John Schmalzbauer

Cultural and moral boundaries in the United States: Structural position, geographic location, and lifestyle explanations☆

Abstract Using the culture module of the 1993 General Social Survey, this study proposes a multicausal model to assess the determinants of moral and cultural boundaries in the American population. We find that structural position - education, income, class, and gender - affects the likelihood that individuals draw one type of boundary rather than another. Furthermore, geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters play an important role in supplying cultural repertoires that affect the drawing of boundaries. While both cultural and moral boundaries are predicted by structural position and geographic location, cultural boundaries are predicted by participation in high culture lifestyle clusters and moral boundaries are predicted by participation in religious lifestyle clusters. Geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters have a stronger effect on the boundaries of non-college graduates than on those of college graduates, suggesting that local cultural repertoires have a less important impact on the boundaries of individuals who share a homogenizing educational experience.

Evangelicals in the new class: class versus subcultural predictors of ideology

This paper tests the relative importance of class and religious subculture in predicting political and social attitudes, by looking at the views of evangelicals who work in the new class. Multivariate regression analyses reveal that religious subculture and class are both highly significant predictors of ideological position on sexual mores, abortion, sex roles, and civil liberties. Additionally, evangelical new-class workers resist the liberalizing effects of class more than other new class members on sexual mores, while accommodating to new-class liberalism on abortion, gender roles, and civil liberties

Between Professional and Religious Worlds: Catholics and Evangelicals in American Journalism

What is the place of personal religious identity in the profession of American journalism ? In a professional culture which prizes the qualities of objectivity and detachment, what place if any remains for the public display of religious and moral convictions on the part of the reporter? This article uses in-depth interviews with twenty Catholic and evangelical journalists (employed at major news organizations such as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and ABC News) to explore how religious people in American journalism manage the tension between objectivity and religious commitment. It identifies three types of strategies Catholics and evangelicals have used to negotiate the boundary between professional and religious worlds: 1) privatization and selective compartmentalization ; 2) multivocal bridging languages; and 3) the rhetoric of objectivity. While some Catholic and evangelical respondents attempted to confine their religious beliefs to the private sphere, the vast majority were able to translate their religious and normative convictions into the language of professional journalism. At the same time, most qualified the use of religious or normative language with countervailing appeals to the rhetoric of objectivity, restoring the boundary between professional and religious worlds after it had become blurred.

American Scholars Return to Studying Religion

a new story needs to be told about religion in the academy, one that recognizes the resilience of the study of the sacred in higher education. Marginalized for the better part of a century, the study of religion is making a comeback in American higher education. In this postmodern era, growing numbers of scholars are challenging the boundary between faith and knowledge, as well as acknowledging the importance of religion as a social phenomenon. Articles on the return of religion can be found in the publications of such disciplines as art, English, philosophy, music, political science, social work, medicine, history, and sociology. Some 50 religious scholarly associations foster the integration of faith and learning, while newly-created centers for the study of religion can be found at Columbia University, the University of Virginia, Princeton University, New York University, and a host of other institutions. In recent years, the academic trade magazines Change and Academe have devoted special issues to the topic of religion and higher education. Like the secularization of the university during the first half of the 20th century, the contemporary resurgence of religious scholarship bears some hallmarks of a social movement. Far from inevitable, this resurgence resulted in large measure from scholars who organized themselves collectively to promote the study of religion. Their efforts have found expression in religious professional associations, centers and institutes, and journals, and they have enjoyed support from philanthropic foundations.

Social Engagement in an Evangelical Campus Ministry: The Case of Urbana 2006

This article uses a case study of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to explore the social engagement of campus evangelicals. It focuses on InterVarsity’s massive Urbana student missions conference, a gathering that drew 23,000 young evangelicals to St. Louis in 2006. Drawing on ethnographic field observations, it profiles a campus group on the center-left of evangelicalism. Although InterVarsity promotes some conservative positions, it is increasingly progressive on issues of poverty, the environment, and race.

Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life By Elaine Howard Ecklund Oxford University Press. 2006. 211 pages.

of existing research on the topic to motivate their analyses, but their empirical work neither identifies new answers to old questions nor generates new questions. We need to know more about the precise mechanisms through which maternal education affects child outcomes, which requires a more systematic approach than simply estimating an effect of maternal education on an intermediate outcome (e.g., warmth or cognitive functioning in the home), and then estimating the effect of that outcome on children’s educational attainment. We need to know the extent to which maternal education has direct effects as well as the extent of indirect effects, and which mechanisms have the most explanatory power. Without that, the analysis begins and ends with the same laundry list of ways in which maternal education might matter for children. Another difficulty with the book arises from what I suspect was an internal struggle over how to best write public sociology. It is clear from the start that the “point of this book is political,” as Attewell stated in an Author Meets Critics session at the annual American Sociological Association meeting. The authors lay out a clear argument, and marshal as much empirical support as they can muster to support it. They draw conclusions and implications for policy and practice, but spend relatively little time considering alternative explanations or broader lessons for theory. The authors seem to have declined to engage their analysis with research in the stratification tradition, and consider in particular implications for the future of educational opportunity and equality. How and why was the effort to equalize not only college access but success undermined in this case? The authors are trained sociologists, and their value-added as such was not fully brought to bear. In conclusion, I most certainly recommend this book to scholars of higher education. It is interesting and worthwhile reading, best considered as the conclusion (?) of a series of outstanding texts by David Lavin. One can only hope it inspires other institutions to undertake efforts to expand opportunities for college access in the dramatic way CUNY once did.

22.95 paper

Abstract This article uses Hans Hillerbrands Encyclopedia of Protestantism 1 to explore the protean character of Protestantism. In considering the question What is Protestantism? it assesses two characterisations of Protestantism: as a rejection of Catholicism and as a religious prelude to secularisation. The article discusses the history of the religion, the challenge of defining a 500-year-old religious family, the ambiguous boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism, and the thin line separating Protestants from their post-Protestant descendants. It concludes by reflecting on the implications of the Encyclopedia of Protestantism for the field of religious studies.

Searching for Protestantism in the Encyclopedia of Protestantism

In recent years, a cottage industry of books and articles has appeared on the topic of faith-based social service providers. Though often lively, the debate has tended to generate more heat than light. Largely missing from the discussion have been systematic empirical investigations of real life churches. Fortunately, this is beginning to change. While Mark Chaves’ National Congregations Study provides us with the first large-scale quantitative data on faith-based social service activities, qualitative studies by Omar McRoberts and the research team led by Ronald Sider and Heidi Rolland Unruh offer rich portraits of local congregations engaged in urban ministry. Joining these pioneering works is John P. Bartkowski and Helen A. Regis’ Charitable Choices, a useful study of 30 Mississippi congregations at the dawn of the charitable choice era. Based on interviews with clergy, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, it adds much-needed nuance to a frequently partisan discussion. The heart of the book consists of in-depth interviews with clergy from a wide range of denominational backgrounds. While the bulk of the interviewees were pastors from Mississippi’s dominant Baptist and Methodist churches, Bartkowski and Regis had the foresight to include representatives of Catholic, Muslim, and Mormon congregations. Divided more or less evenly between black and white churches, this sampling design allowed the authors to look at the powerful impact of race on faith-based social service provision. Though Charitable Choices lacks a single overarching thesis, its argument can be divided into three important insights. First, local context matters. With in-depth profiles of several churches, the authors show how resources, denominational polities, and demographics powerfully shape congregational perceptions of social ministry. In one profile we learn that financially strapped congregations are reluctant to begin new ministries. In another we read about the impact of the United Methodist practice of rotating clergy on the ability of churches to innovate. A second major contribution of this book is to drive home the impact of race on congregational attitudes. Confirming Faulkner’s observation that in the South “the past isn’t even past,” the authors show how white and black memories of the pre-civil rights era continue to influence discourse on poverty and welfare. In an especially revealing chapter, an African American minister expresses strong reservations about the localism inherent in charitable choice, fearing that power will be returned to the “good old boys” who resisted integration (p. 111). Likewise, in a shocking display of historical naïveté, a white Southern Baptist pastor praises the noblesse oblige of white plantation owners. It is a tribute to the interviewing skills of the researchers that they were able to get such candid reflections on race. Perhaps the strongest chapter in Charitable Choices focuses on the area’s March for Jesus. Showing both the fluidity and the persistence of racial and religious boundaries, Bartkowski and Regis contrast the event’s emotional interracialism with the reality of continuing structural inequality. Reminiscent of the Promise Keepers’ rhetoric of racial brotherhood, the March for Jesus preaches against prejudice while doing little to correct the asymmetries of power and wealth in Mississippi. A third major contribution of the book is to demonstrate what Bartkowski and Regis call the “Janus-faced” nature of social capital in the area of religious social service provision. Drawing on Robert Putnam’s contrast between “bridging” and “bonding” social capital, they show how faith-based antipoverty programs both challenge and reinforce social divisions. As this use of Putnam demonstrates, the authors have done an excellent job of connecting their Mississippi interviews and field observations to larger national debates. Like Mark Chaves’ National Congregations Study, Charitable Choices injects a note of realism into discussions about faith-based social service provision. Like Chaves, the authors found that only some of the congregations in