Volume 14 (2018)

Building on a recent article that introduced Jesus’s social network, this study uses social network analysis to examine the structure of Jesus’s social network in more depth. The analyses investigate the interpersonal connections recorded in the four Gospels of the New Testament, and they focus on three main categories of actors with whom Jesus had ties: his family and followers, the civil and religious authorities, and stigmatized people. This study utilizes three analytical techniques to describe the structure of Jesus’s social network: (1) subgroup analysis to identify smaller cohesive communities, (2) blockmodeling analysis to examine different roles and positions, and (3) balance analysis to explore patterns of interpersonal tension. These analyses describe the social dynamics that surrounded Jesus’s life and ministry. Key findings highlight how Jesus compassionately integrated many who were marginalized and stigmatized into his social network, how a key source of conflict between Jesus and the other religious leaders involved how to treat stigmatized people, and how interpersonal tensions contributed to but also provided unexpected sources of support during the major crisis in Jesus’s life: his betrayal, crucifixion, and burial.

This paper explores the role of emotional warmth and dislike towards a variety of religious groups in the shaping of support of sexual minorities. Previous research indicates that hostility towards sexual minorities is linked to lower support for their rights. Theories of symbolic hostility, or favorability, suggest that emotional feelings towards religious groups may also influence support for the rights of sexual minorities. Regression models indicate that support or nonsupport of sexual minority rights are associated with attitudes towards religious groups even after controlling for attitudes towards sexual minorities as well as other social and demographic factors. While overall political ideology and attitudes towards sexual minorities have stronger relationships to support of sexual minorities’ rights, there is no denying the consistency of the finding of the impact of attitudes towards religious groups, especially those who dislike Christian fundamentalists. Emotional warmth or coolness towards Muslims, however, were not strongly associated with attitudes towards the rights of sexual minorities. Given the controls of emotional warmth or coolness towards sexual minorities, and the differential effects tied to Muslim dislike, these results suggest that part of support of sexual minorities is tied to whether a respondent dislikes conservative Christians.

Western concepts of religious identity developed from worldviews that posit a permanent self and require exclusive acceptance of a single religion for salvation. These assumptions become problematic, however, when applied to traditions holding different worldviews. As a result, Western religious demographic research uses categories that do not accurately reflect many practitioners' understanding of themselves and their religious paths. New approaches are needed to assess contemporary religious identity. A 2011 survey of participants in the Buddhist Churches of America asked respondents, 'Would you describe yourself as Buddhist?' Response options included the new category: 'yes, sort of.' While the majority answered that they were 'definitely' Buddhist, 15 percent chose the 'sort of' option. We explore potential motives for this selection from multiple perspectives including a brief overview of Buddhist philosophy and teaching regarding the nature of self, a review of previous literature on Buddhist identity, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of new and existing data. Our literature review and qualitative results suggest that the choice of Sort-of Buddhist identity reflects an understanding of religious identity grounded in Buddhist teaching regarding the 'self' as impermanent and interdependent. We also identify a pattern in which individuals who began attending Buddhist temples as adults are disproportionately likely to identify as 'sort of' Buddhist, even though they respond similarly to 'definitely' Buddhists on measures of religious participation. Finally, we suggest that contemporary ambivalence toward exclusive religious identity in the U.S. may also be a factor in choosing a 'sort of' religious identity.

In response to calls for more theoretically informed attention to gender in sociological studies of religious phenomena (Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015; Charlton 2015; Cornwall 2009), this paper conceptualizes religion as a gendered institution (Avishai 2016a) in an examination of religious exit from a conservative Christian group, namely, the Amish. The present study identifies gender variation in individuals’ motivations for exit and considers how gendered religious ideologies, gendered placement in religious organizational structures, and gendered religious practices explain this variation. Based on analysis of qualitative interviews with fifty- nine former Amish adults, I find that concerns about gender inequity motivated some respondents, almost entirely women, to leave. Men’s and women’s other motivations for exit appear more similar on the surface, but closer examination reveals variation by gender. Analysis reveals that the intersection of religion and gender in the Amish context differently shaped men’s and women’s religious realities and, therefore, colored in some way all of their reasons for leaving. These results suggest that most of the previous research on religious exit, which either overlooks gender entirely (e.g., Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1997; Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt 2013; Shaffir 1997; Smith 2011) or conceives of it narrowly, with little attention to gender theory (e.g., Cottee 2015; Hurst and McConnell 2010; Roozen 1980; Vargas 2012), has misrepresented gender variation in motivations for exit and failed to provide adequate explanation for differences identified. Considering the multiple dimensions through which the institutions of religion and gender intersect allows for a deeper understanding of religious phenomena and provides insights into the ways in which gender is produced and reproduced within religious groups.

Catholic sisters have long played a vital role in addressing the needs of the poor, neglected, and vulnerable members of society. In northeast Ohio, sisters have been instrumental in the arenas of education, healthcare, social service, and advocacy. This research builds on research conducted in 2009 on the characteristics of the ministries of Catholic sisters. Using a survey approach, responses were collected from 358 Catholic Sisters in 12 religious orders, approximately 60 percent of the sisters living in the Diocese of Cleveland. The study explores sisters’ current ministries (work and service), the plans for their ministries to continue, and their perspectives on the future of ministry. The research highlights several avenues for strengthening the transition of ministry activities as the number of retired sisters continues to increase.

This research study explores a Filipino-American community that is “mostly Catholic,”† meaning that Filipino members of the Philippine-American Ecumenical Church of the United Church of Christ (PAECUSA-UCC) in Detroit, Michigan, formally affiliate as Catholic, attend Catholic parish on Sunday mornings, but then also actively participate in PAECUSA-UCC, a Protestant congregation, on Sunday afternoons and throughout the week. Drawing from fieldwork completed in Detroit, Michigan, at PAECUSA-UCC, this paper explores the intergenerational impact of religion on second-generation immigrants, Filipino-Americans in this case, and investigates the following questions: What does it mean when a group of people officially affiliate as Catholic but then actively engage in a non-Catholic religious community? What are the implications for official religious affiliation, belief, and belonging? Moreover, what role does religion play on intergenerational immigrant identity? To that end, this paper advances current social scientific understandings of the complex relationship between religious affiliation, culture, and identity in the 21st century.

Previous empirical work has shown that economic freedom increases standards of living, along with other positive aspects of life such as health and literacy. There has yet to be an extensive study, however, of any causal relationship between economic and religious freedom. The research presented here makes use of longitudinal and cross-sectional data on both economic and religious freedom to study the causal relationship. While no definitive causality is identified in these data, the results further the literature on economic freedom and suggest areas for further study of this and all personal liberties.

Prior research demonstrates that religion variables are among the strongest predictors of attitudes toward same-sex sexuality and marriage, with America’s three largest religious traditions (Roman Catholic, evangelical, and mainline Protestant) differentially influencing adherents’ views on same- sex sexuality and marriage, and with religious elites playing key roles in this influence. While a good amount of research has examined the influential role of pastors as religious elites, minimal research has focused on the seminaries and seminary professors that train America’s future religious leaders. This article reviews basic findings of a 2015 Survey of U.S. Seminary Faculty on Sexuality and Marriage that surveyed seminary faculty from 100 U.S. seminaries. It compares and contrasts Catholic, evangelical, and mainline Protestant seminaries and their theological faculty and examines 1) faculty stances on same-sex marriage, 2) tradition-related factors associated with such stances, 3) faculty understandings of what such stances should imply for religious communities and civil society, and 4) the extent to which engagement with these issues represents a prioritized focus. It concludes with a discussion of key findings, considers possible futures, and suggests directions for further research.

This article examines the words pain, hurt, religion, and God in American English. Despite the linguistic struggle to describe pain, sufferers discuss pain a great deal; they feel compelled to articulate their pain to engender sympathy or to seek medical treatment. But pain sufferers have not always articulated their pain experiences with the same frequency through time. There is variation in the frequency of pain language in American English. This article analyzes the frequency of the words pain and hurt since the year 1800 in four linguistic corpora: Google Books Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English, Corpus of Historical American English, and Time Magazine Corpus. In addition, this study includes a unique perspective in that it does not simply examine the frequency of pain words, but the frequency examination is done in light of the increasing secularization of American society. The principal question is this one: does the increase of pain language correspond with the decrease of language dealing with the divine in American English? The data presented show a substantial increase in pain language in American English, particularly since the 1960s, and this growth parallels the era when language related to the divine was in sharp decline.

Christian pilgrimage was one of the most striking phenomena characterising medieval societies. A physical encounter with the relics of saints often constituted the spiritual summit of the pilgrim’s journey. In order to understand the importance of physicality and the rationale behind the veneration of relics, it is necessary to consider the philosophical recategorisation of the human body and the Christological reflections of Christian writers during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This article presents some exemplificative texts, which show the emergence of a Christian philosophy within which the human body assumed a new dignity and new powers. When juxtaposed to these metaphysical and theological discourses, the acts of veneration towards the bodies and relics of saints become intelligible, suggesting that this aspect of medieval spirituality should be seen not merely as a fideistic and irrational phenomenon but rather as the manifestation of an internally coherent cosmology.

Ethnographers of American evangelicalism agree that “the Bible” functions within the subculture as a ritual totem, that Bible study cell groups are crucial social units, and that Bible reading is less about interpreting texts than appropriating their authority for personal applications. The present study, based on three years of fieldwork at a North American evangelical congregation, affirms this consensus while adding a new contribution. Missing from previous studies of “how the Bible works” is the role of Bible visualization in congregational life. This study demonstrates how visual persuasion builds on a penchant in American evangelical culture for visual communication. As this dynamic was observed in situ, congregational culture was subtly altered in ways that contravened the church’s espoused values as connections to printed texts were attenuated, sermons increasingly featured eisegesis (projecting meaning into the biblical text) alongside exegesis (extracting meaning from the text), and congregational life was colonized by evangelical mass culture. Then, too, few studies explore how “mediatization” of religion extends into everyday congregational life. The present study elaborates this perspective and contributes to a growing ethnographic literature on American evangelicalism by describing Bible visualization practices crucial to a subculture with which one in four U.S. adults identifies. In so doing, field observations are analyzed through an extension of Petty and Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model that accounts for cognitive- cultural models as persuasive cues.

Although reliable statistics do not exist, there is little doubt that The Church of Almighty God (CAG), one of the largest contemporary new religious movements born in Mainland China, experienced a phenomenal growth since its origins in 1991. Some critics explain this growth through unique tactics of recruitment, including kidnapping members of other churches to convert them. They also allege that CAG members conceal their religious affiliation from their families and that the movement has a low opinion of the role of the family in general. An analysis of CAG teachings about the family do not support this conclusion, however. A survey conducted in 2018 with responses from more than 500 CAG members in South Korea, the United States, and the Philippines, more than 60 percent of whom were refugees from China, led to the conclusion that most devotees who converted in China were recruited by members of their family and in turn tried to convert family members to the CAG, while the majority of the non-Chinese who joined the CAG abroad were not converted by their relatives, although they later tried to convert them. Sociologists such as Rodney Stark and Roger Finke warned against underestimating the role of doctrines in the growth of religious movements, and clearly a key factor explaining the CAG’s success is that many regard its holy scripture, The Word Appears in the Flesh, as persuasive. Family networks, however, are also a factor in the rapid expansion of CAG in China.

Religiosity in the United States remains a strong social force. The United States persistently demonstrates higher religious participation than Europe. Some recent trends documented by the Pew Research Center in its 2008 and 2015 publications on the U.S. religious landscape, however, cite evidence that different religious groups are experiencing very different trends in participation. These trends show a recent and significant decline among many moderate Protestant denominations but a modest increase in participation at fundamentalist churches. The Pew Research Center similarly documents significant inconsistencies between what a religious hierarchy teaches versus what individuals personally choose to believe. For example, and perhaps most strikingly, one-half of Christians believe that non-Christian religions can lead to salvation. This finding presents a significant challenge to a religious hierarchy: will members of the church actually embrace and live what the church teaches? Another implication is to argue that an “us” versus “them” perspective with respect to religion is counterproductive and can lead to increased tension between faith traditions and the members of those faith traditions. This paper appeals to an interdisciplinary approach in order to help better understand the factors that explain these trends. This paper suggests that religious identity is personal and a consequence of a myriad of potentially interactive factors that leave traditional measures and definitions of religious identity poorly suited to the study of religious behavior.

Previous data collections have demonstrated that the state discriminates against religions in many ways, but few offer measures on societal discrimination, and none collect data on societal discrimination using religious minorities as the unit of analysis. This study introduces and presents the Religion and State round 3 (RAS3) dataset as a comprehensive collection including a newly collected Societal Module as well as a revised Minorities Module. The Societal Module offers important new measures on societal actions against religious minorities as well as the actions of minorities against other religious groups. This data includes a wide range of discriminatory behaviors ranging from specific forms of harassment and economic discrimination to specific forms of physical violence. Each of these measures was collected for 183 nations and for 771 religious minorities which includes all minorities meeting a 0.25 percent population cutoff as well as some smaller minorities. This study reviews and evaluates the RAS3 collection and finds a high level of reliability and validity for most of the newly constructed indexes and the measures they include.

Utilizing linguistics and literary criticism as the interpretive framework, hermeneut Luz Aurora Pimentel elaborated the theoretical concept of “metaphoric narration.” Metaphoric narration is the intellectual semiotic, or meaning-making, process of metaphorization at the level of the text; in other words, Pimentel has experimented with the possibility of metaphor in the context of the whole of a work rather than just in the context of a sentence. This article tests Pimentel’s experiment by applying the theory of metaphoric narration to a close reading of Hadewijch of Brabant’s “Vision 1,” asking the question, Does the theory of metaphoric narration assist in analyzing narrative expression of lived, mystical experience? In working through an interpretation of this text utilizing Pimentel’s theory, findings indicate that there are characteristics of metaphoric narration that Hadewijch has leveraged in order to transmute her spiritual experience into written language that is mimetic of that lived experience. This detailed study indicates that metaphoric narration may be a useful analytical approach of interest to medieval scholars, as it utilizes semiotics rather than psychoanalysis for its interpretive reference. It will also be of interest to literary studies in its articulation of the expressive possibilities offered by metaphoric narration, and to those in religious studies with an interest in mysticism but limited knowledge of either Hadewijch or literary methods of analysis.

This research describes and analyzes the ways in which adult Ukrainian Baptists who lived under communist rule interpreted and made meaning of memories of state-sanctioned religious persecution they experienced as children. A case study approach provides the framework for the qualitative study. Qualitative methods employed include in-depth interviews, fieldwork in settings where Ukrainian Baptists discussed their experiences under Soviet rule, and content analysis of documents pertaining to persecution toward Baptists by Soviets. Respondents in interviews and fieldwork settings consistently described state sanctioned persecution that sought to dominate and intimidate them and their sense of alienation from the dominant Soviet culture. Documents analyzed came from the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Adolf Klaupiks Collection, and the Albert Wardin Files. Themes of intended domination, intimidation, and exclusion of Baptists were mirrored in the document content analysis. Interviews and fieldwork revealed that setting tight boundaries of inclusion enabled Baptists under Soviet rule to construct worthy identities within their group based on adherence to their faith and survival. Baptist adults acknowledged childhood memories associated with state-sanctioned religious persecution resulted in survival strategies oriented towards close bonds with other Baptists and tight group boundaries associated with high levels of religious bonding capital. Adults reported greater caution when describing contemporary interactions with Ukrainian non-Baptists in their efforts to create ties of religious bridging capital. Past memories of religious persecution, however, failed to inhibit Baptist adults totally from engaging in building relationships outside of their group, building bridging capital, and envisioning a significant role for Baptists in caring for others. We found that individuals and tightly bonded groups of Baptists carried their beliefs and ideas through the era of Soviet rule. These beliefs and ideas today foster the resilience and cautious but steady construction of bridging capital with others beyond the bonded circle of already faithful Ukrainian Baptists.