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Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…light of black voter turnout. Exit polling indicates so far that 10% of African-Americans showed up at the polls across the country. Where was the black church in this election? Despite get out the vote efforts, the “machine” perhaps was unable to conquer potential voters’ disaffection over foreclosures and unemployment. The traditional effectiveness of the church for the Democratic Party in 2012 is going to be tested by the Tea Party’s mobilizat…

Can The Religious Left Be Effective Again? Longer Answer: Quizás

By Daniel Schultz

…gh participation rates are increasing among these types of churches, they represent a small percentage of all churches. Fulton explains that a lot of this increase is due to the debates over immigration reform; but even factoring that in, Hispanic churches are becoming more politically active. The number of congregations might be few, but they may also be larger communities, representing a substantial number of people. In any case, the trend will…

‘Religious Freedom’ Rally Sets Stage for 1st Amendment Collision

By Sarah Posner

…peddled by the Catholic Bishops and their supporters. Nettina claimed the number of abortions increase with greater access to contraceptives, a trope commonly used to assert that contraception fails and therefore does not decrease the number of unintended pregnancies. This claim echoes statements made by the Bishops themselves, as well as anti-contraception groups, that birth control doesn’t work and is harmful to women’s health. Hagen recommende…

The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

By Paul Harvey

…true.” Getting Jefferson Right is an excellent example of the art of historical contextualization, of trying to tell the whole story, not just part of it. For those reasons, the work should become a standard reference. And for that reason, most historians will assume this settles the matter. But they would be wrong, just as they were wrong when a previous generation of Christian historians (Mark Noll and others) allegedly settled the matter with…

Prisoners In the Hands of an Angry God: A Conversation About Religion and Reform

By Andrew Aghapour and Stephanie Gaskill

…em. It’s not just that American prisons hold disproportionate numbers of African Americans. It’s that this racial composition created public support for, or at least indifference towards, “tough on crime” and “law and order” policies. Politicians have been able to pass harsh sentencing laws and build more prisons in part because deeply entrenched racial prejudices make the general public less likely to sympathize with the low-income African Americ…

Warships, Animals, Pubs Eligible For Blessings From Church of England, But Not Same-Sex Couples; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…lesbian brothers and sisters is our issue in Nigeria and other places in Africa,” he said. “The prophetic task for African Anglicans is to denounce violence… that (is) supported by members of our communities and leadership. This is about changing attitudes and we need the space to do this work on our own.” The theologically conservative Idowu-Fearon’s appointment as secretary general in 2015 had drawn criticism over some of his previous anti-gay c…

What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

By John Stoehr

…n by God to his chosen, which is to say, to white people. To many white Americans, the election of a Black president was, quite literally, a robbery. The Second Amendment can therefore be understood as a remedy to the crime, as a means of restoring a religious covenant, the Constitution itself, which for many white Americans is “linked to white nationalism and the idea that God has ordained this country for whites and therefore licenses white nati…

Now That ‘Serial’ is Over: 2014’s Best Podcasts about Religion

By Andrew Aghapour

…political war between an Orthodox Jewish community and their Latino and African-American neighbors is a case study in religious pluralism (or the impossibility thereof). Our second category winner is the most popular podcast in history, the This American Life spin-off Serial, which just wrapped up its first season. Over twelve episodes Serial untangles the 1999 murder trial of Adnan Syed, a 17-year-old Baltimore Muslim who was accused of killing…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…o take their spiritual business elsewhere. We have seen an increase in the number of American politicians who are asked to remove themselves from communion lines and, recently, priests have even denied parishioners communion if they vote for a political candidate who favors abortion rights. This exclusion from the sacrament is essentially a form of excommunication. Dogma Over Diplomacy Ironically, at a time when many earnest believers are being tu…