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Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…fficking. As I note in Salon: According to Pew, between 2009 and 2014, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration — and by inference the Democratic Party — was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent. This suggests that the war on religion is resonating with Catholic voters who increasingly see themselves on the losing side of a culture war and feel the need to assert their religious identity i…

The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

By Bruce Ledewitz

…ecutive seizure of the steel industry during the Korean War and rejected a number of assertions of executive power during the Bush administration when given the chance. However, the courts are reluctant to act where rights are not clear, and assertions of equality are not traditional. Even in these contexts, the courts have rendered decisions protecting novel rights and groups. But they have done so with an eye toward what the public will accept….

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…xploring their spirituality in different ways.’ I think eventually a large number of those people will re-affiliate in some way, shape, or form—but when they do, the actual institutions of religion will be very different because of the demands those people make on new kinds of churches. I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a really ex…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…overthrew democratically elected leaders for fear of what they might do. In 1979, Russia ‘intervened’ to save Afghanistan’s fractious Communist government, which gesture led to the deaths of nearly ten percent of Afghanistan’s population. Afghanistan has still not recovered. Subsequently to this horrifying military intervention, Russia cracked down on a Chechen independence movement that emerged, plausibly enough, with the collapse of the brutal S…

5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Overthink the New Pew Data’s Impact on Politics

By Sarah Posner

…continued growth of the religiously unaffiliated “really remarkable.” The number of Americans identifying with no religion grew by 19 million from 2007 to 2014, and now the religiously unaffiliated are “more numerous,” said Smith, than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. Much of the rise of the “nones” is attributable to religious switching, mainly from Catholicism and mainline Protestantism. One-fifth of Americans raised Christian are now…

More than Half of Mississippi GOP Primary Voters Believe the President is Muslim

By Sarah Posner

…with 33% to Romney’s 28%, and Santorum’s 29%. Of all the respondents, only 12% believe President Obama is a Christian, and 52% believe he is a Muslim. These numbers, like in Alabama, are more pronounced among evangelicals: only 9% of evangelicals in Mississippi believe the president is a Christian, and 54% believe he is a Muslim. The real question here is why evangelicals believe this false and debunked conspiracy theory that the Christian presid…

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…htenment Types On the surface, Buddhism can look pretty messy. There are a number of conflicting stories about the founder of the tradition. Many Buddhists consider Gautama Buddha to be divine, a savior of humanity, but some don’t. Some Buddhists barely think of him at all. And, despite scientific cosmology, there are a large number of mortal creatures—most of them non-human—inhabiting a spectacular 31-tiered cosmos, from the hell beings and hungr…

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…rest of the Muslim world. The majority of Muslim Americans are Sunni, while 16% identify as Shi‘a, 14% say they are “just Muslim,” and 4% are members of smaller communities such as the Ahmadiyya movement and the Nation of Islam. The 2017 Pew poll also reveals that the more things have changed in Muslim America, the more they have stayed the same. Muslims faced a lot of suspicion and discrimination in 1967, just as they do in 2017. In 1967, the Nat…

Creeping Shari’ah… Ahem, Excuse Me… Biblical Law

By Julie Ingersoll

…he 4300 inmates already held within faith based programs by increasing the number of programs from four to six. While inmates in these facilitates choose the faith based programs over other options, it’s not, as proponents like to argue, fair to say that they choose to be there. Opponents of the plans argue that inmates in faith based programs enjoy a number of perks and better facilities than other inmates. But whatever the case, Scott’s plan wou…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…t Supper. Feeding the Poor, Housing the Homeless A 7-year study with nearly 15,000 undergraduates at 136 colleges and universities across the country by Alexander and Helena Astin of UCLA’s Center for Spirituality in Higher Education provides some clues to the shaping of contemporary American religious practice. The Astins’ work has shown that at least for young adults, religious practice is much more linked to acts of social compassion, charity,…