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

By Chrissy Stroop

…inguish between the various stripes of the religiously unaffiliated (i.e. “nones”). Nones may retain some religious beliefs or consider themselves religious without belonging to a formal institution, but this is not true of the nonreligious proper, as the report defines them. As Gill observes, this “can sometimes obfuscate the needs of our community.” According to Reality Check, “Participants’ analysis of community religiosity aligned well with ge…

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…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…the decision will be made. We are participating in a Catholic-to-Catholic phone bank that Washington United for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blossomed in the 1960s after Vatican II. I h…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…generalizing power of polls. Much the same seems to be happening with the nones today. At a more granular level, the nones—people who say that they don’t affiliate with any religious group—are a diverse lot, including atheists, agnostics, and people who say that they believe in God, but don’t feel comfortable in a specific institution. The more closely we view them, the more fluid and diverse the category seems to be. Follow up with self-reported…

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…

Will House “Freedom” Group’s Core Racism Go Unchallenged?

By Peter Laarman

…le I’m on the topic of the “Freedom” agenda as an anti-black agenda, there’s new information available that utterly refutes the standard white conservative contention that welfare programs sap poor people’s morale and promote bad behavior. Not that this will stop them from spouting their big racist lie. Or stop the corporate media from repeating it endlessly. Or, apparently, rouse religious leaders to name what is really going on beneath the froth…

Goodbye ‘Roe,’ Hello Violence and an Out-of-Control Judiciary

By Andrew L. Seidel

…wealthy, who can simply fly to freer places. As always, this law will not stop abortions, it will only stop safe abortions. This bounty system will choke the courts and drown abortion providers in lawsuits, which is the real point. If you thought evangelical churches were good at getting out the vote, wait until you see what havoc they wreak with this (preview). The bounties are nothing short of dystopian, more reminiscent of the morality police…

Burma’s Spirit Festival, and More in This Week’s Global LGBT Roundup

By Peter Montgomery

…vatives, including four huge rallies in Paris within six months, failed to stop the change. But they made history nonetheless, as unexpectedly large social and political phenomena. True to the movement’s name—Manif pour Tous (Protest for All)—the French gatherings brought together a broad coalition. Some came from the political right and far-right: there were well-heeled Catholics from posh parts of Paris, poorer ones from the provinces and some M…