Volume 9 (2013)

The sociopolitical upheavals that appeared suddenly toward the end of 2010 and swept through Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa caught most observers off guard and grasping for explanation. The inability to anticipate these popular uprisings may relate to a widely held understanding of the relationship between Islam and the political-territorial ordering of modernity, namely, the notion that the primacy of the umma—the worldwide commu-nity of Islamic believers—is incompatible with the sovereignty of nation-states. In this article, I first identify and discuss the tendency to underappreciate modern territoriality in shaping contemporary Muslim identities and then, drawing on a range of examples, illustrate how the bases of Muslim identities and the relative significance of Islam to those identities have shifted in relation to changing political-territorial circumstances.

Religious market theory is an approach to studying religiosity that is based in economic theory. It was established by American economists and sociologists, who were inspired by the theory of rational choice. In Poland. in contrast to the United States, the religious market is not fully competitive and pluralistic; the Catholic Church occupies a dominant position. In this article, I investigate whether a decline in participation in religious practice and involvement in Church activities among Poles is more likely to be attributable to secularization or to the quasi-monopolistic nature of the religious market in Poland.

Quantitative studies of the conditions and consequences of religious diversity are based mostly on indices that measure the variety of religious membership in a particular region. However, this line of research has become stagnant, and the question of whether diversity affects religious vitality remains unanswered. This article attempts to shed new light on the discussion by measuring religious diversity differently and capturing religious vitality independently of membership figures. In particular, it contrasts the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index based on membership proportions with a second measure of diversity: an index of organizational diversity. Conversely, the dependent variable religious vitality is measured not by using rates of participation in religious organizations but via the Centrality of Religion Scale. Based on ecological and individual level data of forty-three local regions in Finland, Germany, and Slovenia and using multilevel analysis, our results suggest that religious diversity is related to religious vitality. However, the nature of this association differs across subgroups.

In this article, we investigate the impact of social capital on religious preference in rural China using a dataset from Henan Province. Using family emigration rate and average rate of participation in public activities in the village as instrumental variables of social capital to avoid the problem of endogenous models, we find a causal relationship between social capital and religious preference based on a two-stage least squares estimation. Regression results show a significant negative correlation between social capital and religious affiliation when daily network size, Chinese New Year Greeting network size, attendance at public activities, social indifference, and social conflicts are used as the indicators of social capital. Therefore we infer that the collapse of traditional secular social capital and the fragmentation of farming communities have boosted the religious revival in rural China.

In an interdisciplinary review of twenty-one German- and English-language intervention studies, the effectiveness of spiritually/religiously based interventions is evaluated statistically by measuring the participants' sense of coherence (SOC). Although Aaron Antonovsky considered a change in the SOC-29 score of no more than (+/-)5 points possible, the intentional modification of the SOC-29 median through religious/spiritual interventions ranges from 3.5 to 21 points. In studies using the SOC-13 questionnaire, the SOC increase ranges from about 2 to 7.5 points. Although it is possible that, for example, small sample sizes and biographical factors skew the statistics, the fact that the experimental groups' SOC score was in all cases higher than the control groups' SOC score strongly suggests that the improvement in SOC can be traced to the religious/spiritual practices. However, there seem to be no difference between the efficacy of spiritually/religiously based interventions and that of secular interventions. Moreover, some studies indicate that an intentionally modified SOC might not be stable over time. After reconsidering why I decided to categorize therapeutic programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as religiously/spiritually based interventions, I propose and criticize an ad hoc model of the SOC-enhancing effect of MBSR. I then discuss the potentials and shortcomings of this segment of research and develop perspectives for methodologically more sophisticated investigations.

The environmental crisis is increasingly being seen as both a spiritual and a moral problem. When approaching environmental problems, British Muslim environmental groups depend on a combinations of premodern textual sources (the Islamic legal tradition) and rational elaborations that legitimate Western beliefs. But the combination of traditional and modern sources for each organization varies. The use of Issue Crawler mapping software reveals that among these groups, the ones that have the greatest inclination toward Islamic textual approaches are the most influential in the wider environmental movement. This finding highlights the importance of religion in solving the environmental crisis.

First, we retrace, on the basis of an analysis of European Union documents, how religion became a means for integration on the level of EU policies and debates. Second, we analyze, on the basis of the European Value Survey, how religion and xenophobic attitudes relate to a sense of Europeanness among European citizens. We argue that religion gained relevance for the European Commission and in public debates as a marker to distinguish "us" from "them." On the individual level, we found that denomination does not play an important role in defining Europeanness when we controlled for church attendance and intensity of belief. Xenophobic attitudes do not contribute to the cohesion of a European "we." Instead, they decrease Europeanness. We show that although religion is important on both levels, it refers to different concepts and displays different dynamics when observed as part of integration policies and when observed in relation to individual attitudes.

State policy on religious freedom for minorities varies substantially across nations. Assuming a uniform set of interests for actors regardless of the religious tradition, culture, or type of government they are associated with, I present a path model to explain this variation and test it using cross-national data from a sample of 175 states. The main finding is that the state’s interference in the religious market, through the establishment and subsidizing of a state religion, initiates a path by which the state religion is able to monopolize the religious market and subsequently acquire political influence. In accordance with the interest of maintaining and maximizing its share of the religious market, the state religion uses its political influence to curb prospective competition by restricting the freedom of minority denominations. Further, the prevalence of this process in Muslim majority states likely explains the above-average levels of restrictions on the religious freedom of minorities in the Muslim world.

Four meta-analyses were undertaken to assess various expressions of religious faith and family. The meta-analyses examined the effects of Bible literacy, faith-based schools when compared to charter and other public schools, family factors, and means of reducing the achievement gap. The results of the meta-analyses indicate that many of the variables that were examined are associated with positive academic and behavioral outcomes.

Despite frequent claims from religious colleges and universities that they instill and promote religious identity and despite evidence of growing student interest in religion, very little research - and no data on Catholic universities - linking university features to student religiousness are currently available. A meta-analysis of twenty-six studies measuring student religious outcomes in Catholic universities since 1960 found that overall religiosity in Catholic universities exceeds that at secular universities by about half a standard deviation. Student church attendance—an “objective” religious activity - is highly sensitive to institutional differences; prayer and self-assessed religiousness - reflecting “subjective” personal devotion or attitude - are not. Church attendance has dropped by half a standard deviation since the 1960s, most of the decline having occurred recently; it rises sharply with increased Catholic concentration and declines in universities that are more selective, as indicated by Carnegie undergraduate profile, and more wealthy, as indicated by average faculty salary. Requiring fewer theology/philosophy courses suppresses church attendance, and very high church attendance suppresses selectivity, indicated by SAT scores and admissions yield. The implications of these findings for improving Catholic identity and institutional metrics are discussed.

Volunteers in faith-based organizations play a large and growing role in the delivery of social services in the United States. Previous research has shown that religious individuals are more likely to volunteer than are nonreligious individuals and that religious individuals volunteer for both religious reasons and church-based social reasons. However, relatively little is known about what specific aspects of religious faith most motivate people to volunteer and how the differing religious motivations affect the volunteer’s satisfaction with the experience and willingness to volunteer again. We explored these questions by surveying more than 4,000 volunteers, both adults and youths, who had completed a one-week volunteer project for a Christian nonprofit organization in Appalachia. Religious motivation outweighed secular motivation for most volunteers, but a much larger percentage of adult volunteers (93 percent) were primarily religiously motivated, compared to 63 percent of youth volunteers. Of the volunteers who were primarily religiously motivated, somewhat more described their motivation in personal terms (“because it makes me feel closer to God”) rather than institutional terms (“because my faith encourages me”). Personal religious motivations were particularly characteristic of volunteers who were younger, first-timers, and Catholic. Differing motivations for volunteering affected overall satisfaction and willingness to volunteer again. Religiously motivated individuals were more satisfied than secularly motivated individuals were, and religiously motivated individuals whose particular religious motivations were fulfilled were more satisfied overall and more likely to volunteer again.

In this article, we explore ways in which Mormon feminists balance their membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their desire for gender equality. We examine how Mormon feminists used social media in their activist campaigns of 2012–2013. This study includes the first academic survey of online Mormon feminists, comprising 1,862 self-identified Mormon feminists. We also studied Mormon feminist Facebook groups and blogs from 2004 to 2013. The findings show that Mormon feminists used social media to connect with one another and vet ideas as they navigate the potential pitfalls inherent in religious feminist activism.

Using a new cross-country dataset, we test and extend the religious economies perspective on religious conflict in two ways. First, we expand earlier analyses of whether religious pluralities lead to more or less conflict. Second, we assess the apparent demographic anomaly that high population growth is often found not to contribute to higher levels of violent religious persecution and conflict. We introduce a new demographic measure that captures the net effect of the demographic transition rather than just recent population growth dynamics, thus concentrating on differences in long-term population growth patterns. In particular, we use the demographic transition multiplier, which is the ratio of the population size at the end of the demographic transition to the population size at the beginning of the demographic transition. We find that after controlling for multiple factors affecting religious hostilities, countries with larger demographic transition multipliers tend to have a higher level of religious conflict. Our results provide new insights into the interaction between demographic developments and religious freedom and suggest potentially fruitful paths of further research on this topic.