Big-data Missionary Work

On 26 December 2021, the NY Times published an article titled "Churches Target New Members, With Help From Big Data."  As a UCI student you can get free access to the NY Times, but you will probably need to use the UCI VPN if accessing it from home.

The gist of the article is that a small company, Gloo, analyzes online data to identify individuals who might be most likely to respond positively to churches' missionary outreach.  And just what does the analysis identify as indicators of possible positive responsiveness to outreach?  People dealing with physical and mental-health challenges, for starters, although the company no longer uses mental-health data.  But tens of thousands of churches are using Gloo's services, so a large number of religious leaders evidently see this use of big data as a promising way to court new members.

Companies in many industries use online data in their advertising efforts, so this is not really a new idea in and of itself.  Perhaps this is one of the earliest applications to evangelizing, but I cannot really say for sure.  I can say that this is one of many examples of how churches will use a variety of methods that perceive to be useful to pursue their missions, even when those methods are copied from secular businesses.  Indeed, churches have historically been some of the earliest adopters of new technologies (think of the printing press!).

Twenty-nine Percent of Americans are Now Religiously Unaffiliated

A Pew Research Center report issued on December 14 shows that 29% of Americans are now religiously unaffiliated.  This is the largest percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans in the country's history and continues a trend that has be steady for over a decade.  The results are discussed here, and a complete pdf of the report is here.

Religion Clause's Top 10 Church-state Developments of 2021

 See this Top-10 List at Religion Clause.  Covid and abortion take the top spots.

Pew Study Finds Global Hostilities Decline but Religious Restrictions Remain High

This is the finding reported in the latest Pew Research Center report on religious freedom.  See the main web page here and the complete report pdf here.

Is Cockfighting a Religiously Protected Activity?

Not according to a Louisiana federal district court.  The pastor of the Holy Fight Ministries argued that this activity was an essential part of their religious faith and practice, and so a ban on cockfighting violated its religious freedom.  The court ruled that the law applies generally to protect animals, so it is not a violation of religious freedom.

The Economics of the Taliban

Tony Gill, a political scientist at the University of Washington and long-time promoter and practitioner of the economic approach to religion, recently published this article in the Wall Street Journal (the article is gated).  In it he explains how economics can be used to understand the surprising success of the Taliban.  This is timely piece about a difficult to understand topic.

The Ecclesiastical Abstention Doctrine

 According to this article in the Harvard Civil Liberties Law Review here:

The ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, also known as the church autonomy doctrine, is a longstanding common law doctrine that guides courts when a case would require the court to decide a religious question. In its most distilled form, the doctrine counsels that if a case would require a civil court to decide a matter of religious doctrine, the court should either refuse to adjudicate[1] or defer to the relevant religious hierarchy. Watson v. Jones, an 1871 Supreme Court case is often cited as the basis for the doctrine in the United States, and grounds the doctrine in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

This doctrine was just applied in a legal case in Michigan where the pastor officiating at a funeral made public that the deceased person had committed suicide.  The nature of the death was not public at the time, and the parents claimed that the pastor's sermon caused emotional distress and an invasion of privacy.  A Michigan state appellate court dismissed the case by claiming that this is a religious matter and not something for the court.

The boundary between "religious" and "not religious" is continually negotiated, and the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine is a key idea in that negotiation that determines the rules that govern different aspects of religious life.

USCIRF 2021 Annual Report

The USCIRF just released its 2021 Annual Report.  The page with all annual reports is here.  You can download the pdf of the 2021 Annual Report here.

The following countries were recommended to be designated as Countries of Particular Concern:  Burma, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam.  This list is exactly the same as last year's list.