Relationship Page 3
Click on Book for Amazon
Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they're also the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting—reducing the law to winners and losers.
The single fastest growing religious group of our time is those who check the box next to the word none on national surveys. In America, this is 20 percent of the population. Exactly who are the unaffiliated? What caused this seismic shift in our culture? Are our churches poised to reach these people?
Greene, Jamal. How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart . Harper Collins. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
You have the right to remain silent, and the right to free speech. The right to go out, and the right to stay home. The right to worship, and the right to doubt. The right against racial or sex discrimination, and the right to hate. The right to marry and to have children. The right to divorce and to terminate a pregnancy. The right not to be tortured. The right to die. The right to vote, and the right not to. The right to education, and the right to homeschooling. The right to health, and to refuse health insurance. The right to eat, and to stop eating. The right to clean air and water. The right to smoke cigarettes. The right to buy what you need. The right to hoard. The right to work. The right to party. A performance artist named Karen Finley, best known for smearing chocolate over her naked body, claimed a right to National Endowment for the Arts funding. She lost. A conservative advocacy group called Citizens United claimed the right to use its corporate treasury funds to produce an anti–Hillary Clinton movie during her first presidential run. They won. Two Orthodox Jewish merchants in Philadelphia claimed the right to keep their stores open on Sundays. They lost. Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker, claimed the right to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. He won. Two Missouri women, Ndioba Niang and Tameka Stigers, claimed the right to braid hair without completing a 1,500-hour training course and obtaining a cosmetology license. They lost. A group of neo-Nazis claimed the right to unite, armed with racist propaganda and semiautomatic rifles, in a public park in Charlottesville, Virginia. They won.
Burge, Ryan P. (2023-05-15T23:58:59.000). The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going . Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
I was sitting on a stool in front of a blackjack table in a dry lake bed about thirty minutes outside the Las Vegas strip. Looking around I saw nothing but solar panels, high tension electrical lines, and eight members of a television production crew, most of whom I had met when we arrived at the location for the shoot. All because I wrote a book about the increasing number of people with no religious affiliation. This whirlwind of events that brought me to the Nevada desert had started five days earlier when I received an email from Mike Rubens, a correspondent for the television show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. He was interested in the changing religious composition of the United States and had found my name after a quick Google search. We chatted on the phone for about an hour on Monday afternoon, and by Friday I was on a plane to Las Vegas to do a face-to-face interview with Mike in one of the most desolate places I had ever been.
White, James Emery. The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated (pp. 7-10). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
This is a book on the rise of the “nones,” now the fastest-growing religious group in America. These religiously unaffiliated people have always been with us, of course, but their new classification and the vast numbers who have flocked to their nonlabel label in just a few short years have been breathtaking. This book is divided into two parts. The first part is an analysis of the rise of the nones, with a look at the rise itself, the characteristics of the average none, why the nones are on the rise, the broader cultural context of our post-Christian world and its relationship to the rise, and the various beliefs present among the religiously unaffiliated. In short, the first section will give you the cultural analysis needed to understand the who, what, and why of the rise of the nones. I write not simply as a professor of theology and culture who is attempting to investigate a new cultural phenomenon, but also as a pastor; so this discussion is far from academic. For the last two decades I have led a church that targets the religiously unaffiliated in all of its outreach. To date, over 70 percent of our total growth has come from the previously unchurched. I know that is a staggeringly high number, but it has been the dynamic of our church from its inception. So I write not only as one who has been reaching out to the nones for over twenty years, but also as one who has seen firsthand how that outreach is now having to change.