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What 19th-Century Marriage Controversies Can Tell Us About The Fight Over Gay Marriage

By Eric C. Miller

…h like many current advocates for same-sex marriage, some proponents for expanding divorce laws argued that religion should be separate from politics and that marriage was essentially a civil institution. Religious tropes were also used in attempts to change understandings of marriage. Polygamy (nineteenth century Mormons) and free love (some groups of Perfectionists) were two dramatic attempts to change marriage that were based in religious and o…

A Church With a Hole In Its Heart: An Excerpt from Peter Manseau’s “One Nation Under Gods”

By Peter Manseau

…he hole itself? Do we consider the façade at the expense of the people who pass through it to make the soil within a part of their blood, their bones? The United States is a land everywhere shaped and informed by the kind of internal religious diversity Chimayo proudly displays – some of it obvious, some of it hidden – and yet the categories we use to discuss American religion mostly fail to convey this. The hole is a reminder that we have learned…

All the Belly-‘eich’-ing

By Sarah Posner

…administration, and has held onto it through Obama’s. Translation: your taxpayer dollars help pay for World Vision’s discriminatory hiring practices. That’s been going on since 2007, at least (before Brendan Eich opened his checkbook for the Proposition 8 campaign) and it has drawn a miniscule fraction of the outrage. Why? Just because you expect Silicon Valley to be the ultimate in gay-friendly, and faith-based charities not to be, doesn’t make t…

Why Don’t Republicans Want to Allow Pastors to Endorse from Pulpit?

By Daniel Silliman

…e religious right continues to be the most reliable bloc of voters for the Republican party. To those voters, the 1954 bill passed by then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson requiring tax-exempt religious organizations to refrain from politics is often seen as offensive, and understood as an attack directly on the practice of their faith. Republicans currently control both houses of Congress courtesy, in many cases, to these voters. Nor is it just white ev…

The Politics of Anti-Gay Persecution: Gambia, Egypt, Jamaica, Russia, with a Helping Hand from US Religious Conservatives; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…st in the coming months. RD contributor Jay Michaelson profiled one of the participants, Cameroonian human rights attorney Alice N’kom. The International Olympic Committee unanimously voted to add language opposing discrimination on sexual orientation to the Olympic Charter. Vatican: Pope says Church should help parents ‘stand by’ their gay children Pope Francis gave an interview with the Argentine daily La Nación in which he reflected on the rece…

Torture Denial: U.S. Flunks the Religious Acid Test

By Peter Laarman

…s that he has done wrong, behaved shamefully, we expect to get a deserved spanking. We are particularly ashamed of how we ditched our morality during a period of panic. There’s much more going on here than mere embarrassment. But there have been no major incidents of anti-U.S. violence anywhere in the world so far. And why? Perhaps because the rest of the world already knows things about us that we steadfastly refuse to acknowledge: That we are de…

Synod ‘Fight for Soul’ of Catholic Church, Flap On English Translation of Key Report; Anti-Gay Law Advances in Kyrgyzstan; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…rch may follow the direction Francis has set in the first 18 months of his papacy, away from condemnation of unconventional family situations and toward understanding, openness and mercy.” The conservative backlash was immediate and intense, if sometimes contradictory. Some conservatives lamented what they saw as a betrayal to the church’s teachings, while others, like George Weigel at National Review, downplayed the relatio’s significance and bla…

At the UN, Conservative Christian Agenda Cloaked in Human Rights Language

By Austin Dacey

…ion of UN member states, helpfully condensed onto three handsome sheets of parchment paper. The “right to life” in Article I extends to unborn life: Whereas the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before, as well as after birth. Article II, “Each Child has the Right to a Family,” draws on canonical language from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rig…

Is ISIS Islamic? Is it a State?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ller advocated positive thinking as the basis of the Christian message. As part of his efforts, he designed a version of the Bible that excised all of the bad parts—the wars, the fighting, the sex and the violence. Some might think there would not be much left, and it’s true that it was a thinner book than before. But it was also a thinner message. To accept the significance of the religious imagination is to accept all aspects of it, the positive…

It’s Theology, Not Baseball: Misunderstanding Iraq’s Sectarian Conflicts

By Amyn B. Sajoo

…ture are at best fragile — from Somalia and Yemen to Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, Mali, and the Central African Republic. It is also true that transitions from authoritarian to looser forms of governance are fraught with high political risk, as in ex-Yugoslavia, Egypt, and Iraq. Moreover, most of these radical groups, including the “Islamic State,” have a record of cynical gangsterism, routinely taking hostages and terrorizing targets for ranso…