Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

Many individuals have engaged in behaviors to cope with and mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, including mask wearing and physical distancing. This study considers the extent to which individuals have also engaged in religious behaviors in response to the pandemic and how those responses are associated with behaviors like mask wearing. Using data from a probability survey of U.S. adults, our analysis finds that over half of the respondents have engaged in pandemic-related prayer and about one-fifth have taken other religious steps in response to the pandemic, such as reading religious texts or carrying religious items for protection...

This research note advances the religious coping literature by testing whether belief in an evil world conditions the stress-moderating role of scripture reading. Hypotheses are tested with original data from a survey of Black, Hispanic, and White American churchgoers from South Texas (2017-2018; n = 1,115). Our findings show that reading scripture for insights into the future attenuates the positive association between major life events and psychological distress, but only for congregants who do not believe the world is fundamentally evil and sinful...

While many multidimensional models of religiosity have been proposed over the years across a range of samples, nearly all are cross-sectional; this prohibits the assessment of model change or stability over time, particularly with regard to developmental changes at critical junctures in the life course. Recently, a longitudinal, five-dimensional model of religiosity during adolescence was proposed and validated (Pearce, Hayward, and Pearlman 2017), making significant progress in this regard. This research note now attempts to replicate this model on the young adult sample from the same study...

This study demonstrates that religion protected mental health but constrained support for crisis response during the crucial early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data from a national probability-based sample of the U.S. population show that highly religious individuals and evangelicals suffered less distress in March 2020. They were also less likely to see the coronavirus outbreak as a crisis and less likely to support public health restrictions to limit the spread of the virus. The conservative politicization of religion in the United States can help explain why religious Americans (and evangelicals in particular) experienced less distress and were less likely to back public health efforts to contain the virus...

Social scientists have increasingly recognized the lack of diversity in survey research on American religion, resulting in a dearth of data on religion and spirituality (R/S) in understudied racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, epidemiological studies have increasingly diversified their racial and ethnic representation, but have collected few R/S measures to date. With a particular focus on American Indian and South Asian women (in addition to Blacks, Hispanic/Latinas, and white women), this study introduces a new effort among religion and epidemiology researchers, the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health (SSSH)...

Risk preference theory argues that the gender gap in religiosity is caused by greater female risk aversion. Although widely debated, risk preference theory has been inadequately tested. Our study tests the theory directly with phenotypic and genetic risk preferences in three dimensions-general, impulsive, and sensation-seeking risk. Moreover, we examine whether the effect of different dimension of risk preference on the gender gap varies across different dimensions of religiosity. We find that general and impulsive risk preferences do not explain gender differences in religiosity, whereas sensation-seeking risk preference makes the gender gap in self-assessed religiousness and church attendance insignificant, but not belief in God, prayer, or importance of religion...

This research addresses the intersection of two key domains of adolescents' lives: religion and peer networks. Religion scholars argue that religion is multi-faceted and better understood by focusing on combinations of indicators (i.e. mosaics), versus a variable-centered approach. We adopt this framework and investigate the interplay between religion and peer networks, both in how religious mosaics are shaped by friends and how religious profiles affect friend selection dynamics. With data from two schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate religious mosaics using latent class analysis (LCA) to identify profiles consisting of combinations of commonly available survey-based measures of religious attitudes, behaviors, and identities...

While numerous studies show a persistent inverse association between religion variables and adolescents' sexual behaviors, the nature of this relationship is not well understood. Specifically, many previous studies presuppose that the associations between adolescent religiosity and sexual behaviors are linear. However, a number of studies have also identified important nonlinearities of religious influence during adolescence, with highly religious individuals being distinct from their peers. Incorporating this knowledge into a theoretically-motivated modeling approach, this article provides a comparative analysis of functional forms describing the relationships between religiosity and adolescent sexual behaviors...

Extensive literature suggests that religiosity is a protective factor in reducing a number of deviant behaviors, including sexual aggression. Whereas previous research focused on the role of risky alcohol consumption in mediating the relationship between religiosity and sexual aggression, this study explores the hypothesized meditational paths from religiosity to sexual aggression and technology-based coercive behavior through peer norms, pornography consumption, and promiscuity. Findings from a four-year longitudinal study of male college students suggest that peer norms and promiscuity mediate the relationship between religiosity and both outcome measures, while pornography consumption mediates the relationship between religiosity and technology-based coercive behavior...

Prior research suggests the significance of religion for development and wellbeing in adolescence and beyond. Further, new developments and applications of statistical methods have led to ways of better accounting for the multidimensional nature of religiosity (e.g. latent class analysis), as well as the dynamic aspects of religiosity (e.g. latent growth curve models). Yet, rarely if ever are both features of religiosity incorporated and examined together. Therefore, we propose and conduct a latent class analysis using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to identify seven distinct pathways of religiosity that involve independently changing levels of religious affiliation, religious service attendance, personal importance of religion, and prayer from adolescence to adulthood...

In this study, two telephone interviews that assessed both religious involvement and health-related quality of life were conducted approximately 2.5 years apart in a national sample of 290 African Americans. Religious involvement was assessed with an instrument that measured both personal religious beliefs (e.g., having a personal relationship with God) and more public religious behaviors (e.g., attending church services). Health-related quality of life was measured with version 2 of the Medical Outcomes Study 12-item short form (SF-12v2)...

Women's autonomy has frequently been linked with women's opportunities and investments, such as education, employment, and reproductive control. The association between women's autonomy and religion in the developing world, however, has received less attention, and the few existing studies make comparisons across major religious traditions. In this study, we focus on variations in levels of female decision-making autonomy within a single religious tradition-Christianity. Using unique survey data from a predominantly Christian area in Mozambique, we devise an autonomy scale and apply it to compare women affiliated to different Christian denominations as well as unaffiliated women...

Early marriage has important consequences for individuals in the United States. Several studies have linked religion to early marriage but have not examined this relationship in depth. Using data from Waves 1, 3, and 4 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I conduct multilevel event-history analysis to examine how religion, at both individual and contextual levels, is associated with early marriage. Further, I test mediators of the religion-early marriage relationship. I find significant variation in early marriage by religious tradition, religious service attendance, religious salience, belief in scriptural inerrancy, and religious context in high school...

Following a previous investigation of religio-spiritual beliefs in American Indians, this article examined prevalence and correlates of religio-spiritual participation in two tribes in the Southwest and Northern Plains (N = 3,084). Analysis suggested a "religious profile" characterized by strong participation across three traditions: aboriginal, Christian, and Native American Church. However, sociodemographic variables that have reliably predicted participation in the general American population, notably gender and age, frequently failed to achieve significance in multivariate analyses for each tradition...

I conduct the first large-N study explicitly exploring the association between belief in God and sense of purpose in life. This relationship, while often discussed informally, has received little empirical attention. Here I use the General Social Survey to investigate how form of and confidence in belief in God is related to sense of purpose in life, as measured by a Likert item level of agreement with the statement "In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose." Using logistic regression analysis, I find that those who indicate that they are confident in God's existence report a higher sense of purpose compared to nonbelievers, believers in a higher power, and those who believe but occasionally doubt...

Empirical studies of religion's role in society, especially those focused on individuals and analyzing survey data, conceptualize and measure religiosity on a single measure or a summary index of multiple measures. Other concepts, such as "lived religion," "believing without belonging," or "fuzzy fidelity," emphasize what scholars have noted for decades: humans are rarely consistently low, medium, or high across dimensions of religiosity including institutional involvement, private practice, salience, or belief...

Parental divorce has been linked to religious outcomes in adulthood. Previous research has not adequately accounted for parental religious characteristics or subsequent family context, namely whether one's custodial parent remarries. Using pooled data from three waves of the General Social Survey, we examine the relationships among parental divorce, subsequent family structure, and religiosity in adulthood. Growing up in a single-parent family-but not a stepparent family-is positively associated with religious disaffiliation and religious switching and negatively associated with regular religious attendance...

A large body of historical evidence describes the use of hallucinogenic compounds, such as psilocybin mushrooms, for religious purposes. But few scientific studies have attempted to measure or characterize hallucinogen-occasioned spiritual experiences. The present study examined the factor structure of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), a self-report measure that has been used to assess the effects of hallucinogens in laboratory studies. Participants (N=1602) completed the 43-item MEQ in reference to a mystical or profound experience they had had after ingesting psilocybin...

Club good models developed by economists suggest that the club provides a benefit to members by fostering the provision of semi-public goods. In the case of religion, churches create enforcement mechanisms to reduce free riding. Consequently, the psychic costs of deviant activity should be higher for individuals who belong to religious groups with strong social norms. Data from the General Social Survey are used to examine whether the cost of using pornography is greater for the more religiously involved. We measure the cost of using pornography as the happiness gap or the gap between the average happiness reported by individuals who do and individuals who do not report using pornography...

In 1994, 1 million Rwandans were violently killed in only 100 days. Devastating for some Rwandan survivors was the significant role that some Catholic parishes and leaders took in ignoring, facilitating, and even perpetuating the genocide. This article seeks to understand how Rwandan genocide survivors draw on religion as they negotiate their postgenocide identities in the United States and comprehend their current faiths, beliefs, and practices. Based on qualitative interviews with Rwandan survivors now located within the United States, I argue that the experiences of religiosity postgenocide serve as both an obstacle and a resource in postgenocide life, creating significant individual and local ramifications for community engagement, reconciliation, and trauma recovery...