Declining Religious Authority? Confidence in the Leaders of Religious Organizations, 1973–2010

One view of secularization is that it can be conceived of as declining religious authority. Although studies conducted in the 1990s suggested that confidence in the leaders of religious organizations—a promising indicator of religious authority—decreased in the 1970s and 1980s, research has not examined recent trends. The goals of this study are to (1) examine trends in confidence using data from the early 1970s through 2010 and (2) use recent advances in age-period-cohort analysis to provide a more robust empirical examination of these trends. Using data from the cumulative General Social Surveys, 1973–2010, the results suggest that, even after considering age effects, period declines in confidence have continued, but declines by birth cohort were primarily among those born in the boomer and early post-boomer generations (roughly 1945–1970) relative to those born earlier (pre-1945) or later (post-1970). Moreover, these effects appear to be due mainly to differences in religious participation, especially among more recent cohorts. In particular, there has been a rebound in confidence among members of the younger generation who attend religious services.     

Religious Wars or Healthy Competition in the NDE Movement?

In the early years of near-death research many organized religions rejected the near-death experience (NDE) as a legitimate expression of religious faith. More recently numerous religious apologists have laid claim to NDEs as verifying particular theological beliefs. I see this as a healthy competition between religions, and a competition that results from the very success of the near-death research effort. Religious apologists, however, must be reasonably objective in any juxtapositions of religious philosophy with NDE findings. I point out some problems in this regard with Michael Sabom's recent work. I also argue that Kenneth Ring's recent statements that we might not now be headed toward Omega as he once thought may be premature.     

Instrumental Borders of Gender and Religious Conversion in the Balkans∗

Abstract

In this paper I look at religious identifications and affiliations in the Balkans as instrumental political resources for ascertaining hierarchical relations among social groups and individuals, with extensive use of gendered metaphors, referring to different categories of people as either effeminate or truly manly, and actual women often used as a currency of exchange.     

A Friend in Creed: Does the Religious Composition of Geographic Areas Affect the Religious Composition of a Person's Close Friends?

Numerous theories of religion rest on the assumption that the religious composition of local populations influences the religious identities of a person's close friends, but there have been few empirical tests of this assumption. Using a combination of data on the religious identity of close friends (from the 1988 and 1998 General Social Survey) and information on the religious composition of counties (from the U.S. Religious Congregations and Membership Study) we find that despite tendencies toward religious homogeneity, the religious composition of the surrounding population has an effect on the proportion of a respondent’s same‐religion friends and on the proportion of friends belonging to specific other religious groups. Local population characteristics are unrelated to the proportion of respondents’ friends known in congregational settings. Results have implications for a broad range of sociological theories of religion as well as research examining the impact of same‐congregation and same‐religion friends (e.g., health and well‐being).     

Visiting Religious Places for Prayer in Japan: How Does Religious Identity Affect Religious Behavior?

Review of Religious Research - This paper examines how religious identity is associated with religious behavior in Japan. Prior research suggests that ritual practices rather than doctrines and...     

Wage Differentials in the United States: Does Religious Participation Matter?

Using data on non‐Hispanics from the 2005 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this article examines the within‐religion association between religious participation and wages for mainline Protestants, conservative Protestants, and Catholics, the three major religious groups in the United States. While previous studies have examined this relationship for women only and using ordinary least squares (OLS), this article further analyzes gender differences and differences along the wage distribution using a quantile regression (QR) approach. The results indicate that high participation in religious services is associated with lower wages among mainline Protestant women and men, and among Catholic men. Among Catholic women, those who are not participating in religious activities earn higher wages relative to those who participate on a weekly basis. Furthermore, this advantage is more pronounced at high wages, as the QR estimates show. These results suggest the importance of defining religious participation in a manner that allows the detection of nonlinear effects. In addition, the findings speak to the importance of religion in the lives of individuals and may benefit policies dealing with male‐female wage differentials.     

Religious renewal in Syria: the case of Muammad al‐abash

The Syrian Muammad al‐abash, member of the religious establishment and recently elected to parliament, is the leading figure in a movement of religious renewal in Syria. The Islamic vision he has articulated sheds light not only on the existence of a dynamic religious and inter‐religious debate currently taking place in Syria but also on the potential role of Islam in the development of a civil society in Syria that brooks room in the public arena for both the religious and the secular.     

Recollecting the Religious: Augustine in Answer to Meno’s Paradox

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Philosophers of education often view the role of religion in education with suspicion, claiming it to be impossible, indoctrinatory or controversial unless...     

Does a Nation's Religious Composition Affect Generalized Trust? The Role of Religious Heterogeneity and the Percent Religious

Is religion more of an integrative or a divisive force in contemporary societies? We use multilevel analyses of World Values Survey data from 77,409 individuals in 69 countries to examine how both the percent of the population that is religious and the religious heterogeneity of a country are related to generalized social trust, the willingness of individuals to trust “most people.” When we first examine the main effects of the percent religious and religious heterogeneity we find no evidence that either variable is related to trust in the ways predicted by major theories. However, the combination of these two variables has a huge negative relationship with trust. Countries that are both highly religious and religiously heterogeneous (diverse) have, on average, levels of trust that are only half the average levels of countries with other combinations of these two variables. The results have important implications for understanding the role of religion in modern societies.     

Theology and Religious Studies in the University: ‘Some Ambiguities ’ Revisited

What is the relationship between religious studies and theology? Do both have a place within the university? This paper will argue that no clear distinction can be drawn between religious studies and theology on the level of the methods they employ. Each is multidisciplinary and each is able to address questions of religious truth. They can be distinguished only by asking ‘What is the question which each is attempting to answer? ’ Religious studies addresses the question of the meaning and truth of any religion. Theology is interested in the question of the meaning and truth of one particular faith. By adopting the language of one particular faith, the theologian is able to explore particular religious questions in some depth.     

Spiritual But Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion

“Spirituality” often has been framed in social science research as an alternative to organized “religion,” implicitly or explicitly extending theoretical arguments about the privatization of religion. This article uses in‐depth qualitative data from a religiously diverse U.S. sample to argue that this either/or distinction not only fails to capture the empirical reality of American religion, it does no justice to the complexity of spirituality. An inductive discursive analysis reveals four primary cultural “packages,” or ways in which people construct the meaning of spirituality in conversation: a Theistic Package tying spirituality to personal deities, an Extra‐Theistic Package locating spirituality in various naturalistic forms of transcendence, an Ethical Spirituality focusing on everyday compassion, and a contested Belief and Belonging Spirituality tied to cultural notions of religiosity. Spirituality, then, is neither a diffuse individualized phenomenon nor a single cultural alternative to “religion.” Analysis of the contested evaluations of Belief and Belonging Spirituality allows a window on the “moral boundary work” being done through identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” The empirical boundary between spirituality and religion is far more orous than is the moral and political one.     

Sacred Canopies or Religious Markets? The Effect of County-Level Religious Diversity on Later Changes in Religious Involvement

Secularization theories, such as Berger's Sacred Canopy argument, hold that religious diversity leads to a decline in religious participation. Religious market models (e.g., Finke and Stark) argue the opposite. Voas, Olson, and Crockett found that nearly all of the vast research exploring this important question prior to 2002 was flawed due to a previously unrecognized noncausal statistical relationship between measures of religious diversity and measures of religious participation. Since 2002, this methodological issue has largely stymied research on this important topic. We first describe how, following Voas et al.’s recommendations, longitudinal models can overcome these problems. We then apply these methods to data measuring the religious composition of all U.S. counties found in the Religious Congregations and Membership Studies from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Using multilevel longitudinal regression models, we find that greater county-level religious diversity is followed by later declines in county-level religious participation rates. The negative effect size of religious diversity is large and robust to changes in the control variables and different methods of measuring religious diversity.     

Was the Northern Ireland Conflict Religious?

This article considers the claim that the conflict in Northern Ireland was irreducibly religious. After a brief account of the history of the Northern Ireland conflict, the different arguments and counter arguments that bear on the role of religion in causing and sustaining the conflict are considered. An examination of the relationship of Islam to terrorism and the events of 9/11 provides a comparative perspective that is used both to identify similarities and differences between the situation in Ireland and elsewhere and to distinguish and discriminate between different ways in which religious sanction is given to violence. The implications of our findings are then explored with regard to our understanding of the Northern Ireland conflict and with regard to our understanding of the nature of religion more generally.     

Production of mystical Islam in Europe: Religious authorization in the Süleymanlı Sufi community

This article examines the production of religious authority among the Süleymanlı, a branch of the Naqshibandiyya order, which is the largest Sufi community active among Turkish-origin Muslims in Europe. Like other Islamic organizations, the Süleymanlı claims to represent “true Islam,” which they construct during their central communal ritual, hatim, in which religious knowledge is produced and disseminated. The interaction of a religious corpus of assertions, media of representation, and social organization during this ritual produces its “criteria of Islamic validity and priority” which authorizes mystical Islam. European adaptations of the Islamic tradition require an analysis of how Islam is authorized rather than simply what “European Islam” is or who speaks on behalf of it, individually or communally.     

Are Risk‐Taking Persons Less Religious? Risk Preference,Religious Affiliation,and Religious Participation in Taiwan

The "risk-preference" thesis is a controversial topic in the sociology of religion. Thus far, cross-cultural empirical research on risk preference and religiosity has been meager. This study attempts to replicate Miller's ( Miller, Alan S. 2000 . Going to hell in Asia: The relationship between risk and religion in a cross cultural setting.   Review of Religious Research 42(1):5–18) study for Taiwanese society, using data from the 2007 Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS). Logistic regression results show that for the Taiwanese (1) risk preference has little estimated net effect on religious affiliation, but (2) the relationship between risk preference and frequency of religious participation is statistically significant.     

Religious education in state schools in German‐speaking Switzerland

There are today a variety of patterns in the different cantons of Switzerland for regulating the teaching of RE. The Swiss system is based on a cooperation between Church and state which varies in relation to the history and character of the differing cantons. This allows for diversity in modes of delivering RE. In two cantons there is complete separation between church and state whereas in the majority there is some form of cooperation. State recognized religious communities (normally the Swiss Reformed and Roman Catholic Churches, but in Basel the Old Catholic Church and Jewish community also) are in charge of the RE in schools where it is taught by their representatives visiting the schools. Where state related RE is taught this is done by teachers in the school employed by the state. The presence of Turkish immigrants is raising problems for the teaching of RE in certain areas since Islam has not been traditionally state recognized. However, the inherent diversity of patterns within the 26 cantons allows considerable room for innovation feasible because there is generally an openness between the churches and from the state which facilitates this.     

Religious education,a matter of understanding? reflections on the final report of the Commission on Religious Education

In this article we offer reflections on the final report of the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) that was published in England in 2018. We expose and problematise the prominent place of understanding in the report, not only as an educational method, but also the underlying world view of the report itself, a world view which we characterise as ‘hermeneuticism’. We raise educational, theological and political concerns about the particular approach taken in the report. We propose instead that religious education (RE) should be considered first of all in terms of what it means to live with a religious or non-religious orientation, conceived in existential terms rather than in terms of beliefs or practices or objectified world views. Educationally we show that what we term a non-hermeneutic way of viewing our humanity would open different possibilities for RE and its future.     

Ritualising the Secular? Inter‐Religious Meetings in the ‘Immanent Frame‘

I take a philosophical approach and seek to address the question of inter‐religious rituals and practices with reference to what Charles Taylor has called ‘the immanent frame.’ Whilst considering the dynamics of inter‐religious or cross‐religious ritual, this article will focus mainly on the idea of rituality occurring in an immanent frame or habitus (Pierre Bourdieu). I will argue that whilst there are specific cultic rituals that need to be negotiated as part of any form of explicit inter‐rituality, there is a larger potential that is suggested by a broader anthropological vision. Moreover, an ‘immanent turn’ by religions may be the positive step towards the joint creation of meaning and practice in the public sphere.     

Be ye perfect? Religious ideals in education

This article explores the meaning of ‘religious ideals’ and their possible role in education. ‘Religious ideals’ are defined as ideals that acquire meaning due to a belief in transcendence or a divine being. Two kinds of religious ideals are being distinguished, namely ideals that are constituted by a belief in a transcendent being and ideals that are being determined by this belief. These types of ideals are illustrated by means of the Christian tradition. An example of the first is devotion to God and to the second belong the four cardinal virtues. The second part deals with two issues that are particular to the education of religious ideals. First, I counter the critique that people who have religious ideals are fanatics who pursue the realization of their ideals relentlessly. Secondly, I show that educating children with religious ideals may have positive effects, namely the influence on their development towards autonomy and moral commitment.