Pentecostal Affiliation

Although Pentecostal Protestants are often included under the broad term “evangelical Protestant,” research suggests that Pentecostals are distinct from other evangelical Protestants in their religious and secular beliefs and activities. In this research note, we demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of a religious classification that accounts for differences between affiliates of Pentecostal denominations and affiliates of other Protestant denominations. Analysis of nationally representative survey data shows that affiliates of evangelical Protestant and Pentecostal Protestant denominations differ in their levels of education, religious beliefs, attitudes on social issues, and political ideology. These differences are largely congruent with theoretical expectations of differences among Protestant subgroups. The classification of Pentecostal denominations presented in this research note is an important tool for researchers, which can be applied to a wide range of social scientific inquiries.     

Different Religions,Different Politics? Religion and Political Attitudes in Argentina and Chile

Various theories attempt to explain political outcomes. One of the most bitterly contested schools of explanation deals with culture, attitudes, and values. In the broadest sense, this tradition argues that political and social outcomes are determined in large part by the shared beliefs and values of the populace or a subgroup thereof. Thus, Stephen White (1984) has defined political culture as “historically formed beliefs and behavior,” recognizing that one's political attitudes and behavior are usually formed by inherited values as well as life experience. Moreover, scholars of political culture expect continuity of values over time and therefore are intrigued by cases of changing beliefs and attitudes. Thus, the explosive growth of evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism in Latin America, where Protestants have grown from a handful to 20–30 percent of the population in a single generation, provides a unique opportunity for study. This rapid shift to Protestantism and its consequences for democracy have been fiercely debated in recent years. Max Weber's Protestant ethic thesis suggests that Protestantism may provide a catalyst for the establishment of democratic norms. However, many contemporary scholars argue that evangelical Protestantism is conservative, authoritarian, and politically passive. Do different religions result in different political attitudes? Does religious devotion, as distinguished from denomination, affect one's politics? This article evaluates political attitudes among Protestants and Catholics in Argentina and Chile to examine the claims of recent political culture arguments that modern Latin American Protestantism is resistant to democratic values. Survey data indicate that religious intensity (“devout‐ness”), rather than religious affiliation, does influence political attitudes, and that demographic and political engagement variables also influence democratic values.     

Educational Attainment and Cohort Change Among Conservative Protestants, 1972–2004

A growing literature examines how conservative Protestants have made status gains relative to mainline Protestants over the past three decades. The results of these studies are inconclusive: by some measures conservative Protestants have achieved socioeconomic parity, in other accounts significant discrepancies remain. This article examines the relationship between religion of origin and educational attainment, highlighting the significance of both religious background (rather than adult affiliations) and cohort change in understanding religious stratification. The findings are somewhat mixed: while conservative Protestants born since 1960 are no less likely to finish high school than their mainline counterparts, the negative effect of a conservative Protestant background on college completion remains virtually unchanged for cohorts born before 1940, between 1940 and 1959, and between 1960 and 1972, even when controlling for family background. Conservative Protestants are keeping pace with the educational gains made by mainline Protestants in the postwar era, but other factors associated with a conservative Protestant background still exert a negative influence on educational attainment.     

The Politics of Religious Nones

Americans with no religious affiliation (aka religious “Nones”) are not a politically homogeneous community. Just as there are political differences between groups of Christians, there are political differences between groups of religious Nones. I use nationally representative survey data to examine the political activities and perspectives of atheists, agnostics, and those who are “nothing in particular.” Results show that Americans who report that their religion is nothing in particular are relatively uninterested in politics and unlikely to be politically active; atheists are relatively liberal and likely to experience political conflict and follow political news; and agnostics are particularly likely to vote and feel politically isolated from their families. In many ways, the “softer” secularism of those who are nothing in particular is politically more similar to religious affiliates than the “harder” secularism of agnostics and especially atheists. These results have important implications for the future of American politics as Nones now have the potential to rival evangelical Protestants as a politically relevant constituency.     

Gut Reactions: Moral Conviction, Religiosity, and Trust in Authority

ABSTRACT— Theory and research point to different ways moral conviction and religiosity connect to trust in political authorities to decide controversial issues of the day. Specifically, we predicted that stronger moral convictions would be associated with greater distrust in authorities such as the U.S. Supreme Court making the "right" decisions regarding controversial issues. Conversely, we predicted that stronger religiosity would be associated with greater trust in authorities. We tested these hypotheses using a survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 727) that assessed the degree to which people trusted the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the legal status of physician-assisted suicide. Results indicated that greater religiosity was associated with greater trust in the U.S. Supreme Court to decide this issue, and that stronger moral convictions about physician-assisted suicide were associated with greater distrust in the U.S. Supreme Court to decide this issue. Also, the processes underlying religious trust and distrust based on moral convictions were more quick and visceral than slow and carefully considered.     

Taming Uncivil Discourse

In an era of seemingly intense populist politics, a variety of issues of intergroup prejudice, discrimination, and conflict have moved center stage in much of the industrialized world. Among these is “political correctness” and, in particular, what constitutes a legitimate discourse of political and social conflict and opposition. Yet the meaning of legitimate discourse is being turned on its head as some disparaged groups seek to reclaim, or reappropriate, slurs directed against them. Using as a context a U.S. Supreme Court case about whether “The Slants”—a band named after a traditional slur against Asians—can trademark its name, we test several hypotheses about reappropriation processes based on a nationally representative sample with an oversample of East Asian Americans and several survey experiments. We find that motives attributions influence how people understand and evaluate potentially disparaging words. In particular, when reappropriation motives are perceived, insulting words are judged to be less insulting. In this sense, uncivil discourse can to some degree be tamed.     

How Many “Nones” Are There? Explaining the Discrepancies in Survey Estimates

While there has been a great deal of media focus recently on the rise of those without religious affiliation (also known as the “nones”), there is an underlying issue facing this line of research: different surveys come to completely different conclusions about how many nones actually exist in the United States. Using the General Social Survey (GSS) and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) this work details how each of these instruments measures religious affiliation in a different manner and how that results in an estimate of the nones that diverges by over 8% points in 2018. Statistical analysis reveals that the GSS has a much higher share of Protestants who never attend church than that found in the CCES. In addition, the CCES Protestant subsample is more Republican, while the nones in the GSS are more to the left of the political spectrum than the nones in the CCES. Some advice and caution is offered to researchers who are interested in studying the religiously unaffiliated in these two surveys.

     

“Being Religious” or “Being Spiritual” in America: A Zero‐Sum Proposition?

Recent discussions of religious attitudes and behavior tend to suggest—and in a few cases, provide evidence—that Americans are becoming “more spiritual” and “less religious.” What do people mean, however, when they say they are “spiritual” or “religious”? Do Americans see these concepts as definitionally or operationally different? If so, does that difference result in a zero‐sum dynamic between them? In this article, we explore the relationship between “being religious” and “being spiritual” in a national sample of American Protestants and compare our findings to other studies, including Wade Clark Roof’s baby‐boomer research (1993, 2000), 1999 Gallup and 2000 Spirituality and Health polls, and the Zinnbauer et al. (1997) study of religious definitions. In addition to presenting quantitative and qualitative evidence about the way people think about their religious/spiritual identity, the article draws implications about modernity, the distinctiveness of religious change in the recent past, and the deinstitutionalization of religion.     

Local Religious Subcultures and Generalized Social Trust in the United States

Using multilevel analyses of 21,193 General Social Survey respondents nested within 256 metropolitan areas and counties, we find that individuals’ willingness to trust others is strongly related to the denominational make‐up of geographic areas. The percent of evangelical Protestants in the population negatively predicts individual‐level generalized trust, while percent mainline Protestant and percent Catholic positively predict trust. The effect sizes of these results are large and robust to statistical controls, and they hold even among nonmembers of the religious groups; for instance, “percent evangelical” predicts lower trust even among nonevangelicals. Black Protestant population share initially appears to predict lower trust, but the association disappears after adjusting for racial residential segregation. Following a longstanding theoretical tradition in the sociology of religion, we argue that the religious characteristics of places—not just individuals—shape local subcultures in ways that affect a broad range of behaviors, attitudes, and values such as generalized trust.     

Comparing Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians’ Religious and Political Beliefs Across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa

This article compares the political correlates of Renewalist Christianity in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa (N = 44,832). Renewalists include Pentecostals and Charismatic members of Mainline Protestant and Catholic churches. Though rarely studied comparatively, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa boast the largest Renewalist populations worldwide. Scholars have noted that the religious and political beliefs of Renewalists differ from other Christians, but existing studies either treat Renewalists as a single category or focus on Pentecostals while pooling Charismatic and non-Charismatic Catholics and Protestants as denominational blocks. Using multilevel mixed-effects models, this article first confirms that Renewalists’ religious and political beliefs differ from those of non-Renewalist Christians. Importantly, this cautions against the ubiquitous aggregation of Charismatic and non-Charismatic Catholics (and Protestants) in statistical analyses. Additionally, we theorize and evaluate differences between Renewalists and the role of regional context. Religious differences between Pentecostals and Charismatics, we show, are much larger in Latin America than in Sub-Saharan Africa.     

Religious Ambivalence,Liminality, and the Increase of No Religious Preference in the United States, 2006–2014

Americans identified less and less with organized religion over the past two decades. Yet apparently, many people who no longer identify with a religion are not consistently nonreligious. Reinterviews reveal that many people who express no religious preference in one survey name a religion when asked the same question in a subsequent interview. Past research called this phenomenon a “liminal” status. This article improves estimates of liminality by using three interviews and a better statistical model. About 20 percent of Americans were liminal in recent years, 10 percent were consistently nonreligious, and 70 percent were consistently religious. Falling religious identification in cross‐sectional data over the last three decades reflects slow change in religious identity, but some of the rise of the nones is due to more liminals saying they have no religion. Liminals appear equally among people raised conservative Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic.     

"For God and for the Crown": Contemporary Political and Social Attitudes among Orange Order Members in Northern Ireland

The Protestant Orange Order is the largest organization in civil society in Northern Ireland. From 1905 until 2005, the Order was linked to the Ulster Unionist Party, until recently the dominant local political force. However, widespread Unionist disenchantment with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to a shift in the votes of Orange Order members, in common with other Protestants, to the anti-Agreement Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which traditionally has had no links to the Order. This article examines the political, religious, and cultural attitudes of Orange Order members that prompted such a switch. It suggests that a combination of cultural and political insecurities over the fate of Protestant-British-Unionism has led to a realignment of Orangeism towards the stronger brand of Protestant and Unionist politics offered by the DUP.     

A JEWISH CONCEPTION OF HUMAN DIGNITY

This paper depicts the meanings of human dignity as they unfold and evolve in the Bible and the Halakhah. I posit that three distinct features of a Jewish conception of human dignity can be identified in contrast to core characteristics of a liberal conception of human dignity. First, the original source of human dignity is not intrinsic to the human being but extrinsic, namely in God. Second, it is argued that the “dignity of the people” has precedence over personal autonomy and liberty, which are core liberal pillars. The third characteristic pertains to the potential conflict between personal autonomy and liberty, and God's commandments. The theoretical analysis of human dignity is then examined in light of several Supreme Court decisions in Israel during the 1990s. I illustrate that Jewish religious and secular‐liberal conceptions pull in different directions in the rulings of liberal and religious Justices in Israel.     

Changes in Politics and Religiosity Among Students at a Protestant University

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.     

Italian Protestants: Religion, Ethnicity, and Assimilation

Early in the twentieth century, Italian Protestants in the United States comprised a religious minority in the Italian Catholic community and an ethnic minority in the American one. Because the assimilation of Protestants from heavily Catholic countries is little studied, I examine the life cycle of three Italian Protestant churches in three denominations in Rochester, New York in order to explain why they disappeared earlier than did their Catholic counterparts. When the second generation Italian Protestants attained adolescence, religious identity with American Protestants overrode ethnic identity, accelerating their assimilation. The Italian Protestant churches had become middle-class American organizations save for the use of Italian, a fatal contradiction. By 1960,all three churches had died, but all of the ethnic Catholic and national Orthodox parishes had survived.     

Liberal Churches and Social Justice Movements: Analyzing the Limits of Inclusivity

Conservative Protestants have been successful in communicating their religious voice in the public sphere, while liberal Protestants have struggled to articulate a distinctly liberal, religious voice. In this article, I show that a major component of liberal Protestant identity—inclusivity—itself constitutes a fundamental barrier to developing that voice. Drawing on 26 interviews and a year of participant observation at a liberal Protestant congregation in the southeast, I first show that congregants construct their identity of inclusivity in response to cultural associations of Christianity with conservatism and exclusivism. I then analyze three discursive strategies that congregants use to make sense of individuals’ involvement in Moral Mondays, a left-leaning local social movement. By connecting Moral Mondays to social justice, to religious beliefs, and to individual commitments, congregants depoliticize involvement in Moral Mondays and maintain their commitment to inclusivity. I argue that inclusivity does not limit their participation, but rather limits their ability to connect that participation to their liberal religious voice. This research has important implications for understanding barriers to liberal Protestants’ articulation of a distinctly liberal and religious voice in the public sphere.     

Don't Call Me Ishmael: Religious Naming Among Protestants and Catholics in the United States

We explore whether first names of religious origin continue to have religious connotations for Protestants and Catholics in a U.S. culture where naming is largely secularized. We use 1994 General Social Survey data to examine several questions: (1) whether there are Protestant-Catholic differences in broad categories of names (Old Testament, New Testament, saints, etc.); (2) whether worship attendance predicts the likelihood that Protestant and Catholic parents select categories of names corresponding to their respective traditions; and (3) whether worship attendance predicts selection of specific names that are disproportionately common within Protestantism and Catholicism (without regard to the broader categories). Results show some expected Protestant-Catholic differences in the frequency of name categories. However, there is no relationship between parental worship attendance and the likelihood of choosing these categories, suggesting that differences cannot be explained by religious motivations. In contrast, worship attendance does increase Catholics' likelihood of choosing specific names that are disproportionately common within their tradition. This suggests that committed Catholics perceive certain names as "Catholic" and represents one instance in which names do retain religious connotations for believers. We are aware of no previous research that has established such a link between parental religious commitment and naming.     

The Vanishing Protestant Majority

Since colonial times, the United States has been a majority Protestant nation. But the proportion Protestant in the population has been falling for over a decade, and Protestants are poised to lose their majority status. This decline results from a decline in the intergenerational retention rate for Protestants and from the attrition of Protestants among the youngest cohorts. Shifts in immigration also contribute to the Protestant decline. We also consider the role of an increasing share of people identifying as generic Christians and as inter- or nondenominational.     

Two Approaches to Religion and Politics: Moral Cosmology and Subcultural Identity*

We explore two competing approaches to internal religious divisions and their political consequences. The “moral cosmology” approach focuses on religious worldviews. It juxtaposes the religiously orthodox to modernists, arguing that the former are theologically communitarian in belief while the latter are individualistic. The religiously orthodox worldview (relative to modernists) is posited to lead to politically conservative stances on cultural issues of abortion, sexuality, and family but politically liberal stances on economic issues. In contrast, the “subcultural identity” approach focuses on identity rather than worldview. According to this approach, self‐identified evangelicals and fundamentalists are expected to be more politically conservative on both cultural and economic issues when compared to mainline or liberal Protestants. Through analyses of the 1998 GSS, which allows operationalization of the two approaches and their extension to Catholic identities, we find that cosmology and identity are associated, but they have independent—and sometimes opposite—effects on Americans’ political beliefs.     

Intrinsic religiousness and religious coping as life stress moderators for Catholics versus Protestants

Two prospective studies were conducted to test the stress-moderating effects of intrinsic religiousness and overall religious coping on the depression and trait anxiety of Catholic and Protestant college students. Both studies found a significant cross-sectional interaction between controllable life stress and religious coping in the prediction of Catholics' depression, with religious coping serving a protective function at a high level of controllable negative events. Both studies also found a significant prospective interaction between uncontrollable life stress and intrinsic religiousness in the prediction of Protestants' depression; the relationship between uncontrollable stress and depression was positive for low intrinsic Protestants, flat for medium intrinsic Protestants, but negative for high intrinsic Protestants. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the role of religion in life stress adjustment.