Religious Households Research Articles

Religion and Household Saving Behavior

We examine the effect of religion on household saving behavior. For a sample of 12,686 U.S. households between 2000 and 2016, we find that religious households (i.e., households that have a religious affiliation) are more likely to hold savings accounts than non-religious households. Furthermore, using religious upbringing as an instrument, we show that religion-induced economic attitudes, such as future time preference and risk aversion, increase household saving propensity. Finally, the positive association between religious affiliation and saving propensity is more pronounced for Catholics than Protestants. Overall, our study highlights the importance of religion in shaping households’ saving behavior. (JEL G51, Z12, D14, D91)

Spiritually Well, Mentally Well? Examining the Early Life Religious Antecedents of the Impact of Spiritual Well-Being on Mental Health Among United Methodist Clergy in North Carolina.

Research has consistently shown that the seeds of religiosity are planted and begin to take form during early life socialization, but little attention have been given to these dynamics among clergy members. In this study, we consider whether early life religious exposure may amplify the beneficial effects of spiritual well-being (having a "thriving" spiritual life) for mental health and burnout for clergy. Drawing from a life course perspective, we use longitudinal data from the Clergy Health Initiative, which sampled United Methodist Clergy in North Carolina (n = 1330). Key results suggest that higher frequencies of childhood religious attendance were consistently associated with lower depressive symptoms and burnout. The beneficial associations between spiritual well-being and lower depressive symptoms and burnout were also stronger for clergy with greater church attendance in childhood. The accumulation of "religious capital" for clergy who were raised in religious households with regular service attendance appear to accentuate the positive effects of spiritual well-being, which encompass a greater sense of closeness to God in their own lives and in ministry. This study identifies the importance of researchers taking a "longer" view of the religious and spiritual lives of clergy.

Financial risk-taking, religiosity and denomination heterogeneity

We document a relationship between religiosity and financial risk-taking using geographical variation in Europe. We find that more religious households engage in less risk-taking, and the effect is more pronounced where Protestantism is more widespread than Catholicism. These results suggest that the content of religious doctrines rather than religiosity per se shape risk-taking. We confirm these results using an alternative European survey, evidence from China, and a lab experiment.

Affirming, intersectional spaces & positive religious coping: evidence-based strategies to improve the mental health of LGBTQ-identifying Muslims

ABSTRACT The interplay between Islam, sexuality, and mental health is complex. In large population studies, religiosity is associated with positive mental health outcomes. However, the data among LGBTQ populations is mixed. Structural, interpersonal, and individual forms of religious trauma may adversely affect the mental health of queer people in religious households, but robust social support can remedy these effects. In particular, the dual-identities of LGBTQ-identifying Muslims complicate their relationships with both religious and queer communities. Here, we present models of LGBTQ-inclusive Muslim spaces as intersectional pathways to positive mental health outcomes, simultaneously offering networks of social support and opportunities to engage with healthy religious coping mechanisms.

Dreams, songs and letters: Sectarian networks and musical archives in eighteenth-century North India

Early modern poets conventionally began their compositions by praising and invoking the blessings of their higher authorities, be they their gods, gurus or courtly patrons. In the eighteenth century, North Indian society was particularly unstable, and the relationships between these different power brokers proved volatile. This article considers how intellectuals attached to religious households navigated the challenges of the period, particularly invading armies, religious reforms and forced migration. I examine the works of Vrindavandas (c. 1700–87), a Brajbhasha poet and lay devotee of the Radhavallabh Sampraday, and provide contextualised readings of two of his poems, concerned with recent history and the contemporary political climate. Vrindavandas was not a scribe or chronicler in a conventional sense; however, closer examination of his works reveals the porous boundaries between scribes-cum-recorders and other kinds of intellectuals. Here, I consider how Vrindavandas’ literary activity included copying archival sources, recording recent history, documenting dreams and emotions, and folding different senses of temporality into a single work. This article asks how far his poetic works gesture to a distinctively eighteenth-century mode of literary expression and reflexivity, and how performing these poetic archives through reading, singing, and musical accompaniment provided the sect with tools to navigate a turbulent political landscape.

Apostates as a Hidden Population of Abuse Victims.

The term “apostate” describes the term used by the religious to describe individuals raised within religious families who once identified as religious, but who have ceased to believe in the existence of God, gods or follow their religious belief, and now identify as non-religious. Given the strong feelings families can have about the rejection of their shared faith, and the difficulty that police forces may have in identifying and understanding the complexities of violence toward the apostate, this study sought to examine the possibility that apostates represent a hidden population of abuse victims within religious households. We recruited 228 persons (102 males, 119 females) from an online survey with the support of “Faith to Faithless”—a service within Humanists UK, which supports people that leave their religious faith. Individuals were screened using a modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale to quantify their experience of assault and negotiation. It was found that persons who identified as apostates experienced more assault (i.e., harmful violence) than non-religious persons. Within this sample, Muslim apostates were significantly more likely to be victimized than Christian apostates. Disclosure of being abused for identifying as an apostate within a religious household to law enforcement was extremely uncommon, thereby preventing detection or prosecution of abusive acts committed by family members and limiting public awareness of this issue. These results are discussed in the context of the broader culture of honor-based (izzat) violence, which occurs across the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa, and is also seen in some Protestant Christian subcultures, and common to all Abrahamic religions, rather than Islam alone. This study highlights that within a multicultural society, there remain hidden populations of abuse victims who are vulnerable due to religious, cultural, and traditional constraints made by abusive family members.

Why We Left the Right

When we began putting together an issue on the future of the right, it seemed like those who had conservative pasts might be a source of insight. So I spoke with three others with similar backgrounds—Sarah Jones, Maximillian Alvarez, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins—about how we got here and where we think we're headed, drawing on the experiences we had growing up in conservative, religious households.

Access to Improved Water Sources and Sanitation in Minority Ethnic People in Vietnam and Some Sociodemographic Associations: A 2019 National Survey.

Background:Achieving access to clean water and basic sanitation remains as major challenges in Vietnam, especially for vulnerable groups such as minority people, despite all the progress made by the Millennium Development Goal number 7.C.Objectives:The study aimed to describe the access to improved water sources and sanitation of the ethnic minority people in Vietnam based on a national survey and to identify associated factors.Methods:A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2019 with a sample size of 1385 ethnic minority households in 12 provinces in Vietnam. Multivariate logistic regression modeling was performed to examine the probability of having access to improved water sources and sanitation and sociodemographic status at a significance level of P < .05.Results:The access to improved water sources and sanitation was unequal among the ethnic minority people in Vietnam, with the lowest access rate in the northern midland and mountainous and Central Highland areas and the highest access rate in the Mekong Delta region. Some sociodemographic variables that were likely to increase the ethnic minority people’s access to improved water sources and/or sanitation included older age, female household heads, household heads with high educational levels, religious households, and households in not poor status.Conclusion and recommendations:The study suggested more emphasis on religion for improving the ethnic minority’s access to improved water sources and sanitation. Besides, persons of poor and near-poor status and with low educational levels should be of focus in future water and sanitation intervention programs.

Does Childhood Religiosity Delay Death?

This study explores the potential long-term health effects of religiosity in the childhood home. Analyses use retrospective childhood data from the MIDUS survey linked to National Death Index records from 1995 to 2014. Findings from Cox proportional hazard models suggest that children brought up in highly religious households have a higher risk of mortality than those socialized in more moderately religious households, this despite such individuals having better overall health profiles. The surprising link between high childhood religiosity and mortality was confined to those who downgraded their religiosity. Those who intensified from moderate to high religiosity, in fact, seemed to be most protected. We call for future research to more clearly specify the intervening mechanisms linking childhood religion with adult health and mortality over the life course.

Taste‐Based Discrimination, Tolerance and the Wage Gap: When Does Economic Freedom Help Gay Men?

SummaryAlthough gay men have reported experiencing labor market discrimination, re‐ search studies on a potentially discriminatory wage gap have reported mixed findings. We consider the Becker model of taste based discrimination which hypothesizes that we will observe, in the presence of discrimination, a smaller or non‐existent wage gap in more competitive markets. Using economic freedom at the state level as a measure of market competitiveness, and controlling for other influential characteristics, we analyze the wages of over 300,000 men in the United States to consider how economic freedom influences the wage gap between cohabitating gay men and married straight men be‐ tween the years 2000 and 2014. We find evidence consistent with model predictions in the presence of labor market discrimination for the states in the South and regions with the highest concentrations of religious households but not in the Northeast, West and less religious regions. Given the lower levels of public support of gay rights in the South and religious regions, this result suggests that gay men may be experiencing la‐ bor market discrimination in these regions but not in regions which typically offer more public support. These findings may help reconcile contradictory findings in previous research which did not explicitly allow for differential regional and religious influences.

“The world food crisis is not a fad”: TheMore-with-LessCookbook and Protestant Environmental Spirituality

ABSTRACTThis article examines the spirituality reflected in the 1976 cookbookMore-with-Less. Written by a former Mennonite missionary hoping to provide religious households with a practical way to respond to world hunger, the cookbook's message of a simple diet that could transform users' influence on the world is an early example of the religious environmentalism that has grown increasingly popular among middle-class American Protestants in the last several decades. By examining its historical context, narrating its genesis, and critically assessing the spirituality it recommended, this article argues that the cookbook provides a useful window into Protestant environmental spirituality, its version of which allowed practitioners to maintain traditional institutional relationships and conceptions of the divine while cultivating the individuated religiosity increasingly sought after in modern culture. Emerging in the institutional overlap of traditional religious organizations and the putatively secular formations of mass media, globalization, and consumer culture, the cookbook leveraged the incipient emphasis on lifestyle choices within consumer culture to craft an individuated response to a vision of the world in permanent crisis.More-with-Lessand the Protestant environmental spirituality it represents shed light on current scholarly debates about the form religion takes within modern contexts of secularity, especially when religious practitioners seek adaptations that can maintain traditional theological and organizational commitments.

Review of Divine Economics Framework

The primary research aim of the Divine Economics framework is to provide an empirical basis for behavioural comparison between religious and non-religious households with regards to their economic and non-economic choices. Divine Economics framework is an effort to establish cross communication between mainstream economists and faith-inspired economists by using an appropriate and universal methodological framework, which is sufficiently scientific, objective and broadly agreeable in academics. Divine Economics framework attempts to endogenize religious attributes which may potentially enable the comparison of choices between religious and non- religious as well as less-religious and more religious households. However, reliance on stated preferences, overlap between religious and non-religious activities, inability to observe the motivation and intention behind choices and to judge the quality of religious activities are some of the challenges in Divine Economics framework. In the future research, Divine Economics framework could incorporate how faithful economic agents use common property resources and public goods. It can explore whether the faithful households differ in their choices with regards to biodiversity and negative externalities. Lastly, the future research in Divine Economics framework can also explore whether faithful economic agents differ in their willingness to pay for public goods, environmental protection programs, social protection programs and other voluntary welfare activities.

Expanding on the Experiences of Transgender Nonreligious People: An Exploratory Analysis

Building on research that points out the specific forms of marginalization that transgender and nonreligious people face in contemporary U.S. society, this exploratory analysis focuses on the experiences of transgender nonreligious people who were raised in religious households. Utilizing interviews with eleven formerly religious, now nonreligious, transgender people I draw out some of the future pathways scholars of nonreligion should take to better account for the lives of transgender nonreligious people in scholarship on nonreligion. Specifically, scholars of nonreligion should begin analyzing transgender nonreligious people’s experiences in religious settings, with family, and with organizations and networks outside of religion. I conclude by discussing the ways this study can shed light on the broader processes by which inequality is reproduced and make suggestions for nonreligious leaders to make room for and listen to transgender people in nonreligious spaces.

Spirituality, Fan Culture, and the Music of Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons

ABSTRACTThis article presents findings from a qualitative study with passionate fans of the rock and roll band, Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons. The study looked at how fan involvement in the music scene enhanced quality of life through the ability to access a personal sense of spirituality. While the majority of participants (87%) had been raised in religious households, most of those (93%) had intentionally abandoned religious affiliation only to come to embrace a language of spirituality and religion to describe their attraction to the music. This study fills a gap by exploring how aspects of spiritual language and sensations can be embraced in a secular context after departure from a formal religious upbringing.

RETRACTED: The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World

Prosocial behaviors are ubiquitous across societies. They emerge early in ontogeny and are shaped by interactions between genes and culture. Over the course of middle childhood, sharing approaches equality in distribution. Since 5.8 billion humans, representing 84% of the worldwide population, identify as religious, religion is arguably one prevalent facet of culture that influences the development and expression of prosociality. While it is generally accepted that religion contours people's moral judgments and prosocial behavior, the relation between religiosity and morality is a contentious one. Here, we assessed altruism and third-party evaluation of scenarios depicting interpersonal harm in 1,170 children aged between 5 and 12 years in six countries (Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, USA, and South Africa), the religiousness of their household, and parent-reported child empathy and sensitivity to justice. Across all countries, parents in religious households reported that their children expressed more empathy and sensitivity for justice in everyday life than non-religious parents. However, religiousness was inversely predictive of children's altruism and positively correlated with their punitive tendencies. Together these results reveal the similarity across countries in how religion negatively influences children's altruism, challenging the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior.

Mental disorder among nonreligious adolescents

This study is the first of its kind to investigate mental disorder among nonreligious adolescents. In this paper, we report three main findings based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey of Adolescents. First, nonreligious adolescents on average have higher rates of mental disorder than adolescents who identify as religious. Second, there is variability in rates of mental disorder among the three types of nonreligious adolescents, with atheists/agnostics experiencing the highest rates, followed by those with no religion, and those with no religious preference. Indeed, after controlling for a host of sociodemographic characteristics, adolescents with no preference have levels of mental disorder that do not differ from the religiously affiliated. Third, the mental health disadvantage of nonreligiosity is strongest among nonreligious adolescents with two highly religious parents. Their rates of mental illness are almost twice that of religious adolescents raised in religious households. Moreover, neither nonreligious nor religious adolescents are negatively affected by being raised in nonreligious households.

The Impact of Religion on Household Saving Behavior

Raiffeisen on Savings:“Many drops form first a Creek...Then a Stream....And finally, a River”Although the relationship between religion and economic development on the macro-level has been explored, it is less clear how background of religiosity influences economic attitudes and financial decision-making on the level of the individual or household in the micro-level. Savings can affect national development; widen the gap between rich and poor nations. Like other saving determinant factors, religion in west Amhara National regional state has had its share towards the impact of saving on households, and yet relatively few research has been carry out to establish the extent to which religion has contributed to the financial decision on households. This study was cross-sectional, that used both the quantitative and qualitative data. It applied a multi-stage cluster sampling of administrative units that were randomly selected. Data was collected using both open ended and closed ended questionnaire, focus group discussions and probit as well as ordinary least square (OLS) models were used for analysis. Using survey data generated from 384 religious sample households, the results of this study shows that 240 (62.5%) of the entire sample of which 162 (67.5%) Orthodox Christian, 74 (30.8%) Muslim and 4 (1.7%) Protestant households had saved during the survey time religious affiliation effects on saving behavior regarding the decision to save money or not, comparing religiosity in the form of Christian to non-Christian believers the results show that Christians are more probable to and save more than non-Christian believers. In addition, Orthodox Christians save more than Muslims.

Afterlife incentives in charitable giving

There is an expanding literature that examines the influence of religion on economic behaviour. Researchers typically do not distinguish among religions, masking important variation across doctrines. Our article adopts a typology of religions based on the construct of salvific merit. Major religious doctrines are ordered based on their linkage between charitable behaviour in this life and condition in the afterlife. Using the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study (COPPS), we exploit variation in household marginal tax rates (a subsidy to charitable giving) to test the influence of major religious doctrines on charitable giving. We find that charitable giving by adherents to high-salvific-merit religions are less sensitive to changes in charitable subsidies. Adherents to low-salvific-merit religions behave more like nonreligious households. Our results suggest that religious households optimize according to specific doctrines rather than a broad notion of religion.

WHAT DETERMINES RELIGIOUS SCHOOL CHOICE? THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM RURAL BANGLADESH

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the determinants of school selection in rural Bangladesh, focusing on the choice between registered Islamic and non‐religious schools. Using a unique dataset on secondary school‐age children from rural Bangladesh, we find that madrasah enrolment falls as household income increases. At the same time, more religious households, and those that live further away from a non‐religious school are more likely to send their children to madrasahs. However, in contrast to the theory, we find that Islamic school demand does not respond to the average quality of schools in the locality.

What Determines Religious School Choice? Theory and Evidence from Rural Bangladesh

This paper looks at the determinants of school selection in rural Bangladesh, focusing on the choice between registered Islamic and non-religious schools. We consider a two period framework where children are a source of old age transfers. The amount of old age transfers made by children as adults is influenced both by their schooling and by parental religiosity. Parents also derive utility from educating a proportion of their children in madrasahs in a way that reflects their own religious values. We investigate how household income, religious preferences, schooling costs, and school quality affect the proportion of children sent to each school type. Using a unique dataset on secondary school age children from rural Bangladesh, we find that madrasah enrolment falls as household income increases. At the same time, more religious households, and those that live further away from a non-religious school are more likely to send their children to madrasahs. However, in contrast to the theory, we find that Islamic school demand does not respond to the average quality of schools in the locality.