May 11, 2020
1. The National Day of Prayer was Thursday, May 7.
2. My previous newsletter mentioned the new book about evangelicals, Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be edited by David Bebbington, George Marsden and Mark Noll.
Here is a review in Comment by Pete Wehner. "Among the book’s virtues is that it puts evangelicals within a historical context, helping readers appreciate its rich, complicated history."
As I've been reading the book, I keep thinking it could use more perspectives from political scientists. Now we have one. Reacting to the Noll interview I mentioned last week, Djupe and Burge wrote a helpful explainer, "What is an evangelical?"
3. The Little Sisters of the Poor were back at the Supreme Court last Wed. Here's the Becket Law case page.
4. An increasing number of white Protestants believe Trump is anointed by God, especially those who attend religious services frequently.
5. Trump admin buried CDC guidance on reopening, including guidance for churches and other faith groups. You can see what the guidance would've been for churches on pages 7, 8 here.
6. Harvard study: "People who attended religious services at least once a week were significantly less likely to die from “deaths of despair,” including deaths related to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning, according to new research led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study showed that the association between service attendance and lower risk of deaths from despair was somewhat stronger for women than for men."
7. Webinar at Vanderbilt Divinity School on May 18: "Liberating People and the Planet #1 Intersections in Economics, Ecology and Religion"
8. New podcast: Crossing Faiths: A Christian & a Muslims talk religion & politics.
Two friends, Matt Hawkins (a former policy director for the Southern Baptist Convention) and John Pinna (former Executive Director of American Islamic Congress) talk religion and politics. The podcast delivers weekly episodes featuring commentary on news, politics, multifaith experiences, and expert guests. The conversations build on almost a decade of their collaboration, advocating in Washington, D.C. for religious freedom domestically and around the globe. The two developed the podcast with a desire to share conversations that model friendship and collaboration despite deep differences in religion and background.
Matt and John are interviewed about it here.
9. Russell Moore: "The Killing of Ahmaud Arbery and the Justice of God"
Sadly, though, many black and brown Christians have seen much of this, not just in history but in flashes of threats of violence in their own lives. And some white Christians avert their eyes—even in cases of clear injustice—for fear of being labeled “Marxists” or “social justice warriors” by the same sort of forces of intimidation that wielded the same arguments against those who questioned the state-sponsored authoritarianism and terror of Jim Crow. And so, they turn their eyes.
10. The first report from the U.S. Secular Survey has been released. From the press release:
Today, the nonreligious identity organization American Atheists released Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America, a comprehensive report drawn from the groundbreaking U.S. Secular Survey. Counting nearly 34,000 nonreligious participants and organized by a team of researchers at Strength in Numbers Consulting Group, the U.S. Secular Survey is the largest ever data collection project on secular Americans and their experiences.
“At 75 million people, religiously unaffiliated Americans are as large a demographic as either Evangelical Christians or Catholics, and explicitly nonreligious people comprise a growing share of the population, yet before the U.S. Secular Survey there had been a lack of focused research on our community,” said Alison Gill, Vice President for Legal and Policy at American Atheists, who helped lead the project. “What we found shocked us. Discrimination and stigma against nonreligious Americans is widespread and extremely harmful.”
Due to their nonreligious identity, more than half of participants (54.5%) had negative experiences with family members, nearly one third (29.4%) in education, and more than one in five (21.7%) in the workplace. Of those who experienced discrimination within their families, there was a 73.3% higher rate of likely depression.
“This report shows that the more religious the community, the more likely nonreligious people are to face discrimination and stigma,” said Gill. “Nonreligious Americans living in very religious communities, concentrated in rural areas and the South, are particularly at risk.”
11. Tim Keller and Pete Wehner talk about political polarization among Christians for a Faith Angle podcast.
12. The new book The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity will be available June 1. I wrote one of the chapters. Subscribers to this newsletter can get a copy for 40% off with the code DANGER40.
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