If you are reading this post, we are glad to announce that this is our 1,000th blog post. When we launched our blog last year, we wanted to highlight some of the best work that examined the nexus between Rhetoric Race and Religion. When we officially launched our independent blog on October 15, 2011, we did not know we would reach over 60,000 views and publish 1,000 posts. During this past year, we produced the Rhetoric Race and Religion “Readers.” We... Read more

Three times more Protestant pastors plan to vote for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election. Romney’s Mormon beliefs are a factor for only a small number of pastors who plan to cast their ballot for another candidate. A survey conducted by LifeWay Research Sept. 26-Oct. 3 found that 57 percent of Protestant pastors plan to vote for Romney compared with 17 percent for Obama. Twenty-two percent are still undecided. The breakdown is similar to what it... Read more

Last month, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that banned so-called “reparative therapy” for gay children. The law prohibits state-licensed therapists from conducting “reorientation therapy” or other attempts to change the sexual orientation of children under the age of 18. While the value of this form of therapy has long been questioned both inside and outside the therapeutic establishment, it was only in April of this year that psychologist Robert Spitzer repudiated his 2001 psychological study of 200 men and women who had... Read more

Last week I received another expression of a very common sentiment in the comments box at Philosophical Fragments – and the commenter wished it known that she was “not a libertine” but a 50-year-old former-Christian woman with a long marriage and three children, two in the military. She wrote: George Bush and his supporters were a large reason that I left Christianity and have become quite hostile to the evangelical agenda. I vote against it at every opportunity and make... Read more

Anthea Butler, a noted scholar on religion and politics who is a regular contributor to national media programs, will deliver the 2012 Cole Lectures at Vanderbilt University Divinity School’s Benton Chapel. This year’s Cole lecturer is an associate professor of religious studies and graduate chair of religion at the University of Pennsylvania. Butler will speak at 7 p.m. Oct. 25 on “Whitewashing the Past: The Religious Right and the Quest to Reframe American History.” Her second talk at Vanderbilt will... Read more

In my last post, I offered a brief biographical sketch of Turner. In this post, I want to discuss Turner’s rhetorical education. In my book, The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition, I argue that Turner was one of the finest orators in America during his lifetime. Early in his career, his preaching took center stage. While preaching on the revival circuits, Turner could move a crowd—having folks caught up with the Spirit and... Read more

There’s been much angst on the right over the Republican Party’s growing demographic problems, most memorably by GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said the party was running out of “angry white guys.” But conservatives may be facing another demographic threat as well: declining religiosity, especially among the young. The latest sign came in a Pew study released last week that found that one in five American adults now claims no religion, and that 34 percent of those younger than 30... Read more

D.J. Moberley, a 30-year-old evangelical Christian, seems an unlikely cog in the effort to elect Mitt Romney as president. He has no ties to the campaign, has been skeptical of the candidate’s Mormon faith, and says, “Mitt Romney is not someone I would have picked, that’s for sure.” Nonetheless, the real estate appraiser spends hours chatting with his 900 Facebook friends and talking with fellow church members about Romney, all part of his effort to convince evangelicals who have qualms... Read more

The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in Americaby Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey University of North Carolina Press , 2012 Four years ago, America was on the verge of electing the country’s first African American president—a stunning marker, for many, of the promises of progress fulfilled. This year, Barack Obama faces a Mormon challenger, and religion, not race, fuels at least some of the suspense of this close presidential contest. But religion... Read more

Recently, I read about a new poll whose headline caught my eye immediately: Protestants no longer a majority of Americans, study finds. It turns out that a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that Protestants have fallen to only 48% of the American public while people without a religious affiliation or do not have a faith have risen from 15% to 20% since 2007. The percentage of people who are unaffiliated rises to 32... Read more