Volume 17 (2021)

Scholarly research on U.S. religious congregations and political activity has tended to focus on Christian traditions and denominations. Yet from a comparative perspective, synagogues as institutional locations for political activity are an intriguing topic for investigation because the existing literature on American Jewish political behavior yields three competing hypotheses about the scope of political activity in synagogues relative to congregations from other religious traditions. This article utilizes the National Congregations Study cumulative data file, comprised of four cross-sectional survey waves, to test these hypotheses by comparing political activity in synagogues with political activity in evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, black Protestant and Catholic churches as well as other non-Christian congregations. Factor analysis identifies three modes of political activity: electoral, nonelectoral and hosting speakers. ANOVA and post-hoc tests of homogenous subgroups, followed by generalized linear models that control for other factors predictive of political activity, show that the extent to which synagogues engage in politics relative to other religious congregations varies across different modes of political activity. Synagogues are neither consistently more likely to engage in political activity than other congregations, nor consistently less likely to do so. Instead, like other religious congregations, synagogues appear to emphasize some kinds of political activity and de-emphasize other types, thereby displaying varied patterns of political activity relative to other congregations. A discussion addresses the significance of the empirical findings for the comparative understanding of congregational political activity, before the paper concludes with implications of the findings for the sociology of American Jewry.

Why do America’s youngest generation disaffiliate from religious communities? How do disaffiliated minority millennials and Generation Z (Gen Z) view religion? How do they navigate their largely religious ethnic communities? Previous research has examined the religiosity of communities of color. However, there is a rising trend of unbelief among Gen Z and minority millennials. This research project investigates the diversity of unbelief among minority millennials and Gen Z; specifically, Filipino-Americans, the second-largest Asian-American group; African-Americans; and Hispanic-Americans. Through 45 in-depth interviews, the following three themes emerge across the interviews: 1) Race and Religion: “Fitting In” and Cultural Hegemony or Cultural Incompatibility and Unbelief; 2) Problematic History, Race, and Religion: The Legacy of Slavery; 3) Cultural Cost of Unbelief: Negotiating Family. Gen Z and minority millennials express skepticism due to past histories related to the church and subsequently question whether their respective race “fits in” with their religion. Despite these criticisms, most minority millennials and Gen Z report themselves as spiritual. Culturally, they tend to highly regard their parents and grandparents, who tend to be deeply religious. Because of these intergenerational ties, they are unlikely to “come out” as unbelievers in the church. This paper also explores the secularization theory and finds support for the multiple secularities hypothesis.

One in four Americans identifies as an evangelical Christian. In the “parallel universe” of the evangelical subculture, gender essentialism is advocated as divine mandate. The material culture that shapes everyday evangelical life reproduces and naturalizes gendered dualism so that egalitarian views are delegitimized and rendered unthinkable. This study contributes to the literature on evangelical gender ideology as it goes beyond written texts and examines the visual language of evangelical material culture. As representative artifacts of this culture, mass-circulation women’s and men’s devotional magazines published by the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination, are analyzed. Their respective designs reveal symbolically potent arrangements of texts, fonts, graphics, images, colors, and patterns that work in combination to tacitly reify evangelical gender norms. Using Hall’s Audience Reception Theory as a framework, the study demonstrates how evangelical institutions encode, and evangelical audiences decode, a dominant reading of gender essentialism in the visual language of mass evangelical material culture.

The relationship between religion and psychopathology is an understudied topic, especially in Chinese societies. Previous studies in the West have indicated that religious involvement is negatively related to depression and suicide, but Western religious beliefs are uncommon in China, and Confucian values guide behaviors, especially in rural areas. In this study we examined whether there is a connection between Confucian values and depression and suicidal ideation in China in 1,618 Chinese rural adults who were recruited for a face-to-face structured interview. An inventory to measure Confucian values (Filial Piety, Harmony, and Female Subordination) and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale were employed. It was found that, among women, harmony and female subordination were related to depression and suicidal ideation. This correlation was not observed among men.

This paper explores the relationship between religious and non-religious giving among Canadians. This paper examines the relative percentages given to religious and secular organizations using pooled data from the Canadian Survey of Household Spending between 2012-2015. The results show that secular giving increases at almost twice the rate of religious giving in response to income increases. In summary, the percentage given to religious organizations decreases with income, but increases with household size and age.