Volume 11 (2015)

In this article, we analyze the causal link between membership in environmental groups and active participation and membership in religious groups. We use a club-based model and employ OLS and spatial econometrics with controls to test for whether membership and participation in a religious group is a substitute or complement for membership in environmental groups. Instrumental variables estimation was used as a robustness check. We found that religious participation and religious membership in evangelical groups are a substitute for environmental membership. Much of the work on environmental concerns has focused on answers to survey questions, not on membership. We used a dataset of environmental membership at the county level to perform our analysis. We further add quantitative evidence to the discussion by some researchers on the link between religion and environmentalism. In this respect, our work aims to investigate further the causal links between religion and environmentalism.

In 2008, two citizens sued the Town of Greece in western New York over sectarian prayer at town government meetings. Their dispute worked its way through the federal courts to the U.S. Supreme Court, and with it came a range of media coverage seeking to explain the constitutional question behind this intersection of church and state. This article explores newspaper coverage of Town of Greece v. Galloway at both the local and national levels to determine how reporters tackled the dual challenge of law and faith at the core of this case. A content analysis of media articles indicates that the hesitancy to cover issues of religion and faith that has been well captured in the literature remains alive and well and is joined by an intriguing finding of confluence of Christian speakers and Christian speech. In addition, issues of accuracy in depicting and describing the nature of the Establishment Clause can create dissonance for the audience as they try to understand the nature of this First Amendment right.

Financial matters are one of the most frequently addressed subjects in the Bible. Using a sample of faculty members from a Christian university, we examine the relationship between Christians' retirement preparation and spiritual practice variables. Although the sample might not represent the retirement savings behavior of all Christians, the results show that the members of this specific Christian group increases retirement savings when they get older and have more knowledge about retirement. However, their savings do not show a strong relationship with spiritual practice activities. Because there are no empirical studies relating Christians' retirement preparation and spiritual activities, our results invite researchers' further investigation into the issue.

This study utilized Steven R. Wilson's (1999) cognitive rules model to analyze persuasion goals in American religious sermons that address obligation situations as well as the information used to support these goals. We coded a purposive sample of thirty sermons that were given in 2013 and 2014, gathered from an extensive sermon database, for evidence of goals and information use. Qualitative content analysis of these sermons revealed rich descriptions of several types of pastors based on their use of persuasion goals in addressing each topic. Analysis supports the claim that the activation of a goal likely occurs after the selection of sermon topic and is strongly affected by that topic. Analysis also found that the Bible was used as an information source in a larger number of sermons than other sources but accounted for a smaller percentage of the total sermon text, possibly an indication that the Bible needs less explanation, as it represents a shared information source that congregants are expected to know already.

Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus pertains to matters of biblical interpretation as much as it does to political philosophy. In addition to laying the groundwork for a method of biblical interpretation in his seventh chapter, Spinoza engages in biblical exegesis throughout his work. Among the many portions of the Bible that he uses and discusses are the Psalms. An examination of Spinoza’s highly selective use of Psalms shows this use to be apologetical. Spinoza used the Psalms as part of his defense of his political philosophy, wherein he privatized religion, handing over public religious matters (such as ritual) into the hands of the secular state.

In recent decades, the effects of religious pluralism on religious participation has been a much debated topic among sociologists of religion. During most of the 20th century, the traditional view among sociologists was that pluralism undermines religion because competition between religious organizations was assumed to impair the credibility of religion as such. In the 1980s, however, this view was challenged by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, and since then, the debate about the effects of religious pluralism has been lively. A central point of the discussion has been the relationship between religious pluralism and religious participation in Europe and whether or not Europe should be described as secularized. In this article, some points in the debates about the relationship between religious pluralism and religious participation and about the religious situation in Europe are discussed from a theoretical perspective and illustrated by empirical data from Sweden.

A growing body of research has documented the influence of negative religious coping on indicators of emotional distress. To extend this line of research, we examined whether neuroticism, fading affect, and religiousness could influence the relationship between negative religious coping and two forms of emotional distress (depressed mood and negative affective state) in a sample of 116 college students. Results of this exploratory study indicated that neuroticism did not act as a confounding variable for the relationship between negative religious coping and emotional distress. However, fading affect emerged as a partial mediator, while religiosity was found to be a moderating variable in the relationship between negative religious coping and emotional distress. Differences were also found between religious and nonreligious life events.

The dynamics of charisma in social interaction are analyzed through an examination of ninety-three incidents in the Gospels in which Jesus confronts specific individuals face to face. His charisma is shown in the pattern in which Jesus always win an encounter, is always quick and absolutely decisive, seizes the initiative by doing something unexpected, anticipates what the other person is intending, and is master of the crowd. Jesus' low moments happen when he is isolated or when political crowds are against him. The social settings of Jesus' miracles are also analyzed.

Data from Gallup polls and the U.S. Department of State indicate that nations that score high in religiosity may or may not have strongly opposed human trafficking. However, nations that are low in religiosity have consistently opposed human trafficking. In this article, we investigate relationships between religiosity, religion, and poverty in nineteen Asian countries. The purpose is to identify opportunities to use either economic aid or religion-based social marketing appeals to oppose trafficking. A Spearman’s rho correlation indicated a statistically significant relationship between poverty and religiosity. Religiosity was significantly positively related to the percentage of Muslims in the country and significantly negatively related to the percentage of members of “Other” religions. Overall, the most attractive segments for religion-based social marketing appeals were Hindus and Muslims.

Since the 1960s, there has been a substantial increase in the number of known conversions from Islam to Christianity. Most of these conversions have been to forms of evangelical or Pentecostal Christianity, but there have also been conversions to Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and still other converts claim to remain in some way both Muslims and followers of Jesus. This article ex- plains how we obtained estimates of the number of converts, the complexities involved in this task, and an annotated list of countries by continent with the estimated number of believers in Christ from a Muslim background. The article includes charts with maximal, minimal, and medium estimates of this population from 1960 to the present.

Studies often find that the more active members of a congregation also contribute the most money to the church. However, because these studies typically rely on cross-sectional data, the causation is unclear. Does increased participation lead to more giving, or does more giving increase participation? Moreover, one influential paper found that gifts of time and money are substitutes; in other words, increased financial support causes decreased religious participation. Using a unique time-series data set from a moderately large mainline Protestant congregation, I was able to track annual giving by members who had been elected to the congregation’s governing board. This allowed me to isolate how changes in participation correlate with changes in financial giving over time. The results support the hypothesis that increased participation leads to increased monetary contributions. Serving in this leadership capacity leads to a significant increase in giving that is sustained for a period of at least several years after leaving the position.

Most Christian denominations in the United States have more female than male adherents. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is no exception. However, the sex ratio imbalance within Mormonism is not uniform across the nation. The imbalance is more pronounced in Utah, a traditional Mormon stronghold and site of the church’s headquarters. In this article, we examine potential causes and consequences of the sex ratio imbalance among Utah Mormons. We argue that Mormon men in Utah are abandoning the church at higher rates than they were a decade ago, leaving a surplus of women. We show how this trend coincides with a decline in the LDS Church’s religious market share in Utah. We close by discussing the implications of our findings for the sociology of religion.

Growing access to digital technology in India has led to increased reliance on the interface between religion and social media. The Internet provides traditional religious authorities with tools with which they can reinforce their official practices and beliefs. However, the Internet is also capable of generating multiple meanings from religious and nonreligious content. The multiplicity of meanings can establish a segregated, polarized, and nonhierarchical space. In this article, I seek to understand the use of faith memes on the churches’ Facebook pages. I focus on issues such as authority and the lack of participation that are involved in the use of faith memes as expressions of religious faith. I also analyze the online responses to the faith memes as projected through online tools such as “comment” and “like.” The analysis reflects a form of participatory social action on Facebook that may relate to the traditional hierarchical structure of Sacred Heart Cathedral Church (a Catholic church) and Abundant Life Church East Delhi (a Protestant church) as reflected in their Facebook pages. I employ visual rhetorical analysis of the two churches’ Facebook pages to comprehend social media’s interface with religion. I chose the sample of a Catholic church page and a Protestant church page in an attempt to provide a balanced analysis of the two largest Christian communities in India.

Current debates about the extent and direction of secularization need to take into account the possibility of paganization - not the decline of religion but its fragmentation. One powerful factor that has been shaping all aspects of contemporary culture is revolutionary information technologies, notably the Internet. This article explores these issues through examination of the partial electronic resurrection of the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a religious organization that was well documented during its remarkable rise to public prominence in the years 1963-1975 but has apparently been defunct since then. Four current manifestations that are visible online are (1) Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, which was derived from one selected element of the former Process religious tradition; (2) musical groups such as Sabbath Assembly that offer desacralized forms of Processean transcendence in YouTube videos; (3) enduring bodies of Process literature distributed online that offer concepts, metaphors, and values that contrast with majority viewpoints; and (4) low-commitment online communities that provide a measure of social stimulation and fellowship, such as three Process groups on Facebook. Paganization challenges traditional definitions of religion, as the fact that the Process originated as a form of psychotherapy illustrates, and both new theories and new methods may be needed for Internet-based research into the dynamic between secularization and paganization.