Christopher Obal used to be a Christian. He grew up in Queens, New York, and when he was 5 years old, his parents left Catholicism for a very different form of Christianity. While they didn’t claim a specific denomination, he said the churches they went to would probably be described as Pentecostal, evangelical and charismatic. “We attended churches where people …
Did Affluence Spur the Rise of Modern Religions? By Bret Stetka
About 2,500 years ago something changed the way humans think. Within the span of two centuries, in three separate regions of Eurasia, spiritual movements emerged that would give rise to the world’s major moral religions, those preaching some combination of compassion, humility and asceticism. Scholars often attribute the rise of these moral religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity included—to population …
SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE: RELIGIOUS (NON) AFFILIATION MIGHT NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS – Peter Laarman
If religious kitsch is a guilty pleasure, one of my favorite indulgences is a graphic that depicts a school of ichthus—the simple outline of a fish that is was an early symbol for followers of Christ—with a contemporary “evangellyfish” swimming in the opposite direction. The caption reads, simply, “Go against the flow.” The 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, which is being rolled …
PREDICTING THE FUTURE OF RELIGION: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT – Ed Simon
This week’s news from Pew on the decline of institutional Christianity, with its trove of data on the “unaffiliated” and the decline of the mainstream, has stolen the stage from last month’s release of Pew’s report on the Future of World Religions—a study that concluded that while atheists, agnostics and the unchurched are on the rise in the U.S. their numbers are projected to decline globally. …
THE INVENTION OF A CORPORATE CHRISTIAN AMERICA – Andrew Aghapour
According to author Kevin Kruse, the idea that America is a “Christian nation” was invented only recently, forged by an alliance between industrialists and conservative clergy who preached the connection between Christianity and capitalism. In One Nation Under God, the Princeton history professor issues a twofold corrective: first, to the popular notion that the United States has always understood itself as a Christian nation; and …
The Retro Future – John Michael Greer
Is it just me, or has the United States taken yet another great leap forward into the surreal over the last few days? Glancing through the news, I find another round of articles babbling about how fracking has guaranteed America a gaudy future as a petroleum and natural gas exporter. Somehow none of these articles get around to mentioning that …
Religion Across the Globe Is Changing, But Not the Way You Think
AlterNet and other progressive news sites frequently [3] publish articles about the decline [4] of Christian hegemony in the United States. While this view is to some extent true, it doesn’t necessarily account for other long-term demographic trends, including population growth and migration. In a new report, The Future of World Religions [5], the Pew Research Center attempts to round out the picture and look at patterns of …
Wendell Berry on Climate Change: To Save the Future, Live in the Present
I. [2013] So far as I am concerned, the future has no narrative. The future does not exist until it has become the past. To a very limited extent, prediction has worked. The sun, so far, has set and risen as we have expected it to do. And the world, I suppose, will predictably end, but all of its predicted …