Religion Dispatches
…arison is: according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, seven thousand black South Africans were killed under apartheid, and the number imprisoned was far higher. The Catholic Church neither kills nor imprisons ordained women and their supporters; excommunication, while painful, is not at all the same, even when financial losses accompany it. In 2007 I published an article in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion explaining in some…
Read More…inciples so it’s kind of important when you see a poll that says a growing number of Americans think you might be a Muslim. The President continues to tell everyone he’s a Christian but yet the number rises. See that? Which came first, the thought he was a Muslim or the lack of trust? If he is a Muslim, he can’t be trusted? Or if you can’t trust him, he must be a Muslim? In any case, Obama strained mightily to placate the likes of Graham and Brody…
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…ments meant to prevent them from speaking out about their mistreatment. (A number of sources confirmed that similar non-disclosure agreements have been used at Cedarville, and Steele indicated that most members of Gordon’s LGBTQ working group signed confidentiality agreements, although he refused, in spite of pressure.) The conversation was over RD recently spoke with two former Asbury University professors who are part of the evangelical “brain d…
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…dance in the general population has produced a significant increase in the number of WEINOs, White evangelicals who seldom or never attend church; and Support for Trump is strongest among White evangelicals who are not connected to churches. Let’s take each of these in turn. Myth 1: A Large and Growing Number of White Evangelical Protestants Do Not Attend Church The general assertion that church attendance has significantly declined among White ev…
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…ect, because people like Tonéx were interviewed on YouTube, there were thousands—tens of thousands of emails [and other responses]—can you use a curse word on Religion Dispatches? Oh, I think so. When Cadillac Kennedy did that anti-Eddie Long tape: “Dick-sucking Eddie Long! You’re wrong!” She got over a million views. So what’s coming in are a huge number of statements. Many of them are typically homophobic, “God is not mocked,” “you’re going to…
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…king religious conservatives. According to Pew, between 2009 and 2014, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration—and by inference the Democratic Party—was “unfriendly to religion” skyrocketed from just 17 percent to 36 percent. This year’s Democratic convention may also have helped erase the idea that the Democrats are unfriendly to religion and made the party more welcoming to wayward white Catholics. As Catherine Rampell no…
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…om 24 to 20 percent among historically black Protestant denominations. The number of 18-29 year olds among Catholics and evangelical Protestants ticked up 1 percent respectively, and among mainline Protestants it saw a 9 percent increase. In the interest of equity, blacks make up 9 percent of those who are unaffiliated with any religious tradition (“nones”), and of that, the numbers trended upwards among 18-29 year olds. Many news outlets covered…
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…sota who said children only become people at age 5. Another said “a common number that is going around is 4 years old.” Arguments that college students make to provoke activists and demonstrators should probably not be taken at face value, but more importantly neither these people nor McArdle’s article offered any data indicating an increase in support for infanticide. In fact, Gallup polls show Americans are pretty evenly divided on abortion. A r…
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…or such conversations, but the ideal forum for it. I can fondly recall any number of incidents where I argued theology and philosophy with a religious colleague while doing interfaith work; and how, later, they told me that they actually took my perspective seriously because we had built a trusting relationship. It made all the difference that I treated them as intellectual equals—as people with respectable goals rather than just mindless adherent…
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…s as mostly atheists and agnostics when they clearly are not (although the numbers of atheists and agnostics are rising as well), the subtext that the nones haven’t fully thought through their choice to disaffiliate from religion is offensive—and it’s a prime example of how journalists talk over nones instead of to us. Bolling, by contrast, works directly with students, which gives him valuable insight into their mindset and decision making. “Some…
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