ABSTRACT How do governments’ policies toward religion impact the relationship between citizens and civil society? A large body of literature examines the effect of social capital on democratic governance. Studies of State Religious Policy, or SRP, however, have shown complex and potentially contradictory effects on different types of social capital. Focusing on participation as a particular aspect of social capital, I argue that both supportive and restrictive policies toward religion reduce religious adherents’ incentives to participate in both religious institutions and civil society as a whole. I test this theory using a multilevel analysis of Christian‐majority democracies. I find that both supportive and restrictive policies reduce the effect of religious adherence on service attendance, membership in religious institutions, and participation in civil society organizations. Restrictive policies consistently show stronger effects than supportive ones. Robustness tests indicate that these findings hold in any sample of democratic countries but are weaker or nonexistent when nondemocratic countries are included.

ABSTRACT This study examines how the reputation of Christian churches is configured, and which sociodemographic variables and experiences (personal or mediated) relate to it. It provides in‐depth insights into how the Swiss population evaluates Roman Catholic, Reformed Protestant, and Evangelical churches on the basis of various theories, such as organizational reputation, media, and social identity theories, embedded in a religious sociological context. Data from representative online surveys conducted in 2022 and 2023 show that perceived identity and attractiveness are the most critical factors for a general organizational reputation in a religious context. The results show that online and offline news media significantly influence the reputation formation of the Roman Catholic Church. However, social media has a less significant influence on churches in general. They also show that Protestants and Catholics rate each other better than Evangelicals, and religiosity is the most decisive factor in rating churches favorably.

ABSTRACT Explanations for veiling among Muslim women fall into two main clusters of ethnographic studies. The first, from the 1990s, sees veiling as an accommodation strategy through which women navigate tensions between autonomy and patriarchy or subvert such norms to cultivate piety—though the evidence still reflects fundamentalism's influence. The second, emerging after the 2011 Arab Spring, focuses on women doffing the veil. Viewed together, the two reflect the spirit of their times: veiling aligned with the rise of fundamentalism, unveiling with its decline. Using a clash‐of‐values framework, this paper analyzes data from 10 Middle Eastern countries and among adherents of the Abrahamic faiths. Findings show veiling preference skews more conservative in fundamentalist contexts, while liberal ones support more relaxed dress codes. Sartorial conservatism weakens with greater female employment and social media access, but strengthens in countries with more men and younger populations. At the individual level, conservative veiling correlates with stronger fundamentalist orientation, religiosity, and support for gender segregation, but weakens among those committed to liberal values or with higher socioeconomic status. Since clothing projects power, future research should examine how the nature of political power mediates religion–clothing dynamics.

ABSTRACTThe scholarly study of religion has experienced substantial change over the past quarter‐century. Central among these was recognizing religions as existing within and shaped by spatial relations—a.k.a. religious studies’ “spatial turn.” Engaging geographic theory offered several benefits, particularly concerning interreligious conflicts, religions and secularisms, and religions’ intersections with other, seemingly divorced facets of lives and livelihoods. Yet religion's spatial turn remains incomplete. One striking omission is that of scale. A nuanced concept central to understanding spatialities and their relations, geographers have recently centered on scale and multiscalar relations when theorizing spatialities. Greater engagement with scale and especially multiscalarity would similarly benefit the scholarly study of religion.

Abstract This study examines the relationship between Christian nationalism—a political theology and cultural framework that seeks to amalgamate the Christian faith and a country's political life and privilege Christianity in the public square over other faith traditions—and attacks against religious minorities in the United States. Some Christian nationalists believe that it is justifiable to undertake violent actions in order to realize the goals of Christian nationalism. We theorize that the political empowerment of Christian nationalist ideology in the form of politicians expressing Christian nationalist sentiments corresponds to physical attacks on religious minorities carried out by self‐professing Christians. We test this theory using a cross‐sectional, time‐series analysis of antiminority violence in the United States. The results provide robust support for our theory.

Abstract How COVID‐19 economic aid should be distributed continues to be an important societal question, with relevance to current and future public health policy. We argue that religious identities condition the influence of broader political context on COVID‐19 policy preferences, serving as social conduits through which political attitudes are transmitted. We analyze original U.S. survey data (N = 989), to examine support for inclusive (i.e., including undocumented immigrants) COVID‐19 economic aid. We find that individuals’ religious identities interact with county‐level political context to influence COVID‐19 policy preferences. Born‐Again Christian individuals are more strongly affected by conservative political climates compared to their religious and nonreligious peers, after controlling for individual political characteristics and a host of sociodemographic factors. Findings support the conceptualization of conservative religious identities as social conduits for political messaging and show the importance of religion to how policy opinions are shaped by the broader environment.

Abstract In western societies, secularization in the sense of declining individual religiosity is mainly caused by cohort replacement. Every cohort is somewhat less religious than its predecessor, indicating that religious transmission is incomplete. The puzzle is just what causes this incomplete transmission and whether there is one or a restricted number of factors that mainly explain the process. Our aim in this article is to establish, describe, and explain this lack of religious transmission in West Germany, comparing parents’ and children's level of church attendance and their determinants over time. We use a data set of more than 8,000 parent‐child pairs across four cohorts from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP) and test whether indicators measuring parent attributes, family relations, or parental context influence the attendance gap. As expected, we find a substantial parent‐child attendance gap. However, we do not find factors that mainly explain the process. Only family disruption and the percentage of nones in the state slightly increase the attendance gap, but effect sizes are small. Our surprising result is that secularization happens largely independently of attributes of the parents and their immediate surroundings. We discuss how this finding may give credibility to new theories of secular transition and present an agenda for future research on religious transmission.

Abstract Although public perceptions of science and religion are the focus of a large body of scholarship, we know much less about religious leaders’ views of science and its relationship to religion. Using data from a national survey of religious leaders in the United States, our latent class analysis finds three underlying groups of clergy based on their engagement with science and their beliefs about its interface with religion. Those with a modern clerical perspective on science and religion (40 percent) accommodate mainstream scientific theories alongside their religious beliefs and they discuss science frequently with congregants. Those with a traditional clerical perspective (29 percent) are dismissive of mainstream scientific theories although they rarely discuss science with congregants. Those with a critical clerical perspective (31 percent) are also skeptical of science, yet these clergy frequently discuss science with their congregants. We also find that these latent classes cut across religious traditions and political ideologies and are associated with clergy's social views and political participation. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings in light of religious leaders’ roles in their congregations and communities.