Between acculturation and self-assertion: individualisation in the German-Jewish context of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic and its contribution to the development of modern sociology

Abstract

Using the example of four German-Jewish scholars of the 19^th and 20^th centuries – Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Alfred Schütz (1899–1959), who all maintained intense connections to their Jewish backgrounds – this article aims to illustrate that Jewish traditions held favourable conditions for processes of religious and social individualisation. The focus of the analysis is placed on the figure of the stranger, a theme all four authors dealt with in their work. On the one hand they investigated the stranger as a biblical figure with social-ethical implications (Lazarus and Cohen); on the other, they developed a sociological approach by analysing the role of the stranger in the construction of society (Schütz and Simmel). This article strives to illustrate how a particular religious ideal – the commandment of love for one's neighbour and the recognition of the stranger as a fellowman – has been transformed into a sociological concept for the promotion of individuality. Reconstructing this context also means exploring the history of sociology as a scientific discipline in Germany and to look into the attempts of sociologists to understand otherness in the multicultural societies of the 21st century.     

Public religious activities,stress, and mental well-being in the United States: the role of religious reframing in coping

Religious reframing is applying religious beliefs to an assessment of stressful personal situations. If public religious activities (e.g., religious volunteering) meet the necessary criteria to enable religious reframing, they may serve to limit (or “buffer”) the negative impact of stressors (e.g., family conflict) on mental well-being. Based on this dynamic, two out of three public religious activities (i.e., religious volunteering and religious group activities, but not religious service attendance) were predicted to buffer stress based on their capacity to enable religious reframing. Predictions were supported by hierarchical linear regressions using data for Americans aged 40 and older (N?=?2579). This research proposes a framework for using religious reframing as the basis for making predictions about relative stress-buffering performances. It also finds that religious service attendance – the most common form of public religious involvement – does not enable religious reframing to the point of effectuating stress buffering.     

Suffering for others as religious meaning-making: varieties,prerequisites, and functions in the coping process of a sample of practising Christians living with cancer

The coping method suffering for others as religious meaning-making (SORM) is analysed regarding its varieties, prerequisites, and functions in a group (n?=?10) of practising Christians living with cancer. In-depth interviews are featured in this qualitative, longitudinal study of the interdependence of religiosity and coping. A common feature of the analysed narratives is the idea that the informant's suffering would have – or at least had the potential to have – a positive effect on other individuals. This idea is identified as the “coping tool” of the coping method. Three different variants of SORM are identified, with a variety of prerequisites. The function in all cases is to conserve the significant object sense of meaning and, in some cases: survival. A case study is presented that shows how the coping method can be maintained over time by changing the coping tools of the method when they lose their efficacy in the coping process.     

Using census data in the management of religious diversity: an Australian case study

Abstract

Mapping and measuring religious diversity has become critical to the management of interreligious relations in the 21st century. The data about religious identification provided by the Australian census since the formation of Federal Government in Australia, and prior to that in the Colonies, has provided detailed information about the extent of and changes in religious diversity in the nation and in particular cities. Because the census also provides very detailed information about where people of different religions live, it can provide information about the extent to which religious groups are residentially segregated, a factor which affects how people of different religions relate to each other. The methodological issues related to measuring diversity are discussed and the utility in urban contexts of a ‘dissimilarity scale’ is demonstrated. The unique contribution of census data to the mapping and management of religious diversity in Australia is presented.     

Measuring religious affiliation in Great Britain: the 2011 census in historical and methodological context

Abstract

The British religious census of 2011 is located in its broader historical and methodological context. The principal developments in the measurement of religious affiliation (proxy-assigned or self-assigned) in Britain are traced from the Reformation to the present day, charting the relative contribution of the Churches, the State and empirical social science. The key statistics which have emerged from their respective efforts are summarised, with nominal religious affiliation universal until the time of the French Revolution and preponderant until as late as the 1980s. For recent decades, when the profession of faith has been rejected by large numbers of Britons, particular attention is paid to the variant results from different question-wording. Depending upon what is asked, the proportion of the population currently making sense of their lives without asserting a confessional religious identity ranges from one-quarter to one-half. The difficulties of trying to construct a religious barometer through a single, unitary indicator are thus illuminated.     

From Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’ to Matilda: Orthodox believers,critique, and religious freedom in Russia

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the configurations of belief, critique, and religious freedom in Russia since the performance of the Russian group Pussy Riot in 2012. The ‘punk prayer’ and its legal and political aftermath are interpreted as an incidence of the contestation of the boundary between the secular and the religious in the Russian legal and social sphere. The authors show that the outcome of this contestation has had a decisive impact on the way in which religion, critique, and the human right of religious freedom have been defined in the present Russian context. In response to Pussy Riot, the Russian legislator turned offending religious feelings into a crime. The article investigates two more recent cases where offended feelings of believers were involved, the opera “Tannhäuser” in Ekaterinburg in 2015 and the movie Matilda in 2017, and analyses how the initial power-conforming configuration that emerged as a reply to the ‘punk prayer’ has revealed a ‘power-disturbing’ potential as conservative Orthodox groups have started to challenge the authority of the State and the Church leadership. The article is based on primary sources from Russian debates surrounding Pussy Riot, Matilda, and “Tannhäuser” and on theoretical literature on the religious–secular boundary and human rights.     

Piety,Power, and the Purse: Religious Economies Theory and Urban Reform in the Holy Roman Empire

The religious economies model has been influential in the sociology of religion. Yet, propositions drawn from the model have been difficult to test in the comparative and historical study of religion, generally for lack of appropriate data. We develop a general theory of religious disestablishment and apply it to the Reformation in 16th‐century Europe to explain variation in the abolition of the Catholic monopoly. We suggest three principal factors—changes in demand, entry control mechanisms, and political incentives—that explain why incumbent religious firms may lose their monopoly. We then analyze the resulting hypotheses in a systematic analysis of cities in the Holy Roman Empire. Our analysis yields mixed support for demand‐side factors and entry control mechanisms, and firm support for political incentives in the institution of reform.     

Religious agency,identity, and communication: reflections on history and theory of religion

Abstract

This paper discusses the applicability of recent theories of religion to the problem of describing and explaining religious transformation in the period between the final Bronze Age and Late Antiquity. Instead of evolutionist and cognitive approaches, it proposes a model of religion that tries to analyze religion in terms of its making by starting from the individual's appropriation and creation of religious tradition. Religion is understood as a strategy to attribute agency to agents that do not appear immediately plausible. Recent scholarly discussions on human agency suggest categorizing human religious agency into the three subsets, namely: (1) acting religiously with regards to past, present, and future; (2) collective religious identity; and (3) religious communication. These subsets are shown to produce fruitful questions for research on historical sources. Against this backdrop, religion is explained as a precarious cultural resource articulated through the agency of individuals and allowing changed attributions of individual agency.     

Intersecting cultural identities and help-seeking attitudes: the role of religious commitment,gender, and self-stigma of seeking help

ABSTRACT

The current study (N?=?404) used a moderated moderation model to examine how gender, religious commitment, and self-stigma toward seeking psychological help may interact in the prediction of help-seeking attitudes. Bivariate zero-order correlations indicated that help-seeking attitudes was negatively associated with self-stigma of seeking help (r?=??.55) and positively associated with religious commitment (r?=?.14), and self-stigma was not significantly associated with religious commitment. Men reported more negative attitudes than women (ΔM?=??.18). Furthermore, multiple regression results revealed a three-way interaction such that the relationship between gender and help-seeking attitudes was moderated by both self-stigma and religious commitment. Specifically, men with high religious commitment and high self-stigma endorsed the most negative help-seeking attitudes, suggesting that religious men’s help-seeking attitudes may be particularly susceptible to the influence of self-stigma. Implications for research and the development of targeted interventions are discussed.     

What kind of tensions are involved in the pedagogical use of religious narratives? Perspectives from Finnish Evangelic Lutheran and Islamic religious education

Abstract

In this article, we examine how narratives of religious traditions are used as resources in religious education (RE) and compare practices from Evangelic Lutheran religious education (LRE) and Islamic religious education (IRE) in Finnish public schools. The sacredness of narratives from holy books entails that there can be contestations over their pedagogical use, and teachers need to negotiate the possible tensions between the pedagogical aims of liberal RE and the integrity of the holy narratives. The research data consists of interviews with teachers of LRE (n = 4) and IRE (n = 5) as well as classroom observations. The results of qualitative content analysis show that teachers use narratives as pedagogical resources when teaching about and from religion. However, tensions occurred between the ideals of student-centred, experiential and creative learning, on one hand, and respecting the sacredness of the narratives, on the other. We also present teachers’ ways of negotiating the tensions as well as some differences between LRE and IRE in the pedagogical use of narratives.     

Between daʿwa and Dialogue: Religious Engagement in Muslim-minority Environments

ABSTRACT

Muslim engagement in interfaith and intercultural dialogue began in earnest after the turn of the twenty-first century in response to the rise of global jihad. Both dialogue and jihad are outgrowths of da?wa, the call or mission of Islam, the principal mode of modern Islamic activism. The foundations were laid in the later part of the twentieth century by Muslim intellectual-activists living in non-Muslim environments, who played a special role in conceptualizing the new notion of dialogue and its relation to da?wa. This essay focuses on four pioneering figures, two from the indigenous context of India – the modernist Asghar Ali Engineer and the reformist ?ālim Wahiduddin Khan, and two from the diaspora milieu of the West – the Palestinian-American academic activist Ismail Raji al-Faruqi and the European Muslim spokesman Tariq Ramadan. Each represents a distinct religious orientation that also reflects a different phase in the evolution of modern Islamic discourse. Taken together, these intellectual-activists chart the trajectory of modern Islam from the early pre-Islamist liberal hopes to the present post- and neo-Islamist efforts to navigate between Western-dominated globalization and Islamist jihadism.     

Religion and local politics in Southern Europe: a research agenda

This article brings to a conclusion the series of three special sections published in 2015 and 2016 by Religion, State and Society on ‘Religion and local politics in southern Europe’. We set up a research agenda on the interactions between religion and local politics in Southern Europe. In doing so, we focus on the localisation of religion, including religious debates, and on the impact of the recent economic crisis. More specifically, we address the local as a contested concept, the multilevel governance of religion as a scalar opportunity structure – in relation to the transnational dimension of religious actors – the effects of such changes in the welfare landscape and the impact of the economic crisis on the activities and strategies of religious actors in Southern Europe. Our research agenda focuses on the interactions between two main dimensions: the territorial impact of political and economic changes, and the multiscalar schemes of territorial governance.     

Group Size and the Trajectory of Religious Identification

The relative size of religious groups or denominations within societies or nations influences variation in the extent to which group members psychologically identify with their religion. National‐level census data measuring the proportional size of religious groups in New Zealand are merged with nationally representative data on self‐reported psychological identification drawn from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. A multilevel random coefficient model shows a logarithmic function for the relationship between religious group size and average group‐level religious identification. Members of smaller religious groups (less than 1.5 percent of the population) tend to strongly identify with their religion, whereas members of groups that are larger in size (over 6 percent of the population) tend to be less identified, on average. Religious group cohesion may be a dynamic process. Larger religious groups are less cohesive and experience more contested identities and ideological positions (average group identification is lower).     

Religious Right,Religious Left,Both, or Neither? Understanding Religio‐Political Identification

In this article we analyze the effects of religious, political, socioeconomic, and demographic variables on religious Americans’ propensity to identify with religio‐political movements. Using data from the 2013 Economic Values Survey collected by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we sort nonsecular Americans into four categories: religious right, religious left, both religious right and religious left, or neither religious right nor the religious left. We estimate a multinomial logit model in which we depict religio‐political identification as a function of religious affiliation, worship attendance, religious embeddedness, religious convictions, political attitudes, and socioeconomic and demographic controls. We find that a wide range of religious, political, and socioeconomic/demographic variables affect individuals’ identification with the religious right and/or religious left. Our empirical results also permit us to analyze the seeming paradox of identifying with both the religious right and the religious left. We find that individuals who identify with both movements come from the ranks of the highly religious, those who believe that being moral requires one to believe in God, Tea Party supporters, strong partisans, those with lower education and income, older individuals, and blacks and Hispanics.     

Interreligious contact and media: introduction

ABSTRACT

Religious pluralisation entails interreligious contacts of different kinds and at various levels. At the same time, an increasing mediatisation affects the perception of and encounter with other religious traditions and their adherents. These relations between interreligious contact and media have not yet been subject to extended research from the study of religion perspective. This issue wants to fill this gap by presenting different case studies and systematising considerations on constellations of interreligious contact/dialogue/encounter and media: specifically (a) the influence of mediated discourses on interreligious contact, (b) media extensions of local and global interreligious dialogue, and (c) the digital – and especially social – media as a platform for interreligious dialogue or encounter. This introduction gives an overview on concepts, questions and topics of this field of research, drawing on the case studies within this special issue.     

Religious individualisation in historical perspective

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue of Religion which proposes a new, historical and comparative engagement with processes of religious individualisation. Building on the critique of theories of modernisation the proposition is to trace the variety of forms of individualisation as found in various world regions during different time periods. Together with a particular orientation for the study of religion this represents a shift in social theorising. It puts the experiences and activities of individuals centre stage and foregrounds situation, context and contingency. Accentuating interactional and micro-social dimensions, however, does not mean excluding macro- and long-term perspectives. At the centre of attention are constellations in which the individual personality becomes a defining feature for at least certain sections of society. In addition, the approach allows the capturing of paradoxical constellations. In order to secure individuality, individualisation is turned into a norm or even becomes stereotyped. Our approach allows us to address such trends that counter and sometimes block and reverse individualising developments. The special issue of Religion presents examples of a complex research arena that is still evolving. Besides two conceptual papers the special edition covers examples from various phases of Indian and European religious history as well as from the modern period in both regions.     

Concept History and Religious Discourse

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) has made important contributions to the study of political and social thought, as well as to cultural history more generally. Reinhart Koselleck has argued that, during the eighteenth century, basic concept use in Europe experienced widespread trends of (1) democratization, (2) temporalization, (3) ideologization, and (4) politicization. This article will consider the possibility of a conceptual history of religious discourse. While conceptual history has thus far focused primarily on political and social concepts, some research has more recently turned to religious concepts. This work should be expanded and can be improved by the insight of theologians and ethicists who often have a better understanding of religious concept use than conceptual historians whose main focus is political thought. I will summarize how concept history could be applied to religious concepts, how theologians might make a contribution to the theory behind Koselleck's understanding of modern concept use, and offer a critique of a recent methodological introduction to religious concept history.     

Reassessing women,religion and the Turkish secular state in the light of the professionalisation of female preachers (vaizeler) in Istanbul

Since 2003 the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has increased the number of female preachers (vaizeler). These state appointed professional female preachers are engaged in illuminating women and providing them with an appropriate religious education. Within the frame of Turkish state’s regulation of religious affairs, this phenomenon is important since it calls into question both the state’s monopoly over religious officers and women’s access to the religious public realm. The article casts light on these issues by addressing the following questions: what does the Diyanet’s increase in female preachers reveal about the intertwined relationship between women, religion and the state in contemporary Turkey? Or, in other words, what does it reveal about the transformation of Turkey’s assertive secularism? Following year-long ethnographic observations of the vaizeler’s daily activities in three Istanbul districts (Bahçelievler, Üsküdar and Be?ikta?), this paper analyses the evolution of female religious engagement in Turkey. The concluding remarks highlight the trend of professionalisation and standardisation in the traditional activity of female preaching. The vaizeler’s sessions are also extremely telling of a broader and complex redefinition of Turkish secularism.