The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art

Steensland, Brian; Park, Jerry Z.; Regnerus, Mark; Robinson, Lynn; Wilcox, W. Bradford; Woodberry, Robert D.

doi:10.1093/sf/79.1.291

Cited by 985 publications

(772 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Finally, turning to different types of affiliations, we see in Figure 5 that evangelicals (as measured using the Steensland et al [2000] schema) are not on the decline in the same way as more moderate religious affiliations. In fact, additional analyses going further back in time demonstrate that evangelicals grew from 1972, when they were 18 percent of the population, to a steady level of about 28 percent from 1989 to 2016.…”

Section: The Persistent Intensity Of American Religionmentioning

confidence: 89%

The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

Schnabel¹,

Bock²

2017

SocScience

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Recent research argues that the United States is secularizing, that this religious change is consistent with the secularization thesis, and that American religion is not exceptional. But we show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion-strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism-is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States. We also show that in comparable countries, intense religion is on the decline or already at very low levels. Therefore, the intensity of American religion is actually becoming more exceptional over time. We conclude that intense religion in the United States is persistent and exceptional in ways that do not fit the secularization thesis.

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Section: The Persistent Intensity Of American Religionmentioning

confidence: 89%

The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

Schnabel¹,

Bock²

2017

SocScience

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“…To assess differences across religious groups in social service activity, we use a modified version of a standard categorization [15] of congregations into five broad religious traditions: Roman Catholic, white liberal/mainline Protestant, white conservative/evangelical Protestant, black Protestant, and non-Christian congregations. These subgroups were constructed based primarily on denominational affiliations.…”

Section: Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Congregations and Social Services: An Update from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study

Chaves

Eagle

2016

Religions

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Congregations and other religious organizations are an important part of the social welfare system in the United States. This article uses data from the 2012 National Congregations Study to describe key features of congregational involvement in social service programs and projects. Most congregations (83%), containing 92% of religious service attendees, engage in some social or human service activities intended to help people outside of their congregation. These programs are primarily oriented to food, health, clothing, and housing provision, with less involvement in some of the more intense and long-term interventions such as drug abuse recovery, prison programs, or immigrant services. The median congregation involved in social services spent $1500 per year directly on these programs, and 17% had a staff member who worked on them at least a quarter of the time. Fewer than 2% of congregations received any government financial support of their social service programs and projects within the past year; only 5% had applied for such funding. The typical, and probably most important, way in which congregations pursue social service activity is by providing small groups of volunteers to engage in well-defined and bounded tasks on a periodic basis, most often in collaboration with other congregations and community organizations.

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“…Finally, we include a series of items representing the religious tradition of the respondent's denomination. These items were constructed using the RELTRAD classification (Steensland et al 2000). 11 Descriptive statistics for all of the observed measures included in the analysis below are shown in Table 1.…”

Section: Controlsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Religiosity and Orientation towards Science: Reformulating Relationships

Johnson¹,

Scheitle²,

Ecklund³

2015

SocScience

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Abstract:The religion-science relationship has been the focus of a growing body of research. Such analyses have often suffered from poorly specified concepts related to religion and to science. At the individual level, scholars often assume that an individual's religiosity will affect her orientation towards science. But an orientation towards science consists of several sub-concepts, each of which may have a unique relationship, or lack thereof, with religiosity. We use observed measures from the 2008 General Social Survey to build latent variables representing science orientation sub-concepts and assess their relationships using structural equation modeling. We find that religiosity has no significant association with interest in or knowledge of science. Religiosity does, however, have a significant negative association with confidence in science. This suggests that the lack of faith in science held by religious individuals is not a product of interest or ignorance, but is instead based on theological or institutional reservations.

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The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art

Cited by 985 publications

References 33 publications

The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

Congregations and Social Services: An Update from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study

Individual Religiosity and Orientation towards Science: Reformulating Relationships

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