Religious Demands Research Articles

The Hollywood shtetl

■ This article analyzes the relation between the development of religious institutions and neighborhood formation in the main Jewish Orthodox neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Melrose-La Brea neighborhood, an ethnically Jewish area since the 1930s, was transformed by religious place entrepreneurs from the East Coast in the 1970s. The emerging Orthodox community, however, was not principally populated by converting secular Jews. Instead, by developing prestigious institutions, religious place entrepreneurs made it into a viable destination for Orthodox Jews across the United States. Contrary to ‘supply side’ models developed in the sociology of religion, I then argue that institutional ‘supply’ may be successful without producing local ‘religious demand’. Moving from a market metaphor to examine the role of far reaching networks, I contend that the success of religious place entrepreneurs in this case emerged from the relation between institutional development, the production of neighborhood identity, and population movements within an ethnic geography.

Religious Market Competition in a Richer World

Economic growth has not led to a decline in religion despite past predictions that it would. Using a formal model of religious competition, I show how economic growth produces counteracting effects on religious activity in an open religious market, and that it has little effect in a religious market that is already secularized due to regulations that prohibit religious competition or in a highly religious market with regulations that inhibit secular activities. Theories predicting the decline of religion due to rising opportunity costs of religious demand and supply ignore countervailing influences.

The Thai Muslims and Participation in the Democratic Process: The Case of 2007 Elections

Thailand is a country where Buddhist political culture forms and shapes all activities in the country. This is reflected in the functioning of the Thai polity where the administrative structure functions in a secular pattern while the ideological dimension of the state is rooted in a religious/Buddhist political culture. Non-Buddhist minorities in Thailand such as Muslims and others are allowed free space to practice, express and make religious demands in the political arena of the country. The semi-secular and semi-democratic model of Thai political system has allowed the Thai Muslim minority to define, shape and build their own communal development within Thai polity. Hence, the social-political relations of mutual religious coexistence between the Thai Muslims and Thai Buddhists. The Thai Muslim community is a varied one. Broadly, there are two types of Muslims in Thailand: the Thai-speaking integrated Muslims found in the upper South, Central, North and northeastern parts of Thailand and the unintegrated Malay-speaking Muslims of the deep southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. Yet they all have engaged in the democratization process of Thailand since it is becoming a constitutional monarchy in 1932. This paper looks into how the Thai Muslim minority had engaged in Thai democracy from the point of view of their religious identity in a Buddhist majority country.

Privatisation of religious public education in Israel: enhancing parents’ educational goals or fostering segregation?

Privatisation of the state religious education in Israel raises controversy within Israeli society. It is argued that privatisation leads to the abolishing of equality between students, and accusations are heard about the use of religious arguments to create elitist and selective schools. Questions regarding privatisation, the extent and importance of religious versus science studies were examined. Two of the major findings were that almost one‐third of the students who comprise the religious educational system in Israel came from non‐religious households and a gap was found between parents’ demands for privatisation and their educational goals. Social economic status rather than religious demands were found as enhancing school segregation. The need for reorganisation of the religious public education in Israel is discussed.

Speaking for Islam

Unexpectedly, one of the marking features of democratization in Niger has been the rise of a variety of Islamic discourses. They focus on the separation between religion and the state and, more precisely, the way it is manifested through the French model of laïcité, which democratization has adopted in Niger. For many Muslim actors, laïcité amounts to a marginalization of Islamic values and a negation of Islam. This article present three voices: the Collaborators, the Moderates, and the Despisers. Each represents a trend that seeks to influence the state’s political and ideological makeup. Although the ulama in general remain critical vis-à-vis the state’s political and institutional transformation, not all of them reject the principle of the separation between religion and state. The Collaborators suggest cooperation between the religious authority and the political one, the Moderates insist on the necessity for governance to accommodate the people’s will and visions, and the Despisers reject the underpinning liberalism that voids religious authority and demand a total re-Islamization. I argue that what is at stake here is less the separation between state and religion than the modality of this separation and its impact on religious authority. The targets, tones, and justifications of the discourses I explore are evidence of the limitations of a democratization project grounded in laïcité. Thus in place of a secular democratization, they propose a conservative democracy based on Islam and its demands for the realization of the common good.

Speaking for Islam

Unexpectedly, one of the marking features of democratization in Niger has been the rise of a variety of Islamic discourses. They focus on the separation between religion and the state and, more precisely, the way it is manifested through the French model of laïcité, which democratization has adopted in Niger. For many Muslim actors, laïcité amounts to a marginalization of Islamic values and a negation of Islam. This article present three voices: the Collaborators, the Moderates, and the Despisers. Each represents a trend that seeks to influence the state’s political and ideological makeup. Although the ulama in general remain critical vis-à-vis the state’s political and institutional transformation, not all of them reject the principle of the separation between religion and state. The Collaborators suggest cooperation between the religious authority and the political one, the Moderates insist on the necessity for governance to accommodate the people’s will and visions, and the Despisers reject the underpinning liberalism that voids religious authority and demand a total re-Islamization. I argue that what is at stake here is less the separation between state and religion than the modality of this separation and its impact on religious authority. The targets, tones, and justifications of the discourses I explore are evidence of the limitations of a democratization project grounded in laïcité. Thus in place of a secular democratization, they propose a conservative democracy based on Islam and its demands for the realization of the common good.

The plot to kill God: findings from the Soviet experiment in secularization

List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments 1. The Great Secularization Experiment 2. Dreams of Secularization 3. The Atheist Crusade 4. Shutting Off Religious Supply 5. Hunting for Religious Demand 6. After Atheism 7. The Social and Political Resilience of God Notes Bibliography Index

Live and Let Buy? Consumerism, Secularization, and Liberalism

Religious values and norms often clash with the hedonistic consumer when the global market economy frees itself from prior constraints, religious limitations included, in favor of rules of supply and demand. Accordingly, the advent of the global economy and consumer are powerful secularizers of the public sphere that seem to erode the hold of religion on economic life and, possibly, on social and political life. Shopping, as Benjamin Barber notes, little tolerance for blue laws, whether dictated by pubclosing British paternalism, Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodox, or no-Sunday liquorsale Massachusetts Puritanism.1 Secularism is often associated with the process of modernization and with the modus vivendi entailed in the separation of church and state that underscores liberal values and democracy. However, while practices associated with consumer are secularizing the public sphere, these practices may be separate from a comprehensive and principled secularism and from embedded liberal values. Specifically, the relation between secular practices, underscored by economic incentives, and deeper secular commitments associated with struggles for church-state separation and with liberal values could be rather weak. Consequently, the rise of secularism based on practices of everyday life may be dissociated from the rise of a secular society with liberal values such as religious freedom, tolerance towards minorities, and commitment to equality. The term culture war has been used to describe renewed religious-secular struggles in various countries over different spheres of contemporary life politics, economy, family, education, media, arts, and law. Yet this description, as elaborated below, falls short of capturing the complexities of religious-secular struggles, the secularizing impact of a globalizing market economy, and, most important, the implications for liberal values and democracy at large. The global market economy and consumer culture, argues Barber, has little patience for religious demands but also a limited commitment to democratic values.2

The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization

The aim of this book is both commendable and ambitious, in that it attempts “to take what historians and area specialists currently know about the Soviet Union and apply it to theoretical debates in the social scientific study of religion” (p. 15). In particular, it suggests that what is described as the “Secularization Experiment” tested the extent to which religious vitality or decline are a product of “ignorance, ritual activity, social institutions, social rewards, salvation incentives, and church-state relationships” (p. 24). In exploring these questions, Froese notes the Soviet assumption that if supply was cut off—in a particularly brutal fashion at times—then religious demand would disappear, as repression got rid of religious “free-riders” and made the costs of belief extremely high. Yet despite this he notes that the one thing the state could not do was remove eternal incentives or promises and that, for a section of the population, these promises ensured the continued survival of religious belief. It is impossible to do justice to all the data and discussion in a short review, but one can perhaps raise questions about several points made in this book. At the most basic level, one has to question some of the figures for religious adherence and belonging used for the Soviet period as the Barrett studies used here for 1970 are at best suggestive, and there is really little reliable data that enables us to understand the evolution of religious belief and identification throughout the Soviet period. Of course, when religion was so brutally persecuted at times it is hard to see how there could be such figures, but without them it is hard to draw firm conclusions about religiosity without extrapolating backwards from post-communist data. There has also been some suggestions that Alexander Yakovlev's accounts of the repression of bishops which are used here are not always reliable—in their reporting of the manner of death not the fact of the murders—and there is an inconsistency between the description of Patriarch Tikhon as being executed some ten years after 1922 and the footnote which more accurately refers to his death in 1925. One also wonders about the capitalization of the Secularization Experiment (and the rather sensationalist ‘plot to kill God’ title) which implies a degree of coherence in policy that was not always evident in practice, beyond a generalized desire to do away with religious belief. Similar problems may apply to discussions of religious revival in the post-Soviet states where the figures indicate a numerical revitalization consequent upon the lifting of repression but do little to indicate a “Great Awakening” style of religious rebirth.

Memorialising Europe

In the economic and political unification process of Europe, the idea of the creation of a pan-European identity was put high on the political agenda. With the failure of this effort, the emphasis shifted to the apparently less fraught concept of 'shared cultural heritage'. This article analyses how the politically guided rediscovery of Europe's past has contributed to the creation of a 'Religion of Heritage', not only by raising up a political altar for cultural heritage, but also through the revitalisation, instrumentalisation and transformation of the Christian heritage, in order to try to memorialise and affirm a collective European identity based on its Christian past. In the context of this process, the network of European pilgrims' ways appears to have been an especially successful performative form of heritage creation, which has both dynamised Christian roots as a relevant trans-European form of civil religion that has taken shape, capitalising on the new religious and spiritual demands created by secularisation, and responded to the demand for shared - and Christian inspired - European values and meanings in times of uncertainty and crisis.

Catholicism as Identity Factor among the French Canadian Minority

The main objective of this article is to illustrate the unceasing relevance of the link between Catholic conservatism and French Canadian identity, especially in the cases of the French minorities of the provinces of New-Brunswick and Manitoba, and, more surprisingly, in the province of Quebec. The unceasing relevance of this link is illustrated with our comparative study of the reactions of these three French communities to immigration and to the secular state’s legal obligation to provide reasonable accommodation towards a number of religious demands. More generally, these case studies will show the importance of religion, not only as an identity factor, but also as an identity marker.

Islam, modernity and education in the Arab States

This paper considers the ways in which Arab education systems have responded to the challenges of modernity alongside framing structures of religion. Focusing mainly on the tertiary education sector, it offers a critical overview of the way in which Arab education authorities have sought, collectively and individually, to address both secular and religious fundamentalist demands. It analyses policy and culture in response to econopolitical change, and to shifting perceptions of the functions of education. Engaging with ideas about the relationship between secularism and modernity, it argues that regional patterns of infrastructural engagement with religion have more to do with politics and power than with ideological foundations of culture and society, and challenges, as others have done, the essentialist association of modernity and secularism.

Reconsidering Work–Life Balance Debates: Challenging Limited Understandings of the ‘Life’ Component in the Context of Ethnic Minority Women's Experiences

This article argues for a broader, more diverse approach to the ‘life’ component of the work–life balance equation. This is discussed within the context of ethnic minority women's experiences of balancing their work and personal life, contending that there are restrictions in our understanding of lives that may fall outside the standard white western model. A key aim of this work is to question existing understandings of work–life balance debates that focus almost exclusively on gender and childcare, ignoring issues around ethnicity, culture and religion. A social constructionist framework was adopted for this study, which acknowledges an interaction between structure, culture and agency. Primary data were collected in the form of semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews with 26 minority female participants, 15 ethnic minority men, eight white women and six white men, all employed across a range of industries and occupations. Although the focus of this paper primarily lies with ethnic minority women's experiences, data from ethnic minority men, white women and men are incorporated in the analysis where appropriate or useful. The empirical data have indicated that both white and ethnic minority women struggle with balancing work and personal life demands to a greater extent than their male counterparts. However, an ethnicity or cultural dimension was apparent, as ethnic minority women often had to deal with additional cultural, community or religious demands. It is argued, nevertheless, that a deeper understanding of the diversity within groups is necessary to avoid essentializing experiences and needs. By acknowledging different forms of life, a more realistic analysis can take place which can inform organizational policy and practice.

Fighting with Faith

A growing literature has started to explore the relationship between religious dimensions and the escalation, duration, and termination of armed conflicts. This study explores the conditions for negotiated settlements. The author argues that if the belligerents' demands are explicitly anchored in a religious tradition, they will come to perceive the conflicting issues as indivisible, and the conflict will be less likely to be settled through negotiations. Utilizing unique data on the primary parties' religious demands and identities, all intrastate conflict-dyads in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 1989-2003, are examined. The study finds that if governments or rebel-groups have made explicit religious claims, these conflict-dyads are significantly less likely than others to be terminated through negotiated settlement. By contrast, whether the primary parties come from different religious traditions does not affect the chances for negotiated settlement.

Remaking Israeli Judaism (review)

Reviewed by: Remaking Israeli Judaism Shlomo Deshen Remaking Israeli Judaism: The Challenge of Shas, by David LehmannBatia Siebzehner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 289 pp. $65.00. The growing research literature on the Israeli Shas phenomenon has been moving over the years from a predominantly political perspective to one focused on it as a socio-religious movement. This volume is part of that wave. The authors do not only address their subject from a broad sociological perspective, but also bring with them expertise in research on Latin American Catholicism and Pentecostalism, and they seek to illuminate the Israeli phenomenon through that experience. The book has an informal ethnographic dimension: over a period of three years the authors visited unspecified numbers of Shas-linked schools, yeshivas, synagogues, study groups, etc., and spoke to activists upon whom they came by “networking.” On the basis of this fieldwork and their reading of the pertinent literature, the authors offer a portrait of Shas which emphasizes its being akin to Evangelist movements, in Jewish terms a “teshuva” movement, of a kind with Habad hasidism. The Shas teshuva movement is linked to ethnic and social resentment. But though both secular and orthodox Ashkenazim have discriminated against Sephardim, the resentment of Shas is focused harshly only upon the secular sector. The reason, the authors suggest, interestingly, is that since relatively few Sephardim in the early decades of the State had personal experience [End Page 245] with orthodox Ashkenazim, they remain to this day relatively unaware of the discrimination practiced in that sector. An interesting finding of the book is that some of the Shas schools, despite the vehement anti-intellectualism of the movement, have modern quality programs in secular subjects such as physical education and science. Also, the authors find, the Shas movement is moderate and gradual in the religious demands it poses to new recruits. Further, in contrast to the situation among Ashkenazic haredim, in Shas returnees are acceptable for positions of prominence and leadership. The authors explain this openness as due to the overall expansiveness of Shas and its consequent need for skilled professionals to man administrative and technical positions (such as in the radio stations affiliated with Shas, and in government positions they command). Similarly, in the area of women’s rights, Shas women, while encouraged to high fertility, are invited to be publicly active for the movement, and also to engage in professional work. The movement is involved in private college-level training facilities (separate for men and women). The book offers many arresting theses based on insights on the Israeli situation, supported by Latin American findings. In both cases, Shas and Latin America, the authors claim, the new religious movements entail the recruits’ joining a new community, eventually severing ties with their community of origin, and in time, becoming heavily dependent on the new community. One aspect of this is marriage at a young age (with the support of the religious community) and concomitant parental disempowerment and attrition of kinship. Another thesis is that new religious recruits will be particularly enthusiastic and committed devotees, because of their dependence on their new community. A further thesis is that in common with evangelical movements world-wide, Shas has a marked hierarchical pattern of authority and a centralized system for the interpretation of religious codes. All these assertions are reasonable in theory, but they invite presentation of rigorous evidence, and that we are not offered in this book. The most sweeping thesis of the study is that “conversion-based movements reshape religion everywhere, including evangelical Christianity, Pentecostalism and Islamic renewal. (p. 3). The universal element of this statement need not concern us, but does it apply to the local Israeli scene, and to Shas in particular? In entitling their book “Remaking Israeli Judaism” and subtitling it “The Challenge of Shas,” the authors demonstrate their conviction that the role of Shas in religious change is indeed pivotal. But the issue might have been explored in greater depth. Granting the force of Shas in Israeli religion and politics, the book exaggerates some points and glosses over many reservations. One, the overall Sephardic proportion of Israeli Jews is probably not [End Page 246] much over one-third...

The Acceptance of Konkokyo, from the Perspective of a Community's Religious Demands(The Missionary Works of Popular Religions in the Prewar Period,Panels)

The Acceptance of Konkokyo, from the Perspective of a Community's Religious Demands(The Missionary Works of Popular Religions in the Prewar Period,Panels)

Le don chrétien et ses retombées sur l’économie dans l’Antiquité tardive

The Christian gift is a response to religious demand, but it is realized in the domain of material exchanges. In this respect it is at the heart of an enquiry concerning the relations between religion and the economy. This article takes into account the Christian gift in all its forms, whether alms, gifts made to the Church for the support of clergy or the poor, sums to be distributed by the churches themselves, or gifts made by Christians for the construction of new buildings. It seeks to understand why it is so difficult to value the economic repercussions of practices which are very widespread. After noting the importance and the limits of a quantitative approach, it considers the gift, first from the point of view of the giver, and, secondly, that of the beneficiary. The economic repercussions of Christian practices of giving are limited; in the first place, on account of the relatively small amounts involved, but also because a large proportion of Christian giving is a substitute for other ways of distributing riches, whose characteristics it shares. In only two domains does Christian giving show any signs of innovation: direct support of the poor, albeit on a scale such that it can have only indirect and limited social effects, and no economic effect at all; and in new practices of communal collection, particularly visible in church construction. The economic repercussions are not negligible, but they are delayed as long as the gift keeps its voluntary character, as it does throughout Late Antiquity.

The Religious Market Model And Conversion: Towards A New Approach

AbstractThe article gives a critical overview of the religious market model to assess its usefulness for analyzing religious conversion in a context of increasing pluralism. The model's central idea is that religious organizations are competing for adherents, who make (rational?) choices from the available options. I first present the main tenets, contributions, and possible short-comings of the religious market model at three different levels of analysis: micro, meso, and macro. The next section describes and assesses the conventional social science approaches to conversion. Then I describe and analyze the approach to religious conversion that follows from the religious market model, as developed in Stark and Finke (Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion, Berkeley etc.: University of California Press 2000, 114–138). I end with my own evaluation of the usefulness of the market model for empirical research in a situation of religious pluralism. The conclusion will sketch the connections between individual religious demand and the supply-side of competing religious organizations.

Explaining a Religious Anomaly: A Historical Analysis of Secularization in Eastern Germany

The sociology of religion is engrossed in a debate concerning the process of secularization. Some theories of secularization hold that religiosity decreases under the effects of modernization. In opposition, supply-side models of religious change maintain that declines in religiosity can be explained only through changes in the supply of religious goods. To further examine mechanisms of secularization, this article investigates the emergence of the most secularized society in the world today—eastern Germany. The extremely high percent of atheists in contemporary eastern Germany suggests that the public demand for religion has diminished. But the process of modernization did not bring about this change; instead, current drops in religious demand and religiosity in eastern Germany are the result of dramatic interventions in the supply of religious goods over the past two centuries. We trace the historical conditions that have created the most atheistic society ever.

Survival of intimate partner violence as experienced by women

The study set out to describe women's experiences of intimate partner violence, the consequences of such violence, the help they received and women's experiences of their survival. Social and health professionals do not have sufficient ability to identify and help families who suffer from intimate partner violence. Methods for identifying and treating partner violence not have been developed adequately. The study was conducted in Finland by loosely formulated open-ended interviews with seven battered women. The data were analysed by inductive qualitative content analysis. Women had past experience of maltreatment and a distressing climate at their parental home. Women experienced both themselves and their spouse as having weak identities; their ideals, patterns of marriage and sexuality were different. Violence occurred in situations of disagreement. Women tried to strike a balance between independence and dependence in the relationship. The different forms of couple violence were interlinked. The women sought help when their health and social relationships got worse. An awareness of the problem, taking action, counselling and social relationships helped them survive. Religiousness was a factor that involved commitment to the couple relationship, made religious demands on women and promoted the recovery of integrity. Intimate partner violence was associated with the family model, childhood experience of maltreatment, the partners' weak identity and conflicts between individualism and familism. Social and healthcare professionals need competence in early intervention and skills to discuss moral principles, sexuality, and violence in a way that is free of prejudice and condemning attitudes. Spiritual approaches in the context of interventions should be taken into consideration. In a clinical context, nurses should be aware of the symptoms of violence, and they should have skills in dealing with intimate moral and spiritual issues.