Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion最新文献

This study addresses the ongoing debate surrounding the connection between Internet use and religious identity, belief, salience, and practices. Using data from the 2021 wave of the Baylor Religion Survey (N = 1248), we analyze the relationships between different types of Internet activity and religious outcomes. We find that time spent on online gaming is associated with a higher likelihood of holding atheist or agnostic beliefs and with lower levels of both private and public religiosity. In contrast, posting original content to social media is positively associated with personal scripture reading and religious attendance, suggesting that some forms of digital engagement may reinforce religious practices. Other activities, such as general social media use and video chatting, have no significant associations with religious commitment. Our findings suggest that the Internet and religiosity are not always at odds. Both Internet use and religion are multifaceted phenomena whose relationship varies depending on the nature of online engagement and the religious outcome in question.

Relational inequalities theory relies on categorical differences in status to explain why the claims of people of color may be discouraged or denied. However, this mechanism may be insufficient to explain intraracial inequalities in claims-making. In this study, we draw from 17 semistructured interviews with pastors of color in the United Methodist Church to examine how racial salience affects the success of claims to leadership positions, congregational acceptance, and ordination in an antiracist organization. We find that status differences created by racial categories do not always reduce the success of these pastors’ claims. However, when pastors of color express high levels of racial salience, their claims to organizational resources are delegitimated and their presence in the denomination often becomes untenable. This study contributes to understandings of how race interacts with the claims-making process to generate inequalities, intraracial discrimination within organizations, and the limits of formal policies of antiracism.

Christianity has been the inspiration for a variety of responses to economic inequality in the United States and beyond. However, evangelicalism has been associated in the literature with consistent justification of unequal economic circumstances. To investigate how evangelical leaders confront the conflict between inequality and egalitarian passages of the Bible, I conducted a sermon analysis study of New River, a Midwestern suburban megachurch, leveraging their sermon archive of 395 recorded messages spanning 10 years. New River's pastors justified economic inequality in several ways: proclaiming that God did not condemn ownership of vast wealth; minimizing domestic inequality in comparison to global inequality; selectively spiritualizing economic passages of the Bible; and saying that God owns everything and thus the status quo distribution is justified. My findings provide a detailed portrait of the process of evangelical clergy inequality justification and discussion of the social forces that incentivize justifying inequality.

Evolution acceptance is lower among religious than nonreligious individuals. One potential factor involves how Judeo-Christian individuals interpret the Bible. We administered a nationwide survey to investigate the relationship between religiosity, biblical interpretation, and evolution acceptance. We also surveyed undergraduate students in a biology course before and after they underwent a culturally competent module on evolution. We found that religiosity predicted a more literal interpretation of the Bible, and these factors negatively predicted evolution acceptance in both samples. After the module, biblical literalism in the classroom decreased, predicting an increase in evolution acceptance without any decrease in religiosity. While the nationwide relationship between religiosity and evolution acceptance is generally understood, this study more directly reaffirms that biblical literalism is linked to evolution rejection and takes an important step into investigating interventions. Offering alternatives to biblical literalism may help educators increase evolution acceptance without threatening student religiosity.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between Christian persecution beliefs (CPBs) and race. Existing CPB research has asserted that CPBs constitute a socially appropriate tool to signal White advocacy, but much of this research has centered on White respondents. Utilizing an original dataset with oversamples of Black and Latino Christians, we demonstrate that Black Christians are most likely to adopt CPBs (not White Christians); that the relationship between common measures of racial social identity and CPBs does not vary by the racial group; that the same underlying religion variables predict CPBs in similar ways across the racial group; that CPBs predict support for religious exemptions for all racial groups, even when those exemptions protect racial discrimination; and that CPBs are linked to greater perception of discrimination faced by racial others. We conclude that the relationship between CPBs and racial hierarchies is more complicated than previously understood.

A vast literature in the social scientific study of religion demonstrates that religious people are made not born. More specifically, researchers have shown that becoming religious is something that people must learn how to do. Adding to this well-established focus on the socialization of religious subjects, I argue that becoming religious also involves learning and being taught how to pay attention. Drawing from ethnographic findings on religious conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy as well as other cases, I demonstrate how and to what ends religious embodied practices, material artifacts, and narratives cultivate actors’ attentional habits and capacities. Via this education of attention, aspects of actors’ lived experience become open to the possibility of new religious signification and interpretation. At the same time, what would otherwise be abstract religious meanings are able to take on concrete, perceptible forms, making them more phenomenally realistic and compelling. By paying sociological attention to the education of attention, we gain new insight into how, exactly, religious meanings become implicated in peoples’ lived experiences and self-understandings.