Religion Dispatches
…hink about our bodies. What of Christianity, the dominant religion in the United States? A large majority of Americans identify as Christian, and even non-Christians may find themselves holding “Christian” ideas about sex and proper and improper uses of the body. Additionally, whether you are Christian or not, in the United States you will be subject to laws that are directly influenced by Christianity’s historical ambivalence about, and even fea…
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…ersuade their congregations to vote their “biblical” values. A substantial number of Church United gatherings are conducted in the Spanish language, and the organization has spawned at least one affiliate, Alianza de Pastores Unidos de San Diego, whose members minister to largely Spanish-speaking audiences. It wasn’t always this way, of course, and it isn’t going to change overnight. Many of the southern white evangelical groups that remain entren…
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…at led to a boycott of Danish products, attacks on Danish embassies, and a number of deaths. Last month in the New York Times, however, Reza Aslan countered that the controversy over the cartoons has died out and that in any case, there never was any violence over them in the United States. I agree with Aslan that the novelty of the cartoon depictions, which were intended to irritate Muslims, has worn thin by now—the Saudis, to take just one examp…
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…belief or unbelief. The Pew report on the religiously unaffiliated in the United States does focus substantially on belief, offering a number of significant findings among Nones. I’ve discussed some of these previously here and here, but the pervasiveness of the idea that Nones are unbelievers suggests that the major data highlights bear repeating: 68% of the Unaffiliated in general believe in God or a Universal Spirit Among those who self-identi…
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…Christian nation,” said Moore. “The idea that God was in covenant with the United States of America in order to bless the United States as a special people, as a New Israel, as a group of people covenanted under Christianity — the answer to that is clearly no.” This no doubt raised some eyebrows. The Christian Post carefully noted its resemblance to the position of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, often an evangelical bête noir…
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…ere efforts to show themselves to the world as “one body,” denominations can only make this claim in the spiritual sense. With the looming impasse on LGBTQ full inclusion into the life and ministry of the denomination, it may very well be that the United Methodist Church has reached the end of being “united.” If this is the case, shame on us, for we will repeat our own history of segregation, bigotry and schism and will put the final nail in the c…
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…year’s All-Star game, one team wore Kobe’s number 24, while the other wore number 2, Gianna’s uniform number. The MVP award, given this year to Los Angeles Clippers’ star forward Kawhi Leonard, was renamed permanently for Kobe Bryant. Pregame and half-time shows centered on Kobe, his family, and his impact on the sport of basketball and society. The collective grief and bereavement displayed by fans and players alike not only demonstrate the power…
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…o be like Latino immigrants, flooding dangerously into a hitherto peaceful United States, bringing alien customs, threats to political hegemony, and, in the case of terrorism (like the war on drugs) outright dangers to the safety and security of everyday life. So extreme is this sense of alarm and danger that a significant number of Republicans now believe that the president is a secret Muslim, and sits in the Oval Office to enable the realization…
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…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…
Read More…the President of the United States and they still count abortion as their number one cultural issue. What you may have missed, however, is what number two was on their list of important issues. Coming in at 18 percent behind abortion’s 41 percent response was “protection of religious liberty.” The “butter” of the usual “bread and butter” issues of the religious right—same-sex marriage—had slipped from the number two position drawing the concern o…
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