Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

Silver, Christopher F.; Coleman, Thomas J.; Hood, Ralph W.

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12221pmid: N/A

Members of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) hail from a number of diverse disciplines, but one theme unites them all: a commitment to studying religion scientifically. While many readers of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR) are quantitatively oriented, SSSR has a long history of sharing membership with fields utilizing a variety of qualitative methods, including religious studies, anthropology, and other scholarly disciplines within the humanities. As such, SSSR serves as a nexus for the sharing of different research, ideas, perspectives, and methodologies. Our guest “From the Editor” column is about a psychologist who appreciated SSSR and its multidisciplinary approach so much that he became a major benefactor to SSSR after his passing. That person was John Douglas “Jack” Shand, and this is a brief tribute to his legacy.

Winchester, Daniel

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12211pmid: N/A

Based on interviews with converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States, this article documents and analyzes a narrative form in which conversion is described as the progressive discovery of a latent religious self that was part of one's life all along, or what I term a conversion to continuity. These findings contrast markedly with those of most contemporary conversion research, which emphasize the narration of a dramatic temporal break between converts’ past and present religious selves (epitomized by the evangelical “born‐again” genre). I examine how and why temporal continuity was a characteristic feature of these conversion accounts and demonstrate how such narratives helped constitute forms of religious experience and self‐identity that differ in important respects from those documented in previous studies. In light of these findings, I argue for a reconceptualization of continuity and discontinuity within processes of religious identity change as an institutionally anchored figure/ground relationship as opposed to an either/or dichotomy. I also highlight promising avenues for future comparative research on the relationships between time, narrative, and subjectivity across religious and secular contexts.

Agadjanian, Victor; Yabiku, Scott T.

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12210pmid: 26973353

Women's autonomy has frequently been linked with women's opportunities and investments, such as education, employment, and reproductive control. The association between women's autonomy and religion in the developing world, however, has received less attention, and the few existing studies make comparisons across major religious traditions. In this study, we focus on variations in levels of female decision‐making autonomy within a single religious tradition—Christianity. Using unique survey data from a predominantly Christian area in Mozambique, we devise an autonomy scale and apply it to compare women affiliated with different Christian denominations as well as unaffiliated women. In addition to affiliation, we examine the relationship between autonomy and women's religious agency both within and outside their churches. Multivariate analyses show that women belonging to more liberal religious traditions (such as Catholicism and mainline Protestantism) tend to have higher autonomy levels, regardless of other factors. These results are situated within the cross‐national scholarship on religion and women's empowerment and are interpreted in the context of gendered religious dynamics in Mozambique and similar developing settings.

Reed, Jean‐Pierre; Pitcher, Sarah

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12213pmid: N/A

Building on language as action perspectives and recent social movement research on speech acts, we explore the role religious discourse plays in the maintenance of a collective identity we call revolutionary “we‐ness.” Using NVivo qualitative data analysis software we perform a content analysis of Volume 1 of The Gospel in Solentiname (Cardenal 1976), a historical record of Biblestudy discussions in prerevolutionary Nicaragua. Based on a framework of collective identity construction (boundary work, oppositional consciousness, identity assertion) into which a taxonomy of speech acts (accusations, declarations, directives, exhortations, prescriptions, and warnings) are organized, our content analysis illustrates how revolutionary we‐ness is constituted, and how the recursive employment of speech acts suggests a resonance of ideological motives in religious discourse. We found the degree to which identity assertion, expressed in declarative speech acts, predominated over oppositional consciousness, which in turn figured over boundary work in the constitution of revolutionary we‐ness. Our speech acts approach fills a void in framing theory and confirms religious discourse's capacity to promote radical self‐understandings and commitment to revolutionary activism.

Khattab, Nabil; Modood, Tariq

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12220pmid: N/A

This article uses the case of the probability of being in employment among different ethno‐religious groups in Britain over a period of 12 years (2002–2013) to illustrate how different degrees of labor market penalty in the United Kingdom are highly associated with the different processes of racialization they undergo in the United Kingdom. It is argued that what matters in producing the observed inequalities in the United Kingdom is the inescapable centrality of “color” (mainly blackness) and “culture” (particularly being Muslim) and the way different Muslim and black groups have been racialized. The findings of this study leave little doubt that there is a black and a Muslim penalty in the labor market, but at the same time it suggest that these penalties are not fixed but tend to vary in extent and nature.

Fuist, Todd Nicholas

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12209pmid: N/A

There has been much work on the effects that individual prayer has on a variety of social‐psychological indicators, yet there remains a lack of research on collective prayer. While it is tempting to assume that collective prayer may be analyzed as the aggregate of individual prayers, the research presented in this article suggests that worshipers pray differently when in community than when by themselves. To understand the role of collective prayer in the practices of faith communities, I draw on work on group culture and ritual to create a framework for analyzing collective prayer. I assert that collective prayer represents a meaningful social performance that locates those conducting it within wider fields of meaning. I conclude with suggestions for future work, including examining how collective prayer acts as an element of conflict as well as unity.

Hermann, Anthony D.; Simpson, Austin J.; Lehtman, Mark J.; Fuller, Robert C.

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12208pmid: N/A

We recruited 110 college students for an experimental investigation of the role of guilt in motivating religious behavior. We induced guilt in half of the participants before asking all subjects to indicate their current interest in prayer. Overall, participants in the guilt condition were more interested in praying, but this effect was not observed among those high in grandiose narcissism. Our findings make a contribution not only to the study of the role that emotions have in motivating religious behavior, but also to the study of narcissists’ susceptibility to guilt.

Kim, Jeannie

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12219pmid: N/A

This study measures the effect of regular worship attendance at age 17 on total years of schooling by age 25, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Expanding on previous work, this study estimates differences in the impact of worship attendance by race and family income status using propensity score matching. Individuals who frequently attend religious services complete .69 more years of schooling than similar individuals who do not frequently attend services. There are significantly greater returns to attendance for low‐income youth and no significant difference in returns by religious affiliation. These findings suggest that religious observance provides greater benefits for low‐income individuals or perhaps provides resources high‐income individuals have access to elsewhere. Moreover, this study extends previous work by examining a more recent and nationally representative sample of youth and by using methods that allow for greater causal inference.

Fishman, Robert M.; Gervasoni, Carlos; Stater, Keely Jones

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12216pmid: N/A

This article takes the rate of new incorporations into the Catholic priesthood within national societies as a social fact revealing underlying societal tendencies of broad theoretical relevance extending well beyond the study of religion. Our emphasis lies on the impact of income inequality on the prevalence of altruistic life options. We examine cross‐national and time‐series variation in the priestly vocation rate as the empirical foundation to theorize social dynamics underpinning a life option that entails the renunciation of opportunities for individual material advantage alongside the commitment to serve a broader community. The article elaborates why we view the vocation rate as resting on a combination of piety and altruistic dispositions, and provides a theoretical rationale for expecting inequality to diminish this—and other—altruistic life options. We also examine the impact of other variables that have been theorized to influence the prevalence of Catholic clerical vocations and elaborate the broader theoretical relevance of our empirical findings.

Yi, Joseph; Silver, Daniel

doi: 10.1111/jssr.12218pmid: N/A

We investigate the location patterns of organizations that embody key religious‐spiritual traditions and that have grown to prominence in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries: evangelical churches, yoga, and martial arts. The distribution of key cultural organizations depends on the degree to which they are able to frame themselves in relation to one another and to core American traditions. Organizations associated with the American religious divide are more polarized in their social appeal and spatial distributions, and those framed as broadly neutral elements of popular culture are more widely distributed. Using a national database of local amenities, we find that theologically conservative churches are popular in many neighborhoods but concentrated in less‐educated and nonwhite areas. Yoga studios are less geographically dispersed and more spatially concentrated in college‐educated and white areas. Compared to these, martial arts schools, sports clubs, and other pop‐culture amenities are more widely distributed across different types of areas.