Monthly Archives: July 2013

Statistics on Religion- Part I

Jonathan Morgan

Muslim Friday prayer, blue mosque TurkeyBack in the sixties, the American sociologist Peter Berger proposed the Secularization Hypothesis – a fancy term for the theory that as cultures become more modern, they will move out from under the umbrella of religion. This change could be seen in a number of ways. It could show up as a declining importance of religion in organizations; think about hospitals, many of which still bear religious names, but not much else religious. Or secularization could show up as fewer and fewer people professing belief or affiliation.

Berger recanted his theory and now argues that development leads to a diversity of religions, but the secularization debate continues. And the debate persists for a good reason – it’s really difficult to gain a clear picture of how religion is changing among individuals, communities, and cultures. Over the next few weeks I’m going to review some of the research that tries to follow religious change.

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The Frequencies Project

Jonathan Morgan

monitoring wavesLast week I wrote about the challenges of categorizing spirituality or religiosity. Part of the difficulty lies in the porous nature of the two concepts; each seeps into and encroaches on the other. But another difficulty, one I didn’t touch on last week, is that both concepts are alive – metaphorically of course. They’re dynamic; the ways people and communities use the terms is constantly changing. They aren’t scientific categories, like mammal or friction, with precise definitions. Instead, they’re fluid. This makes the task of studying spirituality or religion challenging and exciting.

A prime example of the nebulous nature of spirituality is the Frequencies Project. This experiment, produced by the people at The Immanent Frame and Killing the Buddha (both worth checking out), aims to be a “collaborative genealogy of spirituality.” They collected reflections from scholars, writers, and artists on what they think of when they think about spirituality. Where a social scientist attempts to be precise and hone in on the concept, this experiment blows open the category and accepts the dynamic and fluid nature of people’s lived spirituality. And the result is fascinating.

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Is spirituality distinct from religion?

Jonathan Morgan

Young pretty caucasian girl praying

How do we categorize someone’s religiosity?  It seems easy enough when people choose their affiliation, but even that category can contain many different types of spirituality: not all Methodists are the same.  This complexity gets even trickier when it comes to categorizing the large group of people who are not affiliated.  The “nones” (a moniker for those who answer “unaffiliated” on survey questions about their religion) encompass everyone from atheists to agnostics to the simply uninterested.  And of course, each of these groups contains an even wider array of personalities.  The complexity is staggering and poses a difficult challenge to anyone studying religion.

On a more basic level, it’s quite difficult to even distinguish between spirituality and religiosity.  In everyday conversation, people readily make this distinction by identifying as “spiritual but not religious,” but new research by Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman shows just how blurry the distinction actually is.

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Meditation and Compassion

Jonathan Morgan

MeditationOne of the challenges of the scientific study of religion is to avoid reducing religion into only one of its parts. Evolutionary models suggest that religion may have helped early societies address the problem of people benefiting from the group’s resources without also contributing; but is religion’s only function to prevent free-riders? Psychological studies suggest that specific types of religious belief relate to our health; but if you focus solely on those findings, what parts of religion do you lose sight of? Do we risk ignoring some essential features of the very thing we hope to study?

The psychologist David DeSteno, at Northeastern University, is attuned to these concerns and designed a clever study to augment our understanding of meditation. In a recent piece for the New York Times[4] , he explains that his motivation stemmed from a concern that meditation studies focus on certain effects of meditation, but may lose sight of the heart of meditation. As he explains, the goal of meditation is not simply to enhance individual performance; it’s “supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.”

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Religion and Morality

classic columns blueprint sketch, vectorHow does our morality affect our religious beliefs?  Perhaps more appropriately: how do our religious beliefs affect our morality? Or do both emerge from something else, like personality? The boundaries and relationships between these different aspects of who we are are very fuzzy. We can’t just point to some behavior and call it exclusively moral, or religious, or just their personality. But while the problem is deeply complex, an abundance of data (some of it collected here) is bringing certain trends into the foreground.

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