News for March 11

Freelancing in Faith

The American Religious Identification Survey came out this week, and its results show that more Americans are choosing not to affiliate with any religious institution. The 2008 study interviewed more than 50,000 people about their beliefs and found that the number of people who are “non-religious” grew from 8.2. percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. This doesn’t mean that these folks are atheists or agnostics, although the number of avowed atheists in the U.S. has grown to 1.6 million. What does the ARIS survey mean for the future of religion in the U.S.? Links include:

Spiritual Politics |  “Among the most significant news politically is that 18 percent of Catholics and 39 percent of those belonging to Mainline Protestant denominations say yes when you ask whether they consider themselves born-again or evangelical Christians. That’s the same question the exit polls ask, and the one that gives us the results for “the evangelical vote.” But we now know that about 25 percent of those “evangelicals” are Catholics and Methodists and Presbyterians etc.–that is, they do not belong to “evangelical” churches.”

GetReligion |  “American religion is getting even more complex and nuanced. This means it is even more important that newsrooms contain Godbeat (or godsbeat) professionals offering a blend of experience, training and talent. That’s obvious, but in the current business climate that is not going to be easy. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

CNN |  “The rise in evangelical Christianity is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans, said Mark Silk of Trinity College. “In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the American public generally that there was a long-lasting ‘religious right’ connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way,” he said of the link between the Republican Party and groups such as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family. “In an earlier time, people who would have been content to say, ‘Well, I’m some kind of a Protestant,’ now say ‘Hell no, I won’t go,’” he told CNN.”

CSMonitor.com |  “We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture. I’m not a prophet. My view of evangelicalism is not authoritative or infallible. I am certainly wrong in some of these predictions. But is there anyone who is observing evangelicalism in these times who does not sense that the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential?

• Related link: Got News? Evangelical Crash Ahead  |  GetReligion

The American Scene |  “Because media coverage of evangelical Christianity so closely hews to particular political controversies, evangelism is presented not as religious practice but as a set of explanations and justifications for positions on the issues of the day. In other words, it’s seen as a totalizing worldview. Mainliners who suspect their beliefs deviate from the accepted line could be declining to call themselves “Christian” because they don’t see Christianity as an explanation for everything, and therefore suspect they don’t “deserve” the label. They may continue to go to church, or they may not; the distinction is one of belief.”

A Democracy Downgrade?  |  FP Passport

Is Barack Obama downgrading the importance of promoting democracy in the Middle East? A group of activists and scholars led by my former boss, Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, sure seems to think so. Or at least, they’re going to hold the U.S. president’s feet to the fire.

• Related link: Grasping at Democracy  |  The Xenia Institute

Despite Crashing Economy, Private Prison Firm Turns a Handsome Profit  |  CorpWatch

While the nation’s economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings.

If Amazon.com Gives Almost Nothing to Charity, Should We Care?  |  Slate

While Amazon.com is famously cheap in its prices, it’s also become infamously cheap to the community it lives in. The tacit silence over Amazon’s stinginess was first broken in a 2007 complaint on a Publishers Weekly blog by a rival Seattle bricks-and-mortar bookseller. When Paul Constant, books editor at the Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger, followed up on the post last year, he hit a stone wall: “[Amazon.com] has refused to return repeated e-mails and calls from The Stranger about the company’s seemingly nonexistent contributions to the Seattle arts scene,” he wrote at the time. “Internet searches for any sign of philanthropy on behalf of the company prove fruitless.”

We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction  |  Chris Hedges @Truthdig

All efforts to stanch the effects of climate change are not going to work if we do not practice vigorous population control. Overpopulation, in times of hardship, will create as much havoc in industrialized nations as in the impoverished slums around the globe where people struggle on less than two dollars a day. Population growth is often overlooked, or at best considered a secondary issue, by many environmentalists, but it is as fundamental to our survival as reducing the emissions that are melting the polar ice caps.