Americans are increasingly choosing not to identify with any religious tradition. But this group of irreligious people is a complex one – with different relationships to religion.
Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena
Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically and culturally diverse societies found that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural than for social phenomena, consistent with theories that ground the origin of religious belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in the natural world. Despite the dominance of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, supernatural explanations of social phenomena were especially prevalent in urbanized societies with more socially complex and anonymous groups. Our results show how people use supernatural beliefs as explanatory tools in non-industrial societies, and how these applications vary across small-scale communities versus large and urbanized groups.
Why Religion, Not Income, Predicts the American Vote
Inside the data that shows socioeconomic status barely matters once you know someone’s religious tradition.
Religious intolerance is 'bigger cause of prejudice than race', says report
Attitudes to faith said to drive negative perceptions more than nationality or ethnicity
Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study
The differences across cultures in the enforcement of conformity may reflect their specific histories. , With data from 33 nations, we illustrate the differences between cultures that are tight (have many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior) versus loose (have weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior). Tightness-looseness is part of a complex, loosely integrated multilevel system that comprises distal ecological and historical threats (e.g., high population density, resource scarcity, a history of territorial conflict, and disease and environmental threats), broad versus narrow socialization in societal institutions (e.g., autocracy, media regulations), the strength of everyday recurring situations, and micro-level psychological affordances (e.g., prevention self-guides, high regulatory strength, need for structure). This research advances knowledge that can foster cross-cultural understanding in a world of increasing global interdependence and has implications for modeling cultural change.
The Association of Religion Data Archives
Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) best reference source to find data, information, datasets on American & international religion, US Religion Census
Sacralizing Dominion: The Doctrine of Christian Discovery and the Religious Nationalist Imagination
White Christian nationalism presents itself as restoration—of a Christian nation, a moral order, a rightful hierarchy. This article argues that what it restores is the world-making rhetoric of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD). Reading the fifteenth-century papal bulls, their sedimentation into United States law, culture, religion, and contemporary dominionist discourse as a single rhetorical formation, we show that the bulls’ vocabulary of discovery, vacancy, and civilization did not describe a world but constituted one: a moral-legal order in which Christian identity conferred sovereignty and racialized peoples appeared as obstacles to salvation and property. That order persists as hegemonic common sense, carried by legal precedent, curricula, and popular culture, and it is re-performed today in the territorial rhetoric of the New Apostolic Reformation and white Christian nationalism. Following Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), repudiating the doctrine’s documents without dismantling its embeddedness within language and cognition leaves religious nationalism’s deepest resource intact. Against the discovery template, we set three counter-rhetorics—Indigenous theologies, Black theology, and womanism—and argue that desanctifying dominion requires conciliation, not reconciliation.
Believing what we do not believe: Acquiescence to superstitious beliefs and other powerful intuitions.
Disclosure Day
Across the films of Steven Spielberg, aliens have frequently been a vehicle to explore religiosity from a secular perspective. Institutions and dogma are elided in favor of dramatizing the ecstatic feeling of believing in something far beyond one�s station, and having that faith rewarded.
Masculist pushback: the threatened extinction of the great, white Judeo-Christian male
A political ideology rooted in fear is remaking the world in its own image and dragging us with it
Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love The People.
Opinion | 9/11 took Islamophobia mainstream in America – and things have only gotten worse
Although I have always had kind and mostly tolerant neighbors, the effects of widespread Islamophobia have touched my life intimately.
Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values
Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.
(Working Paper) Good Faith Design: Religion as a Resource for Technologists
Previous work has found a lack of research in HCI on religion, partly driven by misunderstandings of values and practices between religious and technical communities. To bridge this divide in an empirically rigorous way, we conducted an interview study with 48 religious people and/or experts from 11 faiths, and we document how religious people experience, understand, and imagine technologies. We show that religious stakeholders find non-neutral secular embeddings in technologies and the firms and people that design them, and how these manifest in unintended harms for religious and nonreligious users. Our findings reveal how users navigate technoreligious practices with religiously informed mental models and what they desire from technologies. Informed by this, we distill six design values -- wonder, humility, space, embodiedness, community, and eternity -- to guide technologists in considering and leveraging religion as an additional, valid sociocultural resource when designing for a holistic user. We further spell out directions for future research.
Can Religions Be Reborn? | Over The Mountains to Civilizational Renewal #9
CFP: Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare | The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory | JCRT
This call for papers invites work on religion, politics, and cognitive warfare, exploring how belief, media, conspiracy, identity, and power shape struggles over reality, interpretation, and life in an age of disinformat
Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis - The Great Simplification
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them – such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of our current civilization plays out around us?
