God wills it
Christianity spread faster in small, politically structured societies
Joseph Watts et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, August 2018, Pages 559–564
Abstract:
Over the past 2,000 years, Christianity has grown from a tiny Judaic sect to the world’s largest religious family. Historians and social scientists have long debated whether Christianity spread through a top-down process driven by political leaders or a bottom-up process that empowered social underclasses. The Christianization of Austronesian populations is well-documented across societies with a diverse range of social and demographic conditions. Here, we use this context to test whether political hierarchy, social inequality and population size predict the length of conversion time across 70 Austronesian cultures. We also account for the historical isolation of cultures and the year of missionary arrival, and use a phylogenetic generalized least squares method to estimate the effects of common ancestry and geographic proximity of cultures. We find that conversion to Christianity typically took less than 30 years, and societies with political leadership and smaller populations were fastest to convert. In contrast, social inequality did not reliably affect conversion times, indicating that Christianity’s success in the Pacific is not due to its egalitarian doctrine empowering social underclasses. The importance of population size and structure in our study suggests that the rapid spread of Christianity can be explained by general dynamics of cultural transmission.
Roots of sadistic terrorism crimes: Is it Islam or Arab culture?
Jilani ben Touhami Meftah
Aggression and Violent Behavior, September–October 2018, Pages 52-60
Abstract:
This research deals with the phenomenon of terrorism and attempts to ascertain the true roots of its sadistic crimes. The research considers two possible hypotheses to explain this phenomenon: The first hypothesis says that since most of the perpetrators of these crimes are Muslim, the roots of these sadistic crimes are religious and based on the texts of the Qur'an and Sunnah. The second hypothesis is that since most of the perpetrators of these crimes are mostly Arabs or some of their neighboring nations, the roots of these sadistic crimes are to be found in Bedouin culture. The methodology used in this research is a combination of a historical approach and a psychoanalytic approach. The most important finding of the research is that there is no link between sadistic terrorist acts and Islam. The true roots of these sadistic crimes are cultural, namely mythology of heroes and revenge. In fact, these crimes also contradict the principles and teachings of Islam. The changes made by Islam in the societies of this region are superficial and skin-deep changes while the deep structures of these societies have remained dominated by their local culture. Arab societies have often exploited religion to justify their cultures.
Godless by association: Deficits in trust mediate antiatheist stigma-by-association
Andrew Franks, Kyle Scherr & Bryan Gibson
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the United States, atheists elicit high levels of sociopolitical rejection that is primarily motivated by a lack of trust. Across three studies, we use evaluative conditioning (EC) as a theoretical framework to evaluate whether these deficits extended to candidates who are not atheists themselves but merely perceived to be associated with atheism. Study 1 found that implicit trust, explicit trust, and voting intentions toward target candidates were all negatively impacted by an EC procedure that paired a candidate’s face with words related to atheism. Study 2 found that trust and political support for a Christian candidate was eroded when he expressed proatheist public policy position. In both experiments, trust mediated the effects of atheist associations on voting intentions for religiously affiliated participants. Study 3 found the same moderated-mediation pattern. Religiously affiliated participants who perceived Barack Obama as being more favorable toward atheists were less likely to vote for him, in large part due to a lack of trust.
The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: The Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load
Edward Dutton, Guy Madison & Curtis Dunkel
Evolutionary Psychological Science, September 2018, Pages 233–244
Abstract:
Industrialisation leads to relaxed selection and thus the accumulation of fitness-damaging genetic mutations. We argue that religion is a selected trait that would be highly sensitive to mutational load. We further argue that a specific form of religiousness was selected for in complex societies up until industrialisation based around the collective worship of moral gods. With the relaxation of selection, we predict the degeneration of this form of religion and diverse deviations from it. These deviations, however, would correlate with the same indicators because they would all be underpinned by mutational load. We test this hypothesis using two very different deviations: atheism and paranormal belief. We examine associations between these deviations and four indicators of mutational load: (1) poor general health, (2) autism, (3) fluctuating asymmetry, and (4) left-handedness. A systematic literature review combined with primary research on handedness demonstrates that atheism and/or paranormal belief is associated with all of these indicators of high mutational load.
God’s Country in Black and Blue: How Christian Nationalism Shapes Americans’ Views about Police (Mis)treatment of Blacks
Samuel Perry, Andrew Whitehead & Joshua Davis
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that Americans who hold strongly to a myth about America’s Christian heritage — what is called “Christian nationalism” — tend to draw rigid boundaries around ethnic and national group membership. Incorporating theories connecting ethnic boundaries, prejudice, and perceived threat with a tendency to justify harsher penalties, bias, or excessive force against racial minorities, the authors examine how Christian nationalist ideology shapes Americans’ views about police treatment of black Americans. Analyses of 2017 data from a national probability sample show that adherence to Christian nationalism predicts that Americans will be more likely to believe that police treat blacks the same as whites and that police shoot blacks more often because blacks are more violent than whites. These effects are robust even when including controls for respondents’ religious and political characteristics, indicating that Christian nationalism influences Americans’ attitudes over and above the independent influences of political conservatism or religious parochialism. In fact, the authors find that religiosity influences policing attitudes in the opposite direction. Moreover, observed patterns do not differ by race, suggesting that Christian nationalism provides a cultural framework that can bolster antiblack prejudice among people of color as well as whites. The authors argue that Christian nationalism solidifies ethnic boundaries around national identity such that Americans are less willing to acknowledge police discrimination and more likely to victim-blame, even appealing to more overtly racist notions of blacks’ purportedly violent tendencies to justify police shootings. The authors outline the implications of these findings for understanding the current racial-political climate leading up to and during the Trump presidency.
Liberté, égalité . . . religiosité
Joan Esteban, Gilat Levy & Laura Mayoral
Journal of Public Economics, August 2018, Pages 241-253
Abstract:
We study the effect of religiosity on the political choices over redistribution and the legal restrictions on personal liberties. We assume that the more religious an individual is, (i) the less he enjoys the use of liberties prohibited by his religion; and (ii) the higher the negative externality experienced when others practice those liberties. We show that legal restrictions on liberties has an impact on income inequality. We find that when the religious cleavage in society is large, high intolerance due to negative externalities leads to a political outcome consisting of repression of liberties and relatively low taxes.
Does State Repression Suppress the Protest Participation of Religious People?
Yun Lu & Fenggang Yang
Sociology of Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
The relationship between religion and protest participation has long been of interest to sociologists, however few cross-national, quantitative studies have examined this relationship in a robust methodological way. In addition, how state repression influences the protest participation of religious people is still not clear. Using a dataset integrating the sixth wave of the World Values Surveys, the freedom index created by the Freedom House, and the Religion and State project, we first examine the relationship between individual-level religious participation and protest participation on a worldwide scale, and then assess how country-level repression moderates this relationship. The results of our multilevel logistic regression models show that (1) religious participation has a positive effect on protest participation, and (2) this positive effect is stronger in more repressive countries.
Moral self-regulation, moral identity, and religiosity
Sarah Ward & Laura King
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The association between religiosity and morality identified in self-reports has received limited support from studies of actual behavior. We propose that religiosity variables are likely to contribute to moral behavior in the context of moral self-regulation. Five studies examined the prediction that people who strongly endorse the items “I try hard to live all my life according to my religious beliefs” and “My whole approach to life is based on my religion” and people who report strong God belief would exhibit heightened moral emotions and prosocial behaviors after moral self-image (MSI) threats. Study 1 (N = 169) demonstrated that considering a recent moral transgression (the manipulation used in Studies 2–5) resulted in lower MSI, regardless of participants’ levels of endorsement of religion-related items. Study 2 (N = 207) showed that following a threat to MSI, religiosity variables predicted heightened negative affect and self-conscious moral emotions. Studies 3 through 5 (combined N = 616) showed that following MSI threats, individuals endorsing intrinsic religiosity and God belief items showed increased prosocial task completion (Studies 3 and 5) and decreased cheating on a word-solving task (Study 4). Study 5 demonstrated that moral identity accounted for the role of religiosity variables in promoting moral self-regulation following MSI threat. Noting that these findings are limited to people representative of the participants in these samples (Mechanical Turk workers; University of Missouri undergraduate students), and to the precise measures and manipulations used, implications of these findings and constraints on their generalizability are discussed.
Cultural religiosity as the moderator of the relationship between affective experience and life satisfaction: A study in 147 countries
Mohsen Joshanloo
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
People in different cultures may give different weights to emotional experience when evaluating their lives. In modern secularized cultures, people are more likely to focus on maximizing the experience of positive emotions and minimizing the experience of negative emotions to achieve well-being. In contrast, in traditional religious cultures, people are more likely to use religious standards to evaluate their lives. Therefore, the present study predicted that the frequency of positive and negative affect would be a better predictor of life satisfaction in secular (vs. religious) cultures. A sample of 295,933 participants from 147 countries was used to test this prediction. The data were extracted from the Gallup World Poll. As expected, the results of multilevel modeling showed that the association between affect and life satisfaction was weaker in religious than secular cultures. Therefore, the socioreligious context partly determines the extent to which affective information is relied on in life evaluation.
Religious tides: The time‐variant effect of religion on morality policies
Christoph Knill et al.
Regulation & Governance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Morality policies evince a much closer relationship to religious doctrines than is the case in other policy areas and hence constitute a most likely case for the observation of religious effects on policymaking and regulatory change. Yet we still lack generally accepted answers to the questions of whether and how religion matters to morality policy. In this paper, we present a theoretical argument that helps to overcome the seemingly contradictory expectations derived from the secularization and religion matters hypotheses. We postulate a bottleneck effect of religious opposition: while religious influence matters most during early stages of the policy process when the problem definition of a moral issue is still in flux, it diminishes during later stages when the issue has made it onto the political agenda. We find evidence of the bottleneck effect in a dataset of policy permissiveness covering 26 countries and spanning 50 years for five morality policies (abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, pornography, and same‐sex marriage). The data is analyzed via a multilevel model and using Bayesian inference.
Drawn to the light: Predicting religiosity using “God is light” metaphor
Michelle Persich et al.
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, forthcoming
Abstract:
A prominent class of metaphors depicts that which is sacred (God, a spiritual path) in terms of lightness rather than darkness. Metaphors of this type should have systematic implications for religious cognition according to conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and a new extension of this theory termed balanced CMT. Five studies (total N = 761) derived predictions from these models and then tested them. Consistent with balanced CMT, Studies 1–3 found that people who preferred light to dark believed in God to a greater extent and were more religious. Furthermore, priming thoughts related to God shifted perceptual responses in a light-ward direction (Study 4), and models wearing lighter, relative to darker, shirts were inferred to be more religious (Study 5). The findings provide novel evidence for the importance of light–dark metaphors in religious representations while highlighting a new class of processes that covary with, and therefore predict, religious belief.
As Long as the Breath Lasts. In Utero Exposure to Ramadan and the Occurrence of Wheezing in Adulthood
Fabienne Pradella & Reyn van Ewijk
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
While prenatal exposure to Ramadan has been shown to be negatively associated with general physical and mental health, studies on specific organs remain scarce. This study explores whether Ramadan during pregnancy has impacts on the occurrence of wheezing, a main symptom for obstructive airways diseases. Using data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey collected between 1993 and 2008 (waves 1 to 4), we compare wheezing occurrence among adult Muslims who had been in utero during Ramadan with adult Muslims who had not been in utero during Ramadan. Wheezing prevalence is higher among adult Muslims who had been in utero during Ramadan, independent of the pregnancy phase in which the exposure to Ramadan occurred. Moreover, this association tends to increase with age, being strongest in the age groups 45+. This is in line with fetal programming theory suggesting that impacts of in utero exposures often only show after the reproductive age. Particularly strong associations were detected for smokers. The respiratory system of prenatally exposed Muslims thus seems to perform worse in mitigating later ex utero harmful influences such as smoking. This study suggests that exposure to Ramadan during pregnancy may have lasting consequences for adult lung functionality.
Religious/secular distance: How far apart are teenagers and their parents?
Ryan Cragun et al.
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, August 2018, Pages 288-295
Abstract:
Prior research exploring differences in religiousness (and/or secularity) between parents and their teenage children suggests that there are not substantial differences, with differences increasing during emerging adulthood. However, previous efforts to examine differences in religiousness between parents and their teenage children have relied upon single-item measures, have used self-reported differences, or have only asked either the child or the parent but not both to evaluate religious distance. In this study we use a robust scale measure to calculate the religious distance between parents and children in an upper-middle class high school in New York state (students n = 196; parents/caretakers n = 328). We find that teenage children in our sample are, on average, about 12% less religious (or more secular) than their fathers and about 17% less religious (or more secular) than their mothers. Our study improves upon measures of religious distance between parents and teenage children and provides support for recent research suggesting that the transmission of religiousness from parents to children can function as a mechanism of secularization.