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This study extends research on how political and social contexts mediate the relationship between men's and women's political identities and their support for the environment. Our test consists of a 3 × 2 factorial survey experiment that interacts an individual's partisan identity with three conditions modeling elite support for federal spending to protect the environment. Democrats demonstrate consistently high rates of support regardless of legislative sponsorship. Among Republicans, when Democratic legislators sponsor environmental legislation, support drops about 18% compared to conditions where a bipartisan group sponsors legislation. Support among Republican women, however, remains relatively stable across experimental conditions. Republican variations in support are almost entirely attributable to declines in support among Republican men, whose support drops an average of 24% when Democratic legislators sponsor legislation. In conclusion, intraparty gender differences in opinions and support should be considered more broadly, especially when examining polarized public issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mental health of religious leaders is a serious concern as the emotional, psychological, and spiritual demands on clergy are incredibly high. These demands, however, are likely to vary by the demographic makeup of the congregation that leaders serve, which leads us to expect that clergy mental health is associated with congregational demographics. In this study, we use recently collected (2020), nationally representative survey data from the primary leaders of religious congregations (N = 636) to examine the associations between congregational demographics—the social class, gender, racial, age, and political makeup of religious congregations—and leaders' mental health. The most robust finding from the full model is that political incongruence between leaders and attendees is strongly associated with worse mental health for clergy. We conclude with a discussion of what the results mean for the mental health of religious leaders in a time of declining religion, growing political polarization, and high rates of anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious victimization is a social stressor harmful to identity and well‐being. In this article, we examine how religious victimization is associated with key religious factors in youth using two different data sets collected 17 years apart. The results from both surveys show that youth affiliated with non‐Christian religious traditions, youth who more frequently attend services, and youth who talk more frequently with their parents about religion have a relatively high likelihood of religious victimization. Moreover, Catholic and mainline Protestant youth have relatively low likelihoods of religious victimization, but these findings did not hold across both sources of data. We suggest these patterns reflect cultural views regarding secularization as well as the cultural normativity of Christianity and associated behaviors in the United States. We conclude by encouraging school‐based, antibullying programs to include religion and religiosity in efforts to reduce and prevent youth bullying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjective social class identities—lower, working, middle, and upper—are conditioned by culture and social interactions. I argue that conservative Christianity influences subjective class identification because conservative Christian social networks are highly insular, and its culture prioritizes lower- and working-class ideologies. Using nationally representative data, I find that conservative Christians—operationalized with views of the Bible and religious tradition—are relatively likely to identify as lower and working class, and unlikely to identify as middle and upper class; that these associations are partially but not wholly mediated by higher education and family income; and that there are robust associations between religion and subjective class among those with a bachelor's degree and above-average family incomes, but not among less-educated and lower-income Americans. These results indicate that conservative Christianity promotes a specific class culture, and that this class culture more closely aligns with biblical literalism than with affiliation with evangelical Protestant churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of family income for religious participation in the United States has been largely ignored in recent decades. Addressing this neglect, we focus our attention primarily upon white Catholics, the poorer of whom we reason have fewer options to participate in the context of an increasingly middle-class Church. Analyzing the 1972-2006 cumulative General Social Survey data, we show that net of all other factors low-income white Catholics attend church less often than other white Catholics, although social integration mechanisms significantly moderate the effects of income. Additional analyses suggest that the effects of income on church attendance are greatest for the younger white Catholic cohort. In contrast, the role of income in Latino Catholics' attendance is relatively weak. In our conclusion, we attempt to integrate our most puzzling finding--having children in the home does not increase the church attendance of low-income white Catholics--with our main theoretical line of argument concerning the central role of social integration in understanding the impact of income on religious participation. (Contains 17 notes, 4 tables, and 5 figures.)

The present study examined whether declines in religiousness across adolescence precede religious deidentification in young adulthood. Data came from the National Study of Youth and Religion. Participants were religiously affiliated for the first three waves of the longitudinal study (N = 1144). Latent growth curve models found significant declines across adolescence in church attendance, prayer, scripture study, religious importance, and spirituality, whereas doubt was stable across time. Then, logistic regression models specified the latent intercepts and slopes as predictors of later (Wave 4) deidentification. Significant negative links were found for the intercepts and slopes on church attendance, prayer, scripture study, religious importance, and spirituality. For doubt, a significant, positive link was found for the intercept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]