Religion Dispatches
…re 80 million atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. 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” a…
Read More…More than 20 years ago, sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s classic The Restructuring of American Religion posited that education, mobility, and socioeconomic factors were trumping theological differences among American Protestant denominations. Some took Wuthnow’s argument as proof text for the culture war, but it also explains the softening of theological boundaries among the mainline and the triumph of pragmatics (shrinking budgets) over dogmatics. B…
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…of clothing trumpets red, white, and blue. Even his socks are Stars-and-Stripes. Trim and athletic, with his short blond hair curled at the top, he radiates a kind of kinetic energy. “Wow, you look fantastic!” I say. Then I catch myself. I wonder if I’m building some assumption about his sexuality into the way that I am speaking to him. Domen has built a whole new identity and career out of the idea that he is “ex-gay.” I worry that he’ll take of…
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…our book will take away from reading it? I hope that they will see that I tried to write a book because I love the LGBTQ community, because I love my black community, and I’m trying to work against the intersections of oppression against both these communities. I hope they receive it as a theological response, as my way of combating the homophobia within the Christian church that too often oppresses LGBTQ persons. I really hope that young persons…
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…of the world, the fight must go on. Mexico: Legislative leaders give low priority to president’s marriage equality plan A legislative leader of the PRI said that President Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposal for a constitutional change to guarantee marriage equality nationwide will not be among the legislature’s priorities, which one news outlet characterized as the initiative being “buried in the freezer.” The announcement drew a rebuke from the Movem…
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…ves rules about sexual behavior become less important in a church that is primarily devoted to pastoral care. “Doctrine doesn’t inform ministry,” she said “I think the opposite: Ministry informs the doctrine. In fact, I’m more in line with Pope Francis: I don’t think we need to worry or think about or be concerned about doctrine.” For her, there are just two rules that matter: “We believe in Christ, we believe in the gospel of justice — they’re th…
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…tice in which Americans are encouraged to do whatever it is we do to engage and express our religious, irreligious, unreligious, and anti-religious approaches to life in the digital age. Then maybe we would be able to experience and observe both the continuing richness of American spiritual life and its interactive balance with secular life. A publicly recognized, government sponsored observation of the complex religious and non-religious American…
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…e a ration card, a birth certificate, an identification card, a social security number – they are what Christian men used to brand as the ‘Mark of the Beast’ of state absolutism and dictatorship. Every time we produce a card of any sort we admit to the world we are no longer free human beings. We are crawling, cringing tools of the state, pawns of dictators, slaves of bureaucrats. And every student of history knows that the next event is anarchy,…
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…d. As the political and social landscape has shifted over the years, the Christian Right, along with conservative politicians seeking their votes, has successfully rebooted the culture wars by redefining “religious freedom” and adding it to its anti-abortion and anti-gay arsenal. In honor of National Religious Freedom Day (celebrated on January 16th) I spoke to Clarkson about his thoroughgoing recent report—When Exemption is the Rule: The Religiou…
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…important to remember that the ELCA is not a denomination on the far-left fringes of American Protestantism; it is a traditionally moderate, left-of-center body whose historic heartlands are the Mid-Atlantic and the Upper Midwest. If the this denomination is making moves toward full inclusion, other Protestant bodies can’t be far behind. Female Clergy Oblivious to Irony This is not the first time the ELCA has had these conversations. In fact, almo…
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