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Is courage more than just facing fear? We tested the hypothesis that perceived value of the goal, in addition to the perceived riskiness of the action, predicts the extent to which an action is rated as courageous. Participants (300 US undergraduates and 1,254 US residents recruited online) read about either Caitlyn Jenner's public gender transition or Kim Davis's refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Participants then rated how courageous, risky, and valuable the action was. They also completed a Moral Traditionalism scale. Results indicated that across both samples and both conditions, courage was significantly predicted by the value of the goal, with risk of the action a smaller but mostly significant predictor. Adding Moral Traditionalism as a predictor did not alter these patterns. Results of this study support the inclusion of goal value as an important component of accolade courage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish politics is changing rapidly, as is the place of religion in its public square. In this context, it is useful to ask who prioritizes religious identity and who does not. Our social-psychological approach emphasizes the importance of understanding why religion is more central to certain individuals' sense of self than others. We analyze data from an original, nationally representative survey of over 2,000 adults in Turkey that includes a measure of how strongly respondents identify with religion (among other identity options). We run statistical regression analysis to assess how well existing theories of religiosity in general explain the under-explored theoretical and empirical domain of religious identification. Our findings indicate that ideological conservatism, religious fundamentalism, and minority religious group status have significant implications for one's strength of identification with religion. These results underscore the importance of future research into the psychological roots of attachment to religion and religious identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Religion has been shown to affect the U.S. public opinion about foreign policy. Recent studies emphasize attitudes about issues pertaining to the Middle East. They also tend to focus on the perspectives of evangelical Protestants, so we know comparatively little about how being mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, Catholic, or religiously unaffiliated might affect one's foreign policy preferences. Methods: Using data drawn from the 2009 America's Place in the World General Public Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, we analyze religion's impact on public attitudes about foreign affairs, comparing evangelical Protestants with four other religious groups. Results: We find that the main driver of religion's impact on foreign policy attitudes is nominal religious affiliation ("belonging"), not the frequency of worship attendance ("behaving"). Religiously unaffiliated Americans and Catholics—and to a lesser extent, mainline and Black Protestants—perceive the world as less threatening than do evangelicals. They also prefer multilateral, cooperative solutions to international problems. Conclusion: Americans vary significantly in their international threat perception and support for militant or cooperative internationalism based on their religious affiliation. In addition, evangelical Protestants' preference for hawkish, unilateral foreign policy extends beyond the context of the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As agents of the state rather than private individuals while working, U.S. public schoolteachers' 'free exercise rights' are sharply curtailed to prevent them from (dis)favoring any one religion. Are there public schoolteachers who chafe against these constraints, wishing instead for religious accommodations that would grant them the flexibility to refuse to teach required curricular content, or engage in some other form of religious expression or activity in the classroom? If so, who are these teachers, demographically, professionally, religiously, and politically speaking? To answer these questions, we analyze data from an original national email survey of 5,273 U.S. public schoolteachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is religion a more central social identity for some people than for others? Previous studies focus on explaining individual differences in religious affiliation and religiosity, often using the term "identification" in reference to these concepts. Yet, few scholars operationalize—let alone attempt to explain—identification with religion in social psychological terms, i.e., as a construct that captures the subjective psychological centrality of one's religious identity. After underscoring the benefits of exploring religious identification using cross‐national data, we employ an original data set composed of nationally representative surveys in three European countries to model religious identification in two ways: importance (independent strength of attachment) and prominence (prioritization of one's religious identity relative to the others one holds). We document substantial variation in the degree to which individuals define themselves on the basis of their religious identity. We then test predictions drawn from existing theories to model these two measures. Our results extend current understandings of what shapes psychological attachment to religion and raise new questions for future theorization and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provide historical background about the congressional chaplaincy before presenting a content analysis of prayers that chaplains offered before the Senate and the House in 1990, 2000, and 2010. It analyzes differences in the personal styles of presidents and other elected officials and argue that each congressional chaplain develops a distinctive prayer style, and ways in which the distinctiveness reflects both personal preference and a relative lack of clear rules and guidelines.

In this article we analyze the effects of religious, political, socioeconomic, and demographic variables on religious Americans' propensity to identify with religio‐political movements. Using data from the 2013 Economic Values Survey collected by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we sort nonsecular Americans into four categories: religious right, religious left, both religious right and religious left, or neither religious right nor the religious left. We estimate a multinomial logit model in which we depict religio‐political identification as a function of religious affiliation, worship attendance, religious embeddedness, religious convictions, political attitudes, and socioeconomic and demographic controls. We find that a wide range of religious, political, and socioeconomic/demographic variables affect individuals' identification with the religious right and/or religious left. Our empirical results also permit us to analyze the seeming paradox of identifying with both the religious right and the religious left. We find that individuals who identify with both movements come from the ranks of the highly religious, those who believe that being moral requires one to believe in God, Tea Party supporters, strong partisans, those with lower education and income, older individuals, and blacks and Hispanics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By James L. Guth, John C. Green, Corwin E. Smidt, Lyman A. Kellstedt, and Margaret M. Poloma. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. 221p. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Laura R. [...]

In this article, I compare progressive and conservative religio-political activists' commitment to their movements (the religious left and right, respectively). I rely on data from the Public Religion Research Institute's 2009 surveys of individuals they identified as religious left activists and religious right activists. Do these activists actually say they identify with the movement with which pollsters assume them to affiliate? How potentially influential do they perceive their movements to be? Third, to what extent do activists support their movement's core social movement organizations? I conclude by arguing that the evidence is mixed that the American religious left lacks influence because its activists tend not to be unified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 2000 best seller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Civic Community, Robert Putnam analyzed the links between social capital and civic engagement. Lamenting the decline of “civic America,” he called for a Tocquevillean renewal of voluntary association in the United States. In American Grace, Putnam and coauthor David Campbell—who also helped with the preparation of Bowling Alone—return to the analysis of American civil society, focusing their attention on America's changing religious landscape and its implications for democracy. Their basic argument is that while the United States is religiously diverse and pluralistic to a profound degree, and while in recent years it has witnessed growing religious polarization, it has also succeeded in muting religious tensions and hostilities. As they conclude: “How has America solved the puzzle of religious pluralism—the coexistence of religious diversity and devotion? And how has it done so in the wake of growing religious polarization? By creating a web of interlocking personal relationships among people of many different faiths. This is America's grace” (p. 550).Given the importance of religion in American life and the influence of Putnam's broad agenda on much current social science research on social capital and civic engagement, we have decided to organize a symposium around the book, centered on three questions: 1) How is American Grace related to Putnam's earlier work, particularly Bowling Alone, and what are the implications of the continuities and/or discontinuities between these works? 2) What kind of a work of political science is American Grace, and how does it compare to other important recent work dealing with religion and politics in the United States? 3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of Putnam and Campbell's account of “how religion divides and unites us,” and what is the best way of thinking about the contemporary significance of religion and politics in the United States and about the ways that the religious landscape challenges U.S. politics and U.S. political science? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]