Why does religion continue to emerge as a flashpoint in the age of secularization? Although models of religious resurgence suggest that religious cleavages are more prominent in the modern era, other models continue to show declining religious involvement. What is needed is a theory that can observe both resurgence and secularization at the same time. I argue that globalization—and the flow of people across borders, in particular—provokes a religious backlash at the societal level due to its secularizing effects. As the public is exposed to new and diverse religious traditions, religiosity declines; as a result, however, religious practitioners become more aggressive toward other religious groups. I test this theory using data on globalization, religious discrimination, and religious practice. I find that types of globalization dealing with the flow of people and information across borders have an outsize effect on societal religious discrimination, or SRD. This effect, however, is contingent on a decline in religious practice. This study suggests that religious resurgence can take place in secularizing environments, and that both resurgence and secularization share root causes.

Researchers regularly use large survey studies to examine public political opinion. Surveys running over days and months will necessarily incorporate religious occasions that can introduce variation in public opinion. Using recent survey data from Israel, this study demonstrates that giving surveys on religious occasions (e.g., the Sabbath, Hannukah, Sukkot) can elicit different opinion responses. These effects are found among both religious and non-religious respondents. While incorporating these fluctuations is realistic in longer-term surveys, surveys fielded in a short window inadvertently drawing heavily on a holiday or holy day sample may bias their findings. This study thus urges researchers to be cognizant of ambient religious context when conducting survey studies.

What causes demographic misperceptions of minority populations? We anticipate that the extent to which members of the majority group perceive the minority group as a threat shapes their estimation of minority group size. While existing research argues that demographic misperceptions of minority groups can lead to a sense of threat, we argue that the opposite relationship may exist—that threat also causes demographic misperception. We test our argument using an experiment embedded in a survey of Muslims in Indonesia. We manipulate perceived threat of Christians in Indonesia and then ask respondents to estimate the size of the Christian population. While Muslims generally overestimated the size of the Christian population, we find that Muslims who felt a greater sense of threat estimated the Christian population to be significantly larger at both the national and provincial levels. This finding provides new insights on the directionality of the relationship between the widely acknowledged connection between threat and demographic misperceptions.

This scoping review of conceptualizations of fundamentalism scrutinizes the concept's domain of application, defining characteristics, and liability to bias. We find fundamentalism in four domains of application: Christianity, other Abrahamic religions, non-Abrahamic religions, and non-religious phenomena. The defining characteristics which we identify are organized into five categories: belief, behavior, emotion, goal, and structure. We find that different kinds of fundamentalisms are defined by different characteristics, with violent and oppressive behaviors, and political beliefs and goals being emphasized for non-Christian fundamentalisms. Additionally, we find that the locus of fundamentalism studies is the Global North. Based on these findings, we conclude that the concept is prone to bias. When conceptualizing fundamentalism, three considerations deserve attention: the mutual dependency between the domain of application and the specification of defining characteristics; the question of usefulness of scientific concepts; and the connection between conceptual ambiguity and the risk of bias in the study of fundamentalism.

This research note develops a new theory about innovation in medieval monastic orders that, first, allows us to better understand medieval society and the nature of its dynamism, and second, can be applied to other areas of research on medieval Europe. Medieval monasteries were set in a society that—despite its famous dynamism—was deeply backward-looking. But monastic life generated antinomies that came from the tension between the degeneration into well-living and the ideal of the asceticism of the first Christians. These tensions sparked repeated attempts to reform monastic life, which were understood by reformers not as innovations but rather as efforts to restore the good old ways. This invention of tradition had economic and political repercussions, first in the monasteries themselves and then in surrounding lay society. To understand these processes, we must avoid reading history backward from a modern context that looks entirely different.

Even amidst a decline in religious affiliation, nearly half of the U.S. population still attends religious services at least once a month, and congregations remain the single largest non-profit organizational type across the nation. Therefore, congregational influence on political attitudes and behavior is a crucial line of inquiry. We analyze interviews of 94 congregational leaders to better understand why they address or avoid political issues when preaching. Our research reveals that clergy use theological and pragmatic reasoning to determine whether they explicitly include political discourse in their sermons. Our findings are noteworthy in that clergy from a wide range of religious traditions use similar reasoning, and the same rationale can lead different clergy to adopt contrasting approaches to political content in sermons. Thus, this paper provides nuanced insight into the relationship between religion and politics and may help foster greater mutual understanding in a deeply divided political and social climate.

How does a religious group's demographic status influence its members' attitudes toward economic and political liberalization? This study adopts a contextual approach and compares Azeri Muslims' political and economic attitudes in two illiberal states, Azerbaijan and Georgia. We argue that attitudes toward liberalization are shaped by the strength of association with one’s religious community and its relative position vis-à-vis the state and society. Drawing on a series of Caucasus Barometer surveys, we find that context and position in society matter. In religiously restrictive Muslim-majority Azerbaijan, Muslims’ religiosity is associated with greater support for political liberalization but lower support for economic liberalization. In religiously restrictive non-Muslim-majority Georgia, however, Muslims’ religiosity reflects the converse: opposition to political liberalization but support for economic liberalization. Thus, instead of theologies, the political and economic opportunity structures facing religious groups may play a critical role in determining their attitudes toward various forms of liberalization.

Polls for the past several decades indicate high regard for Jews in democracies in Western Europe and North American. We however have a limited understanding of the properties underlying those poll responses, for instance whether response bias or nonattitudes account for those results. The nonattitudes perspective suggests that respondents’ survey answers to questions about Jews are not true attitudes. Nonattitudes are weakly held responses to survey questions, and tend to be unstable over time, reflecting random as opposed to systematic change. This paper uses panel data from Voter Study Group surveys to test for individual-level stability in attitudes toward Jews by non-Jews in the United States in the 2010s to assess whether such attitudes are true or nonattitudes. Results suggest considerable instability especially when compared to attitudes toward Muslims, Democrats, and Republicans, suggesting a high degree of nonattitudes in non-Jews attitudes toward Jews. The conclusion offers reasons that might account for this instability in attitudes toward Jews and implications for the continuation of positive regard for Jews in western democracies.

Although most people in sub-Saharan Africa are very religious, state support for religion (such as through policies legislating religious values and supporting religious institutions) is very low in the region. Why is this? This paper explores this phenomenon using data from Pew Research Centre and Religion and State Project. While population religiosity is ordinarily correlated with state support for religion elsewhere in the world, sub-Saharan Africa is indeed anomalous. Yet contrary to popular explanations, this is not explained by limited state capacity, weak democracies, religious and ethnic pluralism, or majority religion. Using case studies of Rwanda and Mozambique, the paper considers whether challenges to the moral authority of religious actors as leaders of “the nation” may help explain why state support for religion is so low in sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, these findings challenge assumptions that high religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa is a threat to secular governance.

This paper explores the following question: How does individual religiosity and attachment to a religious community relate to sectarian political loyalties or interpersonal prejudices in a post-conflict, institutionally sectarianized society? The paper explores this question through dialectic, participatory methods with youth involved in community-based youth associations with a religious component. The paper investigates how religiously devout youth in Lebanon conceptualize the personal and communal elements of their religiosity in relation to sectarian politics. In this way, the paper contributes to a study of social sectarianism, in which scholars are striving to understand what individuals mean when they speak about sect, and how discussions surrounding sect mask more complex underlying social realities. Overall, these accounts suggest that personal and social religiosity both positively influence anti-sectarian political outlook among participants, while other factors, such as the institutional sectarianization of public life and a history of violent conflict maintain participants' default attachment to co-sectarian networks in terms of routine, economic security, and communal belonging.

During national emergencies, democratically elected leaders have sought to expand executive power in ways that violate democratic norms, ostensibly to guide their nation through crisis. Drawing from research on democratic backsliding, we anticipate support for such executive privileges may stem from different ideological and contextual factors, but primarily from inclinations toward ethno-nationalistic and authoritarian populism. We propose American Christian nationalism represent such inclinations. Analyses of nationally representative data reveal Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor Americans believe unspecified “national emergencies” might require leaders to suspend elections, suppress political opponents, and disregard checks and balances. However, political disinterest, stronger Democratic partisanship, and being Black (vs. White) are also positively associated with support for violating democratic norms, and these associations are amplified by Christian nationalism. Ancillary analyses suggest the interactions with race and party may be contextual, due to a Democratic President in office at the time of the survey. Findings suggest populist impulses characteristic of Christian nationalism may combine with political disinterest (perhaps reflecting disillusionment) and threats to in-group power to increase support for leaders suspending democratic norms during national crises.