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Legal experts have long suggested that jurors of particular religious affiliations are predisposed to favor either the prosecution/plaintiff or the defense. This chapter presents empirical research that has investigated whether members of various religious affiliations have different attitudes toward legal issues. Some of these attitudes may come directly from religious mandates; for instance, the Catholic Church has declared its opposition to the death penalty, which could lead a Catholic juror to be less likely to support capital punishment. Other attitudes may be shaped less directly, through general religious teachings. For example, fundamentalist Protestant churches generally believe that crime is a result of personal sin (as opposed to environmental influences); thus, members of these religiously conservative groups tend to blame and punish the criminal more. This chapter discusses how religious affiliation is related to one's general worldview, legal attitudes, and attitudes toward civil and criminal sanctions.

This chapter describes eight trends evident in the General Social Survey (GSS) between 1972 and 2008: (i) increased religious diversity; (ii) increased affiliation among Protestants with conservative and evangelical denominations; (iii) softening involvement with congregations; (iv) reduced belief in an inerrant Bible; (v) reduced confidence in the leaders of religious organizations; (vi) reduced tolerance of certain kinds of religious involvement in the public sphere; (vii) a tighter connection between religious service attendance and political, social, and religious conservatism; and (viii) the somewhat higher levels of diffusely spiritual attitudes. Some trends are indicated by a single repeated GSS item while others represent interpretations of a set of similarly trending items.

This chapter discusses the link between happiness and religion. It draws on meaning-and-belonging theory to deduce that a religious affiliation heightens happiness through participation in collective religious rituals. Attendance and engagement appear key: a merely nominal religious affiliation makes people little happier. Notably, two religious foundations of happiness—affiliation with organized religious groups and attendance at services—have fallen. Softened religious engagement, then, may contribute to the slight downturn in general happiness. In fact, steady happiness is reported among those who participate frequently in religious services, but falling levels among those who are less involved. The chapter also considers the association between religion and happiness outside the United States using data from the International Social Survey Program, an international collaborative survey to which the General Social Survey contributes the American data.

This chapter examines America's increasing religious diversity, including the increasing number of people with no religious affiliation. People often talk about religious tolerance, but the cultural shift accompanying increased religious diversity goes beyond mere tolerance. With some qualifications, the chapter argues that Americans now have a greater appreciation of religion other than their own. Moreover, just as families and friendship circles are more religiously diverse than they once were, religious communities are more ethnically diverse than they were before. Indeed, increasing diversity is not just a distant fact about the society as a whole. Many people directly experience this trend in their everyday lives.

This chapter presents an economic theory that describes the choices regarding religious affiliation and the investment in children's literacy and education in a world populated by Jewish and non-Jewish farmers. This theory yields two main implications. First, because individuals differ in religious preferences, skills, costs of education, and earnings, some Jewish farmers invest in their children's religious literacy whereas others do not. Second, Jewish farmers who find it too costly to obey the norms of Judaism, including the costly norm requiring them to send their sons to school, convert to other religions. If the economy remains mainly agrarian, literate people cannot find urban and skilled occupations in which their investment in literacy and education yields positive economic returns. As a result, the Jewish population keeps shrinking and becoming more literate. In the long run, Judaism cannot survive in a subsistence farming economy because of the process of conversions.

The problem of church and state initiated the development of Western political theory in Aquinas, John of Paris, and Marsilius. One difference between European and Islamic thought was the European idea of a natural law which applied to, and could be known by, all humans. Islamic ethics derived solely from the Shari'a which was known only to Muslims and in which rights and duties differed according to religious affiliation. Another difference was the European prioritization of liberty. Natural law and liberty led to a doctrine of human rights. The modern Western idea of the state was based on a distinction between religion and politics, church and state. Aristotle's Politics helped legitimize partially democratic city republics. These did not exist in Islam.

This chapter asks who conservative students are by drawing on two sources. First are the surveys administered by the University of California at Los Angeles's Higher Education Research Institute to thousands of incoming college freshmen and graduating seniors during the 2000s. The second source is the data collected on different campuses, designed to shed light on the formative years of the students and alumni/ae in their families and their schools, their early experiences with conservatism, and how they acquired the politics bug. Using this information, the chapter examines the students' demographics, political identifications, precollege political styles, ideological orientations, religious affiliation, and social class background as well as their families' political backgrounds.

Religious affiliation is the most readily available and least understood indicator of religiosity in the social scientific literature. Religious affiliation is readily available as it is regarded as an aspect of personal and social identity. It is regarded as belonging to the public and social domain in contrast to religious beliefs and religious practices, which are generally believed to belong to the private and personal domain, safe from public scrutiny. Religious affiliation is not fully understood because both conceptually and empirically, it functions differently from the ways in which other indicators of religiosity function. As a result, religious affiliation acts as a poor predictor of other religious indicators. This chapter discusses the notion of the ‘slipperiness’ of definitions of religion and spirituality. It aims to build on the initial findings presented by Francis, delineating a fuller profile of the adolescent world-view and distinguishing between major faith groups and between individual Christian denominations. It concludes that the marginalisation of self-assigned religious affiliation as an indicator of religious behaviour and belief was a detriment to the literature because without it, the nuances of lived belief and faith are unable to be fully captured by quantitative data.

Mainstream modernization and secularization theories once predicted a gradual decline in the importance of religion as a factor in people’s political orientations. Evidence has not borne out this prediction, with the persistence of religious affiliation in contemporary societies and the role religion has played in recent political movements. Aragón discusses how religion impacts Latin American politics today and, using public opinion data, explores whether Peru is a country where religious beliefs and practices are associated with political perceptions and preferences. Whereas progressive Catholicism has declined in Latin America in recent decades, evangelical Protestantism has grown. However, the data indicates that denominational differences have little impact on political participation, whereas the strength of one’s religious participation—whether Catholic or Protestant—does track favorably with increased political participation.

Muslims and Muslim polities have been present for hundreds of years on the coast of East Africa. Some 80 percent of the population in Southeast Tanzania is estimated to be Muslim. How and why this came to be the case, and how this process has shaped both the ritual practice of these Muslims and the way they understand their place within their country, is the subject of this book. It concentrates on the role of proselytizers rather than the motives of converts, emphasizing the former's personal commitment and piety. The conversion to Islam among non-Muslims in the countryside, and the spread of Sufi orders in the towns where many people already were Muslim, are addressed. The religious practice and everyday life, and the role of the state, travel, and local society in the production of oral records are described. Moreover, the chapter discusses the historicity of local views of history and religion, kin networks, villages and religious affiliations, and the polyvalence of religious change, struggle, and negotiation.

This chapter explains that it is in the area of religious practice that the uncertainties of intergenerational transmission are most clearly demonstrated. All available evidence indicates that religious affiliation is inherited from parents. However, that is only part of the story. The chapter focuses on the precariousness of religious transmission and seeks to explore: first, what family and lifecourse events appear to disrupt an inheritance of faith; and, second, what the implications are for young people's civic engagement. In addition to examining the levels and processes of the intergenerational transmission of faith (or its absence), it discusses how religious affiliation is reflected in particular kinds of associational membership, levels of volunteering, and other kinds of social activism.

This chapter examines the religion of judges. Except for a relatively small under-representation of Muslims, the religious affiliations of the judges mirror the religious composition of the population at large to a remarkable degree. Religion has been a selection criterion and this extraordinary amount of proportional representation enhances India’s secular foundation. The convention of a Muslim seat dates back to the 1930s when the Federal Court began functioning. This convention carried over after Independence. Meanwhile, the majority of the judges (82.8 per cent) and the population (82.6 per cent) were Hindu.

The future of relations between Tanzanian Muslims and the state is in the balance as recriminations between reformists and Bakwata continue, and the outline of potential compromises between Ansar and Lailah Muslims is as yet hard to see. Beyond the acceptance of basic religious practices, being Muslim meant very different things to different people at different times: a privileged connection to coastal sites of exchange for pre-colonial big men; social ascendancy for pre-colonial patricians, but social equality to inter-war immigrants; full participation in the social and ritual life of the village for rural converts in the mid-twentieth century; an increasingly problematic separate allegiance for post-colonial Tanzanians. The permutations of public ritual are covered. The concern about ignorance is not in itself a product of post-colonial political rhetoric. The chapter then discusses the political topography and the distribution of religious affiliations. The history of town and countryside helps in the understanding of the context that has shaped academic representations of Swahili culture as an urban culture. The Ansar and the debate on Islam and modernity are explained. The Islamist movements in the Southeast and East Africa at large draw on allegiances and grievances rooted in both recent and long-term history.

Greece is one of the most homogeneous countries in Europe, where over 95 percent of the population are declared Orthodox Christians. It is still a country where church and state are not separated, and there are heated debates about whether this is a negative or a positive feature of the modern Greek nation-state. This chapter focuses on a rather specific aspect of life in contemporary Greece—that of personal identification—a feature that is undergoing radical though largely unperceived change. Since this phenomenon is linked to political, economic, and ideological transformations and refers to religious constructs of the person, its analysis necessarily bears upon much broader issues, such as secularization, modernization, and Westernization. The analysis covers some aspects of legislative modernization, particularly the revision of the Family Law code in 1983, and the hotly contested issue of a new form of ID card, where religious affiliation was deemed to be a private matter.

This chapter is concerned with the implications of growing religious non-affiliation for objections of conscience, which have proliferated lately in the culture wars of Western democracies. Through the eighteenth century, when the U.S. Constitution was framed, the concept of conscience was tightly bound to religion. This chapter’s leading question is: what force do claims of conscientious objection have in the context of growing religious non-affiliation? Underlying this question is a subtler one: what else might we lose when we lose religion? The chapter’s thesis is twofold. First, the public conception of conscience has changed under the pressure of both growing religious non-affiliation and growing religious pluralism. Second, the appeal to conscience is now much less powerful than it was when God figured more prominently in the picture. The buffer between citizen and state has become thinner, and the reasons to accommodate objections of conscience have become weaker.

This book explores the dynamics and consequences of changes in religious identification in the United States since the early 1970s. Drawing on empirical data from large-scale national studies, it analyzes Americans' religious identifications, shifts in religious beliefs and commitments, and participation in religious organizations. It also examines how religious affiliations changed from 1972 to 2012. As an introduction, the book considers the definition of religious commitments, paying special attention to religious traditions, religious denominations, identities and attachment, sect, and church. It also discusses the relationships between social status and religious affiliation, along with the differences between religious groups and classification schemes for religious denominations.

This chapter examines the influence of voluntary shifts in religious identifications on the dynamics of religious affiliation over time. Using data from the 1973–2012 General Social Survey, it analyzes the predictors of religious switching and apostasy to highlight people's tendency to shift their religious identifications. It also considers trends in religious switching and patterns of mobility across religious groups and how these trends and patterns vary across generations and across ethnic groups. Finally, it explores the impact of ethnicity, gender, social status, and geographic mobility on religious switching, apostasy, and which religious changes are most and least likely. It shows that the observed changes in religious identification over the past four decades and across many generations are a function of the ethnic milieu created by patterns of immigration.