Peace be upon you
Religion in the Arab Spring: Between Two Competing Narratives
Michael Hoffman & Amaney Jamal
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Did religion promote or discourage participation in protest against authoritarian regimes during the Arab Spring? Using unique data collected in Tunisia and Egypt soon after the fall of their respective regimes, we examine how various dimensions of religiosity were associated with higher or lower levels of protest during these important events. Using these original new data, we reach a novel conclusion: Qur’an reading, not mosque attendance, is robustly associated with a considerable increase in the likelihood of participating in protest. Furthermore, this relationship is not simply a function of support for political Islam. Evidence suggests that motivation mechanisms rather than political resources are the reason behind this result. Qur’an readers are more sensitive to inequities and more supportive of democracy than are nonreaders. These findings suggest a powerful new set of mechanisms by which religion may, in fact, help to structure political protest more generally.
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Taking a Leap of Faith: Reminders of God Lead to Greater Risk Taking
Kai Qin Chan, Eddie Mun Wai Tong & Yan Lin Tan
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent psychological models of religion suggest that religious beliefs provide a form of psychological control. Independently, other research has found that an increase in psychological control can lead people to adopt riskier strategies. Hence, we hypothesized that activation of God concepts increases risk taking. In three studies, we found that God primes led to take greater risk taking as though participants were literally “taking a leap of faith.” In Study 2, we presented evidence that this effect could be mediated by increased psychological control. Although consistent with psychological models of religion, the findings also contradict some survey findings that religious people are less risk seeking. This inconsistency was addressed in Study 3 by looking at how religion, morality, and risk taking are related. Implications to a relational schema approach to study the effects of God primes are discussed.
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Dawood Ahmed & Tom Ginsburg
Virginia Journal of International Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
The events of the Arab Spring and recent military coup in Egypt have highlighted the central importance of the constitutional treatment of Islam. Many constitutions in the Muslim world incorporate clauses that make Islamic law supreme or provide that laws repugnant to Islam will be void. The prevalence and impact of these “Islamic supremacy clauses” is of immense importance for constitutional design — not just for Muslim countries but also for U.S. foreign policy in the region, which became engaged in the issue during constitution-writing in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, to date, there has been no systematic or empirical examination of these clauses. Many questions remain unexplored: Where did these clauses originate? How have they spread? Are they anti-democratic impositions? What determines their adoption in national constitutions? This Article fills this gap. Relying on an original dataset based on the coding of all national constitutions since 1789 and case studies from four countries — Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and Iraq — it traces the origin and adoption of Islamic supremacy clauses since their first appearance in Iran in 1907. We make three major, counterintuitive claims: First, we argue that the repugnancy clause — the most robust form of Islamic supremacy clause — has its origins in British colonial law, and indeed, that all forms of Islamic supremacy are more prevalent in former British colonies than in other states in the region. Second, we argue that in many cases, these clauses are not only popularly demanded, but are also first introduced into their respective jurisdictions during moments of liberalization and modernization. Third, contrary to the claims of those who assume that the constitutional incorporation of Islam will be antithetical to human rights, we demonstrate that almost every instance of “Constitutional Islamization” is accompanied by an expansion, and not a reduction, in the rights provided by the constitution. Indeed, constitutions which incorporate Islamic supremacy clauses are even more rights-heavy than constitutions of other Muslim countries which do not incorporate these clauses. We explain the incidence of this surprising relationship using the logic of coalitional politics. These findings have significant normative implications. On a broader level, our work supports the view of scholars who argue that the constitutional incorporation of Islam is not only compatible with the constitutional incorporation of basic principles of liberal democracy, but that more democracy in the Muslim world may mean more Islam in the public sphere; in fact, we find that more democratic countries are not necessarily any less likely to adopt Islamic supremacy clauses. Our findings also suggest that outsiders monitoring constitution-making in majority Muslim countries who argue for the exclusion of Islamic clauses are focused on a straw man; not only are these clauses popular, but they are nearly always accompanied by a set of rights provisions that could advance basic values of liberal democracy. We accordingly suggest that constitutional advisors should focus more attention on the basic political structures of the constitution, including the design of constitutional courts and other bodies that will engage in interpretation, than on the Islamic provisions themselves.
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Religious Affiliation and Hiring Discrimination in the American South: A Field Experiment
Michael Wallace, Bradley Wright & Allen Hyde
Social Currents, June 2014, Pages 189-207
Abstract:
This article describes a field experiment in which we sent fictitious résumés to advertised job openings throughout the American South. We randomly altered the résumés to indicate affiliation in one of seven religious groups or a control group. We found that applicants who expressed a religious identity were 26 percent less likely to receive a response from employers. In general, Muslims, pagans, and atheists suffered the highest levels of discriminatory treatment from employers, a fictitious religious group and Catholics experienced moderate levels, evangelical Christians encountered little, and Jews received no discernible discrimination. We also found evidence suggesting the possibility that Jews received preferential treatment over other religious groups in employer responses. The results fit best with models of religious discrimination rooted in secularization theory and cultural distaste theory. We briefly discuss what our findings suggest for a more robust theory of prejudice and discrimination in society.
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A Call to Honesty: Extending Religious Priming of Moral Behavior to Middle Eastern Muslims
Mark Aveyard
PLoS ONE, July 2014
Abstract:
Two experiments with Middle Eastern participants explored the generalizability of prior research on religious priming and moral behavior to a novel cultural and religious context. Participants in Experiment 1 completed a sentence unscrambling task with religious or non-religious content (in Arabic) before taking an unsupervised math test on which cheating was possible and incentivized. No difference in honesty rates emerged between the two groups, failing to extend findings from previous research with similar stimuli. Experiment 2 tested the effects of the athan, the Islamic call to prayer, using the same design. This naturalistic religious prime produced higher rates of honesty (68%) compared to controls who did not hear the call to prayer (53%).These results raise the possibility that the psychological mechanisms used by religion to influence moral behavior might differ between religions and cultures, highlighting an avenue of exploration for future research. The experiments here also address two growing concerns in psychological science: that the absence of replications casts doubt on the reliability of original research findings, and that the Westernized state of psychological science casts doubt on the generalizability of such work.
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Does Adolescents’ Religiousness Moderate Links Between Harsh Parenting and Adolescent Substance Use?
Jungmeen Kim-Spoon et al.
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extant literature suggests that religiousness is inversely related to adolescent substance use; yet, no systematic investigation has examined whether religiousness may be a protective factor against substance use in the presence of risk factors. We examined whether religiousness moderates the links between parents’ psychological and physical aggression and adolescent substance use directly and indirectly through adolescent self-control. The sample comprised adolescents (n = 220, 45% female) and their primary caregivers. Structural equation modeling analyses suggested that adolescents with low religiousness were likely to engage in substance use when subjected to harsh parenting, but there was no association between harsh parenting and substance use among adolescents with high religiousness. Furthermore, although harsh parenting was related to poor adolescent self-control regardless of religiousness levels, poor self-control was significantly related to substance use for adolescents with low religiousness, whereas the link between poor self-control and substance use did not exist for adolescents with high religiousness. The findings present the first evidence that adolescent religiousness may be a powerful buffering factor that can positively alter pathways to substance use in the presence of risk factors such as harsh parenting and poor self-control.
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Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds
Kathleen Corriveau, Eva Chen & Paul Harris
Cognitive Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children's upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children's differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.
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More Like Us: How Religious Service Attendance Hinders Interracial Romance
Samuel Perry
Sociology of Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Religious service attendance is a consistently strong predictor of aversion to interracial romance, but intervening social mechanisms at work in this relationship have yet to be explicated. This article examines whether the persistent negative association between religious service attendance and interracial romance is mediated by a preference for religio-cultural endogamy — a form of cultural purity. Multivariate analyses of national-level survey data reveal that persons who believe it is more important that their romantic partner shares their particular religious understandings are less likely to have interracially dated, and that the initially strong effect of religious service attendance on interracial romance is completely mediated by the inclusion of desire for religio-cultural endogamy in regression models. I argue that, because the majority of American congregations are racially homogenous, more frequent attendance hinders interracial romantic engagement by embedding churchgoers within primarily same-race religio-cultural communities, and because congregational embeddedness influences members to seek romantic partners similar to the group, more embedded members are less likely to view different-race persons as sharing their religio-cultural understandings, and thus, as romantic options.
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Ruth Braunstein, Brad Fulton & Richard Wood
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Organizations can benefit from being internally diverse, but they may also face significant challenges arising from such diversity. Potential benefits include increased organizational innovation, legitimacy, and strategic capacity; challenges include threats to organizational stability, efficacy, and survival. In this article, we analyze the dynamics of internal diversity within a field of politically oriented civic organizations. We find that “bridging cultural practices” serve as a key mechanism through which racially and socioeconomically diverse organizations navigate challenges generated by internal differences. Drawing on data from extended ethnographic fieldwork within one local faith-based community organizing coalition, we describe how particular prayer practices are used to bridge differences within group settings marked by diversity. Furthermore, using data from a national study of all faith-based community organizing coalitions in the United States, we find that a coalition’s prayer practices are associated with its objective level of racial and socioeconomic diversity and its subjective perception of challenges arising from such diversity. Our multi-method analysis supports the argument that diverse coalitions use bridging prayer practices to navigate organizational challenges arising from racial and socioeconomic diversity, and we argue that bridging cultural practices may play a similar role within other kinds of diverse organizations.
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Religion, Motherhood, and the Spirit of Capitalism
Jeremy Reynolds & Matthew May
Social Currents, June 2014, Pages 173-188
Abstract:
Religion can help people cope with problems, but in the modern U.S. economy, it may also create problems for some women. Conservative Protestantism encourages women to avoid paid work when they have young children, but that is a preference many families cannot afford. To better understand how workplace outcomes may reflect religion, we examine whether conservative Protestant, mainline Protestant, Catholic, and non-religious women work the number of hours they prefer. We pay special attention to the interplay of religion and motherhood. We find that among new mothers, conservative Protestants are among the most likely to wish they were working fewer hours. Non-religious women, in contrast, are the least likely to want fewer hours. Among women who are not new mothers, the situation is reversed. Conservative Protestants are least likely to wish they were working fewer hours and non-religious women are the most likely to want fewer hours. These results suggest that researchers interested in the subjective side of employment should pay more attention to how religion shapes experiences of paid work.
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Siyuan Huang & Shihui Han
Social Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent neuroimaging research has revealed stronger empathic neural responses to same-race compared to other-race individuals. Is the in-group favouritism in empathic neural responses specific to race identification or a more general effect of social identification—including those based on religious/irreligious beliefs? The present study investigated whether and how intergroup relationships based on religious/irreligious identifications modulate empathic neural responses to others’ pain expressions. We recorded event-related brain potentials from Chinese Christian and atheist participants while they perceived pain or neutral expressions of Chinese faces that were marked as being Christians or atheists. We found that both Christian and atheist participants showed stronger neural activity to pain (versus neutral) expressions at 132–168 ms and 200–320 ms over the frontal region to those with the same (versus different) religious/irreligious beliefs. The in-group favouritism in empathic neural responses was also evident in a later time window (412–612 ms) over the central/parietal regions in Christian but not in atheist participants. Our results indicate that the intergroup relationship based on shared beliefs, either religious or irreligious, can lead to in-group favouritism in empathy for others’ suffering.
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The Religious Context of Welfare Attitudes
Tom VanHeuvelen
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, June 2014, Pages 268–295
Abstract:
This article examines the influence of three dimensions of religion — belonging (faith tradition membership), behaving (frequency of service attendance), and context (one's relationship to aggregate population characteristics) — on attitudes toward multiple forms of state-provided social protection, or welfare attitudes. To do so, this article uses data from 17 countries surveyed in the 2006 “Role of Government” wave of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Results from mixed effects regression show that contextual effects are highly predictive of welfare attitudes. Nations that are more religiously heterogeneous are less supportive of state protection, while nations that are more homogeneous, particularly Catholic nations, are more supportive. Results hold net of fractionalization, political institutional measures, and economic characteristics. At the individual level, all three dimensions of religiosity are predictive of welfare attitudes. These patterns suggest that in rich Western democracies, religion continues to play an important role in structuring the moral economies.
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The efficacy of religious service attendance in reducing depressive symptoms
Jianxiang Zou et al.
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, June 2014, Pages 911-918
Purpose: To examine whether religiosity may help people ward off depression, we investigated the association between religious service attendance and depressive symptom scores in a community-based 30-year follow-up longitudinal study.
Methods: This study used data on 754 subjects followed over 30 years and evaluated at four time points. Linear mixed effects models were used to assess the association between religious service attendance and depressive symptoms development; frequency of attendance and age also were used as predictors. Demographic factors, life-time trauma, family socioeconomic status, and recent negative events were considered as control variables.
Results: Depressive symptom scores were reduced by an average of 0.518 units (95 % CI from −0.855 to −0.180, p < 0.005) each year in subjects who attended religious services as compared with subjects who did not. The more frequent the religious service attendance, the stronger the influence on depressive symptoms when compared with non-attendance. Yearly, monthly, and weekly religious service attendance reduced depression scores by 0.474 (95 % CI from −0.841 to −0.106, p < 0.01), 0.495 (95 % CI from −0.933 to −0.057, p < 0.05) and 0.634 (95 % CI from −1.056 to −0.212, p < 0.005) units on average, respectively, when compared with non-attendance after controlling for other covariates.
Conclusion: Religious service attendance may reduce depressive symptoms significantly, with more frequent attendance having an increasingly greater impact on symptom reduction in this 30-year community-based longitudinal study.