Volume 1 (2005)

Economists of religion have show a strong relationship between religious pluralism and religious vitality. Likewise, many scholars have associated the presence of religious pluralism in a country with the degree to which a government regulates its religious economy. A relatively free religious market enhances pluralism, which in turn promotes religious participation. But this begs a further question: Why do political actors choose to regulate or deregulate the religious economy? In other words, what political factors determine the level and nature of religious liberty? In contrast to explanations that see religious liberty arising from the natural progression of intellectual history, I argue that laws and regulations governing religious organizations are determined by variables that affect the political self-interest of government officials . Although there are often strong reasons why politicians would want to create regulations that favor a monopolistic church, political actors will liberalize the religious market when such action favors their political survival and ability to attract government revenue and/or enhances economic growth and trade. Moreover, religious deregulation is more likely to occur under conditions in which it is difficult to suppress natural religious pluralism. The development of religious liberty in the United States and in Latin America is offered as preliminary examples of how this deductive theory can be applied.

Data from a large, four-language web-based questionnaire, supplemented with data from the General Social Survey, allow us to explore possible sources of Atheism, notably the hypothesis that lack of social obligations encourages disbelief in God. The analysis is rooted in the compensator theory of religion, first proposed twenty-five years ago, but it incorporates a recent addition: the distinction between primary and secondary compensation. Social obligations make secondary compensation important, because it substitutes a compensator for a reward that a person is obligated to provide to another person. The data show that Atheism is indeed more common among people whose social obligations are weak. The analysis also traces connections between Atheism and the demographic fertility collapse that has been occurring in most advanced industrial nations, suggesting that secularization might best be understood in the context of declining social obligations.

The article applies the theory of religious niches to the intra-Islamic religious markets, with a special focus on Turkey. In normal conditions, these niches conform to general principles of religious economy. The ultrastrict and strict niches are smaller than the “central” moderate and conservative niches. Distortions in religious economies occur in what the article calls “religious war economies” (i.e., military conflicts perceived as religious) and “economies of war against religion” (i.e., governmental intervention against all organized religious groups). In the first case (e.g., Palestine, Iraq), there is in fact a war-caused modification of religious demand, with an expanded demand for ultrastrict religion. In the second case (e.g., Algeria, Turkey before 2002), the state effectively prevents moderate and conservative religious supply to meet the demand, with the unintended effect that in part this demand is captured by the ultrastrict groups, which are much more accustomed to operating illegally or against state pressure. Data about Turkey after the 2002 and 2004 elections confirm that when conservative and moderate religious supply is free to operate, ultrastrict alternatives enjoy only limited success.

Temples in China participate in the competition for believers and are active players in the religious economy. The managers of the most successful new temples engage in strategic decision making about marketing, promotion, innovation, and public activities to increase the visibility and appeal of their temples. We illustrate with examples and data from our studies of eight new temples to the deity Wong Tai Sin (Huang Daxian) in Guangdong and Zhejiang between the late 1980s and 2004.

The religious economy approach in the social scientific study of religion emphasizes the importance of supply-side factors in stimulating religious demand. Where many religious firms compete in a relatively unregulated market, levels of religious belief and participation will be far higher than in situations in which religious life is regulated by the state either in favor of a monopoly church or to constrain the market by subsidizing a state church and making it difficult for other religious groups to compete. Changes in the level of competition should thus be followed by changes in the level of popular religious commitment. This prediction is strongly supported when applied to recent religious trends in Italy.

The role of social and symbolic boundaries has a long history in the sociology of religion. These concepts have taken on more importance with the proposition that religious boundaries are in a state of restructuring. I draw upon theory and research on organizations and religion to create hypotheses concerning the creation and structure of religious boundaries. Using a subsample from the National Congregations Study, I analyze the outgoing hyperlinks of 231 congregational websites as a measure of social and symbolic boundaries. The results show a relationship between theological conservatism and excluding other religious groups from a congregation’s boundaries and including religious media, parachurch groups, and religious resources. Religious tradition predictors also produce significant variations in religious boundaries.

Scholars of religion, including such luminaries as Durkheim, Rappaport, Turner, and Weber, have widely assumed that religion promotes intragroup trust among adherents. Recent applications of signaling theory to religious behavior among economists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary anthropologists further endorse this assumption. However, trust has not been rigorously or consistently defined across authors, making generalizations difficult to evaluate. Here I follow Bacharach and Gambetta’s (2001) behavioral definition of trust and show that the conditions for intragroup trust are often not met in religious communities, especially isolationist and closed communities to which high levels of trust are typically ascribed. Rather, in such communities, cooperation is maintained through institutional structures that effectively punish cheaters and enhance the value of an honest reputation. These groups gainfully facilitate collective action by offering a circumscribed social arena in which reputations can be built, evaluated, rewarded, and efficiently punished. While face-to-face reciprocal relations obviate the need for trusting behavior within closed religious communities, when social groups are fluid, religious practices and symbolic markers are successful in promoting trust among in-group members and anonymous coreligionists who reside in different communities. In addition, these religious badges of identity may be used by non-group members as signals of trustworthiness.

Present in Brazil since 1972, the Gnostic Church of Brazil (Igreja Gnóstica do Brasil) is a neo-esoteric organization that combines traditional and late-modern characteristics. After situating the Gnostic Church of Brazil within Brazil’s contemporary neo-esoteric milieu, this article offers a brief description of the organization, its discourse, and its practice. The remainder of the article is given over to detailing and interpreting research data gathered via interview, questionnaire, and participant observation. Drawing on empirical research and theoretical reflection in light of contemporary academic treatments of religion in Brazil, this article examines a number of late-modern dynamics as they are refracted through a particular occupant of Brazil’s increasingly fluid religious field.

Social scientists have long drawn on church-sect theory to explain religious variation and change. One of the theorys key insights is that, over time, sectarian movements tend to be transformed into churches. The most commonly cited factor in this process is upward intergenerational mobility. For years, social scientists believed that the primary cause of this upward mobility was the sectarian lifestyle itself, but Stark and Bainbridge (1985) have argued that a substantial amount of upward mobility must occur as a simple matter of regression to the mean, suggesting that sectarian movements should demonstrate more intergenerational mobility than nonsectarian movements do. Using conservative Protestantism as a test case and drawing on log-linear techniques, I put the Stark-Bainbridge hypothesis to a test. Specifically, I compare the intergenerational occupational mobility of conservative Protestants with that of individuals who belong to other religious traditions (or those who report no religious affiliation). I find that conservative Protestants are significantly more likely to demonstrate upward intergenerational mobility than are members of other major religious traditions and American society as a whole. I conclude with suggestions for future research.

The so-called Antioch incident (Galatians 2:11–14) has puzzled New Testament scholars for a long time. Some scholars have suggested that the problem in Antioch was related to Jewish purity regulations and that Jews during antiquity considered Gentiles to be ritually impure, which complicated social contacts between Jews and Gentiles. The Jewish Jesus-believers in Antioch are usually assumed to have stopped observing the traditional purity regulations as a consequence of their general repudiation of the Torah, and this is generally believed to have been the underlying source of the conflict. However, the most recent research on Jewish purity regulations and Jewish views of Gentiles suggests that Jews in general considered Gentiles to be not ritually but morally impure, mainly because of their involvement in Greco-Roman religion. Furthermore, an increasing number of scholars argue that it is unlikely that Jewish Jesus-believers ceased to observe the Torah. This article suggests a radically new way of picturing the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish adherents to the Jesus movement. It argues that some parts of the Jesus movement began to consider non-Jewish adherents to the Jesus movement to be holy and morally pure in spite of these Gentiles’ sociopolitically motivated involvement in Greco-Roman cultic activities. The fact that Jews within the Jesus-believing community in Antioch began to consider the Jesus-believing Gentiles to be covenant partners affected the degree of commensality, which was the real source of the conflict in Antioch.

Social scientists often explain religious effects in terms of religious group affiliations. Typically, researchers identify religious groups by denomination or some broader popular categorization, such as “fundamentalist” or “evangelical.” To capture religious differences more effectively, Steensland et al. (2000) propose an intricate classification of American denominations that takes into account the theology and historical development of various American religious traditions to predict individual attitudes and behaviors. We believe that equal care and attention should be devoted to the development of key measures of belief that may cross denominational lines. In this article, we propose one such measure: personal conceptions or images of God. Our simple measure of conceptions of God predicts church attendance rates, belief in biblical literalism, political party identification, attitudes toward abortion, and attitudes about sexual morality. In addition, this indicator provides a means to understand variation within religious traditions. Views of God’s character provide a straightforward way to describe religious differences and an efficient means to demonstrate how religion affects the world.

If we assume that there are few remaining external barriers to religious assimilation for Jews in the United States, a fundamental question arises: Why do some Jews exit Judaism, while others choose to stay with the religion? One of the major themes in the literature about American Judaism is that the reformulation of Jewish theology and practice instigated by some Jewish leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was necessary to strengthen the religion. They believed that if Jews were required to continue in their traditional ways, they would only become disillusioned and leave the faith. Some researchers agree that a traditional and exclusive Jewish religion with its focus on strict ritual observance, the coming of a Messiah, and a book of law dictated by God to Moses will not retain members. They argue that religious adherents will be most effectively retained by groups that are more socially appealing. In contrast, others assert that only commitment to a unique religious culture that socially encapsulates members will retain them. In this article, I investigate whether traditional Jewish observance has a different impact on Jewish retention rates than does adhering to a less costly, socially oriented form of the religion. Specifically, potential causes of the variable retention rates observed between Jews living in the East and West Coast regions are considered. I conclude that the evidence indicates that a retention strategy that promotes unique religious practice provides a stronger basis for religious group persistence.