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Abortion continues to be a highly contentious issue in the United States, with few signs of abatement. The god of this paper is to specify how variable positions about abortion across religious traditions have led to differential shifts in attitudes among their members. Based on culturally relevant events, position papers, and other religious media, the guiding hypotheses propose that Evangelicals have become increasingly opposed to abortion for elective reasons; yet changes in attitudes regarding abortion for traumatic reasons are due primarily to cohort shifts. Data from the cumulative General Social Surveys (1972–2002) are used to test the hypotheses. The first hypothesis is supported: Opposition to elective abortions among Evangelicals has increased relative to other religious traditions. However, contrary to the second hypothesis, they have also become more opposed to abortion for traumatic reasons. This increasing opposition is most prominent among Evangelicals born in the last 40 years or so. Implications for understanding Evangelical distinctiveness and the cultural context of abortion attitudes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles included in the December 2004 issue of the journal "Sociology of Religion" are all based on papers given at the 2003 meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Atlanta, Georgia. Each of the article explores the increasing emphasis on culture in sociology as a whole and more specially in the sociology of religion. Also, the papers also deal with new ideas and approaches. In this issue, the different trajectories within the sociology of religion is demonstrated. These are not random differences, but can be mapped in relation to institutional, philosophical and linguistic constraints within the same profession.

This study offers an analysis of the affinity between Korean traditional religious culture and Protestant Christianity in order to bring into sharper relief several important points of contact that strengthened the appeal of the imported faith in South Korea. In particular, Korean Shamanism, the enduring core of Korean religious and cultural thought, is given special attention in order to explain the prominence of its worldview and practices in the uniquely Korean form of Protestantism. The paper also examines the way in which specific Protestant doctrines and practices were modified or accentuated to suit the disposition of the Korean people. What this study reveals is that Christian conversion in South Korea did not involve an exclusivistic change of religious affiliation, meaning that it did not require the repudiation of traditionally held beliefs. Instead, millions of South Koreans eagerly embraced Christianity precisely because the new faith was advanced as an extension or continuation of Korean religious tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious social justice activist groups strive to develop cultural commitments for sustained activism within congregations. Existing research explains the political and organizational challenges they encounter and hints at corresponding struggles over church culture, but these cultural conflicts have not been fully explained. This paper shows that in attempts to build cultural commitments to activism, faith-based community organizing (FBCO) leaders consciously contest congregational cultures rooted in individualistic orientations to religious commitment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that clergy and lay leaders in FBCO coalitions seek to problematize and displace a comfortable church culture, which extends individualistic religious commitments and individualistic orientations to social problems and thus hinders the cultural appeal of social justice activism in many religious communities. I analyze efforts to replace this comfortable church culture with a culture that encourages activism, and I argue that this struggle reveals a discursive conflict between competing visions of religious life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a call for social scientific studies of religion to start taking “place” seriously. This paper adds to this growing literature by embedding religious commitment within place. We propose that the tension religious groups experience with their surroundings partly depends on local contexts and that certain types of local contexts may generate more tension. These contexts include regions in which the nonreligiously affiliated constitute the majority of the population, such as the American Pacific Northwest (PNW) region. Analysis of qualitative data on evangelical and liberal Protestants from western Oregon and western Washington suggests that they are aware of and experience tension with the regional PNW culture, which shapes their religious experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper systematically examines the extent to which Korean Protestant immigrants in the United States have transmitted their religion and cultural traditions through religion. It is based on a survey of 1.5- and 2nd-generation Korean American adults and a survey of Korean English-language congregations in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. Previous studies reveal that the majority of Korean immigrants are affiliated with a Korean Protestant church and that their frequent participation in it enables them to preserve Korean cultural traditions. Results of our survey show that Korean Protestant immigrants are highly successful in transmitting their church-oriented style of Protestantism to the second generation. Approximately two-thirds of 1.5- and 2nd-generation Korean American adults who attended a Protestant church during their childhood were found to participate in a Protestant congregation regularly, with more than two-thirds of them going to a Korean congregation. Moreover, they also participate in a congregation as frequently as Korean immigrants. However, our study shows that Korean Protestant immigrants have failed to transmit their cultural traditions through religion. Korean English-language congregations for 1.5- and 2nd-generation Korean American Protestants have almost entirely eliminated Korean cultural components from worship services and other socio-cultural activities. Transmitting Korean cultural traditions through religion is difficult for Korean Protestant immigrants partly because there is a great dissociation between Korean Protestantism and Korean secular culture and partly because second-generation Korean American Protestants have embraced the white American evangelical subculture. Based on these findings, we argue that transmitting a religion does not necessarily help to transmit ethnic culture and ethnic identity unless there is a strong correlation between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some forms of sociology, "culture" has come to replace "society" as the central object of study. This has encouraged an epistemological relativism that overrides a proper engagement with human ontology, while it has also allowed for the development of forms of reductionism where culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. Some influential contemporary accounts of the "information age" exhibit both these characteristics. The argument of this paper is that these do not offer a productive route forward for sociology in general, or for sociologists of religion in particular. It is argued that Durkheim's social realism not only helps to illuminate the inadequacy of those theories that ignore the human and religious dimensions of contemporary life in their intoxication with machine-mediated flows of information, but can also point towards a more productive way forward for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims toward a better integration of the sociology of culture and the sociology of religion in the study of American Catholicism. It discusses Catholicism as a cultural discourse, the concept of ideological structures, and the implications of a cultural approach for Warner's "new paradigm" and rational choice theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion in our world is not just a contested category, it is also one which does political work, having implications for the distribution of power in society. Classifying social action and symbols as religion or as something else, above all culture or spirituality, has political implications and is used to carry out political struggles. Starting from two concrete contemporary examples drawn from the Canadian context having to do with smudging and the crucifix, the article argues that the historical form that religion has taken functioned in earlier modern centuries as a way of favourably distributing power to religion's carriers; but that with the progressive development of secular forms of power, religion has progressively been moving towards become a form that is mostly neutral in terms of social power distribution but can also be a source of power loss, these through interrelated processes of privatization, pluralization, and voluntarization. In current circumstances, therefore, in order for what is or was religious form to preserve or regain its erstwhile function for privileged power distribution, one sees attempts in various instances to dissolve religion into other categories and forms; here the prime instances are (national) culture and (instrumental) spirituality. If this process continues and counter-movements do not succeed, then this points to the progressive deinstitutionalisation of religion in the future, its dissolution into collective culture and personal spirituality, while maintaining its religious form in smaller local and transnational organizations and movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faith-based community organizations (FBCOs) have been among the most successful U.S. civic groups in forging solidarity and collective action across social difference. Building on scholarship that emphasizes how culture can ease race and class tensions within organizations, I analyze the emotional management of structural difference in FBCOs' organizing projects. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews within a large, diverse FBCO, I identify two emotional narratives that motivate individuals' participation--lived injustice and failed covenant. I document the streamlining of these narratives through a practice I call vulnerability talk, and show that this process can enhance group cohesion at some times, but undermine it at others. By conceptualizing faith-based organizing as the emotional management of structural difference, this article provides a clearer understanding of how culture works in religious mobilization than accounts focused on interests alone, and points to emotions as a central concern in today's progressive movements, both religious and secular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. churches continue to support families in a society where many previous supports have weakened. But there is a gap in this support: although almost half of congregations in a recent study report offering marriage counseling and postdivorce ministries, only 25 percent of divorced families report experiencing clergy help or congregational outreach while divorcing or postdivorce. This study analyzes data from 26 Northern Indiana Congregations Study Christian churches of different traditions in order to identify the characteristics of congregations that successfully offer outreach to families in crisis. A comparative analysis of congregational cultures finds that congregations with successfully offered outreach exhibit three bundled cultural characteristics not found in those without: realistic confidence among pastors regarding solving marital problems, lay empowerment, and discourses transforming individualized marriage religiously. These findings contribute to our understanding of religion and family life and to practical knowledge of religious supports for vulnerable families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite predictions to the contrary, religion continues to play an integral role in the lives of Americans in general and African Americans in particular. This essay focuses on the place of the contemporary Black Church1 and dynamics relative to relevance, semi-involuntariness, and consumerism as topics for continued sociological research on Black religious life in the spirit of scholarly inquiry by W. E. B. DuBois. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The sociology of religion is not well known for exporting theory to other subdisciplines, for which the author suggests three causes: a lack of interest in religion from other sociologists, a focus on “normal science” rather than exportable theory, and an insistence that religion is a sui generis analytic category. The author then suggests how this third cause can be remedied by no longer thinking of religion as an analytic category but rather as a site though which religious actors can be studied. Doing so would shift religion to a pragmatic, native category, thereby allowing an easier export of concepts discovered while studying religious groups, in the tradition of sociological classics like taboo and charismatic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This address is a contribution to the study of “lived religion,” that is, the embodied and enacted forms of spirituality that occur in everyday life. Like the children's books that ask “where's Waldo,” sociologists are invited to think about the many ways in which we need to refocus our work in order to see the religion that often appears in unexpected places. As the discipline has broadened its geographical and cultural vision, it also must broaden its understanding of what religion is. Religion is neither an all-or-nothing category nor a phenomenon that is confined to a single institutional sphere. Understanding the multilayered nature of everyday reality and the permeability of all social boundaries makes a more nuanced study of religion possible. Using data from the “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life” project, it is suggested that religion can be found in the conversational spaces—both in religious organizations and beyond—where sacred and mundane dimensions of life are produced and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the identity formation process of self-avowed atheists in the context of American culture. Drawing on data collected from participant observation and 40 individual in-depth interviews with atheists in Colorado, four stages of atheist identity development are presented: the starting point/the ubiquity of theism, questioning theism, rejecting theism, and “coming out” atheist. I argue that an atheist identity is an achieved identity, and one that is constructed in social interaction. Focusing on the interactional processes and narrative accounts of participants, I discuss the process of rejecting the culturally normative belief in God, and the adoption instead, of an identity for which the “theist culture” at large offers no validation. This research illustrates how identification with atheism in America becomes an important aspect of self for those who adopt this label. Further, it makes a qualitative contribution to our incipient understanding of the subjective experience and identities of actual atheists, as well as the dynamics of irreligion and unbelief in America—an area of inquiry within the sociology of religion that is in need of further development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite modernity's attempt to structure religion out of many social domains, people still make space for God—the sacred, spirituality, religion, transcendence, etc.—in their everyday lives. Religion may be less apparent at times, but it is not altogether absent and continues to show up beyond its taken-for-granted boundaries. Drawing from photo elicitation interview materials generated by the Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life project, I explore the ways in which religion and spirituality intersect with the domains of home, work, and leisure. At first blush, photos of homes, bedrooms, offices, beaches, pets, and gardens do not appear to be enchanted. But when one looks to the stories behind the photos, it becomes evident that the meanings these narratives convey and actions they evoke push back against the social structure as individuals leverage contextual features of everyday life to construct space for God. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyzes a paradox in the rhetorical strategies of the Christian Right in the United States: How can doctrinally conservative political activists justify "legislating morality" in a culture in which individual autonomy is a central value? This essay is based on the assumption that, although there exist competing values and religious frameworks in the United States, the language of liberal individualism is the lingua franca for distinctively public discourse. Such activists attempt to advance a socially conservative agenda in an individualist culture by emphasizing the existence of competing rights, invoking the special status of children, utilizing the language of the natural sciences, and identifying powerful alien forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Large body of research has shown that bath class and culture impact denominational affiliation. Many empirical and theoretical investigations of the schism between white Protestant mainliners and fundamentalists find that social structural inequality (class/status) and/or certain cultural environments generate the social conditions that are associated with a particular type of religious identity. However, there seems to be little consensus concerning which set of factors is more powerful or how they might interact. This study uses the General Social Survey to explore the class anchors and cultural environments that impact affiliation. A rarely considered hypothesis is explored, namely, that fundamentalists share not only a subculture, but are also part of a distinct class culture. The dam support the class culture hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afro-(Latin)-American religions have spread beyond their original boundaries of race, class, and, increasingly, nation, to attract an economically, ethnically and nationally diverse constituency. in the process, issues of race and nationality, which have always figured prominently in these religions' discourses -- as well as of those who wrote about them -- have now acquired even more relevance. The lecture analyzes the efforts of white, mostly low middle class followers of Afro-Brazilian religions in Buenos Aires to accommodate issues of race and nation in order to overcome the increasing problematization of their practices, and examines the strategies that practitioners have employed to try to improve the image of their religion and how these have changed according to public reaction and the support they have garnered. The analysis focuses, especially, on their attempts to stress the cultural aspects of their religious practice and on their efforts to insert their religion within the country's history and culture by stressing the nation's Black heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the historical roots of the cultural resources used by a number of social movements. Cultural resources are the symbols, meanings, ideologies and legitimacy that movements and other political actors use in their collective actions, they function to recruit members, persuade bystanders and neutralize their opponents. In U.S. politics, cultural resources drawn from religion are particularly potent even if religious groups as such are not prominent players within the movement. The substantive case used to explore the relations between U.S. religious and political cultures is rhetoric about the public or common good and the social arrangements that will achieve it. Public good rhetoric is something of a meta-theme in political culture, potentially available to any and all groups or movements within U.S. society. Rhetoric that envisions the public good and an ideal society is an important resource for actors in U.S. politics. Claiming to desire and act for the public good distances actors from charges of self-interest and provides grounding for more specific issue positions. The ambiguity of the symbolic construct of the good society is one of its strengths, as it provides a resiliency across historical periods, collective actors and various issues.