Pure Land Buddhism is the latest religion to face banning by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), reports Deng Huizhong in the online newsletter Bitter Winter (June 17). In May in Jilin province, the police interrogated followers of Buddhist Master Jingzong of Hongyuan Monastery, which is located in Xuancheng, Anhui province.
Even if it is not the case across the board, we often hear more of religious decline than vitality today, so that the new book The Demise of Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, $115) seems to fit the mood. But the anthology, edited by Michael Strausberg, Stuart A. Wright, and Carole M. Cusack, actually delivers a more nuanced message than the forecasts of inevitable religious decline and secularization. The varied case studies suggest that just as religious organizations can die, they can also be revived and reinvent themselves, with new related ones being born.
“Cults are in style again. Or at least it’s trendy to call things cults—everything from QAnon to SoulCycle,” writes Jesse Walker in Reason magazine (June). Up until recently, “cults,” or new religious movements (NRM), were thought to have little appeal for Americans, especially as compared to the decades of the 1960s to the 1990s. But J. Gordon Melton, an NRM specialist at Baylor University, says that while we may not be reliving the early 1990s, there has been an intensification of cult and anti-cult rhetoric in American culture.
Is “woke” identity politics squeezing out religious practice at elite American colleges? That is the contention of Anna Keating, a former Catholic chaplain at an unnamed elite college in New England, in a controversial blog article in the Hedgehog Review (May 4). Although only focusing on one college, Keating has subsequently said in a video interview [see below] that what she witnessed is fairly common at other elite institutions.
A new survey of U.S. Jews finds that, while holding their own numerically, they are increasingly split between secularism and Orthodoxy, especially among the youngest adults. The survey by the Pew Research Center is a follow-up to its landmark 2013 study.
The view of ultra-Orthodox Judaism as a conservative force in Israeli society is only half the picture and does not account for the changes taking place among ultra-Orthodox women on reproductive and work decisions, writes Michal Raucher of Rutgers University in the online magazine The Conversation (May 17).
Facing disease and death, many in China have found solace in Buddhist teachings and practices during the pandemic, while the state has been careful to curb large gatherings at religious places, possibly not only for health reasons but also because of their potential for sparking criticism of the state’s handling of the crisis.
The journal Mormon Studies Review devotes most of its current issue (Vol. 8) to politics among Latter-day Saints, both on a global scale and in the American context. The lead article looks at how the rapid global expansion of Mormonism has had some impact on members’ political commitments. Laurie F. Maffy-Kipp writes that the LDS church has lived in the tension of maintaining an American uniformity of teachings, practices, and structure throughout the world (which non-Western converts value) while increasingly adapting to and innovating in different societies.
President Biden’s publicly visible faith and the polarized views of him among American Catholics reflect both a struggle within the faith over its direction and a political struggle over the Catholic vote. In a feature article in Time magazine (April 12/April 19), Brian Bennett notes that while they were formerly a reliably Democratic constituency, growing divisions among Catholics have made them a key target for both major parties, with Republicans seeking to win over Hispanic Catholics in particular as part of their effort to expand their voter base beyond older whites.
Choirs were one of the first casualties of the pandemic, and both their potential for being superspreaders and their loss of status in churches will likely prevent their full restoration in American religious life anytime soon. The New York Times Magazine (April 1) chronicles the story of one chorus in Washington state that was said to be one of the first superspreaders in the early days of Covid, while also describing how religious and secular choral music has been affected by the pandemic.
