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

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.

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.

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.

AbstractSociologists whose research intersects with American Christianity recognize the critical importance of the Bible to understanding many Americans' beliefs, values, and behaviors, but their operative approach to the Bible generally ignores that "the Bible" is as much a product of interpretive communities as it is a symbolic marker of identity or shaper of social life. I propose that rather than approaching "the Bible" through a distinctly Protestant lens, as given―specifically as uniform, static, and exogenous―sociologists should apply a critical lens to re-conceptualize the Bible more accurately. That is, sociologists should recognize that Bibles are multiform; they are dynamic; and their contents (not just their current interpretations) are highly contingent on temporal culture and power, being the product of manipulation by interpretive communities and actors with vested interests. Using a recent case study of how complementarian gender ideology became systematically inserted into one the most popular English Bible translations among evangelicals today, I illustrate how a more critical approach toward "the Bible" can provide richer, more sophisticated sociological analyses of power and cultural reproduction within Christian traditions.

Studies often report a negative association between pornography use and marital quality. A number of studies, however, find this negative association to be stronger among religious Americans, suggesting that "moral incongruence" may be a key moderating factor. This theory is tested with panel data from the nationally representative 2006–2012 Portraits of American Life Study (N = 612). Support for the theory is mixed. Any pornography use in 2006 predicts lower marital quality in 2012 regardless of whether the viewer felt pornography use was always immoral. However, among pornography viewers, the negative association between marital quality and viewing frequency is stronger for those who morally oppose pornography. Findings hold regardless of gender. Data limitations and implications for future research are discussed.