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A pattern over time

Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Iza Hussin and Paul Seabright about recent trends in world religions, the interplay between politics and religion, and the economics of religion.
The post What is the future of religion? appeared first on Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

For decades, social scientific study of religion has been dominated by the secularisation question: is religion growing or declining? But this has distracted us from asking how religion itself is changing and, in turn, changing understandings of identity, political participation and citizenship for millions of people around the world. Ahead of our upcoming #LSEFestival panel … Continued

With a date set for the UK’s next General Election, Paul Bickley asks whether the 'religious vote' matters. This is the fourth General Election in nine years, though at least this Parliament has nearly lasted its full duration (albeit with three Prime Ministers). Reminds me of good old Brenda from Bristol: "You're joking. Not another … Continued

Walter Olson


The result of today's Supreme Court opinion in Groff v. DeJoy is to load private, not just public, employers with new practical burdens in the name of accommodating employees' religious beliefs. The Court does so by nimbly reinterpreting, as opposed to overturning, the longstanding standard set forth in TWA v. Hardison (1977), which interpreted Title VII as requiring accommodation of this sort by employers only when the costs were "de minimis." Whatever the standard appropriate for government workplaces, there are high stakes in imposing a standard on private workplaces. Today's decision leaves private employment relations in America less free.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in a concurrence joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Congress has consistently passed up the opportunity to adopt a standard more burdensome to employers than Hardison, even though it has not hesitated to revisit and correct many other high court decisions on Title VII workplace discrimination that it saw as mistaken. We may hope that the Court's newly announced standard, which shifts focus from the question of whether burdens are "de minimis" to that of whether they are "substantial," will in practice not amount to a drastic change.
Sotomayor makes a further point worth noting in her concurrence. It has been known to happen that a private employer's compelled acceptance of religious accommodation requests will adversely affect the interests of co‐​workers. While Title VII will not allow these interests to enter into the balance when based on mere animus or prejudice toward a religion, it is legitimate for an employer to weigh other sorts of harm to co‐​workers when they work to impair the management of the workplace. If a workplace divided by differential treatment based on religion or any other identity is a less efficient and unified workplace, it will often be legitimate for employers to say no to that differential treatment.

Within international law there are significant frameworks contributing to the promotion of religious tolerance and the peaceful coexistence of diverse religions. But challenges emerge in the implementation of them. In this blog, Nazanin Baradaran explains those challenges and the subsequent opportunities should we successfully overcome them. . In the tapestry of the 21st century, the … Continued

It feels like every year we have more reasons than ever to bring religion into the social sciences. I've now been editing LSE RGS for the whole of this Gregorian, Julian, and lunar year, and I've enjoyed every second. At the end of each year we look back on the different trends and discourses that … Continued

The recently published Bloom Report is a landmark review into faith engagement and strongly encourages the government to recognise faith groups as a force for good. But what does “good” religion mean? Here, Dr David Robertson looks at how the report measures this. In October 2019, the then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed an Independent Faith … Continued

For our Covenantal Pluralism series, Alberto Cavallarin applies Paul Feyerabend’s philosophical reasoning to the debates around freedom of religion. On a rainy Saturday, a year or so ago, I found myself in an antique bookstore in the beautiful Dutch city of Utrecht. There, hidden amongst dusty encyclopaedias and old French books, I stumbled upon a … Continued

Justin Burnworth (University of Massachusetts Amherst) has posted The Ministerial Exception Paradox (Quinnipiac Law Review [FORTHCOMING]) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The "ministerial exception" spent the last few decades knocking at the Supreme Court's door with no answer. The...

Marc Andreessen's recent "tech optimist manifesto" is one of the most significant statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I've written elsewhere, it's actually less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Religion of Progress. The words "we believe" appear no less than 113 times in the text, not counting synonyms. The core precept […]

Daniel Cox, Director and Founder of the Survey Center on American Life, interviewed me about the status of religion in the U.S. (though he is probably more expert than I!) for his excellent substack series, American Storylines, here. Dan gave me a chance to reflect on religious trends, how we study those trends, and how […]

How do students experience religious difference, and what can universities do to build positive encounters between people of different religions and worldviews? In this article, researchers at Coventry University’s Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations share some insights from their recent report. This week, we published the report Building Student Relationships across Religion and … Continued

With complex religious imaginations playing an ever increasing role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, peacebuilding requires a consideration of the spiritual realm as well as the political. Here, Kristian Noll argues for more deliberate personal engagement with diverse religious narratives whether or not one agrees with them. The deeply concerning rise of antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since … Continued

The Southern Baptist Convention's annual gathering in New Orleans just expelled or "disfellowshipped" member churches that allowed women to hold pastoral positions. Among the expelled was the amazingly successful Saddleback Church of Southern California, founded by superstar-Pastor Rick Warren, a church that had grown from a six-person Bible study group in 1980 to 15 campuses […]