Source: American Life League | Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/64235822@N00/9186763697/)
The weak effect Adamczyk found in the correlation between religious affiliation and abortion attitudes was only partially offset by respondents’ Catholic affiliation, with an increase in abortion disapproval appearing in Catholic countries, but there was no such effect for dominant religious groups in other countries. But she found it was the country effects (the influence of the surrounding religious or secular culture) that had as much impact on abortion attitudes as personal beliefs. In comparing abortion attitudes in China and the U.S., Adamczyk and researchers conducted 40 expert interviews (comprising such professionals as journalists, researchers, and doctors) and found a wide chasm between the two countries on the issue. In China, there was no effect of religion and spirituality on abortion attitudes, aside from an individual belief in karma with collective implications, while the pervasive Christian presence in the U.S. kept abortion prominent in public life. But in her interviews, Adamczyk found religious overtones to several respondents, ranging from views that confession can help women in coping with the loss caused by abortion to the belief that through reincarnation the couple could have another chance to have children.
Source: GetArchive/Pixabay
(https://garystockbridge617.getarchive.net
/media/saltlake-city-church-utah-religion-b90d2f)
Yet LDS members overreport at a lower rate than other religious adherents; Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses showed higher rates of discrepancy. And even if the total is only one-third of LDS claims to weekly attendance, Mormons remain some of the most stalwart weekly attenders in America: about 15 percent of U.S. Latter-day Saints appear to be weekly attenders, which is triple the national average of 5 percent. Other singularities that Pope finds among the LDS is that they lack the spikes in holiday attendance of other Christians, which is another sign that most of the just under 2 million people in the pews on a given Sunday are regular attenders. He finds LDS congregations to be the least economically diverse of all religious groups. Even when controlling for geography, thinking that the Intermountain West’s high rate of homogeneity (especially Utah) was skewing the results, Pope still found that the LDS “remains one of the least diverse places of worship.”
Source: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Wikimedia)
The researchers find that secular regimes “lack both religious legitimacy and political motivation to engage over religious issues given their much broader constituencies, such as that their dispute resolution forum preferences are unaffected by religious salience.” In contrast, moderately religious regimes, such as seen in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, “are caught in the middle. Unlike secular regimes, their domestic politics and institutions are substantially informed by religious interests and agendas, so non-engagement over religiously salient disputes is unlikely. Yet their dearth of religious legitimacy compared to highly religious regimes implies a substantial risk of domestic religious outbidding and consequent negotiation failure when they do engage,” the researchers write. This results in moderately religious regimes avoiding dispute resolution “rather than engagement of any kind,” they add.
(Journal of Global Security Studies, https://academic.oup.com/jogss)
The recent Savanta poll confirms a continued high level of belief and practice, even if attendance has declined to 36 percent for monthly or more attenders. But more noteworthy was the wide appeal of the evangelical designation: “47 percent of Protestants and a startling 38 percent of Catholics who consider themselves practicing self-identified as evangelicals,” Ganiel writes. Those considering themselves “evangelical” in both surveys stood out from the general population in their support for pro-life measures and opposition to same-sex marriage. But Ganiel concludes that “the two surveys confounded some stereotypes of evangelicalism.” Eighty-one percent of the Evangelical Alliance respondents agreed that asylum seekers and refugees should be supported in practical ways and made to feel welcome, compared to just 56 percent of the general population. The surveys also showed that 82 percent of the general population and 83 percent of Evangelical Alliance respondents agreed that more effort is needed to promote peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
(Brainstorm, https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2024/0227/1434591-northern-ireland-religion-evangelicalism-identity-survey-feb-2024/)
Source: Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (Montecruz Foto via Jewish Policy Center).
An alternative to the much-cited BKA numbers is to be found in surveys of Jews in Germany and Europe, which find that “most incidents of violence or harassment are committed by Muslim immigrants of whatever generation.” Among others, he cites a 2018 survey of Jewish residents in 12 European countries conducted by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, finding that the most frequent offender category identified by victims of antisemitic harassment was “someone with a Muslim extremist view,” which accounted for 30 percent of all incidents in the 12-country study and 41 percent of incidents in Germany. The 12-country average for “someone with a right-wing view” was 13 percent (the figures for “someone with a left-wing view” were 21 percent). “This is the same figure found by a 2022 study by the independent Research and Information Clearinghouse for Antisemitism. Hammel adds that, “according to the best studies we have, only 10–15 percent of antisemitic incidents in Germany are motivated by right-wing ideology—a statistic comparable to the number of antisemitic incidents traceable to extreme-left-wing ideologies. These results hold true for all other European countries with significant Muslim populations, including France and Sweden.”
(Quillete, https://quillette.com/2024/02/13/narratives-damned-lies-and-statistics/)
Source: Lausanne Movement (https://lausanne.org/content/lga/2022-05/christian-persecution-in-nigeria).
Crux writer Ngala Killian Chimtom cites the report as showing that the killings and related violence resulted in the destruction of tens of thousands of civilian homes, more than 18,500 Christian places of worship, 1,000 religious shrines, and 2,500 Christian/traditional education centers. During the same period, over 59,000 square kilometers of land that belonged to native Christians and non-Muslims were taken over and their inhabitants displaced. “Between 2016 and 2023, a period of eight years, more than 30,000 defenseless civilians were abducted by Islamic Jihadists and, some say, ‘Islamic inspired’ security forces in Nigeria,” the report states. It adds that “the most shocking of it all is that the Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen operate freely and unchallenged with impunity and reckless abandon, with the Nigerian Security Forces (NSFs), widely accused of being ‘Islamic-inspired,’ turning blind eyes or looking the other [way], except when it comes to protection of Fulani cows and their herders or arresting members of the victim communities and their leaders, labeling them ‘bandits.’”
(Crux, https://cruxnow.com/church-in-africa/2024/02/nigeria-experiencing-a-silent-genocide-against-christians)