Religion Dispatches
…—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 won mainly by appealing to downscale white voters in the Rust Belt. While Trump clearly won these voters, as the New York Times noted, “Trump won his biggest margins a…
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There’s been a lot of discussion lately of the Catholic-Evangelical coalition based on new numbers from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that shows 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,”…
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This week, researchers at Cornell spent presumably valuable time 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 a…
Read MoreI 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…
Read More…ters report to see that the American Catholic church doesn’t just have a crisis in the rising number of former Catholics. Unsurprisingly, those same Catholics took their money when they walked. The resulting closures of multiple parishes and a drain on the retirement fund for priests have added to the $3 billion cost of the clergy sex abuse scandal, leaving the American church with a massive money problem and shrinking numbers of parishioners on t…
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…ults of the study, presented in the new report Reading, Writing & Religion II: Texas Public School Bible Courses in 2011-12, were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, eleven school districts did quite well, offering courses that were careful not to promote one religious perspective over all others, and which encouraged critical thinking, careful communication skills, and creativity. Twenty-eight districts had courses that reflected a combination of s…
Read More…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 mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first Afri…
Read More…hurch Keep Black Women Single?”, written in response to a blog post on Surviving Dating. My answer is yes, d’oh! So does the white Pentecostal and evangelical church, but of course that’s not the subject of the piece. So why am I upset? Well, for starters, I think the subject is complicated, asinine, and fraught at the same time. I should know. After all, I wrote a book about African-American women, and found that many of the women I studied in th…
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…by the GOP mainstream, with high-ranking Republicans like Elise Stefanik joining the hateful chorus. This smear campaign is accompanied by an all-out assault on LGBTQ (but especially trans) rights on the state level in Republican-controlled legislatures, as Religion Dispatches has previously reported. And while American readers might think that the off-the-rails culture war rhetoric, which has actual, devastating consequences for the lives of all…
Read More…ter Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle demanded he take a position on the matter. It’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Phil…
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