religiosity by State” chart is from “Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America,” courtesy of American Atheists. Indeed, th…

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

By Spencer Dew

…hat, like the mute statue to which it is paired, it can be read across the partisan divide, a paean alternately (or simultaneously!) to American’s exceptional greatness as the result of compassion and generosity as well as the result of an economy characterized by opportunity, where the poor of the world will be limited in their achievements only by the will with which they tug at their own bootstraps. And, yes, as Miller would say, both of these…

Are You There God? It’s Me, Donald: A President at Prayer

By Peter Laarman

…amous Christian in the world.” He told me that last week in a great, great phone call. Oh, and Fred Douglass. I need to get his input, too. Just this morning I told them, the great African Americans who supported me completely, what an amazing job Fred is doing, being recognized more and more. They loved it. They love me. My speech was a the biggest success in the history of black people. The media lied about it, of course. They said I didn’t know…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…causes to supernatural entities—my rain dance made it rain; God found me a parking space. Then came the rational, the enlightened, the scientific, the mindset that knows that rain comes not from dances but from water molecules. This mindset, Bell was repeatedly careful to point out, has given us a lot: schools and iPads and cars and cures for diseases. But as he explained, it has its drawbacks, which is why we need the transrational—or the rationa…

Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…rish Times, mean that “members of the LGBT community, divorcees and single parents working in schools and hospitals under religious patronage could not be discriminated against.” Labour TD Eric Byrne said years ago some members of the Dáil made the mistake of empowering the Catholic Church to discriminate against LGBT teachers. More from Pink News: Section 37 of the existing law grants specific exemptions from sections protecting LGBT people to “r…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…d neither of us has a concrete answer to this question. Assuming that most participants haven’t already thought this through, the answer they choose after mere seconds of consideration isn’t likely to reflect any longstanding, steadfast belief. “Polls are hastily done by telephone rather than in person,” Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow said in a recent interview with The Cubit. “If you’re a respondent in a poll, you’re being asked anywhere fr…