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The Lesser and the Greater Pilgrimage

By Amina Wadud

…icion that I would be more like myself and not so overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. I had stuck with this plan—umrah any time of the year, the further from the three sacred months the better, and then hajj some other year—until my recent stay in Indonesia. I met an Indonesian fashion designer who had one of those life-altering experiences about 15 years ago, after flaunting around in Milan, Italy, where she studied fashion. From that moment on, sh…

Democratic Candidates Don’t Need to Get More Religious, They Just Need to Get Known

By Daniel Schultz

…and 46% of occasional attenders, both enough to win each category. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, won those who never attend worship with 36%. But without context, these numbers might be misleading. For one thing, as Jack Jenkins points out in yet another piece, the black churches aren’t the unilateral power center they used to be in their communities. Black Americans are growing more secular, like whites, albeit at a slower pace. For another, it see…

The Most Important Religious Category of the Primaries, the Non-Religious, Doesn’t Break Down as Cleanly as You Think

By Daniel Schultz

…f older voters. Appropriately enough, Teen Vogue put it best: As expected, Sanders won big with the young voters who did show up, but the youth vote continues to be outnumbered by older voter turnout across the country. Even that might be somewhat generous. As USA Today notes, Sanders won a smaller share of the under-thirty demographic than he did in 2016 in several states. It’s worth noting this shift in a religion-and-politics column because you…

Civil Religion v. Uncivil Religion; With Deadly Consequences

By Daniel Schultz

…civil religion might be to lift the COVID-19 death count from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Had the non-believers of that faith within the administration, like Anthony Fauci, not prevailed, we might be looking at the deaths of millions. According to Bellah, when Rousseau defined civil religion, he outlined “simple dogmas of the civil religion: the existence of God, the life to come, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, a…

Where’s the 2020 Democratic Faith Outreach Discussion… Or Has the Folly of Courting White Evangelicals Finally Hit Home?

By Chrissy Stroop

…to the power to enact their vision of a Christian America.” He added, “The numbers of Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are not declining since 2016, and Christian nationalism still pushes people to embrace Trump and stay in his camp,” which leaves Whitehead “confident we’ll see 80% of white evangelicals support Trump again, if not more.” Can the Quixotic dream of Democratic faith outreach to white evangelicals, then, finally be laid to…

Don’t Die For Me, Wisconsin

By Daniel Schultz

…mission through coughing or sneezing. But that hasn’t stopped Reno and thousands like him from deriding them, as though common courtesy had become some form of candy-ass political correctness gone horribly, horribly afraid. What kind of weird looking-glass have we gone through to stand decency on its head like this? It’s as if conservatives want to spread pandemic to own the libs, as someone on my timeline wise-cracked. If you wear a mask to preve…

Methodist Church’s ‘Dismantling Racism Initiative’ Excludes Some Black Lives

By Pamela R. Lightsey

…protests in Ferguson or Baltimore? Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Botham Jean, and Atatiana Jefferson. Why no initiatives then? Perhaps most telling: Does the Council of Bishops not yet recognize that, included among the very Black lives they now declare matter, are members of the LGBTQ community? How serious can Black LGBTQ United Methodists take this new initiative that doesn’t contain a clear stance against homophobia and…

Religion and Drag Coexist in ‘Drag Race’ Spinoff—but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Queer

By Drew Konow

…ont of a neon cross, holding a rhinestone encrusted Bible, with a giant bedazzled cross around her neck and a cape embroidered with another cross trailing behind, Alyssa Edwards says “I never thought I would be in full drag, holding a holy rhinestone Bible marrying two men.” Here and elsewhere, Alyssa walks the line between campy religion and sincere religious practice. Lines like “my cup is already runneth over” and “If I have to put on my good c…

The Non-Mask of the Red Death: A Deadly Necropolitics Hits Home

By Peter Laarman

…lovingkindness, the God who desires mercy, not sacrifice? (And don’t for a minute try to map “Old Testament” and “New Testament” onto these competing conceptions of God. It just ain’t so.) In this fallen world people get to choose which of God’s faces they prefer. How God is imaged is famously contested territory for the “people of the Book,” and no one can seriously expect today’s champions and worshippers of a wrathful male sky god to grasp how…

The Absence of Public, Visible Mourning Has Weakened Our Ability to Fight COVID

By Joshua Ladon

…g reflects a broader disengagement from death throughout the pandemic. The number of deaths is a rolling tab, a new national debt, scrolling at the bottom of the TV screen. There are no funeral marches, no mass services at cemeteries. The images and sounds of death are absent from our news media. It’s too dangerous for a camera crew to enter an ICU ward. How might the airing of choking, coughing and strained breathing, like war footage, change our…