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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…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

On Zion’s Mount

By Jared Farmer

…sexual oppression. They were variously likened to “Oriental,” “Asiatic,” “Turkish,” and “Mohammedan” peoples. In 1902, when the Utah legislature elected LDS Church apostle Reed Smoot as senator, the US Senate refused to seat him for four years while it conducted hearings and investigations on the question: Can a faithful Mormon also be a loyal American? Traces of these attitudes persist. The media routinely conflates the LDS Church with Mormon fu…

United Nations Affirms the Human Right to Blaspheme

By Austin Dacey

…urt of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which has upheld Austrian, British, and Turkish laws against blasphemy and religious insult by invoking a sui generis right to “respect for the religious feelings of believers.” The major disappointment in the comment, in my view, is its failure to address hate speech laws, which in many countries function as de facto restrictions on blasphemy and sacrilege. Theoretically, we can distinguish between bashing a bel…

From Confusion to Kardashian: Misreading the Middle East

By Haroon Moghul

…k at this picture, worth 1,000 foreign policy words. It’s Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkish Foreign Minister and global thinker, on a visit to a Gaza hospital during the war. (He was joined by several Arab Foreign Ministers, including democratic Tunisia’s.) It matters that he was there. It matters that Turkey is a NATO member. It matters that he seemed genuinely affected. But who does it matter to? Who feels moved by this picture? What political ends will…

Bulgaria and Orthodox Church Cancellation of Louvre Exhibit is Classic Authoritarian Move

By Katherine Kelaidis

…r for Orthodox Christians more generally, to admit that the long night of “Turkish occupation” (as I was taught to call it as a child) left even the slightest mark upon their culture, let alone their religious art. But that is simply not the messy truth. Of course prolonged contact leaves an impression. We are molded by both our friends and enemies. Using the brute power of the state to silence scholars and artists does nothing to change that. And…

COVID-Denying Father Sergei is Just the Latest Example of the Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘Holy Man’ Problem

By Katherine Kelaidis

…he exclusion of women from the ordained clergy has historically kept their numbers small.) Deriving from the ancient Egyptian monastic tradition (the oldest in the Christian world), it’s common practice for pious Orthodox Christians to take a spiritual father, a man to whom they not only offer their confession but also seek out for guidance, both spiritual and temporal. These relationships ideally (and frequently in practice) endure over decades a…

In “The Promise,” A Reminder That U.S. Apathy to Genocide Endures

By Hussein Rashid

…genocide—when the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire goes to meet a Turkish official to seek the release of an imprisoned American reporter. As they speak, the ambassador comments on the plight of the Armenians, who are being killed by the Ottomans. The official wonders if the ambassador’s sympathies come from his being Jewish. The ambassador responds that he is Jewish, and he is American, and America is a nation of refugees. At that moment…

You’re Either Committing Ethnic Cleansing or You’re Not

By Haroon Moghul

…the average viewer would have no frame of reference for it. Serbs refer to Turkish treachery in the past, for example, yet it’s not clear if anyone would know that Bosnian Muslims are not Turks—that they are ethnically and linguistically the same as Serbs. The two are, in fact, differentiated by religious affiliation, which has become not a matter of choice or conviction, but of identity, and thus political destiny. Worse, though, is that we never…

You’re Right, Ross Douthat: Donald Trump Is Kind of Like Islam

By Haroon Moghul

…ited States was rather like that between the Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish Republic. Editors didn’t bite. Trump as the nominee? Nobody believed it could happen. And neither did I, really. The beleaguered minority hardly wants to imagine his country is so racist as to vote for the authoritarian demagogue in the ridiculous red cap. But here we are now, and what a sad reflection on our great nation. Cue remorseful pundits interrogating themse…