ABSTRACTS
The Oppositional Impact of Feminism and
Religious Fundamentalism:
Gendered Variations in Ideological Processes
on US National Identity
Carrie L. Alexandrowicz, Brown
University, carrie_alexandrowicz@brown.edu
The coexistence of religion and government in the US has
historically informed both social institutional development as well as
individual ethics and citizenship. More recently, religious fundamentalism in
particular has functioned as both a social movement and a political entity by
defending traditional family values and emphasizing moral certainty. For these
reasons, research on personal ideology has often linked fundamentalism to
nationalistic self-identity. This paper not only considers the divergent
effects of religious fundamentalism on nationalism, it also introduces a
seemingly competing ideology into the analysis: feminism. Using data from the
1996 General Social Survey, I examine how fundamentalism and femin-ism
differentially affect nationalism by gender. Preliminary results indicate that
the influence of these ideologies not only differs substantially for men and
women, but they also may not be as oppositional as previously theorized.
The Mobilization of “Anti Anti-Cult
Movements”: A Turning Point in the
French Cult Controversy?
Véronique Altglas, University of
Warwick, v.altglas@warwick.ac.uk
This paper is based on data very
recently collected in France. It will concentrate on an organization called CAP pour la Liberté de Conscience (Coordination
of Associations and Peo-ple for Freedom of Conscience), which took legal action
last September against the main anti-cult organization in France, the UNADFI
(National Union of Associations for the Protection of the Family and the
Individual). Although the UNADFI is a state-funded charity and official partner
of the French Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against
Sectarian Deviations (MIVILUDES), the CAP demanded UNADFI’s dissolution on the
assumption that their practices infringed religious liberty. Not only did the
CAP lose its case, but it was also found guilty of abusive procedure by the
Tribunal of Paris. Nevertheless, this is the first time that individuals
involved in religious movements and alternative therapies in France have struck
back and accepted social visibility. This empirical case will shed light on the
current dynamic of the cult controversy in France and its possible future. More
broadly, it contributes to an understanding of the management of religious
diversity in France.
Evangelical Alternative Science: Parallels
between Intelligent Design
Theory and the National Association for
Research and Therapy of
Homosexuality
Antony Alumkal, Iliff School of
Theology, aalumkal@iliff.edu
When mainstream science has conflicted with evangelical
doctrine, evangelicals have often responded not by renouncing science but by
creating alternative scientific paradigms. This paper discusses two scientific
movements started in the late twentieth century that are popular with American
evangelical leaders—Intelligent Design Theory (IDT), which advances a critique
of Darwinism, and the National Association for Research and Therapy of
Homosexu-ality (NARTH), which differs from mainstream psychiatric guilds by
arguing that homosexu-ality is a treatable illness. I note that both movements:
(1) include non-evangelical Christians (Catholics is particular) in leadership
and attempt to persuade non-Christians; (2) accuse their opponents of
propagating politics and/or philosophy disguised as science; (3) downplay their
own religious bases; and (4) claim to be defending the moral foundations of
society. I discuss what these movements reveal about the current state of
American evangelicalism.
The Religious Mainline as a
Non-Historiographic Touchpoint
Yakov Ariel, University of North Carolina,
yariel@email.unc.edu
In the last decade, the historiography of religion in
America has abandoned its traditional touchpoint and adopted a new narrative in
which Protestantism is presented as merely one component of the American
religious story. While awareness of the broader pic-ture as well as an
inclusive attitude is admirable, this historiographic shift has been too
radical. Historians have replaced a narrow narrative with an extremely broad
one, giving up on a “touchpoint” altogether. The result is often a lack of
sound historical perspective. I argue that while we should pay much attention
to the place of other religious communities in American society and culture,
ultimately one cannot tell the story of religion in America without pointing to
the centrality of Protestant groups and modes of thinking in shaping American
institutions and values.
Religious Beliefs and Illness Behavior of
Africans in the 21st Century
Augustine A. Aryee, Fitchburg State
College, aaryee@fsc.edu
The
study of people’s patterns of behavior is generally tied to the study of
systems of belief. This paper will examine some aspects of the philosophical
and religious beliefs that permeate every facet of the African’s pattern of
behavior and which affect his views of illness and health. Accra, Ghana, was
the focus of this research. A subsample of 1017 informants provided data on the
mixed use of new and old medical systems. Religion is intricately tied to
African medicine. African health depends on physical, spiritual, and social
wellbeing. Natural and supernatural elements are inextricably interwoven.
Health is not seen merely as a biological matter, but one bonding the human
body and the soul in total harmony. What governs health and illness is not germ
theory as in the Western world. Tensions and aggres-sions found in social
relations cause troubles. So, too, supernatural forces can bring evil to human
beings. Good health can be preserved only by the observance of social norms and
taboos, the maintenance of a harmonious relationships with the members of the
supernatural world, and the resolution of interpersonal and group strains and
tensions.
Denominational Variations in Spiritual Capital
among American Youth,
1976-2006: Identifying Trends from Monitoring
the Future
John P. Bartkowski, Xiaohe Xu, and
Kristi McLeod, Mississippi State University,
bartkowski@soc.msstate.edu
This
study extends the burgeoning body of scholarship on youth religiosity by
analyzing evidence from several decades of Monitoring the Future (MTF). Using trend
data from MTF, we explore denominational variations in spiritual capital among
American high school seniors from the 1970s to the present. Spiritual capital
is defined as (1) exposure to and internalization of religious norms, (2)
integration within religious networks, and (3) expressions of religious trust.
We find that stocks of spiritual capital among American teens are generally
robust but subject to distinctive temporal variations across denominational
families. We pinpoint those denominations that have successfully sustained the
trans-mission of faith to the next generation during the past four decades—and
those that have failed to do so.
Religious Freedom in Contrast: A Comparative
Analysis of Canada and
the United States
Lori G. Beaman, University of Ottawa,
beaman@alcor.concordia.ca
This paper includes a comparison of
key Supreme Court cases from the United States and Canada on the issue of
religious freedom. Recent Canadian cases indicate that the Supreme Court of
Canada is moving toward greater latitude in interpreting the religious freedom
guarantee contained in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In
contrast, the situation in the United States is less promising. Both countries,
however, still work within a predominantly Christian framework. Moreover, the
Supreme Court of Canada has imported several problematic concepts from United
States jurisprudence, including the notion of sincerely held belief.
Early Dissertations in American Sociology of
Religion
Anthony J. Blasi, Tennessee State
University, blasi3610@cs.com
Taking a reference-work approach,
this paper describes American dissertations in the sociological study of
religion that were written before 1930. The earliest (Pelton, NYU 1895) is
homiletic in nature. The others better resemble the sociology of our day, but
they reveal no conceptual development for the subdiscipline. Rather, they
reflect typical studies found in general sociology in the US at the time: a
history of local charities sponsored by a denomination (Appleton, Columbia
1906), an evaluation of ministries in an inner-city setting (Young, Penn 1912),
a handbook for conducting community studies (Carroll, Denver 1914), religious
demography (Bossard, Penn 1918), a history of a social institution (Jansen,
Chicago 1920) and of a reform impulse (Barnhart, Chicago 1924), studies of a
cultural contact (Price, Chicago 1924), ethnic settlement (Janzen, Chicago
1926), and a category of organizations (Daniel, Chicago 1925), anthropological
reconstruction of a culture (Gower, Chicago 1928), and a development of a pure
type (Kincheloe, Chicago 1929). The hegemony of the University of Chicago in
the 1920s in the sociological study of religion, if not in sociology more
generally, is evident.
Prostitution, Parenting, and Pedophilia: An
Exploratory Study of
Women’s Accounts of Life in a Sex Cult
Miriam Williams Boeri, Kennesaw State
University, mboeri@kennesaw.edu
Using accounts from in-depth interviews with women who
lived in the Children of God/The Family, I present personal testimony from
women who reared children in this group while simultaneously engaging in
“Flirty Fishing,” a form of sacred prostitution. Some of the women gave birth
to nine or more children, some were not sure of the fathers, and others
reported that their children were sexually and physically abused by male
members of the group. Preliminary findings from this ongoing study support
previous research suggesting that male-dominated new religious movements are
associated with the sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children,
specifically that this type of cult environment not only attracts pedophiles
but also encourages adults to engage in activities associated with pedophilia
and child abuse.
Foundational Issues in the Study of
Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada
Paul Bramadat, University of Winnipeg,
paul.bramadat@uwinnipeg.ca
While
a great deal has been written about ethnicity and Christianity, very little has
been written about the complex interaction between these two forces within
contemporary Canadian communities. In this paper, I will introduce the
three-volume “Religion and Ethnic-ity in Canada” project, and I will use my
experience as co-editor of Christianity
and Ethnicity in Canada to reflect on some of the foundational issues we
face when we examine the relationship between these two powerful forces. Some
of these are: the crisis of membership and involvement within the major
Christian traditions in Canada, the de-Christianization of the broader society,
the emergence in the census process of “Canadian” as an ethnic
self-identification, and the implications of the de-Europeanization of
Christian communities.
“We’ve Always Had Human Rights”: Religious
Movements and Discursive
Change in the Global Human Rights Regime
David V. Brewington, Emory University,
david.brewington@emory.edu
Religious voices have long been a significant part of human
rights movements and discourse, yet they have often been neglected in empirical
and theoretical efforts to understand global human rights and globalization.
This paper documents the long history of involvement of these religious voices
in human rights efforts, and attempts to recognize and theorize how religious
voices begin to make theological and religious sense of the secularized global
human rights regime. Protestant, Catholic, Islamic, Judaic, and Buddhist
discourse about human rights implies “we’ve always had human rights,” there
theorized as a Meyerian and Robertsonian response to a secular global human
rights regime begun in earnest after World War II.
From A
Beautiful Mind to a Critical Theory of Religion: Rational Choice,
Religion, and Adorno
Christopher Craig Brittain, Atlantic
School of Theology, chris.brittain@utoronto.ca
This paper examines the presuppositions of rational choice
explanatory models of human behavior, as they are applied to religious
practice. The work of two scholars is ana-lyzed in particular: Rodney Stark and
Lawrence Iannaccone. The reliance of this approach on macroeconomic assumptions
will be explored, and their reduction of religious behavior to “consolation”
will be challenged. The limitations of rational choice theory are illuminated
through a comparison with the social theory of Theodor W. Adorno. This
criticism will be illustrated by drawing from a popular depiction of the presuppositions
of rational choice theory, in the form of a scene from the Academy
Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind.
This analysis will show that, rather than assisting the study of religion to
escape from theological and metaphysical assumptions, rational choice theory is
itself laden with problematic presup-positions.
How Religious Institutions Enable Internal
Reform Movements: Voice of
the Faithful and the Enabling Mechanisms of
the Catholic Church
Trica Colleen Bruce, University of
California Santa Barbara, mein@umail.ucsb.edu
When religious institutions become the target of social
movements, the onus typically falls upon movement participants to negotiate a
place at the bargaining table. The absence of participatory features within
highly centralized religious institutions are legitimately cited as restrictive
to an internal movement’s tactical choices and outcomes. So too, however, must
more subtle enabling mechanisms of
religious institutions be recognized for their role in actually facilitating internal movements. Drawing
from a three-year study of “Voice of the Faithful,” a Catholic lay movement
formed in response to revelations of sexual abuse and nondisclosure within the
Catholic Church, this paper highlights the process by which internal movements
re-purpose existing church structures in order to advance movement goals.
Findings reveal that even while official church sanctioning remains at bay,
institutional avenues can serve as intermediary enabling mechanisms for reform
occurring from within.
Religious Involvement, Race, and Adolescent
Sexual Behavior
Amy M. Burdette, University of Texas,
burdamy@prc.utexas.edu
Studies
show that religious involvement delays and limits adolescent sexual behavior;
however, these effects are not uniform across racial and ethnic groups. For
example, research suggests that religious involvement may not delay sexual
intercourse among African Ameri-cans (particularly males). Although scholars
have begun to acknowledge racial and ethnic variation in the effects of religious
involvement on adolescent sexual behavior, several issues call for further
investigation, including (1) limited measures of religious involvement (i.e.,
church attendance); (2) limited racial and ethnic groupings (i.e., African
American and Cauca-sian); and (3) limited measures of sexual activity (i.e.,
sexual intercourse). The National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) contains
several measures of religious involvement, race and ethnicity, and adolescent
sexual behavior. Using these data, the present study seeks to overcome the
limitations of prior research on religion, race/ethnicity, and sexual activity
among US adolescents.
The Meanings of Mary: Tourism, Faith and
Cultural Dimensions of
Marian Apparitions
Michelle Madsen Camacho, University of
San Diego, mcamacho@sandiego.edu
This
paper explores the social and cultural dimensions of pilgrimages to Virgin Mary
apparition sites in Latin America. Meanings of these pilgrimages vary by race,
gender, and class. I examine how tourism to these sites contributes to cultural
productions of spiritual practice. Two sites will be compared: the festival of
the Virgin of Urkupiña in Cochabama, Bolivia (unrecognized by the Catholic
Church) and the Marian apparitions at Betanía, Venezuela (an “official” site in
the eyes of the Church). Comparing both sites with fieldwork and ethnographic
interviews, I examine ideas of syncretism and cultural fusion and analyze local
responses and interpretations of these “miraculous” sites.
The Man Who Has Will Always Be Given
More? Winners of the Protestant
Market in Taiwan
Hsing-Kuang Chao, Tunghai University,
wade0429@mail.thu.edu.tw
Beginning with the mid-1960s, Taiwanese Protestant
Christianity had been stagnant for about thirty years. New statistical data,
however, show a moderate growth during the last decade of the twentieth
century. This paper will investigate whether the growth of Taiwanese Protestant
Christianity, especially of small denominations and independent churches in the
urban areas, can be explained using a supply-side framework. Two levels of
factors are involved: First are contextual factors, such as industrialization
and rural-urban migration. Second are institutional factors, such as churches’
theological stands, ritual practices, and growth strategies. The contextual
factors may be important to increase the prospect pool for recruiting new
members to Protestantism. This paper argues that institutional factors may be
more important than contextual factors to understanding the growth of small
denominations and independent churches in urban areas. These churches not only
provide a substantive meaning system to rural-urban immigrants, but they also
launch different evangelical move-ments and organize community programs to
satisfy these prospects’ needs.
True Buddhism is Not Chinese: Taiwanese
Immigrants becoming “True
Buddhists” in the US
Carolyn Chen, Northwestern University,
cechen@northwestern.edu
The
majority of Taiwanese immigrants who are practicing Buddhists begin practicing
after migrating to the US. Despite the claim in the immigration and religion
literature that religion preserves ethnicity, Taiwanese immigrant Buddhists
adamantly deny any link between their ethnic traditions and “true” Buddhism.
Rather, Taiwanese American Buddhists appeal to western values and science to
legitimate their religious choices. This paper explores how contextual factors
shape the discourse of true Buddhism in the US and further argues that
religions may challenge rather than preserve ethnic traditions.
Confucian Marxism and the Weberian Thesis
Weigang Chen, University of Vermont,
wxchen@pop.uvm.edu
The increasing salience of cultural conflicts in the
post-Cold War era brings the Weberian legacy of comparative religion to the
center of current debates on globalization. Specifically, these conflicts force
us to confront directly the toughest challenge posed by the Protestant ethic
thesis: If the principles of justice and equality are beyond the peculiarity of
Occidental civilization, how then can we give a full explanation as to why in
the West, and only in the West, the ideal of public reasoning by private people
has materialized? The present study seeks to address this fundamental challenge
by drawing on Confucian Marxism—a distinctive Marxist school that seeks to combine
Marxist aspirations for radical justice and the Confucian ethical tradition. I
argue that at the core of the problem of “the clash of civilizations” is an
intrinsic linkage between Eurocentrism and the liberal paradigm of “civil
society.” The prospect of global justice, therefore, hinges on the development
of a new conception of the “social” that reverses the liberal interpretation of
the relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and public reasoning, and
derives instead directly from the primacy of ethic life for social formation.
Sacred Sacrilege: Religion and Popular Culture
in Singapore
Lloyd Chia, University of Missouri,
lloydchia@mizzou.edu
Religion
and popular culture are often seen as mutually exclusive domains. But Singapore
has pop-star and magician pastors; Malaysia has Islamic boy bands; Iran has
officially sanctioned pop concerts; and England has seen “Harry Potter” church
services. Are these isolated anomalies, or do they portend a religiously
inspired sociocultural shift? This study explains finding religious practice in
“strange places” and finding “strange practices” in religious places. It
accounts for monotheistic religions making their stake in popular culture
industries and expressive genres. How do these social agents deal with the
perceived sacrilegious mixing of sacred and profane? The research employed
in-depth interviews of producers, consumers, and critics of religious popular
culture; it included observations of sites and events. This paper explores a
“crisis of meaning” that occurs between for
and against postures of the
confluence of religion and popular culture. It also seeks to account for intra-religious pluralization by
examining the tensions between factions to define the sacred.
Emergent Global Ethics: Reenchantment and the
Rhetoric of the
Dispossessed
JoAnn Chirico, Pennsylvania State
University, jxc64@psu.edu
A global ethic is emerging, rooted in the religious and
quasi-religious experiences of disenfranchised groups within developing
societies. For them, globalization has not only failed to alleviate poverty and
suffering; it has worsened it. Violent conflict, starvation, the AIDS pandemic,
and environmental destruction threaten their survival. The emergent global
system is not far, economically, politically and strategically, from the “war
of all against all.” We lack adequate meaning at the level of the globe and
increasingly within societies to sustain satisfactory social systemic function.
Disaffected groups are promoting an ethic that transcends the instrumental rational
models, in particular the Washington Consensus, that resulted in their
disaffection. They are forcing more substantive, value rational (reenchanted)
concerns into local and global debate. For many groups, particularly grassroots
women’s labor movements, these emergent ethics have religious roots.
The Charismatic Movement and the Contemporary
Worship Style: How
their Impacts on Church Growth Differ between
Mainline and
Conservative Congregations
Hui-Tzu Grace Chou, Utah Valley State
College, chougr@uvsc.edu
It has been observed that congregations involved with the
charismatic movement or using the contemporary worship style grow faster than
other congregations. However, there are still questions to be answered. First,
are the impacts of the charismatic movement and the contemporary worship style
on church growth caused by other factors? Second, are their impacts on church
growth similar for both mainline and conservative congregations? Analyzing the
data of the National Congregations Study, the results of logistic regression
show that the charismatic movement and the contemporary worship style work
differently on church growth between mainline congregations and conservative
congregations. The contem-porary worship style has a significant impact on church
growth among conservative congrega-tions, while the charismatic movement has a
significant impact among liberal congregations, after controlling for the age
of congregations and other variables. Different religious needs between liberal
and conservative congregations and the definition of disinherited groups are
also discussed.
Strong Religion and the Hard Sciences:
American Muslims and Hindus
and the Applied Sciences
Richard Cimino, New School for Social
Research, relwatch1@msn.com
Many American Muslims and Hindus have training and/or work
experience in the applied sciences, particularly engineering, medicine, and the
hi-tech fields. This paper will examine the religious discourse of these
applied science professionals and the impact it has had in the Muslim and Hindu
communities of the US. Through content analysis of their writings in
publications and online, and interviews with these professionals, I will seek
to understand the relationship and interaction between applied scientific
knowledge and religious belief and practice. I am particularly interested in
the way members of this “new technical knowledge class” have taken up an
autodidactic approach to their faiths while assuming leadership positions in
the Muslim and Hindu immigrant communities (often due to the shortage of
trained clergy and leaders).
The New Buddhism
James William Coleman, California
Polytechnic State University, jcoleman@calpoly.edu
As
Buddhism moves from Asia and the ethnic enclaves of Asian immigrants into
postmodern Western culture, it is undergoing a transformation as sweeping as
any in its long history. In the new Buddhism that is emerging among western
converts, the classic distinc-tion between monks and laity is becoming blurred.
Meditation is no longer the primary domain of monastics but is the central
religious practice among all members. Moreover, celibate monasticism itself is
a far less common and less revered practice. At the same time, institutional
structures are being redefined, and women have moved into leadership roles
unprecedented in patriarchal Asian traditions.
Rescuing Weber: A Critique of the Culturalist
View of Protestantism and
Progress in Latin America
Madeleine Cousineau, Mount Ida College,
mrcousineau@comcast.net
During the past fifty years millions of Latin Americans
have been converting to Protestantism. A number of social scientists and
religious observers have defined this phenomenon as a new reformation that will
bring democracy and prosperity to the region. They frequently turn for their
inspiration to Max Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis. However, their analyses are
limited in several ways: (1) They are one-sidedly idealistic (or culturalist),
in contradiction to Weber’s more nuanced view of the relationship between
religion and economics; (2) they neglect to distinguish between the rational,
inner-worldly ethic of eighteenth-century English Calvinists and the more
emotional, world-rejecting beliefs of contemporary Pentecostals, who constitute
the majority of Latin American Protestants; (3) they fail to consider the
socioeconomic context; (4) they are not supported by empirical research. This
paper provides evidence of these limitations, along with a critique of the
ideological underpinnings of the culturalist view.
Material Culture and the Sociology of
Religion: Speaking the Language
of Objects
Douglas E. Cowan, Renison College,
decowan@uwaterloo.ca
Until very recently, relatively
little attention was paid to the material culture of religious traditions
except as adjuncts to specific beliefs and practices. Hundreds of thou-sands of
books and countless millions of words have been written about the various
beliefs, doctrines, ritual practices, and organizational structures of
religious traditions worldwide, but the objects that make those traditions
recognizable to the rest of the world—and to practition-ers—have been largely
ignored. Can we learn things from the social life of material objects that we
cannot learn in other ways, things that other species of data either cannot
disclose or cannot disclose as clearly or as easily? Using examples drawn from
research on the material culture of modern Paganism, this paper will lay out
what Baudrillard called a “language of objects” as a meaningful approach to the
sociological study of religious belief and practice.
Religious Leadership under Fire: Conflict and
Tension in the Air Force
Chaplain Service
Barbara J. Denison, Shippensburg
University, bjdeni@ship.edu
Recent reports from the USAF Academy
in Colorado have focused attention on evangelical Protestant Air Force
chaplains engaged in proselytizing activity among academy cadets. Training
chaplains receive at Air Force Chaplains’ School reinforces the governing
paradigm that denounces any attempt to proselytize as an illegitimate activity
for chaplains. Additionally, the mandate for Air Force Chaplains in the AF
Chaplain Service has focused on the free exercise of religion and providing
spiritual support, comfort, counseling and other services for all, regardless
of religion, faith, or creed. This paper is an initial attempt to use source
materials from USAF Chaplain Service documents and directives as well as news
reports to examine this crisis created by competing models of religious
leadership among USAF chaplains.
God Matters, Ritual Doesn’t: The Effects of
Importance of Religion and
Church Attendance on Moral Beliefs
Scott A. Desmond, Purdue University,
and Rachel Kraus, Ball State University,
sdesmond@purdue.edu
According
to Durkheim, religious rituals such as church attendance help to support the
moral order. In contrast, Rodney Stark has recently argued that religious
beliefs (impor-tance of religion) are significantly related to moral beliefs,
while religious rituals are not. We used a sample of adolescents to test
Stark’s hypothesis that church attendance is unrelated to moral beliefs.
Preliminary results provide partial support for Stark’s hypothesis. Consistent
with Stark’s argument, a measure of religious importance had a significant
effect on moral beliefs about violence, property offenses, marijuana use, and
drinking. Adolescents who reported that religion was important to them were
more likely to believe that these behaviors are wrong. Contrary to Stark,
however, church attendance had a significant effect on moral beliefs about
marijuana and alcohol use. Therefore, religious rituals may have a significant
effect on some moral beliefs but not others.
Muslim Discourses in the Public Sphere in
Québec
Ali G. Dizboni, Royal Military College
of Canada, dizboni-a@rmc.ca
The Muslim presence in the West, and
in Québec in particular, raised a number of serious challenges and questions
ranging from security concerns to sociocultural issues (identity, integration,
etc.). Depending on particular circumstances, Western democracies adopted
different approaches ranging from laisser-faire to interventionism. My paper
will discuss the leading discourses of Muslim intellectuals living in the West, like Tareq Ramadan, about the
place of Islam in the Western public sphere. My discussion will deal with
fundamental issues of identity, laws (Shari‘a), and cultural integration. The
mediatized controversies around issues of Kirpan and headscarf in Québec and
Islamic Courts in Ontario show the policy-relevance and the social sensitivity
associated with these questions. My objective is to assess the theoretical and
empirical implications of Muslim intellectuals’ discourses both for Québec’s
experience of social integration and for the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms.
“Spiritual but not Religious”? Spiritual and
Religious Identities among
Academic Scientists
Elaine Howard Ecklund, SUNY Buffalo,
and Elizabeth Long, Rice University,
ehe@buffalo.edu
Science is often perceived as incompatible with religion.
Rarely, however, do scholars examine the place of spirituality in relationship to science. This paper compares
religious to spiritual identities among academic scientists in the natural and
social sciences at twenty-one different elite US research universities. Using
recently collected data from a national survey of over 1600 academic scientists
and in-depth interviews with 250 scientists, we specifically compare faculty in
the natural science disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology as well as
the social science disciplines of sociology, psychology, political science, and
economics. Findings reveal several distinct frameworks for the place of
spirituality, when compared to religion, in the lives of elite scientists. We
situate these results in the midst of studies of spirituality in the general US
population and make projections about the relevance of findings for issues
related to secularization and higher education, as well as those related to the
intersection of religion and science.
Spiritual Dimensions of Everyday Life:
Perspectives from Elders
Susan A. Eisenhandler, University of
Connecticut, susan.a.eisenhandler@uconn.edu
Though reliance on attendance and other measures of formal
religious participation is widely acknowledged to be of limited scope in
understanding the meaning and salience of faith for people of all ages,
continued preference for such measures profoundly inhibits our understanding of
how religion and spirituality are perceived in the daily life and lived
experi-ence of older adults. The social milieu or context surrounding older adults
is an important factor that shapes faith practice and the spirituality evoked
in daily life. This paper addresses some spiritual dimensions of faith that
emerged during an ongoing study (2005-2006) that includes face-to-face
interviews and participant observation with fifteen elders from one residential
community. A special focus is a discussion of gardening and other intrinsically
valued secular activities and the construction of transcendent meaning in late
life.
Mellowing with Age? Exploring Age Variations
in Anger toward God
Christopher G. Ellison and Wei Zhang,
University of Texas, cellison@prc.utexas.edu
Although
many studies have reported salutary associations between religion and health, a
modest literature has begun to identify aspects of religiousness that have
harmful health consequences. Much of this work focuses on “religious struggle”
or negative relation-ships with God (e.g., feelings of anger, abandonment,
etc.). Researchers have called for more attention to the social sources and patterning
of “religious struggle.” Our study contributes to this area by developing and
testing a series of hypotheses concerning the age distribution of anger toward
God. We address the following questions: (1) Are there age variations in this
type of anger? (2) Can these variations be accounted for in terms of
individuals’ social location, exposure to chronic stressors or personal crises,
or religious background? (3) Do the effects of these factors on individuals’
anger toward God vary by age? Data come from the 1988 NORC General Social
Survey, a nationwide sample of US adults—to our knowledge, the only large-scale
representative database containing information on this topic. Findings are
discussed in terms of the interplay of psychological and sociological perspectives,
and study limitations and future research directions are elaborated.
Wrestling with the Meaning of Multiracial
Congregations
Michael O. Emerson, Rice University,
moe@rice.edu
Based
on seven years of research, key findings from the Multiracial Congregations
Project will be discussed with a focus on the implications for race relations,
racial inequality, religion, and other aspects of social life. An important
question guiding the presentation and subsequent discussion will be whether
more of such congregations would be beneficial to US society and to groups
within the society.
Muslim American Politics and Presidential
Elections: Discourse,
Strategies, Orientations
Marcel Fallu, Université Laval,
marcel.fallu.1@ulaval.ca
Muslim organizations “advocate active engagement in the
political process.” In 2004, the American
Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), a coalition of
several American Muslim advocacy groups, endorsed Democratic presidential
candidate John Kerry; in 2000, a similar coalition had advocated bloc-voting
for George W. Bush. Defending a “Civil Rights Plus agenda” in a context of
increased scrutiny, these organizations—who claim to speak on behalf of a
strikingly diverse minority—have engaged in the American system through, among
other means, the formation of Political Action Committees (PACs). Through
content analysis, I will provide insight on how their Islamic orientation is
articulated with American citizenship, patriotism, and nationalism in an
institutional context marked simul-taneously by the separation of state and
religious institutions and the omnipresence of religious values in the public
sphere.
Religious Coping, Family Stressors, and
Elderly Depression in Taiwan
Daisy Fan and Gang-Hua Fan, University
of Texas, daisy@mail.la.utexas.edu
The purpose of this study is to
examine the buffering effect of three dimensions of religion (attendance,
coping, and private practice) on psychological distress in the presence of
family stressors among elderly Taiwanese. Using the 1999 Survey of Health and
Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan, results thus far suggest that religious
attendance may buffer the deleterious effect of financial hardship and negative
family interaction on distress; while, sur-prisingly, religious coping turns
out to exacerbate the stress experience related to negative family
relationship. The nature of religious behaviors in Taiwan and the salience of
family relationship to Taiwanese elderly may account for some of the findings.
Are Religious Revivals Over in France and the
UK? When History and
Sociology Compete for the Answer
Sebastien Fath, École Pratiques des
Hautes Études, faths@wanadoo.fr
Are
religious revivals over in France and the UK? Comparing the contemporary
Evan-gelical scene in Britain and in France reveals a striking difference. In
the first case, Evangeli-cals seem condemned to decline. In this national
context, revivals appear to be clearly over. In the French case however,
Evangelical figures have multiplied by seven in the last 50 years. This
contrast will be described and addressed in the first part of the paper. How
does sociol-ogy of religion address these two national cases? In the second
part of this analysis, I will highlight the contrast between two sociological
frameworks. At this stage, should be give up the possibility of unifying the
analytic framework? Does sociological truth on one side of the Channel become
sociological error on the other side? Maybe not. In the last part of the paper,
I will evaluate the opportunity of “rescuing” sociology with comparative
history.
The Place of the Charismatic Renewal in the
Formation of the Coalition
of Opposition to the Consecration of V. Gene
Robinson as Episcopal
Bishop of New Hampshire
Dana Fenton, Lehman College CUNY,
ddfen@juno.com
In the course of my research on
Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians both before and after the approval
of the election of Gene Robinson, a gay man with a partner, to the episcopate
in the Episcopal Church, I started to hear about the healing movement that
started with the Bennets and continued with the McNutts. I quickly learned that
the healing movement was intimately connected with the charismatic renewal in
the Episcopal Church in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I later realized that many
of the current leadership of the “Biblically Orthodox” Episcopalians first
worked together in the loose network of the Charismatic Renewal.
The Mormon Work Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism
Michelle Fether-Samtouni and Barry
Goetz, Western Michigan University,
michelle.fether@wmich.edu
One hundred years after its publication, Weber’s theory of
the Protestant ethic contin-ues to have tremendous force for debating the links
between ideas, economic structures, and social behavior. This paper will discuss
how religious ideas continue to influence human action, particularly economic
action within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormon
Church is well known for its financial success and work ethic. Church leaders
frequently stress that work is a blessing from God and a fundamental principle
of salvation, while idleness is condemned. The unemployment rate in Utah, where
the majority of the population is Mormon, is 3.8% compared to the national
average of 4.9%. In this paper we will conduct a content analysis of church
scriptures, Sunday school textbooks, and official church magazines that reveal
linkages between Mormon doctrine and the stimulation of a strong work ethic. We
conclude that Weber’s argument about religious ideas influencing social and
economic outcomes is still relevant for understanding Mormons and other social
groups, and also show that Weber’s ideas about the Protestant ethic in particular has special resonance for
understanding the cultural life of Mormonism today.
Drumming as Embodied Spirituality: Focus on
Religious Venues
Tanice G. Foltz, Indiana University
Northwest, tfoltz@iun.edu
This paper is part of a larger project that centers on
drumming in its multiple uses for healing, serving special populations, and
creating a global drum community. My analysis of drumming as embodied
spirituality addresses Weber’s concern with the disenchantment of the rational
world and proposes that drumming is one pathway of spiritual re-enchantment.
Drumming connects participants and leads them into a “flow” state that can be
likened to Turner’s conceptualization of “communitas,” defined by a feeling of
unity and bonding often found in spiritual settings. I draw upon studies of
trance and entrainment, as well as my participant-observation experiences in
experiences in several religious and spiritual venues. These include Yoruba
Candomble House ceremonies in Bahia, Brazil, as well as Pagan rituals and
Christian worship services in the US, where drumming is employed to enhance
parti-cipants connection with the spirit world.
How Congregations Advertise and Market
Themselves
Steven Frenk, Duke University, and
Wayne Luther Thompson, Carthage College,
wthompson@carthage.edu
This paper identifies types of congregational communication
strategies and activities. Religious congregations enter into relationships
with the social environment. Evangelism and other attempts of congregations to
project an image are clues to theological stances, growth and survival
strategies, scope and targets of programming and market niches. Congregations
range from inward orientations to enthusiastic and extensive activities to
communicate about themselves and what they have to offer. Do growing,
evangelical, or newer congregations act more aggressively to communicate and
advertise themselves than other congregations? Do the content and style of
advertising and other communications of congregations affect worship and the
creation of sacred space for those groups? How do congregations cultivate and
project images of themselves in lieu of demand for privatized, personal meaning
in modern societies, and with what results? Data for this analysis come from
the Social Ecology of Congregations project. This study combines fieldwork in
dozens of congregations with surveys of congregational lay leaders and
professional staff in those congregations and broader samples. The initial wave
of data comes from three urbanized Southeastern Wisconsin counties.
Views on Marriage among Immigrant Muslim Women
in the Los Angeles
Area
Inger Furseth, KIFO Centre for Church
Research, inger.furseth@kifo.no
This paper explores the experiences of and discourse on
marriage among Muslim women in the Los Angeles area. The study is based on
in-depth interviews with a small sample of immigrant women. The women are
divided into four categories, based on their orientation toward society and the
religious community: the Representatives, the Communi-cators, the Belongers,
and the Ambivalent. Analysis shows that the Representatives tend strongly to
favor arranged marriage. The Communicators are more hesitant toward arranged
marriage. The Belongers have a diverse view on this issue, while the Ambivlent
are negative to arranged marriage. The latter group favors marriage based on
love and individual choice. This study suggests that there is a link between
these immigrant women’s religious orientation and their view on marriage.
Whereas most of the women wore the hijab on a daily basis, some had never done
so, and some had quit. Their discourse on the hijab centers on religious
obedience, oppression, identity, and dialogue. This study suggests that women
use the hijab to position themselves in the religious landscape, inside and
outside the religious community.
Canadian History of Wicca: Obstacles on the
Path of the Uninitiated
Researcher
Mireille Gagnon, Laval University,
mireille.gagnon.1@ulaval.ca
How does one retrace Canadian Wiccan
history without being a Wiccan? Though the researcher might be welcomed in the
communities, it will soon become apparent that information will be harder to
gather than one would think. Troubled pasts of communities, rivalry between
members involved in witch wars, informants with several pagan names are just
some examples of issues with which the researcher has to deal. In order to understand
the Wiccan presence in Canada, one must be able to dig in its past and find out
how it got here and how it developed. How does an uninitiated avoid the many
obstacles? In this paper I will show the challenges of working in such an
environment, while keeping in line with our professional ethics and our
continual search for balanced information.
Evangelicalism and Change in the DUP:
Implications for the Northern
Ireland Peace Process
Gladys Ganiel, Trinity College Dublin,
gganiel@tcd.ie
In 2005 the Democratic Unionist
Party (DUP) became the largest political party in Northern Ireland. Since its
inception in 1971, it has been regarded as a vehicle for Protestant
fundamentalism and as a destabilizing force in the peace process. This paper
presents new research about the changing role of evangelicalism within the DUP.
It highlights the DUP’s shift away from “evangelical” issues, demonstrating how
evangelicals within the party are pursuing those issues through interest groups
rather than the party. This has increased the party’s secular appeal and
ability to negotiate with the republicans, while keeping evangeli-cals on
board. I also draw on interviews to explore how evangelicals’ personal
convictions intersect with pragmatic political decisions. As the DUP attempts
to appeal to a wider base, the evangelical convictions of key individuals will
be sources of tension, contradictory stances, and ideological confusion that
may hinder its ability to reach accommodation with republicanism.
Beyond Identity: A Framework for Understanding
the Dynamics of
Religious Journeys
Gladys Ganiel, Trinity College Dublin,
and Claire Mitchell, Queen’s University Belfast, gganiel@tcd.ie
Scholarship on evangelicalism has focused on explaining the
persistence of this so-called “old time religion.” Evangelicalism has been
conceived as a reaction to modernity and as providing people with a meaningful
social identity. In this paper, we move the debate beyond religious persistence
and social identity, presenting a more dynamic analysis of evan-gelicalism.
Drawing on research among Northern Irish evangelicals, we argue that
evangeli-calism is better understood as a journey or process rather than a
social identity category. We develop a theoretical framework for understanding
evangelicalism as a process, identifying and highlighting the dynamics of
change at various stages of the journey: conversion, con-servatism,
privatization, moderation, and transformation. This allows us to make
conclusions about both the persistence and the fluctuation of evangelicalism in
Northern Ireland over time. It also allows us to contribute to the theoretical
debate about how to conceive religion’s role in the contemporary world.
Turkey’s Quest for European Union Membership:
Will the EU Accept a
Muslim Candidate?
Brent Garrett, US Department of
Homeland Security, wbrentgarrett@aol.com
Ankara is currently in the process of institutionalizing
far-reaching reforms required by Brussels in order to be considered a serious
candidate for membership in the European Union. Many Turks are convinced,
however, that even if Turkey succeeded in the reforms required for EU
accession, Brussels would ultimately reject Ankara’s application due to the
fact that Turkey is a Muslim candidate. Ankara’s accession to the EU would
indubitably buttress Turkey’s chances of becoming a successful modern democracy
in the Muslim world. This paper will examine the following: to what extent does
religion play a role in determining Turkey’s eventual acceptance or rejection
as a member of the EU? Turkey’s acceptance into or rejection from the EU will
certainly cause reverberations throughout the Muslim world, as well as
throughout Europe’s Muslim communities.
The Impact of Race on Denominational
Variations in Social Attitudes:
The Issue and its Dimensions
David A. Gay, John P. Lynxwiler, and
Warren S. Goldstein, University of Central
Florida, dgay@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu
Although the impact of religious affiliation on social
attitudes is a popular research topic in the sociology of religion, few
scholars have examined the role that race plays in this relationship. Moreover,
studies that do explore the interplay of race and religious affiliation seldom
move beyond the general categories of conservative, moderate, and liberal
denomina-tional families. Our research uses recent General Social Survey data
to compare the social attitudes of African Americans and their White
counterparts within established designations of religious affiliation. Along
with control variables, we include attitude measures for political tolerance,
legalized abortion, gender equality, premarital sex, homosexual lifestyles, and
extramarital sexual relations. Our analysis isolates levels of support for
these attitudes within categories of race and religious affiliation to determine
if variations emerge and whether they are nested within specific issues or
denominations or reflect more general patters of race differences.
The Secularist Movement in Québec
Martin Geoffroy, Université de Moncton,
geoffrm@umoncton.ca
The Secularist Movement in Québec has been gaining ground
in the last ten years by successfully pushing the Québec government to complete
the secularization of the public school system in the province. The movement is
mainly represented by a militant organization called the Mouvement Laïque
Québécois. The dream of its president, Daniel Baril, would be to have a system
similar to the “secularist” regime in France to deal with Québec’s dealings
with religion. This paper is based on interviews done with the leaders of this
organization and on content analysis of their documents. It will show that
despite some gains on the political front, the secularist movement in Québec
remains relatively marginal.
Worlds Apart? A Comparative Study of the Place
of Religion in Canadian
and American Public Space
Martin Geoffroy, Université de Moncton,
and Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, Université de
Montréal, geoffrm@umoncton.ca
Based on many years of fieldwork in Canada and the US, this
paper will attempt to point out both the differences and similarities in the
way these two neighbors deal with reli-gion on an everyday basis. In Canada, it
seems religion has been perceived as a symbol of individual choice rather than
a collective one as in the US. But is that really totally true? In recent years
the Canadian court system has seen more and more cases of collective demands
based on religious believers. These demands are confronting the so called
Canadian concep-tion of political non-involvement in religious affairs, and
with a new Conservative Canadian government with ties to western
fundamentalism, the question of these differences can be asked without sounding
as out of place as before. Is religion becoming more political in Canada, as it
can be in the US?
Muslims of the West: Loyalty to Faith and
Membership in Western
Society
Kamel Ghozzi, Central Missouri State
University, ghozzi@cmsu1.cmsu.edu
The
growing presence in Europe and North America of a second and third generation
of western Muslims deeply challenges the West’s traditional image of Islam as
an “Eastern Religion,” as well as western Muslims’ traditional self-image as
“immigrants” in foreign lands. Nevertheless, western Islam remains deeply
problematic and somewhat irritating to the west-ern mind. Many in the West
question the adaptability of Islam as a new religious component in the
religious pluralism of western societies. Given its organic nature, Islam
equates religion and society, and merges religious law and social structure;
hence, it may not easily accept the western principle of separation of realms
or any notion of civil religion. This paper explains the dilemma lived by large
numbers of western Muslims as they struggle to bridge the gap between loyalty
to faith and membership in western society.
The Night the Guru Spanked Natalie Wood:
Emotion and Legend at
Esalen
Marion S. Goldman, University of
Oregon, mgoldman@uoregon.edu
Esalen
Institute in Big Sur, California is a legendary community, retreat, spa, and
think tank founded in 1962. Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Abraham Maslow,
Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Bishop James Pike, and Timothy Leary were among
dozens of well-known fig-ures associated with the institute. Since the late
1960s, three central informal narratives have supported the institute’s
foundational mission, encouraging personal spiritual growth and social
sensitivity. One of these three contemporary legends is the “wise father”
story, about the Hollywood party where Fritz Perls, a gestalt therapy guru,
turned a gorgeous movie star, Natalie Wood, over his knee and spanked her. She
responded with a satirical movie, Bob and
Carol and Ted and Alice, and a personal search that led her back to Esalen
almost two decades later. This narrative reveals ways in which Esalen
encouraged emotional intelligence through exploring personal vulnerabilities.
Sweet Potato Latkes and Other Southern Jewish
Delicacies: Exploring
the Myriad Flavors of Jewish Identity
Formation in the American South
Dana M. Greene, Appalachian State
University, greenedm@appstate.edu
This
paper addresses the richness of Jewish American identity formation in the
Ameri-can South by focusing on the socioreligious definition that has been
adopted by members of Southern Jewish communities that link their regional
identities to their religious heritage, thereby becomingly “Jewishly Southern.”
This process of self-definition, coupled with the meaning of having a religious
tradition that links ethnicity and geographic regionality repre-sents the crux
of this study. Thus, drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, this paper addresses the myriad social considerations
linked to cultural capital—e.g., opportunities for upward mobility; experiences
with racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of ethnically entrenched bias;
religious freedom; interactions with differing denominations within Judaism;
and most important, Southern pride and Southern history—to define a
contemporary Jewish American identity in the South that is tied to collective
group historical memory and an understanding/interpretation of the lived experience
of being both Jewish and American, as well as residing in the Southern US.
What is Religion for Americans?
T. Jeremy Gunn, Emory University,
jgunn@law.emory.edu
Several religious identity symbols are part of the 21st
Century culture wars in the US: Ten Commandment monuments, “intelligent design”
as an alternative to the theory of evolu-tion, crèches and holiday images, and
the phrases “in God we trust” and “one nation under God.” These symbols are
largely uncontroversial when they are a matter of individual expression, but
they elicit a firestorm when some citizens insist that governments adopt or
promote them. Curiously, the proponents of such symbols do not base their
arguments on religious requirements (e.g.,
that scripture or theology demands it), but on nationalist or identity grounds. The arguments are “our country was
founded on religious principles” and “we are a religious people,” not “the
Bible commands us to do this.” Theology is thin; identity conflicts control.
Where the Babies Are: Patterns of
Congregational Fertility
Conrad Hackett, Princeton University,
chackett@princeton.edu
Since
children usually inherit parental religious identity, fertility patterns are
consequential for religious institutions. Despite scholarly and popular
interest in church growth and decline, the relationship between congregations
and fertility has been neglected. Using the Congregational Life Survey, an
innovative, large-scale study of American congrega-tions, I report and analyze
congregational fertility patterns. High fertility is found in congrega-tions
affiliated with small denominations, whose members are not identified in
standard demographic surveys. Using regression analysis, I estimate the
influence of theology, compo-sitional characteristics, and pro-natalist
congregational culture upon congregational fertility rates. Within
congregations, there is a close relationship between completed fertility rates
and current fertility rates among women of childbearing age.
How Theology Matters for Congregants in Presbyterian
Churches
Jennifer Campbell Hackett, Princeton
Theological Seminary,
campbell.hackett@ ptsem.edu
This
study investigates how the theology and culture of eight Presbyterian (PCUSA)
congregations influence the way members frame ethical issues. Anticipating that
many Pres-byterian congregations may shy away from providing theological
resources to address sub-jects such as political behavior and medical ethics, I
study “typical” congregations as well as congregations distinguished by strong
evangelical or liberal theology. I find that members of the evangelical
churches think theologically about a narrow range of topics and tend to frame
social problems on a personal level. Members of liberal congregations think
theology is relevant to a broad range of topics and tend to think structurally
about social problems.
Evangelicalism as the Future of an “Illusion”?
An Evolutionary
Perspective
Durk Hak, Enschede, Netherlands,
durkhak@home.nl
It is supposed (a) mainline modern Christianity as described, e.g.,
by Bellah will result in secularization, unchurching, and unbelief, and (b) the
soteriology of both historic Christian
religion and early-modern Christianity
are no acceptable any longer to modern Christian
believers. Two orthodox Christian reactions to modern Christianity are observed: one “reform-ative” fundamentalist
(and regressive); the other evangelical. The question addressed in the paper is
whether the adaptive capacity of evangelicalism to the requirements of modern soci-ety is great enough to last
until the end of the century. Evangelicalism (and “reformative” fundamentalism)
is seen as a “family of denominations” with a hard core consisting of (1)
accepting Jesus Christ as savior, (b) personal conversion, (c) reaching out to
the world, and (b) the Bible as God’s word, “inerrant in matters of faith and
practice”—to which evangelicals subscribe to a lesser or greater degree. It is
assumed that evangelicalism is instrumental to a modern religious person’s needs for physical and social wellbeing.
The kingdom of heaven can be achieved because of the believer’s voluntary
decision to accept Jesus Christ as savior. Evangelicalism is supposed to have
the greater adaptive capacity to modern
society of the two, and consequently is supposed to “have” the future. Yet,
it is institutionally relatively weak, and we cannot yet foresee the
consequences of institutionalization or oligarchy formation, nor the effects of
the coming generation of evangelical academics
and academic evangelical
theologians.
Catholic Decline and the Challenge of
Liberalism
Pierre Hegy, Adelphi University,
hegy@adelphi.edu
This paper reviews major findings about Protestant decline
since the 1960s and then concentrates on Catholic decline in more recent years.
I review the literature on strictness and rational choice, and find that they
have little explanatory power. I hypothesize that secular liberalism and
internal secularization have played a major role in mainline Protestant
decline. I then apply these criteria to Catholic interview data.
Bringing Theology Back In: Building a Swedish
Lutheran Parish in an
Industrializing City
Michael Hillary, University of
Wisconsin–Waukesha, mhillary@uwc.edu
Early
in the study of immigration communities of the late 19th and early
20th centur-ies, a general model of immigrant churches emerged,
describing them as central institutions in the creation of ethnic communities,
providing essential services to members of the com-munity, organizing responses
to challenges from the surrounding society, variously facilitat-ing,
regulating, and resisting assimilation. A vast array of historical work
documents varia-tions and exceptions among churches, based on ethnicity,
leadership, various characteristics of local context, political challenges, and
historical timing. This paper gives attention to a difference curiously
neglected or left out of focus in the literature on immigrant
churches—theology. Historical research on Swedish Lutherans in an
industrializing city is used to examine how a distinct theology gives shape to
ethnic parishes with practices and structures both similar to and different
from common patterns found in Catholic parishes. While aspir-ing to the
inclusiveness of many ethnic Catholic parishes, theological constraints
systemati-cally undermined this ideal.
Buddhism in the HomeSpace
Jane N. Iwamura, University of Southern
California, iwamura@usc.edu
In the sociological study of Asian North American Buddhism,
the temple has served as the primary site of research. While there are good
reasons for this focus, examining Buddhist practice in the home can prove
equally illuminating. Drawing from a pilot study of Japanese American Buddhists
and their home shrines (obutsudan), I
discuss how Buddhist altars and altar practice play an understated, but important
role in mediating family relations, ethnic identity formation, and religious
attitudes. Monitoring Buddhism in the “homespace” also reveals much about the
way in which practices change in diaspora and over time. In addition to looking
at Japanese American home altars, I will also consider other examples (e.g.,
Chi-nese, Vietnamese) to discuss the relevance that these alternative spaces
hold for the study of (Asian) North American religions broadly conceived.
A “New” Religious Movement: The Dutch Prophetess
and Healer, Mrs.
Sonja de Vries
Lammert G. Jansma, Foundation Forces
(Netherlands), f2hlgjansma@hetnet.nl
In my paper I will discuss the
movement that has assembled around the prophet and healer Mrs. Sonja de Vries,
which has its center in the village of Oudehorne (Friesland, Netherlands).
Important elements in the doctrine of the movement, which considers itself a
Christian movement, are personal growth, reincarnation, and health/illness.
This movement has a firmly established structure and a belief system
collectively shared by its adherents. This type of highly institutionalized
movement seems to be an exception among current emerging religious groups,
where loosely organized groupings seem to be the rule. In this paper both the
organization and the belief system are discussed, and an explanation is given
why this particular movement developed into a full-fledged organization.
The Political Past as Sacred Past: Making
Shivaji a Sacred King in
Western India
Daniel Jasper, Moravian College,
djasper@moravian.edu
In this paper, I look at the ways in
which the seventeenth-century king Shivaji has been deified in the
Marathi-speaking region of western India. The memory of Shivaji was
“rediscovered” as a model of a glorious political past during the colonial
period. In recent years, his legacy has been reframed, positing him as a
religious leader. In tracing the deification of Shivaji, I identify how secular
spaces of commemoration have been constructed as sacred spaces of worship. In
this paper, I analyze the actions of officials and popular actors, including
local and state agencies, political parties, and civil organizations. This dual
focus shows the ways that new religious practices and beliefs are
institutionalized by a variety of social actors with different objectives or
toward different goals.
Rituals of Civil Religion: Beyond Durkheim
Diane Johnson, Kutztown University,
dijohnson@kutztown.edu
Some of the most virulent objects to
Robert Bellah’s “civil religion” find their origin in its alliance with
Durkheimian ritual. This paper explores the possibility of meeting these
criticisms through a modification in the century-old analysis. Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of
Humanity provides a concept of religious ritual that moves us beyond a
focus on belief to emphasize the ritual creation of obligation and the
digitalized communica-tion of social change. Applied to an analysis of the
published text of congressional hearings, Rapport’s religious ritual allows for
a more complete interpretation of the complexities of Bellah’s scheme, a
clearer perspective on his differences with his critics, and a more system-atic
investigation of the process and globalization of America’s civil religion over
time. The model is illustrated through an analysis of the legislative history
of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1975-2000).
Sociological Theory and the Sociology of
Religion: Bridging the Gap
between Distinct Fields of Discourse
D. Paul Johnson, Texas Tech University,
d.paul.johnson@ttu.edu
Religion
was a key concern of the classical-stage founders of sociology, and their
theoretical analyses of religion have served as a reservoir of concepts and
ideas that have influenced subsequent developments in general sociological
theory. As sociology has frag-mented into numerous specialty areas, including
the sociology of religion, each has tended to develop its own theoretical ideas
and styles of discourse. The goal of this paper is to argue for more explicit
convergence between general sociological theory and theoretical concepts and
ideas used in the sociology of religion to show how both areas can be thereby
enriched. Theoretical ideas from the sociology of religion that can be related
to general sociological theory include the concept of civil religion (in both
its “priestly” and “prophetic” forms), church-sect theory and its elaborations,
emergence and subsequent of secularization theory, the focus on religion as
socially constructed and as reflecting and reinforcing individuals’ identities
and group memberships, the contrasting functions of different religious
orientations in escalating/reducing conflict, and the overlap between the “new
paradigm” rational choice/market model of religion with exchange and rational
choice theory generally.
Orientalists, Islamists, and the Global
Discourse on Islam: Shaping the
Modern Image of a Religion
Dietrich Jung, Danish Institute for
International Studies, dju@diis.dk
Against the background of the ongoing public debate that
focuses on differences between Islam and the West, this paper suggests a change
of perspective. It will start from the observation that both Western analysts
and Islamist activists define Islam similarly as an all-encompassing religious,
political, and social system. In shifting from differences to similarit-ies, it
associates the evolution of this particular modern image of Islam with a
complex process of cross-cutting (self)-interpretations of Muslim and Western
societies within an emerging global public sphere. Thereby the changing infrastructure
of the global public sphere has facilitated the gradual popularization,
trivialization, and dissemination of a previously elitist discourse on Islam
and the West through which the idea of Islam as an all-encompassing system
became accepted knowledge in the Western and Muslim worlds alike.
“Dark Pilgrimages” in Virtual Reality and
Cyberspace: The Example of
“‘Browsing’ through Auschwitz
Lutz Kaelber, University of Vermont,
lkaelber@uvm.edu
The current frontier in post-Fordist pilgrimages is the
expansion of religious journeys into the worlds of cyberspace and multimedia
generated hyper-reality. In many cases official as well as unofficial websites
in cyberspace offer potential or actual travelers to sacred sites guides and
other information, and they sometimes act as virtual depositories of local
know-ledge that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to obtain. Some
virtual pilgrimage sites offer a curious mix of kitsch, commerce, and
salvation, and many seem to vanish as quickly as they spring up. Some virtual
tours, however, go further and take visitors or viewers on a “dark pilgrimage,”
which, as a concept, is analogous to “dark tourism”: journeys to and through
sacred sites of atrocity. William Miles has painted an ominous picture of dark
pilgrimages in referring to the cybertourist as soon no longer being able to
perceive a substantial difference between walking and “browsing through
Auschwitz.” This paper addresses the current state of “browsing through
Auschwitz” by analyzing as sociological phenomena the currently offered virtual
tours through Auschwitz as well as the virtual recreated gas chamber(s) in the
2005 BBC series “Auschwitz.”
Ethnographic Fluidity: Connections between
Religiosity, Vulnerability,
and Power
Kristina Kahl, University of Colorado,
kristina.kahl@colorado.edu
This paper engages the methodological tool of reflexivity
to uncover issues of power and of insider/outsider perspectives based on an
ethnographic study of a new Foursquare Gospel church facilitated by a woman pastor.
Research has shown that focus of standpoint positions provide a detailed view
of the complexities of ethnographic work. Specifically, this research gave
insight into the dynamics of power relations between the researcher and the
researched. Central issues of standpoint positions in this study include age,
class, and social status of the key respondents in relation to the researcher’s
own status level. Second, this research found that the multiplicity of fluidity
provided this study with more complex and enriching perspectives than a
traditional insider/outsider perspective. Fluidity enhanced understanding of
the researched and the study itself. The relationship complexities of
stand-point and fluidity perspective provide insight into how data collection
can be impeded or magnified within the research process and research outcomes.
On the Conceptualization and Measurement of
Religious Intolerance:
Theoretical Considerations and an Empirical
Application
Vyacheslav Karpov, Western Michigan
University, Kimmo Kääriäinen, Finnish Church
Research Institute, and Elena
Lisovskaya, Western Michigan University,
v.karpov@wmich.edu
The spread and intensity of religious conflicts throughout
the world suggest the importance of research on religious intolerance. Specifically,
comparative survey research could shed light on the spread and determinants of
religious intolerance in various national, cultural, and political settings.
However, systematic survey research on religious intolerance is rare.
Theoretically justified conceptualizations and reliable empirical measures of
this phe-nomenon are hard to find. Seeking to fill this gap, we conceptualize
religious intolerance as the unwillingness to grant civil religious liberties
to religious out-groups. Such a conceptuali-zation is based on the
interpretation of religious freedom as a universal human right as well as on
other forms of tolerance. We apply this conceptualization to an empirical study
of reli-gious intolerance in Russia (2972 interviews conducted in 2005). We
show that the Religious Intolerance scales we constructed are reliable, valid,
and applicable in other national and reli-gious contexts.
Islam, Orthodoxy, and Religious Intolerance in
Russia
Vyacheslav Karpov, Western Michigan
University, Kimmo Kääriäinen, Finnish Church
Research Institute, and Elena
Lisovskaya, Western Michigan University,
v.karpov@wmich.edu
We
explore religious intolerance (defined as the unwillingness to grant religious
liber-ties to religious out-groups) in Russia using 2005 data from a
representative national survey (n = 2972, including over 1300 from four
predominantly Muslim regions). Findings show remarkably widespread and strong
religious intolerance. Orthodox Christians were found on average less tolerant
of Muslims than Muslims were of Orthodox, while both were highly intolerant of
Jews and Western churches. Tolerance varies greatly by region, suggesting that
exposure to diversity and traditions of peaceful coexistence increase
Muslim-Christian toler-ance. We find that in today’s Russia religious
intolerance is essentially a nonreligious pheno-menon: it has little to do with
either Orthodox or Muslim traditional religiosity. Predictors of intolerance
included political authoritarianism, ethnic prejudice, and religious ethnocentrism.
Japanese-American Religiosity: A Contemporary
Perspective
Tetsuden Kashima, University of
Washington, kashima@u.washington.edu
Although Japanese Americans constitute a relatively small
population, their signifi-cance in major social and political areas of American
society garners considerable attention. Much of the sociological attention
focused on their early immigrant social history and adjust-ment, the violation
of their civil rights during World War II concomitant with their superior
record of military service, and their present status. Scholarly attention is
less focused on their religiosity and religious institutions, areas with more
than a century-long social history. A knowledge gap is consequently apparent
about their present-day religious attitudes and beliefs. Through a generational
and age-focused perspective, their religiosity, especially centered on
Protestantism and Buddhism, is examined from data derived from 1999-2000
interview studies conducted on the West Coast and Hawaii.
Freedom of Incorporation and the Incorporation
of Religious and
Voluntary Organizations in the 19th
Century United States and Canada
Jason Kaufman, Harvard University,
jkaufman@wjh.harvard.edu
This paper examines state support for religious and
voluntary organizations provided via the legal form of incorporation. The term
“freedom of incorporation” refers to variance in citizens’ “relationship to the
means of incorporation,” or their ability to secure corporate charters from
state legislatures. Legislative records for each of the original thirteen
American states as well as the Canadian provinces of Ontario (Upper Canada),
Québec (Lower Canada), Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick are examined for the
period 1780-1820. Though incorpora-tion is not a conventional frame within
which to view church-state relations, the results raise interesting new
questions about the topic. Most American state legislatures, for example,
sup-ported religious activity via incorporation, though there were nonetheless
major differences in incorporation rates by state. By contrast, there were no
charters granted to religious organi-zations in any of the Canadian provinces
for this time period. This contrast is striking when seen in the light of the
American tradition of church-state separation and Canada’s lack thereof. A
preliminary explanation focuses on emergent differences in the perceived role
of the state as a regulator of private civic activity.
Definitional Issues Concerning Child Sexual
Abuse in Alternative
Religions
Stephen A. Kent, University of Alberta,
steve.kent@ualberta.ca
Working with data from approximately
three dozen sectarian groups, this study identifies at least seven variants of
child sexual abuse in alternative groups. Although these seven variants appear
in secular and mainstream religious situations as well, unique aspects about
the origins and operations of many nontraditional groups increases the
likelihood of these types of violations occurring.
The “Christianization” of South Korea:
Religious and Nonreligious
Factors for Protestant Growth
Andrew Eungi Kim, Korea University,
aekim@korea.ac.kr
This paper argues that several important points of
convergence between the imported faith and traditional Korean religions
strengthened the appeal of Protestantism in Korea. In particular, Korean
Shamanism, the enduring core of Korean religious and cultural thought, is
especially important to explain the prominence of its worldview and practices
in the uniquely Korean form of Protestantism. The paper also argues that key
historical and social circum-stances in Korea—and the resulting sentiments—have
galvanized a large number of Koreans to embrace the imported faith as a means
of making sense of their experience in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, such
political, economic, and social strains as the traumatic experience of the
Korean War (1950-53), the fear of further North Korean attacks, the anomie
arising from rapid industrialization and urbanization, abject poverty for a
substantial segment of the populace, and the deeply-rooted sense of deprivation
arising from a widening income gap have all encouraged a large number of
Koreans, particularly the underprivileged classes, to embrace a new value
system offering them hope and a way out of misery.
Religion—A Seedbed of Civic Privatism? How
Religious Familism
Influences Civic Engagement
Young-Il Kim, University of Virginia,
yk2a@virginia.edu
This paper uses GSS data to examine how religious familism
influences doing nonreli-gious volunteer work. It is assumed that religious
involvement fosters civic engagement, but critics often say that familism
erodes civil society by turning attention to the well-being of one’s own family
rather than engaging in the broader society. To what extent, then, does family
impede civic participation? By constructing an index for measuring religious
familism, I aim to answer two questions: Does the relationship between familism
and civic engagement vary by religious tradition? What factors may account for
the variation between involvement in religious organizations and participation
in nonreligious civic activity? Based on previous literature, I hypothesize
that church-going families with young children will be less likely to
participate in secular civic activity. I also hypothesize that religious familism
along with family structure, income, and education explains the variation
between involvement in churches and other kinds of voluntary associations.
From Tolerance to Prohibition: The Question of
the Islamic Headscarf in
France’s and Québec’s Schools
David Koussens, Université du Québec à
Montréal, koussens.david@courrier.uqam.ca
The
debate about the wearing of Islamic headscarves by Muslim women in schools
arose for the first time in France in 1989 and in 1994 in Québec. While relying
on different principles, the two countries refused to interpret the religious
sign and adopted similar positions authorizing the wearing of the Islamic
headscarf in public schools. This situation is no more effective. On March 15,
2004, the French government passed a law banning Islamic headscarves from
schools, thereby rejecting the visibility of religious diversity in educational
institutions and reaffirming the role of schools in the transmission of
republican values. Meanwhile, Québec still refuses to interpret the headscarf
and reiterates the role of schools in the redefinition of values shared by the
population. Through a juridical comparative analysis, I propose to show how the
two positions diverge.
Fighting a Culture War? The Political
Priorities of Washington Offices
Rachel Kraus, Ball State University,
rmkraus@bsu.edu
James Davison Hunter argues that
liberals and conservatives, competing with one another to create their
respective versions of a moral America, are engaged in a “culture war.” Does
this thesis apply to Washington offices? Unlike independent religious lobbies
that represent only those who belong to or donate money to them, Washington
offices are the political advocacy arm of their parent religious body, to whom
they are formally tied. Utilizing an in-depth analysis of office literature,
office websites, and interviews with the offices’ directors, I identify and
compare the political priorities of 15 religious conservative and liberal
Washington offices during the 108th Congress. Results indicate that,
with few exceptions, Washington offices are not engaged in a culture war.
Instead, they champion very different causes. Liberal offices are most
concerned with social welfare and economic justice, while conservative offices
devote their time to religious, life, and culture issues.
Moral Crisis in a General Motors Town: An
Examination of Church
Response to the Flint, Michigan Sit-Down
Strike, 1936-37
Amy Lane, University of Missouri,
aml705@mizzou.edu
This paper examines the context of
the 1936-37 sit-down strikes during which churches of Flint, Michigan were
faced with a crisis of morality over whose ownership rights were best supported
by church doctrine. They were torn between supporting laborers who could
contribute only pennies to local churches and wealthy bankers and General
Motors managers who occupied the pews of prestigious churches. The historical
evidence suggests the majority of churches upheld the GM status quo by
condemning the strike. However, oral histories and non-mainstream media suggest
a few of the less affluent churches supported the strikers by providing meeting
places, sustenance, and emotional support. Rather than arguing Flint churches
were simply conservative, I point out instead that churches were sur-prised by
the outbreak of the strike. The ways they responded were influenced not only by
class interests, but also broader national debates over employer ownership of
the means of production and the human rights of workers.
Reasonable Irrationality: Religious
Abnegations of the World Revisited
Lauren Langman, Loyola University of
Chicago, llang944@aol.com
Whereas the dialectic of rationality
was a central theme for Weber, for the Frankfurt School the Dialectic of
Enlightenment was a critique of the irrationality of rational modernity leading
not to utopia, but to a society where the “technicians without feelings and
specialists without hearts” created highly efficient death camps. The insights
of Weber recede before the current explosion of an “abstract empiricism” guided
by the logic of classical political econ-omy. Given the works of Homans, Blau,
and Coleman, a “one dimensional,” causal/linear approach to religion has taken
hold in the sociology of religion as seen in Stark and Finke’s “rational
choice” approach. As Horkheimer argued, the traditional theory of Smith,
Bentham and Locke revived stands opposed to an emancipatory Critical theory
with its dialectical understanding of Reason as both emancipatory and
dehumanizing. The absurdity of a rational choice approach to religion can be
seen in the embrace of Islamic fundamentalism.
Religion in the Public School System
Solange Lefebvre, Université de
Montréal, solange.lefebvre@umontreal.ca
In June 2000, Bill 118 was adopted. It swept away schools’
Catholic and Protestant confessional structures and brought in a compromise
solution regarding their educational services related to religion. Mindful of
the public’s range of sentiments regarding the school’s supervision of the
spiritual or religious aspect of students’ lives and aware of the need to
clarify the teaching establishment’s role in this matter, the legislature added
to the Public Education Act such provisions as would create in Québec’s public
schools a secularity open to the
religious fact. This is the tenor of articles in the Act assigning public
schools the responsibility “to facilitate the spiritual development of students
so as to promote self-fulfillment” (art. 36) as part of an educational project
that “must respect the freedom of conscience and of religion of the students,
the parents and the school staff” (art. 37). It was also in this spirit that a
non-confessional service of spiritual care and community involvement was set up
for all students regardless of their religious convictions. France is also
going through some changes regarding religion in the public school system.
The Roman French Catholic Church in Canada
Solange Lefebvre, Université de
Montréal, solange.lefebvre@umontreal.ca
This paper offers observations regarding several dimensions
of Roman Catholicism in French Canada, the seeds of which were sown over 400
years ago. Research conducted by Statistics Canada on ethnic identity shows
that the Canadian francophone population is still mostly composed of people of
French ancestry. I will reflect on the relationship between ethnicity and
religion among French Catholics up to the present and how it has been changed
with the arrival of French-speaking immigrants from other parts of the world
since the 1960s. In a final point, I will explore the changing nature of religious
practice and ideas. The liveli-ness of Christian practices in the 1960s and
1970s has given way to an intergenerational crisis in the transmission of
religion. Following upon the work of José Casanova, I argue that the strength
of the voluntary culture is decisive
in our high modern culture to assure the survival of religious institutions.
According to some surveys, this is weaker in Québec than elsewhere in Canada,
at least in its formal forms.
“Extreme” Catholicism on College Campuses:
Reclaiming or Renovating Tradition?
Laura M. Leming, University of Dayton,
leming@udayton.edu
US
Catholic Colleges have seen a growing number of young adults arrive on campus
who are proud of their Catholic identity, actively engage in a variety of
traditional and non-traditional religious practices, and seek a supportive
Catholic environment. This study inves-tigates the religious practices and
impact of these Catholic Millennials as revealed in the first year of what is
planned as a longitudinal study of a Midwest evangelical-style Catholic cam-pus
group. A mixed-methods approach, using survey and interview data as well as
participant observation, yields insight into how these “extreme” Catholic
students interpret their fidelity to Catholic tradition and their efforts to
renovate Catholic practices.
Somewhere between Heaven and Hell:
Congregation Members Reflect on the Afterlife
Pamela Leong, University of Southern
California, pamelale@usc.edu
This study examines how 35 members of an urban, West Coast
congregation conceptualize heaven and hell. Congregation members are
overwhelmingly GLBT, low SES, and African American. A sizeable proportion of
the congregation is HIV-positive or HIV-at-risk. Fear mongering and promoting
despair among a population that is already extremely marginalized makes little
sense for the pastor, who intentionally avoids persecutory images,
de-emphasizes the hellish, and highlights universal redemption, salvation, and
heavenliness. The respondents’ frameworks for understanding heaven and hell are
in line with the church’s religio-therapeutic emphasis. Most respondents
described heaven/hell not as physical spaces but as internal/psychological
processes (states of mind, emotions, or life conditions). Their interpretations
provide substantial allowance for redemption/salvation. These alternative
formulations illustrate how heaven and hell are very much individualized and
personalized concepts. Finally, although there is less preoccupation with moral
infallibility and a general disbelief in divine judgment, many respondents
continued to believe that placement in heaven or hell is controllable.
How Religion Circulates in America’s Local
Public Square
Paul Lichterman, University of Southern
California, lichterm@usc.edu
Alexis de Tocqueville famously argued that American
religion would enhance American civic life. He imagined that religion would
promote concern for fellow humans and temper the passions that produce uncivil
behavior. US sociologists and political scientists have been rediscovering Tocqueville’s
writings amidst the news that American civic group memberships have declined
steeply in the past thirty years. Many of them reiterate Tocqueville’s paean to
American religion. But what does religion do in US civic life today? How, it at
all, does religion circulate in local, civic organizations? This paper
investigates how religious language circu-lates in local, voluntary
associations in the US, using two ethnographic examples of religious community
service groups. I suggest that when scholars equate public religion with
religious deliberation about social issues, we miss important factors that
shape the public influence, or irrelevance, of religious discourse. Members of
local, religiously based civic groups shared dis-tinct ideas about what it means
to be a religious person, quite apart from their religious beliefs about the
world. In both cases, shared notions of religious identity limited and even silenced religious deliberation. In these groups, and perhaps others in the American
civic arena, a “good” religious person was not
someone who develops elaborate religious reasons for opinions on social
issues.
Joining Systems Theory and the Sociology of
Religion
Robert Liebman and Martin Zwick,
Portland State University, liebmanr@pdx.edu
Systems theory offers conceptual and theoretical tools for
the study of religions as sociocultural systems. We show how systems theory can
augment historical and sociological studies of religion through three
demonstrations of the use of systems ideas in the literature (Bellah, Sloan
Wilson, Sharot). From thermodynamics we use the ideas of openness and
closedness to consider the persistence of tradition in Islam and Judaism. From
game theory, we use the ideas of cooperation and defection to examine tensions
between exclusivist and ecumenical traditions in Christianity. From complexity
theory, we use the idea of differentia-tion to consider how the embeddedness of
religious systems within the larger society influ-ences the relations of church
and state and processes of acculturation.
The Last Shall Be First: The Leveling Effect
of Pentecostalism among
Latino Immigrants
Tony Tian-Ren Lin, University of
Virginia, ttl6c@virginia.edu
Harvey
Cox points out that Pentecostal practices have a leveling effect to lift those
who are socially disadvantaged. Tongue speaking, for example, allows the poor,
uneducated, and illiterate to speak with as equal authority as the educated and
elite. This effect is especially prominent in Latino Pentecostal Christians,
who not only have an actual linguistic disadvan-tage, but also face alienating
realities in other parts of their lives. They are culturally and socially
disadvantaged because of their immigrant status and often have lower
educational attainment. This study finds that Pentecostal Christianity offers a
sophisticated system of cultural logic for its adherents. I seek to understand
the process by which Pentecostalism becomes a compensatory force in the daily
lives of these immigrants. Through ethnographic research and structured interviews,
I articulate the theodicies they create. I find that Pente-costalism not only
possesses leveling qualities but it also reproduces the disadvantaged life.
“Epistle to the Galatians’ or Epistle to the
Galli? Roman Cultural Politics
and Pagan Influences in the New Testament and
Beyond
Orestis Lindermayer, Athens, Greece,
orlindermayer@hotmail.com
Rodney
Stark has asked us to reconsider the history of early Christianity. In this
paper I will try to reconsider the culture
of early Christianity, especially that of the New Testament. I will argue
that one of the reasons for the success of Christianity in late antiquity and
beyond was the formulation by Christians of a theory of “Romanness”—a new,
initially marginal, sense of Roman identity. In this sense, I will also follow
in the steps of Sir James Frazer, whose Golden
Bough had put forward the controversial point that Jesus Christ of the
Gospels corresponds to the Carnival King of the pagan Roman Saturnalia. Here I
will examine the text of the apostle Paul’s “Epistle to the Galatians” and
place it in the context of other contemporary non-Christian texts. I
hypothesize that Paul’s Galatians were Galli—in fact, reformed Galli—in the
sense of Galli as castrati converts to the pagan Roman cult of Cybele and Attis.
This twist can help us understand the links that exist between the cult of
Cybele on the one hand and Christianity on the other, especially in what
concerns the later development of the cult of the Virgin Mary.
“Heart and Head” in Reaching Pastors of Black
Churches
Adair T. Lummis, Hartford Seminary,
alummis@hartsem.edu
From the nineteenth century to the present in America,
evangelical preaching that “brings down the Spirit” to members’ hearts in the
Black church has been the cachet of the superior pastor. Black churches may
also need pastoral leaders may also need pastoral leaders to stretch the minds
of youth and other members, to keep their church administra-tively sound, and
to take a pivotal leadership role in the surrounding community. According to
some African-American church leaders, foundations and seminaries, this is
particularly true for pastors of Black congregations in the 21st
century, especially the many pastors without graduate seminary education. Using
insights gleaned from three recent survey evaluations and interview data from
one seminary’s certificate program, the “heart-head” connection or disjunction
will be explored in reaching pastors of Black churches.
Religious Experience and the Economy of
Exchange: Notes toward a
Theory of Material Christianity
Kenneth MacKendrick, University of
Manitoba, mackendr@ms.umanitoba.ca
Drawing on recent studies dealing
with religion and the marketplace, my paper will explore the social
construction of “religious experience” within competitive and consumer oriented
markets. Neither celebrating the potential of the market to replicate itself
and pro-duce cultural goods nor lamenting its power to hollow out formerly
sacred ties, I will provide an explanation as to why competitive market-places
and mystical revival go hand in hand.
Religion, Religiosity, or Something Else?
Political Trends in the US
Sandy Marquart-Pyatt, Utah State
University, sandm@cc.usu.edu
The question of how religion and politics intersect among
members of the US general public has received renewed media attention in recent
years, especially in the popular press. However, sociological explanations
related to the values divide are relative sparse in pointing out broader issues
that have been advanced as possible explanations for larger processes
potentially at work. This research explores how religious group membership and
religiosity are related to a number of political issues and compares them using
two large public opinion surveys, the General Social Survey and the American National
Election Studies. Trend data are examined for three decades, showing how views
of religious groups and the intensity of participation in religious life are
linked with larger cultural and political trends, as evidence in evaluations of
different groups and the relationship to political ideology, tolerance, and
con-ventional and unconventional political activism. Unanticipated results are
highlighted in the discussion.
Affinity, Identity, and Transcendence: The
Experience of Religious
Racial Assimilation in Diverse Churches
Gerardo Martí, Davidson College,
gemarti@davidson.edu
How
do diverse races come together? Why should social scientists care? Synthesizing
ethnographic data drawn from two extensive case studies, the core of this paper
provides a heuristic model for understanding the process by which believers of
disparate ethnic and racial heritages assimilate into multiracial churches.
Three “moments” will represent key phases of the lived experiences of members
as they co-construct common bonds of spiritual kinship. In addition, the paper
argues for the strategic importance of the multiracial church as a fascinating
site for investigating core human interactions and then provides cautions and
suggestions for future work.
From Watch Night to First Night
Richard McCarthy, Kutztown University,
and Melissa Warner, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, mccarthy1117@att.net
The idea of celebrating the New Year seems to be a part of
almost all cultural/ethnic and religious traditions. Jews, Chinese, Muslims,
and Christians all celebrate the holiday, although at different times and in
different ways. However, our paper will concentrate on the Western tradition,
tracing New Year’s and, especially, New Year’s Eve from the Roman Empire,
through Medieval Christianity, the Reformation, and observances through US
his-tory. In the 19th century, many Protestant denominations
introduced “Watch Night,” observing New Year’s Eve with programs of prayer,
hymns, and meditation in reaction to raucous New Year’s Eve celebrations. In
the past few decades a new, ecumenical celebration, “First Night,” has arisen
in many communities in the US. This is an alcohol-free, family-friendly
celebration. One of our authors was invited to examine First Night in Evanston,
Illinois, and will discuss what he observed.
The History of Oppression of Religion in the
Soviet Union and the
People’s Republic of China
Charles Allan McCoy, Purdue University,
mccoyc@purdue.edu
While
throughout history specific religions have been oppressed by the state, it was
not until the 20th century that we find Communist states opposed to
religion in general. To study their oppression of religion this paper performs
a comparative analysis of two of the last century’s major communist countries.
The main thesis of this paper is that the divergent approaches of oppression
used in the Soviet Union and China caused different reactions. Religious groups
in the Soviet Union faced a more hard-line approach that actively sought to
eliminate religion. As they had no other option for survival, religious groups
reacted with greater resistance and protest. In China, where the state adopted
a softer approach of control and restriction, we find religious institutions
more willing to adapt and conform to the new system, seeing this as their best
option for survival.
Feeling Jesus in the Backbeat: Music and
Emotion in an Evangelical
Worship Experience
Kevin L. McElmurry, University of
Missouri, klm143@mizzou.edu
One perennial problem for
maintaining religion’s place in the modern world is the question of how to make
the traditions (the old) new and relevant, while conversely relating the new
and rapidly changing culture to the traditions of the past. This is more than a
question of recruitment and growth, though these are certainly concerns of the
modern era. It is also a question of where, how, and in what contexts religious
bodies negotiate the distinc-tion between the sacred and the secular on an
ever-shifting cultural field. My paper draws on ethnographic data gathered from
a large Mid-Western Evangelical Protestant congregation to track the shifting
boundary between sacred and secular as it is elaborated in everyday practices.
Employing theoretical and methodological tools from cultural sociology and the
sociology of music, I explore the relationship between popular culture and
religious experi-ence and argue that this relationship is in part mediated
through emotion.
Consumer Culture and the Logic of Religious
Markets
Andrew McKinnon, University of Toronto,
amckinno@chass.utoronto.ca
Rational choice theory is the only major approach to take
account of the consumer form of contemporary religiosity in North America. This
paper argues, however, that by positing consumer behavior as a set of
transhistorical cross-cultural dispositions, RC theorists fail to theorize
adequately what is unique about this new situation. As Pierre Bourdieu argues,
these economic models and their scholastic reason misrepresent the logic of
actors and thus, I suggest, also why religion has become ever more market-like
and the tools of rational choice more useful.
The Trajectory of African-American Studies
Omar M McRoberts, University of
Chicago, omcrober@uchicago.edu
This paper presents a critical review of developments in
the sociological study of African-American religion from the early twentieth
century to the present. I explain how major themes of migration,
accommodation/resistance, and functional adaptation and differentia-tion have
motivated and organized much research in this tradition. I then highlight lines
of inquiry into African-American religion that transcend or integrate these
major themes in important new ways.
Catholicism as Memory in a Spiritualist
Congregation
Dierdre Meintel, Université de
Montréal, dmeintel@videotron.ca
The spiritualist congregation in
Montréal where the research was carried out is composed mainly of Québécois
francophones who were brought up as Catholics. Here I dis-cuss how religion is
articulated with social memory for the members of this group. I suggest that in
this case the religious rituals of the Église spirituelle de la guérison
(pseudonym) do not efface the Catholic past of its members but rather reinforce
and, to a certain degree, celebrate it. Here religious memory is not
transformed in a lineal way (Hervieu-Léger) but is rather renewed through
ritual activities and transformed in shared experiences of communitas (V.
Turner).
Socioeconomic Status and the Influence of
Religious Participation on
Political Participation
Veronica Momjian, Fordham University,
vmomjian@westlondongarcia.com
Recent US political activity suggests that many poor and
working-class individuals undermine their social and economic interests by
voting in favor of shared cultural values associated with religious beliefs.
Building upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social capital, this paper examines
the use of class-cultural models of social movements, and argues that
religi-osity, as a form of cultural and social capital will be a better
predictor for political participa-tion among lower classes. Political
participation, therefore, is as much a product of culture as it is of economic
interests and is determined within the constraints of social class and through
cultural beliefs and practices that are class relevant. Individuals seek to
enact change within the social arena through various forms of cultural and
social capital, religion being one such form. This paper proposes that among
individuals with lower socioeconomic status, higher religious participation
will be positively related to political participation; for individuals with
higher levels of socioeconomic status, higher levels of educational attainment
will be positively related to political participation.
Faith under Communism: Insights into Cuban
Catholicism Today
Margarita Mooney, Princeton University,
margarita@princeton.edu
Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, religious freedom in
Cuba has been severely restricted. Changes in the international context after
the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992 and the visit of Pope John Paul II to
Cuba in 1998 have reopened many spaces for private worship and public
engagement of religion. In this paper, I review how the largest religious
institution in Cuba, the Catholic Church, has reconstituted itself during the
last ten years. Data for this paper come from secondary research, a review of
Catholic publications in Cuba, and observations and interviews from my visits
to Cuba. This paper attempts to answer several questions: What challenges does
the Church face in reconstituting the clergy and religious? Given the lack of
clergy and religious, what types of lay leadership have evolved? What explains
the interest in entering the Church among youth reared in revolutionary Cuba.
Jewish Ghost Stories: Support for a Cultural
Source Theory for
Extraordinary Human Experience
Christopher M. Moreman, St. Francis
Xavier University, cmoreman@gmail.com
Encounters with the dead appear in
folklore around the world and throughout history. Depictions of spirits are
similar across traditions. Jewish ghost stories, however, differ in a
significant way: they regularly involve only invisible spirits, whereas ghosts regularly appear visibly in the folklore of other
cultures. Adding to this are surveys of first-person experiences with
apparitions. Several studies, in both the East and West, have reported 10-30%
of respondents claiming first-hand encounters with spirits of the dead. Further
analysis of these reports has found that visual apparitions are by far the most
common. Ghost stories are easy to find in the rich folklore that exists
throughout the history of Judaism. That within this long history the appearance
of ghosts is almost totally limited to auditory apparitions is surprising given
the cross-cultural survey data. An explanation must be sought for the divergence
between Jewish experience, or the reports thereof, and the cross-cultural
studies.
When Immigrant Religious Groups Attract
Québécois Converts
Géraldine Mossière, Université de
Montréal, geraldine.mossiere@umontreal.ca
Though often conceived in terms of ethnicity, migration has
also significantly modified Québec’s social landscape. When arriving, newcomers
bring with them new beliefs and practices. Here I describe two religious groups
where an interactional space of contact between immigrants and members of the
host group is formed and where new identities are developed among all the
participants, be they immigrant or native-born Québécois. The paper is based on
two field studies: one conducted in a Pentecostal congregation and one in a
Sufi group. Both are based in Montréal. There membership includes mainly
African immigrants, nevertheless they also attract a minority of Québec-born
members. I will examine the reconstruction of identity of these Québécois as
new converts and discuss the role of the religious marker in this process. My
data lead me to suggest that we should question the widespread assumption that
the Quiet Revolution shifted Québécois identity from one based on religion to
one based on language.
Christianity in Japan: Toward a Sociology of
Success and Failure
Mark R. Mullins, Sophia University, mmullins@sophia.ac.jp
Since the reopening
of Japan to the West in the late nineteenth century, scores of denominations
and sects have made their way from Europe and North America to Christianize Japan.
In spite of significant growth periods over the past century, institutionally
affiliated Christians still amount to only approximately one percent of the
population. When one considered the number of missionaries and the financial
resources invested by both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, this is
hardly a picture of success. In sum, the story of Christianity in Japan is
often told as one of “failure” when compared to the remarkable growth of
Christianity in South Korea and, more recently, in China. Many observers have
suggested that the “Westernness” of Christianity represents a major obstacle to
church growth in Japan. Sociological studies to date, however, indicate that
indigenization (i.e., de-Westernization) does not guarantee growth in this
context. The aim of this paper is to identify other key factors (sociocultural
and macropolitical that help to explain the predicament of this transplanted
religion.
Nancy Nason-Clark and Barbara
Fisher-Townsend, University of New Brunswick,
nasoncla@unb.ca
Religion continues
to be a powerful and empowering force in societies around the world. It helps
to shape—and indeed is shaped by—the needs, dreams, and ideals of men and women
everywhere. Yet, when scholars of religion consider religious beliefs and
practices, they often overlook or minimize women’s reality. Moreover, as an
analytical frame, gender is seldom at the center of conceptualizing religious
experience or examining its impact upon believers. Various feminist
epistemologies have sought—with some success—to restructure academic discourse
as it related to women’s lives and circumstances. However, within the sociology
of religion, our collective consciousness is still in its early stages of
development. In this paper, we examine contemporary theory, research, and
social action initiatives within the sociology of religion that attempt to take
seriously the concepts of women, gender or feminism.
This paper examines Hochschild’s
work on the commercialization of intimate life and explores its relevance for
thinking about some of the recent changes in both people’s expecta-tions for
congregational life and what congregations are doing. While families and
churches have had different relations to the public sphere, both families and
congregations are affected by social changes that have objectified and
commodified intimacy and commitment.
Paul J. Olson, Briar Cliff University,
paul.olson@briarcliff.edu
Roger
O’Toole, University of Toronto, otoole@utsc.utoronto.ca
From
the beginning of Canada’s existence as an independent nation, the decennial
census has included compulsory questions on religious affiliation—a
circumstance that per-mits sociologists to view current patterns of religiosity
within a historical context of thirteen decades of religious continuity and
change. Inspection of recently published census data raises several interesting
issues including: the contrast between Canadian and US religious organizational
frameworks, the continuing increase in the proportion of those professing no
religion, the persistence of nominal Christianity among the vast majority, and
the significance of a recent rapid growth in adherence to Asian, African, and
Middle Eastern religious tradi-tions. Contemplation (of these} and other topics
inspires broad theoretical questions concerning the relevance of
secularization, public religion, spirituality, identity, ethnicity, and
immigration, as well as drawing attention to the role of religious competition,
encasement, hegemony, diversity, fragmentation, and privatization in the mosaic
of contemporary Canadian life.
Michal
Pagis, University of Chicago, mpagis@uchicago.edu
Sabrina Pastorelli, École Pratiques des Hautes Études,
sabrina.pastorelli@ephe.sorbonne.fr
My
paper will focus on French public policy toward “cults.” First, we will take
into account what is intended as “cult” and the insertion of this phenomenon as
a problem in the political agenda. Then, to analyze the development of the
political program, we will concentrate on the processes of enunciation and legitimation of the problem
and its insertion into the public and media debate. Furthermore, we will focus
on the realization of the public policy—assessments and adjustments—and on the
approval of the law against “cults.” We will finally try to put the French
situation into perspective with another European country, Italy, while taking
account of the actions and attitude of such international institutions as the
Council of Europe and the European Parliament.
Lauren
E. Pinkus, Ohio State University, pinkus.4@sociology.osu.edu
2006 marks the twentieth anniversary
of the US Bishops’ Pastoral Letter Economic
Justice for All. This document represents the most successful attempt of
the bishops to employ a consultative process in the exercise of teaching
authority. In contrast to other bishops’ statements, its application of
deductive reasoning led it to employ an inductive method in its composition.
The documents of Vatican II are the theoretical foundation of this pastoral
letter. They promote inculturation, which calls local churches to integrate
cultural mores into their polity. This paper will examine from historical and
sociological perspectives the ecclesiological, theological and cultural
literature that shaped the Economic Pastoral’s composition, the process itself,
and its consequences.
Tia
Noelle Pratt, Fordham University, tnpratt@prodigy.net
E.
Burke Rochford, Middlebury College, rochford@middlebury.edu
Claude
Rochon, Université de Montréal, claude.rochon@umontreal.ca
When it comes to new
religious movements, is Québec a distinct society? Since its founding in 1933,
the Worldwide Church of God (Église Universelle de Dieu) has emphasized
doctrinal orthodoxy. However, from 1986 to 1995 significant doctrinal changes
were imple-mented that brought the church closer to traditional evangelical
beliefs, even within the evangelical fold. Moreover, doctrinal orthodoxy was no
longer considered a test of member-ship. Thus, differences that may have
emerged in Québec during and after the changes (and even some that may have
existed before) may provide clues as to the extent to which an NRM ethos is
assimilated (and how membership is lived out) in Québec’s distinct society.
Through a mix of data collection techniques—review of the (scant) literature,
survey of official and officious websites in and outside of Québec, and
informant and participant observation—a case study is built and suggestions for
further research are offered.
Michael
Roemer and Matt Bradshaw, University of Texas, mroemer@mail.utexas.edu
Women
are almost “universally” found to be more religious than men. Religion scholars
typically argue that socialization is responsible—but is this true? Miller and
Stark examined this assumption and found virtually no empirical support,
leaving them to a controversial conclusion: biology, not socialization, may
predispose women toward higher levels of religiousness. In opposition,
sociologists have recently developed a model of patriarchal socialization. The
original test of the model provided support by showing that gender differences
in church attendance, prayer, strength of affiliation, belief in God, and
self-reported religiosity were indeed smaller in egalitarian (versus
patriarchal) contexts. In a follow-up study, however, patriarchal socialization
was found to explain gender differences in church attendance and religious
identification, but not subjective religiousness, spirituality, the use of
religion in daily life, and religious coping. Here we test and provide partial
support for the utility of the theory in a non-US context: Japan.
Richard
Rymarz, Australian Catholic University, r.rymarz@patrick.acu.edu.au
Richard
Rymarz, Australian Catholic University, r.rymarz@patrick.acu.edu.au
Rebecca
Sager, University of Arizona, rsager@email.arizona.edu
Recent research on
the influence of religion has focused mainly on how it affects institutional
structures such as law or politics. However, little attention has been paid to
how the state itself can create and promote religion through cultural means. I
find that through their sponsorship of conferences aimed at faith-based social
service providers, state organizations and actors actively create and promote
religion in these cultural contexts. In this paper I explore this topic through
field research conducted at four such conferences. I find that while the stated
intention of these events is to bring information and awareness to faith-based
leaders, what actually happens is the generation of religion through two main
mechanisms: (1) Religious exhortations by the leaders of the conference used to
engage the audience and inspire religious responses. (2) Encouragement of
religious expression in the small groups at the conferences. Through these
mechanisms state organizations/actors become not just passive observers, but
active initiators of religion.
Nicole
Saunders, Concordia University, nic.saunders@gmail.com
This
paper is intended to contribute to a growing body of literature on agency in
the development of religious identity within the boundaries of a religious
group, the Twelve Tribes religious community near Winnipeg. Every religious
movement is composed of individuals, each of whom has his or her own life story
and history which contribute to the way each negotiates and embodies the
theology of the group. This boundary negotiation is the interac-tive process by
which the individual makes the boundaries of the group flexible through
dif-ferent interpretations, living out a religious identity in a unique manner,
while at the same time sharing the commonalities of membership within the
Twelve Tribes. How does one, throughout the period of a lifetime, craft a
religious identity? By asking this question, we can attempt to paint a picture
of what religious adherence looks like in Canada, a shifting land-scape of
religiosity.
Scott
Schieman, University of Toronto, and Alex Bierman, University of Maryland,
abierman@socy.umd.edu
Jennifer Selby, McMaster University,
selbyja@univmail.cis.mcmaster.ca
David
Seljak, St. Jerome’s University, dseljak@uwaterloo.ca
At present, the
organization of the Chaplaincy in the Canadian Forces reflects the
quasi-established status of the mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic
churches. For example, except for one Muslim, all CF chaplains are Christians;
set they serve personnel who are of many faiths and none. Today chaplains find
themselves challenged by many social developments, such as the breakdown of
institutional religion and concomitant rise of interest in spirituality, the
new religious diversity among CF personnel, and the increasing
bureaucra-tization of the CF chaplaincy. These challenges come at a time when
the CF hope to expand the role of chaplains to aid soldiers in dealing with
ethical problems family and personal issues as well as increased trauma
(including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Interviews with chaplains are used
to illustrate the nature of the changes that this institution is facing in new
times.
Susan
M. Setta, Northeastern University, s.setta@neu.edu
Both
scholars looking at the diverse Christological leanings of the earliest
Christian communities and those exploring charismatic authority in more
contemporary new religious movements assume that charismatic leaders have a
clear view of their own role in the revela-tions they proffer. But despite the
wide-ranging studies on charisma, attempts to understand the individual’s
self-perception from the perspective of the sociology of religion have been
rare. In this study I draw on archival materials to access the self-perceptions
of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. To do this I will use
archival sources from the Mary Baker Eddy Library recently made available to
non-Christian Scientists and draw on the methodologies of Biblical scholarship,
sociology of religion, and intellectual history. To explore the different
perceptions of what I call charismology,
I appropriate from Biblical scholarship the herme-neutic that explores the
various christologies that emerge in early Christian narratives.
Sarah Shafiq, University of Notre Dame,
sshafiq@nd.edu
John
H. Simpson, University of Toronto, hermanjs@sympatico.ca
Whereas the popular meaning of
globalization refers to the spread of capitalism and markets throughout the
world following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the use of the term
“globalization” in social theory predates the end of the Cold War and refers to
a much broader set of phenomena than is typically described in contemporary
mass media. Arguably, Roland Robertson in 1985 was the first to use the term in
a comprehensive sense. He and others developed a variety of approaches to the
globalization question (neo-Marxian, Weberian, interactionist, functionalist),
each relevant in some way to religion/culture. A review of several perspectives
is followed by a consideration of the problem of unity and diversity in
defining and theorizing globalization—and how the “solution” to that problem
contributes to a sociolo-gical understanding of the contemporary world.
Nurit
Stadler, Hebrew University, msstad@mscc.huji.ac.il
Other’s Tools
When
we examine the modus operandi of
scholars as they describe and explain what happens along the cutting edge of
history, some of the differences between historians and sociologists depend
upon their toolboxes. What happens when scholars start to share or steal each
other’s tools? This problematic is illustrated by four examples: (a) the
concept of “folk-ways” operationalized by an American historian dealing with
the colonial period; the “blue-print” that Bartlett operationalized in his
account of the Making of Europe in
the medieval period; (c) a reexamination of their tools in light of
Zijderveld’s account of social institutions (Rotterdam technology); and (d) the
use of different sets of highly specialized toolkits succes-sively to generate a description and explanation of the
ecumenical movement (from social movements to elite negotiations via unofficial
and official networking and organization).
Peter
Staples, University of Utrecht, shstaples@hotmail.com
When I Survey the Cutting Edge of
History: The Rising and Falling of
Peter
Staples, University of Utrecht, shstaples@hotmail.com
When we identify those who deal with
what is happening nowadays along the cutting edge of history, we find
sociologists plus a few historians who also deal with ongoing devel-opments.
This segment of the knowledge-generating industry is now dominated by
journal-ists, while the “prophetic” mantle has fallen upon “columnists.” An
examination of how current events are presented by “the media people” in the
Netherlands suggests that the phe-nomenon of “political correctness” has mutated
into a modality of “civil religion,” what has already embedded itself in all
but the most conservative congregations and most political par-ties. However,
it is currently under threat following rapid swings in public opinion in the
aftermath of traumatic historical events such as Srebrenica, the assassinations
of Fortuyn and van Goch, and the Cartoon Crisis.
The Catholic Worker and Resistance to
the State: On the Relevance of
Anarchy
Paul
Stock, Colorado State University, pstock@lamar.colostate.edu
Historically,
the Catholic Worker movement, founded in the midst of the Great Depression, has
remained antagonistic (although not always internally unified) to all things
related to the State. The Catholic Worker can be best described as Christian
anarchists with no centralized organizational structure or hierarchy. The
purpose of this paper is to demon-strate the utility of studying anarchism
today, despite its marginalized connotations, as well as presenting the
Catholic Worker as a viable subject of study in sociology. By
compar-ing/contrasting the Catholic Worker in light of social movements and new
social movements theory, I explore how the decentralized organizational
structure of the Catholic Worker pre-sents an example of contemporary anarchism
based predominately in opposition to the State, while providing necessary
services to the poor, homeless, and forgotten. The Catholic Worker also
presents an alternative organizational model for social causes that typically
evolve into movements.
Going and Coming: The Belated
Development of the Chapel of Our Lady
of the Miraculous Medal as a Pilgrimage
Site
Cultural Coexistence as Seen in the
Islamic Architecture of China’s
Central Plain
Xiaorong
Tang and Changwen Chen, Sichuan University, tshelizi@yahoo.com.cn
Images of Religion in the Policy
Process: The Case of Religious
Arbitration in Canada (Ontario)
Ronan
Teyssier, École des HautesÉtudes en Sciences Sociales, ronan.l.teyssier@ulaval.ca
Agenda-setting
and public policy evaluation theories can be of relevance in investigat-ing
religions’ treatment in the public sphere. After reviewing recent
contributions, I will focus on the issue of “sharia courts” (religious
arbitration in family matters) in Ontario. The agenda-setting approach will
enable us to increase our understanding of how and why religious arbitration
became a “problem” requiring a governmental “solution.” The policy evaluation
perspective will then be used to analyze the official report presented on the question
of religious arbitration by the study group led by Marion Boyd. Finally, I will
argue that even though deeper theoretical foundations and empirical
illustrations have still to be designed, policy analysis is a powerful tool for
understanding how religions are conceived, portrayed, and perceived in the
public sphere.
Barbara
Thériault, Université de Montréal, barbara.theriault@umontreal.ca
Wayne Luther Thompson, Carthage College, Jeffrey Kroll,
University of Arizona, and
Steven Frenk, Duke University, wthompson@carthage.edu
Conversion
to Mormonism in France among Young Adults Today
Although the Mormon Church is
historically American, it has had dramatic growth in Western Europe since the
second half of the twentieth century. Approximately 33,000 members of this
Church live in France. Whereas in Utah Mormon education of the children of the
community is the principal means of gaining/retaining members, in France
proselytism is the most important way to increase numbers. Therefore, the study
of conversion to Mormon-ism in
France, rather than a historical perspective, seems to be the most productive
method for studying the contemporary situation of an American NRM in Western
Europe. This analy-sis is based on five years of ethnological research I have
conducted in the francophone zone (France, Belgium, Switzerland), mainly among
young adult Mormon members. I then compare this to a survey I conducted in Utah
among students at Brigham Young University.
Regulation
of Religious Pluralism in Québec
Jean-Guy Vaillancourt and
Elisabeth Campos, Université de Montréal,
jean.guy.vaillancourt@umontreal.ca
Religious
pluralism has become a distinctive trait of religion in contemporary Western
countries. The emergence and proliferation of ethnic groups has contributed to
the dismem-bering of the traditional religious landscape. Governmental
authorities in Western countries are thus faced by plural demands emanating
from groups with religious traditions that differ from the Judeo-Christian
roots of these nations. Questions arise from this pluralism and have an
influence on the regulation of the religious sphere by public authorities.
These interrogations gravitate mostly around the more or less liberal
conception of religious freedom that is accepted and around the reactions toward
groups with radical convictions that contain doctrinal aspects that are in
opposition to the basic rights and values commonly shared and accepted in these
societies. We shall limit our comments to the current situation that prevails
in Québec and illustrate our ideas with recent examples.
Travis
Vande Berg, Ithaca College, tvandeberg@ithaca.edu
July 2006 will mark
the 40th anniversary of the founding of the International Society
for Krishna Consciousness in New York City by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami
Prabhupad. Over these forty years, ISKCON has experienced a broad array of
changes in its external relation-ships with the larger society and within its
internal membership and organization. One of the major changes has been a
membership shift from Western countercultural seekers to Indian Hindu
immigrants. In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Chicago and
Toronto ISKCON temples, I will discuss the relationship between two subgroups
of these Indians, both of which self-identify as Krishna Conscious but have
different understandings of exactly what Krishna Consciousness means. These two
constructions of Krishna Consciousness have resulted in different types of
membership for each subgroup and, more important, in the development of two
conflicting visions for ISKCON’s future in North America.
Barbara
R. Walters, CUNY-Kingsborough, bwalters@kbcc.cuny.edu
Jacqueline
Wenger, Catholic University of America, jackie_w@comcast.net
Two recent studies,
the National Congregations Study and the American Religious Identification
Survey, have recognized nondenominational churches as a significant phenom-enon
in contemporary American Christianity. I am currently studying a group of
thirty middle-class nondenominational congregations in the suburbs of
Washington, DC to learn what is unique about them and why they are independent.
The first challenge in this study has been how to find nondenominational
churches. These churches often meet at schools or community centers, so not
“steepled” buildings announce their presence. No convenient lists are available
for an organizational body, and Yellow Pages listings are woefully inadequate.
This paper will describe some helpful ways to find nondenominational churches
and some pitfalls to avoid. Use of the Internet, including Web search sites and
phone look-ups, availa-bility of state and federal records, school rental
lists, methods for making contacts, Saturday sandwich boards, and the “drive-around”
method are discussed.
Thomas F. O’Dea on
Mormon Intellectual Life: An Assessment Fifty
Years Later
O. Kendall White, Jr., Washington and
Lee University, whitek@wlu.edu
The 1957 publication
of The Mormons not only marked a
significant point in the social scientific study of Mormonism, but this work
became a classic to which many scholars still turn. O’Dea was not at the time
optimistic about the prospects of viable intellectual life among Mormons. He
argued that the tradition (1) lacked sufficient philosophical sophistica-tion
to provide for the development of meaningful theology and (2) that Mormon
social structure forces intellectuals to become apologists or apostates. This
paper challenges both claims and appeals to experience over the past fifty
years to document theological develop-ment and posits a continuum between
apostates and apologists rather than the dichotomy suggested by O’Dea.
What is it to be a
religious person in contemporary social life? Is it about holding beliefs or
values? Adopting a particular worldview? Maintaining certain group
affiliations? Confronting questions of religious identity means entering
complex conceptual terrain, but perhaps one of the most promising approaches
within the sociology of religion in recent years turns our analytic attention
to practice, to the diverse ways
individuals go about “doing” their religious identities in the variegated
contexts of everyday life. This paper engages with some of the available
literature on practice and then applies such an approach to an empirical study
of Muslim converts in mid-Missouri. I focus my attention on the religious
practices these individuals incorporate into their daily lives, demonstrating
how these practices work to constitute a new religious identity. I argue that,
for these individuals, converting to Islam is not simply about accepting a set
of propositions or ideas about the supernatural order, willy-nilly, but about
acquiring—in and through practice—the practical competence and embodied
subjectivity necessary to create this order in their everyday lives. It is
through this process of practicing the
faith that a Muslim religious identity is formed.
Rational
choice theory presumes the existence of an abstract culturally universal
indi-vidual who maximizes self-interest. I argue that the existence of “the
individual” in society makes a better research question than a presumption.
Comparing mainstream American secular, Pentecostal, and Jehovah’s Witnesses’
cultural practices, I will offer evidence to support the argument that people’s
relationship to themselves, each other, and their society or community is lived
through detailed visible practices that may predominately construct the
experience of individualism or community membership. This argument is rooted in
Marx’s premise in The German Ideology that
lived visible social practices are the basis of human social life and
consciousness. Detailing the lived practices of social groups used to breakdown
social consciousness of communal interdependence and construct “an experience
of individu-ation,” as well as lived practices reinforcing communal
interdependence and constructing “an experience of membership,” challenges the
premise of rational choice theory.
Protestantism has
been growing fast in China. In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took
power on the mainland, there were less than a million Protestant adherents.
Fifty years later, the number of Christian believers is anywhere between 50 and
100 million. What accounts for this rapid growth? The Chinese government,
evangelical Christians, and aca-demic scholars of religious research inside and
outside of China have offered explanations. This paper attempts to assess these
with particular attention to their respective empirical evidence or data. What
kinds of data do we need to test various social scientific explanations of
Christian growth in China? Furthermore, will Christianity continue to grow in
China, as in South Korea, or will it level off, as in Taiwan and Hong Kong?
Again, what kinds of data do we need to make such a prediction, no matter how
tentative it might be?
Independence and
Integration: Chinese Christian Churches in America
Fenggang Yang, Purdue University,
fyang@purdue.edu
This
paper will provide a brief history and current overview of Chinese churches in
the US with a focus on the tensions between independence and integration.
Chinese Christians have strongly desired independence, whereas the larger
American society has expected, and sometimes forcefully pressured for,
integration. Racism has been an important undercurrent in this struggle. In the
19th century, many Chinese Sunday School classes and mission
churches were established by American denominations for Chinese immigrants, but
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other anti-Chinese measures prevented
Chinese from integration into American society. In the second quarter of the 20th
century, Chinese Chris-tian independence movements in China and America
converged, but not until after 1965 has independence become the mainstream of
Chinese Christianity in America. Independent, but not isolated, the experience
of Chinese American churches demonstrates a different form of integration.
Mennonite Cultures of
Pacifism: Resistance, Knowledge, and Use
Kendra L. Yoder, University of
Missouri, klyd29@mizzou.edu
North
American Mennonites have a long history of pacifism. This experience of
pacifism is often presented as a unified story extending across time and space,
describing this subculture’s relationship to state-mediated military power.
This largely institutional narra-tive suggests a high degree of centrality or
commitment to being pacifist. It also suggests a high degree of salience to
pacifism, where Mennonites use this cultural form to guide their decisions and
actions. Longitudinal survey data demonstrate, by contrast, that over time the
salience of this cultural form among Mennonites has changed, whereas the idea
that Menno-nites are pacifist has remained central. I explore the ways in which
resistance to changing historical circumstances influences the tension between
knowledge of pacifism and use of pacifism within the Mennonite subculture.
Progressive Politics,
Conservative Practices: Rethinking Gender in the
Asian-American Church
Karen L. Yonemoto, University of
Southern California, kareny@usc.edu
Contrary
to the assumption that evangelical churches reinforce conservative social
politics, a growing number of Asian-American churches in Los Angeles are
promoting progres-sive politics of race and gender. However, despite their
progressive rhetoric, case studies of Asian American churches suggest that they
in fact observe conservative gender practices that keep women in positions of
subordination and marginalized spaces. This paper will address the tension
between the progressive rhetoric asserted by church leaders and the
conservative realities experienced by church congregants. Based on discourse
analysis of sermons and interviews, the paper suggests that use of progressive
language merely masks conservative church practices, thereby protecting male
privilege and power. This paper concludes by discussing the ways that lay women
and men create subversive spaces to define and redefine new politics of gender
and power, navigate within spaces of conservative evangelicalism, and
ultimately reshape church culture through the embodiment of new gendered and
racial selves.
Does Religion
Influence Gender Role Ideologies in Taiwan?
Elisa Jiexia Zhai and Christopher G.
Ellison, University of Texas,
jzhai@mail.la.utexas.edu
Studies
conducted in the US have long associated certain forms of Christianity,
particularly conservative Protestantism and Catholicism, with support for
traditional gender role ideologies, e.g., ambivalence toward women’s higher
education and labor force participa-tion and/or support for female (wifely) domesticity.
However, most empirical studies are limited to Judeo-Christian sociocultural
contexts, and it is not clear whether these forms of Christianity play similar
roles in non-western settings. Using data from two recent nationwide surveys in
Taiwan, we compare the links between religious tradition—Christianity,
Buddhism, Taoism, and various folk and indigenous religions—and gender roles in
Taiwan. Even with controls for other background factors, our findings link
Christianity with relatively progres-sive gender role attitudes and practices.
A number of explanations and implications are discussed.