Religion
Same-Sex Marriage versus the Black Church: The GOP’s New Southern Strategy
In the 1968 presidential election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and the Republican Party implemented a plan that has come to be known as the Southern Strategy. The Southern Strategy was a communications campaign with the goal of winning the previously unattainable votes of white Americans in the formerly Democratic South. The strategy [...]
More African-Americans leaving religious faiths
African-Americans are significantly more religious compared to the rest of the U.S. population, but a growing community of black atheists, like the Black Skeptics of Los Angeles, are steadily increasing each year. The American Religious Identification Survey of 2008 found that from 1990 to 2008 the number of blacks without any religious affiliation nearly doubled [...]
Across country, black pastors weigh in on Obama’s same-sex marriage support
Addressing his large, mostly black congregation on Sunday morning, the Rev. Wallace Charles Smith did not mince words about where he stood on President Barack Obama’s newly announced support for same-sex marriage: The church is against it, he said, prompting shouts of “Amen!” from the pews. And yet Smith hardly issued a full condemnation of [...]
Is the black church guilty of spiritual hypocrisy in same-sex marriage debate?
Some people wonder if the black church will punish President Barack Obama for announcing support for same-sex marriage. Here’s another question: Why would the black church cite scripture to exclude gays when a similar approach to the Bible was used to enslave their ancestors? “It’s so unfortunate,” says James Cone, one the nation’s most influential [...]
Complexity in black church reactions to Obama’s gay marriage announcement
After the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. first gained wide public recognition in the mid-1950s, he made a special request to evangelist Billy Graham. King was poised to join Graham on one of his barnstorming crusades, but he would do so only on one condition. He asked Graham to publicly speak out against segregation, a [...]
