Suchergebnisse

Introduction: recasting Red culture in proletarian Japan -- Fairy tales on the front line: reading childhood, class, and culture -- Writing on the wall: kabe shosetsu and the proletarian avant-garde -- Comrades-in-arms: Zainichi communists, revolutionary local color, and the antinomies of colonial representation

In Religion for Realists, Samuel L. Perry argues that, as people in the West self-sort into partisan tribes, we need the scientific study of religion--the rational, data-driven analysis of religious life--now more than ever. This book presents a practical roadmap for ensuring that its insights are widely available, accessible, and impactful.

Introduction: The GOP and the Christian Right -- George W. Bush, the War on Terror, Certitude and Aporias: We're Ready to Believe You -- Imprecating Whiteness and Losing Black Religious Freedom: The Damned Road from Jeremiah Wright to Rick Warren in the Obama Campaign -- Amalekites and Birthrights: The Birther Conspiracy, Dominion Theology, and Othering Barack Obama -- The Holy Wars and the Crusade against Obama: Muslim Conspiracy Theories and the War on Terror -- Conclusion: The 4 Horsemen and a turn to the Eschatological.

AbstractHow do Americans perceive the orientation of political entities toward religion? Building on group identity theories and burgeoning Christian nationalism research, I theorize Americans' perceptions of friendliness, neutrality, or unfriendliness toward religion will be contingent on the interplay between the specific entity, "identity congruence" (how partisan and ideological identities correspond to the partisan character of the entity), and Christian nationalism. Analyses of data from a large, nationally representative sample of Americans support my expectations. Both Christian nationalism and congruence on political identities predict how Americans perceive the posture of the Democratic Party, Republican Party, and Supreme Court toward religion. Yet associations differ depending on whether friendliness to religion challenges the entity's legitimacy (e.g., the Supreme Court). Interactions also show the influence of Christian nationalism and political identities on perceptions of friendliness are contingent on one another and the entity. Findings reveal how religious evaluations reflect group interests in complex ways.

Within America's racialized social system, White people can generally navigate life as "unmarked," oblivious to race. But for White parents of Black adopted children, everyday public interactions provide occasion to directly and vicariously experience a form of "racial gaze," specifically via scrutiny directed toward them as parents and the bodies of their Black children. Drawing on 46 in-depth interviews with White adoptive parents of Black children, and incorporating insights from whiteness theory and research, I analyze how White parents perceive and respond to racial scrutiny. Parents describe how their ability to raise Black children feels challenged through unsolicited advice about haircare, negative comments, and perceived disapproving looks from Black strangers. These interactions provoke parents' insecurity and anxiety such that they become more aware of their own whiteness and thus less "colorblind" than they might have been otherwise, while also resenting Black strangers for implicitly challenging their parenting abilities or the appropriateness of their parenting Black children. Findings provide novel insight into ways White Americans respond to the subjective experience of racial gaze. Given expectations of universal white innocence, competence, and colorblindness, they react with increased anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and greater guardedness around Black Americans in public to the point of resentment.

Asymmetric social alignments are transforming American partisan rhetoric, particularly how politicians leverage identity-based appeals. For example, asymmetric religious, racial, and ideological alignments within the Republican party now make reactionary religious rhetoric increasingly strategic. Focusing on that case, I propose a novel conceptual model to understand what such rhetoric aims to accomplish. Reactionary religious rhetoric advertises, appeals, and activates on a spectrum from overt to subconscious registers, which I explain using three metaphors: mating call, dog whistle, and trigger. Within a context of asymmetrical partisan "sorting," Christian nationalist rhetoric overtly advertises partisanship (mating call). Rhetoric deploying encoded terms like "Christian" and "socialist" appeals to ethno-culture, connecting specific political opponents to abstract ethno-religious threats (dog whistle). Lastly, research on overlapping identities increasingly suggests rhetoric involving threats to "Christianity" may unconsciously activate White racial threat (trigger). I consider applications of this conceptual model to growing political appeals to nationalist and populist identities.

Americans are increasingly polarized by a variety of metrics. The dimensions, extent, causes, and consequences of that polarization have been the subject of much debate. Yet despite the centrality of religion to early discussions, the analytical focus on America's divides has largely shifted toward partisan identity, political ideology, race, and class interests. I show that religion remains powerfully implicated in all dimensions of American polarization, and sociologists must once again make religion more central to their analyses. After outlining research on American polarization, focusing on the role of religion, I survey findings within the burgeoning literatures on cultural transformation processes, (White) Christian nationalism, complex religion, and Americans' attitudes toward science in order to underscore the centrality of ethno-religious identities, religious demography, and religious institutions for both shaping and exacerbating various forms of polarization. Lastly, I propose an agenda for elucidating religion's ongoing role in understanding polarization beyond public opinion research at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. Though polarization research has been dominated by political scientists, leveraging religion in our analyses—not merely as a sui generis variable, but as a site of complex social behavior—facilitates novel sociological contributions to these literatures via our relative attention to multiple levels of analysis, theoretical eclecticism, and methodological fluidity.

AbstractFor decades anti-pornography sentiment and campaigns were driven largely by religious conservatives citing pornography's "contaminating" moral effects. More recently, however, anti-porn campaigns have sought to support their arguments by appealing to social and cognitive science. This raises the question of whether anti-pornography sentiment is undergoing an "internal secularization," reflected in a growing connection to scientific authority and weakening connection to religious authority, or conversely, whether the use of "science" reflects a more symbolic and tactical framing used by religious conservatives who already oppose pornography. Using the General Social Surveys (1984–2018), I examine how trust in scientific authority and traditional measures of religious conservatism are associated with anti-pornography sentiment and how these associations have changed since the mid-1980s. The positive association between religious conservatism and support for anti-pornography legislation has either remained the same or, in the case of biblical literalism, grown stronger. In contrast, Americans with greater confidence in science or scientists are less likely to support outlawing pornography, and this pattern has not reversed. Indeed, in recent decades, Americans across all levels of confidence in science have declined in their support for banning porn and now differ only minimally. Together these patterns suggest anti-porn sentiment is actually desecularizing, growing more connected to religious conservatism than views about scientific authority. Findings suggest current anti-pornography sentiment does not stem from scientific authority gaining ground among Americans who oppose pornography. Rather, citing scientific research likely reflects efforts to leverage its cultural authority among those already morally inclined to restrict porn's availability.