Journal ArticleSociological Focus · January 1, 2024
We use the National Survey of Religious Leaders (NSRL) to extend prior research on clergy’s political activism and agendas. We find that christian clergy engage in political cue giving at similar rates across religious traditions, though evangelical clergy ...
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Journal ArticlePolitics and Religion · September 1, 2023
We use data from the new and nationally representative National Survey of Religious Leaders, supplemented with the 2018 General Social Survey, to examine the extent to which clergy are politically aligned with people in their congregations. Two assessments ...
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Journal ArticleJAMA psychiatry · March 2023
ImportanceReligious leaders commonly provide assistance to people with mental illness, but little is known about clergy views regarding mental health etiology and appropriate treatment.ObjectiveTo assess the views of religious leaders reg ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · September 1, 2022
The National Survey of Religious Leaders (NSRL) is a new survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,600 clergy from across the religious spectrum. Conducted in 2019–2020, the NSRL contains a wealth of information about congregations’ religious leade ...
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Journal ArticleReview of religious research · January 2022
BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic dramatically upended religious life and placed significant strain on religious congregations. However, the effects of the pandemic were likely not felt evenly across the religious landscape.PurposeWe used d ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · December 1, 2020
The fourth wave of the National Congregations Study (NCS-IV) was conducted in 2018–2019 with a nationally representative sample of congregations from across the religious spectrum. The NCS-IV included a fresh cross-section of congregations generated in con ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · December 1, 2020
Racially diverse congregations have become an important part of the American religious landscape. We use data from the National Congregations Study (NCS), notably including data from the fourth wave, collected in 2018–2019, to examine 20 years of racial di ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of sociology · June 2018
Economists and sociologists of religion have claimed that religious establishment dampens religious vitality, leading to lower recruitment efforts, low attendance, declining membership within established congregations, and the 'crowding out' of non-establi ...
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Chapter · May 14, 2018
Every country is unique in its own way, and every country has its own religious particularities. But a main lesson that I take from these chapters is that there also are striking similarities across countries in their current religious situations. Perhaps ...
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Journal ArticleSociological Science · January 1, 2018
In their 2017 article, "The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research," Schnabel and Bock claimed that "intense religion . . . is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United ...
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Journal ArticleSociological Methods and Research · January 1, 2017
The positive relationship between family formation and regular weekly religious service attendance is well established, but cross-sectional data make it difficult to be confident that this relationship is causal. Moreover, if the relationship is causal, cr ...
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Journal ArticleReligions · May 1, 2016
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 serv ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · March 1, 2016
Previous research shows that clergy make less money than others with similar levels of education. We use Current Population Survey data to offer five contributions to knowledge about clergy compensation. First, we document and take into account the shift i ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · December 1, 2014
The third wave of the National Congregations Study (NCS-III) was conducted in 2012. The 2012 General Social Survey asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation, producing a nationally representative cross-section of ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of religion and health · June 2012
Surveillance studies monitor the prevalence and incidence of HIV, and this information is used by policy makers to design prevention programs and facilitate care for people living with HIV (PLWHIV). Although most of these studies monitor the presence of PL ...
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Journal ArticleSociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review · March 1, 2011
Key informant interviewing is an important methodological tool for gathering information about congregations, but little research has examined the accuracy of the information key informants provide. We assess the validity of key informant reports about con ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · March 1, 2010
Religious congruence refers to consistency among an individual's religious beliefs and attitudes, consistency between religious ideas and behavior, and religious ideas, identities, or schemas that are chronically salient and accessible to individuals acros ...
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Journal ArticleNonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly · January 1, 2010
We use national surveys of congregations conducted in 1998 and 2006-2007 to assess whether or not the faith-based initiative increased congregations' social service involvement, government funding, or collaborations with government or nonprofit organizatio ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · December 1, 2009
We use the 2008 General Social Survey to estimate the prevalence of clergy sexual advances toward adults in their congregations. Overall, 3.1 percent of women who attend religious services at least monthly reported being the object of a sexual advance by a ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · March 20, 2009
A growing literature examines the role of religious communities as sources of social support for members, and a smaller body of work also explores negative aspects of social relations within congregations. However, very little is known about the characteri ...
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Journal ArticleThe Christian Century · 2009
How do congregations decide what to emphasize about themselves on their Web sites? Since Web sites make congregations more visible to each other as well as to prospective members, will clergy and lay leaders monitor and influence each other more than befor ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · June 1, 2008
We establish for the first time a national mortality rate for religious congregations by determining the 2005 status of congregations in the 1998 National Congregations Study sample. The annual mortality rate for religious congregations is 1 percent, which ...
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Journal ArticleSociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review · January 1, 2008
The second wave of the National Congregations Study (NCS-II) was conducted in 2006-07. The 2006 General Social Survey asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation. This new nationally representative cross-section of ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · September 1, 2007
Weekend attendance at conventional religious services remains the most common form of social religious action in American society. Debates about secularization, discussions of congregations as sites of political skill-building and mobilization, and researc ...
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Journal ArticleReview of Religious Research · June 1, 2006
Why have very large Protestant churches proliferated in recent decades? I address this question by shifting attention from megachurches themselves to the overall size distribution of American Protestant churches, examining how and why that distribution has ...
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ConferenceInvited Lecture, Symposium on Civil Society, Civic Engagement, and Catholicism in the U.S., Friedrich-Schiller-Universit�t, Jena, Germany, May. · 2006Cite
Journal ArticleThe Christian Century · 2006
The number of very large churches has increased, for example, in the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Methodist Church. (This is not a perfect measure, especially not after 1970, when increases in the cost of bene ...
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Journal ArticleSociety · 2005
Argues that Frederick Turner's "The Double Citizen: Religious and Secular" (2005) suffers for the empirical assumption that religious people are more inclined than nonreligious people to be double-minded citizens, ie, able to separate their own personal va ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Sociological Review · 2004
Autonomy from the state has been considered a core feature of American civil society, and understanding the consequences of perceived threats to that autonomy has been a central theme in social and political theory. We engage this theme by examining a spec ...
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Journal ArticleSociety · 2003
A response is offered to Philip Jenkins's (2003) article on the abuse crisis in the US Catholic Church. It is suggested that the roots of the current crisis go beyond his analysis of the cultural conflict between liberals & conservatives within the US Roma ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Behavioral Scientist · 2002
This article distinguishes the following three types of religious organizations: congrega tions, denominational organizations (religious organizations that are not congregations but that mainly produce religion), and religious nonprofits (religious organiz ...
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Journal ArticleNonprofit Management and Leadership · 2001
This article describes the restructuring process currently underway at the United Church of Christ (UCC)—a 1.4 million member Protestant denomination. Three main questions are addressed: What are the central goals of the UCC restructure? What factors might ...
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Journal ArticleAnnual Review of Sociology · 2001
For more than a decade, sociologists of religion have been debating the answer to a basic question: What is the relationship between religious pluralism and religious vitality?? The old wisdom was that the relationship was negative, that pluralism undermin ...
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Journal Article · 2001
Examines the assumptions that religious social services provide holistic service delivery for long-term solutions to problems, and that collaborating with secular organizations and government agencies would undermine that approach; data from the 1998 Natio ...
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Chapter · 2001
Reviews empirical research on ways in which religious institutions have generated & mobilized social capital in low-income US communities. The roles of (1) congregations themselves, (2) congregation-based organizing efforts, & (3) denominations, interfaith ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Sociological Review · 1999
The "Charitable Choice" provision of the 1996 welfare reform legislation requires states that contract with nonprofit organizations for delivery of social services to include religious organizations as eligible contractees. This legislation altered the con ...
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OtherThe Christian Century · 1999
Chaves reviews "American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving," by Christian Smith with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink. ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Sociological Review · 1998
Responds to comments by Theodore Caplow, Michael Hout & Andrew Greeley, & Robert D. Woodberry (all, 1998 [see abstract 9809981, 9810019, & 9810065, respectively]) regarding the authors' (1993) analysis that concluded that surveys grossly inflate US church ...
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OtherContemporary Sociology · 1998
"Feminization of the Clergy in America: Occupational and Organizational Perspectives" by Paula D. Nesbitt is reviewed. ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1997
Conflicts over women's ordination have occurred within U.S. religious denominations for over a century. The nature of those conflicts, however, has changed over time in very substantial ways. Using systematic data and illustrative material from 15 conflict ...
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Journal ArticleThe Journal of Religion · 1997
American women continue to enter the clergy in growing numbers. Chaves argues that a religious denomination's policy on the ordination of women is better understood as a symbolic display of gender equality--or inequality--that as a policy either motivated ...
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Book · 1997
This Vol applies a sociological perspective to a historical, comparative analysis of the practice of female ordination in various US religious denominations, drawing on quantitative event-history analysis of 100 of the largest Christian denominations, supp ...
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ConferenceAmerican Sociological Association · 1997
Event history data from US Catholic dioceses are used to examine the determinants of an organizational change by which priests are treated as employees rather than as independent contractors, as indicated by whether income is reported using W-2s or 1099 fo ...
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Journal ArticleThe American Journal of Sociology · 1996
Why do denominations vary in the extent to which they resist ordaining women? Extensive loose coupling between formal policy and actual practice concerning female access to positions within religious organizations highlights the symbolic importance of rule ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1996
A growing body of research conducted by cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists finds that some features of human decision making are not adequately described by standard rational choice models of human behavior. In this paper, we offer experimen ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Sociological Association · 1995
Why do religious denominations vary in the extent to which they resist granting full clergy rights to women? Here, the extensive loose coupling between formal policy & actual practice concerning female access to religious positions are established indicati ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1995
Transformations within religious institutions and traditions often occur via conflict and internal social movements. Yet previous research on such phenomena has missed some important sociological insights because it has not incorporated methodological and ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1995
Part of a "Symposium on the Rational Choice Approach to Religion"(see related abstracts in SA 43:4). It is argued that the metatheoretical claims made by rational choice (RC) approaches to religion are misleading oversimplifications, & that the assumption ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1994
Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves (1993) have recently argued that U.S. weekly church attendance is about one-half the rate that is commonly accepted. Regarding Catholics, their result was based on head-count data from only 18 dioceses. The present paper is base ...
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Journal ArticleThe Journal of Politics · 1994
Church-state relations have captured the attention of prominent thinkers throughout history. Drawing upon the intellectual heritages of Adam Smith and Alexis de Toqueville, a "supply-side" explanation of religious participation predicts that religion will ...
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Journal ArticleSocial Forces · 1994
Secularization is most productively understood not as declining religion, but as the declining scope of religious authority. A focus on religious authority (1) is more consistent with recent developments in social theory than is a preoccupation with religi ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Journal of Sociology · 1993
Internal secularization is reconceptualized as religious authority's declining scope within religious organizations. It is analyzed as the outcome of intraorganizational conflics between elites of two parallel stuctures within denominations: religious auth ...
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Journal ArticleSociology of Religion · 1993
The central thesis of this article is that denominations are composed of two parallel structures overlying congregations: a religious authority structure and an agency structure. This article elaborates the notion of religious authority structure, provides ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Sociological Association · 1993
Consistently high levels of participation reported in US poll data suggest an exceptionally religious population, little affected by secularizing trends. This picture of vitality, however, contradicts other empirical evidence indicative of declining streng ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1992
Have the extra-religious functions of black congregations become attenuated in recent decades? We have addressed this question here via a comparative analysis of black and white churches with the only extant national probability sample of U.S. congregation ...
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ConferenceAmerican Sociological Association · 1992
A comprehensive critical review is presented of the extant research on intradenominational conflict, identifying & describing five major shortcomings. Also described are two research projects that avoided these shortcomings by investigating intradenominati ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1991
This paper is a response to Firebaugh and Harley (1991), as well as an attempt to enhance our understanding of age-related patterns in Protestant church attendance. Firebaugh's and Harley's arguments in favor of an "age effects only" model of Protestant ch ...
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Journal ArticleSA. Sociological Analysis · 1991
Historical data on the careers of those attaining elite positions within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are used to analyze the differentiation of a religious labor market into congregational, educational and agency segments. ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 1989
In this research, age-period-cohort models were estimated for NORC church attendance data. The models were identified by assuming no life-course effects on church attendance beyond age 70, an assumption strongly supported by past theory and research. The r ...
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Journal ArticleSociological Analysis · 1988
In his discussion of methodological issues in the sociology of religion, Donald R. Ploch (see SA 35:4/87R8080) asserts that all socially constructed meaning, arising from all human attempts to face the necessity of contingency, can be considered religion. ...
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