Belief Systems
Political responsiveness and centralized religious leaders: Lessons from the Catholic Church
Jeffrey Ziegler
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are centralized leaders of religious organizations responsive to their followers' political preferences over time even when formal accountability mechanisms, such as elections, are weak or absent? I argue that such leaders have incentives to be responsive because they rely on dedicated members for legitimacy and support. I test this theory by examining the Catholic Church and its centralized leader, the Pope. First, I analyze over 10,000 papal statements to confirm that the papacy is responsive to Catholics' overall political concerns. Second, I conduct survey experiments in Brazil and Mexico to investigate how Catholics react to responsiveness. Catholics increase their organizational trust and participation when they receive papal messages that reflect their concerns, conditional on their existing commitment to the Church and their agreement with the Church on political issues. The evidence suggests that in centralized religious organizations, the leader reaffirms members' political interests because followers support religious organizations that are politically responsive.
Counties With Growth in Religiosity Exhibited Greater Labor Market Resilience During Covid-19
Christos Makridis & Byron Johnson
Baylor University Working Paper, May 2024
Abstract:
Using the United States 2010 and 2020 Religious Congregations and Membership Survey, we document three new facts about long-run changes in religiosity. First, there has been an average decline in the share of religious (Christian) adherents of 1.9 percentage points (2.6pp) across counties. Second, these declines are greater in higher income counties and lower in more racially diverse counties. The declines are also slightly greater in areas that traditionally rank higher in social capital. Third, using additional data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, counties that exhibited greater increases in the share of Christian adherents also experienced improved labor market performance between 2020 and 2023 in the form of employment, number of establishments, and, to a lesser extent, wages. Our results highlight the importance of religiosity, and distinctiveness from social capital, in understanding economic phenomena during a crisis.
Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe
Şener Aktürk
International Security, Spring 2024, Pages 87–136
Abstract:
Sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities lived across large swathes of medieval Western Europe. But all the Muslim communities and almost all the Jewish communities in polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated between 1064 and 1526. Most studies of ethnoreligious violence in Europe focus on communal, regional, and national political dynamics to explain its outbreak and variation. Recent scholarship shows how the Catholic Church in medieval Europe contributed to the long-term political development and the “rise of the West.” But the Church was also responsible for eradicating non-Christian minorities. Three factors explain ethnoreligious cleansing of non-Christians in medieval Western Europe: (1) the papacy as a supranational religious authority with increasing powers; (2) the dehumanization of non-Christians and their classification as monarchical property; and (3) fierce geopolitical competition among Catholic Western European monarchs that made them particularly vulnerable to papal-clerical demands to eradicate non-Christians. The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing. These findings also contribute to understanding recent and current ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, Myanmar, the Soviet Union, and Syria.
The Relative Effects of a Scandal on Member Engagement in Rites of Integration and Rites of Passage: Evidence from a Child Abuse Scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia
Bryan Stroube & Anastasiya Zavyalova
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Organizational research has documented that scandals lead to negative aggregate stakeholder reactions. There is little reason to believe, however, that the effects of a scandal are homogenous across different types of engagement. We therefore compare the effects of a scandal on member engagement in two types of rites at normative organizations: rites of integration and rites of passage. Rites of integration focus on the community, celebrate organizational values, and help strengthen organizational identification; they are thus enacted more by core members. Rites of passage focus on the individual, celebrate transition between social roles, and require only occasional engagement; they are thus enacted by core and peripheral members. Because of these differences, we hypothesize that a normative organization’s implication in a scandal affects rites of passage more negatively than rites of integration, but that this effect depends on scandal prevalence among neighboring organizations, organizational age, and organizational size. We test our hypotheses in the context of a child abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Using yearly parish-level data from 1990 to 2010, we find that a parish’s implication in the scandal was associated with a larger decline in rites of passage (marriages, baptisms, and funerals) than in rites of integration (mass attendance). This difference was reversed with the increase in scandal prevalence. Furthermore, rites of integration were more resilient than rites of passage at older and larger parishes. To help rule in the plausibility of our organization-level theory, we present a simulation grounded in individual-level polling data from the context.
A Buddhist Mindfulness View of Paradox: Silence and Skepticism of Language to Dismantle Paradoxes
Hee-Chan Song
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores how Buddhist mindfulness as a self-reflective practice helps individuals respond to a paradox and ultimately dismantle it. To deeply immerse myself into this context, I conducted a nine-month ethnographic fieldwork in three Korean Buddhist temples that confront the paradox between the need for financial resources and spiritual values that disavow money. The findings show a series of cognitive mechanisms that reveal multiple roles of mindfulness, manifested as silence and skepticism of language. First, the monastic environment enables monks to become familiar with a life of silence that turns their attention to the inner mind from the external-empirical world. The silence serves as a mental buffer when monks switch between their sacred role and their business role. Over time, deep silence directs them to skepticism of language that triggers doubt on preexisting linguistic categories, boundaries, and separations. When the preexisting linguistic categories finally disappear in their mind, monks no longer rely on any differentiating or integrating tactic to navigate their paradox. In other words, they no longer perceive a paradox, which means the paradox has disappeared from their life. These cognitive mechanisms construct the monks’ worldview on contradictions, conflicts, and dualities, leading them from the experience of paradox to a unique mental state, the nonexperience of paradox. Integrating this mental state and the worldview of Buddhist monks with paradox research, this study theorizes a Buddhist mindfulness view of paradox.
The Rise of the Religious Right: Evidence from the Moral Majority and the Jimmy Carter Presidency
Giulia Buccione & Brian Knight
NBER Working Paper, June 2024
Abstract:
We investigate the rise of the religious right in the context of the Moral Majority and Jimmy Carter, the first Evangelical President. During Carter's Presidency, the Moral Majority, an Evangelical group headed by televangelist Jerry Falwell, turned against the incumbent Carter, a Democrat, and campaigned for Ronald Reagan, a Republican, in the 1980 Election. To investigate the role of religious groups and leaders in the political persuasion of followers, we first develop a theoretical model in which single-issue religious voters follow better-informed religious leaders when choosing which candidates to support. Using data from county-level voting returns, exit polls, and surveys, we document that Evangelical voters indeed shifted their support from Carter in 1976 to Reagan in 1980. We also provide three pieces of evidence that the Moral Majority played a role in this switching: survey data on Moral Majority campaign issues, exposure to Jerry's Falwell's television ministry, and exposure to state headquarters of the Moral Majority.
Religiosity predicts the delegation of decisions between moral and self-serving immoral outcomes
Alexa Weiss & Matthias Forstmann
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2024
Abstract:
Studies support an association between religious belief and prosocial behavior. Such religious prosociality has been attributed to fear of supernatural punishment and enhanced concern for a prosocial reputation and self-image. Hence, religious individuals may be more prone to pursue their self-interest indirectly, thereby averting personal responsibility. We conducted 12 studies (Ntotal = 4468) to examine whether religiosity predicts delegation in incentivized deception, dictator, and die-roll cheating games and in realistic scenarios. Participants could choose between an immoral (e.g., lying) and a moral, prosocial (e.g., honest/fair) option or leave this decision to another individual (the agent) who equally benefited from the immoral option. Across all studies, religiosity positively predicted delegation, even though participants could directly implement prosocial outcomes. Employing experimental manipulations of participants' interests, we found that the predictive effect of religiosity on delegation only emerged when participants could expect to benefit from the agent's decision, but not when they were not affected by it or could be harmed by it. At the same time, religiosity predicted prosocial decisions among non-delegating participants. Moreover, delegating participants felt less bad and responsible about their decisions and victims' outcomes. Taken together, these findings suggest that delegation is strategically employed by individuals who would otherwise act prosocially to pursue selfish interests while avoiding responsibility and blame. They further support the notion of religious prosociality as a multi-faceted, context-dependent phenomenon.
The sun's position at birth is unrelated to subjective well-being: Debunking astrological claims
Mohsen Joshanloo
Kyklos, forthcoming
Abstract:
Beliefs linking zodiac signs to personality traits, life outcomes, and well-being remain widespread across various cultures. This study examined the relationship between Western zodiac signs and subjective well-being in a nationally representative American sample from the General Social Survey (N = 12,791). Well-being was measured across eight components: general unhappiness, depressive symptoms, psychological distress, work dissatisfaction, financial dissatisfaction, perceived dullness of one's life, self-rated health, and unhappiness with marriage. Parametric and nonparametric analyses consistently revealed no robust associations between zodiac signs and any of the well-being variables, regardless of whether demographic factors were controlled for. The effect sizes were negligible, accounting for 0.3% or less of the variance in well-being, demonstrating that zodiac signs lack predictive power for well-being outcomes. An additional analysis revealed that astrological signs were no more predictive of than random numbers. Thus, a randomly generated number between 1 and 12 is statistically as predictive of one's well-being as one's zodiac sign. These findings challenge popular astrological claims about the influence of zodiac signs on well-being and quality of life.