religion

Cross-posted at Global Policy TV.

Recent research has unearthed the interesting finding that most Americans dislike atheists.  In fact, they strongly dislike atheists. Surveys suggest that they’d rather share a beer with almost anyone, even members of historically-hated groups: homosexuals, African-Americans, or Muslims (yes, even after 9/11).  This phenomenon is new in American society, as I’ll discuss below, and reflects a significant change in our social alliances.

But first, consider this data published by Penny Edgell and her colleagues in the American Sociological Review (full text).  It reveals that Americans believe that atheists, more than many other groups, are not likely to agree with their “vision of American society.”  Atheists topped the list, beating out the second contender, Muslims, by 13 percentage points.  Likewise, among the types of people Americans would not want their children to marry, atheists come first, beating out Muslims (again) by 14 points and African Americans by a full 20.

This dislike for atheists, by the way, isn’t on the wane.  While dislike of gays and lesbians has been easing, racism has become increasingly unacceptable, and religious diversity has become less contentious, intolerance for non-believers has held steady.

An even more recent article revealed that the reason people dislike atheists so much has to do with trust (cite).  Many people are skeptical that someone who doesn’t believe in God would do the right thing, given that they don’t imagine that a higher power is watching them and keeping score.  Atheists were more distrusted than Muslims, Jews, gay men, and feminists.  The only group that was as strongly suspected of bad behavior as atheists?  Rapists.

What is interesting in all this – above and beyond a clear prejudice against atheists – is the change in how Americans think about religion.  Until recently, members of different religious saw each other as enemies, not friends.  American history is characterized by “long-standing divisions among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews” (Edgell et al.). Many of us can remember how significant it was to elect the first Catholic president (something we take for granted as unremarkable now) and we are on the precipice of nominating a Mormon to run on the Republican ticket.

Indeed, historical data shows that Americans have been increasingly willing to vote for a Catholic or Jewish Presidential Candidate (as well as an African American and homosexual candidate), but their willingness to vote for an atheist is lagging behind:

The take home point has to do with shifting social alliances.  Now that most Americans have abandoned a strong dislike for members of other religions, it’s possible for The Religious to emerge as a socially-meaningful identity group.  In other words, once members of different religions begin to see each other as the same instead of different, they can begin to align together.  Suddenly atheists become an obvious foe.  Instead of one of many types of people who had lost their way (along with people of different faiths), atheists could emerge as uniquely problematic.  It is the building of cross-religious alliances, then, that undergirds the strong dislike for atheists specifically.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The burqa and headscarf are often identified as symbols of women’s oppression in Muslim countries.  In fact, head covering is a form of religious garb in many sub-cultures.  Some of these subcultures require head covering all of the time, and others only during religious rituals, but all involve this tradition.  Yet, when it comes to Muslims, the discussion often goes forward as if it is a uniquely oppressive, and uniquely Islamic, practice.  Food for thought.

Thanks to Dolores R. for the link.  Found at Socialist Texan.

UPDATE: In the comments, Alastair Roberts suggests that it’s important to consider whether head covering is required for just women, or both women and men.  I agree.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Flickr Creative Commons, Lau

Stephanie Medley-Rath sent in a new example of urinals shaped like women’s mouths (source).

Liz B. sent in a slide show of “innovative” urinals that included this example.

Urinals at the Rosenmeer restaurant in Moenchengladbach, Germany, are shaped like women’s bodies (source).

Others are shaped like nuns urinals (more nun or maybe the Virgin Mary urinals here).

Emma B. sent in this image of sinks:

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

The cartoon added below inspired me to revive this post from 2008.

Many believe that the U.S. is at the pinnacle of social and political evolution. One of the consequences of this belief is the tendency to define whatever holds in the U.S. as ideal and, insofar as other countries deviate from that, define them as problematic. For example, many believe that women in the U.S. are the most liberated in the world. Insofar as women in other societies live differently, they are assumed to be oppressed. Of course, women are oppressed elsewhere, but it is a mistake to assume that “they” are oppressed and “we” are liberated. This false binary makes invisible ways in which women elsewhere are not 100% subordinated and women here also suffer from gendered oppression.

(If you’re interested, I have a paper showing how Americans make these arguments called Defining Gendered Oppression in U.S. Newspapers: The Strategic Value of “Female Genital Mutilation.”)

I offer these thoughts are a preface to a postcard from PostSecret.  The person who sent in the postcard suggests that she’s not sure which is worse: the rigid and extreme standard of beauty in the U.S. and the way that women’s bodies are exposed to scrutiny or the idea of living underneath a burka that disallows certain freedoms, but frees you from evaluative eyes and the consequences of their negative appraisals.

Cartoonist Malcolm Evans drew a similarly compelling illustration of this point, sent along by David B.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Being in the dominant majority allows you that comfort of not thinking.  People in that majority can assume that everyone shares their views, ideas, and even characteristics, and much of the time, they’ll be right.  “Flesh colored” in the U.S., sometimes even today, means the color of white people’s flesh.

White is the default race, the American race.  It’s easy to ignore that African Americans might not see those Band-Aids as flesh colored.  Similarly, Christianity is the default religion, and those who are in the majority can make those same flesh-colored assumptions.  Justice Scalia, for example, seemed unable to understand that the Jewish families of Jews killed in war might not feel “honored” by a cross placed on the grave of their son or daughter. (My post on this is here.)

The latest example:  this Hannukah card sent in South Carolina, presumably to Jews, by Rick Santorum’s local team.  First tweeted by political reporter Hunter Walker, it’s rapidly making the rounds of the Internet.

Originally posted at Religion Bulletin.

Now that Denver has fallen out of the playoffs, I want to write an homage to a figure I, like so many others, find fascinating: Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.  Carter Turner over at Religion Dispatches has suggested that the “real reason” for “Tebow fever” was the theological investment that atheists and theists alike had in watching Tebow succeed or fail.  I think that’s absolutely right: Tebow’s body became a sort of theological battleground for broader religious and cultural forces.  But I also think there’s an even more elementary reason, one that becomes apparent when we think about Tebow not just as a proxy for doctrine, but as a particular religious body.

Feminism, poststructuralism, and decolonial studies in the humanities have made scholars more and more aware of the importance of bodies.  Whereas the logocentric western tradition focused on words — the creations of the intellect — 21st century global scholarship sees words as a secondary function of embodiment.  In religious studies, scholars such as Talal Asad, Kimerer LaMothe, and Saba Mahmood have called on us to explore how bodies, through practices, are constituted as religious subjects.  Bodies become religious through performance, through embodied exercises that, through repetition, inscribe us with the modalities of a religious “ethics.”  But embodiment is more than just practices.  I here want to suggest a different direction for understanding the relationship between religion and bodies.

Here’s something I often ask my students to do: Look at this body.  How does religion converge on this body?

Let me tell you what I see, using my own bodily practice, martial arts, as a lens.  This is a body I would not want to fight.  It’s not just about dense muscle lines, the sheer evidence of physical strength, reach, and an intricately arranged posing that suggests bodily self-awareness and sharp muscular intelligence.  This body is compelling.  It draws the eye.  You want to watch it.

This is more dangerous than physical strength — the kind of strength you build on the bench press or the curl.  It’s a “presence.”  The kind of strength that stops bodies in their tracks without landing a punch.  And the kind of strength that draws allies, that rewrites the broader bodily landscape on which conflict happens.  This body has what we might call, following Max Weber, “charisma.”

This way of looking at bodies helps us think again about a fact that has become dramatically apparent in the past two years: Tebow is fascinating.  People love to talk about him, love to love him, love to hate him.  Tebow fever didn’t just happen.  It was and is something is felt–viscerally–by millions of bodies around the world.

On the one hand, Tebow is a leader–an emblematic body — for millions of Christians who see in him a dignification of their faith.  Faith here is not an abstract personal belief.  It is an identity formation, an Us.  Tebow is the champion of a certain Christian Us, an embodiment of values and a leader who rallies the believers.  As a champion, he doesn’t win through debate, he wins through charisma.  He is a hero, resplendent on the battlefield.

At the same time, Tebow is fascinating to other groups — to other bodies — that are frustrated with or skeptical of the Christian Us — and particularly the Christian Us that has managed to insinuate itself into the corridors of power in America through one (but only one) of its instantiations, the Christian Right, a major driver in contemporary Republican politics.  These bodies, as Turner pointed out, are interested in Tebow’s failure, the fall of the enemy’s flag.

My argument, however, is this: this profile of the divergent responses to the nexus of religious and cultural forces that converge on the image of Tebow’s body would be irrelevant and unread if Tim Tebow were a schlub–a homely, uninteresting, modest body, the kind of body that bus drivers drive past at the bus stop.  It is also an open question to me how we would be responding to Tebow if he were not a white body.  Those who want to challenge Tebow, to fight Tebow, to talk about Tebow are drawn in by the seductions of this image–the power of Tebow’s body — no less than those who are so ardently admiring of Tebow that criticism of him becomes a political rallying cry.  Tebow’s body is a magnetic body, a charismatic body.  It bends other bodies towards it–in both positive and critical ways.

This, then, is one of the main ways that religion happens — how identities, beliefs, and affects form and fuse: not through the advance of doctrine, but through the magnetism of religious bodies.

Thanks to William Eric Pedersen for talking this post out with me and pointing me in the direction of the unanswered question on race.

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Donovan O. Schaefer is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His interests involve the relationship between religion, bodies, and emotion. In his dissertation, Animal Religion: Evolution, Affect, and Radical Embodiment, he argues for understanding religion in terms of a set of affective bodily practices that are shared by human and non-human animals.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

While most Americans think of the witch as a possibly evil character associated with Halloween in the U.S., many Italians would see a motherly figure who keeps a clean house (hence the broom) and gives candy or coal to children.  The character’s name is Befana.  Thanks to Katrin for drawing my attention to her.

Italians celebrate the end of the Christmas season today,  January 5th.  Tonight is the night before the Feast of the Epiphany (celebrating the understanding that Jesus was God in human form) (source).  According to Italian mythology, Befana will visit children’s homes, filling their shoes with candy (if they’ve been good) or coal (if they’ve been bad) (source). Epiphany Eve is celebrated throughout Italy.

For more examples of variation in the culture of Christmas, see our posts on Krampus: Santa’s Evil Side Kick, The ChristKind, Snegurochka: Santa’s Granddaughter, and Black Pete (trigger warning for blackface).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Citings and Sightings.

In an interview discussing whether teen sleepovers can actually prevent teen pregnancy, CNN’s Ali Velshi says flatly, “This is a little bit counter-intuitive.” But as his interviewee, UMass sociologist Amy Schalet (who wrote on this subject in Contexts in “Sex, Love, and Autonomy in the Teenage Sleepover” in the Summer of 2010), explains:

Let me clarify: it’s not a situation where everything goes… It’s definitely older teenage couples who have established relationships and whose parents have talked about contraception.

Which is to say, as Velshi puts it, sex and sex education in countries like the Netherlands, in which parents are more permissive—or as Schalet says, “parents are more connected with their kids”—about allowing boyfriends and girlfriends to sleep over, take “a holistic approach.”

Schalet’s research, explored more deeply in her new University of Chicago book Not Under My Roof, takes a look at American parenting practices surrounding teen sex and the practices of parents in other countries. Using in-depth interviews with parents and teens and a host of other data, she finds:

The takeaway for American parents… isn’t necessarily “You must permit sleepovers.” Many parents are going to say, “Not under my roof!” That’s why it’s the title of my book. The takeaway is that you can have more open conversations—you should probably have more open conversations—about what’s a good relationship, sex and contraception should go together, what does it mean to be “ready,” how to get rid of some of these damaging stereotypes (gender stereotypes). Those are all things that are going to help promote teenage health and better relationships between parents and kids.

Schalet is clear that parental approaches are nowhere near the only factor in the stark differences in teen pregnancy rates between the U.S. and the Netherlands, but says they are, in fact, particularly important. “Kids are having sex, clearly,” Velshi says. And that’s precisely the point, no matter whether parents believe their kids should be able to have sex in their own homes, Schalet believes: “I think what you emphasize is that, above all, the conversation is important, and the conversation itself does not make kids have sex.” Ideally, she points out, that conversation will take place at home with parents, but a holistic talk about sexuality, relationships, and health can also take place in schools, with clergy, and in many other locations.

Dr. Schalet on CNN (we apologize for the commercial):

Amy Schalet’s new book is Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex.

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Letta Page is the Associate Editor and Producer of The Society Pages. She has a decade of experience in academic editing across a range of disciplines, including two years as the managing editor of Contexts. Page holds degrees in history and classical studies from Boston University and an art degree from the University of Minnesota.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.