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 Tibetans at a protest in Taipei in 2011 display portraits of people who killed themselves by self-immolation.
January 2nd, 2013
07:00 AM ET
My Take: Blood on Chinese hands in Tibetan self-immolations
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN) -China Daily, an English-language newspaper and a mouthpiece of the Chinese government, last week published an article called “Western Voices Question Tibetan Self-Immolation Acts.” The first of the voices quoted was mine—for a Belief Blog piece I wrote last summer criticizing the Dalai Lama for averting his gaze from the spate of self-immolations protesting Chinese rule in Tibet. "If the Dalai Lama were to speak out unequivocally against these deaths, they would surely stop. So in a very real sense, their blood is on his hands," I wrote in a passage quoted in the Chinese Daily piece. In my post, I wrote of an “epidemic of self-immolations,” noting that from mid-March to mid-July 2011 more than 40 Tibetans had set themselves on fire to protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Since then, the pace of these protests has accelerated. According to the International Campaign for Tibet, 94 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since March 2011, and the pace in November was nearly one a day.  Ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee appeared to blame the Newtown massacre at least partly on the secularization of schools.
December 18th, 2012
12:58 PM ET
My Take: Six things I don't want to hear after the Sandy Hook massacre
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN) - There are a lot of things I am sick of hearing after massacres such as the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Here are six of them: 1. “It was God’s will.” There may or may not be a God, but if there is, I sure hope he (or she or it) does not go around raising up killers, plying them with semiautomatic weapons, goading them to target practice, encouraging them to plot mass killings and cheering them on as they shoot multiple bullets into screaming 6- and 7-year-old children. Much better to say there is no God or, as Abraham Lincoln did, “The Almighty has his own purposes,” than to flatter ourselves with knowing what those purposes are.
December 17th, 2012
01:16 PM ET
My Take: Obama's Newtown remarks show presidents as pastors in chief
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN Presidents wear a lot of hats. They serve as commanders in chief. They nominate Supreme Court justices. They veto congressional legislation. Increasingly, they are also coming to serve as our pastors in chief. In his remarks Sunday night at an interfaith service at in Newtown, Connecticut, President Barack Obama vowed to use “whatever power” he has to prevent more mass shootings, and he all but promised to push for stricter gun control laws in the next U.S. Congress. But policy was not top of mind yesterday for either the president or a grieving nation.  An Indian artist gives the final touches to a statue of Hindu goddess Kali ahead of the Diwali festival, the Festival of Lights, in Allahabad on November 10, 2012.
November 22nd, 2012
06:35 AM ET
My Take: A multireligious Thanksgiving
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN) - A few years ago, I came across a high school textbook on U.S. history that stumbled badly when it tried to describe the first Thanksgiving. Because of a serious misunderstanding of the First Amendment, the authors thought they couldn’t even refer to God in their textbook. So they ended up telling their readers that the Pilgrims were giving thanks to the Indians. (Huh?) Personally, I think Thanksgiving is (and was) about giving thanks to God, but I am too eclectic nowadays to confine my giving of thanks to the capricious Calvinist God of the Pilgrims. So in the spirit of Pascal, who placed a wager on the Christian god, I'm putting a marker down, too. But why confine your wager to one divinity? Here is my own Thanksgiving litany to the gods. 
November 16th, 2012
12:01 PM ET
My Take: 113th Congress looks like old America
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN) - The 2012 election has been widely hailed as a diversity moment — a coming out party for an American electorate no longer dominated by white men. And it was a triumph as well for religious diversity, thanks especially to Hawaii, which is sending the first Hindu to the House and the first Buddhist to the Senate. But is this religious change more symbolic than real? In “Faith on the Hill,” a study on religion in the 113th Congress released Friday by the Pew Forum, the story seems to be static rather than change. 
November 9th, 2012
05:00 AM ET
My Take: 7 Ways religious diversity played in the election
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN “It’s demography, stupid!” is the new mantra for analyzing the 2012 election, in which African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos cast their votes in overwhelming numbers for President Obama. But religious diversity was another key theme. How so? Let me count the ways.  The author says Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's speeches early Wednesday testify to an American rite.
November 7th, 2012
01:26 PM ET
My Take: Elections are the rite of our American republic
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN Some believe that the United States is held together by a common creed. What marries our “pluribus” to our “unum,” they argue, is a common commitment to a shared "American idea." I am not so sure. Americans may agree on certain values such as “liberty” and “equality” but we disagree fiercely about what these keywords mean and how to weigh one against the other. What holds us together are rituals.  How many times do hot-button issues come up in the Bible?
November 5th, 2012
09:43 AM ET
My Take: Counting the Bible's words doesn't yield a Republican Jesus
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN) - Over the last few days I have fielded hundreds of angry e-mails from pro-Mitt Romney evangelicals about a recent Belief Blog post in which I took Billy Graham and other white evangelicals to task for turning Jesus into a water boy for the Republican Party. A disturbing number of these complaints about my alleged "evangelical bashing" have been hateful, ill-informed and explicitly racist. But the more intelligent responses have taken two tacks. First, readers have told me that they are voting for Romney not because Mormonism is proper Christianity but because Romney is the lesser of two evils. Some in this camp, convinced (wrongly) that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, say they would rather vote for a Mormon than a Muslim.  Nate Silver's blog at The New York Times has consistently predicted President Barack Obama will likely be re-elected.
November 2nd, 2012
12:01 PM ET
My Take: I've got my money on the Church of Nate Silver
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN) - Nearly three centuries ago, in Colonial New England in the midst of a religious revival now remembered as the Great Awakening, settled ministers in local congregations complained bitterly about itinerant revivalists sweeping into town and whipping their parishioners into a frenzy. They had reason to be worried. 
November 1st, 2012
01:43 PM ET
My Take: Billy Graham and Ralph Reed are putting politics before God
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN)–Why are evangelicals like Billy Graham and Ralph Reed stumping for Mitt Romney? And why are roughly three-quarters of white evangelicals inclined to vote for him? Because politics matters more to them than religion. Last year, in a talk at a conference on Mormonism and Islam at Utah Valley University, I asked my Mormon listeners why they had not rushed to the defense of Muslims in controversies such as the one that raged over the Park51 project near ground zero. After all, they have been the victims of religious prejudice. Their founder, Joseph Smith, was killed by a mob of vigilantes. |
  About this blog
The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke with contributions from Eric Marrapodi and CNN's worldwide news gathering team.  |
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Editor's note: Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of "