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Religion and Resistance at the New National Museum of African American History and Culture

By Anita Little

…chose to live in, how you educate your children and how you protest. Kwanzaa pin from 1960, Collection of the Smithsonian Leaping off of that question, in what way is black history and black present inseparable from black religion? A major question is: how do you separate out this story? For example, if we’re looking at 1968, and we’re studying the Black Panthers or Black Power, we tend to assume that story is different from 1964 with the story o…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…s in evangelical-heavy states like South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, pushed that opposition into overdrive. And it’s also prompted evangelical leaders to mount a defense of their faith by tearing apart what they have called the “myth” of the evangelical Trump voter. It’s understandable why they have done so. Portrayed as hypocrites who’ve abandoned their “values voters” reputation for the luster of the Trump moment, some evangelical…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…August 29, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Mississippi and Louisiana coast, packing 125 mph winds and strong waves and producing a storm surge of 10-20 feet. The winds and flooding left New Orleans without power and submerged in as much as 20 feet of water in some areas. The treacherous physical and social circumstances faced by the 10-20 percent of largely black New Orleanians that were unable to evacuate the city visited horror and dea…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…st’s “On Faith” section, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins railed against what he describes as the opportunistic evils of the gay agenda. He did so under the auspices of addressing the recent epidemic of gay teens who have committed suicide. I find it awfully clichéd that the post’s title began with the phrase “Christian Compassion,” but let me be blunt: There was no Christian compassion in that post. There was, however, a whole lot of po…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

Over the past few days I’ve seen a number of references to “America’s Birthday” coming up on Friday. If a commercial advertiser wants to say this, fine (I guess). But I have spotted a couple of otherwise sober-minded writers using the “birthday” tag as well, and their ignorance is more disturbing. July 4, 1776, was in no way the birthday of anything. It was the start of a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the ti…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…nald Trump won the Catholic vote by seven points on Tuesday, a group that Barack Obama won by two points in 2012 and nine points in 2008. The loss of the Catholic vote—which usually determines which way the election will go—was especially striking because most polls until just before the election found Catholics more reluctant than evangelicals to support Trump. The loss of the Catholic vote is also somewhat disruptive to the narrative that Trump…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…s just how misunderstood this “coalition” continues to be. Vox.com’s anti-gay apologist-in-residence Brandon Ambrosino, whose supposed expertise is “culture and religion,” seems surprised to find that Catholics and Evangelicals “might be less politically aligned than is otherwise thought,” with Catholics more closely “aligned with liberal values than Evangelicals.” But these numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has bothered to looked…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…me determining the safest places to be during a zombie apocalypse. Key takeaway: not big cities. To observe that the apocalypse, in varying forms, is all around us is no more than a platitude. Pick your apocalypse: zombie apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic worlds that crowd our television screens, movie theaters, and book stores, or, perhaps more traditionally, the apocalypse associated with the Second Coming. Think of the 2011 Family Radi…

“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

I appreciate Brent Plate’s analysis in these pages of Indie religious contemplation. But he must know that Americans are newcomers to the history of musical pronouncements on religion, and particularly the criticism of institutional religions. The Saw Doctors — one of my favorite bands — have been astute observers of religious hypocrisy for twenty years now. They have a well-deserved reputation for insulting Catholicism. The band is the project o…

How to Make Nones and Lose Money: Study Shows Cost of Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals

By Kaya Oakes

…d people. We saw zero evidence then that the scandal was turning teenagers away from Church.” David Clohessy, the Executive Director of SNAP (Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests), disagrees with Smith. “Generations of Catholics have been raised to respect and revere priests and bishops and trust them implicitly,” he says. “Even without the scandal, younger people are more skeptical and rightfully so. Most survivors are no longer churchgo…