Moral teachings and religious sensibilities

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 valuations & priorities from those of God. In addition, Turner is challenged for his notion that religious people absorb the moral teachings of their religions enough to influence their political behavior. At heart, Turner seems unable to demonstrate that religion's capacity for social & political good outweighs its capacity for the opposite. Further from a sociological perspective, Turner errs in assuming that the practice of religion can be decoupled from the sociocultural contexts in which it is embedded; he treats an interpretive possibility in a religious tradition as if it were evidence of empirical practice. Thus, "doubleness" should be viewed as a religious & political project rather than social fact. J. Zendejas

Duke Scholars

Author Mark Chaves Sociology