No abstract
sociology has long documented and theorized persistent inequalities between religious communities in the United States; in addition, socioeconomic inequalities between religious groups have played an important role in many sociological theories about religion and society. Since the publication of numerous important works published in the mid-20th century, however, the social stratification of American religion has been a curiously understudied topic. This research note is an attempt to update our descriptive knowledge about socioeconomic inequalities between American religious groups. Using General Social Survey data to track educational, income, and job status inequality over a 16-year period, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, we find that socioeconomic inequality in the American religious system has been quite persistent and stable, suggesting that significant mobility within this system in the mid-20th century may be declining, thus producing a more stable system of stratification.American religion has from the beginning of its history been stratified by education, income, and occupational status. Since colonial days, religious differences have played a role in constructing social differentiations that sustained socioeconomic inequalities. As the American religious system grew increasingly pluralistic over time, socioeconomic disparities between different religious communities transformed and persisted.American sociology has for decades documented and theorized these persistent inequalities between religious communities. Many distinguished works-including H. Richard Niebuhr's
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 152.3.43.154 on Thu, To further understanding of Americans' explanations for racial inequality, and the implications these explanations have for reducing black-white socioeconomic inequality, we explore the role of religion. We argue that the cultural tools of a religious subculture shape the rationale for racial inequality. Examining white conservative Protestants, who comprise nearly 25 percent of white Americans, we identify religious cultural tools we call "accountable freewill individualism," "anti-structuralism," and "relationalism." Based on these, we hypothesize that white conservative Protestants explain inequality in more individualistic and less structural terms than other white Americans. We also expect them to emphasize perceived dysfunctional social relations among African Americans in their explanations. Using the 1996 General Social Survey and qualitative data from 117 in-depth interviews, these hypotheses are clearly supported. Religion, it appears, has an independent effect on explanations of racial inequality. Based on these findings, we suggest that rationales for racial inequality are not mere defenses of socioeconomic privilege, but, more fundamentally, defenses of identity, culture, and worldview.
In the Unites States, the public has a constitutional right to access criminal trial proceedings. In practice, it can be difficult or impossible for the public to exercise this right. We present JUSTFAIR: Judicial System Transparency through Federal Archive Inferred Records, a database of criminal sentencing decisions made in federal district courts. We have compiled this data set from public sources including the United States Sentencing Commission, the Federal Judicial Center, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, and Wikipedia. With nearly 600,000 records from the years 2001 - 2018, JUSTFAIR is the first large scale, free, public database that links information about defendants and their demographic characteristics with information about their federal crimes, their sentences, and, crucially, the identity of the sentencing judge.
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