Patricia Miller
Religion Dispatches
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Past articles by Patricia:
Three Takeaways from the Contraceptive Mandate Religious Liberty Debacle
There were two major winners in Trump’s long-expected executive order to gut ObamaCare’s contraceptive mandate: the Catholic bishops, who ginned up this particular culture-war debacle in the first place, and the evangelical right, which was happy to take up the fight once they realized it meant lim → Read More
Steve Bannon and the Conservative “Cafeteria Catholics”
The phrase “cafeteria Catholic” first gained currency in the mid-1980s to describe—mostly disparagingly—progressive Catholics who pick and chose from church doctrine, following the precepts they like on poverty and peace while ignoring those they didn’t like on sex—particularly regarding birth contr → Read More
Catholic Nuns Show Bishops How it’s Done on ObamaCare
In the end, it would be a fitting sort of justice if it were the Catholic nuns who saved the Affordable Care Act. After all, it was only through the efforts of Sister Nancy Keehan of the Catholic Health Association and Sister Simone Campbell of the social justice lobby NETWORK that the ACA passed in → Read More
Vatican Fires Shot at US Religious Right, Calls Out “Religious Liberty” Industry and “Evangelical-Catholic Alliance”
An article being described as “explosive,” written by two allies of Pope Francis in a Vatican-reviewed publication, is taking on the “spurious alliance between politics and religious fundamentalism” in the United States. Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa call out the dominionist groups “compos → Read More
GOP isn’t Pro-Life After All
The GOP’s morally indefensible position on maternity care shows the hollowness of the party’s claim to be “pro-life.” It also shows a way forward on abortion for Democrats. Texas Rep. Peter Olson this week became the latest Republican to assert that it was perfectly fine for the party’s overhaul → Read More
GOP “Stealthcare” Bill Reveals Catholic Bishops’ Priorities
It’s unlikely that many of the Catholic bishops who voted last week to make permanent their (formerly) Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty saw the irony when several of their fellow prelates sharply criticized the GOP health care bill making its secretive way through the Senate as potentially deva → Read More
Pence’s Prayer Breakfast Appearance Underscores Fractured American Catholicism
The annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is hardly a bipartisan or nonpolitical event. It was founded in 2004 as part of an effort to cement ties between conservative Catholics, the Catholic hierarchy, and the GOP. Among those associated with it are noted right-wing luminaries like Leonard Leo → Read More
Five Signs Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” Dystopia May Be Nigh
Pending dystopia, it appears, is in the eye of the beholder. Here at RD, Diane Winston notes that Vice President Mike Pence makes a chilling stand-in for the “Commander” in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, a representative of what “quiet, white, Christian male authority looks like in today’s world → Read More
Irony Really is Dead: GOP Plans to Send Adulterous Third Wife of Serial Philanderer as Ambassador to Vatican
The Republican Party has maintained a death-grip on protestations of moral authority on matters of sexuality for most of my adult voting life. Since the Reagan administration we have seen a party that has consistently hoodwinked voters with its assurances that the morally upright Party of God would → Read More
“Pro-Life” Has Officially Lost its Meaning
For anyone whose political memory dates back more than a decade or two, the term “pro-life” was pretty clear: it was understood as the antithesis of “pro-choice” or supportive of the legal right to abortion. But increasingly, what constitutes “pro-life” seems to be as contested as the question of → Read More
Archbishop Drops the Girl Scouts Amid Alarmist Rhetoric and Fake Accusations
Robert Jones of PRRI has an insightful column in the New York Times about the unraveling of a unified American identity, which he defines as a “set of core political beliefs enshrined in founding ‘sacred texts,’ like the Declaration of Independence.” According to Jones: …recent survey data provi → Read More
The Problem with Moral Nuance on Abortion for Democrats
The New York Times received numerous responses to an opinion piece it recently published—from a man—about how the Democratic Party should tone it down on abortion to win back Catholic voters. So, being the Times, and obviously committed to diversity and airing opinions from a range of voices, it dec → Read More
Hillary Clinton Won the Catholic Vote After All, So Dems Should Stay Pro-Choice, Right?
A more accurate analysis of the 2016 presidential election than the preliminary exit polls shows that Hillary Clinton won the Catholic vote, so now I’m waiting for the spate of stories about how the Democratic Party should stop worrying about courting religious voters and hold strongly to its pro-ch → Read More
How the Politics of the 1890s Explain the GOP’s Health Care Woes
Amid news that the GOP is trying once again to restart negotiations over their failed ObamaCare “repeal and replace” measure, it’s worth noting that the party’s problems with health care go beyond schisms within the party and Trump’s incompetence. They go to the heart of how seemingly dry public pol → Read More
Old White Dudes Tell the Democrats to Forget about Abortion
Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Groome, a professor of theology at Boston College, has a super original, never-before articulated idea about how the Democrats can “reclaim their Catholic base.” The Democrats need to “stop being the party of abortion” to win back the Catholic voters that abando → Read More
Is the Rise of “Nones” Actually the Decline of Catholics?
The Public Religion Research Institute is out with another fascinating report on one of the most significant religious trends of our time: the dramatic rise in disaffiliation, or, as some call them, the “nones.” PPRI found that a fully a quarter of all Americans, and a whopping 39% of young adult → Read More
Women Are Leaving Church, And the Reason Seems Clear
A new Pew Research Center analysis of General Social Survey data confirms a long-simmering trend in U.S. religious observance: While attendance at religious services has declined for all Americans, it has declined more among women then men. In the early 1970s, 36 percent of women and 26 percent o → Read More
Trump Was Right About Outlawing Abortion: It Would Punish Women
Is Donald Trump really pro-life or is he just faking it, stoking his anti-abortion bona fides to appeal to the socially and religiously conservative base of the Republican Party? According to leading Catholic intellectual Robert P. George, Trump’s affirmative answer to Chris Matthew’s question about → Read More
Are the Girls Scouts Evil? And What About Thin Mints?
In the latest example of a high-ranking Catholic prelate who hasn’t gotten the memo from Pope Francis that the culture wars are over, St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson is urging parishes in his diocese to cut ties with the Girl Scouts because the organization is “increasingly incompatible with → Read More
Pope Calls Trump “Not Christian”…But What’s So Different About Trump?
Is Bernie the only viable Christian? → Read More