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Why the Great Religious Realignment is a Great Secular Opportunity

By Sarah Posner

…drive President Obama to a reelection victory, one in which an increasing number of “nones” are non-believers, yet one in which white religious conservatives remain the essential bulk of the Republican base. The morning after an election always brings lists of winners and losers, and here are some losers: people or entities who tried to use their power or money to advance their religious agenda, often one not only out of step with most voters, bu…

The Great Religious Realignment

By Sarah Posner

…t given what we’ve learned recently about religious realignments—declining numbers of Catholics, declining numbers of mainline Protestants, declining numbers of evangelicals in the 18- to 29-year-old age group, and increasing numbers of unaffiliated voters, and in particular, atheists and agnostics in the 18- to 29-year-old age group—it seems like a significant shift is underway. A recent Pew survey found that there are now equal numbers of white…

New Anti-Trans Strategies Floated at Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit

By Heron Greenesmith and Asia Korkmaz

…major part of the FRC’s political strategy, both to maintain the dwindling numbers of young people in the Christian Right and to proselytize to youth nationally. The Christian Right knows that Gen Z has the highest percentage of LGBTQI identification and, as he wrote earlier this year in World magazine, Joseph Backholm, Senior Fellow at the Family Research Council and a speaker at the youth session, is afraid it’s contagious. While a child’s ideal…

How We Got to Super: Grant Morrison’s Visionary Gnosticism

By Jeffrey J. Kripal

…is modern mysticism. And so he writes about hyperdimensions, the brane and bulk of contemporary cosmology, and, of course, evolution. These scientific models are never sufficient, however. And so the creators turn to mystical literature as well. Indeed, over and over, they actually call themselves Gnostics, by which they mean to invoke both their radical rejection of institutional religion as so many power-games and the fantastic ways they have en…

Don’t Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect

By Jonathan L. Walton

…nce of these demographics on the state electorate in relation to the small number of African Americans, it is inconceivable to argue that African Americans are to blame. The fault lines of a progressive coalition to resist Prop. 8 were seemingly regional and religious as opposed to racially determined. Do Black Folks Need an Elton John? Scapegoating black folks is descriptively flawed because it pits a racial group against a multiracial reality. B…

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…

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…

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

…ho have to deal with it on a regular basis,” she said. “I have already had phone calls from irate family members: ‘how could I perform the ceremony, didn’t I know this was wrong and not biblical’. I have, in my studies, a different interpretation of a lot of what people say the Bible says. “I believe in the whole Jesus concept. You love people and there is no judgment. They have their belief system and I have mine and I’m living true to mine.” Dom…

Gay Marriage Opponents Running on Empty

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. At the first, about a dozen volunteers spent the night making almost 300 phone calls and collecting pledges of volunteer support and contributions from 50 new supporters. Add that to the five other locations holding similar phone banks or collecting post cards of support, and I’m sure we easily got our 300 today. In addition, Equality Maryland hosted an interfaith meeting to mobilize supportive faith leaders. It was so great to see such a wonder…

Education, Texas-Style

By Lauri Lebo

…nation.” I’ve spoken to board member Don McLeroy quite a few times on the phone and he genuinely seems like someone who wants to be understood and have people appreciate what he’s doing. (I’ve never met or spoken to Cynthia Dunbar, but she strikes me as someone who really doesn’t care what people think of her.) So, I feel like calling up McLeroy and saying, “You, sir, are a cheater!” Because from the perspective of the literal-minded (and fundame…