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What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…the danger of using public coffers to subsidize houses of worship. The majority describes this as a case about religious discrimination, which demonstrates how successful the religious right has been at rebranding nearly any attempt to enforce the Establishment Clause as a form of religious persecution. Declining to divert public money to churches has long been considered necessary to protect the individual right of conscience of the citizenry. Fa…

Is Abortion No Longer Significant for Evangelicals — or Has it Just Become Like Water?

By Bradley Onishi

…if they hold water. Has there been a sea change in how white evangelicals prioritize abortion? Burge bases his argument on a series of polls from 2018. First, there is data from PRRI that shows how white evangelicals rank certain political issues: From this graph we can see that white evangelicals mention reducing healthcare costs, the budget deficit, immigration, and addressing the opioid epidemic as the highest priority in higher percentages tha…

Boo! Trump’s Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

By Daniel Schultz

…support comes from white Evangelicals and his weakest from Hispanics and African-Americans. We’ll talk about the minorities in a minute. Here, let us notice that while Evangelical support for Trump is overwhelming, he’s actually running quite a bit behind Mitt Romney’s 79% and even John McCain’s 73%. He’ll still win the demographic handily, but it won’t do him much good. Trump needs to improve on Romney’s scores with white voters in order to keep…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…Second Great Awakening. (It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall during a private conversation between Lehmann and Finney partisan Marilynne Robinson.) And, finally, a long chapter given over to a detailed exposition of the plot of the “Left Behind” books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins delivered just too much of a muchness to suit this particular reader. These quibbles aside, Lehmann has given us a sobering spiritual biography of a ceasel…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…s. Research in this vein continues to this day, often with the goal of offering empirical support for otherwise subjective accounts of religious states. The second, often referred to as the “cognitive science of religion,” or CSR, includes books and articles that generally try to explain salient features of religious experiences, beliefs, and practices by appealing to the functions of evolved cognitive mechanisms. A common method within the CSR is…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…working, because the decisions of some bishops continue to put children at risk—by keeping cases of accused priests from lay scrutiny. Many bishops were blindsided when they heard what had happened in Philadelphia. But should they have been? Bishops know that they have absolute autonomy in their dioceses. The USCCB has no authority to tell individual bishops how to run their shops. That’s why there are still two bishops who refuse to participate…

There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

By Haroon Moghul

…ians are numerous, and include bridges of faith as well as a shared perception of colonialism. The conflict between Israel and Palestine isn’t at bottom about religion—or, I should say, it shouldn’t be. Some on both sides try to pitch it that way, and considering the territory that is right now fought over, it’s not surprising religion plays that role and is made a justification for actions and policies and aspirations. It’s just surprising when…

And What of the Non-Jewish Jews?

By Shaul Magid

…wish, because of Jewish ancestry generations ago, a Jewish spouse, Jewish friends etc. In terms of numbers, Jews by religion or no religion make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, but if you add “People with a Jewish affinity” it rises to 2.7%, so that this category of people who are not considered Jews by the Jewish community but identify as Jews is nearly 25% of the Jews by religion or no religion, those we conventionally call “Jews.” The fact that…

False Saviors: Trump, Cruz, and the Gospel of the Quick Fix

By Marcia Pally

…and state churches. The rough frontier settlement encouraged an anti-authoritarian do-it-yourself-ism, and voluntary associationism, as Tocqueville called it. But government is something to keep your eye on. This is a chunk of the American DNA. It was the basis for Nixon’s Southern strategy, wooing the Dixie-crats to Republican small-government-ism. It was why Reagan said government was the problem, and why so many cheered and voted for him. And…