Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion最新文献

Some versions of secularization theory propose that existential security, education, and urbanicity exert directly measurable negative effects on religiosity cross-culturally. However, few studies have tested this using longitudinal data. Nor have researchers adequately examined how much the relationship between these modern social conditions (MSCs) and religiosity varies society-to-society. This study addresses these limitations in a series of new analyses, using 1989–2020 World/European Values Survey data from approximately 100 countries. Results suggest that the three MSCs do not exert independent, negative effects on religiosity in general, at least not in the short or medium term. Indeed, national-average increases in these MSCs were not found to predict decreased religiosity. And, interestingly and unexpectedly, the direction of individual-level relationships between each MSC and religiosity varied greatly between countries and world regions. These findings suggest scholars should probably look elsewhere to explain why average religiosity has decreased in some world locations over recent decades.

Why do people make supernatural attributions (SA) for events? This article focused on five possible predictors: stressfulness, unusual events, religiousness, seeing a supernatural explanation as meaningful, and seeing supernatural entities as powerful. We also predicted that people would be more likely to adopt supernatural explanations seen as highly accessible, motivating, and plausible. We focused primarily on SA in general and secondarily on specific entities. We tested preregistered hypotheses using survey data in two samples of undergraduates: one reporting life-changing events (N = 594) and another reporting on an event with a supernatural air, or supernaturally perceived events (N = 475). Results supported all proposed predictors except for stressfulness. Path analyses revealed that, in both samples, predictors were linked with seeing supernatural explanations as accessible, plausible, and motivating; these ratings, in turn, had positive associations with SA. These results begin to integrate previous theory and research on individual predictors of SA.

How COVID-19 economic aid should be distributed continues to be an important societal question, with relevance to current and future public health policy. We argue that religious identities condition the influence of broader political context on COVID-19 policy preferences, serving as social conduits through which political attitudes are transmitted. We analyze original U.S. survey data (N = 989), to examine support for inclusive (i.e., including undocumented immigrants) COVID-19 economic aid. We find that individuals’ religious identities interact with county-level political context to influence COVID-19 policy preferences. Born-Again Christian individuals are more strongly affected by conservative political climates compared to their religious and nonreligious peers, after controlling for individual political characteristics and a host of sociodemographic factors. Findings support the conceptualization of conservative religious identities as social conduits for political messaging and show the importance of religion to how policy opinions are shaped by the broader environment.

We aimed at exploring the interplay between fundamentalism and perception of group norms in predicting willingness to join radical group actions. We conducted three studies in two countries to examine the relationship between religious fundamentalism (RF), general religiosity, and support for radical actions on behalf of various social movements. Three studies (N₁ = 305, N₂ = 251, and N₃ = 137) show positive relation between religious fundamentalism and willingness to engage in radical action in favor of the right-wing and antivaccine movements. The significant interaction between RF and perception of group norms has also been found: RF was linked to radical action intention at the high level of radical group norms’ perception. We discussed possible explanations of these results and future avenues for research.

In western societies, secularization in the sense of declining individual religiosity is mainly caused by cohort replacement. Every cohort is somewhat less religious than its predecessor, indicating that religious transmission is incomplete. The puzzle is just what causes this incomplete transmission and whether there is one or a restricted number of factors that mainly explain the process. Our aim in this article is to establish, describe, and explain this lack of religious transmission in West Germany, comparing parents’ and children's level of church attendance and their determinants over time. We use a data set of more than 8,000 parent-child pairs across four cohorts from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and test whether indicators measuring parent attributes, family relations, or parental context influence the attendance gap. As expected, we find a substantial parent-child attendance gap. However, we do not find factors that mainly explain the process. Only family disruption and the percentage of nones in the state slightly increase the attendance gap, but effect sizes are small. Our surprising result is that secularization happens largely independently of attributes of the parents and their immediate surroundings. We discuss how this finding may give credibility to new theories of secular transition and present an agenda for future research on religious transmission.

How people perceive morality plays a crucial role in their behavior and moral decision making. However, we have little understanding of the factors that drive the perception of morality as objectively existing. This study examines the impact of religion, specifically religious rituals, in promoting the perception of morality as objective. I analyzed two waves (2003, 2013) of the National Study of Youth and Religion to test whether religious participation during respondents’ adolescence predicted their perceived moral objectivity 10 years later. Moreover, I estimated the difference in effects for those who anchored moral decision making on religious and secular grounds. Ritual participation in 2003 was positively associated with moral objectivity in 2013. This association was stronger for respondents who grounded their morality in religion and who had powerful religious experience. The results point to the essential role of adolescence period in forming moral views.

Religious victimization is a social stressor harmful to identity and well-being. In this article, we examine how religious victimization is associated with key religious factors in youth using two different data sets collected 17 years apart. The results from both surveys show that youth affiliated with non-Christian religious traditions, youth who more frequently attend services, and youth who talk more frequently with their parents about religion have a relatively high likelihood of religious victimization. Moreover, Catholic and mainline Protestant youth have relatively low likelihoods of religious victimization, but these findings did not hold across both sources of data. We suggest these patterns reflect cultural views regarding secularization as well as the cultural normativity of Christianity and associated behaviors in the United States. We conclude by encouraging school-based, antibullying programs to include religion and religiosity in efforts to reduce and prevent youth bullying.

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 and subsequent calls for a reckoning with systematic racism forced many religious leaders to confront the question of how to talk about race in their congregations to an extent not seen in the 21st century. We argue that this period reflects an “unsettled time” and prompted several types of leadership responses, which we have identified through interviews with Christian religious leaders. Among leaders of non-Black congregations, we find three common responses: feeling called to openly take a stand against racial injustice, cautiously engaging the issue but experiencing tensions in one's congregation, and avoidance by claiming that racial justice is primarily a political issue that should only be addressed in religious contexts as far as it relates to biblical teachings. Finally, we find a more consistent assumption of the need to address racial injustice among the leaders of majority Black congregations.

Increasing numbers of religious disaffiliates in the United States is a notable demographic shift with deep implications for the money donated in the philanthropic sector. We seek to understand this change in more detail by analyzing philanthropic giving and volunteering patterns among religious disaffiliates using data from the General Social Survey. This article identifies that people who were religious at age 16 but leave later in life gave less to charitable causes, gave less often, and were less likely to have volunteered recently than their consistently religious counterparts. This article initiates the study of philanthropy specifically among religious disaffiliates, and so we conclude by discussing areas for further research that could further address fundamental questions about religious disaffiliates and their philanthropic behavior. By examining religious disaffiliates, this article adds nuance to more common comparisons of giving and volunteering across religious and nonreligious people. With changing religiosity in the United States, understanding these philanthropic changes is important for the future of both secular and religious nonprofits that rely on these donations for funding.