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The New Disciples: Report from South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…fulfill the Christian right’s wish to vanquish Mitt Romney.) At the South Carolina Citizens for Life Rally in Columbia on Saturday, that conventional story was on view: voters for whom abortion is the number one motivating issue, trying to send that message to both candidates and observers. There, on the statehouse steps, another kind of conservative evangelicalism was on view: that of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting fame, who…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

At oral argument in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties, Inc. v. Sebelius this morning, the Supreme Court justices spent a great deal of time questioning the lawyers in the case about whether corporations have a religious conscience, and whether Congress intended to protect it when enacting the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia So…

Big White Evangelical Turnout for Midterms

By Sarah Posner

…e, Jones identified five races—Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina—in which those demographic changes could help either keep Senate seats in Democratic hands, or tip Republican-held seats to the Democrats. 2014, Jones wrote, “may be the year that the underlying demographic trends finally exert enough force to make themselves felt.” I was skeptical, pointing out that turnout and intensity matter more than these numbers. (Reli…

Will Declining Numbers of White Evangelicals Change the Senate?

By Sarah Posner

…felt.” The New York Times Upshot blog ranks three of those states—Georgia, North Carolina and Arkansas—competitive, giving Democrats an 81% chance of winning the North Carolina seat, Republicans a 61% chance of winning the Georgia seat and a 77% chance of winning the Arkansas seat. Republicans have a better than 90% chance, the Upshot predicts, of winning the Kentucky and Louisiana contests. What’s more, six other Southern states—Alabama, South Ca…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…te segregation and economic favoritism. When I spoke with Rothstein on the phone, he underscored the long-term effects of this last policy. During the 1940s and 1950s, suburban subdivisions were built in St. Louis, and throughout the country, using federal loans stipulating that no homes be sold to African Americans. Priced at about $125,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet bl…

Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage Headed for NC Vote

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…e ballot next May. (UPDATE: The measure passed the Senate this afternoon.) North Carolina had, so far, been the only state in the Southeast to resist such a discriminatory amendment to their constitution, thanks to Democratic control of their legislature. Now that Republicans rule the roost, the measure has passed, even as the state’s unemployment rate is 10.1 percent. House Majority Leader Paul Stam, R-Wake opened the floor debate this way: “The…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…in my community, something that was “sending me backwards.” I had moved to North Carolina almost a year before, from New York, in order to get my PhD in religion at UNC Chapel Hill. A good Northeastern liberal, I’d read the warning articles in The New Republic before I went, and I knew the Tea Party had taken over the state, but I could not have imagined something like the “bathroom bill,” or HB2. When I sat in Bell’s audience in Durham in March,…

Nikki Haley: Churches Should Take Over Universal Pre-K Education

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ne! As in most of the country, and especially in the deep South like South Carolina, when Haley says “faith-based organizations” what she really means is “Christian organizations.” Here in South Carolina, Muslims, Jews, or any liberal faiths like the Unitarian Universalists or the United Church of Christ, need not apply. What Haley proposes to do is put conservative Christians in charge of the earliest learning experiences of children around the s…

Billy Graham, Most Famous Religious Figure of 20th C, Dies at 99

By Randall Balmer

…s almost certainly true. Early Life Born November 7, 1918, near Charlotte, North Carolina, William Franklin Graham Jr. worked on his father’s dairy farm. In the fall of 1934, when he was a teenager, Billy Frank, as he was known, accompanied several of his friends to a revival meeting conducted by an itinerant evangelist, Mordecai Ham. The revival had already stirred the passions of many in Charlotte, in large part because of Ham’s public speculati…