Religion Dispatches
…on 8 donations from Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, and PG&E—has aggravated a number of Christian Right leaders including Randy Thomasson, the head of the Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), who has called for a boycott of Google. “There needs to be a response from people who will say, ‘I’m not going to put a dime of my money or time into businesses that are attacking the sacred institution of marriage,’” Thomasson told the AFA’s OneNewsNow. As…
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…ntry. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being representative of atheism, and he told me he woul…
Read More…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…
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…r movement? The Black Lives Matter movement as I have experienced it has a number of queer black women on the ground doing the work. It also has trans women and trans men on the ground doing the work. They are part of the leadership. As you know the Black Lives Matter movement is a “leaderful” movement, and that is to say that not one or two persons are in charge of any action but that the movement itself very beautifully recognizes and utilizes t…
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…researchers share the unsurprising finding that “young adults engage in a number of religious practices less often than do older Americans.” What they may mean to say is traditional religious practices: weekly attendance at religious services, weekly scripture reading, daily prayer, and weekly meditation. (My guess is as good as yours on the greater expected frequency of prayer in the survey.) The Pew survey design is problematic—and this is wher…
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…people are by intensity, measured with the simple hack of subtracting the number of people Strongly Opposed to same-sex marriage from the number Strongly In Favor. Not surprisingly, since the Unitarian-Universalists only had 6 percent opposed, their position on the chart hardly budged at all. Other groups traveled a little more. Mainline Baptists, for example, strongly disapprove just a little more than they strongly approve. Evangelical Baptists…
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…tholic Christianity as a factor in his conversion, but he also points to a number of other courses that he took at King’s that led him to the point of conversion. He says of the college’s curriculum that it is “not a ‘great books curriculum’ but it draws heavily on the liberal arts tradition.” He adds, “You can’t study the liberal arts without confronting the rich history of Catholicism.” Indeed The King’s College is a microcosm of the larger comm…
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…ican American communities a disservice and fails to consider why a growing number are shifting away from belief— a shift that is tied to a long history of African Americans challenging belief in God. This narrowing of African American’s opinions on belief misses an important point. “Free thought,” in a variety of forms, has a presence in African American life that is centuries old. To question or deny God is as African American as is embracing the…
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…reciated aspect of the wider trend is something called “religification.” A number of Christian right legal agencies have produced manuals for churches and related institutions, to rewrite such things as job descriptions to extend the legal definition of “ministry” in order to seek exemption from labor standards and civil rights laws, and to inoculate themselves against discrimination lawsuits. Much of this is based on the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court r…
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…om 24 to 20 percent among historically black Protestant denominations. The number of 18-29 year olds among Catholics and evangelical Protestants ticked up 1 percent respectively, and among mainline Protestants it saw a 9 percent increase. In the interest of equity, blacks make up 9 percent of those who are unaffiliated with any religious tradition (“nones”), and of that, the numbers trended upwards among 18-29 year olds. Many news outlets covered…
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