Here is your Religion News Roundup excerpt for today.

By Daniel Burke
c. Religion News Service 2012
Reprinted with permission

Americans' confidence in organized religion is at an all-time low, according to a new Gallup poll.

Currently, 56% of Protestants express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church/organized religion, compared with 46% of Catholics, according to Gallup.

That's still a whole lot better than confidence in, ahem, newspapers (25 percent) and TV news (21 percent). But hey, we're killing big banks and Congress.

Ross Douthat rehashed his "Nation of Heretics" argument to bash the Episcopal Church and liberal Christianity in general. It's worth noting that membership in less liberal denominations, such as Douthat's own Catholic church and the Southern Baptist Convention, has also declined in recent decades.

Reuters says the PC(USA) "is in the grips of a crisis over gay marriage." Interesting nugget: the church trials of a minister accused of performing same-sex marriages cost $25,000.

Read the rest of this post here.