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Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…media excitement over the latest poll illustrating continued growth in the number of people who answer “none” when asked with what religion they are affiliated, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life seems to have pulled a similar trick for those interested in how religion is changing in America. “‘Nones’ On the Rise,” released on October 9 by Pew in affiliation with PBS’ Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, gives the sense that we can see what’s really…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

By Joel Pitney

…ere not companionship-based. They were economic arrangements. Okay, that’s number 1. Number 2, let’s say that your wife didn’t provide you with a male offspring. A man could take another wife and another wife and another wife until one of them did. This is the “sanctity of marriage” that is being protected. Are you kidding me? Wow. Okay, so that’s Old Testament. Then along comes Jesus. Well for those of us who follow Jesus, I always like to point…

The Jihadi Revolution is Dead (But Bin Laden’s Death Didn’t Kill It)

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ategy of strategic violence has been largely counterproductive; will a new nonviolent and non-extremist movement of young educated Palestinian professionals create a different kind of impetus for change in their region of the Middle East? The rise of a new nonviolent popularism in the Middle East may seriously undercut the viability of the jihadi image of violent social change. On the other hand, a significant number of failures of nonviolent resi…

Sharing Many of the Same Flaws as its Subject ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill’ Podcast Puts Blame Anywhere But Where It Belongs

By Jessica Johnson

…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…

It’s the Theology, Stupid: Why the Shocking SBC Report is Anything But Surprising

By Chrissy Stroop and Jessica Johnson

…ou on it not going far enough, Jessica. The suggestion that SBC structures stop using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in connection with sexual misconduct settlements (unless requested by the victims) is a good one—it’s also currently the law in the state of California, and I wish we’d make it the law nationwide. I’m not quite sure what the recommendation that the OIS be made available to churches “voluntarily” means, and I personally feel that i…

New for Democrats: Non-Personhood for the Non-Rich

By Peter Laarman

…is party will now attempt to romance, yet again, the millions of America’s non-rich, including the younger voters, many of them people of color, who actually believed that we would turn a corner in 2008. We turned a corner, all right: we turned a corner toward a complete mockery of democratic aspiration. The one real hope left to us is not that God will now sweep in to deliver the oppressed but that the oppressed will find the godly part in themse…

Heaven On Earth: A Non-Hysterical History of Shari’ah

By Haroon Moghul

…torian has attributed the shift to the influence of Spanish and Sicilian canonists on their Muslim counterparts. True or not, the coincidence serves to recall an important truth: the claim to act in God’s name is no guarantee against injustice. I must admit I was somewhat disappointed with the turn the book takes, from a general overview of the evolution of Islamic law, as a tradition, to a much narrower focus on jihad and terrorism. Considering…

Christians More Supportive of Torture than Non-Religious Americans

By Sarah Posner

…tic voters among white evangelicals.) A full three-quarters (75%) of white non-evangelical Protestants outnumber the 22% of their brethren in saying CIA treatment was justified. White Catholics believe the treatment was justified by a 66-23% margin. But a majority of non-religious adults, 53%, believe the CIA actions were not justified, with 41% of the non-religious saying the treatment was justified. These results are rather astonishing, aren’t t…

Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…se members. In 2013, the SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect their active members. The problem is, membership isn’t alone in its decline—it’s joined by baptisms and weekly worship attendan…