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What’s in a Name? Religious Nones and the American Religious Landscape

By Richard Flory

…cal approach to religion that really doesn’t fit what is going on in real world. Rather than imposing a category that forces a multi-dimensional reality into a dichotomous measure of religious or not, or thinking about religion as a purely numbers game of what group has the most adherents, we might shift our attention to focus on how religion, values, relationships and meaning really operate in the lives of individuals and communities—religious or…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…tor that suffers at the hands of radical Islam, he said, ‘The eyes of the world are on California. We’re watching California and the vote on marriage. Because if you fail there to stop it, if you fail to stop it, what will be unleashed across the world will be a spirit worse than radical Islam.’” In late September, Sergey Brin, cofounder and the president of Technology at Google, took a public stand in opposition to Proposition 8. The statement, t…

How a Powerful ‘Ex-Gay’ Pastor is Chasing the Latino Vote

By Katherine Stewart

…ersuade their congregations to vote their “biblical” values. A substantial number of Church United gatherings are conducted in the Spanish language, and the organization has spawned at least one affiliate, Alianza de Pastores Unidos de San Diego, whose members minister to largely Spanish-speaking audiences. It wasn’t always this way, of course, and it isn’t going to change overnight. Many of the southern white evangelical groups that remain entren…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

Economy Yields Too Few Prophets

By Peter Laarman

…mployed workers for every new job opening. And as of last month the actual number of workers in crisis is not the 14 million who are officially unemployed (as if that number were acceptable), but more like 29 million people, if you count people no longer looking or working at sharply reduced hours or taking big pay and benefit cuts. That is 18 percent of the total workforce and still rising. What’s more, three-fourths of those losing work over the…

The Plot to Turn the Synod into a “Plot”

By Patricia Miller

…nod is to take up. The Supreme Pontiff may, if he so chooses, increase the number of members of the Synod of Bishops by adding bishops, or religious to represent the religious institutes, or clerics who are experts, to the extent of fifteen percent of the total number of the members mentioned in articles V and VIII. Despite this, Douthat assures us that “as a Catholic,” he expects “the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ugh to incite vitriol from all corners of Nigeria, and other parts of the world still today. We queer folk still have a lot of fighting to do. We may have thankfully won marriage equality here on American soil, but until it is legally safe for our gay, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming brothers, sisters, and family to live their lives as they wish to be in all corners of the world, the fight must go on. Mexico: Legislative leaders give low p…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…d. Although Magufuli has not said anything publicly about homosexuality, a number of his appointees have made harsh remarks. Critics of gay rights say this nation — which has large numbers of Muslims and Christians — must protect traditional values. In an August speech, Paul Makonda, the regional commissioner of Dar es Salaam, the capital, threatened to arrest people who were linked to gay men on social-networking sites. “If there’s a homosexual w…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…way from a repeat of their late-nineteenth-century insurgency. There are a number of historical explanations for this. Certainly the Cold War baptism of “free enterprise” as a distinctively Christian way of doing business worked to erode social Christianity’s hold at the grassroots. The surging prosperity gospel of our own times has done further damage. All this being said, there are some favorable trends. The resources available to working people…

Data-Mining Denominations: Same-Sex Marriage Edition

By Daniel Schultz

…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…