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Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Statement By Orthodox Church in America Should Be Christian Nationalist Warning Sign to US Orthodoxy

By Katherine Kelaidis

…dox Church in America (OCA). Both are, unsurprisingly, characterized by a large number of American converts in their ranks. Nearly 70% of those in the AOA are converts, while the OCA is about evenly split, 50-50. Similarly, the GOA, arguably the most progressive Orthodox body in America—“progressive” being a relative term—remains almost exclusively composed of ethnic Greeks. Focused on their own ethnic political concerns, including the position of…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…dicator, conservatives within the ELCA (and the new NALC) are fighting a rear-guard action that will become increasingly irrelevant. Surveys consistently show that younger generations of Americans are becoming more accepting of LGBTQ persons, and none other than former first lady Laura Bush admitted recently that same-sex marriage “will come.” It is also important to remember that the ELCA is not a denomination on the far-left fringes of American…

The Family Research Council’s Mistaken Identity

By Sarah Posner

…adical far right, described in the FBI’s Project Megiddo report as “a vast number and variety of groups, such as survivalists, militias, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Christian Identity churches, the AN and skinheads.” The report called Christian Identity “the most unifying theology for a number of these diverse groups and one widely adhered to by white supremacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ked a rapid increase in the number of people who do not identify with any particular faith tradition. However, the so-called “Nones” have been shown in both studies to be moving not so much from belief to unbelief, as from institutionalized expressions of faith in community to all kinds of “something else.” The “something else-ness,” if you will, of American faith practice is likewise tracked in a recent Pew study on religion among the millennial…

Jonestown at 40: The Real Conspiracy Is More Disturbing Than the Theories

By Rebecca Moore

…er, it’s reassuring, for it promises a world that’s meaningful rather than arbitrary. Thus, it’s more comforting to believe that nefarious outside forces murdered everyone than to accept the concrete evidence that insiders were responsible for what happened. Hateful enemies rather than loving parents perpetrated the atrocity. Forty years later, the deaths in Jonestown seem neither meaningful nor arbitrary. They are evil insofar as fundamentally de…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…what many working people argued. There is no question that, as industrial warfare broke out across the late-19th-century United States, the Protestant elite sided almost exclusively with capital. Of course, even that way of putting it makes it sound like the two could be differentiated, when in many cases they could not. In the book I discuss how Chicago’s wealthiest citizens predominated on Protestant church boards and vestries. In the early 1870…

As Gaza Burns, Jews Disagree, Protest & Pray

By Sam Kestenbaum

…center of world news, just a mile away, but still obscured. He watches as rockets are launched from building-tops in Gaza, leaving long wispy streams as they arch into the air. Far more dramatic is when Israel strikes: the missiles make huge explosions, plumes of black smoke spreading over the skyline. It looks like the city is on fire. Buildings are obliterated, people inside, reduced to rubble in seconds. There is a crowd here, watching from la…

What’s in a Name? Religious Nones and the American Religious Landscape

By Richard Flory

…the role of religion in their lives is often much different than what scholars are able to express through their measures. Religious Nones is a more complex—and interesting—category than its name implies. Perhaps following Vernon’s 1968 suggestion to call the religiously unaffiliated “religious independents,” we might pursue a better term for this category. Yet even then we are left with a category that implies a particular theoretical and methodo…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…es, including Brazil’s gold-medal-winning Rafaela Silva. Among LGBT firsts are a married lesbian couple who are teammates on the British women’s Rugby team and an on-field marriage proposal from a volunteer to her Rugby-playing girlfriend. Unfortunately the Olympics also featured a Daily Beast article about the use of Grindr among Olympic athletes, an article that drew savage criticism from activists and from an openly gay Tongan athlete for provi…

3 Reasons the SCOTUS Challenge to Contraceptive Mandate is a “Religious Liberty” Stalking Horse

By Patricia Miller

…provider like Planned Parenthood authorized to provide free coverage. Both are barriers to contraceptive access. And on a conceptual level, it would mean that the government could be prevented from arranging work-arounds for other religious liberty claims. What happens if an organization refuses to provide health insurance coverage to the same-sex spouse of an employee because it doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage? Would the government be prevent…