Sacred Patterns
The Stalled Revolution versus Secularization: The Dynamic Relationship between Gender Attitudes and Religiosity
Elizabeth McElroy, Abby Young & Cyrus Schleifer
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, September 2025
Abstract:
Scholars have theorized that as societies move toward gender equity, they move away from religious institutions. Research has relied on cohort turnover and unidirectional models to test these societal transformations; however, these approaches fail to recognize within-person change and mutually reinforcing dynamics between these two social processes. Religiosity may delay a person’s adoption of egalitarian gender attitudes, but gender egalitarianism may also accelerate their religious disengagement. To test these competing hypotheses, the authors use two nationally representative panel datasets (the National Study of Youth and Religion and the General Social Survey panels) and latent outcome cross-lagged panel models to compare the influence of gender attitudes and religiosity as individuals change over time. The authors find that a person’s gender attitudes strongly shape changes to later religiosity across all age groups, whereas religiosity is a far less reliable predictor of later gender attitudes. The key exception is among young women, for whom religiosity counteracts the trend toward gender egalitarian attitudes.
Trends in Circumcision Among Newborn Males in the US
Ping Yang et al.
JAMA Pediatrics, forthcoming
Methods: This cross-sectional study used the 2012 to 2022 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), a nationally representative dataset of US pediatric hospitalizations. The analytical subpopulation included all discharges of male neonates aged 0 to 28 days except those with coagulopathies, penile anomalies, or prematurity. The outcome was NMC [neonatal male circumcision] identified by International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. The Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board deemed this study exempt from review because it used deidentified data. We followed the STROBE reporting guideline. All analyses accounted for the stratified, 1-stage, cluster survey design. Discharge weights were applied to generate national estimates. The unit of analysis was a hospital discharge. Annual inpatient NMC prevalence was calculated overall and stratified by patient and hospital characteristics. We used binomial regression to estimate prevalence difference (PD) between 2012 and 2022. Data were analyzed from February to May 2025 using Stata/MP 18 (StataCorp).
Results: This study included over 1.5 million hospitalizations of male neonates (aged 0-28 days) each year, ranging from 1 816 129 hospitalizations in 2012 to 1 655 434 in 2022. From 2012 to 2022, the overall prevalence of hospitalizations with an NMC decreased significantly from 54.1% to 49.3% (PD, −4.8%; 95% CI, −6.9% to −2.6%). Decreases were observed across most patient and hospital subgroups. In 2012, NMC prevalence was 39.7% among Asian or Pacific Islander, 64.9% among Black, 21.2% among Hispanic, 44.2% among Native American, 65.3% among White, and 48.7% among other neonates. White neonates had a significant decline (PD, −5.3%; 95% CI, −7.4% to −3.2%), while prevalence among Black and Hispanic neonates remained stable. Neonates from the highest-income zip codes and those with private insurance had the highest NMC prevalence but experienced the largest reduction. Significant declines in NMC prevalence were observed across all Census regions, with the Midwest maintaining the highest prevalence (68.5%) and the West the lowest (19.7%) in 2022. Significant declines in NMC prevalence were also observed among White neonates across all regions, with the West showing the lowest prevalence (34.3% in 2012 and 26.2% in 2022) and the largest decrease (PD, −8.1%; 95% CI, −13.0% to −3.2%). NMC prevalence remained stable among Black and Hispanic neonates across regions.
Sacred speech: Analyzing the influence of congressional leadership on religious rhetoric
Julianna Thomson & Alena Smith
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Religious language plays a pivotal role in shaping political behavior and attitudes. This study investigates how representatives utilize religious rhetoric when addressing the House floor and their constituents, and how this language is influenced by congressional leadership. The inauguration of openly religious Mike Johnson as House Speaker in 2023 provides a unique case to explore these dynamics. Using difference-in-differences and triple difference models, we analyze House speeches and newsletters from before and after Johnson became House Speaker to assess changes in religious speech between Republican and Democratic representatives. Our findings reveal a significant increase in newsletters using religious language sent out by Republicans after Johnson became Speaker, while religious speech on the House floor remains unchanged. Overall, our findings contribute to the literature on the relationship between religion, partisanship, and Congressional leadership, highlighting the potential influence of the Speaker of the House on religious communication to constituents.
Life loses some meaning after leaving religion
Daryl Van Tongeren et al.
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, forthcoming
Abstract:
Religion is a prominent source of meaning in life. It can provide people with a sense of coherence, significance, and purpose. Accordingly, does religious deidentification affect a sense of meaning in life and purpose in life? We analyzed six waves of cohort panel data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N = 46,672) to estimate the causal effects of religious deidentification on meaning and purpose in life. Participants were included if they completed Wave 10 (years 2018–2019), and meaning of life outcomes were measured in Wave 15 (years 2023–2024). Using semiparametric machine learning, controlling for baseline confounding in the first wave and time-varying confounding for the subsequent four waves, and using inverse probability of censoring weights for attrition, we estimated meaning outcomes at the end of study in response to three “modified treatment policies”: steady religious for all exposure waves, steady secular for all exposure waves, and religious dones -- religious for the first two exposure waves and secular for the final two exposure waves. The contrast between steady religious and religious dones provides a causal effect estimate for religious deidentification. We find that religious deidentification results in lower meaning and purpose compared with the steadily religious; however religious dones remain higher in meaning than their secular counterparts. These findings offer the first quantitative demonstration that religious deidentification reduces meaning and purpose compared with remaining religious and furthermore supports a religious residue hypothesis in which echoes of religion remain evident after leaving religion.
God and Gold: The Moderating Role of Countries’ Historical Religious Heritage in the Income–Life Satisfaction Relationship
Ángel Sánchez-Rodríguez & Michael Harris Bond
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, October 2025, Pages 779-796
Abstract:
Household income is an important predictor of that individual’s satisfaction with life, but the ecological-cultural context of one’s society can qualify the strength of this relationship. In this research, we examine the extent to which qualitative differences in a country’s religious heritage moderate the strength of the relationship between household income and life satisfaction. In exploring this question, we used data from 86 countries, grouped into five main religious traditions, that is, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Buddhist, and Muslim. Multilevel interactions showed that the positive association between household income and life satisfaction was stronger than average in Protestant countries, but weaker than average in Catholic and Orthodox countries. We also found main effects of religious heritage on life satisfaction, indicating that countries with Catholic and Orthodox religious traditions reported higher average life satisfaction than the average of all countries, Buddhist countries showed average levels, whereas Muslim and Protestant countries reported lower life satisfaction. Even after accounting for potential confounders — including national income, economic inequality, religiosity, democracy, and environmental variables — most effects remain statistically significant. We discuss these findings in terms of possible institutional developments found in countries with different religious ideologies concerning household income and how those ideologies may support socialization processes relating material prosperity to personal life satisfaction.
Institutional Decline and Resilient Belief: Understanding Secularization in Latin America
Matthew Blanton
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, September 2025
Abstract:
A large body of literature analyzes trends of religious decline across Western Europe and North America. Often rooted in secularization theory — the idea that modernization reduces religious beliefs and practice — this research lacks attention to global, comparative contexts. In this study, the author addresses that gap by examining religious trends spanning two decades across 17 Latin American countries to analyze changes in religious affiliation, church attendance, and religious importance. The author demonstrates that institutional religiosity, measured by affiliation and church attendance, is declining, whereas personal religiosity, measured by religious importance, remains resilient and is even increasing. This fragmented secularization is distinct from patterns observed in Western Europe and the United States. Further analyses highlight additional differences, showing that religious dimensions in Latin America are less tightly correlated and that the religiously unaffiliated maintain stronger religious beliefs and practices than their counterparts in the West. To account for this divergence, the author integrates insights from the neosecularization paradigm with Latin American theories of popular religiosity and lived religion. This synthesis provides a more precise framework for understanding secularization in Latin America and offers a model for applying secularization theory to non-Western contexts, in which modernization unfolds in diverse ways.
Is Ethnic Violence Self-Perpetuating? Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Hindu-Muslim Riots in India
Sam van Noort & Tanushree Goyal
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ethnic riots tend to occur in the same places over time. We study whether this serial correlation exists because ethnic riots tend to be self-perpetuating or because both past and future riots are caused by the same underlying factors that persist through time. To answer this question, we leverage the fact that the timing of major Hindu festivals in India is exogenously determined by the lunar calendar and that when a major Hindu festival happens to fall on a Friday — the principal day Muslims attend mosque — the likelihood of a Hindu-Muslim riot increases significantly. Using this instrument, we find that the well-documented serial correlation in Hindu-Muslim riots disappears entirely (T = 1950–2006). This suggests that the observed recurrence of riots is not driven by the riots themselves, but by underlying conditions that remain unaddressed. Once these confounding factors are accounted for, we find no “additional” effect of past riots on future riots.
(Un)holy Trade: Ecclesiastical Slavery, French Missionaries, and Catholic Expansion in the Early U.S. West
Gabrielle Guillerm
Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 2025, Pages 363-392
Abstract:
This article explores the enslaving practices of Catholic priests and nuns in the American West in the early republic. Through a study of Catholic correspondence and financial records, the study reveals how Catholic missionary leaders — who were predominantly French — regarded the holding and trading of enslaved people as a holy endeavor fostering the expansion and prestige of the U.S. Catholic Church in the West and thereby contributed to the dynamic and dehumanizing growth of the economy of slavery in the antebellum era. The research underscores how the legacy of slavery in the French Atlantic, together with distinctive Catholic features such as the sacrality of Catholic marriages and the status of nuns, uniquely influenced the growth and shape of ecclesiastical slavery in the West. By doing so, this article demonstrates the need to move beyond the prevailing scholarly focus on Catholic institutional slavery in North America, which is traditionally centered on Anglo-Catholic institutions in the East Coast.
The unequal spirit of the Protestant Reformation: Particularism and wealth distribution in early modern Germany
Felix Schaff
Journal of Economic Growth, September 2025, Pages 417-460
Abstract:
This paper assesses the impact of the Protestant Reformation on wealth distribution and inequality in confessionally divided Germany, between 1400 and 1800. The Reformation expanded social welfare, but provided it in a particularistic way to “deserving" poor and natives only. This gave Protestantism an ambiguous character in terms of redistribution and its impact on inequality. I develop a theoretical framework of this trade-off between welfare expansion and particularistic provision, and test its implications empirically, using a difference-in-differences and an instrumental variable strategy. In line with the theoretical framework, the analysis documents that the Reformation exacerbated inequality overall by making marginal poor people relatively poorer. This increase in inequality was driven by the introduction of new particularistic poor relief policies in Protestant communities. Economic growth was unlikely to be large enough to compensate poor strata for their losses. Protestantism emerges as an underappreciated driver of preindustrial inequality, long before the onset of industrialisation and modern economic growth.