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Are (White) Evangelicals Really Dwindling? A Debate Heats Up

By Sarah Posner

…licated.” Because those affiliations are “so complex,” Jones says, and because he used the same standard self-identification definition used by Pew and others, he was able to compare his own data from this year with Pew’s data from 2007. In other words, those comparisons were not apples and oranges. That said, Jones added, even”if you set aside the definition of who is evangelical and who is mainline and look at white Protestants overall (who lean…

How Trump’s Assertion of “Power to Pardon” Tramples the American Sacred

By Spencer Dew

…Schmitt wrote, not only because the term carried traces of its historical use in discussions of God but, importantly, because the “systematic structure” of the term was theological, evoking a metaphysics of the state that functioned as a kind of religious belief. Hitler’s totalitarian power, then, involved a “secularized” version of the miraculous: the Führer’s proclamations cut through the constraints of law just as the divine’s interventions de…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…e basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various participants bring to the playa each year. With issues like these in mind, part of how I’ve come to understand this event is by looking at the various ways in which participants are constantly cont…

Kim Davis, County Clerk, is Not a Person

By Ivan Strenski

…he United States of America, not some place where police extort bribes because they feel they own their offices, like franchises, or “turf,” onto which you have been unlucky enough to have trespassed. Public offices are not like the “businesses” Tony Soprano “owns,” the use for which you have to pay what he demands on top of the cost of service. Tony’s “businesses” are very personal things, part of himself. And, thinking this way about public offi…

Religion or Ethics at the Supreme Court?

By Daniel Schultz

…the values justices are supposed to have but can’t disclose, so we have to use the next best thing, which turns out to be just another tap dance— because everybody but the crazies know that it’s perfectly possible to have values without believing in God. But everybody wants to keep the crazy people happy, lest we have an honest discussion about abortion and the gay and the megacorporations that are eating up the nation. So let’s talk faith instead…

SCOTUS Seems to Think You Should Be Forced to Pay For Religious Education

By John Stoehr

…e court’s right-wing majority will continue to ignore the establishment clause and blow up the free exercise clause into a broadly applicable special rights provision. A free ticket for the religious to exempt themselves from federal and state laws—most importantly, public health and anti-discrimination laws. JS: Do these special rights provisions apply equally? The court is on a mission to remake free-exercise law. Not too long ago, it held that…

No Presidential Magic When it Comes to Oil Spill

By Gordon D. Newby

…lling in the Gulf brings the power of great destruction. And, even when we use our best resources to contain the damage, we seem to do more. Jacques Cousteau’s son, Jean-Michel, reported that the use of the dispersants that were meant to lessen the impact of the oil have only made things worse. They have changed the specific gravity of the oil so that it no longer floats on the surface but lurks beneath, destroying plants and animals into the dept…

A Comedy Writer Confronts ‘Mind-Shredding Evil’ in Uganda

By Frederick Clarkson

…period in history when the people supposed to be hunting him found it more useful to use the hunt as a smokescreen for lining their pockets in illegal mining operations and ghost soldier salary rackets. He also had the smarts to claim to represent the disenfranchised Acholi tribe, which stalled the intellectuals and academics who should be uniting against him. Sure, the Acholi are disenfranchised. But how can you insult the intelligence of Acholi…

Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…d preferred mercy, amnesty and forgiveness over force (though Muhammad did use force, and at times that use of force shocks). And, as noted earlier, slavery has ended. So many Muslim religious voices have endorsed or accepted abolition that it’s become one of the few things on which an entire religious tradition agrees, and which unanimity is endorsed by Islamic law as equal in force to its most sacred judgments. Muslim scholars have issued collec…

The Politics of Anti-Gay Persecution: Gambia, Egypt, Jamaica, Russia, with a Helping Hand from US Religious Conservatives; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…Islamist factions. Morals police reportedly arrested men at a Cairo bathhouse on Sunday and accused them of “perversions.” A reporter for a pro-regime TV channel that instigated the raid gloated over the arrest and posted photographs of the men on Facebook. At the Guardian, Brian Whitaker examines the ways Egyptian governments have made political use out of anti-gay persecution, “even though homosexuality is not actually illegal in Egypt.” He rec…