Abstract:A major goal of ideological education in China is to promote loyalty to the party-state and to instill atheism among the people. How effective is this ideological education? This article examines the relationship between education and trust in government and trust in religion using data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey. We find that education is negatively associated with trust in government, while positively related to trust in religion. Our findings suggest that policies aimed at displacing religion in favor of the Communist ideology have largely failed to shape the public mindset; rather, the more educated, the more people tend to trust religion instead of the government.
Americans who self-identify as spiritual but not religious (SBNR) have increased in recent years. Existing studies of American religion often assume the SBNR as a homogeneous group. Recently some scholars suggest they are not all the same. Instead, SBNR people may differ in the pattern of religious practice, attitude, and affection. This study examines the heterogeneity of the SBNR using a person-centered approach of latent class analysis. We first identified four distinct types of SBNR adolescents in the Wave 2 data of the National Survey of Youth and Religion. Then, we explored how subgroups changed their religious identity over time by tracking them in Wave 3 data.
The sex ratio at birth in China is highly imbalanced in favor of boys. Past research on sex ratios in China emphasizes economic factors for their weakening effect on the Confucian tradition of son preference. Research in the sociology of religion suggests that religious geography may affect sex ratios through the spill‐over of religious teachings to those living in areas dominated by a religious tradition. To assess this linkage, we investigate the relationship between religious geography and county‐level child sex ratios using the 2000 China Population Census and the 2004 China Economic Census, the most complete and recent data available on religious presence in China. Applying spatial analyses of 2,685 counties (over 90% of all counties), we find that counties with a greater presence of Daoist temples have more imbalanced (male‐biased) sex ratios, whereas a greater presence of Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques is associated with less imbalanced sex ratios.
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