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Oct 21, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
Like a comet closing in on Planet Earth, the US presidential election is hurtling toward its destination. With around two weeks left before impact, the stakes of the choice before the American electorate are becoming ever clearer, as are the differences between the parties’ standard bearers. Robert P. Jones, President and Founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has long been one of the sharpest observers of those consequential differences.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
Almost as soon as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, attacks focused on his association with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) started to roll in. Harris herself is a Baptist.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
Here at Religion Dispatches, we have an informal policy that “religion is as religion does.” Which is to say, we don’t try to adjudicate who is, for example, a “real Christian” and who’s not. If you label your beliefs and practices as “Christian,” and those beliefs are shared by a reasonable number of people, that’s the label we use. It’s not a perfect rule, but then heuristics are only ever meant to work well enough.
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May 17, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
In her just-released book Soul By Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread The Gospel to Muslims, journalist Adriana Carranca follows a Brazilian missionary known as Luiz and his wife Gis from their humble origins in Northeastern Brazil through their time as evangelists in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East serving underground communities of Christian converts in majority Muslim nations.
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May 3, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
The Project 2025 plan published by the Heritage Foundation is, in the words of Peter Montgomery, “an unprecedented collaboration among former Trump officials and the Right’s legal and political infrastructure [that] would enable Trump to make good on his threats” of autocratic government should he be reelected. “This should be a cause for alarm,” says Montgomery.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
When social psychologists Marah Al-Kire and Michael Pasek primed White members of a research panel with an article about anti-Christian bias in America, those participants were more likely to perceive such bias in society. Hardly a surprising result. But follow-up questions revealed a more startling connection: Panelists shown an article on anti-Christian bias also showed increased perceptions of anti-White bias in American society.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
This morning, PRRI released a new study on religious change in the US with implications for understanding support for White Christian nationalism and its avatar, Donald Trump. Those implications fall into two broad categories: religious change and the faith identity of Trump’s followers.
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Mar 20, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
It’s not every day a legitimate paradox turns up in national polling. But the Pew Research Center’s recent survey on the influence of religion on American public life seems to have uncovered one. According to Pew, nearly three-quarters of White evangelicals think it’s important to have a presidential candidate with strong religious beliefs—indeed, a similar proportion want a candidate who shares their beliefs. Yet just 6% of those same voters think Donald Trump is very religious.
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Mar 13, 2024 | 
religiondispatches.org | Daniel Schultz
Last week, Katie Britt, one of Alabama’s two Christian nationalist senators, provided a now-notorious rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. If nothing else it was compelling television (and it even inspired a widely shared Saturday Night Live parody featuring Scarlett Johansson).
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Mar 6, 2024 | 
dandadad.com | Daniel Schultz
Solutions for contemporary problems sometimes come from unexpected places. For example, in the 4th century A.D., the early Christian monastic Evagrius Ponticus wrote about acedia, a state of restless futility. The "Noonday Demon," as Evagrius called it, convinced his brother monks that their day was "fifty hours long" and their hard work not worth the toil. You may know the idea better as "sloth," one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
