Citings and Sightings

A recent article in the Fresno Bee examined the current wave of apocalyptic themes in pop culture:

Prophecies about the end of the world have been debated by scholars, theologians and religious leaders for a long time. But it’s not just them. Pop culture also has a fascination with end times.

The fascination is clear in society today with the release of recent movies. The film “2012,” which opened Friday, depicts the end of the world and is stirring talk about the meaning of a Mayan calendar with the doomsday date. Another movie, “The Road,” which opens Nov. 25, looks at a man and his son’s post-apocalyptic struggle to survive.

One sociological explanation for the trend:

Sociologists say the interest in books, movies and lectures on the subject increases with bad times, such as those scarred by hurricanes, famines, tsunamis, war and economic collapse.

Commentary from a sociologist:

Margaret Gonsoulin, a sociology professor at California State University, Fresno, says the fascination with end times in pop culture reflects a hunger for meaning in the anxiety people feel in bad times.

“They want to know about the future,” she says. “But these sorts of ideas about end times mean different things to different people.”

Read more

Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad recently reported on research forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology that challenges the idea that increased education leads to decreased religiosity. According to the article,

Stijn Ruiter, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and Frank van Tubergen, a professor of sociology in Utrecht, compared ‘religious participation’ in 60 countries. They found no effect of education, but instead came to the conclusion that social insecurity and the environment people grow up in have a significant impact.

The authors focus on church attendance rather than religious belief as their measure of religiosity, and this may help to explain their findings.  Van Tubergen says,

“Other research has shown that highly educated people are indeed less religious. But at the same time they tend to be more actively involved in political parties, associations and thus also in churches. Less educated people are more religious, but less active about it. There is a higher rate of churchgoers amongst educated believers than low-skilled believers.”

According to the authors, the level of economic security in a country is a stronger predictor of religious participation.

“The US has long been regarded as a special case: a developed country and scientific vanguard that is exceptionally religious. But past researchers did not take uncertainties resulting from the high socio-economic inequality into account. In the US you can quickly climb the social ladder, but you can fall off very hard,” Ruiter explains.

Van Tubergen: “Conversely, the link between religiosity and uncertainty explains why the churches in the Netherlands have emptied out. As a result of the welfare state great security can be found outside the walls of the church. It would be interesting to examine the impact of the current economic crisis on church attendance.”

The Washington Post reports today on how the Christian right has “found new life with Barack Obama in office, particularly around healthcare” as many had speculated about the declining potency of the group for cultural and political change.

The state of affairs…

As the president prepares to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night to press for health-care reform, conservative Christian leaders are rallying their troops to oppose him, with online town hall meetings, church gatherings, fundraising appeals, and e-mail and social networking campaigns. FRC Action, the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council, has scheduled a webcast Thursday night for tens of thousands of supporters in which House  Minority Leader John A. Boehner(R-Ohio) and other speakers will respond to the president’s health-care address.

And a sociologist explains the trend!

“Movements do better when they have something to oppose,” said D. Michael Lindsay, a sociology professor at Rice University who studies evangelicals. “It’s easier to fundraise in those kinds of situations. It’s easier to mobilize volunteers because you have an us versus them mentality, and that plays very well right now for the Christian right.”

After seeing their bread-and-butter issue of abortion take a back seat during the election last year, the Christian right has been a prime force in moving it back to the front row by focusing on it as a potential part of health-care reform.

Additional scholarly commentary…

Laura Olson, professor of politics at Clemson University, said health-care reform has been a way to rally Christian conservatives and get them back into the national conversation.

“It has the potential to remind people in that sector. . . of the American electorate that, ‘This is really one of our core concerns, and here’s a new manifestation of it,’ ” Olson said. “It puts a whole new coat of paint on it and makes it even more useful strategically.”

Read more.

Over the weekend the New York Times reported on the recent vote by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (or ELCA), the largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S. to “allow gay men and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as members of the clergy.”

The vote made the denomination the latest mainline Protestant church to permit such ordinations, contributing to a halting sense of momentum on the issue within liberal Protestantism.

By a vote of 559 to 451, delegates to the denomination’s national assembly in Minneapolis approved a resolution declaring that the church would find a way for people in “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships” to serve as official ministers. (The church already allows celibate gay men and lesbians to become members of the clergy.)

The Times called in a sociologist for some additional commentary…

Wendy Cadge, a sociology professor at Brandeis University who has studied Evangelical Lutheran churches grappling with the issue, said, “It does show, to the extent that any mainline denominations are moving, I think they’re moving slowly toward a more progressive direction.”

Describing the context of Friday’s vote, several religion experts likened it to the court decision last year in Iowa legalizing same-sex marriage.

And…

“In the same sense that the Iowa court decision might have opened people’s eyes, causing them to say, ‘Iowa? What? Where?’” said Laura Olson, a professor of political science at Clemson University who has studied mainline Protestantism. “The E.L.C.A. isn’t necessarily quite as surprising in the religious sense, but the message it’s sending is, yes, not only are more Americans from a religious perspective getting behind gay rights, but these folks are not just quote unquote coastal liberals.”

The denomination has struggled with the issue almost since its founding in the late 1980s with the merger of three other Lutheran denominations.

Read more from the New York Times.

With the murder of a physician who was a regular target of anti-abortion activists this past Sunday, news outlets have returned to covering the schism in our country on the abortion issue, this time focusing on a new study linking the likelihood of having an abortion to religiosity.

MSNBC reports:

Unwed pregnant teens and 20-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to obtain abortions than their peers from public schools, according to research in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

“This research suggests that young, unmarried women are confronted with a number of social, financial and health-related factors that can make it difficult for them to act according to religious values when deciding whether to keep or abort a pregnancy,” said the study’s author, sociologist Amy Adamczyk of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

More from Adamczyk…

Adamczyk examined how personal religious involvement, schoolmate religious involvement and school type influenced the pregnancy decisions of a sample of 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women age 26 and younger from 125 different schools. The women ranged in age from 14 to 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Twenty-five percent of women in the sample reported having an abortion, a likely underestimate, Adamczyk said.

Results revealed no significant link between a young woman’s reported decision to have an abortion and her personal religiosity, as defined by her religious involvement, frequency of prayer and perception of religion’s importance. Adamczyk said that this may be partially explained by the evidence that personal religiosity delays the timing of first sex, thereby shortening the period of time in which religious women are sexually active outside of marriage.

Despite the absence of a link between personal religious devotionand abortion, religious affiliation did have some important influence. Adamczyk found that conservative Protestants (which includes evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians) were the least likely to report having an abortion, less likely than mainline Protestants, Catholics and women with non-Christian religious affiliations.

Regarding the impact of the religious involvement of a woman’s peers, Adamczyk found no significant influence. However, Adamczyk did find that women who attended school with conservative Protestants were more likely to decide to have an extramarital baby in their 20s than in their teenage years.

“The values of conservative Protestant classmates seem to have an abortion limiting effect on women in their 20s, but not in their teens, presumably because the educational and economic costs of motherhood are reduced as young women grow older,” Adamczyk said.

The LA Times also picked up on the story in their Health section this week. They report: 

In a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, a sociologist at the City University of New York analyzed the abortion decisions of unmarried teenagers and young twentysomethings. Specifically, she was looking at how those decisions were affected by personal religious devotion, schoolmates’ religious devotion and the type of school (public or religious).

Come decision-making time, religiosity –  the importance attributed to religion and the involvement in it — didn’t make much difference.

Maybe that’s surprising to you, maybe not.

But of note, she writes: “Conservative Protestants appear less likely to obtain abortions than mainline Protestants, Catholics, and women of non-Christian faiths. Regardless of personal religious affiliation, having attended a school with a high proportion of conservative Protestants appears to discourage abortion as women enter their twenties. Conversely, women from private religious high schools appear
more likely to report obtaining an abortion than women from public schools.”

Read more from MSNBC.

Read more from the LA Times. 

An article in the Washington Post a few days ago discusses why Americans are leaving their churches. The answer is because of ‘gradual spiritual drift’ rather than disillusionment over church policy. The study offering these new insights illustrates how “spiritual attitudes are taking precedence over denominational traditions.”

About this new research:

The survey, by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first large-scale study of the reasons Americans switch religious affiliations. Researchers found that more than half of people have done so at least once…

Almost three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants who are now unaffiliated with a religion said they had “just gradually drifted away” from their faith. And more than three-quarters of Catholics and half of Protestants currently unassociated with a faith said that over time, they stopped believing in their religion’s teachings.

Pew Forum senior fellow John C. Green said that result surprised researchers, who had expected policy disputes or disillusionment over internal scandals — such as the clergy sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church — to play more of a role in people’s decision to leave a faith. Among former Catholics who became Protestants, one in five cited the sex-abuse scandal as one of several reasons why they had left the church. But only a small percentage — 2 to 3 percent — cited it as the lone reason.

The sociological slant…

The results are a “big indictment” of organized religion, said Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and author of a book on evangelical leaders. “There is a huge, wide-open back door at most churches. Churches around the country may be able to attract people, but they can’t keep them.”

At the same time, the large and growing number of people who report having no religious affiliation are surprisingly open to religion, researchers said. Unlike the popular perception that many have embraced secularism, a significant percentage appeared simply to have put their religiosity on pause — having worshiped as part of at least one faith already, about three in 10 said they have just not yet found the right religion.

Read more.

Newswise, a press release service, brought to my attention interesting new research out of Vanderbilt University by Sandra Barnes suggesting that, “churches with predominantly black congregations are thriving in urban and suburban areas, and the most successful churches employ a variety of sophisticated marketing and programming strategies to draw members.”

The research offers insights into what successful black churches have in common today, when parishioners have more choices and expect more from their churches than they have in the past.

“Contrary to expectations, I found that the black church is still a very important part of the lives of many African Americans,” Barnes said. “Those churches that market themselves, make sophisticated use of technology, offer practical sermons and programs for families and children over and above typical Bible studies are most likely to draw and keep new parishioners.”

People are expecting more from their churches…

Barnes found that today’s parishioners are “religiously savvy” and expect more from their church service, such as sermons and Bible studies relevant to everyday life, activities for individuals and families, and innovative worship services that incorporate dance and music.

“The broader societal change we have seen in consumerism is also manifesting in the religious arena. We expect more, bigger and better,” Barnes said. “As in the retail environment, today’s church goers are savvy shoppers. They are looking for a worship experience that meets their needs and programs that meet their needs and they’re willing to shop around to find it.”

This consumerism has led churches to use sophisticated marketing tools, specifically the Internet.

“Successful churches are very savvy when it comes to marketing. Word of mouth continues to be an important tool, but it is no longer the primary mechanism,” Barnes said. “Web sites, television ads and prime time exposure all play a role. Churches are using very intentional marketing strategies and much of it relies on technology.”

Read more.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story about recent work from Trinity College sociologist Barry A. Kosmin (the study’s principal investigator) that suggests that Americans are turning away from many denominations with greater frequency. Moreover, Kosmin finds that the percentage of people who do not identify themselves as having a particular religious affiliation has almost doubled since 1990 – to 15%.

The LA Times writes:

Mainline Christian denominations, once bulwarks of the religious landscape, have suffered most from the drift. Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians are among the denominations that have seen their ranks decline. Although 86% of Americans identified as Christians in 1990, just 76% said the same last year, the result of onetime adherents rejecting organized religion, the survey concluded. The broad falloff has occurred as some groups, including Catholics, have seen their overall numbers rise. But despite growing by 11 million new members since 1990, Catholics now account for a smaller percentage of the U.S. population than they did then — 25% compared with 26%.

Kosmin’s commentary:

The survey’s principal investigator, sociologist Barry A. Kosmin of Trinity College in Connecticut, described the overall trend as an erosion of the “religious middle ground.” He said many people appeared to be rebuffing denominations altogether or favoring more conservative evangelical groups that have boosted their relatively small memberships by offering emotional and personalized religious experiences.

Kosmin said the changing religious outlook also reflected an increasingly diverse and complex culture that emphasized greater tolerance for diversity while eschewing respect for authority.He pointed to one sign of religious detachment — the fact that 27% of Americans do not expect to have a religious funeral.

“Even the people in the pews are more rebellious than they used to be,” said Kosmin, founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. “Those you would call ‘the religious’ don’t look like what their grandparents did in terms of their worship style, their ritual behaviors.”

Read more.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune posted a podcast today about holiday spirituality, which included a discussion of new work from Mark Chaves, a Duke University sociologist studying churches in the United States. Technology is the opiate of the masses…

One of the biggest changes in churches over the past decade is a huge increase in the use of computer technology to keep in touch with current members and to reach out to new ones, according to a Duke University study that was released — appropriately enough — in the online version of the journal Sociology of Religion.

An average of 10,000 church websites are being launched every year, according to the National Congregations Study, Wave II, a follow-up to a 1998 study. In the earlier study only a handful of churches used e-mail to communicate with members. Now 60 percent are doing it.

Researchers conducted interviews with 1,500 congregations representing a cross-section of religious traditions. For the follow-up study, they went back to the same churches.

“This is the first study that has tracked change over time in a nationally representative sample of congregations,” said Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology, religion and divinity and the lead researcher. “We’ve never been able to do that before. This research tells us what is changing and what is staying the same.”

Read the full story.