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Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

By Patricia Miller

…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…oes mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.” White privilege is primarily a systemic issue, not an individual one. Aside from the fact that (again) Jesus was not white (and that whiteness did not exist as we understand it today), the fact that Metaxas spotlights him to ask whether he had white privilege is to miss the point entirely. It’s also curious that he ties the concept of white privilege to the notion of sin. From a theo…

Gen Z’s Religious Affiliation Stats Are Confusing … But Only When Viewed From a Christian-Centric Perspective

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…arch Institute (PRRI) “Census of American Religion” focuses largely on “affiliation.” But both “belief” and “affiliation” are poor proxies for how something called religion exists in the world. The inadequacy of measuring belief and affiliation is especially apparent when we are talking, as we often are, about the “nones.” That term, it’s worth repeating, refers to people who check “none of the above” when given a list of religious terms with whic…

How Fitbit Helps a Conservative Evangelical College Monitor Students’ Bodies For Christ

By Jonathan Root

…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…

Single, But Married To Jesus

By Anthea Butler

…is an important story when poverty and hopelessness are driving women to kill their own children. Seriously, we are all being played to focus on stupidity while the country burns and people suffer from unemployment, angst, and anger. Now that I got that off my chest, can I and all the rest of black women who don’t care or want to be married get some peace. Sheesh! The only white I want to wear in the immediate future is my Philadelphia Eagles foo…

6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

By David R. Brockman

…ces of imbalance, and sometimes patterns of imbalance, in the textbooks. While these problems spanned a number of religious traditions, I will discuss two representative examples, Christianity and Islam—the two religions about which the most heat was generated in the textbook debate. 5. Pro-Christian, Anti-Muslim Slant As I mentioned in item 1, the curriculum standards (TEKS) promote Christianity over other religions. Sadly, I found a similar pro-…

Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…ng it comes from a quiet, upper-class organizational structure like The Family, while everyone else is watching the sideshow of preachers and abortion protesters. The vox populi voice of fundamentalists, whether Jerry Falwell, or John Rice, was not the kind of voice someone like [Family founder, Abraham] Vereide wanted. Those voices were “lower class,” who could appeal to the masses. While those voices were distracting some of the public (and late…

Rumors of the Suicide of the Liberal Church Are Exaggerated: A Response to Chris Hedges

By Mark Hulsether

…win. We seem to disagree over whether significant institutional space is still available and what kinds of compromises are worth making to keep it. We also seem to have a different sense of whether religious contestation is somehow less important than contestation over Democratic politicians or TV programs—or than defending space in academia or journalism. Are the choices available to the Protestant left as stark as Hedges presents them: either se…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…al, faith-based thinking and an aversion to science and empiricism help facilitate “alt-right,” racist, illiberal, anti-democratic politics? What’s the most important take-home message for readers? The message is that the Third Reich would have been highly improbable without a widespread penchant for supernatural thinking—exacerbated by military defeat and social crisis—which Hitler and the Nazi Party rushed to exploit. Nazism was not the first mo…

Fox News Controversy on Yoga and White Supremacy Reveals Problem of Yoga Discussion

By Andrea R. Jain

…ization doesn’t end there. Yoga didn’t become a part of popular culture until the late twentieth century when it was tied to a number of social trends, including the rise of the 1960s British-American counterculture and the concomitant appeal of yoga’s South Asian roots, changes in global consumer culture toward a consumer-oriented approach to spirituality and wellness among bourgeois urban dwellers, and the continued Orientalist gaze that picture…