The Abuse of Power: A View of Sexual Misconduct in a Systemic Approach to Pastoral Care

The article explores the dynamics of transference and countertransference in hierarchical relationships which exist between clergy and lay persons, both in the parish setting, as well as in the pastoral counseling relationship. It is of utmost importance that the power differential be consciously acknowledged by pastoral caregivers so that appropriate boundaries can be exercised. All too often it is the negligent, careless, or unconscious disregard for this power dynamic by individuals providing pastoral care that has led to the sexual violations recently surfaced within our religious institutions. Acknowledgement of the imbalance of power, and its consequences for both clergy and parishioner, is essential in a systemic model of pastoral care.     

Is There a Crisis in Clergy Health?: Reorienting Research Using a National Sample

Are religious leaders unusually unhealthy? This question has long occupied scholars interested in the study of religious institutions, and a significant body of research has examined the causes, correlates, and effects of poor health among clergy. In this study, we aimed to: (1) outline the development of, and bias inherent to, the scholarly understanding of clergy health over the past 50 years; (2) test, using a recently collected nationally representative sample of clergy, the standing assumption that clergy are an especially unhealthy vocational group, specifically in terms of depression, obesity, and self-rated health; and (3) identify the major correlates of health among clergy using these data. Contrary to the recent tenor of scholarly research on this subject, our research revealed that clergy are not a particularly unhealthy group. We suggest potential pathways forward to ameliorate the bias inherent in the research into clergy well-being.     

Training Community Clergy in Serious Illness: Balancing Faith and Medicine

Community-based clergy are highly engaged in helping seriously ill patients address spiritual concerns at the end of life (EOL). While they desire EOL training, no data exist in guiding how to conceptualize a clergy-training program. The objective of this study was used to identify best practices in an EOL training program for community clergy. As part of the National Clergy Project on End-of-Life Care, the project conducted key informant interviews and focus groups with active clergy in five US states (California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas). A diverse purposive sample of 35 active clergy representing pre-identified racial, educational, theological, and denominational categories hypothesized to be associated with more intensive utilization of medical care at the EOL. We assessed suggested curriculum structure and content for clergy EOL training through interviews and focus groups for the purpose of qualitative analysis. Thematic analysis identified key themes around curriculum structure, curriculum content, and issues of tension. Curriculum structure included ideas for targeting clergy as well as lay congregational leaders and found that clergy were open to combining resources from both religious and health-based institutions. Curriculum content included clergy desires for educational topics such as increasing their medical literacy and reviewing pastoral counseling approaches. Finally, clergy identified challenging barriers to EOL training needing to be openly discussed, including difficulties in collaborating with medical teams, surrounding issues of trust, the role of miracles, and caution of prognostication. Future EOL training is desired and needed for community-based clergy. In partnering together, religious–medical training programs should consider curricula sensitive toward structure, desired content, and perceived clergy tensions.     

Same-Sex Marriage: A Dilemma for Parish Clergy

Same-sex marriage within churches is an ongoing, highly contentious, and contested topic. A rich literature depicts dichotomised views, reflecting those of academics at denominational level, and addresses theological substance or denominational policies. Significantly less is known about the perspectives held on the issue by individual clergy at parishioner level. This paper provides a background on the subject of Christian clergy who support same-sex marriage. A review of the literature in this area reveals few sociological studies pertaining to clergy who are supportive of gay rights. No known studies in the combined sociological and psychology scholarship have yet exclusively examined clergy’s perspectives on same-sex marriage. While previous study offers some understanding on religious attitudes toward gay individuals, it should not be assumed that attitudes of religious individuals toward same-sex marriage necessarily follow the same pattern. For many religious people it is more problematic to accept same-sex marriage than same-sex partnerships, as this challenges the definition of the institution of marriage. This paper presents a literature review which identifies a gap in knowledge regarding perspectives of clergy who support same-sex marriage. These perspectives are important to understand, as clergy hold influential positions as opinion leaders impacting both at individual and social level, and influence discourses within religion and beyond.     

Protestant Clergy and the Culture Wars: An Empirical Test of Hunter's Thesis

Examinations of culture wars typically assess the attitudes of the American public. This study instead focuses on culture wars among religious elites—clergy—and tests three aspects of the culture wars thesis: (1) whether religious elites are engaged in culture wars, (2) whether clergy attitudes are polarized on these issues, and (3) whether religious authority or religious affiliation is more salient in creating culture wars cleavages. Using data from a large random sample of Protestant clergy, we find a substantial amount of engagement in culture wars by all types of Protestant clergy. The amount of polarization is more attributable to views of religious authority (i.e., biblical inerrancy) than to religious tradition. Moreover, polarization among clergy is somewhat more evident on culture wars issues than on other social and political issues. These findings are generally supportive of the culture wars thesis and should help return examinations of culture wars back to where they were originally theorized to be waged: among elites.     

The Church of Faith and Freedom: African–American Baptists and Social Action

Clergy have an undeniable ability to shape the political beliefs and attitudes of their congregations and thus revealing how the framing activities of clergy affect behavior and influence mobilization is vital for political sociology. This ethnographic work delineates how, in 1972, the Second Baptist Church of Evanston's new pastor initiated a rapid change from social conservatism to become one of the most politically and socially active African–American Baptist churches in the Midwest. Second Baptist's radical change confirms the power of religious elites in shaping politics in spiritual institutions, and also demonstrates the vital impact of professional socialization on the theological and political orientations of clergy.     

The Deliberative Pulpit? The Democratic Norms and Practices of the PCUSA

In contrast to typical approaches that view religion as problematic or benign, thicker conceptions of religion's place in promoting and sustaining democratic politics are possible. This includes religious organizations modeling democratic practices and engaging in debate on common terms. We initiate this program of inquiry with data from a survey of Presbyterian Church, USA clergy gathered during the late summer and fall of 2009. We asked explicitly about clergy commitment to democratic norms and practices as reflected in their public speech and small group activities in their congregations. We use this article to explain variance in the results, looking especially to see if democratic commitments fall at the expense of religious competition, organizational maintenance, and personal preference and increased conservatism.     

Orthodoxy and Modernity in Cyprus: The 2006 Archepiscopal Elections in Historical Perspective

This article offers an analysis of the 2006 Archepiscopal elections of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus (OCC). It uses this analysis to develop an interpretation of the OCC's evolution over the last two centuries. Unlike other Orthodox churches, it is the laity and the clergy—through a system of proxy voting—that elect the OCC's high clergy. In the 2006 elections, the first contested elections since 1950, the contenders and the public divided into mainstream modernizers and traditionalists. The election of Chrysostomos II signifies continuation with the OCC's conventional interventionist role in the island's social, economic, and political life. The election also led to the creation of additional eparchies, which suggests the normalization of the OCC's organizational structures. These developments point to a conventional pattern of coexistence between Orthodox religious institutions and modernization. Therefore, the Cyprus case casts doubt on scholarly arguments advocating Eastern Orthodox Christianity's exceptionalism vis-à-vis Western Christianity.     

Gender, Religion, and the Experience of Suffering: A Case Study

This article explores how gender and religious belief come together in an elderly woman’s experience of suffering. It is based on qualitative research that explored experiences of suffering in a group of community-dwelling elders (80+) living in a North American city. We use the case study method to introduce themes that show suffering’s uniqueness to the individual whose narrative we report, as well as similarity to themes that emerged in other participants’ narratives. In this case, an elderly woman’s gender and religious identities merge in her stories of suffering, which include the memory of a childhood disability and an incident of clergy abuse that occurred 70 years previously. A key finding in this paper is that key themes in her story of suffering, which are disablement and clergy abuse, resonate to the general themes of suffering found in our study, which are (1) threats to personal identity; (2) loss of a valued item, quality, or relationship; and (3) a lack of control over self or the circumstances of life.     

Are Bivocational Clergy Becoming the New Normal? An Analysis of the Current Population Survey, 1996–2017

Transitions in the American religious landscape including religious nonaffiliation, congregational and seminary enrollment declines, and the proliferation of megachurches have reshaped the clergy labor market and increased the precariousness of this type of work. One potential indication of this growing instability is the supposedly increasing number of bivocational clergy who depend on a second job to supplement their income. There are few reliable data, however, that can trace out national‐level trends of bivocational clergy. Using the Current Population Survey, this study tests whether there has been any proportional increase in bivocational clergy and to what extent such an increase has been localized to certain groups. We find that the percentage of clergy who report having a second job has not increased since 1996. However, clergy who are female, unmarried, or working in the American northeast are increasingly likely to report working a second job. These trends suggest that clergy who receive occupational advantages—due to gender or marital status—or who live in highly religious/low cost‐of‐living regions of the country may be protected from taking on a second job whereas those clergy without these advantages increasingly must depend on additional sources of income.     

Collaboration Between Clergy and Mental Health Professionals: A Review of Professional Health Care Journals From 1980 Through 1999

Given the frontline role of community clergy in mental health care, this study examined how collaboration with clergy was viewed by mental health and other health professionals outside of the religious community. Searches of health care journals on Medline and PsycINFO yielded 44 articles from non‐religious journals from 1980 through 1999 that specifically addressed collaboration between clergy and mental health professionals. Seven themes were identified through content analysis, including the benefits of collaboration to each profession, the need to increase the clergy's knowledge about mental heath, and the importance of referrals. Discussion about interdisciplinary referrals significantly increased over time, r_ø (1, N = 44) = .31, p < .05).     

The Ismaili sect in London: Religious institutions and social change

The Ismailis in London are a community attempting to adapt the stock of Ismaili theoretical concepts to the explanation and control of events in a changed and changing social situation. This article is concerned with assessing the role of Ismaili religious institutions in this process of adaptation. It will be argued that because the Ismaili belief system emphasizes the irrelevant and transitory nature of Ismaili religious institutions, the true role, paradoxically, of these religious institutions is preserved, and as a consequence they remain relevant to Ismailis.     

The Ismaili sect in London: Religious institutions and social change

The Ismailis in London are a community attempting to adapt the stock of Ismaili theoretical concepts to the explanation and control of events in a changed and changing social situation. This article is concerned with assessing the role of Ismaili religious institutions in this process of adaptation. It will be argued that because the Ismaili belief system emphasizes the irrelevant and transitory nature of Ismaili religious institutions, the true role, paradoxically, of these religious institutions is preserved, and as a consequence they remain relevant to Ismailis.     

Predictors of university students’ willingness in the USA to use clergy as sources of skilled help

This exploratory study investigated U.S. university students’ perceptions (N = 186) and the predictor variables associated with their willingness to use clergy as a source of help. In the final regression analysis using the predicted variable of willingness to use clergy as a source of help (R = 0.816, R ²= 0.665, Adjusted R ²= 0.650), there were seven significant predictor variables: (a) trust of clergy, (b) empathic ability of clergy, (c) having previously sought help from clergy, (d) respondents’ dominant/minority cultural identification, (e) attendance at religious services at least once a year, (f) believing that spiritual counselling is as effective as psychotherapy, and (g) receiving religious/spiritual education as a child. An eighth variable was retained in the final regression model because of its proximity to significance (Friendships between clergy and people, p = 0.051). Accusations against clergy and the belief that clergy are held to a higher standard did not predict willingness to use clergy as a source of help. A general linear model (F = 125.696, df = 10, p < 0.001) revealed that those who self-identified with Protestant Christianity, Catholic/Orthodox Christianity, and Judaism were more likely to consider seeking help from clergy than those who self-identified with another religious tradition (Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism), or adherence to spiritual not religious belief. Further, those who self-identified as Jewish or Christian were also more like to perceive clergy as trustworthy and empathic. Finally, African American/Caribbean Black respondents were more likely than either Latino/Latino American respondents or European American respondents to seek help from clergy, to perceive clergy as empathic, and to believe that spiritual counselling is as effective as psychotherapy (F = 1495, df = 12, p < 0.001).     

A Proposed Psychological Assessment Protocol for Applicants to Religious Life in the Roman Catholic Church

This paper proposes a psychological assessment protocol for applicants to religious life in the Roman Catholic church. While most Catholic religious orders, seminaries, and dioceses require applicants to complete some type of psychological evaluation prior to entrance into seminary, there is no established standard or protocol suggested for conducting these evaluations. The current proposed assessment protocol provides those conducting or receiving these evaluations with a comprehensive foundation from which they can add or delete components to meet their specific needs. Furthermore, the utilization of a standard clergy assessment protocol creates the opportunity for the establishment of a national database useful for conducting research concerning clergy applicants.     

Clergy Response to Domestic Violence: A Preliminary Survey of Clergy Members,Victims, and Batterers

Although the presence of both religious organizations and violence in American communities is pervasive, scant attention has focused on how to best enroll clergy and religiously oriented resources in the battle against family violence. Given that it is not uncommon for women or couples to seek counseling or advice from clergy before accessing community-based resources, the frequency, nature, and utility of these contacts were assessed in this exploratory study from the perspectives of 47 female victims and 70 male perpetrators of domestic violence. Forty-one clergy members from various denominations were also surveyed about their contacts with those seeking help for domestic violence. Results indicated that 43% of the victims and 20% of the perpetrators did seek help from clergy. Almost all of the victims who contacted clergy reported satisfaction with the counsel they received. All clergy respondents reported counseling people who had experienced domestic violence during their career, and 80% had violence-related contacts in the past year. The service-related implications of these clergy contacts from victim, perpetrator, and clergy perspectives are discussed.     

Faith‐Based Decisions? The Consequences of Heightened Religious Salience in Social Service Referral Decisions

Previous research suggests that clergy members are often an initial contact for people seeking advice or social services and clergy often refer such individuals in need to outside agencies. Recent "faith-based initiatives" seek to engage churches and religious groups more deeply in social service delivery, potentially changing the mix of organizations to which clergy might refer people in need. In addition, public debates about faith-based social services have drawn attention to religion, often in politically divisive ways. Using semi-structured interviews and vignettes in which key characteristics of outside agencies are experimentally varied, we explore the implications of this heightened attention to religion on clergy referrals. We find that increasing the salience of religion affects clergy referral choices, with some clergy even willing to sacrifice quality care and resources for an individual in need when religious options are available as referral choices. We argue that this occurs at least in part because making religion salient in policy and referrals makes religious differences salient as well.     

“The Friendly Clergy”: Characteristics and Referral

Among the recommendations possible in assessment of clients' religious beliefs is that of referral to the “friendly clergy.” This article delineates guidelines for referral as well as ideal characteristics of that spiritual professional.     

Which topics are important to address in premarital counseling? A survey of clergy

Pastoral counselors who provide premarital counseling must address the topics that are most relevant to couples as they prepare for marriage. This article presents the results of a survey of clergy who provide premarital counseling, demonstrating the relative importance that clergy ascribe to premarital counseling topics, as well as the relationship between religious affiliation and ratings of topic importance.     

Market Share and Religious Competition: Do Small Market Share Congregations and Their Leaders Try Harder?

A central claim of the religious economies model is that religious competition affects levels of religious participation and commitment primarily because religious competition pushes the suppliers of religion (religious leaders and organizations) to market their faith more vigorously and effectively. We examine whether U.S. congregations experiencing greater religious competition measured by their smaller religious market share do more to recruit new members, offer more services to current followers, and whether their clergy work longer hours. The efforts of congregations and clergy do vary substantially, but this variation is not related to their denomination's market share. The variations are also not due to religious pluralism, intradenominational competition, or evangelical market share. Members of small market share congregations are more committed, but this higher commitment does not appear to arise because religious suppliers are responding to religious competition. Several alternative explanations for the higher commitment levels of small market share groups are offered with a discussion of the implications for theories of religious competition.