Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion最新文献

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.

Although religiosity has been recognized as a predictor of health and well-being, links between religiosity and body image have not been extensively examined. The objective of our study was to explore possible pathways through which religious commitment might be associated with body appreciation in a Polish sample. Participants (N = 262) completed measures of religious commitment, positive orientation, gratitude, and body appreciation. Results demonstrated that religious commitment was positively related to body appreciation. Moreover, both positive orientation and gratitude mediated this relationship. A higher level of religious commitment was associated with a higher level of positive orientation and gratitude that, in turn, was related to a greater body appreciation. We concluded that religious commitment may be related to people's loving and respectful relationship with their bodies.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) teens raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (CJCLDS) experience microaggressions in their religious contexts. Active Latter-Day Saint parents of LGBTQ+ teens also face microaggressions in their religious environments, despite not holding an LGBTQ+ identity. We examined the impacts of microaggressions and the coping strategies used by 19 dyads of LGBTQ+ teens and their Latter-Day Saints (LDS) parents to understand how current microaggression and minority stress theories map on to their experiences. Participants described feelings of anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and surprise as well as increases in relationship conflict due to microaggressions. Both parents and teens described religious doubt, disengagement from religion, and feelings of dis-belonging and disillusionment because of microaggressions. These findings may provide insight into the ways that minority stressors threaten the health and faith of LGBTQ+ teens and their families. Finally, participants reported using a range of coping strategies to buffer against the effects microaggressions, including social support, emotion-focused, problem-focused, meaning-making, and faith-based approaches to coping. Overall, parents and teens reported similar impacts and ways of coping with microaggressions, demonstrating how minority stress process may be at play on a family-systems level in the CJCLDS.

This article draws on the anthropology of crisis to analyze ways in which communal-religious responses to crisis situations can reveal engrained social and cultural structures, and especially their gendered aspects. We focus on two alternative forms of Jewish communal prayer service that emerged in Orthodox communities in Israel during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: street and balcony minyans. Based on interviews and texts, we explore Orthodox women's experiences of these new religious spaces that entailed the rearrangement of traditional gender and spatial boundaries. We show that while these spaces opened room for new religious experiences for women, they ultimately accentuated their experiences of exclusion. We argue that the destabilization of the physical religious space in these alternative communal prayers reinforced symbolic gender boundaries. Thus, our study not only demonstrates how crises can uncover the deep social grammar of a community, but also how they unearth processes that defy and challenge that grammar.

A prominent focus of New Age beliefs and practices has always been health and healing—including the use of holistic healing, power crystals, homeopathy, and complementary and alternative medicine. Given its association with modern science and medicine, genetic testing would seem to run counter to New Age alternative medical practices. On the other hand, the use of at-home genetic health tests and the use of such New Age alternative medical practices could both be motivated by a desire for personalized healthcare. Using data generated from a survey fielded on a probability sample of U.S. adults, we examine associations between individuals’ use of at-home genetic health tests and their use of power crystals and acupuncture or other homeopathic medicine. Logistic regression models find that those who use power crystals or homeopathic medicine have significantly greater odds of having used an at-home genetic health test. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing market and the relationship between science, religion, and spirituality more broadly.

Whether religious groups advance or limit human rights has been a topic of recent debate among human rights scholars. This article studies the conditions under which religious leaders advance human rights in the context of Argentina's Jewish community during the country's 1976–1983 military dictatorship. Three major influences on religious support for human rights—autonomy from a religious community's establishment, a missionary-reformer identity, and congregational mobilization—are highlighted. Original archival research from the papers of U.S.-born rabbi Marshall T. Meyer illustrates his defense of human rights in Argentina, contrasting his work with the inaction of a major established Jewish organization. Quantitative cross-national analysis extends the case study findings by showing a relationship between religious institutions’ autonomy from the state and defense of human rights.

College is a setting and time of profound change in the lives of emerging adults. This change can include shifts in identity related to politics and religion. Given widespread attention to the alignment of religious people with conservative politics and less religious people with liberal politics (i.e., the “God Gap”), we ask: do college students who become politically liberal lose their religion in the process? Using longitudinal panel data, this study examines changes in political identity and religiosity among students at a Protestant university. Findings reveal changes in students’ politics align with changes in public and private religious behaviors, certainty in belief, agreement with core tenets of the Christian faith, faith maturity, and closeness to God. Whereas students who become more politically conservative increase their religiosity, the inverse is true for those whose politics become more liberal in college.