Religion Dispatches
…llion 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” as being…
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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…LGBT rights activist Bisi Alimi, who has been living in asylum in the IK since 2009, announced that he will enter Nigerian politics, an announcement that “was met by a ferocious backlash from anti-gay Nigerians.” Nigerian Newspapers Today chronicles some of the social media reaction, pro and con. One example: Please gather all the Nigerian gay along. After welcoming you home, we shall ensure that none of you escape, because we are going to burn an…
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…bishops two weeks ago. Among them is Faith in America’s Eliel Cruz: It is incredibly naïve Pope Francis believes the image of God is anything close to binary… In believing that God is only represented in male or female, Pope Francis is effectively eliminating the diversity and complexity of the image of God. Francis also ignores the reality of intersex individuals in his complementary lens. Pope Francis is denying the full image of God when he den…
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…United, he has built his voter-outreach machine around the idea of racial inclusiveness. Like Watchmen On the Wall, Family Research Council’s pastors network, Church United holds gatherings in which the organization is introduced to pastors across the state. The aim is to get them to engage with political leaders and persuade their congregations to vote their “biblical” values. A substantial number of Church United gatherings are conducted in the…
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…gious engagement, it is clear that social media sites have done more than increase the frequency with which Americans “use” the internet in the context of their faith lives. Digital social media have made it clear that the Internet is not a tool, but a place: a locale for religious seeking, expression, engagement, and other practices that are increasingly woven into the fabric of daily life by wireless technologies. Like other locales, social medi…
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…ar thinking carries on in African American folktales addressing the importance of human ingenuity and human agency in the world. The literary expression of agnosticism and atheism hits a high point during and after the Renaissance of African American literature, grounded in places like Harlem, that gave us figures such as Nella Larsen (Quicksand), Lorraine Hansberry (“A Raisin in the Sun”), and Richard Wright (Black Boy). These and others like the…
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…ck Lives Matter 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…
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…a church whose roots run deeper than the Reformation. Further, due to the number of non-denominational churches that have proliferated since the Jesus Movement, many evangelicals’ knowledge of their history runs only as far back as the 1970s. These are the young believers who are attracted to a Church that sees itself as the direct descendent of the religion founded by Saint Peter and the apostles. Another recent convert and current King’s sophom…
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…stian Right presidential candidates remain prominent and the movement has increased its numbers in the Congress and in state governments and functions as a major and sometimes the dominant faction in the Republican Party in many states. The Christian Right remains one of the most powerful movements in American history. I should add that the implications of these things are broader than may meet the eye. Donald Trump’s calls for restricting Muslims…
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