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

By Andrew Aghapour

…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…asting Network’s revenue in 2006 was $246,986,289. James Dobson’s Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family had $156,972,266 in revenue in 2006. Pat Robertson and Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice/Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism has offices in Virginia Beach, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia and its 2007 revenue amounted to $42,658,159. The Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, whose President, CEO…

Old Sins Cast Long Shadows: America’s Enduring Fascination with the Ten Commandments

By Jenna Weissman Joselit

…actice, material culture and daily life as well as the law. I then spent a number of years tracking down, unearthing and interpreting the many iterations of the ancient biblical passages that turned out, much to my surprise and delight, to be just about everywhere in the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? What a country! The stalwart, enduring presence of the Ten Comman…

Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…atest in a series of liberal or secular media reading the reduction in the number of evangelicals who will pull the “R” lever (and the addition of poverty, the environment and war to the greatest hits of abortion and gays) as perhaps auguring the “end” of a damaging force in the American political system. Those who favor this narrative tend to see the religious right as having been “born” of Roe v. Wade, feeling its adolescent oats during the Cart…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…

UN Human Rights Council Creates LGBT Watchdog; Orthodox Council Affirms Traditional Teaching on Family; Pope Francis Says Church Should Apologize to Gays; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…are 18 to 29 year-olds. Perla notes response to the Orlando massacre: The North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists (NAD) joined the chorus of supporters, offering a ray of hope to LGBT members in an otherwise desolate moment. The same day of the tragedy, the NAD issued a statement expressing heartbreak over “the loss of innocent lives.” Although the statement failed to name homophobia, it “denounc[ed] the hate that led to this mass shoot…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quickly ran into a problem that’s been under discussion for at least two th…

For Unto (Some of) Us a Child is Born: Handel’s Messiah and the Voice of Empire Rising

By Peter Laarman

…tion thing better than the Protestant English (including, of course, their North American “cousins”). Which brings us back yet again to 1742 and Messiah and all the wealth and power of 18th century Britain: a wealth and power extracted primarily from Black bodies. We should note that imperial triumphalism was everywhere in Georgian England, not just in the work of Handel and Jennens. Take, for example, this verse in the Isaac Watts hymn “Jesus Sha…

NC’s “Bathroom Bill” Shows Problem With “Religious Freedom” Label

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…e then went on to give two examples of “religious freedom laws,” including North Carolina’s HB2. “It’s more like ‘The Religious Right Wants To Keep Transgender People Out Of The Bathrooms That Correspond To Their Gender Identities Because They’re Scared Of Them…’ Act,” Smith said. In another video, the Atlantic’s Emma Green also characterized North Carolina’s law as a “religious freedom bill” that creates “protections for people, mostly Christians…

Céad Mile Fáilte: Open Hearts, Shifting Power Paradigms, and the Irish Same-Sex Referendum

By Gareth Higgins

…over the state, but rather its tipping point. Things are different in the North—nearly 50 years of the current iteration of sectarian conflict has, in the words of my colleague Conflict Studies professor John Brewer, “brutalized” religion. It is natural to occupy a defensive posture when you feel you’re being attacked; when people are literally being killed for their perceived religion, the posture is only entrenched. It takes conscious and inten…