The formation of the National Association of Evangelicals represented one crucial inflection point in 20th-century US religious history. While long recognized as such, the early years have not recently been examined in intricate detail, resulting in some skewed interpretations that this article will contest. The article analyzes the early coalescence and challenges of the National Association of Evangelicals according to coalitional formation, identity construction, institution building, and especially “assemblage theory.” Drawing on this case, the article also seeks to reframe the larger historiographical impasse over the nature of Evangelicalism by arguing that the National Association of Evangelicals represented one in a series of contestations over Evangelical identity across American history.
The purpose of this study was to explore how Christian spiritual disciplines (i.e. private religious practices) such as prayer, scripture reading, meditation, and forgiveness are related to experiential comforting faith and the role of religion as quest (i.e. positively valuing doubt, openness to questioning and change, etc.) as a moderator in those relationships. It was anticipated that the private religious practices would be positively related to comfort from faith. No hypotheses were put forth regarding religion as quest as a moderator. The sample consisted of college students ( N = 165) at a large southeastern university in the USA, who completed an online survey. A series of multiple regressions revealed that private religious practices and forgiveness were positively related to experiential comfort from faith. Religion as quest was negatively related to experiential comfort from faith as an individual predictor but did not significantly moderate the regression analyses. The implications include the power of forgiveness across three entities on the experience of comfort from faith and the collective predictive power of forgiveness and private religious practices on comfort received from faith while considering the influence of religion as quest. Future research should consider more comprehensive measures of religion as quest, as well as samples of individuals who engage in private religious practices more frequently.
Religiosity measures are in short supply in most Canadian general population surveys, which often limits our understanding of some of the empirical complexities and patterns of individuals’ religiosity, spirituality, and secularity across the country. So, when a research project has the funds and know-how to run a high-quality survey with a large number of religiosity and spirituality measures included, like the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project did in 2023, it is worth taking a closer look. This research note uses latent class analysis with these survey data to establish a more data-driven, complex, and robust categorization of Canadian respondents based on their religious and spiritual beliefs, practices, and identities. Five latent groups emerge from the analysis and are examined in detail: (1) the religious; (2) the spiritual and occasionally religious; (3) cultural believers; (4) those uncertain in beliefs; and (5) the nonreligious and nonspiritual.
This article offers a critical review of the scientific literature devoted to new religious movements (NRMs) during the period known as the “cult wars”, which spanned from the 1970s to the late 1990s in several Western societies, notably the United States, Great Britain, France, and Canada. Marked by intensified public, media, and legal controversies surrounding NRMs, this period profoundly influenced scientific production itself, placing many researchers at the center of polarized debates on mind control, religious freedom, and state intervention. Using the periodization of cult wars as an analytical framework, the article highlights the tensions between scientific expertise, anti-cult mobilization, and state regulation of religion. It shows that public responses to NRMs depend less on their empirical characteristics than on the interpretive frameworks used to think about religion, identity, and pluralism. Finally, the article suggests that the experience of cult wars offers heuristic lessons for understanding certain contemporary controversies surrounding secularism in Quebec, particularly those raised by the Law on the “renforcement de la laïcité de l’État”, adopted on April 2, 2026.
The relationship between religion and the state has been a contested issue in Turkey since the foundation of the Republic, both institutionally and ideologically. This article examines the political and bureaucratic functioning of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, established in 1924, during the period between 1945 and 1960, and discusses whether the institution has operated as a form of religious tutelage. The central question of the study is whether the Directorate of Religious Affairs, within the framework of a secular state, has merely functioned as a service-oriented religious body or whether it has operated as a tutelary institution under the oversight of political authority. In this context, the role, authority, and functional transformations of the Directorate of Religious Affairs during the transition from single-party rule to a multi-party-political system are placed at the center of the analysis. Drawing upon Max Weber’s theory of the sociology of religion, bureaucratization, and the monopolization of the sacred, the study explores the institutionalization process of the Directorate of Religious Affairs. The analysis is based on a range of primary sources, including archival documents, official correspondences, legislative texts, and periodicals of the era. The religious policies of the Republican People’s Party, the populist strategies of the Democrat Party after 1950, and the institutional reshuffling following the 1960 coup all contributed to reshaping the Directorate of Religious Affairs’ position within the state structure. Practices such as the centralization of sermons, publication control, and surveillance of mosque personnel are examined as manifestations of the Directorate of Religious Affairs’ supervisory functions. Ultimately, the study critically investigates whether the Directorate of Religious Affairs functioned as a mechanism of religious tutelage during this period, using historical-institutional data and theoretical insights to evaluate its role within the broader framework of Turkish secularism and political authority.
As part of an effort to model a version of the field in which religious things are no longer seen as special and therefore naturally set apart but, instead, are understood as but one more instance of historical and cultural human practices, this article offers a novel comparison of items that are not often placed into a relationship of similarity with one another (i.e. recent Olympic curling and faith healing). The article therefore aims to demonstrate what a more modest—yet rather more rigorous and theoretically driven—academic study of religion might look like in the future.
