We use data from a nationally representative survey to analyze anti-atheist sentiment in the United States in 2014, replicating analyses from a decade earlier and extending them to consider the ...factors that foster negative sentiment toward other non-religious persons. We find that anti-atheist sentiment is strong, persistent, and driven in part by moral concerns about atheists and in part by agreement with cultural values that affirm religiosity as a constitutive moral grounding of citizenship and national identity. Moral concerns about atheists also spill over to shape attitudes toward those who are spiritual but not religious (SBNRs) and influence evaluations of the recent decline in religious identification. Americans have more positive views of SBNRs than of atheists, but a plurality of Americans still negatively evaluate the increase in the percentage of Americans who claim no religious identification (nones). Our analyses show the continuing centrality of religiously rooted moral boundary-making in constituting cultural membership in the American context.
Spirits of protestantism Klassen, Pamela E
2011., 20110625, 2011, c2011., 2011-07-14, Letnik:
13
eBook
Spirits of Protestantism reveals how liberal Protestants went from being early-twentieth-century medical missionaries seeking to convert others through science and scripture, to becoming vocal ...critics of missionary arrogance who experimented with non-western healing modes such as Yoga and Reiki. Drawing on archival and ethnographic sources, Pamela E. Klassen shows how and why the very notion of healing within North America has been infused with a Protestant "supernatural liberalism." In the course of coming to their changing vision of healing, liberal Protestants became pioneers three times over: in the struggle against the cultural and medical pathologizing of homosexuality; in the critique of Christian missionary triumphalism; and in the diffusion of an ever-more ubiquitous anthropology of "body, mind, and spirit." At a time when the political and anthropological significance of Christianity is being hotly debated, Spirits of Protestantism forcefully argues for a reconsideration of the historical legacies and cultural effects of liberal Protestantism, even for the anthropology of religion itself.
The title for this work comes from the Puritan minister Increase Mather, who used the colorful metaphor to express his concern about the state of English Protestantism. Like many New Englanders, ...Mather’s fears about the creeping influence of French Catholicism stemmed from English conflicts with France that spilled over into the colonial frontiers from French Canada. The most consistently fragile of these frontiers was the Province of Maine, notorious for attracting settlers who had “one foot out the door” of New England Puritanism. It was there that English Protestants and French Catholics came into frequent contact. The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier shows how, between the volatile years of 1688 to 1727, the persistence of Catholic people and culture in New England's border regions posed consistent challenges to the bodies and souls of frontier Protestants. Taking a cue from contemporary observers of religious culture, as well as modern scholars of early American religion, social history, material culture, and ethnohistory, Laura M. Chmielewski explores this encounter between opposing Christianities on an early American frontier. She examines the forms of lived religion and religious culture—enacted through gestures, religious spaces, objects, and discreet religious expressions—to elucidate the range of experience of its diverse inhabitants: accused witches, warrior Jesuits, unorthodox ministers, indigenous religious thinkers, voluntary and involuntary converts. Chmielewski offers a nuanced perspective of the structured categories of early American Christian religious life, suggesting that the terms “Protestant” and “Catholic” varied according to location and circumstances and that the assumptions accompanying their use had long-term consequences for generations of New Englanders.
THEOLOGY IN DIVISION East, Brad
First things (New York, N.Y.),
04/2023
Journal Article
Even a whiff of sacred tradition, magisterial authority, patristic doctrine, or medieval piety stinks to high heaven, and just about everyone has a nose for it. (A third, Ephraim Radner, is a regular ...contributor to these pages; I'll let him speak for himself.) Here is how Jenson opens the first volume of his Systematic Theology, published in 1997: ...theology may be impossible in the situation of a divided church, its proper agent not being extant-unless, of course, one is willing to say that a particular confessional or jurisdictional body simply is the one church. ...the context and audience of theology is nothing less than the communion of saints. In it the future pope, in conversation with the work of Lutheran theologian Oscar Cullmann, offers a profound reflection on unity and disunity between Protestants and Catholics.
RESUMO O artigo aborda o tema da laicização do Estado a partir das ações e dos discursos do missionário protestante George William Butler (1853-1919) nos primeiros dias após a proclamação da ...República. O objetivo é avaliar como esse personagem vivenciou e participou desse processo. Analisando seus relatórios, os conflitos políticos locais e as relações do missionário com agentes que elaboraram uma lei de separação Igreja-Estado no Maranhão, sua vida surge como uma via de acesso para o entendimento deste processo e dos sentidos que os protestantes lhe desejavam imprimir. Assim, destaca-se a importância da análise micro-histórica para se perceberem os indivíduos não apenas como receptores de transformações macrossociais, mas como agentes dessas mudanças.
ABSTRACT The article addresses the theme of the laicization of the State based on the actions and speeches of the Protestant missionary George William Butler (1853-1919) in the first days after the proclamation of the Republic. The objective is to evaluate how this character experienced and participated in this process. By analyzing his reports, the local political conflicts and the missionary’s relations with agents who drafted a law of church-state separation in Maranhão, his life appears as a form of access to understand this process and the meanings that Protestants wanted to imprint on it. Thus, the importance of micro-historical analysis stands out to perceive individuals not only as receivers of macro-social transformations, but as agents of these changes.
This article proposes a theory of post neo-Protestantism highlighting the key relationships maintained by this new postmodern manner of thinking and living religion with the medialization, that is to ...say, with the ‘mediatization of everything’ as a model of public communication developed in favor of broadband internet, wireless internet or social media. In this perspective, it is shown that post neo-Protestantism is basically the virtualization of neo-Protestantism still clinging to modernity and the communicative individual pragmatics of this virtualization now inescapably linked to new media.
Ecological density dependence theory argues that organizational founding rates have an inverted U-shaped relationship with density (the number of organizations already present). This study develops ...this theory by showing how the “density dependent” curve is moderated by continually expanding/contracting opportunities among religious movement organizations. Using event-history analyses, I investigate how the rate at which transnational American Protestant mission agencies found new ministries internationally is influenced simultaneously by density and continuous expansion/contraction of a country's Protestant market share (i.e., “monotonic market change”). Results show that as Protestant market share increases from continuous years of contraction to expansion, the peak founding rate of the density curve changes non-monotonically while the density at this peak rate increases monotonically. The study concludes by considering how a theory of monotonic market change may contribute to the study of religious as well as secular movement organizations and nonprofits more broadly.
•Inverted U-shape relationship between ministry founding rates and density.•Peak founding rate and density at this peak moderated by monotonic market change.•As Monotonic market change increases, peak founding rate increases monotonically.•As Monotonic market change increases, density at peak changes non-monotonically.•Applications for monotonic market change theory in nonprofit research.
PDF
