Volume 21 (2025)

Although countries with larger Muslim populations are less likely to be democracies, multi-national individual-level studies question whether Muslims are less democratic. Furthermore, the secular- Islamist cleavage has been linked to diverging democratic sentiment. To unpack the relationship between Islam, Islamism, and regime-type preferences, this study employs a conjoint analysis in Egypt and Morocco. Religious and Islamist Muslims demonstrated limited differences in their attitudes toward participatory democracy compared to their less religious and non-Islamist counterparts. They are substantially different, though, in their support for political Islam; namely, Islamists are more likely to support an official religion and including religious leaders in government. This accords with the argument that Islam is not inherently anti-democratic.

The clergy are a quintessential example of a positive deviance profession. Further, clergy families are usually expected to represent the clergy. In the context of conducting qualitative interviews of clergy and their family members in terms of other issues, it became clear that the labor they perform is extensive and varied. While physical labor is minimal, other types of labor include the following: intellectual labor, unpaid labor, emotional labor, spiritual labor, aesthetic labor, care work, dirty work, and identity work. Additionally, much of this labor is imposed on the family of clergy. Positive deviance professions are demanding and, in the case of the clergy, challenging for the family.

Clergy financial literacy has been discussed as a vital tool to help leaders effectively manage their personal finances and the financial responsibilities of church and parish governance. However, these discussions have not adequately addressed the issue of clergy whose denomination judicatories lack a formalized system of financial literacy training for local employees in leadership positions. This research focuses on Roman Catholic clergy. This case study addresses the issue of clergy who perform parish governance without the benefit of formal financial training. The study findings suggest that managing church finances without being taught how to do so results in feelings of uncertainty and the potential for errors in managing the organization’s financial affairs. The lack of financial oversight or assistance requires the pastor to take it upon himself to ensure that the Church is appropriately administered. In conclusion, by revealing the rarely acknowledged experiences of clergy who do not receive financial training, this case study sheds new light on the importance of clergy financial literacy training.

Contemporary churches face a myriad of challenges that will impact their future. However,the challenges that individual churches face vary according to the church. One factor that might be associated with different challenges is church size. This study of 129 evangelical churches in North America seeks to understand better what these challenges are, which are the greatest, and how they relate to church size. Church leaders were asked to indicate how difficult each of the 50 challenges was for their church. A factor analysis extracted 13 families of challenges. The four factors representing the greatest challenges were Evangelism and Youth Ministry, Leadership Support and Development, Spiritual Development, and Lay Involvement. The factors that accounted for the most variation between the churches were Cultural Changes Threatening Stability and Poverty in the Local Community. Two families of challenges (High Quality Church Programs and External Threats) were related to church size; specifically, they were greater challenges for smaller churches than for larger churches. The challenges and their relationship to church size are analyzed from psychological, managerial, and economic perspectives to understand the phenomena better.

The primary purpose of this exploratory research was to seek initial validation of a measure for use in the Christian population, the Christian Health Internalization Scale (CHIS)— providing a specific, theoretically-supported measure help further our understanding of why certain health behaviors might become internalized into religious values, but not others (particularly related to chronic disease prevention). Findings provide initial support for the validity of CHIS and provide an option for researchers and practitioners who desire to assess how well a health behavior is internalized into one's Christian values and identity, variation across populations, and/or for determining the effectiveness of interventions aimed at enhancing internalization.

Prayer takes many forms, the most common of which is petitionary prayer, asking for something specific from someone/something perceived to be supernatural. Research has focused on praying for things such as healing and positive outcomes, with less emphasis on praying for harm to others. In this study, we define hostile prayer and, drawing on literature regarding deprivation theory, Biblical literalism, and regional cultures of violence, we theorize correlates of hostile prayer. Using nationally representative data of US adults, we find that income is inversely related to the odds of engaging in hostile prayer. In contrast, a belief in biblical literalism is associated with increased odds of engaging in hostile prayer, relative to other views of the Bible. We also find that men have significantly higher odds of engaging in hostile prayer relative to women, and those who live in the South, relative to those who live in the West or Midwest. We discuss these findings and limitations and propose directions for future research on hostile prayer.

This study investigates childhood experiences that may shape adult religious and spiritual comfort (R/S-C) across diverse cultural contexts. Nationally representative cross-sectional data from 22 countries (N = 202,898) were analyzed using modified Poisson regression to examine the associations between adult R/S-C and 13 retrospectively reported early-life potential predictors in each country. The results were pooled across countries using a random-effects meta-analysis. Supplementary analyses assessed the robustness of the results against unmeasured confounding and sample composition. Regular attendance at religious services during childhood was consistently associated with higher adult R/S-C. Being female and aged 30–49 or 80+ also predicted greater R/S- C, though these effects were modest and only moderately robust to unmeasured confounding. Other childhood factors showed weaker associations with adult R/S-C in the pooled analysis, though cross- national differences were evident. Overall, early-life experiences show limited global association with adult religious and spiritual comfort, but their influence may vary by cultural and national context.