Global Studies of Religiosity and Spirituality: A Systematic Review for Geographic and Topic Scopes

Patricia Snell Herzog

doi:10.3390/rel11080399

Abstract

This paper advances the global study of religiosity by conducting a systematic review of the geographic scope, religious traditions, levels of analysis, and topics investigated within contemporary scientific studies of religion, paying particular attention to intersections with generosity. The analysis builds upon a meta-analysis of 30 years of scientific studies of religion that was published ten years ago and engages a similar framework to analyze the most recent ten years of research on religiosity and spirituality. Specifically, this analysis codes for the potential for Western-centrism, Christian-centrism, and congregational-centrism, all while attending to ways to study the potential intersection between religiosity and generosity, especially during the formative youth development life stage. Two data sources inform this analysis: the international data catalog of the Association for Religious Research Archives (ARDA) and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR). The results indicate that centrism remains, though perhaps to a lesser extent than in the previous decades, with the notable exception of a remaining inequality in the geographic scope. Implications for research are discussed, including practical implications to implementing a better geo-tagging process to more overtly identify the scope of data and make U.S. scope less implicit.

Highlights

This paper aims to advance global studies of religiosity and spirituality, and their intersection.Within the United States, at least, many studies have established a link between religiosity and generosity during the formative years of child and youth development
The causal directions are complex in this relationship: people could learn to give through religious experiences, or people who are more inclined to give could select into religious participation as part of a broader prosocial orientation
The findings of this review indicate that several centrist trends and inequities persist and continue to plague the scientific study of religion, highlighting the need for more critical attention

Summary

Introduction

This paper aims to advance global studies of religiosity and spirituality, and their intersection.Within the United States, at least, many studies have established a link between religiosity and generosity during the formative years of child and youth development. Americans explain how they learned to give, they often refer retroactively to key experiences during their childhood or adolescence when they observed people giving within a religious setting, or describe having seen their parents be religious and participate in giving in generous ways, to religious or other causes (e.g., Herzog and Price 2016). The causal directions are complex in this relationship: people could learn to give through religious experiences, or people who are more inclined to give could select into religious participation as part of a broader prosocial orientation. Being precise in identifying the presence, or lack of presence, of a causal relationship between religiosity and generosity often requires scholars to distinguish religious forces from other social forces. There are distinctions between studies that conceive of religiosity as the primary independent variable that predicts social outcomes, versus a non-religious social force as the primary independent variable that predicts religious outcomes

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