Barry A. Kosmin

On the Receiving End: Discrimination toward the Non-Religious in the United States

The present study examines perceived discrimination faced by religious ‘nones’. After distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones’ who are deists or theists, we use nationally representative data from the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) to study the contexts in which these various types of religious ‘nones’ have reported experiencing discrimination. The strongest predictor of such discrimination was not theological atheism or agnosticism but self-identifying as an atheist or agnostic when asked what ones religion is. Context-specific predictors of discrimination are age, region of the country, rural versus urban location, parents’ religious identifications, educational attainment, ethnicity and race. Results are consistent with the view that people who hold more pronounced views are more likely to report discrimination.

American Jewish Secularism: Jewish Life Beyond the Synagogue

This chapter goes beyond asking whether a Jewish identity can exist independently of religion in the contemporary United States. American Jews have already answered that question in the affirmative. The chapter documents and illustrates the richness of today’s secular Jewish culture and expressions of Jewishness beyond religion by exploring how a multitude of trends—intellectual, social, demographic and political—are broadening and transforming Jewish identity and identification in twenty-first century America. Pluralistic market forces and the new information technology provide increasing opportunities for expressions of Jewish secularism and the formation of new forms of community.

Secular Education and the Religious Profile of Contemporary Black and White Americans

This paper deals with the relationships among social status, race, and religion in the contemporary United States. The religious data came from the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification and a sub-sample of 84,469 non-Hispanic white and 8,859 non-Hispanic black adult respondents distributed across 14 religious groups. Educational attainment, i.e., high school and college graduation rates, was used as a measure of social status. Three issues were examined. First, does the historical pattern of social ranking among religious groups still exist in the 1990s? Second, do African-Americans fit the dominant pattern? Third, do national white-black educational disparities occur across all religious groups?

The Need for a Systematic Comparative Approach to National Population Surveys of Jews

National counts of Jewish populations have been fraught with unpleas ant consequences for their sponsors since biblical times (see II Samuel 24:1-18). In those times they were unpopular because of the belief that unfair advantages and dangerous unnatural powers were conferred on the initiators of such projects. In the contemporary academic world, social scientists are taught that surveys have to be approached with cau tion because they famously are prone to error because of bad or fluctuat ing design, discrepancies in samples, and poor execution (Kosmin, 1979). Unfortunately, the National Jewish Population Surveys of 1970 01 and 2000-01 brought little naches (satisfaction) to their sponsors in part because they took place in an intellectual vacuum and ignored the historical and international comparative framework that should under pin all major social scientific studies of the Jews. Their sponsors also failed to recognize that the essence of science, especially as applied to national baseline data collection, is replicable data with standardized and detailed classification rules applied consistently. Rabbinical and biblical literature, as well as gentile authorities, tra ditionally viewed the Jews both as a nation and as a religious commu nity. After Emancipation during the 19th century, this fabric of unity began to unravel. In Western Europe, some Jews chose to define them selves solely as a religious group, eliminating the national aspect. In Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, and also to some extent in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Jewishness was expressed by modernizers, such as the Bundists and Zionists, as a secular national category compa rable to other nationality groups dwelling in these multi-ethnic empires. Internationally, official Jewish population and social statistics reflect these historical developments. For instance, for more than a century the Jews of Switzerland and Ireland have been recorded as a religious or confessional group in their respective national decennial censuses. By contrast, the Jews of the USSR/CIS were recorded as a nationality on the basis of descent in censuses that provide a similar rich time series. North American Jews are heirs to three traditions: the pre-modern religion-nation; the Western modernizers who defined themselves as a group with a distinct religion and who maintained the nationality of their host country; and the East European modernizers who defined themselves as a secular nationality on the basis of Yiddish or Hebrew culture. Though largely of Eastern European stock, American Jews live in a society similar to Western Europe, a society of unitary nationality but with multiple religious groups. Contemporary Jewish identification

It’s the Best of Times: It’s the Worst of Times

The medium is often the message. Powerful messages highlighting the current condition of both organized American Jewry and American Jewish society are revealed by the sponsorship and methodology of the Pew Survey of the US Jewish population. Unlike past national surveys, no national Jewish organizations were involved in the project. Yet the community did not exhibit hostility or fear over non-Jews investigating it, nor did it question their motives. In fact, most welcomed this outside involvement, presumably for its supposed lack of potential denominational or political bias. Nonetheless, the absence of Jewish organizational involvement clearly reflects the palpable decline in the power and prestige of the national Jewish organizations and the national synagogue bodies over recent decades. These national organizations – American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, B’nai Brith, Hadassah, CJF and its successor Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) – have lost members, donors and resources. Local and sectional interests have replaced over-arching national and international “peoplehood” concerns among affiliated American Jews. This weakening of the old “representative bodies” parallels the decline of mainstream, middle of the road American Judaism and especially the Conservative synagogue movement. The bell curve of American Jews has flattened as elements to the right and left – in both theological and political terms – have gained in numbers as the center has weakened. The Orthodox and Chabad have become more prominent in Jewish life. The secularized left has grown demographically, but largely has vacated organized Jewish philanthropic, religious, and political life. However, there are no real surprises in the Pew Survey findings, they are merely an extension of the social and religious trends revealed by the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), which I directed.

Old Questions and New Issues for Organized Secularism in the United States

American secularism is a feature of American exceptionalism.1 It is unique in its origins as well as its composition. I have suggested that American history since 1776 has produced alternations between eras of Christian religious ‘awakenings’ and periods of ‘secular’ or non-religious dominance and so, in effect, a continuous ‘culture war’ over the nature and purpose of the American nation (Kosmin 2014a). Recently national social trends seem to suggest the country is entering a new secular phase (Kosmin 2013). The ARIS 2008 findings showed that half of U.S households did not currently belong to a religious congregation and on the average Sunday 73% of Americans did not go to Church.While 27% of Americans did not anticipate a religious funeral, 30% of Americans did not believe in a personal biblical style God (Kosmin et al 2009). And more recent surveys have confirmed these data and trends so we may be at an important tipping point in U.S. history. The evidence demonstrates that the Zeitgeist, if not the Force, is with the secular and secularizing Nones and this development makes the analysis and study of secularism per se of major relevance for American social science. Religious conservatism, faith-based initiatives, religion-related terrorism, the New Atheist texts, and increasing use of digital and ‘social’ media have energized and emboldened secularist advocates, networks, and organizations at both local and national levels. Accelerated growth in membership has been reported in recent years by nationwide organizations with clear secularist agendas including the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), Center for Inquiry (CFI), American Atheists (AA), American Humanist Association (AHA), Secular Student Alliance (SSA) and the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers (MAFF). On the intentional side, public advertising campaigns and events have been mounted in major cities. This new secularist surge of activism has been framed, in part, as an identity politics issue and movement in the United States. Some present themselves as members of a marginalized and maligned minority

Faith and Philanthropy in America: Exploring the Role of Religion in America's Voluntary Sector.

A Publication of INDEPENDENT SECTOR Examines the patterns of charitable activity among members of several major faiths and traces the historical and theological roots of giving traditions.