Volume 16 (2020)

This paper argues and demonstrates that Calvinism, contradicting its claim to be the only true Christian and reformed religion, reverses the Christian Biblical injunction and desideratum that the "last shall be the first". In terms of social stratification, this injunction represents the mass social-psychological manifestation of the revolt of oppressed social classes against their oppressor class. Calvinism, by effectively inverting it into the "first shall remain the first", becomes an expression and justification of oppression and domination by the ruling social class over other classes. The main argument is that orthodox Calvinism constitutes both the product of a social stratification system in which the "first shall be the first" and, once established as the predominant religion, the religious and ideological reproducer of such a system of perpetual and widespread societal inequality, including economic and political. Specific hypotheses specify this argument with respect to particular dimensions of the system of social stratification. Both historical observations and comparative data largely support the argument and hypotheses. Especially, comparative data confirm that the legacy of Calvinism, including Puritanism, in the US and other historically Calvinist/Puritan countries is pervasive wealth and income inequality and persistent and widespread poverty by comparison to most Western and comparable societies.

"Being a man" in today’s world is a challenging and confusing task. Culture and religion, the two main sources from which men construct their identities, now have an important addition: the popular media. How men perceive themselves, however, is important because it has repercussions for women with respect to how they relate with women. Indeed, emerging studies on masculinity show that perceptions of what it means "to be a man" equally affect men who may be at risk because of their disposition to life. Previous studies on masculinity in the Hebrew Bible largely isolate and explain the qualities or traits that embody the concept of maleness in ancient Israel. Apart from the social practice of sexual relations, most of the studies, however, are removed from social life practices of Israelite men. For instance, little is known about the relationship between masculinity and health within the Israelite society. Nevertheless, several profane studies indicate that among the factors that shape health related beliefs and behaviors is the sociocultural element of gender. This paper, therefore, departs from previous studies on masculinity in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), by exploring the relationship between wisdom genre (specifically Proverbs) and masculinity, and how they impinge on health.

Based on the theoretical arguments of the context-dependent role of religion as a “bridge” or “barrier” for immigrant outcomes, this study examines the relationship between religiosity and school performance in three European countries.

This article introduces a new data collection on the social networks between religious congregations in eight counties encompassing and surrounding a major metropolitan area in the southeastern United States. Participating congregations were asked to mention up to ten other congregations within the study area with whom they were connected. Of the congregations in the study area, 20% participated, and another 30% were mentioned by a participating congregation as a connection; the larger social network that can be created from this project includes 50% of the congregations in the study area. This article’s initial analyses describe and depict the overall structure of the network, focusing on patterns of cohesion, fragmentation, and centralization, which have implications for congregations’ ability to access friendship and support within the network. Future research from this project will use social network analytic techniques to examine diversity and homogeneity within relational patterns and to analyze the relationships between congregational connectedness, isolation, vitality, and sustainability. This collection addresses a need for network data within sociology of religion and congregational studies, whose scholars often ask questions related to relational dynamics in religious settings but lack the data needed to analyze them.

According to conservative estimates, early Christianity was extraordinarily successful at evangelization: in its first 200 years, its membership increased by a factor of 28. I offer an explanation for the early Church’s success, based on an economic reading of The Didache, an important 1st Century Christian document that deals with church organization. I argue that early Christians were motivated to evangelize, based on a model of non-price competition (Ekelund and Tollison, 2011), and that the Didache reflects this impetus. Specifically, there are three claims that this paper advances. First, that Christianity's difficult and culturally alienating moral strictures were, paradoxically perhaps, important in winning converts. Second, Chapters 11-12 of The Didache, which deal with church organization, balance the needs of evangelism with the necessity of preventing free-riding (Iannaccone, 1992). Third, early Christians placed much weight on the importance of so-called 'prophets and teachers,' specialized labourers who were instrumental in spreading the faith. In these three ways, the Didache provides full expression to a paradigm that is already taking shape in the New Testament.

Places of worship are often vital local institutions, providing needed social services and engaging in the community. Yet, there is much we do not know about why certain congregations are more involved in the community than others. This article looks beyond mission orientation to more deeply examine how theology motivates engagement. Using a multi-method approach, we examine clergy survey data and interview data (n=64) from a single city in the Southern United States to provide an in-depth look at congregational community engagement. Through t-tests, regression analysis, and qualitative analysis, we find that when spiritual and material concerns are theologically linked, congregations are significantly more likely to be engaged in the community. This result holds even when other influences on community engagement are taken into account through a regression model. These findings challenge current distinctions in the literature and emphasize the theological importance of community engagement for some congregations.

In sociology and criminology, a consensus has emerged since the 1980s that there exist three basic forms of social control: informal, legal, and medical. However, Talcott Parsons developed a typology of social control that added a fourth type, namely religious control, which was needed to maintain consistency with his four-function analytical schema. In addition, since the 1980s Michel Foucault’s writings on social control have grown in influence in these fields. One particular aspect of Foucault’s work appears to be both complementary to and subsumable under Parsons’ grand AGIL schema. This is Foucault’s concept of pastoral power, whose four elements or dimensions can be understood as having functional significance for religious social control as developed by Parsons. The study of religion always brings to bear the problem of transcendence, and along the way I confront pertinent elements of idealist philosophy, and especially the phenomenology of Husserl, in this attempt to overcome some of the admitted difficulties in bringing together the thought of Parsons and Foucault.

The article analyses religious discourse on economic practice in three different strands of American Protestantism. It examines the distinct ways in which instructions on economic behavior are derived from a common reference point – the Bible – and assesses the resulting and considerable variation in economic norms, as stated in rules, texts, and cultural materials. The analysis compares instructions out of three communities between the 1970s and 2010s that represent different facets of conservative Protestant religiosity in the United States: (1) the Amish community and its specific economic ethic of simplicity in the Ordnung, derived from Anabaptist principles; (2) mainstream Evangelicalism’s discursive and literary genre of guidebooks dealing with economic wealth; and (3) neo-Pentecostalism’s focus on the Prosperity Gospel, as exemplified by the teachings of Joel Osteen, senior pastor of America’s largest megachurch. Distancing itself from the religious economy approach, the article taps into Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg’s work in New Economic Sociology. Applying the concepts of “moral economy” as well as “social embeddedness,” it examines how the three groups’ discursive instructions conceive of what is morally appropriate economic action given their respective relational, structural, and temporal embeddedness. Methodically, we work with institutional analysis, discourse analysis, and content analysis. We argue that theological interpretations of biblical Scripture are socially embedded in each group’s specific context – distinct forms of social interaction, power dynamics, and histories – and that contextual specifics must necessarily be taken into account to better understand the high diversity of instructions on economic decision-making, even within American Protestantism itself.

Philosophers have debated whether it makes sense to say that the dead have rights. They certainly may be granted some control over posthumous events, such as the disposal of their property. From the 13th century on, the new doctrine of Purgatory gave people an incentive to provide prayers and good works that would shorten their period of suffering after death. This had important consequences: a flowering of ritual, art and architecture; greatly increased wealth for the Catholic Church; the establishment of endowments to yield a perpetual income; and the rise of testamentary freedom as an alternative to primogeniture. The Protestant Reformation abolished Purgatory, but retained many of its social and economic consequences.