Reassessing the Concept and Measurement of Evangelicals: The Case for the RELTRAD Approach

Smidt, Corwin E.

doi:10.1111/jssr.12633

Cited by 16 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(31 reference statements)

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“…Religion is also predictive of political orientation (Wilde and Glassman 2016), so we consider the relationship between religion and liberal gun ownership. Religious tradition is operationalized using Steensland et al (2000) RELTRAD coding (also Smidt 2019). The RELTRAD divides religious traditions in the following way: Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Other Religions, and Non‐Affiliated.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Are the Liberal Gun Owners?

Yamane

DeDeyne

Méndez

2020

Sociological Inquiry

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In the recent renaissance of interest in guns among sociologists, studies of the political conservatism of gun owners have proliferated, but we still know very little about politically liberal gun owners. This despite the fact that one in five U.S. gun owners (some 12 million adults) self‐identifies as liberal. This exploratory study, therefore, seeks to understand what seems on the surface to be an interesting and not rare category in American society: the liberal gun owner. In particular, we seek to answer two questions: Do liberal gun owners differ from other liberals who do not own guns and from other gun owners who are not liberal? We answer these questions using data from the General Social Survey, treating liberal gun owners as a category rather than a point on a continuum. Binary and multinomial logistic regressions suggest ways in which liberal gun owners are a distinct group, more resembling their fellow gun owners in their demographic and geographic backgrounds, but differing from moderate and/or conservative gun owners in important ways, including in their propensity to be hunters, religious affiliation, religiosity, and punitive attitudes.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Are the Liberal Gun Owners?

Yamane

DeDeyne

Méndez

2020

Sociological Inquiry

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“…There are three major strategies for identifying evangelicals in survey research (Smidt, 2019). Climate researchers should be aware that different strategies may yield different results when it comes to climate variables.…”

Section: Box 1 Identifying Evangelicals In Climate Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who are American evangelical Protestants and why do they matter forUSclimate policy?

Veldman

Wald

Mills

et al. 2020

WIREs Climate Change

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White evangelical Protestants are the most skeptical major religious group in the United States regarding climate change. While their position of political influence in the Republican coalition is widely recognised, the full range of effects of this position on evangelicals' climate opinions is not. To move research on evangelicals from the margins of climate change opinion research, we review and integrate the interdisciplinary literature on US evangelicals, climate change, and politics. In assessing this literature, we identify three areas in need of further research. First, there is a critical need for more research on the climate attitudes of evangelicals of color, who comprise a growing share of the evangelical tradition in the US. Second, highlighting the Christian Right's active engagement in the climate debate, we identify a need for more experimental work examining how cues from religious elites may shape evangelicals' opinions. Finally, we suggest that to better harness insights across disciplines, researchers must become more explicitly aware of how different disciplines conceptualize temporality. Attending to temporal scale suggests that a new approach is needed to test how dominion beliefs, which are widely thought to be an important theological driver of climate skepticism, operate. We also suggest that two factors that appear to play a weak or limited role in driving climate skepticism over the short term (anti‐science attitudes and evangelical religiosity) may in fact play a significant role in driving skepticism over the medium term. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

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“…The RELTRAD method similarly focuses on intra-Protestant variations. However, perhaps the most glaring limitation especially relevant in the context of the current study is that, in the RELTRAD method, a respondents' race is not factored into these categorizations (Steensland et al 2000;Smidt 2019). The RELTRAD method may therefore not be the most appropriate definition to take in studies such as this one, where the aim is to understand white evangelical beliefs and behaviors.…”

Section: Definitions Data and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A separate approach defines evangelicals by the religious tradition that individuals belong to (Steensland et al 2000; Smidt 2019). The RELTRAD method similarly focuses on intra-Protestant variations.…”

Section: Definitions Data and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does it Matter if the President Isn't Pious? White Evangelicals and Elite Religiosity in the Trump Era

Thompson

2022

Politics and Religion

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Trump's unwavering support among white evangelicals seems a contradiction considering his seeming irreligiosity and well publicized moral transgressions. This contradiction raises an interesting question concerning whether Trump represents something of a unique case when it comes to white evangelical evaluations of elite religiosity, or whether his support among the group indicative of a new era of evangelical support for candidates that does not assess religiosity as it used to. Drawing on contemporary debates from the religious psychology and Christian nationalism scholarship, I use data from Wave 61 of the American Trends Panel (ATP) to test whether white evangelicals who encounter threats to their religious identities are more likely to view that God played some role in Trump's election. Overall, I find that white evangelicals consider themselves minorities as a result of their beliefs. Most importantly, these beliefs condition white evangelical beliefs about God's role in Trump's election. Specifically, I find that increases in threat perceptions lead to an increase in the probability of a white evangelical believing that Trump's election was part of God's plan. These findings provide a new vantage point for understanding why so many white evangelicals view Trump's election as a divine outcome despite the fact they are indifferent to his irreligiosity.

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Reassessing the Concept and Measurement of Evangelicals: The Case for the RELTRAD Approach

Cited by 16 publications

References 26 publications

Who Are the Liberal Gun Owners?

Who Are the Liberal Gun Owners?

Who are American evangelical Protestants and why do they matter forUSclimate policy?

Does it Matter if the President Isn't Pious? White Evangelicals and Elite Religiosity in the Trump Era

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