Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion最新文献

Research about the experiences of young black members of the LGBTQIA community often centers HIV-related themes. Fewer studies consider more emotive aspects of their lives such as their attitudes and behavior around religion and/or spirituality. This study is a response to this dynamic. Informed by the Structure versus Agency discourse, this qualitative analysis examines dimensions of the religious and spiritual lives of 76 young black members of the LGBTQIA community aged 18–30 years old. Given the continued influence of the Black Church in the black community as well as concerns about the relevance of religion in general, findings here may illumine how a cadre of young black people understand and respond to religion today. Results illustrate the tendency to espouse spirituality over religion; syncretism; and, continued use of Christian practices such as prayer, while compartmentalizing and secularizing this faith tradition. This study introduces the concept of the “spiritual sidepiece” as an exemplar that sheds light on how some young black sexual minorities today are re-imagining religion, Christianity, the Black Church, and spirituality in their lives.

Against the background of the assumed polymorphous character of evangelicalism as a trans-denominational movement, this article aims to construct a typology of Dutch evangelicals and, subsequently, to test whether this religious typology also manifests sociodemographic differences. Two research questions are addressed: Which types can be distinguished among contemporary Dutch evangelicals on the basis of their core religious convictions and religious orientations? and To what extent do these types also display sociodemographic differences? Analyzing survey data on more than 1100 Dutch evangelicals using latent class analysis reveals five types of evangelicals: Proclaiming Orthodox, Engaged Orthodox, Spiritual Orthodox, Seeking Orthodox, and Questing Liberals. These five types basically seem to represent an orthodox-liberal continuum and mainly differ in terms of gender, age, income, education, and marital status.

The research literature on collective religious violence with regard to new or nontraditional religious movements (NRMs) has revealed an engaging set of arguments about the relative importance of internal versus external factors. While internal or group-bounded factors are certainly significant, external factors and conditions are sometimes overlooked or at least not fully appreciated. This article synthesizes several models of collective religious violence highlighting external factors into a single “cultural opposition” model to reexamine the Rajneesh movement case in Oregon in the 1980s. I contend that key external incidents, particularly the bombing of the Rajneesh hotel by outsiders, serve as pivotal turning point for the dramatic advent of an armed encampment. The study then offers evidence to support the proposition that exogenous conditions of intense cultural opposition can transform the nonviolent beliefs and practices of a peaceful religious community into the endogenous conditions that Robbins identifies as “necessary” to heighten the likelihood of collective religious violence.

This study investigates the remnants and dynamics of religious beliefs and practices among religiously unaffiliated youth in Europe, comparing them with the older unaffiliated as well as with the religiously affiliated. Using EVS 2017–2021 data to test contrasting hypotheses of diffused religion and cohort replacement, the study draws three main conclusions. First, youth believe more on average and older age groups believe less when it comes to eschatological beliefs among both the unaffiliated and the affiliated. Second, youth practice less and older age groups practice more on average among both the unaffiliated and the affiliated. Third, the gaps in levels of religious beliefs and practices remain between the religiously unaffiliated and the religiously affiliated among younger populations, but this gap is now narrower for religious practices. Results confirm both hypotheses (diffused religion and cohort replacement) depending on the dimensions of religiosity at study.

Providing shelters and other aid for refugees is one of the core Christian principles, but there exists a great divide in Protestant churches’ response to the refugee crisis. This study examines what contributes to the divide, focusing on how various congregational characteristics relate to churches’ interests and involvement in refugee resettlement. The analysis of the 2018–2019 National Congregations Study data reveals that political conservatism within a church is linked to the disinterest in refugee resettlement. The results also show that churches with more members who have a bachelor's degree and churches participating in international humanitarian works are more likely to have discussions on refugee resettlement. In terms of direct involvement in helping refugees, congregational members’ migration experiences seem to make a significant difference.

This article demonstrates that people animated by Christianity draw on faith to help people in poverty through building relationships. Contrasting with the literature that presents relationships as a means to change people, including through evangelizing, we find that relationships are conceived as an end in and of themselves. Drawing on an Australian ethnographic study with pastors and volunteers in church-based community centers and people living in poverty, we illustrate how the realities of poverty subvert relationships. People in poverty prioritize their material needs. The challenges developing relationships notwithstanding, the article argues that elements of relationships found in this research represent an opportunity to advance knowledge of what it means to draw on faith to help people in poverty. Relationships can be a vehicle to change oppressive systems, but the capacity to do so must be assessed in the contexts of religion's position in dominant political and power structures.

Measures to limit COVID-19's spread were vital at the pandemic's onset. While some churches complied with public health mandates, others resisted them. Some religious ceremonies depend on third parties independent of the church. Funerals may require mortuary services overseen by funeral directors. Religious groups that may otherwise resist public health directives may comply when they depend on a third party. Extending street-level bureaucracy theory, we examine the role of service providers who function as street-level bureaucrats in shaping how religious groups respond to public policy mandates. Using the case of funeral rites in Old Order Amish churches, we content-analyzed Old Order Amish obituaries from an Amish correspondence newspaper and interviewed funeral directors that serve the Amish. We found that the content of obituaries changed to incorporate COVID-19 mitigation strategies due to requirements from some funeral homes. We also found that funeral directors used discretion to interpret health mandates.

This study explores potential heterogeneity in the relationship between religion and politics in the United States. Rather than assume all religion is conservatizing, it conducts a broad preliminary search for liberalizing religion across three cross-sectional national datasets. While the study finds the most liberal politics among adherents of particular “liberal” religious groups rather than among the unaffiliated, it largely fails to find forms of religion where exposure is associated with liberal politics. In fact, exposure to even “liberal” religion is generally associated with more conservative politics. American religion's political asymmetry has important societal implications in a highly religious nation where even liberal religion appears to conservatize the public.

There is a burgeoning literature that investigates the effects of religion on relationship dissolution. This study is distinguished from prior scholarship in three broad areas: The investigation estimates the effect of religion on relationship stability using multiple measures of religious affiliation and religious observance; it is based on information of the respondent and their partner for both cohabiting and marital relationships; and it is performed using multiple waves of a large-scale nationally representative panel data set, the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. It addresses key limitations, such as: the use of a single measure of religion, a tendency to only use married individual data, and an overreliance on cross-sectional data. The results indicate that intrafaith couples tend to have a higher degree of relationship stability than other couple types; although, once other factors are controlled for, this effect is no longer statistically significant. We also find religiosity, in particular, religious attendance has a large positive effect on stability in intrafaith couples but can lower stability in interfaith and mixed couples.

While religiosity has generally been found to be associated with health, sexual minority individuals are a theoretically unique population in the literature. Because of sample size issues, the extent to which sexual minority individuals differ from nonsexual minority individuals in the health and religion relationship has been difficult to comprehensively test; additionally, the theoretically germane but often hypothesized distinction between affirming and nonaffirming religions has remained largely untested. This study draws on the Cooperative Election Study, a nationally representative survey with a relatively large sexual minority sample (∼6600), and finds that (1) sexual minority individuals are less likely to affiliate with a religion; (2) sexual minority individuals report poorer health; (3) sexual minority individuals do enjoy an overall health benefit from religiosity, but this benefit is attenuated (compared to nonsexual minority individuals) in the case of affiliation; and (4) there is some ambiguous evidence for an affirming religiosity effect.