Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion最新文献

If tattoos have a religious function, tattooists play a role in crafting a spiritual object. Hence, we explore the religious function of the tattooist and how tattooists deal with religion in their work. We used a “Lived Religion” approach that focuses on religious practices instead of religious organizations, because neither tattooists nor tattoo parlors are religiously legitimized figures or institutions. We collected data from tattooists from five different countries, with 23 semistructured interviews, 110 photos, and 4 video clips. After doing a content analysis of the interviews, and a denotative analysis of the photos and videos, we found that tattooists are aware of the religious overtones of their work. They understand themselves as figures that perform spiritual tasks. We also verified that tattoo parlors are spaces of religious negotiation, where tattooists, tattooed, and other actors exercise power. Finally, we established that a religious tattoo is the result of the negotiation among the actors involved, and that tattooists play a role as religious authorities.

How do racial attitudes affect the relationship between religion and support for capital punishment? Past research has clearly established important links between religion, racial attitudes, and capital punishment. Yet, it remains unclear how racial attitudes affect this relationship. We examine this question using a large sample of respondents from the General Social Survey from 1994 to 2018. We find evidence of a strong moderating effect where the relationship between religion and support for capital punishment varies considerably contingent on racial resentment. At high levels of racial resentment, support for capital punishment is uniformly high across all religious traditions while there are large disparities at low levels of racial resentment. Thus, strongly held, prejudicial racial attitudes overshadow the association between religion and support for capital punishment. Future research should more seriously consider the racial dynamics embedded religion and punishment.

Few studies have explored religious professionals’ interactions with scientific authority in work settings. Fewer still examine professionals outside Western contexts. We analyze the science-religion interface as it exists in Shaolin Temple—an ancient Chan Buddhist temple with a worldwide reputation for Shaolin Kungfu. Drawing on a near-exhaustive survey within Shaolin monastery and 23 interviews with Shaolin monks, we discern and differentiate two modes of nonconflict operating in monks’ psychic lives. One group understands Buddhism and science as comprising independent realms—nonconflictual by virtue of their noninteractivity. Another views science and religion as being interpenetrative and nonconflictual in the sense of being mutually constitutive. These differing orientations, which reflect established categories of “transcendentalist” versus “immanentist” religion, further correlate with different facets of religiosity: Monks with high religious knowledge tend to view Buddhism and science as independent, while monks with high levels of piety tend to see them as collaborative or mutually constitutive.

RELTRAD is a major religious taxonomy used by a large number of researchers. Although criticisms have been raised about its utility, improving the algorithm to capture contemporary religious dynamics is important given its widespread use. The present RELTRAD taxonomy classifies more religiously active nondenominational respondents as Conservative Protestants and codes the remainder as missing data. A growing number of Americans indicate they are either nondenominational or only Christian or Protestant, which means using RELTRAD in its existing form codes a nonrandom and increasingly large number of respondents with a missing value for religious affiliation (growing from 2 percent to 5 percent of the US General Social Survey (GSS) sample between 2000 and 2018). Using a machine learning algorithm to predict the likely religious tradition of nondenominational respondents, we demonstrate the shortcomings of this approach and introduce a new coding scheme, RELTRAD2, which classifies nondenominational respondents who report a Black racial identity as Black Protestant, non-Black respondents who never attend religious services as Mainline Protestant, and the remainder as Conservative Protestant. Code to derive RELTRAD2 from the GSS is provided.

Why do some Christian foreign mission groups dispatch missionaries to some culturally and politically risky states where they face personal risks and political entanglements? Using world polity theory, I argue that local religious groups’ motivations are driven by their involvement in international religious networks, which mobilize missionaries to go to places such as Muslim countries. Based on 30 semistructured interviews with South Korean missionaries and leaders of churches and mission organizations, I illuminate that globally shared discourse of unreached people encouraged missionaries to volunteer to go to high-risk states. I also suggest that Korean religious actors did not passively accept the influence of the international discourse but also reconstructed the discourse. The study also highlights that a missionary's dual identity as a religious actor and another profession to get a visa in high-risk countries is bound up with the state's surveillance and potential persecution.

This study examines how interpersonal conflict at work is associated with worker well-being in Singapore. More importantly, it assesses how this association is contingent upon belief in angelic intervention and belief in supernatural evil. Using data from the 2021 Work, Religion, and Health Survey (N  =  508), the analyses show that interpersonal conflict at work is positively associated with anxiety and job burnout. In addition, belief in angelic intervention and belief in supernatural evil moderate the association. Specifically, the positive association between interpersonal conflict at work and anxiety is weaker for those who report the belief in angelic intervention. Similarly, higher levels of belief in supernatural evil reduce the positive association of interpersonal conflict at work with anxiety and job burnout. These findings indicate that belief in supernatural agents acts as a key personal resource in the workplace, buffering against the harmful effects of interpersonal conflict at work on worker well-being.

Research documents that nearly all parents of school-aged children in the general U.S. population strongly consider academic quality when choosing a school for their children. Many of these parents also prefer a religious setting for their children's education. However, little is known about how these school characteristics affect the stated preferences of parents of children in private faith-based schools. We conducted a conjoint experiment in which we presented 2474 parents in the private Christian school sector with three sets of three hypothetical schools, randomly varying each school's tuition level and the quality of academics, spiritual formation, and extracurricular opportunities. We found that lower quality spiritual formation and academic offerings substantially reduce the likelihood a school will be selected by about 30 percentage points. The quality of extracurricular opportunities and tuition levels influence the likelihood a school will be selected to a lesser degree—about 11 percentage points.

Secularization theory has been challenged by research showing religious persistence and upswing in contexts across the world. In Europe, particularly in highly secular and historically religiously homogeneous Nordic settings, there has been little research, and representative data for minority groups are rare. We offer a pioneering study using national register data to study religious changes over the past five decades in Finland, where the two native ethnolinguistic groups—Finnish and Swedish speakers—offer a unique study context. We use register data with yearly information on every individual's religious affiliation to compare the two groups, exploring the mechanisms behind any differentials. Swedish speakers are found to be consistently more affiliated with the National Lutheran Church than Finnish speakers. This finding contradicts the expectation of modernization theory because the Swedish-speaking population is, in some aspects, socioeconomically advantaged in Finnish society. The higher affiliation level of Swedish speakers can be partly explained by lower levels of internal migration, which is possibly driven by stronger community attachment. Our results suggest that community cohesion may help preserve the religious tradition of a minority group, even in the absence of socioeconomic disadvantages or threats from the majority.