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Why are Women more Religious than Men? Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce

Published in print: 2012 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199608102 eISBN: 9780191744730 acprof:oso/9780199608102.001.0001 Item type: book

Women are more religious than men. Despite being excluded from leadership positions, in almost every culture and religious tradition, women are more likely than men to pray, to worship, and to claim that their faith is important to them. Women also dominate the world of ‘New Age’ spirituality and are far more superstitious than men. This book reviews the now-sizeable body of social research to consider if the gender gap in religion is indeed universal. It critiques competing explanations of such differences as we find. It concludes that the gender gap is not the result of biology but is rather the consequence of important social differences — responsibility for managing birth, child‐rearing and death, for example, and attitudes to the body, illness and health — over‐lapping and reinforcing each other. In the West, the gender gap is exaggerated because the social changes that undermined the plausibility of religion bore most heavily on men first. Where the lives of men and women become more similar, and where religious indifference grows, the gender gap gradually disappears.

Distant Markets, Distant Harms: Economic Complicity and Christian Ethics Daniel Finn (ed.)

Published in print: 2014 Published Online: April Publisher: Oxford University Press 2014 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199370993 eISBN: 9780199374212 acprof:oso/9780199370993.001.0001 Item type: book

Many have asserted, without explanation, that because markets cause harms to distant others, consumers bear moral responsibility for those harms. But traditional moral analysis of individual decisions is unable to sustain this argument. The harms caused by markets to distant others continue unabated even if any particular consumer completely ceases to Page 1 of 7 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 26 January 2017

make market purchases. Because that consumer plays an imperceptibly small causal role, he or she as an individual is judged to have no significant moral responsibility for the harms markets cause. A deeper analysis of those causal relationships—and the moral responsibilities that arise from them—requires the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship entailed in this volume. Because of its individualistic methods, mainstream economics as a discipline is not equipped to understand the causality entailed in the long chains of social relationships that make up the market. Critical realist sociology, however, has addressed the character and functioning of social structures, an analysis that can helpfully be applied to the market. For this reason, the True Wealth of Nations research project of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sociologists, economists, moral theologians, and others to describe these causal relationships and articulate how Catholic social thought can employ these insights to more adequately address fundamental issues of economic ethics in the twenty-first century. This volume of chapters analyzes moral complicity in markets employing the resources from sociology, from earlier periods in Christian history, and from feminism, legal theory, and Catholic moral theology today.

A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs and Early American Religious Life T.J. Tomlin

Published in print: 2014 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press September 2014 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199373659 eISBN: 9780199373673 acprof:oso/9780199373659.001.0001 Item type: book

A Divinity for All Persuasions investigates the religious significance of early America’s most ubiquitous popular genre. Other than a Bible and perhaps a few schoolbooks, an almanac was the only printed item most people owned before 1820. A calendar surrounded by poetry, medical advice, moral axioms, and amusing anecdotes, the almanac is most often associated with folksy quaintness rather than serious cultural significance. This book uncovers and analyzes the pan-Protestant sensibility distributed through the almanac’s pages between 1730 and 1820. Influenced by readers’ opinions and printers’ pragmatism, the religious content of popular print supports an innovative interpretation of early American cultural and religious history. In sharp contrast to a historiography centered on intra-Protestant competition, this book demonstrates how most early Americans relied on a handful of Protestant “essentials” (the Bible, the afterlife, and a recognizably moral life) rather than denominational specifics to define and organize their religious lives. A Divinity for All Persuasions reveals popular culture’s influence on Page 2 of 7 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 26 January 2017

American religious life and the overwhelmingly religious nature of early American popular culture.

Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On Bryan R. Wilson

Steve Bruce (ed.) Published in print: 2016 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press October 2016 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780198788379 eISBN: 9780191830297 acprof:oso/9780198788379.001.0001 Item type: book

Fifty years after its publication, Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society remains one of the clearest articulations of the modern secularization thesis: the claim that modernization brings with it fundamental changes in the nature and status of religion. For Wilson, secularization refers to religion’s loss of influence at societal, institutional, and individual levels. Largely as a result of inadvertent consequences of modernization (rather than the deliberate activity of avowed secularists) religion has lost power, prestige, and popularity. Science and technology have reduced the importance of religious knowledge and the officials who carry it. With the development of secular education, social control, and welfare provision, fewer people now have any contact with the churches. Individual piety may persist as a private preference, but religion can no longer have the public presence or influence it enjoyed in pre-modern societies. Wilson considers the difference between the UK, where people abandoned the churches, and the USA, where additional social functions allowed the churches to survive shorn of much of their traditional religious content. He also considers the various forms of sectarian rejection of modernity. Steve Bruce provides a summary and assessment of critical responses to the core ideas of Religion in Secular Society and summarizes the major changes in the religious culture of the UK and USA since the 1960s.

Christmas as Religion: Rethinking Santa, the Secular, and the Sacred Christopher Deacy

Published in print: 2016 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780198754565 eISBN: 9780191816192 acprof:oso/9780198754565.001.0001 Item type: book

This book begins with the premise that religion plays an elementary role in our understanding of the Christmas festival, but takes issue with much of the existing literature which is predilected to associate ‘religion’ Page 3 of 7 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 26 January 2017

with formal or institutional forms of Christianity or to construe Christmas as a commercial and secular holiday. In Christmas as Religion, Deacy argues that such approaches fail to take adequate stock of the manifold ways in which people’s beliefs and values take shape in modern society. It may be, for example, that a supernaturally-themed Christmas film about Santa or a Christmas radio programme such as Junior Choice comprise a non-specifically Christian, but nonetheless religiously rich, repository of beliefs, values, sentiments, and aspirations. This book thus makes the case for laying to rest the secularization thesis, with its simplistic assumption that religion in Western society is undergoing a period of escalating and irrevocable erosion, and to see instead that the secular may itself be a repository of the religious. Deacy argues that a festival of consumerism can be an unexpectedly fertile site of spirituality and transcendence and that materialism and consumption need to be understood within a context of familial, social, and interpersonal connection and, even, transformation. Rather than see Christmas as comprising an alternative or analogous form of religious expression, or dependent on any causal relationship to the Christian tradition, Deacy’s premise is that it is religious per se, and, moreover, it is its very secularity that makes Christmas such a compelling, and transcendent, religious holiday.

Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance Matt Tomlinson

Published in print: 2014 Published Online: April Publisher: Oxford University Press 2014 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199341139 eISBN: 9780199358373 acprof:oso/9780199341139.001.0001 Item type: book

A classic question in the anthropology of religion is how ritual performances achieve—or fail to achieve—their effects. This book argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual efficacy by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research on Christianity in Fiji, the book presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians’ “happy deaths”; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. Each of these cases reveals the broad ideologies of motion that frame participants’ ritual actions, such as Pentecostals’ beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries’ insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By Page 4 of 7 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 26 January 2017

approaching ritual as an act of “entextualization”—in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts—while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.

The Great Divide

Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce in Why are Women more Religious than Men? Published in print: 2012 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199608102 eISBN: 9780191744730 acprof:oso/9780199608102.003.0001 Item type: chapter

This chapter illustrates the female preponderance in the ranks of the godly in modern industrial democracies. It analyses church attendance and church membership figures and data from large-scale surveys of religious beliefs. It also presents various bodies of data which show the preponderance of women in the world of alternative spirituality. Methodological problems with measuring religious interest are acknowledged and discussed. Also, the case is made that while there are gender differences in forms of religiosity in most societies, differences of degree are generally a feature of secularising societies. This explains the book's focus on the West.

New Religions

Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce in Why are Women more Religious than Men? Published in print: 2012 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199608102 eISBN: 9780191744730 acprof:oso/9780199608102.003.0002 Item type: chapter

This chapter is a brief review of the role played by women in a variety of eighteenth and nineteenth century new religions and in the post-1960s new religious movements. The first part discusses a number of female millenarian visionaries, such as Ann Lee, Joanna Southcott, and Mary Baker Eddy, and the female founders of Theosophy in an attempt to explain the appeal of these ‘new religions’ to a female audience. The second part demonstrates that women outnumbered men in the type of new religious movements which were non-patriarchal and placed emphasis on independence and empowerment.

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Spirits and Bodies

Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce in Why are Women more Religious than Men? Published in print: 2012 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199608102 eISBN: 9780191744730 acprof:oso/9780199608102.003.0003 Item type: chapter

Women are more likely than men to engage in the type of religious and spiritual activities motivated by a desire to maintain contact with the souls of the dead. This chapter presents a brief history of Spiritualism and explains its disproportionate appeal to women. In some cases, mediumship was socially empowering for female practitioners. It argues that, prior to the institutionalization of Spiritualism in the twentieth century, women were more likely than men to become mediums because the role required sensitivity and a caring attitude to others. The second part of this chapter introduces data on women's attitudes to the disposal of the dead and to the human body in general in order to suggest a link between bodily purity and religious enthusiasm. Women are far more concerned than men about being cremated alive and about the decay of their bodies. This, in itself, does not make them more religious but it does point to some elective affinities between feminine attitudes and religiosity.

Spirituality

Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce in Why are Women more Religious than Men? Published in print: 2012 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/ ISBN: 9780199608102 eISBN: 9780191744730 acprof:oso/9780199608102.003.0004 Item type: chapter

The preponderance of women in the world of alternative spirituality has been explained by their double alienation. The bureaucratic rationality of the modern world and the role-based nature of social interaction prevent us forming authentic relationships and being ‘ourselves’. Unlike men, women cannot find relief in the private sphere because they are oppressed and exploited by both the family and the workplace. So they seek authenticity in spiritual development. This chapter demonstrates that as well as failing the test of scale, explaining the appeal of the New Age by social strain fails the test of more detailed examination of the demographics of interest in spirituality. Detailed examination of survey data finds that better off, better educated women are more likely than the poor and dispossessed to be involved in spiritual seeking Page 6 of 7 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 26 January 2017

and physical health, which suggests the explanation lies more in the continuation of prior interests and experiences from one sphere of life to another than in any notion of deprivation and compensation. The gendering of the holistic milieu is done in the construction of the activities as they are designed to recruit women in the first place.

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