Church-state Relationships Around the World

The Pew Forum has released a report on church-state relationships around the world.  The complete report is here.  The report is nicely conceived and has several useful graphics and appendices.

They partition nations into four categories:  (i) those with official state religions, (ii) those with a preferred or favored religion, (iii) those with no official or preferred religion, and (iv) those that are hostile to religion, with the distribution of countries in these categories being 22%, 20%, 53%, and 5%, respectively.

Countries from the Middle East and North Africa are common in category (i), with Islam the most common official state religion in those countries.  European countries are prominent in category (ii), with Christianity the most common favored religion.

This is a nice resource for researchers and students alike.

The Impact of ATMs on Churches

James Hudnet-Beumler, Professor of American Religious History at Vanderbilt University, wrote an article at Real Clear Religion that describes how ATMs impacted church fundraising in the U.S.  Here is an extended quote:

There are two interesting dimensions of this appearance of ATMs and churches to consider. One is the strong affinity between cash and conservative evangelicals. For many evangelicals debt is a form of bondage – a message conveyed through conservative radio financial guru Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University to tens of millions of his followers on AM radio each week in his call-in programs. Ramsey teaches how to “dump debt, budget, build wealth and give like never before!” The building of wealth is a corollary to eschewing debt and it makes Christians free, in Ramsey’s view to be godly. 

The point is, money isn’t just a fungible means to various ends, it is sacred to these believers.

The second dimension for consideration in the appearance of ATMs in the lobbies of evangelical churches is that they signaled something by their very presence: America was in fact becoming a cashless society. The debit card that people carried in their wallet could be just as good as cash anywhere else, but in the sanctuary, cash was the appropriate offering.