Decodedc

Unless you’ve been trapped in a monastery over the past month, you’ve witnessed the fire and brimstone storms over so-called religious freedom laws in Indiana and Arkansas. Coverage of the push for these religious freedom laws tends to focus on how they have emerged as pushback against gay marriage. They are that, but the backstory is more complicated. These laws deserve some serious decoding and on this week’s podcast, we turn to Robert Jones, the director of the Public Religion Research Institute, for help. Jones is a sociologist and a scholar of public attitudes about religion. At the Public Religion Research Institute, he and his colleagues conduct large polls to track changes in religious attitudes about public issues. Jones traces this conflict of values at the center of ‘religious freedom laws’ back to the late 1970s, when the Christian right organized itself into a real political powerhouse. Groups epitomized by Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority pushed an aggressive agenda that was conservative, ant