Should Religious Naturalists Promote a Naturalistic Religion?

Religious naturalism refers here to a view of reality, and it will be contrasted with versions of supernaturalism and of atheistic naturalism. Naturalistic religion refers to certain varieties of religion, especially some inspired by the universality of science and the need for a global ethics. In this essay I explicate why a religious naturalist need not advocate a naturalistic religion. Rather, a religious naturalist can build upon the heritage of religious traditions and be open to, but at the same time be agnostic about, the idea of a nonnatural ground of reality . The religious naturalism I defend has been criticized from various directions: one reviewer in this journal considered it too much indebted to the traditions, and hence "reactionary" and supernaturalistic; another considered it too minimalist in its religion ("virtually nonexistent") as a consequence of the preference for a too sober version of naturalism. My distinction between religious naturalism and naturalistic religion may answer some of these objections.     

Religion and Charitable Financial Giving to Religious and Secular Causes: Does Political Ideology Matter?

Previous research on charitable giving has identified a significant relationship between political conservatism and greater financial giving to charitable causes. Yet that research has not adequately explored the important role of religion in that relationship, nor differences in financial giving targets (i.e., religious congregations, noncongregational religious organizations, and nonreligious organizations). Support for competing theories concerning political ideology, religious practice, and charitable financial giving is assessed using data from the Panel Study on American Ethnicity and Religion (PS‐ARE). For both religious and nonreligious giving, the effect of political ideology is completely mediated by participation in religious and civic practices. These findings support recent arguments on “practice theory” in cultural sociology and suggest that it is less the effect of ideology than of active participation in religious, political, and community organizations that explains Americans’ financial giving to religious and nonreligious organizations.     

From stimulus-driven to appraisal-driven attention: Towards differential effects of goal relevance and goal relatedness on attention?

The Component Process Model posits that attention is appraisal-driven rather than stimulus-driven and that the appraisal of relevance is of critical importance in such a mechanism. This means that any stimulus can attract attention or not depending on how relevant it is appraised. This hypothesis was tested in an implicit border similarity judgement task, in which thirsty participants were presented with bottles and vases that were respectively very relevant and weakly relevant to their goal to quench their thirst. These stimuli were also presented to quenched participants for whom none of the stimuli was relevant. The findings support the idea that our attention is more likely to be appraisal-driven than stimulus-driven, since bottles produced an attentional interference in thirsty participants only. It was also observed that, even if vases were judged weakly relevant by thirsty participants, they produced an attentional interference compared to empty stimuli, which was not the case in the quenched participants group. The concept of goal relatedness was proposed as an explanation for this result, and methodological implications were also discussed.     

Are Religious Women More Traditionalist? A Cross-National Examination of Gender and Religion

Does national context shape the relationship between religious attendance and women's gender ideologies? Although previous studies have examined gender and religion within a single national context (and often in a single faith community), few have done so using a cross-national comparative perspective. This has left a significant gap in our understanding of how gender and religion operate in distinctive national contexts. Relying on survey data collected in 37 countries, this study analyzes how the relationship between religious attendance and women's gender ideologies is conditioned by their country's gender inequality. The findings indicate that while women's religious attendance is, on average, negatively related to egalitarian gender ideologies, this association is conditioned by religious affiliation. The relationship is also contingent on the level of gender inequality experienced, and grows weaker in countries with more prominent gender inequality. This study reveals the mechanisms that contextualize the intersection of gender and religion.     

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

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

Mourning Religion? Celebrating Transformation! From Loss to Gain,from Depression to Melancholia

The article raises some questions about issues in the recently published volume Mourning religion, edited by Parsons et al. (2008).     

Does Religion Breed Trust? A Cross‐National Study of the Effects of Religious Involvement,Religious Faith,and Religious Context on Social Trust

Many previous studies have linked religiosity to social trust. Yet much of this relation remains insufficiently understood, which is partly due to the fact that religiosity is a multidimensional phenomenon. In this article, we identify several of those dimensions, including the integration in religious communities, the importance of God in people's lives, and the religious context. These dimensions give rise to different mechanisms that produce both trust‐enhancing and trust‐reducing effects. Data from the European Values Survey (2008) were used to test the resulting hypotheses, using multilevel logistic regression models. We conclude that the micro effects are ambivalent: integration in religious communities furthers trust, whereas religious socialization and the importance of God lower trust. On the macro level, we find a strong effect of Protestantism, which is in line with previous studies, but that remains puzzling since the individual‐level difference between Protestants and the other religious traditions was found to be very small. In addition, in contrast to other studies, we found that religious diversity increases social trust.     

The Return of Religion to North American Public Education?

Books reviewed:
Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and Secular University
D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion, Religious Studies in American Higher Education
Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia     

Religion,Prejudice, and Authoritarianism: Is RWA a Boon or Bane to the Psychology of Religion?

In research on religiosity and prejudice, right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) has been studied alongside variables such as fundamentalism and orthodoxy. Four concerns regarding research on the relationship between RWA and religiosity are identified: (1) the overlap of religiosity and prejudice within the RWA scale; (2) the inflation of relationships by correlating part‐whole measures; (3) covariation in the extremes of the construct hiding the possible independence of components within RWA; and (4) statistical artifacts arising in multiple regression from the combination of these factors. We elaborate these four issues and then demonstrate how they can lead to different interpretations of some previously published data. The article concludes with suggestions for the management and resolution of these issues that may allow RWA to continue to be used in religiosity and prejudice research and how it might evolve to become the boon to researchers that they seek.     

Rise of Pilgrims on the Camino to Santiago: Sign of Change or Religious Revival?

There is a renewed interest amongst scholars in the practice of pilgrimage. Over the past two decades, pilgrim numbers have risen significantly, whilst forms of “implicit” or “alternative” spirituality have gained visibility and now coexist with organised religions, sometimes sharing the same ritualistic space. There is probably no better place to look at the coexistence of old and new forms of ritual expression than in the Camino to Santiago. To better understand the meanings attributed to this pilgrimage, we undertook a survey with over 470 pilgrims at various locations along the Camino. The findings confirm that individuals with various, often contrasting, motivations and expectations walk side by side on this pilgrimage route. We suggest that the results cannot be read simplistically as either confirming a “post-secularisation” trend or a religious revival.     

Reading paradigms: From lab to cyberspace?

Computer-controlled display procedures useful for doing reading research are discussed. The procedures used in the present research vary the text unit size (from single words to half-sentences), the amount of context available (no context and varying amounts of prior text), text movement (centered words or successive left-to-right placement), and use of text highlighting (present, absent). The data suggest links between the display attributes and the subjects’ coding strategies during reading of mathematical word problems. Display attributes can influence the time course of processing, the subjectively coded unit size, and the nature of linguistic processing. The data also have implications for display attributes that may make reading in cyberspace more user friendly for both novice and expert readers.     

Lifelong Education: From Conflict to Consensus?

The concept of lifelong education received wide criticism and rejection in many educational circles in the 1970s. Recent developments in educational research and the increasing influence of postmodernist thought, the paper argues, are major factors in the return to favour of lifelong education. While a postmodern society is one characterised more by conflict than by consensus, the paper suggests that consensus on the importance of lifelong education might be one precondition for such a society.     

Understanding phenomena: From social to collective?

In making sense of the world, we typically cooperate, join forces, and draw on one another's competence and expertise. A group or community in which there is a well-functioning division of cognitive-epistemic labor can achieve levels of understanding that a single agent who relies exclusively on her own capacities would probably never achieve. However, is understanding also collective? I.e., is understanding something that can be possessed by a group or community rather than by individuals? In this paper, I develop an account of understanding phenomena according to which understanding a phenomenon requires reasonably endorsing an adequate and intelligible epistemic mediator that accounts for this phenomenon. I then show that understanding, conceived along these lines, can be attributed to collective entities. An important result of my arguments will be that a collective entity's understanding cannot (always) be reduced to the sum of the understandings of the individuals belonging to it. This is because a collective entity can sometimes be rightfully claimed to understand a phenomenon while none of its individual members understands it.     

To Buy or Not to Buy? Introducing Philosophy of Religion

Books reviewed in this article:
Beverley Clack and Brian R. Clack, The Philosophy of Religion: A Critical Introduction
Brian Davies OP (ed.), Philosophy of Religion: A Guide to the Subject     

Does Religious Belief Matter for Grief and Death Anxiety? Experimental Philosophy Meets Psychology of Religion

It is commonly reasoned that religious belief moderates death anxiety and aids in coping with loss. However, a philosophical perspective known as meta‐atheism includes the claim that avowed religious believers grieve deaths and experience death anxiety as intensely as avowed atheists. Thus, we report a study comparing religious believers and nonbelievers on measures of death anxiety and grief. We further investigated the relationships between certain religious beliefs (views of God, afterlife belief, religious orientation) and death anxiety, as well as both painful grief reactions and grief‐related growth. We surveyed 101 participants across the United States, ranging in age (19 to 57), education, and ethnicity. Participants avowing some form of religious belief, in comparison to those not, did not demonstrate lower levels of death anxiety. They did, however, display higher levels of a certain type of death acceptance. Additionally, those professing belief reported less grief and greater growth in response to loss. Greater afterlife belief was not associated with less grief; however, it was associated with both greater grief‐related growth and lower death anxiety.     

Do Religious Politicians Take Risks Differently? Evidence From Pakistan

Given popular religiosity, the presence of religious parties, and the politicization of religious issues, it is highly likely that politicians with varying levels of personal religiosity are active in politics. Yet, our knowledge of how politicians’ religiosity influences their political choices is still limited, particularly for developing countries. In this paper, I use data from a survey experiment fielded to Pakistani politicians in 2018 to study whether and how politicians’ personal religiosity influences their political risk preferences. Scholars debate whether religiosity is correlated with higher or lower risk aversion among citizens; however, no study has examined this relationship among politicians. I find that higher religiosity systematically predicts which politicians are more risk-averse and highly religious politicians’ decisions under uncertainty are inconsistent with expected utility maximization and prospect theory. These findings suggest that in contrast to existing assumptions of elite decision-making, politicians’ religiosity systematically influences their risk preferences and choices.