Attention to the Unseen

Michelle Goldberg writes: The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.” Back then, much…

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New York Magazine reports: The new “2020 Census of American Religion” from the Public Religion Research Institute is out, and while it has a number of interesting findings, the most surprising is that among white Christians, mainline Protestants have reversed a long-standing decline in membership and have now surged past Evangelical Protestants. The survey measured self-identification among white Christians as “evangelical”/“born-again” Protestant or “other” Protestant, so it is not correlated to institutional membership in this or that denomination. But generally…

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Emma Green writes: Bill Haslam is not a natural fit for the Donald Trump–era Republican Party. The former Tennessee governor checks certain GOP boxes: He favors low taxes and opposes abortion rights; his background is in business, including an executive role in his family’s highly successful truck-stop chain. But during his time in office, Haslam also got in trouble with his base for vetoing a bill that would have declared the Bible Tennessee’s official state book. He successfully championed Tennessee…

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Anish Kapoor writes: At the heart of New Delhi, the capital of India, sits a Mughal-inspired monument that houses the seat of the Indian parliament. Built by the British architect Edwin Lutyens between 1911 and 1931, the parliament buildings and their grand roadways and water channels follow the form established by the Islamic rulers of Iran and elaborated by the Islamic sultanate of Samarkand and the Mughal rulers of India. Lutyens designed perhaps the most important Islamic-inspired edifice of modern…

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The Times of Israel reports: A new survey points to a growing divide in the US between young evangelical Christians and their elders, particularly in their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, indicating Israel could see a significant drop in support in coming years. While the religious group has long been a bulwark of support for Israel in the US, the Barna Group-administered poll commissioned by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke indicates a sharp drop in support…

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CNN reports: When Pastor James Kendall stepped on to the stage of his small church in Madera, California he knew that day’s sermon was going to take him in a direction unlike most. He had seen some troubling Facebook posts from members of his congregation. God, he says, was telling him speak out and warn his flock. “I don’t like to get off track and off the Bible,” Kendall said during a sermon on March 7. “But as a pastor…

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The Guardian reports: A data breach from Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has revealed that millions of dollars have been raised on the site for far-right causes and groups, many of whom are banned from raising funds on other platforms. It also identifies previously anonymous high-dollar donors to far-right actors, some of whom enjoy positions of wealth, power or public responsibility. Some of the biggest beneficiaries have been members of groups such as the Proud Boys, designated as a terrorist group…

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Nicholas Kristof writes: The Rev. Rick Joyner is a famous evangelical leader who has called on Christians to arm themselves for an inevitable civil war against liberals, whom he suggests are allies of the devil. But this is the awkward part: His five children would be on the other side of that civil war, as he and his kids all acknowledge. Just as America is torn asunder by politics and polarization, so is the Joyner family. The Joyners love each…

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Shadi Hamid writes: The United States had long been a holdout among Western democracies, uniquely and perhaps even suspiciously devout. From 1937 to 1998, church membership remained relatively constant, hovering at about 70 percent. Then something happened. Over the past two decades, that number has dropped to less than 50 percent, the sharpest recorded decline in American history. Meanwhile, the “nones”—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion—have grown rapidly and today represent a quarter of the population. But if secularists…

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The Associated Press reports: Pope Francis and Iraq’s top Shiite cleric delivered a powerful message of peaceful coexistence Saturday, urging Muslims in the war-weary Arab nation to embrace Iraq’s long-beleaguered Christian minority during a historic meeting in the holy city of Najaf. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said religious authorities have a role in protecting Iraq’s Christians, and that Christians should live in peace and enjoy the same rights as other Iraqis. The Vatican said Francis thanked al-Sistani for having “raised…

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Julia Duin writes: Perched on a cream-colored armchair, Johnny Enlow, a 61-year-old, California-based Pentecostal pastor with short-cropped gray hair, a trim beard and Tom Selleck-style mustache, looked into the camera and prophesied that Donald Trump would become president again. Not in 2024. In 2021. “The January 20 inauguration date doesn’t really mean anything,” Enlow said in the January 29 video, which has gotten north of 100,000 views on YouTube. According to Enlow, more than 100 other “credible” Christian prophets around…

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