It is important to know the difference between a hate crime and a hate incident. A hate crime is a crime against a person, group, or property motivated by the victim’s social group.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The wide empty spaces in pews between parishioners at a Sunday service at Zion Baptist Church in South Carolina’s capital highlight a post-pandemic reality common among many Black Protestant churches nationwide.
During nationwide protests, leaders from many religious traditions spoke out to support the peaceful goals of demonstrators. But in the months since, some segments — particularly within Christianity — have taken notably different approaches.
Joe Biden will be just the second Roman Catholic president in U.S. history, after John F. Kennedy. But he has been viewed cautiously by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over his support for abortion rights.
Donald Trump built close ties to conservative evangelicals even before his 2016 election, but he didn’t establish a formal White House faith operation until more than a year after his inauguration. His Faith and Opportunity Initiative has been led by Florida-based televangelist Paula White, a longtime spiritual adviser to Trump who later campaigned for his reelection.
Under Trump there have been some rollbacks in civil rights protections for LGBTQ people that Biden is vowing to restore and expand. But that may prove complicated if Republican lawmakers and the Supreme Court, now with a solid conservative majority, endorse the arguments of religious conservatives that some of those protections infringe on religious liberty.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, plans a national meeting in June after canceling it in 2020 due to COVID-19. A new SBC president will be elected at the meeting.
The pandemic also forced the United Methodist Church to cancel a potentially momentous national meeting last May that’s now rescheduled for late August. The same topic will dominate the agenda: Whether America’s largest mainline Protestant denomination will split due to differences over inclusion of LGBTQ people.
Muslim American groups have lauded Biden’s plans to end Trump’s curbs on travel from several majority-Muslim nations. And after that, the nation’s diverse Muslim communities have other hopes for his administration.
