Organizational scholars expect organizations to conform to the norms and expectations of their institutional environments. In some cases, though, organizations may reject rules if they perceive a greater advantage to defiance than to conformity. This project analyzes a sample of sermons given by United Methodist Church (UMC) clergy surrounding the 2019 UMC General Conference. We focus on a subset of sermons in which clergy explicitly mention they will not follow denominational rules, meaning they will marry and ordain LGBTQ people, to investigate how clergy legitimize their rule breaking. We find that clergy draw on several sources of religious authority to justify their decisions, including meso-level structures in the UMC tradition, the autonomy of local congregations, and religious texts and leaders. This project provides empirical evidence of how organizations resist institutional pressure and construct their decision as legitimate, with implications for other organizations and for LGBTQ inclusion.
This project investigates the relationship between religious involvement and women's work and family pathways in the United States. I identify five work‐family configurations using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and latent class analysis. These configurations incorporate cohabitation histories, timing of family formation, and maternal employment. Then, I analyze how adolescent religiosity and personal and family characteristics are associated with subsequent work‐family pathways. Affiliation with an evangelical Protestant tradition is associated with women who form families early, while Catholic affiliation is tied to later family formation. Importantly, family background characteristics such as living with both biological parents and higher parental education, as well as race/ethnicity and the respondent's educational attainment, are the most consistent variables associated with work‐family configurations. These results suggest that religious involvement, when considered alongside family background, contributes to women's unequal work‐family pathways in adulthood. The close links between religion, family, and stratification are evident in the study of women's work‐family experiences.
Clergy have regular opportunities to take a prophetic stance on social issues in their weekly sermons, but they are also responsible for maintaining organizational stability. How do they respond to controversial denominational decisions? We collected sermons from United Methodist Church (UMC) clergy following the 2019 UMC decision to maintain their prohibition against same sex marriage and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) ordination. Our qualitative analysis of a sample of 447 sermons reveals three strategies clergy use to respond to the UMC decision: prophetic engagement, unifying discussion, and detached acknowledgment. Further, we show that different strategies are likely tied to the pastor’s perception of the attitudes of their attendees. Some clergy are willing to use a constrained prophetic voice in support of LGBTQ people, but most balance their comments with pragmatic efforts to minimize conflict. As a result, a more inclusive religious voice is present, but it may be muted by congregational concerns.
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