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

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…ength to believe in a better future. Muslim Americans also report that the number of non-Muslims who have been kind to them has risen in the past year. They believe in the American dream by a greater percentage than non-Muslim Americans. Over nine out of ten Muslims say that they are proud to be American. The question this poll raises for non-Muslims is: over the next fifty years, will our actions strengthen or weaken the surprising optimism of Mu…

Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

By Warren Throckmorton

…e American Journal of Psychiatry.* In that study, they claimed that 11 men participating in a crisis hotline at the Melodyland Christian Center, pastored by Ralph Wilkinson in Anaheim, CA, had changed dramatically from gay to straight. But in an interview, Michael Bussee, who had been a leader at Melodyland at the time of the study, told me, “We professed that we had been healed—past tense—because it was part of the theology to claim your healing…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…e has undergone a simultaneously rapid yet sustained change in history. In particular I see the Protestants’ reformation of marriage during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a particularly relevant historical analog. That reformation is important for, among other things, planting seeds inside the Christian tradition that may bear fruit in the form of pro-polygamy theology and practice. The Protestant Reformation is famous for, in theory,…

How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

By Cody J. Sanders

…ople could die in the U.S. alone. The grief of each person will be just as palpable to loved ones, but the communal shock of a single death will be diffused by the sheer number of our dead. Our Good Death narratives include gatherings of those left behind for the purpose of remembering the dead. We want to die surrounded by those we love, and we also want those we love to surround us when we have lost someone close to us. In the coming months, pub…

Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ted. Only 149 groups existed before Obama was elected in 2008. In 2012 the number had expanded to 1,360. Not all are plotting terrorist attacks, of course. But some are. In September 2012, Daryl Johnson, a terrorist analyst for the US Department of Homeland Security testified before a Senate committee that there was an “upsurge” of potentially violent non-Islamic extremist activity in the United States. So fingers point toward right-wing Christian…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…Southern Baptist Convention will have to start looking like the millenial South if they want to stick around. * I’m using data from The ARDA, which break down membership by state, but which apparently don’t match the SBC’s self-reported numbers. If anyone from the convention has state-level data they want to send me, I’ll gladly update the analysis….

It’s Not About Cake: Anti-Gay Vendors Want a Constitutional Right to Discriminate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…e-providers like bakeries and florists, dress-shops, hair salons, and “any number” of other businesses could claim that their services are in fact a form of constitutionally protected artistic practice. “The claim at issue here sounds as if the business can put up a sign in its window that says, ‘We sell cakes for heterosexuals only,’” Melling explained, taking ADF’s logic to its natural conclusion. “There’s an immediate consequence of that, and t…

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

By Sarah Posner

…ith, Associate Director of Research at the Pew Research Center, called the pace of the 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 Ca…

What Color is Vatican Smoke?

By Marian Ronan

…liation Commission, seven thousand black South Africans were killed under apartheid, and the number imprisoned was far higher. The Catholic Church neither kills nor imprisons ordained women and their supporters; excommunication, while painful, is not at all the same, even when financial losses accompany it. In 2007 I published an article in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion explaining in some detail why highly educated white women simply…

What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…t visit by a Dutch head of state with the group, which is “advocating for a ban on discrimination against LGBT people to be included in the constitution.” India: New Delhi’s pride parade AP reports on Sunday’s New Delhi pride parade: Rituparna Borah, an activist, was not very hopeful, saying that the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not supportive of gay rights. “We have yet to have an inclusive society,” she said….