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Changes in race and ethnicity, religious affiliation, political polarization, and economic inequality are making social variation more salient in the United States. Some research suggests this produces conflict, and other work suggests this may pave the way toward greater social cohesion across difference. Both theories rely on assumptions about the relationship between actual social heterogeneity and perceived diversity; do people accurately perceive local diversity, or are such assessments driven by other cultural and ideological factors? We investigate this question using unique, nationally representative survey data on attitudes about diversity merged with county-level estimates of the actual county-level ethnoracial, religious, political, and economic variation in which each respondent lives. We find that local racial heterogeneity has the strongest relationship with the probability of respondents saying there is a lot of diversity in their city or town, and this relationship is most sensitive to small increases in racial heterogeneity in relatively homogenous areas. Our results empirically validate research on "diversity" discourses in the USA which discuss how race relates to the ways Americans think and talk about this term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, increasing support for same-sex marriage (SSM) coincides with persistent prejudice against lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals, demonstrating the need for multidimensional measures of attitudes toward SSM. Using national survey data from 2014, we compare two measures of support for SSM: a measure of public support for legalizing SSM, and a measure of private support of one's child marrying someone of the same sex. Though responses on these questions are related, we find important and unexpected differences between these measures within demographic sub-populations, especially among parents, Millennials, and Black respondents. Our findings complicate the narrative of increasing public acceptance of SSM, supporting a theoretical explanation that highlights cultural context in public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising tolerance for many religious minority groups in the United States has led influential scholars to argue that the pluralism, voluntarism, and vitality of the American religious landscape dampen religiously-based conflict and exclusion. The persistence of negative attitudes toward religious non-religious minorities, however, raises questions about the underlying mechanisms that hinder acceptance for some groups and drive religious prejudice. We argue that these two perspectives consider attitudes toward public religious expression- respondents' expectations about the relevance of religion to public life-but they expect these attitudes to relate to different social outcomes. One perspective expects higher tolerance, while the other expects higher prejudice. Using data from the nationally-representative 2014 Boundaries in the American Mosaic Survey, we test the relationship between respondents' preferences for public religious expression (PRE), their attitudes toward religious out-groups, and their willingness to extend political tolerance toward minority groups they find problematic. Our results show a strong and consistent positive relationship between high PRE, higher odds of prejudicial attitudes, and higher odds of intolerant attitudes. We discuss the implications of these relationships for studies of symbolic boundaries and civic inclusion in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans disagree about the appropriate role of religion in public life. More Americans than ever are non-religious, but surveys also find renewed support for public religious expression. Accordingly, some scholars predict growing polarization as pro-secular and pro-religious factions emerge, but other theorists predict growing cultural consensus built on non-particularistic moral language. We use data from a new, nationally representative survey to identify four sets of preferences that Americans hold regarding religion's appropriate role in the public sphere, and use these orientations to assess theories of polarization and consensus. We find that about four in ten Americans hold ideological positions that are not open to compromise, and that the other six in ten with more moderate views often agree about religion's proper role in policy, but are ideologically divided over symbolic religious expression. Drawing on Giddens's theories of modern self-identity and the politics of authenticity, we argue that this ideological split reflects a politicization of public religious language that undermines recent optimistic theories of religious pluralism, and we discuss the effects of this politicization on the symbolic construction of public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current literature on negative attitudes towards atheists reports many Americans carry cultural prejudice, seeing them as immoral, cynical, and hedonistic, and that individuals with high levels of religiosity are more likely to hold these kinds of biases. That story may be too simple, though, because we do not know what kinds of religiosity are associated with these attitudes. Existing literature on the topic often mixes indicators of distinct religious constructs, or narrowly chooses indicators of only one type of religiosity. Using a combination of structural equation and ordered logit modeling with 2014 survey data from The American Mosaic Project, this paper demonstrates that high religious centrality--a personal identity favoring the integration of faith with other roles in public life--is distinctly and significantly associated with both public and private distrust of atheists, unlike other forms of frequent religious participation or high religious orthodoxy. This centrality also has a strong Christian component and is explicitly political. It is expressed in relationships among survey questions probing respondents' personal religiosity and their expectation that good citizens and competent leaders will be both Christian and religious, respectively. Substantively, these results lend support for a theoretical account of citizenship which incorporates a critical approach to studying dominant cultural forms of religiosity in the United States. They also suggest that it is methodologically prudent to carefully distinguish respondents' constructs of religiosity when attempting to explain negative attitudes towards religious and non-religious minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent work on music file-sharing highlights a gap between explanations which emphasize the lack of social control and deterrent effects on downloaders, and those which highlight the influence of social learning from music subcultures. However, this work also obscures the nature of file-sharing behavior, because it rarely studies the online communities in which it occurs on their own terms. Using mixed method content analysis on a year of archived posts from a popular anonymous music discussion forum, this project demonstrates the continued relevance of both theories for understanding file-sharing as collective action undertaken by subcultural communities. It also emphasizes social learning theories, as interactions between users relied much more on teaching informal community norms than techniques of rationalization or neutralization to elicit contributions of music for members to download. These findings have implications for both theoretical interpretations of social behavior on the internet and policy attempts to reduce illegal downloading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presidential debates are key political events in which candidates engage each other directly and compete to establish their character and legitimacy as members of the American political community. Research on distrust of the non-religious in public life demonstrates that religiosity remains a key factor in establishing national belonging throughout the campaign process, but how do candidates work to demonstrate their religiosity through the rhetoric of a debate? Through a content analyses of 31 transcripts from all televised presidential debates between 1960 and 2012, this study provides a new application for a three-part typology of claims to religiosity developed most recently by Pearce and Denton (2011). It demonstrates that candidates are more likely to use a discourse of religious centrality (religiosity integrated into their everyday lives and practices of governance) than one of specific religious practices or content of belief. Centrality discourse most effectively accomplishes both the inclusionary and exclusionary work necessary to demonstrate a candidate's commitment to the religious nature of the American national community while masking the exclusion of othered religious populations and the non-religious from that community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]