Reading Time: 3 minutes The percentage of Australians who have no religious affiliation has jumped from 30.1% in 2016 to an astonishing 38.9% in 2021, marking a rapid shift away from organized religion. That’s one of the major results released by Australia’s Bureau of Statistics, which conducts a census every five years and began releasing 2021 Census data today. […]
Analysis
Posted inAnalysis
Of God and guns
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the wake of yet another and another and another mass shooting by a young man armed with an AR-15, it is natural for people to seek someone or something to blame. The left blames their usual suspects: too-easy access to increasingly lethal firearms, the NRA, and their Republican enablers. The right also has their […]
Posted inThe Flare
Mass shootings in America: Why does the U.S. continue to do nothing?
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hungerford, England, 1987. 16 people were killed by a lone gunman. The Conservative government introduced the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, making registration mandatory for owning shotguns and banning semi-automatic and pump-action weapons. There was a huge firearm amnesty. Dunblane, Scotland, 1996. 16 children died in another rare UK shooting. The Conservative government passed a ban […]
Posted inResearch
A bridge too far: The failure to capture ‘spiritual fitness’ in the US military
Reading Time: 3 minutes After massive resources have been spent trying to assess spiritual fitness in the military, scholars now admit it is not a meaningful concept.
Posted inEducation
Religion and education: Let’s be perfectly clear
Reading Time: 5 minutes Despite a long-time understanding among sociologists that certain forms of religious belief and identification undercut educational attainment, contrarian social scientists and religious apologists often argue that education and religion are completely compatible. Recent arguments by Ilana Horwitz and Ryan Burge go further to claim that religion may even enhance educational success. Such arguments wither under […]
Posted inAnalysis
Canadians say evangelicals hurt society more than any other religion
Reading Time: 3 minutes When it comes to religion in Canada, most adults believe Catholics, evangelicals, and Muslims do more harm than good. All three religions had a net negative score when people were asked if their members helped or hurt Canadian society. Evangelical Christians received the lowest scores. Those are some of the takeaways from a new survey […]
Posted inAnalysis
Does religion really improve educational outcomes?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Horwitz makes the claim that religiosity is beneficial for working-class young men when it comes to their educational attainment. The claims in the article are clear illustrations of two logical fallacies – faulty generalization and cherry-picking.
Posted inAnalysis
Church membership as a product in search of demand
Reading Time: 7 minutes Christianity itself became superfluous a while ago for a lot of Americans, and church leaders simply can’t deal with that fact. Well, most of them. Today, we’ll meet a Christian leader who has a better perspective on his religion’s decline.
Posted inAnalysis
Why secular Americans are pivotal allies in the fight for racial justice
Reading Time: 6 minutes New research from the Pew Center points to the powerful potential of secularism as an avenue for forging multiracial coalitions.
Posted inAnalysis, Religion
The decline of religion: the bad news
Reading Time: 3 minutes In the Western world, like a cornered, injured animal, religion is both weaker and more dangerous than ever.