Conflicted Religionists: Measuring political backlash on salient issues

Abstract

Over the past few decades, a steadily increasing number of people have identified as “nonreligious.” Scholars have suggested that this trend is in part due to attitude conflict within churches, where a political backlash of sorts has driven religionists away from their affiliations. While past research has largely focused on drawing descriptive patterns of those who have already disaffiliated from churches, there has been less of an effort to measure those religionists who experience attitude conflict with their churches—I call these individuals conflicted religionists. Using data from the Baylor Religion Survey (Wave II, 2007), a nationally representative sample, I expand the political backlash model and provide a novel measure of conflict by (1) measuring conflict on two specific and important issues: same-sex marriage and abortion, (2) identifying the socio-demographic makeup and magnitude of conflicted religionists, and by (3) measuring the association between attitude conflict and church attendance. Overall, the results show that a considerable proportion of religionists are indeed conflicted. Results from multivariate analyses suggest that political orientation is a clear and important predictor of attitude conflict. Moreover, Evangelicals stand out as being especially unlikely to conflict, even after other variables are controlled. Finally, using Coarsened Exact Matching techniques, I show that conflicted religion is associated with significantly lower church attendance. This paper provides the first known attempt to measure attitude conflict in churches and takes initial steps toward understanding the relationship between conflict and religious participation. Broader implications for the study of religion, politics, and social change are discussed.

Selfish or Substituting Spirituality? Clarifying the Relationship between Spiritual Practice and Political Engagement

“…We identify distinct sociodemographic patterns in who reports doing spiritual practice: political progressives, respondents of color, and, most notably, members of the LGBT community are more likely to report engaging in spiritual rather than religious practices. In an era where religious engagement is increasingly politically polarized (Bock 2021; Margolis 2018; Schnabel and Bock 2017) and political progressives may be alienated from religious institutions for different reasons (Deguara 2020; Kucinskas 2019), we theorize that spirituality is a boundary object that can avoid the cultural trappings of “religion” or “the secular.” Because spiritual practice is also associated with political behavior, we hypothesize that spiritual practice is functioning in similar ways, in some cases, to how religious practices in congregations have functioned in the past. Building on burgeoning literature in this area (e.g., Delahanty 2020; du Plessis and Just 2022; Sauerborn forthcoming), future research needs to continue to identify specifically how spiritual practices contribute to political engagement for these different groups, and the extent to which they are tied to progressive mobilization.…”