CURRENT RESEARCH

■   While there is less opposition to the prospect of an atheist president, especially as the stigma of atheism has decreased in recent years, partisanship and religiosity may still keep voters from electing even patriotic candidates if they don’t profess a faith, a new study finds. In an article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (online in September), political scientists David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, and Wayde Marsh report drawing on four survey experiments from 2020 to 2023 to test whether America’s growing secular currents have been changing the negative perception of voting for an atheist candidate. In these experiments, respondents first read news stories about a hypothetical candidate for political office who was an atheist and then were asked how likely they would be to vote for such a candidate. One news story also portrayed the candidate as patriotic and “truly American.” The researchers found that, depending on the news story respondents read, identifying as an atheist produced either “a null or slightly negative overall effect.” They also found that voters’ reactions to atheist candidates did not vary with the office or position for which they were running.

Source: People’s World, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/atheists-also-fight-for-religious-freedom/

As might be expected, partisanship was found to be the main factor in voter reactions, with Republicans being more critical of atheist candidates and Democrats being consistently favorable to such politicians. Since Republicans are more religious than Democrats, that effect carried over to support for atheist candidates. The depiction of the patriotic and “truly American” candidate in one of the news stories was not enough to narrow the gap between the voters, showing the continual importance of religiosity. Campbell, Layman, and Marsh conclude that atheists can count on support from Democrats (except for the small percentage of strongly religious ones). But in the future, the declining number of religious voters may propel atheist candidates to office, even if some degree of apprehension remains.

(Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14685906)

■  A “U.S. leadership culture” remains influential in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) outside of America, a factor that may be keeping recent-convert retention rates at a low level.In the independent Mormon journal Dialogue (57:2), anthropologist Henri Gooren writes that the LDS’s emphasis on maintaining a global and transcendent church free of national traditions and cultures has opened it to criticism that its U.S.-based leadership culture has been exported by default worldwide. In an effort to update a previous study of Latin American Mormons, Gooren conducted a survey of LDS leadership demographics in Chile and all the countries of Central America, based on data on the occupations of stake presidents and their counselors listed in the LDS’s Church News from 2000 to 2019. He also compared these findings to data from the same source on European church leaders. He found continuities in the distributions of the church leaders’ occupations in these countries: stake presidents and their counselors “are still overwhelmingly recruited from a background of (small) business owners, business administrators, business employees and professionals.” Gooren writes that this leadership culture based on American business models and norms conflicts with Latin American leadership models that uphold a more traditional style of leadership, known as “personalism,” based on bonds of friendship and the leader’s ability to bestow favors on followers. This conflict may be related to recent low retention rates in Latin America (which are in the 15-to-25 percent range) and Europe. However, Gooren notes that the church has sought to address the problems of local leadership and the dominance of local culture.

Source: Ask Gramps, https://askgramps.org/how-should-mormon-missionaries-be-addressed-and-treated/

(Dialogue, https://www.dialoguejournal.com/)

    Source: Mormon Olympians,   
    https://mormonolympians.org/tithing_mormonism

■  A new study finds that tithing practices in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) do not appear to assist in alleviating localized poverty.In the Journal of Economics, Theology and Religion (4:1), economist Dallin Overstreet describes how Mormon scriptures and leaders teach that tithing helps break the cycle of poverty. This claim was made explicit by LDS President Russell Nelson, who told members in Africa that “we preach tithing to the poor people of the world because the poor people of the world have had cycles of poverty, generation after generation. That same poverty continues from one generation to another, until people pay their tithing.” Overstreet used LDS temples as a proxy for tithing participation, testing whether counties with temples exhibited lower poverty rates than comparable counties without temples over the period from 2010 to 2018. His findings revealed no statistically significant impact of temple presence on poverty rates. He proposes that the gap between the promised prosperity benefits of tithing and these null results of temple presence is due to a fundamental flaw in the way the church allocates funds from tithing, with only a small percentage returned to the temples and their charitable activities that could alleviate local poverty. Instead, institutional priorities and incentives are centered around global expansion, real estate, and public relations, recently revealed in the church’s $100 billion investment arm. Overstreet allows that it is possible that tithing confers financial benefits mostly to individuals or households rather than to entire communities, with temples boosting economic outcomes for members through expanded social networks and labor market referrals through congregational ties.

(Journal of Economics, Theology, and Religion, https://j-etr.org/2024/04/03/the-elusive-economic-blessings-of-tithing-mormon-temples-and-county-poverty/)

■  While the Israeli government has set the goal of integrating more ultra-Orthodox Jews into the labor market, a new study finds that “pull” factors are keeping members of this religious community from joining the labor force.In the journal Rationality and Society (36:3), Yossi Perelman and Chen Goldberg write that, although the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, have a higher natural growth rate than the general Israeli population, their employment rate, especially among men, is significantly lower. The researchers analyzed individual-level data collected from 256 ultra-Orthodox men and found a positive association between wage expectations and likelihood of entering the labor market, “implying a potential tradeoff between earning potential and the extent of social fines” keeping members devoted to the religious community. The researchers found that the ultra-Orthodox community is also accepting of members who engage in Yeshiva studies but may not follow accepted norms, because they want to encourage potential future religious commitment. Although these laxer members may be amenable to entering the labor market, the community has increasingly been offering incentives (such as subsidies for Yeshiva studies) to retain members. Perelman and Goldberg conclude that Israeli economists and policymakers, in their attempts to assimilate ultra-Orthodox men into the labor market, may overlook how this community doesn’t have the control over its members that is often assumed, even as the Haredi also offer incentives to keep members within a demanding religious community.

(Rationality and Society, https://journals.sagepub.com/home/rss)