Part I. Understanding Secularization: 1. The secularization debate 2. Measuring secularization 3. Comparing secularization worldwide Part II. Case Studies of Religion and Politics: 4. The puzzle of secularization in the United States and Western Europe 5. A religious revival in post-communist Europe? 6. Religion and politics in the Muslim world Part III. The Consequences of Secularization: 7. Religion, the Protestant ethic, and moral values 8. Religious organizations and social capital 9. Religious parties and electoral behavior Part IV. Conclusions: 10. Secularization and its consequences 11. Re-examining the theory of existential security 12. Re-examining evidence for the security thesis.

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Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide

Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion’s impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because they regularly attend religious services and build social networks in their congregations. The effect of within-congregation friendship is contingent, however, on the presence of a strong religious identity. We find little evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.

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Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction

This article examines why people violate rationality and take part in their communities, differentiating by types of participation, particularly political versus other, more communal types of participation. The authors argue that trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to participation. In addition, the authors posit that trust is strongly affected by economic inequality. Using aggregated American state-level data for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the authors present a series of two-stage least squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on participation, controlling for other related factors. Findings indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust and that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on political participation.

Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement

http://www.theculturelab.umd.edu/uploads/1/4/2/2/14225661/exploitingaffinities_dimaggio.pdf

Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture: Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding

Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.

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Atheists As ''Other'': Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American

Recently, scholars have devoted renewed attention to the role of religion in American life. Thus, it is important that they use the most effective means available to categorize and study religious groups. However, the most widely used classification scheme in survey research (T.W. Smith 1990) does not capture essential differences between American religious traditions and overlooks significant new trends in religious affiliation. We critique this scheme based on its historical, terminological, and taxonomical inaccuracy and offer a new approach that addresses its shortcomings by using denominational affiliation to place respondents into seven categories grounded in the historical development of American religious traditions. Most important, this new scheme yields more meaningful interpretations because the categories refer to concrete religious traditions. Because of increased accuracy in classification, it also improves model fit and reduces measurement error.

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The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art

How would we characterize the relationship between religion and the arts in the Philadelphia area between 1965 and 1997? The late 1980s and early 1990s in Philadelphia followed a decade that was unusually free of contention between religion and the arts In comparison to the 1970s and early 1980s, religious participation in cultural conflict was not particularly high during the "culture-war" era However, religious discourse as opposed to participation did play a role in more controversies during the late 1980s and 1990s The findings also suggest that after 1986 religious actors and their allies were far more likely to employ the tools of social-movement mobilization and to connect their own claims to national social movements or campaigns

The Role of Religion in Public Conflicts over the Arts in the Philadelphia Area, 1965-1997

The Role of Religious Actors and Religious Arguments in Public Conflicts over the Arts: A Case Study of the Philadelphia Area, 1965-1997

The Cascadia subduction zone continuously shapes the landscape of the Pacific Northwest of North America and the cultures of its inhabitants. The impacts of subduction processes on Pacific Northwest societies and cultures are varied, but Native Americans and European settler cultures alike have described geological processes through oral histories and have relied on resources provided by the subduction zone. Indigenous peoples focus many aspects of their religious practices and art around the geohazards of the Cascadia region, and our melded modern cultures continue to take part in storytelling related to subduction zone hazards through movies and other forms of narration.

Lynn Robinson

Papers

The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art

The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art

The Role of Religion in Public Conflicts over the Arts in the Philadelphia Area, 1965-1997

The Role of Religious Actors and Religious Arguments in Public Conflicts over the Arts: A Case Study of the Philadelphia Area, 1965-1997

The Role of Subduction Zone Processes in the Cultural History of the Cascade Region