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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

…eland’s legislature passed a bill that would make it illegal for religious school to discriminate against gay teachers. The Equality (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill would also, according to the Irish 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…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…heir religious practices. None of this necessarily gets picked up over the phone, by a surveyor working through a scripted questionnaire. Gauging something as amorphous and context-rich as religiosity, within the framework of something as amorphous and vast as The Public, is difficult work. It’s even harder because The Public doesn’t like to answer its phones. Some people are more difficult to reach than others, such that these representative samp…

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

…m constituents every day who have complaints about their children facing discrimination and bullying in school, how they’re at risk at work for talking about their beliefs, how they’re not able to access government services.” Stigmatized minority or bullies without a pulpit? The representation of nonreligious Americans as a stigmatized minority is bound to be contentious, particularly when the Secular Survey’s respondents—a convenience sample recr…

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

By Spencer Dew

…escribes his dismissal of the poem. Lazarus’s biographer weighed in on the scene, describing Miller as “a Trump apologist telling a reporter that a revered American poem must be dismissed on the ground that it’s a fake law (Miller baited Acosta repeatedly about different moments in immigration history, asking ‘is that violating or not violating the Statue of Liberty law of the land?’)” Acosta promptly tweeted the text of the poem, and Newsweek pub…

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

By Peter Laarman

…fighting the bad guys won’t be pretty for a while. Let’s see if the Sunday School types at the Hilton tomorrow are ready to face reality. OK, God, this has been a good conversation. You’ve been great. So great. I’ve always been the best at praying. You know who told me that? Billy Graham himself. He told me, “Donald, you pray better than I do, and I am the most famous Christian in the world.” He told me that last week in a great, great phone call….

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…

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

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…dvice on how to reach people who didn’t want to be reached. Someone else described at length a Sunday School class he taught that was based entirely on improv-comedy techniques. He described responding to a woman’s fear of death by enacting an improvised funeral for her, in which she had to lie still and listen to people say nice things to her. All of this was met with enthusiastic if sometimes bemused support from Bell. Still thinking about Bell’…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…continue LDS Church activity into their own lives, I saw they faced this disconnect: “Gay people can’t be in this Church? What about all the love I’ve been taught my whole life?” For example, my eighteen-year-old son received a phone call from the bishop for an interview to set him on the road to preparing for his missionary service. So we are in the hall, and I’m telling him, “You need to call the bishop.” My son looks at me and says, “Mom, I can…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ave to slog through the incredibly depressing details of the committee’s discussion. As the Tulsa World reports: Its House sponsor, Rep. Lisa Billy, said SB 1443 is simply a “statement of purpose” that recognizes what she called “the irrefutable scientific fact that life begins at conception.” Billy assured the committee that in its current version the bill would not change existing abortion law or interfere with medical research, in vitro fertili…