Religion Dispatches
…ondents believe interracial marriage should be illegal; 24% of evangelicals did. Sixty-six percent of respondents in Mississippi do not believe in evolution; among evangelicals that number jumped to 74%. Of all the respondents, 29% believe interracial marriage should be illegal; among evangelicals that number was 33%….
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…ng to us doubting Thomases who live by Occam’s razor and won’t believe in anything without sufficient evidence. But here’s the rub: In Buddhism, it seems, you don’t have to believe any of this stuff. You can say with all the gravity you can muster that you believe none of it—except perhaps something about nirvana, perhaps—and no one will tell you that you’re not a Buddhist. Because when you whittle it down to its essence, Buddhism is very simple a…
Read More…speech, the group’s criticism of American racism and imperialism struck many ordinary Americans as politically radical and thus dangerous. The globe’s most powerful symbol of resistance to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was the Nation of Islam’s most famous member, boxer Muhammad Ali. In 1967, Ali refused induction in the U.S. armed forces to protest the war, and as a result, was forced to give up his heavyweight boxing crown. In 2017, even…
Read More…hole with a model put forth over 40 years ago by none other than RJ Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. Governor Rick Scott wants to move prisoners from government institutions to privately run facilities and increase the 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 p…
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…tracked a rapid increase in the number of people who do not identify with any particular faith tradition. However, the so-called “Nones” have been shown in both studies to be moving not so much from belief to unbelief, as from institutionalized expressions of faith in community to all kinds of “something else.” The “something else-ness,” if you will, of American faith practice is likewise tracked in a recent Pew study on religion among the millenn…
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…y, CA, who chaired a task force that crafted part of the resolution. “In many ways, the liturgy just approved for the blessing of a lifelong covenant contains many of the same elements as the liturgy for celebrating a marriage in the Book of Common Prayer—declaration of intention, the exchange of vows, exchanging rings or other tokens, et cetera,” Johnson explained. “The liturgy, however, is not called ‘marriage’ and the presiding minister does no…
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…ese things all hang together. I think that’s why immigration is the thing that Trump is always pivoting to, because it’s always the best tool in his toolbox to drive his authoritarian agenda forward. And to the extent that anyone can tell, he really believes it. I think, though, Trump doesn’t practice Christianity in any recognizable way, [but] he culturally believes this is a White Christian country. And that’s who he’s going to bring back….
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…tention is that there has been a significant and sustained increase in the number of people who are choosing not to identify with any religion. As reported by the Pew Research Center, in 2007, 16 percent of American adults reported no religious preference or affiliation; by 2014 this statistic had increased to almost 23 percent. And younger adults are more likely to say that they have no religion than their parents or grandparents’ generations. Ma…
Read More…ia ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on. ”However, while there are many objections to this proposition—further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text—it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of thi…
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…ic imperative—and for a political candidate who appeals to the racism of many supporters. But the leaders of the movement can read the demographic future just as well as you or I can. Many of them understand very well that the electoral future of their movement is not ethnically homogenous. They can also see, as some members of majority-white American congregations cannot, that some of the fastest-growing varieties of evangelicalism in America are…
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