This study examines the relationship between Christian nationalism and inherent distrust of immigrants using multinomial logistic regression models to analyze original U.S. survey data (n = 1,894). I also test moderation by political and ethno-racial identities. Christian nationalism is associated with greater distrust of immigrants, controlling for relevant covariates, including trust of one's own racial in-group. The positive association is stronger among Democrats and political independents, compared with Republicans. At high levels of Christian nationalism, political independents report similar levels of distrust as Republicans, who tended to have relatively high distrust of immigrants across levels of Christian nationalism endorsement. The positive association between Christian nationalism and immigrant distrust is also particularly pronounced among non-Hispanic White Americans and weaker among Black and Hispanic Americans. These findings support-and extend-recent framings of Christian nationalism as a right-wing political movement with implications for Americans across political and sociodemographic groups.
Based on 52 in-depth interviews, this study demonstrates that orthodox Protestants, atheists, and adherents of new spirituality in the Netherlands define religious otherness through distinctive interpretive frames that reflect their own worldviews. Orthodox Protestants associate otherness with "worldliness," atheists with "fantasy stories," and new spiritualists with "fanaticism." These frames are applied uniformly across different religious outgroups, which leads differences between religious others to be downplayed and perceived ranges of acceptable religious options to be narrowed down. This finding challenges the widespread assumption that religious pluralism expands available religious options, and points to the need for further research into variegated cultural interpretations of religious pluralism.
This article reports findings from a multi-method study of atheism and agnosticism-grouped here as nontheism-in contemporary China, conducted as part of a research program exploring the nature and varieties of nontheism across six countries. We find that, unlike the naturalistic and antireligious forms of atheism prominent in many Western contexts, nontheism in China is characterized by high engagement with supernatural beliefs, low antireligious sentiment, and weak attachment to explicitly nontheistic worldviews and identities. When Chinese nontheists self-identify as atheists, such identification often appears situational, strategic, and linked to social or political expectations. We argue that nontheism in China tends to operate less as an ideological stance and more as a pragmatic orientation embedded in social relationships and instrumental concerns. This mode of nontheism, we suggest, reflects a sociocultural environment in which nontheists generally face little pressure or incentive to develop strong nontheistic positions, aside from the ocasional need to signal adherence to state-endorsed atheism.
This investigation examined how intergenerational transmission of subjective religious intensity varies across historical periods, birth cohorts, and depends on emotional closeness and type of relationship between parents and children. Principles from the life course perspective specified how these various social factors moderate the strength of religious transmission. Data derived from 8,341 dyads of parents and children from four generations participating in the Longitudinal Study of Generations between 1971 - 2016. Multilevel ordered logit regression indicated that parental transmission of religious intensity was weaker to baby-boom children compared to children in the previous cohort. Parental transmission was also stronger to children in biological/adoptive relationships compared to step-relationships, and in relationships that were emotionally closer compared to less emotionally close. Demonstrating how intergenerational religious transmission is patterned by temporal and relational qualities sets the stage for future research on the reproduction of religiosity during a period of rapid religious and family change.
Sociologists have long recognized the socioeconomic disparities that persist between American religious groups, but have also found that elements of religiosity predict better academic outcomes. Existing research has not yet considered sources of educational inequality that may occur in secondary school course selection. We draw on longitudinal data from Add Health and linked restricted access high school transcript data to predict youth's highest course level taken in mathematics (e.g., calculus vs. precalculus), science, English, and the humanities. Regression results reveal a mix of positive and negative associations: Affiliation in an evangelical Protestant denomination was consistently associated with taking less advanced classes in mathematics, science, English, and the humanities. However, greater personal religiosity (religious importance and worship attendance) was associated with taking more advanced courses across all subjects. Our results suggest that religious commitments may factor into the academic course selection of American adolescents even before their college years.
The United Methodist Church, the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the United States, underwent a significant schism in 2024 following its decision to ordain clergy in same-sex relationships and permit clergy to perform same-sex marriages. While the schism was explicitly about same-sex marriage, it may reflect more fundamental divides within the American religious landscape. To address this question, we used a survey of United Methodist Church clergy in North Carolina, denominational records, and a nationally representative survey of American clergy to compare and contrast the theological, political, and vocational characteristics of clergy leaving the United Methodist Church with those remaining in the United Methodist Church. Leaving clergy were more conservative, Republican-aligned, less professionalized, and led more ideologically uniform congregations-mirroring differences between evangelical and mainline Protestant clergy nationally. These findings show that the United Methodist Church schism was not an isolated theological disagreement, but rather the natural outgrowth of long-standing political and theological polarization in American religion.
Organized labor has long defended workers' rights and reduced inequality in the USA. Yet despite religion's historical ties to labor movements and unions, little work considers contemporary religious influences on attitudes toward organized labor. Building on research showing "Christian nationalism" strongly predicts neoliberal or libertarian economic attitudes, but that this connection is often contingent on considerations of in-group power, I theorize Christian nationalism will generally predict opposition to organized labor, but this will differ by socioeconomic status (SES). Results from the 2021 General Social Survey affirm the association between Christian nationalism and views on labor unions and worker representation diverges by income quartile and subjective class identification. As Christian nationalism increases, Americans with lower SES are more likely to support organized labor while those with middle or higher SES are more likely to oppose it. Findings challenge the theory that Christian nationalism uniformly inclines Americans toward conservative or Republican views, but instead suggest its link to economic views (in this case, labor attitudes) can diverge on considerations of in-group power, including class power.
Sociologists point to important social and political distinctions within religions yet we generally treat the roughly one-in-three Americans with no religious affiliation (aka Nones) as a homogeneous population. Using nationally-representative survey data, I compare the social and political perspectives of Nones who believe in God, believe in a higher power, are skeptical of any knowledge about the existence of God, and do not believe in God. Results show that across 16 different social and political perspectives (e.g. racial resentment, traditional gender roles, political intolerance, capital punishment, school prayer, abortion, and confidence in government), Nones who believe in God are notably different than other Nones, and often more similar to believing religious affiliates than to other Nones. I conclude by noting that while sociologists and popular discourse portray Nones as distinct from religious Americans, these findings make clear that believing Nones have quite different social and political perspectives than non-believing Nones.
This longitudinal study examines how students with salient religious identities navigate symbolic boundaries at an elite secular university where faith is positioned as intellectually suspect and morally regressive. Drawing on 151 interviews with 42 students across four years, we identify three boundary work strategies: (1) blurring boundaries through impression management and preemptive progressive signaling to counter stereotypes; (2) contracting boundaries by gravitating toward protective communities; and (3) repositioning across boundaries through religious exit or transforming boundaries by redefining religious categories themselves. By applying symbolic boundary theory, we demonstrate how ideological boundaries operate differently than ascriptive ones, revealing the hidden costs of maintaining religious identity in secular spaces, and showing how micro-level negotiations reflect broader transformations in American religious life. This study shows how institutional contexts shape the cultural work required to maintain-or abandon-identity and illuminates broader transformations in religion's contested place within American higher education.
The project of queering the sociology of religion relates to intersectionality in that both approaches interrogate religion’s embeddedness in a much larger social reality. Intersectionality has gained prominence in the subfield over the last decade, but less attention has been paid to applying queer theory to the sociological study of religion, a reality that may be related to subdisciplinary discomfort with the topic of sex and, to a lesser extent, with nonbinary gender. I advocate the adoption of queering as a method that involves making things strange by looking to the margins of the subfield rather than using the term to indicate a focus specifically on gender and sexual identities. I argue that the sociology of religion would benefit from prioritizing a practice of queering that involves regularly and intentionally troubling what we study, how we study it, and how we disseminate our research.
Religious people are considered to be more conformist, both in popular imagination and in scholarly literature. However, most studies on religion and values have been conducted in majority religious societies. In a growing number of countries, the majority of the population is nonreligious, and here individuals with socially conformist values might also opt to become or stay nonreligious. Using data from 10 rounds of the European Social Survey (2001-2020), we find that the relationship between religiosity and conformism is stronger in more religious countries and birth cohorts, and conformists are more likely to disaffiliate in contexts where larger proportions of the population are nonreligious. The cross-level interaction between religion and social conformism could be key to understanding the relationship between religion and values, as well as secularization trajectories around the world.
Much research has examined the adverse effects of racialized norms and discriminatory practices in predominantly White institutions, or "White spaces," on Black people and their mental health. Though research has shown that predominantly White congregations uphold similar racialized norms and practices as other predominantly White institutions, the corresponding relationship to mental health has not been investigated. Using two nationally representative datasets, I find that Black attenders of White congregations differ from Black attenders of Black congregations on key demographic, political, and religious measures. Even after accounting for these differences, I find that Black attenders of White congregations do not report worse mental health than Black attenders of Black congregations. These results stress the differences between Black people who attend predominantly White and predominantly Black congregations, highlight the distinct nature of religious communities, and raise questions about the association between White spaces and the mental health and well-being of racial minorities.
