Who’s Winning the War Against Science?

There is an outcry among scientists that they are being attacked on multiple fronts by fake news, alternative facts, climate change denial, fossil fuel industries, shrinking government funding, postmodernism, and religion. Is this siege mentality realistic or paranoid? It’s realistic. This article encourages theologians and other religious leaders to ally themselves with scientists in defense of evidence-based judgments in public policy-making.     

Race,Religion, and Anti‐Poverty Policy Attitudes

Using the 2008 National Politics Study, the present study indicates that while African Americans are more likely than whites to hear sermons about poverty and other political issues, hearing such sermons more consistently associates with support for anti‐poverty government programs among non‐Hispanic whites than among both African Americans and Hispanics. The racially/ethnically marginalized status of blacks and Hispanics may contribute to these groups being more receptive than whites to religious messages emphasizing social inequality. The contrasting racial experiences of dominance and marginalization may also help explain why hearing politicized sermons is more meaningful to the progressive social welfare attitudes of whites than to African Americans and Hispanics. This expectation is rooted in the heightened variability of perspectives among whites and their religious organizations regarding the government's role in aiding the economically disadvantaged. Conversely, the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics support the government helping individuals who fallen upon hard times. The greater variability in opinion among whites may also allow for greater differences in opinion to emerge between whites who attend relative to those outside of religious congregations led by clergy emphasizing spiritual and political solidarity with the poor than is the case for African Americans and Hispanics.     

Religious Identity-Inconsistent Attending: Its Correlates and Political Implications

The foundation of religious measurement in surveys presumes that individual religious affiliation (“What is your present religion, if any?”) accurately describes the religious community in which respondents are involved. But what if it doesn't? In a recent survey of 4,000 Americans, we asked whether their current congregation matches their religious identity and about a fifth of Americans indicated that it does not. We document the degree of this inconsistency, its correlates, and its implications, focusing primarily on the politics that congregants are exposed to from clergy and the attitudes they hold about salient political matters. The identity-inconsistent attenders often vary significantly from identity-consistent attenders, which serves to introduce considerable measurement error in the use of a religious tradition measure to depict American religion. The results suggest that salient disagreement induces a sizable population to migrate to a congregation outside their religious identity.     

Two Key Differences between Science and Philosophy

C. S. Peirce made the following claim: If science reveals truth, then consensus among scientists can be expected in the limit. This article does not dispute this claim; it simply assumes it. On the basis of this assumption, the following question is asked: Is it possible to extend Peirce's claim to philosophy in a natural way? It is argued that two important differences between science and philosophy strongly militate against such an extension. Does this mean that there is no truth to be found in philosophy? Are there, perhaps, different kinds of truth (scientific, philosophical, religious, and so on)? But such questions, though related to the present investigation, are nevertheless well beyond the scope of this article.     

“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.     

Conflict Between Religion and Science Among Academic Scientists?

Using new survey data ( N = 1,646), we examine the attitudes academic scientists at 21 elite U.S. research universities have about the perceived conflict between religion and science. In contrast to public opinion and scholarly discourse, most scientists do not perceive a conflict between science and religion. Different from what other studies would indicate, this belief does not vary between social and natural scientists. We argue that maintaining plausibility frameworks for religion is an important correlate of whether scientists will reject the conflict paradigm, with such frameworks taking surprising forms. When scientists do not attend religious services they are more likely to accept the conflict paradigm. When scientists think their peers have a positive view of religion, they are less likely to agree there is a conflict between science and religion. Religious upbringing is associated with scientists adopting the conflict paradigm. Spirituality is much more important in this population than other research would lead us to believe. Results reformulate widely cited earlier research, offer new insights about how scientists view the connection between religion and science, and expand public discussion about religious challenges to science.     

Is Religious Service Attendance Declining?

Weekend attendance at conventional religious services remains the most common form of social religious action in American society. Debates about secularization, discussions of congregations as sites of political skill-building and mobilization, and research on religion's contributions to stocks of social capital often rely partly on claims about trends in religious service attendance. Yet, existing evidence does not definitively establish whether attendance at religious services declined in American society from the 1950s to the present. We examine the trend in religious service attendance between 1990 and 2006. Evidence from several sources converges on the same answer: weekly attendance at religious services has been stable since 1990. However one reads the evidence about trends between World War II and 1990, the recent past has been a time of stability. This has important implications for theories of religious change.     

Religious Engagement,Civic Skills,and Political Participation in Latin America

To what extent has the growth of Evangelicalism in Latin America contributed to political participation across the region? A number of scholars of religion and politics in the United States have suggested that Evangelicalism promotes the development of civic skills necessary for political engagement, while the Catholic Church, due to its hierarchical structure, provides fewer opportunities for skill acquisition. In this paper, we apply this debate to Latin America to test whether civic skills developed in Catholic and Protestant church activities lead to differential participation rates in 18 countries. We utilize the 2014 Pew Religion in Latin America survey to test these effects, and find that Protestant churches do indeed promote skill-developing activities at higher rates, but that Catholics, when involved, are more likely to translate this religious participation into political action. We conclude that political scientists must better understand the organizational role of religion in promoting political engagement worldwide.     

Achieving community justice through faith-based initiatives

Prior to 1996, most churches and other faith-based organizations were ineligible to receive federal funding for community services. In a little noticed provision of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 known as 'charitable choice,' the federal government allowed religious groups to receive money for social programs without requiring them to censor their religious expression or give up their religious identity. States, with varying degrees of vigor and success, have partnered with faith-based organizations to provide community services that serve the purpose of transitioning people from welfare to work. Recent political developments and legislation suggest an expanded role for faith-based organizations to receive federal money to develop community services, including money for community justice projects. The Comment begins with an overview of the political and legal contexts that allow the development of promoting community justice initiatives through faith-based efforts. Next, there is a discussion of practical considerations that influence decisions of churches and faith-based organizations to participate in these activities. Finally, there is discussion of the roles social scientists and others might play to facilitate community justice initiatives through faith-based efforts.     

Religious Appeals and Implicit Attitudes

This article explores the effects of religious appeals by politicians on attitudes and behavior. Although politicians frequently make religious appeals, the effectiveness of these appeals and the mechanisms of persuasion are unknown. This article explores the possibility that religious language can affect political attitudes through implicit processes. Because religious attachments are formed early in the lives of many Americans, religious language may influence citizens without their awareness. Implicit and explicit attitudes are related but distinct constructs, and implicit attitudes may have behavioral implications in the political realm. I test these hypotheses experimentally, relying on a widely used implicit measure, the Implicit Association Test. I find that a Christian religious appeal affects implicit attitudes and political behavior among people who currently or previously identify as Christian. Furthermore, an explicit preference for less religion in politics does not moderate implicit effects.     

Attendance Matters: Religion and Ethical Affirmation of Gay and Lesbian Sexuality

This paper uses data from the 1974–2010 General Social Surveys to analyze the relationship between religion and ethical affirmation of gay and lesbian sexuality. Religion has become increasingly important in understanding the greater variation in ethical affirmation of same-sex sexuality over this time period. Yet in contrast to previous studies which have emphasized denominational affiliation, orthodoxy of religious belief, or alignment along a left–right political or theological spectrum as the key predictors, this study emphasizes the role of social isolation. With the sole exception of recent Mainline Protestants, religious service attendance is found to be a strong predictor of levels of affirmation regardless of denominational affiliation or level of conservatism, with liberal Christians who attend weekly religious services looking very similar to conservative Evangelicals who attend fewer services. A potential argument explaining this finding is put forth: Weekly attenders of religious services are more likely to be isolated into a narrower institutional field while more occasional attenders may hold identical theological and political beliefs but are more likely to have a breadth of perspective that comes from multiple institutional connections. As such, the barriers to greater affirmation of gay and lesbian sexuality may be less about religion than about social isolation.     

The Religious and Political Origins of Evangelical Protestants’ Opposition to Environmental Spending

Evangelical Protestants are less likely than most other Americans to support environmental policies and spending to protect the natural environment. We use almost three decades of repeated cross‐sectional data to examine the factors that promote evangelicals’ opposition to environmental spending. Mediation models with bootstrapped standard errors show that affiliation with the Republican Party, biblical literalism, and religious service attendance mediate differences in support for environmental spending between evangelical Protestants and other Americans. The importance of these mediating variables, however, varies over time and by the group evangelicals are being compared to. Differences in support for environmental spending between evangelical and mainline Protestants, for example, are primarily due to views of the Bible, but not at all to Republican identification. The results shed light on the causal effects of religion on views of the environment, temporal changes in the social and political implications of religiosity, the persistence of divisive issues that support the continued existence of culture wars, and the future of government spending on environmental problems in a social context where scientific evidence is filtered through political and religious ideology.     

Justifying political decisions through theological arguments

The relationship between religion and politics in Muslim contexts has been discussed from many different perspectives. One of these proceeds from the theory of religious politics, according to which political thoughts and decisions are justified and legitimated with the support of theological explanations. A central premise is that religion is able to provide a moral sanction for political actions and decisions. This article discusses the relationship between religion and politics in a Shiite context in pre-modern and early modern times, based on the theory of religious politics. The central point is that the Shiite scholars, during the Safavid era (1501–1736), based their secular viewpoints on interpretations of the Quran, the hadiths, and the 12 Imamite Shiite sources, especially the specific ideas about the hidden imam, to legitimate their own collaboration with the Safavid kings. According to this theory, the religious politics occur within an ideological context such as a nation-state and specific historical circumstances. The religious legitimizations of political actions are usually intertwined with local and historical identities. As such the religious ideologies reflect not a return to tradition per se, but rather an ideological reconstruction of tradition for a new context. The ultimate question is which came first? Did the theological interpretations precede secular and political decisions, or was it the other way around? The theory of religious politics arrives at the conclusion that the theological explanations are employed to legitimate traditions of political thought and secular decisions and not the reverse.     

Religious Switching: Preference Development, Maintenance, and Change

Up to one–third of Americans switch religions at some time during their lives. What are the predictors of this religious mobility? This article addresses this question using a modified rational choice framework to explain the development, maintenance, and change of religious preferences. Although classical rational choice theory assumes that preferences are stable, this article suggests that preferences are variable and that social interaction works to maintain or change an individual's preferred religious choice. A cultural theory of preference formation is applied to allow for the social constraint rational choice theory often ignores. Findings suggest that childhood socialization does not cement religious preference, that formally joining a church while growing up acts to stabilize preferences, that lapsing in practice increases the likelihood of switching, and that “distinctive” denominations generate religious preferences that reduce individual switching.     

Religious Involvement and Status-Bridging Social Capital

Is religious involvement positively associated with having influential friends or is religious involvement unrelated to this kind of social capital? Building on the distinction between the “bonding” and “bridging” aspects of social capital, I distinguish two kinds of bridging social capital—identity‐bridging and status‐bridging—that have been a source of terminological confusion. I examine the relationship between religious involvement and status‐bridging social capital by analyzing data from a large nationally representative survey of the U.S. adult population that included questions about friendships with elected public officials, corporation executives, scientists, and persons of wealth. The data show that membership in a religious congregation and holding a congregational leadership position are most consistently associated with greater likelihood of having these kinds of friendships. The data also show that frequency of religious attendance is largely unrelated to these measures of social capital and that there are some significant variations among religious traditions and size of congregation.     

Muslim religious oratory on Swedish public service radio

This article analyses religious Morning Services, delivered by eight Muslim speakers, broadcast on Swedish public service radio during 2013 and 2014. Morning Services have been broadcast on Swedish radio since 1930, but only in recent years have non-Christian speakers been invited to contribute. Inviting religious minority speakers is understood as a strategy for incorporating selected representatives of religious minorities into hegemonic practices and discourses. The analysis identifies four shared discourses produced in the material and relates these discourses to hegemonic views regarding legitimate public expressions of religiosity in Sweden. The discourses are: 1) a positive discourse on religious pluralism, 2) a discourse that emphasises practical self-help-like effects of Muslim religious practice, 3) a discourse that articulates religiosity as challenging purported negative aspects of current society, 4) a discourse that raises difficulties which Muslims in Sweden face. The Muslim Morning Services illustrate a complex dialectic, as, on the one hand, they endorse hegemonic values and ideals and thereby contribute to and legitimise the status quo, while, on the other hand, their individual voices, personal narratives, and religious messages signify change through their use of public space which was previously unavailable to Muslims.     

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 Politics of Paradox: Leo Strauss’s Biblical Debt to Spinoza (and Kierkegaard)

The political philosopher Leo Strauss is famous for contending that any synthesis of reason and revelation is impossible, since they are irreconcilable antagonists. Yet he is also famous for praising the secular regime of liberal democracy as the best regime for all human beings, even though he is well aware that modern philosophers such as Spinoza thought this regime must make use of biblical morality to promote good citizenship. Is democracy, then, both religious and secular? Strauss thought that Spinoza was contradictory in teaching that reason and revelation should be separated from each other while also insisting that a secular democratic politics still requires the biblical morality of charity (love thy neighbor as thyself). The paradox that liberal democracy is both religious and secular, which is central to Spinoza, was dismissed by Strauss as a Machiavellian subterfuge or the cynical attempt to use religion for political purposes. In order to adhere to his dualistic separation of reason and revelation, Strauss turned to ancient Greek political philosophy, particularly the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, as the true ground of liberal democracy since this classical tradition was never exposed to biblical revelation. Yet, the illiberal and hierarchical implications of Greek political thought, which clash with Strauss’s modern views on human individuality and dignity, ultimately take him back to the biblically based philosophies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, who teach the paradox that the Bible is the true foundation of human freedom.     

JEWISH FOREIGN POLICY: ISRAEL,WORLD JEWRY AND THE DEFENCE OF “JEWISH INTERESTS”

Is there such a thing as a “Jewish foreign policy”? This article argues that Jewish foreign policy does in fact exist. It is not Israeli foreign policy, nor is it an aggregation of American Jewish political power and interests. Jewish foreign policy is not controlled by the Israeli Prime Minister, nor is it led by the myriad of Jewish communal organizations in the United States or elsewhere. It defies the traditional ‘Israel-diaspora’ dichotomy that all too often defines Jewish political discourse. Jewish foreign policy, like other systems of foreign policy, has its own distinctive set of interests and actors. It is a complex, informal, and de-centralized system of ethno-nationalist foreign policy. This article maps out the Jewish foreign policy system. In doing so, the following questions are addressed: Who are the actors involved? What are its interests? What are the challenges and problems facing the system?     

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS AND HAS IT EVOLVED?

Research into consciousness has now become respectable, and much has been written about it. Is consciousness the exclusive property of human beings, or can it be found also in animals? Can machines become conscious? Is consciousness an illusion, and are all mental states ultimately reducible to the movement of molecules? If consciousness is other than matter, what connection does it have with matter? These and others like them are now serious scientific questions in the West. This article discusses consciousness within the frame of the following assertions: Consciousness has evolved from earlier states of awareness to be found in lower forms of life. The current scientific method is too restrictive for the study of conscience and its evolution. In particular classical logic leads scientists to ignore or reject consciousness as a legitimate field of study. Mind and matter, generalized as knowing and being, have equal status.