Unlicensed production prompts cease-and-desist letter from Broadway musical.  When offered a chance to save his soul at a Texas church this past weekend, Alexander Hamilton did not throw away his shot.During a slightly adapted production of the hit musical Hamilton at The Door Church, a large, diverse congregation, the main character bowed his head, closed his eyes and gave his life to Jesus.“What is a legacy?” the actor playing Hamilton said, according to a recording of the show obtained by Religion News Service. “It’s knowing you repented and accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ that sets men free.”There was just one problem. The church did not have the rights to perform Hamilton or post videos from a performance online.“Hamilton does not grant amateur or professional licenses for any stage productions and did not grant one to The Door Church,” a spokesperson for the musical told RNS in an email.After learning about the unauthorized performance on social media, the producers of Hamilton sent a cease-and-desist letter to the church, instructing them to remove all videos and other images of the August 5 performance. The producers did tell the church it could go ahead with a performance on the following day, provided the performance was not recorded, no images of the event were posted online and no additional productions would be staged.According to a statement from the producers, they planned to discuss “this matter with the parties behind this unauthorized production within the coming days once all facts are properly vetted.”Written by actor and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton reimagines the early days of the United States with a diverse cast and a hip-hop inspired score. The musical debuted in 2015 and became a pop culture juggernaut.A staffer ...Continue reading...
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Unlicensed production prompts cease-and-desist letter from Broadway musical.  When offered a chance to save his soul at a Texas church this past weekend, Alexander Hamilton did not throw away his shot.During a slightly adapted production of the hit musical Hamilton at The Door Church, a large, diverse congregation, the main character bowed his head, closed his eyes and gave his life to Jesus.“What is a legacy?” the actor playing Hamilton said, according to a recording of the show obtained by Religion News Service. “It’s knowing you repented and accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ that sets men free.”There was just one problem. The church did not have the rights to perform Hamilton or post videos from a performance online.“Hamilton does not grant amateur or professional licenses for any stage productions and did not grant one to The Door Church,” a spokesperson for the musical told RNS in an email.After learning about the unauthorized performance on social media, the producers of Hamilton sent a cease-and-desist letter to the church, instructing them to remove all videos and other images of the August 5 performance. The producers did tell the church it could go ahead with a performance on the following day, provided the performance was not recorded, no images of the event were posted online and no additional productions would be staged.According to a statement from the producers, they planned to discuss “this matter with the parties behind this unauthorized production within the coming days once all facts are properly vetted.”Written by actor and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton reimagines the early days of the United States with a diverse cast and a hip-hop inspired score. The musical debuted in 2015 and became a pop culture juggernaut.A staffer ...Continue reading...
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Public School Bureaucrats Want to Choose Your Child's Religion...
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If current rates continue, most religious communities in America will shrink by more than half within three generations. But nondenominational Christianity might buck the trend.  Birth rates in the United States are near record lows, but not for everyone.Under the surface of the fertility decline is a little-noticed fact: Births have declined much more among nonreligious Americans than among the devout.Data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) from 1982 to 2019, along with data from four waves of the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey (DIFS) from 2020 to 2022, point to a widening gap in fertility rates between more religious and less religious Americans.In recent years, the fertility gap by religion has widened to unprecedented levels. But while this difference may comfort some of the faithful who hope higher fertility rates will ultimately yield stable membership in churches and synagogues, these hopes may be in vain. Rates of conversion into unfaith are too high, and fertility rates too low, to yield stable religious populations.Past religious fertilitySince 1982, the NSFG has asked respondents about their religious attendance and their recent fertility history. In recent years, it has operated as a continuous annual survey.As a result, data from over 70,000 women surveyed from 1982 to as recently as 2019 can be used to estimate fertility rates for three broad groups of women: those without any religious affiliation, those with religious affiliation but less than weekly attendance, and those with at least weekly attendance.Total fertility rates are estimated by using a given group’s current birth rates by age to guess how many children a woman would end up having over the course of her life. In practice, however, birth rates shift as women get older, and of course religious identity can change over time, as well, so fertility measures of this kind are unlikely to perfectly ...Continue reading...
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It's not mainline traditions anymore.  Over the last decade Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and every other Protestant family has declined except for those who say they are nondenominational.The 2020 US Religion Census, due out later this year, tallied 4,000 more nondenominational churches than in 2010, and nondenominational church attendance rose by 6.5 million during that time.At the same time, mainline Protestant Christianity is collapsing following five decades of declines. In the mid-1970s, nearly a third of Americans were affiliated with denominations like the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Episcopal Church. But now, just one in ten Americans are part of the mainline tradition.In 2021, nondenominational Protestants in the United States outnumbered mainline Protestants. But what is causing this tremendous shift in the church landscape?In the General Social Survey, Americans are asked about the religion they were raised in and then their current tradition. Mainline traditions have struggled for decades to retain believers born into their churches. In the 1970s, about three-quarters of those raised mainline would still belong to mainline churches as adults. In the 2010s, the share who stayed mainline had declined to just over half (55%).Of the 45 percent of the mainline who leave, some end up in evangelical congregations; however, the evangelical share did not increase between the 1980s and the 2010s. Instead, the bigger story is that the portion of those who leave the mainline and become a religious “none”—claiming no faith or no tradition in particular—has tripled since the 1970s, from 6 percent to nearly 20 percent in the most recent data. Thus, there’s not a lot of evidence that ...Continue reading...
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