Assessing support for political violence in the United States remains a major point of focus. However, generating reliable population-level estimates of support for political violence has proven difficult. In this study, we fielded a split-ballot survey experiment comparing two measures of support for political violence. Specifically, we examine support for abstract and unspecified forms of political violence, as well as the willingness to engage in concrete actions, such as damaging property, to support political goals. As expected, we find greater support for abstract political violence than for a personal willingness to engage in political violence. In our multivariable analyses, we found that younger people were more likely to endorse both expressions of political violence. Regarding political ideology and party identification, we found a complex set of results. While the results related to ideology suggest people who identify as "very liberal" were more likely to endorse both expressions of political violence, party identification showed that independents, not Democrats or Republicans, were more likely to endorse both expressions of political violence. As such, we argue that alienation from conventional political parties is an important feature that deserves more attention.

There is now a well-established literature on ghost tourism. However, much of this work examines aspects associated with the demand side of the industry, or the motivations and experiences of consumers. There are currently no studies that have sought to explore the supply of ghost tourism and the spatial, social, and economic relationships that exist between these places. Using Lower Tier Local Authorities (LTLAs) in England and Wales as the units of analysis, this study draws on a bespoke range of local government and Census data to examine the prevalence of ghost tourism and explore how these sites are differentiated across local contexts. We find that locations with higher levels of economic deprivation and connections to rurality are more likely to contain sustained ghost tourism. The study makes three key contributions to the literature. First, it provides a spatial analysis of the regional variations in the number of ghost hunts and ghost walks in England and Wales. Second, it identifies the spatial, social and economic circumstances associated with local variations in the provision of ghost tourism. Third, it outlines a localized and robust research method through which ghost tourism can be systematically studied.

Institutional anomie theory (IAT) posits that religion is a social institution that influences crime, yet religion has been relatively neglected in empirical research on IAT. We elaborate the role of religion within IAT, methodologically differentiate religious traditions, and empirically test hypotheses regarding local religious ecologies and community homicide over time in the United States. In analyses of county-level panel data, we find that increases in the evangelical Protestant adherent rate are directly associated with increases in homicide rates, while increases in the Catholic adherent rate are directly associated with decreases in homicide rates. Using spatial analysis to examine spillover effects from adjacent locations, increases in the Catholic adherent rate and the evangelical Protestant adherent rate are indirectly associated with increases in homicide, while increases in the mainline Protestant adherent rate are indirectly associated with decreases in homicide. The total effect (both direct and indirect) for changes in the evangelical Protestant adherent rate is the largest in the model. In sum, elaborating and extending IAT, this study theorizes and then demonstrates the importance of differentiating between specific religious traditions for understanding spatial and temporal patterns in crime.

Journal Article Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization, by RYAN T. CRAGUN and JESSE M. SMITH Get access Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization, by RYAN T. CRAGUN and JESSE M. SMITH. New York: NYU Press, 2024, 352 pp.; $35.00. Joseph O Baker Joseph O Baker East Tennessee State University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, sraf001, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraf001 Published: 04 March 2025

Christian nationalism in the United States has recently gained increased attention from scholars because of its consequential connections to contemporary right-wing politics; however, the historical roots of the connections between Christian nationalist rhetoric and white supremacy often remain obscured. Here, we highlight these roots by analyzing the rhetorical uses of Christian nationalist narratives in overt white supremacy movements, focusing on British-Israelism and Christian Identity. Using qualitative content analyses, we examine rhetorical themes of Christian nationalism in the Kingdom Digest, a magazine produced, edited, and distributed by popular radio preacher and influential British-Israelist John A. Lovell. Across more than 40 years of content (from 1949 until 1991), Christian nationalism was a foundational and fundamental trope used to justify, frame, and advance racialist claims about civilization, segregation, citizenship, patriotism, and politics more generally. By straddling the line between underground and aboveground activism and ministry, Lovell was able to disseminate the message of Christian nationalism and white supremacy among the mainstream American public, while simultaneously supporting and religiously legitimizing underground leaders of far-right, racialist movements.

There is growing recognition of the prevalence of paranormal beliefs in Western countries. However, most of this interest has been focused on the United States and robust, comparative data remain limited. This study extends this literature to report findings from a national survey of the United Kingdom designed to assess the prevalence and patterns of paranormal beliefs. Although there are many similarities to previous research, the results also suggest that there are significant differences in the scope, clustering, and patterns of paranormalism across contexts. The study makes four contributions to research on the paranormal by a) reiterating the continuing popularity of paranormal beliefs, even in highly secularized locations, with over 70% of people in the United Kingdom believing in something paranormal; b) demonstrating that these beliefs are differentiated across contexts where they might otherwise be assumed to be similar; c) demonstrating the applicability of social control and bounded affinity theories for explaining belief in the paranormal; and, d) documenting how conventional religiosity relates to paranormalism in a relatively secular cultural context. These findings highlight the need for further research on diffuse forms of supernaturalism and the potential for such studies to contribute to important questions about theory and research in sociology.

Recent research demonstrates strong connections between Americans' embrace of Christian nationalism and their beliefs and attitudes towards a host of salient social and cultural issues. Implicit in these explanations is that a stronger embrace of Christian nationalism signals an underlying fear of changes to the broader culture, which are perceived as leading the nation further away from a preferred, mythic past. To date, however, empirical studies have not focused explicitly on the relationship between social fears and Christian nationalism. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examine the relationship between Christian nationalism and Americans' fears about immigrants, Muslims, communism, white racial replacement and gun control. We find that Christian nationalism is strongly associated with fears about ethnoracial 'others', as well as fears about losing economic autonomy and access to guns. Overall, our study shows that contemporary Christian nationalism in the United States is situated in a constellation of social fears about ethnoracial purity, as well as about the perceived loss of individual autonomy.

Sigmund Freud in his "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921) outlined his take on this after World War I. British psychotherapists, including some of his English followers such as Wilfried Trotter, appropriated a psychology of difference popularized by Gustave Le Bon to define the valorous "Tommy" crusading against the inherently evil "Boche." In his 1921 essay, Freud began with the claim concerning collective behavior that had long been established in the psychological literature of the late 19th century—that "a group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it." In the first of many striking moments in this book, Makari locates the modern origin of xenophobia—and it is not where we expected to find it: the social fascination with the "phobias" had its origin in 19th-century medicine, which quickly devolved into social metaphor, as such diagnostic categories of behavior tend to do rather quickly. Makari begins his book locating his own discomfort with being seen as "different" and trying to understand his own family, Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Ottoman Lebanon, whose trek to the United States created (as many of us know from our own family experience) "better" Americans, initially struggling as peddlers and then establishing themselves in Texas as "real" Americans.

Symbolic InteractionEarly View BOOK REVIEW Spectral Sociology Joseph O. Baker, Joseph O. Baker [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-8378-1679 East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN, USASearch for more papers by this author Joseph O. Baker, Joseph O. Baker [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-8378-1679 East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 March 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.640Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

What are the most important questions in the sociology of religion? And how would scholars answer them? This article explores what people consider the most important questions in the field. Sociologists tend to study what we can readily answer with data, but the questions that elicit the most interest turn out to be quite different. They are bigger, broader, and harder to answer empirically. A crowd-sourced poll identified what people consider the most important questions in the sociology of religion, which were then posed to scholars in the field. They provided nuanced and complex answers revealing a diversity of approaches involved in the study of religion. This unorthodox article invites the reader to listen in on dynamic conversations that bring scholars into dialogue with one another, revealing points of consensus, ongoing debate, areas where there are more questions than answers, and directions for future work.

Prior research has found that different aspects of religion (such as service attendance and fundamentalism) have significant and varying effects on public attitudes about immigration. We identify an important but understudied aspect of how religion connects to immigration attitudes: beliefs about the reality of supernatural evil (e.g., Satan, hell, and demons). Using a national sample of Americans, we find that greater belief in supernatural evil is a strong and consistent predictor of more restrictive views of immigration, even after controlling for other dimensions of religiosity, sociodemographics, and political characteristics. Overall, beliefs about religious evil are the aspect of religion with the strongest connection to views of immigration. Consequently, consideration of religious evil is integral to understanding how religion influences public attitudes about immigration.

We extend theories about "immigration backlash" and right-wing populism in three ways by analyzing trend data to examine the interplay between views of immigration, partisan polarization, and voting patterns in presidential elections. First, we document how immigration views became more aligned with partisan polarization between 2000 and 2018. Second, we show that immigration views were significantly more predictive of voting for Donald Trump in 2016 compared to Republican presidential candidates in the 1992 through 2012 elections. Due to increased partisan polarization, the indirect effects of immigration views on presidential voting (as mediated through political ideology and party identification) also increased over time, and were stronger in 2016 compared to previous elections. Finally, we show evidence of a post-Trump backlash on immigration views, with political independents and Democrats becoming significantly more favorable toward immigration after 2016. By 2018, the American public was more polarized over matters of immigration than at any time previous in the available data, and these views corresponded more strongly with voting patterns. These findings highlight the increasing importance of immigration for understanding partisan politics in the contemporary U.S., and reiterate the importance of anti-immigrant sentiment and partisan polarization to the success of right-wing populism in electoral democracies.

Objective Vaccine hesitancy remains a significant public health challenge, and one that is socially patterned. This study examined whether the vaccine hesitancy effects of identifying as female, race-ethnicity, the number of children, educational attainment, and political conservatism were mediated by governmental conspiracy beliefs. Methods Linear mediation models controlling for potential confounders were employed to analyze data from a national survey of adults (2019 Chapman University Survey of American Fears; n = 1,209). Results Effects on vaccine hesitancy were significant and negative for educational attainment, and significant and positive for the other focal predictors. Governmental conspiracy beliefs significantly mediated each of these effects; the percent mediated was largest for Hispanic identity (79 percent), followed by female identification (69 percent), educational attainment (69 percent), number of children (55 percent), black identification (34 percent), and political conservatism (30 percent). Conclusion This study underscores the importance of nonvaccine-related conspiracy beliefs for future interventions aimed at reducing sociodemographic disparities in vaccine hesitancy.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump distinguished himself from other candidates via his hardline stances on issues of immigration. Using data from national surveys conducted between 2014 and 2019, we identify three key findings about views of immigrants among the American public during the Trump era. First, xenophobia was the strongest predictor of Americans' feelings-anger, fear, pride, and hope-about Donald Trump during his time in office, and the second strongest predictor of feelings about the Republican party (after partisan identification). Second, the influence of Americans' levels of xenophobia on their feelings about the Republican Party were significantly mediated by their feelings about Trump, especially for negative affect (anger and fear). Third, there has been a backlash against xenophobia, such that political independents and Democrats became significantly more favorable toward immigrants after 2016. As a result, views of immigrants have become more favorable overall, but also more politically polarized. These findings support and extend immigration backlash theory, contribute to research on affective polarization, and document consequential trends in contemporary American politics.

Religiously conservative Americans consistently demonstrate lower scientific literacy than other Americans. Some argue, however, that Americans' scientific literacy is contingent on subcultural conflict, showing differences in scientific literacy that emerge only on religiously contested scientific claims. Building on these insights, we find that the most salient factor explaining Americans' divergence on contested (though not on uncontested) scientific claims is not religious commitment or conservatism per se, but an ideology that seeks political-and consequently epistemic-dominance: Christian nationalism. National data show that Christian nationalism is unassociated with Americans' answers on questions about uncontested scientific knowledge. However, Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor of incorrect answers on questions about religiously contested scientific claims. Contemporary "culture war" debates over science have little to do with outright ignorance of science, nor are they strictly about religiosity or theological conservatism. Rather, disputes over science and religion reflect politically motivated denials of scientific facts that threaten Christian nationalism's claims to epistemic and cultural authority.

The increase in the percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has sparked renewed debates about processes of secularization. Too often, however, these discussions overlook nonreligious diversity, and all religious “nones” are assumed to be homogeneous. Using the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey, this chapter details the many different ways theistic nonbelief and religious non-affiliation can overlap and diverge. It then uses cluster analysis to condense this diversity into the categories that are the most similar in socio-demographic, political, and religious characteristics. When possible, atheists, agnostics, and non-affiliated thesis should be treated as distinct categories in social surveys. The chapter also provides basic guidelines for researchers about how best to measure, categorize, and analyze nonreligion. Overall, it is imperative for scholars, journalists, and the public more broadly to account for the diversity of secularities when analyzing and discussing patterns and trends in religious non-affiliation.