The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (28 page)

tural and cultural circumstances (for example, Gallagher and Smith, 1999). It

remains to be seen how profound an effect some of these religious transforma-

tions will have on the religious landscape. Meanwhile, work along these lines is helping to break down old categories of thinking, to retheorize religious change, and to track novel expressions of religious faith and practice.

Religious Pluralization

Pluralization

The USA is now undergoing a pluralization of religions, particularly in urban

areas, which is made complex by issues of race and ethnicity, social class,

subcultural identity, and generational change. The waves of ``new immigrant

groups'' have arrived in North America since the USA and Canada lifted restric-

tion on non-European immigration in the mid-1960s. These groups often carry

with them the native (and sometimes missionary-planted) religions of their

homelands. The substantially increased presence and visibility of Salvadoran

Catholics, East Indian Hindus, Korean Presbyterians, Cambodian Buddhists,

Pakistani Muslims, and so on is transforming and complexifying the US religious

landscape. The simple days of Protestant, Catholic, or Jew are gone. And a new

surge of sociological research is examining the implications of this new religious pluralization in the USA.

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Recent scholarship by Warner and Wittner (1998), Stevens-Arroyo and col-

leagues (Stevens-Arroyo and Cadena, 1995) at the Program for the Analysis of

Religion Among Latinas/os at the City University of New York, and an ongoing

project by Helen Rose Ebaugh at the University of Houston (Ebaugh and

Chafetz, 2000) suggests that religion plays a varied and vital role for new

immigrants. The new immigration has brought greater religious pluralism to

North America. Now mosques, temples, and ashrams sit alongside Protestant

and Catholic churches in many parts of the country. However, it has not brought

as much pluralism as many scholars suspect. This is partly because the vast

majority of new immigrants to North America are at least nominally Christian.

Much of this is because of the large waves of immigration from Latin America

and the Philippines ± both predominantly Catholic. But even immigrants from

Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East are disproportionately Christian. Per-

secuted religious minorities such as Jews, Ahmadia Muslims, and Bahais are

also overrepresented. Thus, even with the new immigration, Kosmin and Lach-

man's (1993) National Survey of Religious Identification found 1.9 percent of

Americans stating their religion as Jewish, and only 0.76 percent of Americans

identifying with another specific non-Christian religious tradition (Muslim,

Buddhist, Hindu, etc.). The Adolescent Health Survey of high school students

gives similar results.

Religious affiliation helps immigrants to adapt to US life and preserve key

elements of their cultures. However, religious traditions also often transform in the process. In most groups, religiosity increases after immigration. Groups also generally increase lay involvement and become more intentional ± for example,

children do not automatically pick up Hinduism from North American culture

and so must be carefully instructed. Gender roles within religious groups also

often change. In some groups (for example, Latin American Pentecostal con-

verts), women gain more functional power; in others, the involvement of women

is restricted. Among Indian Thomas Christians, men often counteract their

decline in social status relative to their wives in the general society by maintaining stricter control of church leadership (Warner and Wittner, 1998). One of the most difficult problems for immigrant congregations is bridging the gap between

the first and second generations. In churches, mosques, and temples that do not

successfully bridge this gap, the young often leave their parents' faith. Tensions also develop between earlier and later waves of immigrants and between immigrants and their host religious denominations. Thus immigrant congregations

provide a fascinating laboratory to study cultural and institutional change, and the selective process of cultural resistance and assimilation.

Yet immigration is not just a North American issue. Many Muslims, Hindus,

and Buddhists have migrated to Europe, Latin America, and former British

colonies around the world. Indian, Filipino, Korean, European, and North

American workers also migrate to the oil rich Middle East. And wars, famines,

and natural disasters force major cross-national migrations around the world.

However, it is still unclear if religious groups play a similarly vital role for these immigrants and migrants. Future research should analyze such things as religion's possible influence on who migrates and to where, and how the religious

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context of host societies influences immigrant response. For example, does the

religiosity of immigrants increase after migration everywhere, or is this particularly true in more religiously active societies like the USA?

There are also some weaknesses in the literature on new immigrant groups. In

the past, research has been based almost exclusively on either small qualitative studies or quantitative data with awkward samples. Getting a national sample of

small groups has been difficult; thus most scholars have used convenience

samples, snowball samples, or samples of ethnic names in a telephone book.

Fortunately, Guillermina Jasso and colleagues are now using administrative

Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) records to get a nationally repres-

entative sample of new immigrants to the USA for their New Immigrants Survey.

This will help scholars to determine the actual religious composition of US

immigrant groups and how this changes over time. Another weakness in this

field is that the research has not generally been comparative. Researchers have

not typically compared the same group of immigrants moving to two different

countries, or gone back to the immigrants' place of origin to see how their

religious traditions have changed.

Religion

Religion and Health

Although long neglected, research on the relationship between religion and

health is growing rapidly. Much research suggests that religiosity has a consistent, moderate, positive influence on life expectancy, health, psychological wellbeing, and recovery from illnesses and surgery (for example, Ellison and Levin,

1998; Sherkat and Ellison, 1999). These salutary effects are consistent across

several hundred studies and persist despite an impressive array of statistical

controls for social ties, physical mobility, health behavior, and socio-demo-

graphics. They are consistent for a wide variety of illnesses and surgeries, for multiple age groups, social classes, races, ethnicities, and nationalities ± although most of this research has been done in North America and Europe. The positive

impact of religiosity seems greatest for the elderly and African Americans, but

does not vary much by gender. There may also be some variation by religious

tradition, as some studies suggest that certain conservative religious groups have greater positive health outcomes and greater life satisfaction (Ellison and Levin, 1998). Generally, church attendance has the greatest positive impact, although

private prayer, subjective importance of religion, and religious coping strategies often have additional positive influence. Greater social support, more satisfying family relationships, and healthier behavior (for example, less smoking, alcohol abuse, and risky sexual behavior) account for some but not all of this positive

impact. Scholars have begun to analyze a number of other possible mechanisms,

such as the possible impact of religious meaning systems on stress.

Of course, not all forms of religiosity promote health and psychological well-

being. A significant amount of research focuses on abusive churches, ``toxic

faith,'' and maladaptive religious coping strategies. And theorists like Sigmund Freud (1927), Albert Ellis (1992), and Nathaniel Branden (1994) have argued

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Christian Smith and Robert D. Woodberry

that religion is neurotic and damaging to self-esteem and self-efficacy. Most of this research, however, is based on anecdotal evidence and non-random samples.

The overwhelming empirical evidence suggests that these cases are the exception

rather than the rule (Gorsuch, 1988; Ellison and Levin, 1998).

However, there remain some important weaknesses in the field of health and

religion. First, almost all the research has been done in North America and

Europe, where Christian and Jewish traditions predominate. More data need

to be collected to see if this impact is consistent across other religious traditions.

Second, the generic religion questions on most surveys prevent scholars from

modeling many possible causal mechanisms. Fortunately, researchers associated

with the National Institute on Aging and Fetzer Institute (Idler et al., 1997) are currently developing better measures, and some appear on the 1998 General

Social Survey. Third, most of the research only looks at the direct impact of

religiosity, while controlling for social support, health behavior, and so on.

However, much of religion's impact may be indirect (for example, through

greater social support). With structural equations modeling, researchers could

model both the direct and indirect impact of religiosity and use better latent

measures of religious variables. Finally, because few longitudinal surveys include questions about religion on early waves, most of the conclusions are based on

cross-sectional evidence. This makes it difficult to control for selection bias ±

perhaps the type of people who will be more healthy also choose to be more

religious. It also means that researchers cannot measure the cumulative impact

of religion, since they only have a snapshot of respondents' religiosity at one

point of time. This is equivalent to knowing how many cigarettes someone

smokes at the time of a survey, but not knowing how many he or she smoked

previously. What researchers need is the religious equivalent to packs smoked

per number of years. Duke sociologist Linda George (1999) and others are

currently developing retrospective measures to gather this information. If reli-

gion's impact is so consistent with such weak measures of cumulative religiosity, it will likely be stronger with better measures.

Conservative Protestantism

Protestantism in the United States

States

Recently, scholars have carried out much interesting work about conservative

Protestants (CPs) in the USA ± that is, evangelicals, fundamentalists, pentecos-

tals, and charismatics. To be clear about terms, ``conservative'' here refers to theological, not economic or political conservativism ± CPs are typically more

economically liberal with regard to government spending for the poor, for

example, than are theologically liberal Protestants (Iannaccone, 1993; Clydes-

dale, 1999; Davis and Robinson, 1999). Long thought by scholars to be lan-

guishing in the backwaters of American religion, American CPs have become

more socially mobile and culturally and politically visible since the 1970s.

Inheritors of a religious tradition that consciously resisted the naturalism and liberalism of modernity, CPs represent an attempt to maintain a more intense

religiosity and theological orthodoxy than much of American mainline religion.

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As a group, CPs have higher levels of church attendance, attach greater import-

ance to faith, and also are more successful in membership recruitment and

retention than most other American religious groups. And these characteristics

help to make CPs significantly different in a variety of other ways. For example, when it comes to family, CPs are strict about premarital sex, generally marry

earlier than other Americans, have higher marital fertility rates, and report

higher levels of marital happiness and adjustment (see Woodberry and Smith,

1998). CPs tend to emphasize well defined, gendered, non-egalitarian parenting

roles, and are more likely than other Americans to endorse and use corporal

punishment of children. But they are also less likely to yell at, more likely to express verbal and physical affection to, and more likely to spend greater time

with their children (Wilcox, 1998). CPs are more likely to say they support

patriarchal marital roles; but as a group they also comprise greater diversity on gender attitudes than other Americans, and have more egalitarian marriages in

practice than their ideology would suggest (Woodberry and Smith, 1998; Galla-

gher and Smith, 1999; Sherkat and Ellison, 1999). Similarly, studies show that

CPs are also distinct when it comes to political attitudes and behaviors, work-

place ethics, volunteering behavior, rates of giving to the poor, and other issues of social and policy importance. Beyond merely demonstrating the sustained

social influence of a particular religious tradition, studies of American CPs

reveal interesting and important larger processes of collective identity construction, subculture formation, and the selective resistance to modernity (Smith et

al., 1998).

Tolerance and Prejudice

As societies become increasingly globalized and pluralistic, religion's effects on tolerance and prejudice grow ever more important to understand. In the USA,