This article examines how parents who are religiously unaffiliated make decisions about the religious upbringing of their children. Drawing on qualitative data, this study explores the diverse worldviews that are included within the term "None" and how those beliefs are reflected or not reflected in the way parents raise their children. The article identifies four distinct worldviews among unaffiliated parents and identifies five different strategies that parents use to incorporate religion in the lives of their children. The article then analyzes the relationship between parent worldviews and actions, with particular attention to secular unaffiliated parents who incorporate religion in the upbringing of their children and to religious unaffiliated parents who do not. In addition to providing empirical data about unaffiliated parents, the article engages the wider debate about what it means to be religious or secular. It calls for more attention to salience, not just of religion but of secular worldviews, and offers parent actions visa -vis the religious upbringing of their children as a concrete measure of how much religion matters.
The Catholic Church in America is deeply divided, and gender issues ( espeeiaUy reproductive choice and women's ordination) have become a symptom of this division. This paper examines the language used by liberal and conservative Catholic women to talk about gender, h is argued that although similar clivisions over gender exist within Protestantism and Judaism, Catholic women ate in a unique position to confront them. Unlike conservative Protestants and Jews who have separated themselves from their more liberal counterparts by forming independent Evangelical and Orthodox denorninations, conservative Catho//cs co-exist with liberds in the same church. The paper shows that being … to confront those divisions has resulted in a tendency towards polarization on the one hand, and towards m, xteration on the other, both of which have important implications for the future of the Catholic Church.Roman Catholicism in America is becoming a divided church. In the past, this division has usually been conceptualized as laity and women on the liberal side versus male leadership on the conservative side. There is thus a substantial body of literature on the growing division between the increasingly liberal American Catholic laity and the conservative Vatican bureaucracy (e.g., Bianchi and Ruether 1992; D'Antonio 1994; Greeley 1990; Hoge 1981; Seidler and Meyer 1989). Greeley noted as early as 1976 that the Catholic laity disagreed with their church on birth control. D'Antonio's (1994) review of more recent survey research suggests that a majority of Catholics disagree with their leadership on many other issues (e.g., mass attendance, abortion) that in the past were never questioned as requirements for being a good Catholic. D'Antonio shows that the number of Catholics disagreeing with their leaders is increasing, and that this finding holds even for committed Catholics (those who attend mass at least once a week). 'q'he laity," as he puts it, "ate developing an image of a good Catholic very much at variance with the traditional model set forth by the magisterium in Rome" (p. 384).
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