Browsing by Author "Chaves, Mark A"

Although many organizations aspire to be diverse, both in their internal composition and external collaborations, diversity's consequences for organizational outcomes remain unclear. This project uses three separate studies to examine how diversity within and across organizations influences organizational outcomes. The first study uses original data from a national study of organizations to analyze how an organization's internal social composition is associated with its performance. It advances diversity-performance research by demonstrating how the mechanisms of social bridging and social bonding can work together within a diverse organization to improve its performance. The findings suggests that an organization can improve its performance by having socially diverse members who interact often and in ways that engage their social differences. The second study integrates social capital theory and network analysis to explore the relationship between interorganizational networks and organizational action. It uses cross-sectional and panel data from a national study of congregations to analyze the collaborative partnerships congregations form to provide social services. This study demonstrates that a congregation's network ties, net of the effects of its internal characteristics, are significantly associated with the number and types of social service programs it offers. The third study illustrates how an organization's external ties can shape its action by examining black churches and their responses to people living with HIV/AIDS. It uses data from a nationally representative sample of black congregations and draws on institutional theory to analyze congregations as open systems that can be influenced by their surrounding environment. This study indicates that black churches that are engaging their external environment are significantly more likely to have an HIV/AIDS program. Overall, by analyzing how individuals interact within organizations and how organizations interact with one another, these three studies demonstrate how diverse networks influence organizational outcomes.

Scholars over the past several decades have noted the resilience of religion in the United States (Chaves 2011; Gorski and Altınordu 2008; Hadden 1987:601–2; Presser and Chaves 2007), but many recognize that the youngest US cohorts are significantly lower on several religious characteristics than older cohorts (Hout and Fischer 2014; Putnam and Campbell 2012; Voas and Chaves 2016). Scholars have proposed several explanations for this trend, disagreeing about whether it is the result of a particular cultural moment or an ongoing process leading to even greater religious decline. Replicating Voas’ (2009) model of slow, predictable decline across cohorts, I find that, surprisingly, the US closely fits the same trajectory of religious decline as European countries, suggesting a shared demographic process as opposed to idiosyncratic change. Family dynamics are an important part of this story. Family characteristics are some of the most significant predictors of religious outcomes (Hoge, Petrillo, and Smith 1982; Smith and Denton 2005; Uecker and Ellison 2012), but only a few studies have examined how aggregate religious decline is shaped by family processes (Chaves 1991; Crockett and Voas 2006; Kelley and De Graaf 1997). Even fewer have done so using self-reported data from members of several generations of the same families (Bengtson et al. 2018; Bengtson, Putney, and Harris 2013; Smith and Denton 2005). I advance this line of research by decomposing within-family, inter-generational religious decline into components that can be attributed to factors within the family and those that cannot. Whereas the combination of individual and family characteristics explains the decline in religious service attendance within families, it does not explain much of the decline in self-rated religiosity, suggesting that the intergenerational transmission of religious behavior operates differently than the intergenerational transmission of internal sense of religiosity. I consider these findings in light of theory and research by developmental psychologists and sociologists of the family on what leads children to adopt (or not) their parents’ values, attitudes, and practices.

This dissertation examines the relationship between religion and higher education in the United States through analyses of the religious histories of four distinct educational institutions in North Carolina’s Research Triangle—Duke University, Meredith College, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It places three seemingly contradictory scholarly representations of this relationship in conversation with one another. The first, represented by evangelical historians George Marsden and John Sommerville, claims that American higher education has come to be characterized by exclusive secularism. The second, represented by scholars of education, including Tricia Seifert, Lewis Schlosser, and Sherry Watt et al. claims by contrast that Christian privilege continues to obstruct the full inclusion of religious and non-religious minorities. And a third, represented by Rhonda and Jake Jacobsen, contends that historical Protestant and secularist predominance have been transcended by inclusive pluralism in the “postsecular” 21st century. This dissertation draws on archival research, participant observation, interviews, quantitative survey analysis, and secondary sources to demonstrate how Protestant, secular, and pluralist forces have coexisted and interacted throughout these four institutions’ histories. It illuminates how their campus religious climates have evolved in distinct ways through contingent interactions among these forces conditioned by a variety of institutional identity factors, including race, gender, affiliation, prestige, and geographical reach. As a result, we see that the relationship between religion and higher education is not uniformly characterized by either Christian privilege, exclusive secularism, or inclusive pluralism. Distinct institutional trajectories shape coexisting forms of privilege, secularism, and pluralism that interact in specific contexts, producing unique campus religious climates that shape undergraduate identity formation.

Research into how different life events shape individual religiosity has a long history within sociology. However, some scholars have begun to question whether research in this area has methodologically justified making strong causal claims. In an effort to re-center religion within the field of sociological concerns, quantitative sociologists of religion have tended to over-state the meaning of their statistical relationships and this has led to many of their causal assumptions being unstated and/or untested in their analyses. The advances in causal statistical modeling and counterfactually grounded analyses has led to the development of statistical models that are better able to establish causal relationships. It is time to begin implementing these approaches within the sociology of religion. This more rigorous statistical approach runs the risk of demonstrating that social life’s influence on religion may be less impressive than was previously thought. But researchers in this area must take this risk to develop a better sense of the real effects of society on religion. This in turn will provide a better foundation for developing theories of religion’s role in our modern world.

One way in which sociologists of religion can improve their causal modeling strategies is through the use of longitudinal data and methods. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the availability of large-scale longitudinal data that collects information on respondents’ religious belief, practice, and belonging. With these data, scholars interested in religious change can move away from their reliance on comparing individuals to one another – a constraint of cross-sectional data – and begin to analyze how certain life course events may lead to change in individual religiosity. I revisit two important areas within the sociology of religion –the relationship between family formation and religious service attendance and the effects of educational achievement on religious beliefs and practices – to assess whether these relationships can be considered causal in light of results from longitudinal statistical models. By implementing longitudinal models, I am able to directly assess whether between-individual differences or individual change over time is driving the statistical relationships found in my analyses. I will show that the story we thought we knew about how religion responds to family formation and educational attainment changes when these additional statistical tests are brought to bear on the data.

This dissertation aims to address the ways that American religious congregations and religious leaders respond to and are formed within the context of a society marked by inequality. Specifically, I study: (1) the ways that the stress of the pastorate, and the ways that clergy respond to those stressors, is shaped by gender; (2) the ways that the racial make-up of religious congregations relate to the mental health of Black church-goers; and (3) the ways that white liberal religious leaders talk about race and racial inequality during our current period of ferment about race in America. To do so, I use three primary sources of information: (1) the Clergy Health Initiative Statewide Panel Survey of United Methodist Clergy, a longitudinal study of all UMC clergy in North Carolina from 2008-2019; (2) the linked General Social Survey and National Congregations Study dataset, a representative repeated cross-sectional sample of individuals and the religious congregations they attend in 2006, 2012, and 2018; and (3) 41 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with leaders from 41 religious congregations from across the United States that housed an undocumented individual in their congregational space during the Trump era Sanctuary Movement, conducted in 2020. I find that clergywomen are potentially more resilient than their male colleagues at processing occupational stress; that Black individuals who attend predominantly white and liberal congregations report better mental health than Black individuals who attend predominantly non-white congregations; and that, in line with recent quantitative research, white liberals’ rhetoric concerning race seems less colorblind than it used to be but, moving beyond the recent quantitative evidence, it remains complex and continues to perpetuate some features of racist discourse. These findings contribute to the sociology of religion, and they connect to important debates concerning gender, health, occupations, social stratification, and social movements.

In three distinct but related chapters, this dissertation explores the causes and consequences of an important trend in American religion -- the concentration of people into very large churches. I undertake a systematic examination of historical materials to excavate the origins of the modern Protestant megachurch and find its genesis lies in the beginnings of the Reformation, not in the late twentieth century as commonly argued. I then turn to study the consequences of this shift, using data from the combined National Congregations Study and U.S. General Social Survey. I uncover a significant negative relationship between congregation size and the probability of attendance. These results provide convincing evidence in support of the theory that social interaction and group cohesion lies at the heart of the size-participation relationship. Finally, I use zero-inflated regression models to examine the relationship between size and the socio-economic status composition of the church. My analyses reveal a negative relationship between size and low household income. Larger congregations contain a larger proportion of regular adult participants living in high income households and possessing college degrees, and a smaller proportion of people living in low income households. In congregations located in relatively poor census tracts, the relationship between high socio-economic status (SES) and congregation size remains significant. This research offers important correctives that help situate megachurches in the United States in their proper context. It provides important insights into how the shift of churchgoers into large congregations may concentrate power in these organizations and reduce overall rates of attendance.

Abstract

It is commonly thought that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. Race in America is a vitally important issue and is equally significant within the inner systems of American churches. This project considers what motivations can be embraced to move homogeneous churches toward racial diversity and specifically whether the prayer for unity in the body of Christ that Jesus prayed in John seventeen is compelling enough to initiate a transition from homogeneity to multiracial. This thesis addresses the questions: What societal barriers exist that prevent or inhibit racial diversity within the majority of American churches? Can we identify societal mandates with theological underpinnings that are adequate to overcome these barriers? What practical approaches can congregational leaders implement to create and sustain an intercultural, multiracial church? So, this project is both an expedition for understanding and a search for strategies that will give the most promising opportunity to produce a healthy multiracial local church. The research is primarily a literature review and will include existing literature regarding historical race relations, sociological implications of race, and segregation in American churches as well as personal experiences pastoring a multicultural church. Documented interviews and discussions from notable individuals about race, white privilege, and discrimination within the American church structures will be included in the inquiry. Ultimately, this thesis provides pastors, leaders, church planters, or leadership teams the tools necessary to navigate the challenges of forming a racially diverse church, understand the complexity of race relations in America, identify the needed motivation to persevere through the process of transforming a homogeneous church into a multicultural one, and acquire reliable action steps that if taken, will increase the likelihood of success. This project presents Jesus’ prayer for unity in John seventeen as a call to action and the research both affirms its validity and offers steps toward its fulfillment.

This dissertation investigates three areas where religious leaders have confronted changes in the modern world. In Chapter 2, I investigate trends in congregational worship towards more enthusiastic and contemporary styles to determine the extent to which this trend is driven by congregations adapting or congregations dying and being replaced. I find that, in contrast with the expectations of the strongest versions of population ecology theories, the overwhelming majority of change is the result of congregations themselves changing, though this varies by religious tradition. In Chapter 3, I examine which congregations were prepared to shift their worship to an online format on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that, in addition to technological know-how and financial resources, contemporary worship practices and religious tradition were strong, independent predictors of streaming and recording capabilities. This suggests that cultural factors, and not just financial or technological resources, were important in enabling an effective response to the pandemic. In Chapter 4, I study the rhetoric of evangelical opinion leaders on immigration and Islam before and after Donald Trump rose to political prominence. I find that evangelical leaders were already discussing immigration and especially Islam with frames of foreign threat even before Trump became politically relevant, and this did not meaningfully shift in the Trump era. Taken together, these studies advance knowledge of how religious leaders and institutions are continuing to interact with an ever-changing modern world.

While there has been much speculation among sociologists on what the rise of religious disaffiliation means in the long-term for American religiosity, and if it can be considered a valid measure of broader secularization, the issue of if and how explicitly atheist communities are normalizing irreligion in the United States has received little attention. Adopting an inductive approach and drawing on one year of exploratory ethnographic research within one atheist community in North Carolina's Triangle Region, including extensive participant-observation as well as nineteen in-depth interviews, I examine in what ways individuals within this community have experienced and interpreted stigma because of their atheistic views, how they have conceptualized and constructed their atheist identity, and how both of these things influence their motivations for seeking and affiliating with atheist organizations and communities. On all these measures I found great diversity among my interlocutors along with a popular desire to shift the focus of atheist organizations, within their own community and in the public sphere, in a positive and value-affirming direction. I consider how these findings might reflect broader trends in how atheism is conceived of and enacted in the contemporary United States and where organized atheism might be heading in the years to come.