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Presbyterians, Change Hearts & Minds, Begin Ordaining Gays

By MaryAnn McKibben Dana

…d ran a 50-state, all-173-presbytery campaign.” This included church-based phone banks; ads in national Presbyterian magazines; and letter-writing and story-telling campaigns using traditional mail as well as social media [YouTube, Facebook, Twitter]. “We [also] found church leaders who had changed their mind about homosexuality—what they had been taught about the Bible—and shared their stories in these national ads and through social media,” Adee…

Who’s Accusing Who of Mormon-Baiting?

By Joanna Brooks

…t Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is Easy” ministry in Florida.) May cool heads prevail as the race heats up in its fina…

Electionpocalypse, Part I (Christianity)

By Sarah Posner

…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…

Republicans in Favor of Reproductive Rights

By Katie Toth

…poll teaches two lessons. Firstly, she wants to see Republican policies reflect the views of the party’s constituents. Secondly, Stone says, labels of “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are misleading and do little to reveal people’s political opinions. “National pollsters need to stop using self-labeling to gauge true sentiment on the issue of choice,” she says. “These labels have lost their meaning.” In a Gallup poll earlier this year, 72 percent of R…

Bishop Minerva Carcaño Has a Nearly Impossible Job

By Mary E. Hunt

…f women’s leadership in mainline Christian denominations—and if our recent phone conversation is any indication, she has her work cut out for her. She must assume the bishop’s role of watcher or overseer; she must surpass her male colleagues in competence to show that a woman, in her case an Hispanic woman, can be a good bishop; and, she must find a way to live out her own unique commitments with integrity. As was said of the legendary Ginger Roge…

Ralph Reed’s Group Goes after “Union Thugs” in Wisconsin

By Sarah Posner

…be canvassing the state, in preparation for “a full-scale get-out-the-vote phone bank operation to make sure every last pro-freedom and pro-family voter goes to vote on behalf of our values.” So far, the right’s anti-union battleground in Wisconsin hasn’t been explicitly framed as a “pro-family” issue, but here’s Marx: Please join Tony Nasvik and join the fight with 100 plus FFC activists who will be going door-to-door encouraging the Badger State…

Even Tougher Questions to Ask Mormon Presidential Candidates

By Joanna Brooks

…own father is (or was) an extremely powerful and wealthy man with great influence within LDS culture and beyond. How have you personally benefitted from a patriarchal (and therefore exclusionary) religion and culture? How has patriarchy shaped your ability to exercise independent judgment? Have you ever openly disagreed with your father or another male LDS leader? Why or why not? 3. The LDS Church withheld priesthood from men of African descent…

Suicide Leads to Calls for Improved Treatment of LGBT Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…s. But in the wake of Bryan’s death, many Mormons—LGBT and otherwise—are reflecting on the kind of support our communities are capable of offering gay Mormons who feel they can no longer hide their sexuality. I’ve heard LDS Church members ask whether excommunication is the best institutional response to gay Mormons in acute spiritual struggle or crisis. I’ve also heard Mormons reflect on how despite some signs of increased awareness and outreach b…

Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC

By Sarah Posner

…ict. “I’ll be the guy in the Ben’s Chili Bowl hat,” Merritt told me on the phone. Merritt, 42, was inspired by the movement’s goals of confronting structural economic problems, a tack that he says has largely been ignored by progressive religious activism. As to why there isn’t more of a religious presence at the Occupy protests, “I think about that a lot,” said Merritt. “I think: exactly what happened? What happened? Why aren’t there 50 clergy?”…

God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

By Nathan Schneider

…media culture, separates people into consumers of messages that prompt unreflective behavior. Where reflection or questioning are the rule, they fall flat. This is the cultural domain of progressive churches. Certainly, digital culture has allowed for the aggregation of conversations among clusters of progressives, and that has extended the conversation somewhat into the wider culture. But, as we saw in the #OccupyAtlanta debacle with Rep. Lewis,…