The International Social Survey Program Modules on Religion, 1991–2018

This is an introduction to the special issue on the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) religion survey. Previous special issues covered the ISSP surveys on “citizenship” (Scholz et al. 2017; Eder 2017), “work orientations” (Jutz et al. 2018; Volk and Hadler 2018), “role of government” (Edlund and Lindh 2019; Hadler et al. 2019), and “social networks” (Sapin et al. 2020; Hadler et al. 2020). The four substantive articles in this special issue cover a wide range of important issues about religion around the world. Hoellinger and Lorenz (2021) examine the level and nature of religiosity across religious cultures. Their comparison covered three aspects: identifying with and belonging to a religion, public and private religious behaviors, and religious beliefs. They found large cross-cultural variation in both the pattern and level of religiosity across nations and religious cultures. Standard secularization theory does not apply uniformly across different religious cultures. Dimova and Dimov (2021) study the connection between religion and ethnicity in comparative perspective. They found that ethnic minorities had higher levels of religious behaviors and beliefs than the dominant national groups. Also, they discovered that “religion is among the key markers of ethnicity” but one cannot be simply substituted for the other. Babunashvili and Kipiani (2021) look at the connection between religion and liberal attitudes toward same-sex relationships and how it differs between former-Communist countries and other countries. They observed that liberal views toward sexual minorities decrease as religiousness rises, that independent of religiousness post-Communist countries are less accepting of homosexuality than those in other countries, and that in postCommunist countries religion has less impact on views about homosexuality than it does in other countries. Ladini et al. (2021) conduct a case study in Italy of the relationship of religiosity and attitudes toward immigration. Their analysis showed that the non-religious and Catholics frequently attending religious services were the most favorable toward immigration, while Catholics who irregularly or never attended church services were the least in favor of immigration. The ISSP evolved out of preexisting general social surveys. Its origin was a bilateral collaboration between the respective national studies of the National Opinion Research