Trends In Religiosity Research Articles

Antiwitchcraft Movements in Colonial Asante

Abstract Silences exist in the British colonial archives and the secondary literature on Asante's resistance to colonial rule. The Yaa Asantewaa War (1900–1) is cited as the main instance of resistance. This study challenges these assumptions by arguing that Asante resistance was apparent in the arena of Asante religious belief and practice, and particularly rooted in antiwitchcraft movements. These movements materialized not in periods of extreme violence and sociopolitical decay, but in the environments between socioeconomic chaos and stability. Such periods were usually characterized by pronounced social, political, and economic changes and transitions. The study concludes by situating the history of these antiwitchcraft movements in Ghana's broad historical trends in religiosity and belief using a qualitative research methodology based on archival records, interviews, secondary literature, and multimedia from YouTube.

Religiosity of Migrants and Natives in Western Europe 2002–2018: Convergence and Divergence

Patterns of religiosity among both settled and migrant populations have been the subject of intense, and often conflicting, scholarly debate. In Europe, most analysis of migrant religiosity has focused on Islam, though migrants to Western European countries come from a wide range of religions and denominations. Despite a general assumption of assimilation over generations to greater secularization, evidence on trends in religiosity across migrants of different religions and for both first and second generations remains partial. We use the European Social Survey (rounds 1–9) to examine three dimensions of religiosity encompassing both performative and subjective domains, across 15 Western European destination countries over a 16-year period. While variation in religiosity between different affiliations is not large, migrants tend to have higher religiosity than non-migrants across the religious affiliations we consider. Over time we see that while natives show an overall decline in religiosity over the period, first- and second-generation Protestants and Muslims show increases in religiosity, providing some evidence for religious revival. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of secularization and religious revival, and the future religious landscape of Europe.

Religiosity and Long-Run Productivity Growth

In this paper, we show, using a panel of developed countries, that there is a long-run negative association between church attendance and total factor productivity (TFP) with predictive causality running from declining church attendance to increasing factor productivity. According to our preferred estimate, about 18% of the increase in TFP from 1950 to 1990 can be motivated by declining religiosity. In order to explain this phenomenon, we integrate into standard R&D-based growth theory a micro-foundation of individual cognitive style, which is either intuitive-believing or reflective-analytical. Under the assumption that R&D productivity is positively influenced by a reflective-analytical cognitive style, we find that secularisation leads to an increasing labour share in R&D and gradually increasing productivity growth. We use these insights to reflect on the trends in religiosity and R&D-based growth in the very long run, from Enlightenment to the present day.

Failed promises of modernization: Temporal trends in religiosity, postmaterialism and Ethno-nationalist attitudes in the Netherlands

Th e process of modernization is understood to imply changing tends in prevalenceof certain value orientations. Th eoretical accounts dealing with theprocesses of global value changes include notions such as secularization, modernization,and postmaterialist value shift, among others. Th e paper analyzestrends in prevalence of thee basic value or ideological orientations: religiosity,postmaterialism and nationalist attitudes. Th e classical theories of valuetransformation imply decrease in religiosity and nationalist orientations, andincrease in post-materialism. Th e problem is examined using data the DutchParliamentary Election Studies (DPES). Th e Netherlands is an especially appropriatecase to address these problems. Th e trend of the initial sharp secularizationand then persisting religious cleavage is particularly clearly outlinedhere. Th e Dutch have also been found to be among the most postmaterialistnations. Finally, the new trend of anti-immigrant politics has also been earlyand very vividly expressed in the Netherlands, indicating the importance ofnationalist attitudes.Th e main fi ndings indicate that modernization and ‘post-modernization’theories are imperfect explanations for the observed trends in values. Decreasein religiosity is observed only for some indicators, while trends in nationalistand post-materialist orientations do not follow the expected course.

Religiosity and Long-Run Productivity Growth

In this paper, we show, using a panel of developed countries, that there is a long-run negative association between church attendance and total factor productivity (TFP) with predictive causality running from declining church attendance to increasing factor productivity. According to our preferred estimate, about 18% of the increase in TFP from 1950 to 1990 is caused by declining religiosity. In order to explain this phenomenon, we integrate into standard R&D-based growth theory a micro-foundation of individual cognitive style, which is either intuitive-believing or reflective-analytical. Under the assumption that R&D productivity is positively influenced by a reflective-analytical cognitive style, we find that secularization leads to an increasing labor share in R&D and gradually increasing productivity growth. We use these insights to reflect on trends in religiosity and R&D-based growth in the very long run, from Enlightenment to the present day.

Secularization versus religious revival in Eastern Europe: Church institutional resilience, state repression and divergent paths

Despite continuing for over two decades, the debate about the nature of the trends in religiosity in post-Communist Eastern Europe remains unresolved: some arguing that these countries are undergoing the same process of secularization as the West, while others insist that the entire region is experiencing a religious revival. Using national sample surveys from the early 1990s to 2007 to examine the change in demographic predictors of religiosity, we show that Catholic and Orthodox countries are experiencing different trends, the first group displaying evidence of secularization and the second of revival, and that these two different trends are likely to derive from the legacies of state repression and the differing abilities of the churches to resist such repression. We argue that the current literature has thus taken a mistakenly general approach, and that the post-Communist region consists of at least two distinct groups of societies with different trends in religiosity.

Church Attendance, Problems of Measurement, and Interpreting Indicators: A Study of Religious Practice in the United States, 1975–2010

Church attendance is usually measured in surveys by asking a direct question about frequency of churchgoing over a preset period of time, which is typically a year. Different studies have cast doubt over the validity of this indicator as it tends to overestimate actual attendance to a significant degree. The aim of this article is to compare data on church attendance provided by two different types of research conducted in the United States between 1975 and 2010: survey data (GSS) and data obtained from time use surveys (ATUS). This comparison has three main objectives: (1) to confirm the hypothesis that survey data tend to overestimate actual attendance; (2) to show that this overestimation is not constant over time and space, but tends to vary in an erratic and unpredictable way; and (3) to demonstrate that data provided by time use surveys are more reliable than the frequencies of churchgoing provided by traditional surveys when the objective is to identify trends in religiosity in a population.

Religion and fertility ideals, intentions and behaviour: a comparative study of European countries

European demographers rarely study religion as a determinant of contemporary demographic behaviour. One reason could be the secularisation observed in European countries, implying that the effect of religiosity has been diminishing. This paper aims to show that religion can have an important impact on ideals, intentions and behaviour related to fertility. First we discuss recent trends in religiosity. We base our ensuing hypotheses on three deliberations why religion may have a bearing on fertility: importance of religious teaching, effect of social capital and function of religion to decrease uncertainty. Using FFS data we examine the influence of several measures of religiosity on the ideal number of children and intentions to have a second and third child, as well as on the expected and actual number of children. We find that all measures of religiosity are in general related to a higher ideal number of children, higher odds to intend another child and higher expected and actual number of children. Participation in religious services turns out to be slightly more salient than affiliation and self-assessed religiosity. We also discover that the effect of religion on ideals is more pronounced than its effect on intentions. Ideals stay further away from behaviour than intentions do and hence the influence of religion is intermediated by other social systems.

Continuity and Change in Contemporary Ulster Protestantism*

This paper explores current trends in religious practice, observance and belief in Ulster Protestantism for elements of continuity and change. Using historical and survey data it is clear that there are strong elements of both. However, Protestant religiosity is not changing to the point that it constitutes secularisation, as sociologists of religion understand it. Nor are new trends in religiosity weakening ethno-national identities in Northern Ireland. This is because political identities are socially reproduced in ways that are independent of their religious roots and are thus unaffected by patterns of religiosity. Likely changes in Protestant religiosity in the future therefore offer no immediate panacea for altering the dynamics of Northern Irish politics.