Nonfirmands: Danish youth who choose not to have a Lutheran confirmation

Most Danish youth participate in the traditional Lutheran ritual of confirmation. However, a growing minority does not. Based on survey data collected in 2011 from over 600 Danish pupils, this study examines the ways in which Danish ‘nonfirmands’ are different from their peers who participate in confirmation in relation to religious background, personal religious beliefs, intellectual engagement, and demographic factors. We further explore key motivations for ‘nonfirmation’ expressed by the nonfirmands in the sample. Broadly speaking, our findings highlight secular socialization and individual beliefs about God as key elements in understanding the nonfirmand and his or her reasons for opting out of confirmation. We expect confirmations to continue to decline in popularity as nonfirmation gains social acceptance, as nonfirmands raise their own children, and as Denmark becomes increasingly secular.     

Debating educability: diverging social representations of abilities in Finnish educational discourse

By surveying a representative sample of Finnish parents, this study set out to compare two social representations of intelligence current in our educational discourse: the established one, ‘the idea of natural giftedness’, and an emerging one, ‘the idea of the multifariousness of abilities and support for social equality.’ It was found that the parents’ social positions and their views on the malleability of intelligence contributed to their endorsement of the two representations. The idea of natural giftedness was endorsed particularly by academically educated fathers and those viewing intelligence as a genetically determined capability, while the idea of the multifariousness of abilities and support for social equality was endorsed by mothers and those with the view that intelligence can be developed through practice. It was suggested that these two polemical representations appear to embody opposite views in regard to the deeprooted controversy between nature and nurture and reproduce the basic cultural separation between the abilities of ‘head’ and ‘hand’.     

‘He thinks Krishna is his friend’: Domestic space and temple sociality in the socialisation beliefs of immigrant Indian Hindu parents

This paper reports results from a study of the cultural belief systems, or ethnotheories, of Asian Indian Hindu parents in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, in the USA. I adopted a cultural, developmental psychological approach and, over a one-year period, used caregiver diaries, ecological inventories, repeated in-depth interviews and participant observations to gain access to the ethnotheories of the parents. These immigrant parents emphasised family ties, unprompted adherence to the daily routine, knowledge of cultural origins and religiously inflected moral values. Exploring the nuances of their emphasis on cultural origins and moral and religious values, particularly as those relate to Hinduism and its transnational rearticulation, I show how the parents utilised domestic spaces and the temple as dual venues to systematically socialise their children into a new form of Hindu religious and ‘Indian’ ethnic identity in the USA.     

The Effect of Religiosity on Life Satisfaction in a Secularized Context: Assessing the Relevance of Believing and Belonging

The positive relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction is well-established. This relationship is, however, likely to vary across cultural contexts and different religious affiliations. Furthermore, research is needed to uncover why religion is relevant for life satisfaction. Addressing these issues, we investigate what dimensions of being religious play a role in the life satisfaction of individuals with different religious affiliations, including the understudied Muslim category, in the highly secularized Dutch context. We examine ‘believing’, which captures how religion provides meaning and a coherent worldview, and ‘belonging’, which comprises both cultural benefits of being embedded in a congregation with a shared framework of meaning and structural benefits due to more social ties. Analyses of the NEtherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (n = 5312) first indicate that Muslims display significantly lower life satisfaction than the non-religious, which appears to be due to their underprivileged social position rather than intra-religious factors of believing and belonging. Second, we find that Catholics experience significant life satisfaction benefits compared to those who are not religious, and that only belonging plays a role in this association. Next to the beneficial effect of the structural aspect of belonging, which revolves around social ties, a cultural aspect of religious belonging appears to be salient, suggesting that an important life satisfaction advantage of religious communities lies in their ability to foster a sense of solidarity and commitment through a shared framework of meaning. We make several recommendations for further research based on these findings.     

Spirituality,the opiate of scholars of religion?

This review discusses Craig Martin’s approach to religious individualism and more widely the ways in which social scientists can make sense of individuals’ identities, beliefs and practice, as these seem more volatile and eclectic than ever. In particular, it is interested in the ‘critical’ study of religion developed in Capitalizing Religion. This review underscores the convergence between this book and other recent works regarding epistemological weaknesses affecting the contemporary study of religion (and in particular the ‘paradigm of spirituality’). It discusses Martin’s original contributions – in particular, a critical analysis of the ideological origins and biases underlying the categorisation of freely chosen spirituality vs. coercive religion. Finally, this review tries to further Capitalizing Religion’s argument by drawing on my own empirical work on the popularisation of meditation, yoga and kabbalah, sharing Martin’s critical approach and interest for the ways in which social structure and cultural norms affect individuals’ religious life.     

“I don't reject the Catholic Church—the Catholic Church rejects me”: How Twenty- and Thirty-somethings in Poland Re-evaluate their Religion

Abstract

Given measures of religious belief and participation, young adults in Poland are becoming increasingly disengaged from the Catholic Church. Broad theories of secularisation are less useful for making sense of this trend than an analysis of the role of Catholicism in Polish society in the twentieth century, which demonstrates the ways in which forms of belief are contingent upon wider social and political transformations. This article argues that, since 1989, attempts by the Catholic Church in Poland to influence public life through conservative social and political interventions have alienated young people who are looking for religious resources with which to make sense of their lives in a rapidly changing social milieu. Alongside disengagement from conservative, propositional forms of Catholic truth and rejection of direct authority, young people still possess ‘religious capital’ and look upon religious ideas to orientate their personal lives. However, disaffection from the propositional truths offered by the Church and disengagement from rituals and practices of ‘folk Catholicism’ at the level of the family and local parish have not led to widespread expressions of atheism among young people. Instead, there is a sacralisation of everyday life and there are attempts to use ‘religious capital’ to help young people make choices for life. The reconfigured ‘religious capital’ is often expressed through diffuse Catholic symbols and sentiment as well as the periodic use of major religious festivals as a means of finding access to some form of collective religious experience. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of these changes for the future religious landscape of Polish society.     

Coming Out to Parents in Japan: A Sociocultural Analysis of Lived Experiences

While empirical studies on LGBT individuals coming out to their parents are common in Western societies, these studies are rare in non-Western societies. This article attempts to fill that void by shedding light on the experiences of Japanese individuals coming out to their parents. The coming-out narratives of Japanese LGBT individuals (N = 43) were examined. This study revealed three important findings. (1) Similar to the findings of studies in Western societies, Japanese LGBT individuals typically consider coming out to their fathers considerably more difficult than coming out to their mothers. Moreover, many study participants expressed the absence of a significant relationship with their fathers, even before coming out—making coming out to their fathers unnecessary. (2) Similar to the findings in previous studies, Japanese mothers’ responses are often reactionary and abusive; in fact, a disproportionate number of Japanese lesbian, bisexual female, and transgender Female-to-Male/X-gender individuals reported their mothers’ markedly negative, personal responses, illustrating why some were reluctant to come out to their mothers. (3) By contrast, Japanese gay and transgender Male-to-Female/X-gender individuals reported their mothers’ responses were comparatively undemonstrative. Also, they typically attribute their mothers’ negative responses to the fact that mothers are the solo overseers of heteronormative norms at home. Overall, Japanese LGBT individuals’ experiences reveal the gendered effects of Japanese sociocultural configuration, as well as the Japanese cultural implication of disclosing one’s sexuality.     

Counselling adolescents of immigrant parents: A transcultural approach

Adolescence is a difficult time for most children, but even more complex for the adolescents coming from immigrant families. Immigrant is a vague, broad concept and is difficult to define. Not all immigrants experience financial, psychological and social adjustment in the same way. In this paper it refers to the ones who experience ‘cultural misunderstanding’ characterized by social isolation, social confusion and deep general uncertainty. The paper focuses on some of the general aspects of the lack of appropriate support that the offspring of immigrant parents experience. A brief outline is given to show the attempt made by the Intercultural Therapy Centre (NAFSIYAT) to provide a transcultural therapeutic milieu for the adolescents from immigrant parents.     

Keepin’ it Real: London Youth Hip Hop as an Authentic Performance of Belief

Abstract

Hip hop is a global cultural phenomenon that encompasses rap music, dance, graffiti art, and fashion as well as particular ways of being. One sub-genre of hip hop is Gospel rap, in which Christian rappers attempt to ‘represent’ the truth of God as a tangible reality, thereby ‘keepin’ it real’. This study investigates how young British Jamaican male adults in the Brixton area of London appropriate hip hop for their own ends. Based on original raps authored and performed by these young people, the research finds that their representations of spiritual reality are influenced by the conventions and boundaries of professional Gospel rap. The study describes how youth incorporate religious hip hop into their everyday lives and argues that in some cases hip hop performance becomes a method for pedagogically reshaping the body, giving religious beliefs an ‘embodied authenticity’.     

Towards an anthropology of doubt: the case of religious reproduction in Orthodox Judaism

As Israel’s Orthodox Jews struggle to live up to high fertility norms rooted in religious and Zionist ideals, an obscured model of stratified critique has emerged. Based on an ethnography of Israel’s reproductive landscape, I demonstrate how critique of high fertility standards is based on particular social and cultural capital only available to the religious elite. While well-established, knowledgeable and assertive religious members find private ways to bypass the almost unachievable levels of fertility, a veil of secrecy leaves less privileged groups, particularly ba`aley teshuva (returnees) to carry most of the fertility load. Whereas scholars of religious transformation have demonstrated how religious elites act as actors and leaders of resistance, my findings illustrate an opposite pattern. Instead of disseminating this critique publicly, religious elites engage in private strategies of secrecy and creative performances of failure that enable these individuals to diverge from norms without publicly contesting them. I argue that not only is stratified critique based on social and cultural capital, it also reproduces social inequalities. By focusing on doubt, struggles, and failures engendered in “everyday Judaism,” these findings require us to refocus our inquiry on power structures within different sub-groups of Israel’s Orthodox Jews. Further, this unique case study highlights how stratified reproduction takes new shape as social and religious convictions gain and lose their force at a particular moment in history.     

Pedagogies of piety: Comparing young observant Muslims and Christians in the Netherlands

In this article, I compare the active religious engagement found among many of today's young Dutch Muslims and Christians. I show that such comparison requires a move beyond the separate frameworks through which these groups are commonly perceived, found both in widely shared public discourses (‘allochthons’ versus ‘autochthons’) and in academic research (minority studies versus the sociology of religion). In their stead, this comparative analysis examines in what ways both groups give shape to observant religious practice in the shared context of contemporary Dutch society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I show that young Christians as well as Muslims participate in social settings of religious pedagogy, where they are encouraged to attain, sustain and improve personal piety in today's pluralist Dutch society. Such social participation does not preclude, but rather comes together with a strong emphasis on reflexivity and authenticity.     

Bridging separate communities: the aspirations and experiences of minority ethnic religious education teachers in England

This article takes as its starting point concerns about community separation that arose in 2001, following outbreaks of violence in English urban centres, and again in 2014, following the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ case. Despite a series of reports which have highlighted the need to address ‘separation’, promote ‘meaningful contact’ between those who differ in terms of ethnicity and worldview and identify teachers of religious education (RE) as key players, researchers have paid no attention to teachers of RE from minority ethnic and religious backgrounds. The article draws on a qualitative study of teachers from Hindu, Muslim and Sikh backgrounds to explore their concerns about pupils’ perceptions of separation and the ways in which they attempted to address these in white majority and Muslim majority schools. Communication research and studies based on social capital theory are used to suggest that the teachers used ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ strategies as means of encouraging pupils to explore their perceptions of separation, engage in a mediated form of meaningful contact with ‘the Other’ and expand their thinking. The conclusion calls for further research in to the strategies reported and for policy makers to support the recruitment, training and career development of minority ethnic teachers of RE.     

The Challenges of Multiculturalism

Although the term multiculturalism is often understood on the public level as an ideology or as a social programme (to be ‘for’ or ‘against’), I argue in this paper that the term should also be understood to refer to the complex range of issues associated with cultural and religious diversity in society, and the social management of the challenges and opportunities such diversity offers. Understood in this sense, multiculturalism is not an optional extra, it is not something that a society can choose to have or avoid. For any country without closed borders then multiculturalism is a fact of today—it is present within the society. What is important are the social and political responses to the cultural and religious diversity that results from transnational flows and settlement of people. This introduction to the collection of papers highlights the need to understand multiculturalism as a process which is always contextual, and the role that state management of difference in the successful development of diversity plays.     

‘Hijab envy’: the visible angst of immigrant Christians in a pluralist Canada

This article explores the predilection of Christians of immigrant background to perceive themselves as a disadvantaged group in the new reality of Canada’s growing religious diversity. The present inquiry challenges loss as the definitive emotional register for Christian engagement with Canada’s new religious minorities, demonstrating that religious minorities have elicited begrudging admiration and envy from their Christian counterparts. This inquiry insists that contemporary Canada, not ‘Christian Canada’, is the most important frame for understanding the perceptions and predilections of the Christians in this study. It argues that pluralist ideals, the policy instruments, and social practices that carry these ideals and the cultural forums that display and debate these ideals shape not only the ‘attitudes’ of young Christians, but also the regimes of visibility in which and from which they operate. While scholars impute an increasing visibility to religion, this article demonstrates that the array of affects between viewer and viewed are highly variable and context specific.     

“If a girl doesn't say ‘no’…”: young men,rape and claims of ‘insufficient knowledge’

Most psychological theories of rape tend to stress factors internal to both rapists and their victims in accounting for the phenomenon. Unlike such theories, social psychological and feminist accounts have drawn attention to social and cultural factors as productive of rape, and have criticized psychological accounts on the grounds that they often serve, paradoxically, to cement pre‐existing ‘common‐sense’. In this paper we examine the ways in which young Australian men draw upon widely culturally shared accounts, or interpretative repertoires, of rape to exculpate rapists. In particular, we discuss the reliance placed on a ‘lay’ version of Tannen's 1992 ‘miscommunication model’ of (acquaintance) rape and detail the use of this account—the claim that rape is a consequence of men's ‘not knowing’—as a device to accomplish exculpation. Implications of our methods for capturing young people's understanding of sexual coercion, rape and consent, and for the design of ‘rape prevention’ programmes, are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Islamic piety against the family: from ‘traditional’ to ‘pure’ Islam

One might suppose that a foundational element of proper Muslim behaviour is respect for one’s parents. However, it is not unusual in the contemporary Islamic world, both in Muslim-majority countries and in the diaspora, for young people to be much more ‘Islamic’ in behaviour, dress and lifestyle than their parents. As this may suggest, modernist Islamic piety is not infrequently directed by young people against their parents, as a mode of resistance to parental authority. However, wearing the hijab, becoming a follower of a Sufi shaykh, or marrying a ‘good’ Muslim spouse from another ethnic group to one’s own, are different kinds of resistance from, for example, joining an inner-city youth gang, or rejecting one’s parents’ Asian cultural background for a more globalised identity. I discuss some of the ways in which Islamic piety can be deployed in resistance to parental authority through case studies from my Economic and Social Research Council-funded field research in Bangladesh and the UK, and consider in what ways these forms of behaviour resemble, and differ from, more familiar forms of resistance.     

Religious cultures and gender cultures: tracing gender differences across religious cultures

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Religion focuses on varying empirical connections and theoretical relations between ‘religion’ and ‘gender’. The introduction to this special issue suggests a theoretical approach which is sensitive to culture by drawing on a phenomenological understanding of culture that is based on knowledge and meaning production and sense making. At first sight, this may not sound convincing because ‘culture’ is a category that is most notably used in combination with religion and gender in culturalist ways. In the migration societies of contemporary Europe, religion has become a metaphor for cultural difference and symbolic boundary-making. The core element of this approach is the conceptualisation of culture as a social web consisting of symbolic forms based on signs of meaning that shape social action, orientation, and experience in the world, including the religious sphere. This entails an understanding of religion as a distinct province of meaning that is structured by processes of social symbolisation just like any other sphere of life. This approach reveals that culturalist conceptions of both religion and gender have specific social meanings as meaningful signs in the symbolic order of secular modernity.     

Two ways of being a Christian in the Muslim context of the Middle East

This article identifies two fundamental outlooks and basic orientations of Christians living among Muslims in the context of the Middle East that result in two ways of being a Christian in that region. The origin of the two types, labelled the ‘Arab Christian’ and the ‘Eastern Christian’, is traced back to early Christian contacts with Islam, and the content of those two ways is explicated in their political, cultural and religious implications by briefly elaborating two contemporary Lebanese Christian conceptualizations of the two ways. It is argued that these two types provide a hermeneutical key not only for understanding the behaviour, actions and thought of Christians of the Middle East, but also for understanding and evaluating the perceptions of non-Middle Eastern writers and historians about the topic of Christians in that region.     

The social life of the Samson Saga in Israeli religious Zionist rabbinic discourse

This article will explore how different contemporary groups of Israeli religious Zionists read and relate to the Biblical tales of Samson. Using current religious Zionist discourse (Bible lessons, newspaper articles and written opinion pieces) authored or delivered by leading rabbinic figures, this article will demonstrate how contemporary interpretations of the ‘Samson Saga’ (Judges 13–16) are used as a medium through which contemporary religious Zionists in Israel and the West Bank contest the meanings of political sovereignty, violence and personal ethics. More broadly, this article will argue that a focus on how sacred texts are interpreted, debated and contested in social contexts (or the ‘social life’ of a text) can offer scholars a thicker and more nuanced window into the varied ways in which religious nationalists grapple with competing political visions and desires.