disadvantages of religion essay

The Upside and Downside of Religion, Spirituality, and Health

Clinicians may need to consider what happens to religiously oriented people when things go badly, despite their faith and prayer.

COVER STORY

The Bible tells us to lay hands on the sick and they shall recover and will continue to do that without the fear of the spread of any virus. —Pastor Tony Spell, Life Tabernacle Church, Baton Rouge, LA 1

Can prayer on behalf of those with serious illness be of benefit to a cohort of anonymous recipients? We recently became aware of a randomized, controlled study aimed at answering precisely this question for a population of patients with COVID-19 in the intensive care unit. 2 Whatever one’s religious or spiritual beliefs—or lack thereof—this study raises profound questions and concerns for psychiatrists. For example, what is the effect on patients and their families if their prayers for ailing loved ones are not answered? What is the potential for religious and spiritual interventions to relieve—or to exacerbate—the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic? In this article, we explore the double-edged sword of religious and spiritual responses to the pandemic.

The upside of religion and spirituality during the pandemic

A recent survey sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association highlighted the adverse psychological effects of the current pandemic and the prominent place of religious faith in addressing these effects. 3 The survey results indicate that nearly half of Americans (48%) are anxious about the possibility of contracting coronavirus; about 40% are anxious about becoming seriously ill or dying from coronavirus; and even more Americans (62%) are anxious about the possibility of family and loved ones getting coronavirus. The APA survey is cited in a new Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) resource for faith-based leaders assisting their communities to manage the challenges COVID-19 presents to their faith and lives. Importantly for our topic, DHHS cites research that “one in four people who seek help for mental health concerns turn to faith leaders before they seek help from clinical professionals.” 4

Indeed, there is a long philosophical and historical relationship between religion, spirituality, and healing, as well as a modern body of solid empirical evidence showing the beneficial effects that traditional religion and more contemporary spirituality have on physical and mental health. 5 Although there is valid criticism of the methodological limits of some studies—including, for example, the difficulty in establishing causality—most health care practitioners, including mental health professionals, have seen these benefits for many patients under their care.

"One in four people who seek help for mental health concerns turn to faith leaders before they seek help from clinical professionals.”

For example, a rigorous 16-year follow-up study showed that women (N = 74,534) who attended religious services more than once per week experienced 33% lower all-cause mortality, including cancer and heart disease, compared with women who had never attended religious services. 6 Li and colleagues noted that, “There may be many pathways from attendance at religious services to health” and that effects on depressive symptoms, smoking, social support, and optimism were potentially important mediators. No single mediator explained more than about 25% of the effect.

Even more pertinent to psychiatry findings from a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggest that persons who endorsed religion and spirituality as being of “high importance” in their lives had only one-tenth the risk for depression (especially recurrent depression), compared with those for whom religion was of less or no importance—no matter the nature of the religious or spiritual beliefs. 7 This association held true even more strongly if an individual had a depressed parent.

We might just say, all well and good: religion and spirituality, through 1 or more mechanisms, can have a positive impact on heart disease and depression. But how could religious belief and spiritual practice be helpful in the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic when we do not even have a vaccine? Intuitively, it might seem more likely that, in the context of such a devastating plague, certain religious beliefs would only worsen fear and despair—perhaps conjuring up images of apocalyptic plagues and divine punishment for sin, or leading people to feel that God had abandoned them and then to reject religion and spirituality completely.

Although scientific research on this issue is not yet available, news stories and public opinion polls suggest that the picture is actually more ambiguous, and that there is both an up- and a downside to religion and spirituality in COVID-19, as we will discuss in the remainder of this article.

Many mainstream churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples—faced almost overnight with the need to promote public health restrictions and cancel the services that are the heart of much communal worship— developed an online presence that reduced isolation and offered solidarity in prayer, medication, and religious reading. 8

Moreover, a recent Gallup Poll—again belying the scenario that COVID-19 will lead to a loss of faith or negative expressions of religiosity—has found that the COVID-19 crisis has enhanced spirituality and religion for many Americans. During the period when the pandemic was rapidly spreading to many parts of the US (March 28-April 1), 19% of those interviewed felt their faith or spirituality had “gotten better” during the crisis. Commenting on this finding, Gallup senior scientist Frank Newport, PhD, 9 observed that “One of the traditional roles of religious individuals and religious entities has been to serve a positive, integrative, pro-social, charitable function in crisis situations.”

The downside of religion and spirituality

In our view, the best available evidence points to a predominantly positive effect of spirituality/religion on mental health and coping, especially during times of crisis. However, as Mosqueiro and colleagues 10 observe, “there is also a downside to this relationship . . . [as] religion can be a major source of stress for many people.”

Thus, Rosmarin, Malloy, and Forester 11 have described what they call a spiritual struggle in some individuals, defined as “any dysfunctional religious or spiritual belief that is capable of generating or exacerbating suffering.” This is also called negative religious coping and may include religious guilt, the belief that God is malicious, and the fear of [divine] retribution. 11

In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, clinicians may need to consider the following questions: What happens to religiously oriented people when things go badly, despite their faith and prayer, when for example, a loved one dies of COVID-19 despite the prayers and faith in God of family members? Might the family think that they did not pray hard enough or were not cheerful and positive enough? Or that their loved one was somehow unworthy of being saved? Consider how people of faith—especially someone with a psychiatric disorder, such as major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or posttraumatic stress disorder—would feel if a priest, rabbi, or other religious leader assured them that if they attend a large religious gathering, God will protect them from COVID-19; and later, the individual becomes ill and learns that other members of the congregation—including, the leader himself—have died of COVID-19. This is exactly what befell a respected Virginia pastor who had promised his congregation that “God is larger than this dreaded virus.” 12 Not only may the members of that congregation experience an exacerbation of their underlying mental health condition, they may also lose trust in the very community and beliefs that were providing support and purpose.

We are not aware of any systematic research that has examined these questions with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still at a relatively early stage. However, studying these issues may have important implications for psychiatry and mental health treatment. For example, Rosmarin and colleagues 11 found that spiritual struggle (negative religious coping) was a strong predictor of greater symptoms of both depression and mania and appears to be a common and important risk factor for depressive symptoms. However, religious affiliation, belief in God, and frequency of religious service attendance were all unrelated to affective symptoms. These findings suggest that it is not religious belief or religiously oriented behavior per se that negatively affects mood; but rather, the dimension of spiritual struggle and its accompanying cognitions (eg, “God must be punishing me,” “I must be unworthy of being saved”).

Negative religious coping may be more common among faiths and congregations that encourage the belief that people can will themselves into remission from some disease through prayer—and that continued disease is a sure sign that the person has failed in some respect. Thus, Christina Puchalski, MD, MS, FACP, FAAHPM, Director of the George Washington University Institute for Spirituality and Health , reports “I’ve had very religious patients who told me that ‘my church group said I didn’t pray hard enough, because otherwise my diabetes would have been cured.’” 13

We wonder how such a self-blaming belief may be playing out in very religious patients who are suffering prolonged and severe bouts of COVID-19—but again, we are not aware of research in this area, at this stage of the pandemic. Nevertheless, we note with concern CNN reporter Miguel Marquez’s observation at a recent protest against restrictions imposed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 14 Marquez caught sight of a truck that bore the message, “ Jesus is my vaccine .” 14 As clinicians, we wonder what happens to people of strong religious faith when the “Jesus vaccine” does not work for them or their families.

Psychiatry and religious faith

Healthy religious and spiritual expression has almost always offered solace in disaster, consolation in bereavement, hope in sickness, and peace in death, for millions of human beings over the millennia. These are powerful reasons why, despite Freud’s prediction in Civilization and Its Discontents nearly 100 years ago, that religion was a mass delusion that reason would soon banish—religious and spiritual expression has retained its vital significance in human life. Until quite recently, Freud’s view captured the ambivalent, if not frankly adversarial, relationship psychiatry has had, historically, with religious belief. In our view, such animus is not in the best interest of our religiously oriented patients. Fortunately, as Professor of Medical Humanities, Farr Curlin, MD, 15 has noted, “This historical antagonism appears to be waning.”

We believe that mental health and religious professionals must work together to help persons of faith toward an authentic understanding of spiritual practice and religious devotion. Furthermore, we believe that certain religiously based misconceptions can actually work against the interests of the patient. For example, a purely instrumental view of prayer can inhibit what we would call the experience of relational openness to God. In this regard, Daniel Sulmasy, MD, PhD, 16 a former Franciscan monk and philosopher – physician, has pointed to the danger of “trying to control or manipulate God’s power, even for a good purpose, such as healing . . . .” Dr Sulmasy specifically relates this to the matter we raised at the beginning of this article—that of the “unanswered prayer.” He writes:

Is one to suppose that God is absent from those that are not healed? Should one question the purity, intensity, sincerity, quantity, or duration of these patients’ prayers or of those who prayed for them? From the point of view of true faith, God is never absent from persons who seek him with a sincere heart. Persons whose prayers for healing are not answered with healing should not be made to feel guilty; they must find a way to understand [God’s] mysteries. . .

One approach to these mysteries—especially in some Asian religions and in existential psychotherapy—is to shift the focus of prayer from the narrowness of one’s ego to a wider vision of the self that encompasses empathy for the suffering of others. Religious leaders have urged the faithful to see the immense human anguish and economic dislocation the pandemic has wrought as an invitation to spiritual transformation. Thus, the Abbott of Wat Pasukato—a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, the Venerable Phra Paisal Visalo, 17 offers this sage advice , regarding the COVID-19 pandemic:

This situation has great potential to help each of us to reduce our selfish behaviors and attitudes and increase our generosity in support of each other. We need to stay connected and encourage people to express their goodness from within, which ultimately helps others.

Like any intervention with the power to effect emotional change, religious and spiritual approaches to serious illness have risks and benefits. As psychiatrists, we need to understand both the positive and negative interactions of religion and spirituality with the particular patient’s physical and emotional needs—and this will likely differ considerably from patient to patient. We can address maladaptive responses stemming from religious guilt and fear, while supporting beliefs and practices that foster hope and resilience. Finally, we believe that psychiatry can play a useful role in re-framing the distressing aspects of the current pandemic in the altruistic and prosocial terms so eloquently expressed by Phra Paisal Visalo.

Dr Pies is Professor, Department of Psychiatry, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY and Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA; he is Editor in Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times (2007 to 2010). Dr Geppert is Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Internal Medicine, and Director of Ethics Education, University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque, NM; she is also Health Care Ethicist, Ethics Consultation Service, VA National Center for Ethics in Health Care. She is also an Editorial Board Member of Psychiatric Times and serves as the Ethics Chair.

1. Kaur H. 4 reasons why the rush to reopen churches goes beyond politics. May 24, 2020. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/24/us/churches-reopening-state-orders-trnd/index.html

2. Gjelten T. Clinical Study Considers the Power of Prayer to Combat COVID-19. NPR. May 1, 2020.

3. American Psychiatric Association. New Poll: COVID-19 Impacting Mental Well-Being: Americans Feeling Anxious, Especially for Loved Older Adults are Less Anxious [press release]. Washington DC; March 25 2020.

4. Wang PS, Berglund PA, Kessler RC. Patterns and correlates of contacting clergy for mental disorders in the United States. Health Serv Res. 2003;38:647-673.

5. Koenig HG. Religion, spirituality, and health: the research and clinical implications. ISRN Psychiatry. 2012;2012:278730.

6. Li S, Stampfer MJ, Williams DR, VanderWeele TJ. Association of religious service attendance with mortality among women. JAMA Intern Med. 2016;176:777-785.

7. Miller L, Wickramaratne P, Gameroff MJ, et al. Religiosity and major depression in adults at high risk: a 10-year prospective study. Am J Psychiatry. 2012;169:89-94.

8. Amy J, Schor E, Lavoie D. Worshippers go online, those at services keep at distance . Associated Press. March 15, 2020, 2020.

9. Newport F. The Religion Paradox. Polling Matters. May 8, 2020. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/310397/religion-paradox.aspx

10. Mosqueiro BP, de Rezende Pinto A, Moreira-Almeida A. Spirituality, religion and mood disorders. In: Rosmarin DH, Koenig HG, eds. Handbook of Spirituality, Religion and Mental Health. London: Academic Press; 2020:1-19.

11. Rosmarin DH, Malloy MC, Forester BP. Spiritual struggle and affective symptoms among geriatric mood disordered patients. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2014;29:653-660.

12. NBS News, Bishop who preached “God is larger than this dreaded virus” dies of COVID-19. April 14, 2020.

13. Shomon MJ. Living Will With Hypothyroidism, revised ed. New York, NY: HarperCollins; 2005.

14. Marquez M. “Jesus is my vaccine” is one of the more colorful messages. https://twitter.com/miguelmarquez/status/1252262768591491072?lang=en

15. University of Chicago Medical Center. Psychiatrists: Least Religious but Most Interested in Patients’ Religion. Science News. December 11, 2007.

16. Sulmasy DP. The Rebirth of the Clinic: And Introduction to Spirituality in Health Care. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press; 2006.

17. Lewis C. Senior Thai Monk Offers a Buddhist Perspective on Dealing with COVID-19 . Buddhistdoor . March 25, 2020. ❒

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Positive and Negative Religious Beliefs Explaining the Religion–Health Connection Among African Americans

Cheryl l. holt.

a University of Maryland, School of Public Health, Department of Behavioral and Community Health

Eddie M. Clark

b Saint Louis University, Department of Psychology

David L. Roth

c Johns Hopkins University, Center on Aging and Health

Theory and literature suggests that the reason religiously-involved people tend to have good health outcomes is because they have healthy lifestyles and behaviors in accord with religious beliefs. Other literature suggests that religious involvement may play a negative role in health outcomes due to beliefs about illness originating as punishment for sins. These ideas were tested as part of a theoretical model of the religion-health connection, in a national sample of African Americans. Outcomes included a variety of health-related behaviors. Study participants (N=2,370) randomly selected from a US national call list completed a telephone survey assessing religious involvement, health behaviors, and demographic characteristics. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze study data. Findings indicate that perceived religious influence on health behavior mediated the relationship between religious beliefs and behaviors and higher fruit consumption, and lower alcohol use and smoking. Belief that illness is the result of punishment for sin mediated the relationship between 1) religious beliefs and higher vegetable consumption and lower binge drinking; and 2) religious behaviors and lower vegetable consumption and higher binge drinking. These findings could be applied to health education activities conducted in African American faith-based organizations such as health ministries, in the effort to eliminate health disparities.

Research has extensively examined the relationship between religious involvement, referring to “an organized system of [religious] beliefs, practices, rituals, and symbols” ( Thoresen, 1998 , p. 415)”, and a wide variety of physical and mental health outcomes ( Koenig, McCullough, & Larson, 2001 ). These relationships are generally agreed to be positive in nature (see Ellison, Hummer, Burdette, & Benjamins, 2010 ; Koenig, King, & Carson, 2012 for reviews), though some evidence of negative aspects of religious involvement and impact on health have been noted as well ( Exline, 2002 ; Mitchell, Lannin, Mathews, & Swanson, 2002 ; Pargament, 2002 ; Pargament, Koenig, Tarakeshwar, & Hahn, 2001 ). Additionally, these relationships are particularly relevant for segments of the population high in religiosity, such as African Americans ( Krause, 2002 ), who tend to have greater religious involvement than other groups ( Levin, Taylor, & Chatters, 1994 ; Taylor, Chatters, Jayakody, & Levin, 1996 ). This population suffers a notable burden of chronic disease and other health problems ( Pleis & Lethbridge-Çejku, 2007 ), including but not limited to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, and cancer. Such conditions have often been found to be negatively associated with religious involvement (see Koenig et al., 2012 for review). An overarching goal of Healthy People 2020 is to attain health equity and eliminate health disparities, in which a health outcome occurs to a greater or lesser degree in a particular group ( U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010 ). Learning more about how religious involvement is connected to health can better inform interventions aimed at health disparities reduction, including faith-based programs, and efforts to increase cultural competence/humility among practitioners.

There have been several efforts, mainly through systematic reviews, to document why the relationship between religious involvement and health-related outcomes exists, or to identify the mediators/mechanisms of the religion-health connection. One review included mechanisms such as lifestyle/health behavior, social support, positive self-perceptions, coping, positive emotions, and healthy beliefs ( Ellison & Levin, 1998 ). Religious involvement was proposed in another review to impact physical health through healthy lifestyle and social support ( Musick, Traphagan, Koenig, & Larson, 2000 ). In a review focusing on longitudinal studies in this area, it was concluded that most have included mechanisms of healthy lifestyle, social support, self-esteem/self-efficacy, and sense of meaning ( George, Ellison, & Larson, 2002 ).

In their updated review, Koenig and colleagues (2012) provide hypothetical causal models of the religion-health connection. A Western model is described from a largely Christian context. In this model, multidimensional religion/spirituality (e.g., public, private, coping, etc.) leads to psychological traits such as self-discipline, patience, and forgiveness. These in turn lead to emotional states (positive/negative) and social connections, which impact physiological function, and finally health. An Eastern model follows, which is largely the same as the Western, except that rather than the religion/spirituality stemming from belief in God, the source is Brahman or Buddha. Finally, a secular model is proposed, in which the root source is self and community, which leads to a multidimensional concept including but not limited to public good, ethics, and justice, and the remainder of the model is the same as the others. Taken together, most models of the religion-health connection recognize the importance of a higher power and some form of multidimensional religious involvement, which lead to a set or series of mediators including but not limited to psychological traits and support from others, which ultimately impacts health outcomes. The next section describes two mediators of interest that were identified based on the aforementioned theoretical models.

Perceived religious influence on health behavior

Proposed theoretical models commonly reflect the idea that religiously involved people are healthier because they engage in healthy lifestyles in accord with their religious beliefs. This perceived religious influence on health behavior ( Holt, Clark, et al., 2009 ) may include avoiding behaviors such as such as drinking alcohol excessively, risky sexual practices, using illegal drugs, or tobacco use ( Ellison & Levin, 1998 ; George et al., 2002 ; George, Larson, Koenig, & McCullough, 2000 ; Levin & Vanderpool, 1989 ; Mullen, 1990 ; Musick, Traphagan, et al., 2000 ; Strawbridge, Shema, Cohen, & Kaplan, 2001 ). Such behaviors may reflect religious doctrine, or the general belief that the body is the temple of the holy spirit ( George et al., 2000 ). In the aforementioned review, Koenig and colleagues (2012) list a number of health behavioral pathways through which religious involvement may impact health, including physical activity, diet, weight control, sexual activity, smoking, and screenings. It was concluded that religious involvement may indeed impact physical health through greater engagement in these types of healthy behaviors.

Hill and colleagues (2007) examined whether religious individuals engaged in healthier lifestyles than less religious individuals, using a sample of Texas adults. They confirmed this idea, among both men and women, and across race/ethnic groups. They called for future research to determine whether healthy lifestyles serve as a mechanism whereby religious involvement plays a role in mortality reduction, which is where the current study contributes. Only recently has perceived religious influence on health behavior been operationalized in terms of assessing people’s specific beliefs about if/how their religious convictions impact their health behaviors ( Holt, Clark, et al., 2009 ). This enables the assessment of the construct in its mediational role as proposed by the aforementioned theoretical models.

Illness as punishment for sin

Though perceived religious influence on health behavior reflects a positive role of religious involvement in health, not all religious influences are positive/adaptive in nature. An exception is negative religious coping ( Pargament, Koenig, & Perez, 2000 ), which has been the focus of much previous research. Religious coping involves two overall dimensions, positive and negative ( Pargament, Feuille, & Burdzy, 2011 ). Positive religious coping is where an individual has a close relationship with a higher power, is spiritually connected with others, and has a benevolent world view. Negative religious coping involves spiritual struggle with one’s self, others, and a higher power. Research suggests that the negative dimension is predictive of health outcomes including mortality ( Pargament, Koenig, Tarakeshwar, & Hahn, 2001 ).

Another negative aspect of religious involvement is the idea that some people believe that illness may be the result of punishment for sins or wrongdoings ( Ellison, 1994 ). People who violate religious norms may experience feelings of guilt or shame, or they may fear punishment from God ( Ellison & Levin, 1998 ). Empirical literature on this specific concept has suggested the idea that serious illness such as HIV may be viewed as being the result of punishment for sin ( Crawford, Allison, Robinson, Hughes, & Samaryk, 1992 ; Kaldjian, Jekel, & Friedman, 1998 ; Klonoff & Landrine, 1994 ; Kopelman, 2002 ; Neylan, Nelson, Schauf, & Schollard, 1998 ). These beliefs around punishment may also be relevant in the context of cancer ( Burker, Evon, Sedway, & Egan, 2005 ; Degner, Hack, O’Neil, & Kristianson, 2003 ; Eidinger & Schapira, 1984 ; Luker, Beaver, Leinster, & Owens, 1996 ; Springer, 1994 ). Instruments to assess beliefs regarding illness as punishment for sin are also rare. Therefore, one was developed specifically for use in testing mediational models of the religion-health connection ( Holt, Clark, et al., 2009 ). The Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity (PIOS) also assess fears about having committed sin and receiving punishment from God, however this instrument is not health-specific and was developed and validated in an undergraduate sample ( Abramowitz, Huppert, Cohen, Tolin, & Cahill, 2002 ).

The Present Study

The purpose of this study was to test a theoretical model of the religion-health connection, to determine whether perceived religious influence on health behavior and illness as punishment for sin played a mediating role in a number of modifiable health behaviors in a national sample of African Americans. Although these two constructs have both been proposed as religion-health mediators, there has been limited empirical research testing their mediational role in health-related outcomes. This may be in part due to the limited availability of ways to assess these complex beliefs relating religious involvement and health. A review of religion and health research among African Americans indicated that few studies have focused on African Americans relative to non-Hispanic Whites ( Ellison et al., 2010 ). African Americans tend to have high levels of religious involvement. They are more likely than other groups to report a religious affiliation, over half report at least weekly service attendance (compared with 39% of the US general population), and almost 80% indicate that religion is important in their lives (compared with 56% of the US general population) ( Pew, 2009 ).

African Americans also suffer a disproportionate burden of health conditions and illness, making this lack of attention particularly unfortunate. Health behaviors play a significant role in the development of chronic disease, which account for 70% of annual deaths ( Kung, Hoyert, Xu, & Murphy, 2008 ). Several key behaviors are linked to longevity through their associations with the most common chronic diseases. These include avoiding excess alcohol use (e.g., men should have no more than 2 drinks per day, and women no more than one); avoiding tobacco; maintaining a healthy diet (e.g., eating fruits/vegetables, and avoiding foods high in fat and sodium); and getting regular physical activity ( Ford, Zhao, Tsai, & Li, 2011 ). Health behaviors are the basis for much of chronic disease and have been the target of health promotion efforts, including many community- and faith-based interventions.

The present study references a Religion-Health Mediational Model, based on a systematic review of the literature on religion/spirituality and health and a program of previous qualitative research ( Holt, Clark, et al., 2009 ; Holt, Lewellyn, & Rathweg, 2005 ). This model includes a set of constructs widely recognized to be potential mediators of the religion-health connection. The Religion and Health in African Americans, or “RHIAA” study is a national survey designed to test this theoretical model of the religion-health connection, comprised of a series of mechanisms (see Figure 1 ). Perceived religious influence on health behavior and illness as punishment are examined in the present analysis, which is part of a larger theory-testing initiative being conducted in the overall RHIAA study. While the current analysis focuses on two of the constructs, it is noted that statistical testing of a comprehensive theory is not feasible in a single analysis. Previous studies have examined other mediators, for example one on positive self-perceptions (e.g., self-esteem; self-efficacy) reporting that both in part mediated the relationship between religious beliefs and greater fruit and vegetable consumption, and lower alcohol use ( Holt, Roth, Clark, & Debnam, 2012 ). Another study with a similar dataset found that religious social support mediated the relationship between religious beliefs and emotional functioning and depressive symptoms among African Americans ( Holt, Wang, Clark, Williams, & Schulz, 2013 ).

Religion-Health Mediational Model

Note: Constructs in bold were included in the current analysis.

Telephone Survey Methods

The RHIAA study data collection methods have previously been reported elsewhere ( Holt, Roth, Clark, & Debnam, 2012 ). A professional sampling firm used probability-based methods to generate a call list of households from all 50 United States, constructed from publicly available data such as motor vehicle records. Trained interviewers selected telephone numbers randomly from this call list, and introduced the project to the adult living at the selected household. If that individual expressed interest, they were screened for eligibility to determine whether they self-identified as African American and age 21 or older, with no cancer history. Cancer diagnosis was an exclusion criterion for the larger RHIAA study that assessed screening data, as those with a previous diagnosis of cancer would be engaged in surveillance rather than screening. Individuals who were interested and eligible listened to an informed consent script and provided their verbal assent to participate. They completed the 45-minute interview and received a $25 gift card by mail. The study was approved by the University of Alabama at Birmingham and University of Maryland Institutional Review Boards.

Religious involvement

A validated Religiosity Scale previously used with African Americans assessed religious beliefs (e.g., presence of God in one’s life, perceiving a personal relationship with God) and behaviors (e.g., church service attendance, involvement in other church activities) ( Lukwago, Kreuter, Bucholtz, Holt, & Clark, 2001 ). Items are assessed in 5-point Likert-type format, with the exception of two monthly service attendance items that were assessed in 3-point format (0; 1–3; 4+). Scores range from 4–20 for beliefs and 5–21 for behaviors, with higher scores indicating higher religious involvement. Internal reliability of the beliefs (α=.89) and behaviors (α=.73) subscales was reasonable to high in this sample.

The Perceived Religious Influence on Health Behavior scale ( Holt, Schulz, & Wynn, 2009 ) consisted of 7 items (e.g., “I tend to avoid things harmful to my body because of my religious/spiritual beliefs.”; “God helps me to maintain a healthy lifestyle.”; see Appendix A for full scale) assessed in 4-point Likert-type format (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree). The scale has a possible range of 7 – 28, with higher scores indicating higher levels of these beliefs. The internal consistency of the instrument was α = .87 in this sample. The average item-total correlation was .46 and ranged from .34 – .62, and test-retest reliability was modest during a two-week interval, r = .65, p < .001 ( Holt, Clark, et al., 2009 ).

Illness as punishment

The Illness as Punishment for Sin scale was comprised of 8 items (e.g., “God sometimes uses physical illnesses to punish people.”; see Appendix A for full scale) assessed in 4-point Likert-type format (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree) ( Holt, Clark, et al., 2009 ). The scale has a possible range of 8 – 32, with higher scores indicating higher levels of these beliefs. The internal consistency of the instrument was α = .89 in the present sample. The average item-total correlation was .84 and ranged from .69 – .95, and test-retest reliability was acceptable during a two-week interval, r = .84, p < .001 ( Holt, Clark, et al., 2009 ).

Health behaviors

An adaptation of National Cancer Institute’s Five-A-Day Survey was used to assess fruit and vegetable consumption ( Block et al., 1986 ). The instrument was previously validated with the study population ( Kreuter et al., 2005 ). Seven items assess fruit consumption and 5 assess vegetable consumption (e.g., In a typical week, about how many times do you have…a piece of fresh fruit, like an apple, orange, banana, or pear). Fifteen different fruits and 18 vegetables are assessed using these items, including “other fruits” and “other vegetables”. The response scale ranges from 0 to 8 or more servings per week. Participants are asked to think about a typical week, and servings per day can be computed by summing all items and dividing by 7. The test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient) for the both the fruit ( r = .52, p < .001) and the vegetable ( r = .60, p < .001) portions were adequate over a two-week period.

Alcohol and tobacco use were assessed using modules from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). This established interview is administered nationally, and has been utilized with the study population. The BRFSS has demonstrated adequate test-retest reliability over a 21-day period among African Americans ( Stein, Lederman, & Shea, 1993 ). The alcohol consumption module includes an initial question on any alcohol use during the preceding 30 days (yes/no). Those who answer “yes,” are asked additional items assessing binge and heavy drinking (“Considering all types of alcoholic beverages, how many times during the past 30 days did you have 4/5 or more drinks on an occasion?”; “During the past 30 days, what is the largest number of drinks you had on any occasion?”). Participants indicate how many days, or how many drinks, respectively. The tobacco use item asks whether the individual smokes cigarettes every day (2), some days (1), or not at all (0).

Demographics

A standard demographic module assessed participant characteristics such as sex, age, relationship status, educational attainment, work status, and household income before taxes.

Statistical Methods

The current analyses were conducted using Mplus ( Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2012 ), applying maximum likelihood estimation methods. Confirmatory factor analysis models were run first that specified the observed items to be indicators of underlying latent constructs, in a modification of the traditional two-step approach ( Anderson & Gerbing, 1988 ). Second, structural models testing the significance of the mediated and unmediated effects of religious involvement on the health behavior outcomes were conducted. Fit statistics assessed included the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) as the primary fit criterion, with an RMSEA of 0.05 or less an indication of excellent fit. Standardized (STDYX) estimates are reported and tested for statistical significance. These standardized estimates represent the change in standard deviation units in the outcome variable that is associated with a 1.0 standard deviation change in the predictor variable.

The general arrangement of the structural models assessed is shown in Figure 2 . The mediators of perceived religious influence and illness as punishment were examined in separate models with 6 outcome variables (fruit servings per day, vegetable servings per day, drinking behavior (yes/no), largest number of drinks, number of binge drinking days, and current smoking status) for a total of 12 different structural models. The models for largest number of drinks and number of binge drinking days were analyzed on the subset of participants who reported any alcohol use in the previous 30 days. Across all models, 4 exogenous covariates (age, gender, education, self-rated health status) were included as predictors of the religious involvement independent variables, mediator, and health behavior outcome variable. The standardized estimates from these models corresponding to the mediated and unmediated/direct effects were assessed for statistical significance. These estimates are also effect size measures that were examined across outcome measures to assist in interpretation of findings across the models.

Structural model

Note: The two mediators were tested in separate structural models.

A total of 12,418 people were asked to participate and 2,370 completed the telephone interview. The overall response rate is calculated as accepted/[accepted + non-interviewed], and was 19%. Of individuals contacted but did not participate (N=10,048), 8,240 refused before eligibility could be assessed, 1,658 were not eligible [81 were under age 21, 444 did not provide an age for eligibility screening, 878 did not self-report as African American, 224 reported a history of cancer, and 5 refused to respond to the cancer history question]. Twenty-six individuals were not capable of participating in the interview. Only 150 were eligible but refused, resulting in an upper bound response rate of 94% (2,370/2,520). The upper bound response rate is the most liberal and includes only refusals, terminations, and completed interviews ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1998 ). Table 1 provides a study sample description.

Participant demographic characteristics

Note. Numbers may not sum to 2,370 or 100% due to missing data.

Measurement Models

The two-factor measurement model (beliefs and behaviors) for religious involvement items has previously been reported for this sample ( Roth et al., 2012 ). Allowing for two correlated residuals – one between the first two items that load on the religious beliefs factor and reflect the concept of closeness with God, and one for two consecutive items that load on the religious behaviors factor and reflect attendance at religious services, excellent fit was observed for this measurement model (χ 2 = 138.57, df = 24, RMSEA = .045) ( Roth et al., 2012 ).

This religious involvement measurement model was then expanded by adding items and factors for the perceived religious influence on health behavior and illness as punishment models. The seven perceived religious influence on health behavior items formed one factor and the eight illness as punishment items formed another. Together with the two-factor religious involvement model (beliefs and behaviors), this overall measurement model provided a good fit to the data (χ 2 = 2116.03, df = 324, χ 2 /df = 6.53, RMSEA = .05, comparative fit index [CFI] = .94, Tucker Lewis Index [TLI] = .99). All items had reasonable and significant loadings on the appropriate factors. No additional modifications were considered.

Structural Models

Table 2 reports the relationships between the two religious involvement factors and 1) the mediating latent variables of perceived religious influence on health behavior and illness as punishment, and 2) the six health behavior outcome variables. Standardized estimates are reported both before and after accounting for the demographic covariates (age, gender, education, self-rated health) and the other religious involvement factor. This analysis suggests that, when controlling for both covariates and the religious behaviors, religious beliefs were positively associated with religious influence on health behaviors and negatively associated with illness as punishment. The controlled analysis also shows a negative association with fruit consumption and positive association with smoking, presumably due to a suppressor effect (described below). In analyses that controlled for both covariates and religious beliefs, religious behaviors were positively associated with both mediator variables, as well as fruit and vegetable consumption. Religious beliefs were negatively associated with all three alcohol use outcomes and smoking. Uncontrolled analyses as well as those controlled only for demographic covariates are also presented.

Standardized estimates of the unadjusted and adjusted effects of religious involvement on the mediators and health outcomes (N = 2358)

Note. CV = Covariate. Rel = Religious Involvement. The CV adjusted effects are adjusted for age, gender, education, and self-rated health. The CV-Rel adjusted effects are those adjusted for age, gender, education, self-rated health, and the other religious involvement latent factor.

Table 3 reports the standardized estimates for the structural models that were conducted to evaluate the mediation hypotheses. The standardized path estimates in Table 3 for the a, b, and c paths correspond to those illustrated in Figure 2 for each mediator and each health behavior analyzed separately. Table 3 also provides the RMSEA from each model when including the outcome variable and the four exogenous covariates. Because the a 1 and a 2 paths represent the relationship with religious beliefs and religious behaviors, respectively, with the mediator, these estimates are consistent and change very little from one health behavior outcome to another within a certain mediator variable. 1

Standardized estimates from the structural equation models testing mediation effects (N = 2358).

Note: RMSEA = root mean square error of approximation.

The a 1 , a 2 , b, c 1 , and c 2 entries are the standardized estimates that correspond to the paths illustrated in Figure 2 .

The “a” paths for the models examining perceived religious influence on health behavior as a mediator indicated that both religious beliefs and religious behaviors were positively associated with higher levels of perceived religious influence ( ps < .001; see Table 3 ).

Examining the “c” direct paths in these models, religious beliefs were negatively associated with fruit consumption ( p < .001), positively associated with greater likelihood of reporting alcohol use in the past 30 days ( p < .01), and associated with an increased likelihood of reporting smoking behavior ( p < .001; see Table 3 ). These direct effects are all in the opposite direction of what would be anticipated and are generally in the opposite direction of the unadjusted associations reported in Table 2 . Consequently, these direct effects are indicative of a suppressor effect ( MacKinnon, Fairchild, & Fritz, 2007 ; MacKinnon, Krull, & Lockwood, 2000 ) due to the high correlations among religious beliefs, religious behaviors, and perceived religious influence. Conversely, religious behaviors were associated with greater fruit ( p < .001) and vegetable consumption ( p < .01), lower likelihood of alcohol use in the past 30 days ( p < .001), lower likelihood of days with 4 or 5 drinks consumed ( p < .01) and fewer number of drinks on any drinking day ( p < .05). The relationship with smoking was non-significant. Similar results related to the “c” paths but involving different mediators have been previously reported for this sample ( Holt, Roth, et al., 2012 ).

Evaluating the “b” paths, or the relationships between the mediator and the health behavior outcome, perceived religious influence on health behavior was positively associated with fruit consumption ( p < .001), negatively associated with alcohol use in the past 30 days ( p < .001), and negatively associated with smoking status ( p < .001; see Table 3 ). Paths for the other health behaviors (e.g., vegetable consumption, days of 4/5 drinks; largest number of drinks) were non-significant.

The mediation analysis indicated evidence of mediation in the relationship between religious beliefs and the outcomes of fruit consumption, alcohol use in the past 30 days, and smoking status (see Table 3 , “Indirect” column). There was also evidence for mediation in the relationship between religious behaviors and these same three health behaviors. No evidence was provided for mediation in the other health behaviors.

Examining the “a” paths, level of religious beliefs were associated with lower levels of perceived illness as punishment for sin ( p < .01; see Table 3 ). Religious behaviors were positively associated with greater perceived illness as punishment for sin ( p < .001). However, when examining Table 2 where these relationships are examined in an unadjusted fashion, neither have significant relationships with illness as punishment.

Examining the “c” direct paths, level of religious beliefs were negatively associated with fruit consumption ( p < .01; see Table 3 ). This is in the opposite direction of what would be anticipated, and suggestive of the aforementioned suppressor effect ( Fritz, 2007 ; MacKinnon et al., 2007 ; MacKinnon et al., 2000 ). Conversely, religious behaviors were associated with greater fruit ( p < .001) and vegetable consumption ( p < .01), lower likelihood of alcohol use in the past 30 days ( p < .001), lower likelihood of days with 4 or 5 drinks consumed ( p < .01), fewer number of drinks on any drinking day ( p < .05), and lower likelihood of being a smoker ( p < .01).

Evaluating the “b” paths, or the relationships between the mediator and the health behavior outcome, illness as punishment was negatively associated with vegetable consumption ( p < .01), positively associated with likelihood of days with 4 or 5 drinks consumed ( p < .05), and associated with more drinks on any drinking day ( p < .05; see Table 3 ). Paths for the other health behaviors (e.g., fruit consumption, alcohol use in the past 30 days; smoking status) were non-significant.

The mediation analysis indicated evidence for mediation for the relationship between religious beliefs and vegetable consumption and largest number of drinks on any drinking day (see Table 3 , “Indirect” column). There was evidence for mediation between religious behaviors and vegetable consumption, likelihood of days with 4 or 5 drinks consumed, and largest number of drinks on any drinking day. No evidence of mediation was suggested for the other health behavior outcomes.

The present study examined the role of perceived religious influence on health behavior, and perceptions of illness as punishment for sin, as mediators of the relationship between religious involvement and health behaviors among healthy African American adults. Though previous theoretical models have suggested that perceived religious influence on health behavior (e.g., healthy lifestyle as a result of one’s religious beliefs) is a main reason why individuals who are religiously involved experience positive health outcomes, there has been surprisingly little research aimed specifically at testing this hypothesis. More broadly, religious involvement might have both positive and negative influences on one’s health. The notion that some people believe illness can occur as a punishment for one’s wrongdoings or sin has been previously reported in the literature ( Abramowitz et al., 2002 ; Crawford et al., 1992 ; Ellison, 1994 ; Ellison & Levin, 1998 ; Kaldjian et al., 1998 ; Klonoff & Landrine, 1994 ; Kopelman, 2002 ; Neylan et al., 1998 ), but as of yet has gone untested as a religion-health mechanism. The present study addresses the complex relationships between religious involvement, perceived religious influence on health behavior, perceptions of illness as punishment for sin, and health behaviors.

Religious Involvement and the Mediators

Those high in religious beliefs and behaviors tended to report high belief in performing health behaviors in accord with religious doctrine. This would be an anticipated relationship with religious beliefs and participation; however the relationships with perceptions of illness as punishment for sin were somewhat puzzling. Religious beliefs and behaviors were individually not associated with illness as punishment, but when controlling for each other, religious beliefs were positively associated and religious behaviors were negatively associated with belief in illness as punishment for sin. This analysis was based on the variance in religious beliefs and behaviors that was not shared between the two aspects of religious involvement. Given the high positive correlation between religious beliefs and behaviors, the remaining smaller amounts of independent variance for these constructs are associated with belief in illness as punishment in opposing and counterbalanced directions. Therefore, the seemingly counterintuitive finding of a positive association between religious behaviors and illness as punishment is only observed after statistically controlling for religious beliefs.

Religious Involvement and Health Behaviors

We found that religious behaviors were associated with protective health measures such as fruit and vegetable consumption. As previously reported ( Holt, Roth, et al., 2012 ), religious beliefs, when accounting for the suppressor effect, were associated with greater fruit consumption and lower alcohol use. These findings would be expected given the literature on the salutary relationship between religious involvement and health ( Koenig et al., 2012 ). In a recent review, it was suggested that “all major religious traditions have rules and regulations concerning diet, sexual practices, and other health-related behaviors, although they vary in the extent to which such guidelines are enforced.” ( Koenig et al., 2012 , p. 535). This review indicated that 62% of the studies examined reported a positive association between religiosity and diet quality. Previous research has suggested that religious involvement is associated with higher fruit and vegetable consumption specifically ( Holt, Haire-Joshu, Lukwago, Lewellyn, & Kreuter, 2005 ).

Religious behaviors were also associated and lower alcohol use and smoking. Religious sanctions that come from involvement in a religious community may protect against alcohol consumption ( Musick, Blazer, & Hays, 2000 ; Strawbridge et al., 2001 ). In the current sample, 58% of people reported that they had not consumed an alcoholic beverage in the previous 30 days. This is consistent with previous research that suggests African Americans consume alcohol at rates lower than national averages ( Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2010 ).

Mediators and Health Behaviors

Those who believed in maintaining a healthy lifestyle in accord with religious doctrine tended to have higher fruit consumption and lower rates of alcohol use and smoking. Again, these behavioral patterns would clearly be expected based on theory in this area ( Ellison & Levin, 1998 ; George et al., 2002 ; George et al., 2000 ; Levin & Vanderpool, 1989 ; Mullen, 1990 ; Musick, Traphagan, et al., 2000 ; Strawbridge et al., 2001 ). Similarly, those who believed that a higher power might use illness as a punishment for wrongdoings or sin had lower vegetable consumption and were more likely to engage in binge drinking behaviors. This too is consistent with expectations from the aforementioned previous literature on this construct.

Mediational Findings

The analyses supported the occurrence of mediation in several cases. It appears that the relationship between religious beliefs and fruit consumption, alcohol use in the past 30 days, and smoking was, at least in part accounted for by perceived religious influence on health behavior. The same was true for religious behaviors. As proposed by previous researchers ( Ellison & Levin, 1998 ; George et al., 2002 ; George et al., 2000 ; Levin & Vanderpool, 1989 ; Mullen, 1990 ; Musick, Traphagan, et al., 2000 ; Strawbridge et al., 2001 ), individuals who are religiously involved may tend to live a healthier lifestyle in accord with their religious traditions. It is interesting that the same mediational patterns were evidenced for both religious beliefs and behaviors. While this may initially seem reasonable, with religious involvement being a multidimensional construct, it is not unusual for religious beliefs and behaviors to operate differently with regard to relationships with health behaviors. This suggests that both religious beliefs such as having a close personal relationship with a higher power, and behaviors/participation through organized worship both work to reinforce healthy lifestyle habits. It is also interesting in the current findings that this appears to apply to both health risk (heavy alcohol use, smoking) and protective (dietary) behaviors. Future studies should conduct such analyses on health-related outcomes such as illness and/or mortality.

The mediational analyses suggest that the relationship between religious beliefs and vegetable consumption and binge drinking is, at least in part, accounted for by the perception that illness is the result of punishment for sin. This suggests that individuals with strong religious beliefs are less likely to believe that illness is punishment for sin, and this translates to increased vegetable consumption and decreased binge drinking. The analyses also suggest that the same mediational findings for the relationship between religious behaviors and vegetable consumption and binge drinking. However, in these models, the signs are in the opposite directions. This suggests that individuals who are religiously involved are more likely to believe that illness is punishment for sin, and this translates to decreased vegetable consumption and more binge drinking.

The findings in Table 2 are needed to interpret this seemingly inconsistent effect. Note that the bivariate unadjusted relationship between religious beliefs and behaviors and illness as punishment are non-significant. Then, when controlling for the other religious involvement subscale, these relationships become significant and in the opposite direction, such that religious beliefs becomes negatively associated and behaviors becomes positively associated. This is suggestive of the aforementioned suppressor effect, which persists in Table 3 (columns a 1 and a 2 ), where the paths involving religious beliefs and behaviors are in the opposite directions. Because the mediation paths are a function of the multiplicative effects of the a x b paths, these signs directly impact the mediation effects. Taken together, and in the context of the suppressor effect, these findings may be considered to be consistent with previous literature, in that individuals with increased belief in illness as punishment for sin would engage in less adaptive health behaviors ( Ellison, 1994 ; Ellison & Levin, 1998 ). However, additional research is needed to confirm these findings.

Strengths and Limitations

Several factors strengthen the current findings. First, the focus was on African Americans, a population that carries a significant burden of chronic disease and has not been the focus of research in the way that other groups have been ( Ellison et al., 2010 ). Second, the RHIAA dataset was intended specifically for testing theoretical models of the religion-health connection and used validated measures in doing so, rather than using secondary data. Third, the present analysis used modeling techniques that allowed for mediational relationships to be assessed.

Several limitations should also be considered. First, the use of telephone survey methods introduces a certain bias. The full nature of this bias is unknowable. Response bias presents a data problem if there is an impact on data quality that is not random ( Langer, 2003 ). The current response rates are comparable to a national telephone survey that over-sampled African Americans ( Hartmann, Gerteis, & Edgell, 2003 ), and are consistent with recently reported decreases in response rates for typical telephone surveys, from 36% in 1997, to 25% in 2003, to 9% in ( Pew, 2012 ). Relative to the U.S. Black population, the current sample is older than the US median age of 32.7 years (current median = 54.0); contains fewer men (current = 38.2%; US = 47.7% male); is more educated (current % attended 4+ years of college = 26%; US = 18.4%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 ); and is as likely to report attending religious services at least once per week (current = 50.6%; US = 53%) ( Pew, 2009 ). Given this, a potential impact on the study findings may be that the sample may hold stronger religious beliefs than average, given that they are more likely to be older and women ( Levin et al., 1994 ). It is possible that, being relatively well educated, they may also have better health behaviors than average. Taken together, the study may over-estimate the religion-health connection in an average African American. However, one must always be careful when working with averages and making generalizations to a very heterogenous population group.

Second, the current analyses focused on two mediators from the literature, perceived religious influence on health behavior and illness as punishment. As previously discussed, although perceived religious influence on health behavior is probably the most widely cited potential mechanism of the religion-health connection, there are other significant factors that may help account for this complex relationship including but not limited to social support and positive affective states. Though these are potentially important, structural models become difficult to interpret as additional constructs are added. The RHIAA approach was to aim for a more clear understanding of fewer mediators at a time, rather than a larger but incomprehensible model. Third, because the current data were cross sectional, conclusions about causality are not possible. Longitudinal data would be required to make such assertions, an initiative on which the RHIAA team is currently embarking.

Implications and Future Research

These findings indicate that people who are religiously involved may experience better health outcomes because they engage in healthy lifestyles in accord with their religious beliefs, and that belief that illness is the result of punishment from a higher power could play a potentially maladaptive role in health behaviors. With regard to implications for the illness as punishment findings, this is where church-based counseling or pastoral counseling may play a role in working with individuals who may hold such beliefs, with a spiritual sensitivity and competence ( Pargament, Mahoney, & Shafranske, 2013 ).

By focusing on African Americans, a population adversely impacted by most chronic disease, the study is framed in the context of health disparities, thereby enhancing the public health significance of the findings. Healthy People 2020, along with setting specific health-related goals for the US population, aims to attain health equity and eliminate health disparities group ( U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010 ). Because so much of chronic disease has behavioral origins ( Ford et al., 2011 ), it is important to learn more about how salient cultural beliefs that associated with health behavioral outcomes.

There has been a steady focus on faith-based organizations as venues for health promotion activities ( Levin, 2013 ), particularly in African American communities ( Levin, 1984 ). African American churches serve as a cornerstone of the communities they serve, and are places where their members have been able to receive guidance and services on matters far beyond spiritual ( Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990 ). The church is a venue where people who may not otherwise be connected with the health care system can receive health information from trusted sources. By learning more about how religious involvement is associated with health behaviors, this information can be used to inform such interventions. This information can not only be helpful to researchers but also to faith-based leaders who are involved in health ministry activities, or things that faith-based organizations do in order to improve the health of their memberships. Finally, Levin (2013) described an agenda for the Surgeon General, that highlighted the role of faith communities in health promotion, consistent with an upstream approach to public health. The current findings reinforce the need to continue to engage with faith-based organizations that serve African Americans, in the effort to eliminate health disparities.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute, (#1 R01 CA105202) and was approved by the University of Maryland Institutional Review Board (#08-0328). The team would like to acknowledge the work of OpinionAmerica, who conducted participant recruitment and data collection activities for the present study.

Appendix A: Items comprising mediator scales

Adapted from: Holt, Clark, Roth, Crowther, Cohler, Fouad, … Southward, 2009 .

1 Additional analyses were also conducted for a measure of physical activity as an outcome variable, but preliminary analyses indicated that physical activity was not significantly associated with either religious involvement or the mediating variables, precluding any significant mediation effects.

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14 Religious Advantage and Disadvantage

• Published: January 2016
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This chapter defines relationship with a religion as a spectrum of possibilities between self-identification with a religion and active participation in a congregation and in religious practices, and religion’s relationship with ethnicity is discussed. The chapter shows that economic disadvantage attaches more clearly to ethno-religious identity than to religious identity, but that with advantage and disadvantage more broadly defined a clearer link between religion and (dis)advantage can be established. Following a discussion of the relationship between this debate and that on multiculturalism, the ways in which social policy might address religious disadvantage are explored.

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Is religion bad for democracy?

Professor of Sociology of Religion, Boston University

Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Exeter

Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies, Princeton University

Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Boston University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

University of Exeter provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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When we see political leaders appealing to one religious group to the detriment of another, or when we see religious authorities claim to speak for “all” people, we often wonder if a thriving democracy might not require the elimination of religion from public life entirely.

Even in the most secular of democracies, however, a more careful reckoning of religion’s public role can bring to light not only potential anti-democratic factors but potential pro-democratic forces.

Our work on the International Panel for Social Progress has led us to conclude that religion is neither inherently pro-democracy nor inherently anti-democracy. Finding ways to live together more freely and responsibly requires a careful look at the specific religions and specific societies in question. More importantly, it also requires attention to ground-level religious action and religious organisations and not just to theologies and authorities.

Enlightenment legacies

One can point to anti-democratic examples in many religious traditions. In addition to non-democratic regimes supported by monotheistic world religions, there are autocratic examples that range from Hindu nationalism in India to Buddhist repression of Muslim minorities in Myanmar .

Indeed links between religions and anti-democratic regimes have – at least since the Enlightenment – prompted some thinkers to believe that all religions inculcate intolerance toward alternative views of the world and instil in their followers norms of obedience and deference to authority that are incompatible with democracy and individual liberty .

Keeping all religion carefully separate from public life was, it seemed, the best way forward. The French instituted their system of “laicité”, and other countries have followed suit.

The dangers of generalisation

Not all democratic countries, of course, insist on an entirely secular public sphere, so other political theorists have speculated about whether particular religious traditions may be more or less friendly to democratic participation.

In different times and places the very same religious tradition has been hailed as inherently a seedbed for democracy and as a danger to it.

For instance, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that Catholics “constitute the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the United States.” The reason for this, he argued, was Catholicism’s emphasis on equality :

“[T]he Catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same level; it subjects the wise and ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to the details of the same creed; it imposes the same observances upon the rich and needy, it inflicts the same austerities upon the strong and the weak, it listens to no compromise with mortal man, but, reducing all the human race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions of society at the foot of the same altar…”

More than a century later, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset came to the opposite conclusion . Lipset argued that democracy requires a political belief system that accommodates competition among ideas, while the Catholic church claims that it alone has the truth.

Catholic countries, he contended, were particularly prone to instability and were inhospitable to the kind of compromise and pluralism that lie at the heart of democracy.

More recently – and closer to the ground – the Catholic church’s development of “liberation theology” has been accompanied by the construction of “base Christian communities” in which local citizens have articulated their daily concerns and democratically organised to advocate for change .

The Latin American experience is, in fact, a good example of how the involvement of religion in politics is many-sided. Our co-author David Smilde has written about the many roles of religious groups in Venezuela’s recent history . The Catholic hierarchy has been a key actor opposing the socialist project of Chavismo, yet a group of Catholic community groups has protested that the hierarchy is not taking the sentiments of its members into account . Interestingly, Neo-Pentecostal Protestants have also supported Chavismo, while more traditional Protestant groups have not .

Thus both de Tocqueville and Lipset were wrong in assigning either democratic or anti-democratic essences to the Catholic faith – or to Protestantism, for that matter. The many-sided grassroots public involvement of both Catholics and Protestants in Venezuela illustrates the need to go beyond generalisations that start with an entire tradition.

Incompatible Islam?

Generalised arguments, however, continue to be invoked with respect to other religions – most notably, Islam. Thinkers over several generations have argued that Islam is inherently inhospitable to democratic government.

For instance, French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu declared that “[t]he moderate government is better suited to the Christian religion, and despotic government to Mohammedanism,” on account of “gentleness so recommended in the gospel,” which he contrasted to the “despotic fury” that allegedly characterised the behaviour of “Mohammedan princes”.

More recently, political historian Elie Kedourie wrote:

“[T]he ideas of the secularity of the state, of society being composed of a multitude of self-activating, autonomous groups and associations – all these are profoundly alien to the Muslim political tradition”.

Similarly, Samuel P. Huntington invoked Islam itself to explain why few Muslim-majority countries transitioned to democracy during the so-called “Third Wave” of democratisation that began in the 1970s:

“To the extent that governmental legitimacy and policy flow from religious doctrine and religious expertise, Islamic concepts of politics differ from and contradict the premises of democratic politics”.

The evidence on the ground, however, is mixed. Several Muslim-majority countries – including Indonesia, Senegal, Turkey, and most recently, Tunisia – have been able to construct and sustain democratic governments, but recent statistical analyses show that the higher the proportion of a country’s population that is Muslim, the higher its propensity to autocratic government .

Individual attitudes tell a different story

Our co-author Tarek Masoud surveyed the evidence for our IPSP chapter and suggests that the autocratic governments in place may not be the governments that Muslim populations want.

For instance, in a study of mass attitudes toward religion and democracy in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and the Palestinian territories in the 1980s and 1990s, political scientist Marc Tessler found that “Islam is not the obstacle to democratisation that some western and other scholars allege it to be.”

And in a thorough analysis of cross-national data from the World Values Survey, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart find that “surprisingly similar attitudes toward democracy are found in the West and the Islamic world.”

Similarly, political science professor Amaney Jamal , analysing a subset of these survey data from Egypt and Jordan, argues that “the dichotomisation of Islam and democracy is a false construct,” as evidenced by the fact that “the vast majority of respondents in both Egypt and Jordan demonstrate simultaneous support for both Islam and democracy.”

More recently, a study of attitudes toward democracy in ten Muslim-majority countries conducted by Sabri Ciftci found that greater adherence to Islamic precepts is unrelated to support for democracy, which “is remarkably high, and […] independent of ‘sectarian’ or theological traditions across the Muslim world.”

Similar findings have been recorded since the early 2000s.

In short, individual-level support for democracy is widespread among the world’s Muslims.

Religion on the ground

If we want to assess the impact of religion on democratic participation, it is crucial to see how religions are “lived” by ordinary people and how they are organised in local communities. Each tradition has ideas and rituals and ways of living that may support (or inhibit) democracy.

Political Scientists Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom and Gizem Arikan drew on data from 54 countries from the World Values Survey to show that religious beliefs and religious participation have different effects.

People who participate in religious organisations have heightened interest in politics, more trust in institutions, and greater support for democracy. They write that how people enact their religions in practice can lead to “the development of civic skills and norms that can have a positive effect on support for democracy”.

Similarly, U.S. political scientists Sidney Verba, Key Lehman Schlozman and Henry Brady found that religious participation was an unexpected predictor of civic participation, especially for less well-off citizens. Opportunities within religious groups to speak out, organise, and lead helped people acquire civic skills they could use in democratic participation.

Bringing religion in?

In a book published in 2011 , Rethinking Religion and World Affairs , the authors argued that democracy is more likely to emerge and survive when religious actors are included in transition processes, instead of being viewed as hostile forces to be contained.

Including religion will mean paying attention to what religious people do and how they organise, not just to their ideas and theologies or even the pronouncements of religious authorities. It is important to pay attention to the role that religious groups play in enabling or inhibiting the emergence of democratic political orders. Where there is a lively presence of religious organisations, they are likely to be important in any democratising effort.

In Hong Kong’s 2014 democracy protests, for example, leadership developed in Christian communities came to the fore , much as Christians had played key roles a century earlier on the mainland. Such is the case of Dr. Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen), leader of the Republic founded in 1912 and a Christian convert.

Religious leaders and religious groups should always be seen against the complexities of each particular context.

When Muslims form Islamist political parties, the parties tend to behave like other political parties. They are shaped by the conditions they face on the ground . The shifting fortunes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt provide a vivid example of the difficulty in generalising about religion’s role in democracy .

Thus, the overwhelming impression conveyed by these and other cases is that religions (or religion in general) are neither inherently pro- nor anti-democratic, nor left nor right, nor even for religious freedom or against it. Each situation must be examined on its own terms.

This post belongs to a series of contributions coming from the International Panel on Social Progress , a global academic initiative of more than 300 scholars from all social sciences and the humanities who have prepared a report on the perspectives for social progress in the 21st Century. In partnership with The Conversation, the posts offer a glimpse of the contents of the report and of the authors’ research .

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Article contents

Religion, culture, and communication.

• Stephen M. Croucher , Stephen M. Croucher School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing, Massey Business School, Massey University
• Cheng Zeng , Cheng Zeng Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
• Diyako Rahmani Diyako Rahmani Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
•  and  Mélodine Sommier Mélodine Sommier School of History, Culture, and Communication, Eramus University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.166
• Published online: 25 January 2017

Religion is an essential element of the human condition. Hundreds of studies have examined how religious beliefs mold an individual’s sociology and psychology. In particular, research has explored how an individual’s religion (religious beliefs, religious denomination, strength of religious devotion, etc.) is linked to their cultural beliefs and background. While some researchers have asserted that religion is an essential part of an individual’s culture, other researchers have focused more on how religion is a culture in itself. The key difference is how researchers conceptualize and operationalize both of these terms. Moreover, the influence of communication in how individuals and communities understand, conceptualize, and pass on religious and cultural beliefs and practices is integral to understanding exactly what religion and culture are.

It is through exploring the relationships among religion, culture, and communication that we can best understand how they shape the world in which we live and have shaped the communication discipline itself. Furthermore, as we grapple with these relationships and terms, we can look to the future and realize that the study of religion, culture, and communication is vast and open to expansion. Researchers are beginning to explore the influence of mediation on religion and culture, how our globalized world affects the communication of religions and cultures, and how interreligious communication is misunderstood; and researchers are recognizing the need to extend studies into non-Christian religious cultures.

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• intercultural communication

Intricate Relationships among Religion, Communication, and Culture

Compiling an entry on the relationships among religion, culture, and communication is not an easy task. There is not one accepted definition for any of these three terms, and research suggests that the connections among these concepts are complex, to say the least. Thus, this article attempts to synthesize the various approaches to these three terms and integrate them. In such an endeavor, it is impossible to discuss all philosophical and paradigmatic debates or include all disciplines.

It is difficult to define religion from one perspective and with one encompassing definition. “Religion” is often defined as the belief in or the worship of a god or gods. Geertz ( 1973 ) defined a religion as

(1) a system which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (p. 90)

It is essential to recognize that religion cannot be understood apart from the world in which it takes place (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). To better understand how religion relates to and affects culture and communication, we should first explore key definitions, philosophies, and perspectives that have informed how we currently look at religion. In particular, the influences of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel are discussed to further understand the complexity of religion.

Karl Marx ( 1818–1883 ) saw religion as descriptive and evaluative. First, from a descriptive point of view, Marx believed that social and economic situations shape how we form and regard religions and what is religious. For Marx, the fact that people tend to turn to religion more when they are facing economic hardships or that the same religious denomination is practiced differently in different communities would seem perfectly logical. Second, Marx saw religion as a form of alienation (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). For Marx, the notion that the Catholic Church, for example, had the ability or right to excommunicate an individual, and thus essentially exclude them from the spiritual community, was a classic example of exploitation and domination. Such alienation and exploitation was later echoed in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844–1900 ), who viewed organized religion as society and culture controlling man (Nietzsche, 1996 ).

Building on Marxist thinking, Weber ( 1864–1920 ) stressed the multicausality of religion. Weber ( 1963 ) emphasized three arguments regarding religion and society: (1) how a religion relates to a society is contingent (it varies); (2) the relationship between religion and society can only be examined in its cultural and historical context; and (3) the relationship between society and religion is slowly eroding. Weber’s arguments can be applied to Catholicism in Europe. Until the Protestant Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries, Catholicism was the dominant religious ideology on the European continent. However, since the Reformation, Europe has increasingly become more Protestant and less Catholic. To fully grasp why many Europeans gravitate toward Protestantism and not Catholicism, we must consider the historical and cultural reasons: the Reformation, economics, immigration, politics, etc., that have all led to the majority of Europeans identifying as Protestant (Davie, 2008 ). Finally, even though the majority of Europeans identify as Protestant, secularism (separation of church and state) is becoming more prominent in Europe. In nations like France, laws are in place that officially separate the church and state, while in Northern Europe, church attendance is low, and many Europeans who identify as Protestant have very low religiosity (strength of religious devotion), focusing instead on being secularly religious individuals. From a Weberian point of view, the links among religion, history, and culture in Europe explain the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and now the rise of secularism.

Emile Durkheim ( 1858–1917 ) focused more on how religion performs a necessary function; it brings people and society together. Durkheim ( 1976 ) thus defined a religion as

a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things which are set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. (p. 47)

From this perspective, religion and culture are inseparable, as beliefs and practices are uniquely cultural. For example, religious rituals (one type of practice) unite believers in a religion and separate nonbelievers. The act of communion, or the sharing of the Eucharist by partaking in consecrated bread and wine, is practiced by most Christian denominations. However, the frequency of communion differs extensively, and the ritual is practiced differently based on historical and theological differences among denominations.

Georg Simmel ( 1858–1918 ) focused more on the fluidity and permanence of religion and religious life. Simmel ( 1950 ) believed that religious and cultural beliefs develop from one another. Moreover, he asserted that religiosity is an essential element to understand when examining religious institutions and religion. While individuals may claim to be part of a religious group, Simmel asserted that it was important to consider just how religious the individuals were. In much of Europe, religiosity is low: Germany 34%, Sweden 19%, Denmark 42%, the United Kingdom 30%, the Czech Republic 23%, and The Netherlands 26%, while religiosity is relatively higher in the United States (56%), which is now considered the most religious industrialized nation in the world ( Telegraph Online , 2015 ). The decline of religiosity in parts of Europe and its rise in the U.S. is linked to various cultural, historical, and communicative developments that will be further discussed.

Combining Simmel’s ( 1950 ) notion of religion with Geertz’s ( 1973 ) concept of religion and a more basic definition (belief in or the worship of a god or gods through rituals), it is clear that the relationship between religion and culture is integral and symbiotic. As Clark and Hoover ( 1997 ) noted, “culture and religion are inseparable” and “religion is an important consideration in theories of culture and society” (p. 17).

Outside of the Western/Christian perception of religion, Buddhist scholars such as Nagarajuna present a relativist framework to understand concepts like time and causality. This framework is distinct from the more Western way of thinking, in that notions of present, past, and future are perceived to be chronologically distorted, and the relationship between cause and effect is paradoxical (Wimal, 2007 ). Nagarajuna’s philosophy provides Buddhism with a relativist, non-solid dependent, and non-static understanding of reality (Kohl, 2007 ). Mulla Sadra’s philosophy explored the metaphysical relationship between the created universe and its singular creator. In his philosophy, existence takes precedence over essence, and any existing object reflects a part of the creator. Therefore, every devoted person is obliged to know themselves as the first step to knowing the creator, which is the ultimate reason for existence. This Eastern perception of religion is similar to that of Nagarajuna and Buddhism, as they both include the paradoxical elements that are not easily explained by the rationality of Western philosophy. For example, the god, as Mulla Sadra defines it, is beyond definition, description, and delamination, yet it is absolutely simple and unique (Burrell, 2013 ).

How researchers define and study culture varies extensively. For example, Hall ( 1989 ) defined culture as “a series of situational models for behavior and thought” (p. 13). Geertz ( 1973 ), building on the work of Kluckhohn ( 1949 ), defined culture in terms of 11 different aspects:

(1) the total way of life of a people; (2) the social legacy the individual acquires from his group; (3) a way of thinking, feeling, and believing; (4) an abstraction from behavior; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a storehouse of pooled learning; (7) a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems; (8) learned behavior; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men; (11) a precipitate of history. (Geertz, 1973 , p. 5)

Research on culture is divided between an essentialist camp and a constructivist camp. The essentialist view regards culture as a concrete and fixed system of symbols and meanings (Holiday, 1999 ). An essentialist approach is most prevalent in linguistic studies, in which national culture is closely linked to national language. Regarding culture as a fluid concept, constructionist views of culture focus on how it is performed and negotiated by individuals (Piller, 2011 ). In this sense, “culture” is a verb rather than a noun. In principle, a non-essentialist approach rejects predefined national cultures and uses culture as a tool to interpret social behavior in certain contexts.

Different approaches to culture influence significantly how it is incorporated into communication studies. Cultural communication views communication as a resource for individuals to produce and regulate culture (Philipsen, 2002 ). Constructivists tend to perceive culture as a part of the communication process (Applegate & Sypher, 1988 ). Cross-cultural communication typically uses culture as a national boundary. Hofstede ( 1991 ) is probably the most popular scholar in this line of research. Culture is thus treated as a theoretical construct to explain communication variations across cultures. This is also evident in intercultural communication studies, which focus on misunderstandings between individuals from different cultures.

Religion, Community, and Culture

There is an interplay among religion, community, and culture. Community is essentially formed by a group of people who share common activities or beliefs based on their mutual affect, loyalty, and personal concerns. Participation in religious institutions is one of the most dominant community engagements worldwide. Religious institutions are widely known for creating a sense of community by offering various material and social supports for individual followers. In addition, the role that religious organizations play in communal conflicts is also crucial. As religion deals with the ultimate matters of life, the differences among different religious beliefs are virtually impossible to settle. Although a direct causal relationship between religion and violence is not well supported, religion is, nevertheless, commonly accepted as a potential escalating factor in conflicts. Currently, religious conflicts are on the rise, and they are typically more violent, long-lasting, and difficult to resolve. In such cases, local religious organizations, places facilitating collective actions in the community, are extremely vital, as they can either preach peace or stir up hatred and violence. The peace impact of local religious institutions has been largely witnessed in India and Indonesia where conflicts are solved at the local level before developing into communal violence (De Juan, Pierskalla, & Vüllers, 2015 ).

While religion affects cultures (Beckford & Demerath, 2007 ), it itself is also affected by culture, as religion is an essential layer of culture. For example, the growth of individualism in the latter half of the 20th century has been coincident with the decline in the authority of Judeo-Christian institutions and the emergence of “parachurches” and more personal forms of prayer (Hoover & Lundby, 1997 ). However, this decline in the authority of the religious institutions in modernized society has not reduced the important role of religion and spirituality as one of the main sources of calm when facing painful experiences such as death, suffering, and loss.

When cultural specifications, such as individualism and collectivism, have been attributed to religion, the proposed definitions and functions of religion overlap with definitions of culture. For example, researchers often combine religious identification (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.) with cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1991 ) like individualism/collectivism to understand and compare cultural differences. Such combinations for comparison and analytical purposes demonstrate how religion and religious identification in particular are often relegated to a micro-level variable, when in fact the true relationship between an individual’s religion and culture is inseparable.

Religion as Part of Culture in Communication Studies

Religion as a part of culture has been linked to numerous communication traits and behaviors. Specifically, religion has been linked with media use and preferences (e.g., Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ), health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), interpersonal communication (e.g., Croucher, Faulkner, Oommen, & Long, 2012b ), organizational behaviors (e.g., Garner & Wargo, 2009 ), and intercultural communication traits and behaviors (e.g., Croucher, Braziunaite, & Oommen, 2012a ). In media and religion scholarship, researchers have shown how religion as a cultural variable has powerful effects on media use, preferences, and gratifications. The research linking media and religion is vast (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ). This body of research has shown how “religious worldviews are created and sustained in ongoing social processes in which information is shared” (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 , pp. 7–8). For example, religious Christians are more likely to read newspapers, while religious individuals are less likely to have a favorable opinion of the internet (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), and religious individuals (who typically attend religious services and are thus integrated into a religious community) are more likely to read media produced by the religious community (Davie, 2008 ).

Research into health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues is also robust. Research shows how religion, specifically religiosity, promotes healthier living and better decision-making regarding health and wellbeing (Harris & Worley, 2012 ). For example, a religious (or spiritual) approach to cancer treatment can be more effective than a secular approach (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), religious attendance promotes healthier living, and people with HIV/AIDS often turn to religion for comfort as well. These studies suggest the significance of religion in health communication and in our health.

Research specifically examining the links between religion and interpersonal communication is not as vast as the research into media, health, and religion. However, this slowly growing body of research has explored areas such as rituals, self-disclosure (Croucher et al., 2012b ), and family dynamics (Davie, 2008 ), to name a few.

The role of religion in organizations is well studied. Overall, researchers have shown how religious identification and religiosity influence an individual’s organizational behavior. For example, research has shown that an individual’s religious identification affects levels of organizational dissent (Croucher et al., 2012a ). Garner and Wargo ( 2009 ) further showed that organizational dissent functions differently in churches than in nonreligious organizations. Kennedy and Lawton ( 1998 ) explored the relationships between religious beliefs and perceptions about business/corporate ethics and found that individuals with stronger religious beliefs have stricter ethical beliefs.

Researchers are increasingly looking at the relationships between religion and intercultural communication. Researchers have explored how religion affects numerous communication traits and behaviors and have shown how religious communities perceive and enact religious beliefs. Antony ( 2010 ), for example, analyzed the bindi in India and how the interplay between religion and culture affects people’s acceptance of it. Karniel and Lavie-Dinur ( 2011 ) showed how religion and culture influence how Palestinian Arabs are represented on Israeli television. Collectively, the intercultural work examining religion demonstrates the increasing importance of the intersection between religion and culture in communication studies.

Collectively, communication studies discourse about religion has focused on how religion is an integral part of an individual’s culture. Croucher et al. ( 2016 ), in a content analysis of communication journal coverage of religion and spirituality from 2002 to 2012 , argued that the discourse largely focuses on religion as a cultural variable by identifying religious groups as variables for comparative analysis, exploring “religious” or “spiritual” as adjectives to describe entities (religious organizations), and analyzing the relationships between religious groups in different contexts. Croucher and Harris ( 2012 ) asserted that the discourse about religion, culture, and communication is still in its infancy, though it continues to grow at a steady pace.

Future Lines of Inquiry

Research into the links among religion, culture, and communication has shown the vast complexities of these terms. With this in mind, there are various directions for future research/exploration that researchers could take to expand and benefit our practical understanding of these concepts and how they relate to one another. Work should continue to define these terms with a particular emphasis on mediation, closely consider these terms in a global context, focus on how intergroup dynamics influence this relationship, and expand research into non-Christian religious cultures.

Additional definitional work still needs to be done to clarify exactly what is meant by “religion,” “culture,” and “communication.” Our understanding of these terms and relationships can be further enhanced by analyzing how forms of mass communication mediate each other. Martin-Barbero ( 1993 ) asserted that there should be a shift from media to mediations as multiple opposing forces meet in communication. He defined mediation as “the articulations between communication practices and social movements and the articulation of different tempos of development with the plurality of cultural matrices” (p. 187). Religions have relied on mediations through various media to communicate their messages (oral stories, print media, radio, television, internet, etc.). These media share religious messages, shape the messages and religious communities, and are constantly changing. What we find is that, as media sophistication develops, a culture’s understandings of mediated messages changes (Martin-Barbero, 1993 ). Thus, the very meanings of religion, culture, and communication are transitioning as societies morph into more digitally mediated societies. Research should continue to explore the effects of digital mediation on our conceptualizations of religion, culture, and communication.

Closely linked to mediation is the need to continue extending our focus on the influence of globalization on religion, culture, and communication. It is essential to study the relationships among culture, religion, and communication in the context of globalization. In addition to trading goods and services, people are increasingly sharing ideas, values, and beliefs in the modern world. Thus, globalization not only leads to technological and socioeconomic changes, but also shapes individuals’ ways of communicating and their perceptions and beliefs about religion and culture. While religion represents an old way of life, globalization challenges traditional meaning systems and is often perceived as a threat to religion. For instance, Marx and Weber both asserted that modernization was incompatible with tradition. But, in contrast, globalization could facilitate religious freedom by spreading the idea of freedom worldwide. Thus, future work needs to consider the influence of globalization to fully grasp the interrelationships among religion, culture, and communication in the world.

A review of the present definitions of religion in communication research reveals that communication scholars approach religion as a holistic, total, and unique institution or notion, studied from the viewpoint of different communication fields such as health, intercultural, interpersonal, organizational communication, and so on. However, this approach to communication undermines the function of a religion as a culture and also does not consider the possible differences between religious cultures. For example, religious cultures differ in their levels of individualism and collectivism. There are also differences in how religious cultures interact to compete for more followers and territory (Klock, Novoa, & Mogaddam, 2010 ). Thus, localization is one area of further research for religion communication studies. This line of study best fits in the domain of intergroup communication. Such an approach will provide researchers with the opportunity to think about the roles that interreligious communication can play in areas such as peacemaking processes (Klock et al., 2010 ).

Academic discourse about religion has focused largely on Christian denominations. In a content analysis of communication journal discourse on religion and spirituality, Croucher et al. ( 2016 ) found that the terms “Christian” or “Christianity” appeared in 9.56% of all articles, and combined with other Christian denominations (Catholicism, Evangelism, Baptist, Protestantism, and Mormonism, for example), appeared in 18.41% of all articles. Other religious cultures (denominations) made up a relatively small part of the overall academic discourse: Islam appeared in 6.8%, Judaism in 4.27%, and Hinduism in only 0.96%. Despite the presence of various faiths in the data, the dominance of Christianity and its various denominations is incontestable. Having religions unevenly represented in the academic discourse is problematic. This highly unbalanced representation presents a biased picture of religious practices. It also represents one faith as being the dominant faith and others as being minority religions in all contexts.

Ultimately, the present overview, with its focus on religion, culture, and communication points to the undeniable connections among these concepts. Religion and culture are essential elements of humanity, and it is through communication, that these elements of humanity are mediated. Whether exploring these terms in health, interpersonal, intercultural, intergroup, mass, or other communication contexts, it is evident that understanding the intersection(s) among religion, culture, and communication offers vast opportunities for researchers and practitioners.

Further Reading

The references to this article provide various examples of scholarship on religion, culture, and communication. The following list includes some critical pieces of literature that one should consider reading if interested in studying the relationships among religion, culture, and communication.

• Allport, G. W. (1950). Individual and his religion: A psychological interpretation . New York: Macmillan.
• Campbell, H. A. (2010). When religion meets new media . New York: Routledge.
• Cheong, P. H. , Fischer-Nielson, P. , Gelfgren, S. , & Ess, C. (Eds.). (2012). Digital religion, social media and culture: Perspectives, practices and futures . New York: Peter Lang.
• Cohen, A. B. , & Hill, P. C. (2007). Religion as culture: Religious individualism and collectivism among American Catholics, Jews, and Protestants . Journal of Personality , 75 , 709–742.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). Hinduism and buddhism . New Delhi: Munshiram Monoharlal Publishers.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). A new approach to the Vedas: Essays in translation and exegesis . Philadelphia: Coronet Books.
• Harris, T. M. , Parrott, R. , & Dorgan, K. A. (2004). Talking about human genetics within religious frameworks . Health Communication , 16 , 105–116.
• Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great . New York: Hachette.
• Hoover, S. M. (2006). Religion in the media age (media, religion and culture) . New York: Routledge.
• Lundby, K. , & Hoover, S. M. (1997). Summary remarks: Mediated religion. In S. M. Hoover & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 298–309). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Mahan, J. H. (2014). Media, religion and culture: An introduction . New York: Routledge.
• Parrott, R. (2004). “Collective amnesia”: The absence of religious faith and spirituality in health communication research and practice . Journal of Health Communication , 16 , 1–5.
• Russell, B. (1957). Why I am not a Christian . New York: Touchstone.
• Sarwar, G. (2001). Islam: Beliefs and teachings (5th ed.). Tigard, OR: Muslim Educational Trust.
• Stout, D. A. (2011). Media and religion: Foundations of an emerging field . New York: Routledge.
• Antony, M. G. (2010). On the spot: Seeking acceptance and expressing resistance through the Bindi . Journal of International and Intercultural Communication , 3 , 346–368.
• Beckford, J. A. , & Demerath, N. J. (Eds.). (2007). The SAGE handbook of the sociology of religion . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Burrell, D. B. (2013). The triumph of mercy: Philosophy and scripture in Mulla Sadra—By Mohammed Rustom . Modern Theology , 29 , 413–416.
• Clark, A. S. , & Hoover, S. M. (1997). At the intersection of media, culture, and religion. In S. M. Hoover , & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 15–36). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Croucher, S. M. , Braziunaite, R. , & Oommen, D. (2012a). The effects of religiousness and religious identification on organizational dissent. In S. M. Croucher , & T. M. Harris (Eds.), Religion and communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, and method (pp. 69–79). New York: Peter Lang.
• Croucher, S. M. , Faulkner , Oommen, D. , & Long, B. (2012b). Demographic and religious differences in the dimensions of self-disclosure among Hindus and Muslims in India . Journal of Intercultural Communication Research , 39 , 29–48.
• Croucher, S. M. , & Harris, T. M. (Eds.). (2012). Religion and communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, & method . New York: Peter Lang.
• Croucher, S. M. , Sommier, M. , Kuchma, A. , & Melnychenko, V. (2016). A content analysis of the discourses of “religion” and “spirituality” in communication journals: 2002–2012. Journal of Communication and Religion , 38 , 42–79.
• Davie, G. (2008). The sociology of religion . Los Angeles: SAGE.
• De Juan, A. , Pierskalla, J. H. , & Vüllers, J. (2015). The pacifying effects of local religious institutions: An analysis of communal violence in Indonesia . Political Research Quarterly , 68 , 211–224.
• Durkheim, E. (1976). The elementary forms of religious life . London: Harper Collins.
• Garner, J. T. , & Wargo, M. (2009). Feedback from the pew: A dual-perspective exploration of organizational dissent in churches. Journal of Communication & Religion , 32 , 375–400.
• Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays by Clifford Geertz . New York: Basic Books.
• Hall, E. T. (1989). Beyond culture . New York: Anchor Books.
• Harris, T. M. , & Worley, T. R. (2012). Deconstructing lay epistemologies of religion within health communication research. In S. M. Croucher , & T. M. Harris (Eds.), Religion & communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, and method (pp. 119–136). New York: Peter Lang.
• Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind . London: McGraw-Hill.
• Holiday, A. (1999). Small culture . Applied Linguistics , 20 , 237–264.
• Hoover, S. M. , & Lundby, K. (1997). Introduction. In S. M. Hoover & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 3–14). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Karniel, Y. , & Lavie-Dinur, A. (2011). Entertainment and stereotype: Representation of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel in reality shows on Israeli television . Journal of Intercultural Communication Research , 40 , 65–88.
• Kennedy, E. J. , & Lawton, L. (1998). Religiousness and business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics , 17 , 175–180.
• Klock, J. , Novoa, C. , & Mogaddam, F. M. (2010). Communication across religions. In H. Giles , S. Reid , & J. Harwood (Eds.), The dynamics of intergroup communication (pp. 77–88). New York: Peter Lang
• Kluckhohn, C. (1949). Mirror for man: The relation of anthropology to modern life . Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• Kohl, C. T. (2007). Buddhism and quantum physics . Contemporary Buddhism , 8 , 69–82.
• Mapped: These are the world’s most religious countries . (April 13, 2015). Telegraph Online .
• Martin-Barbero, J. (1993). Communication, culture and hegemony: From the media to the mediations . London: SAGE.
• Marx, K. , & Engels, F. (1975). Collected works . London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Nietzsche, F. (1996). Human, all too human: A book for free spirits . R. J. Hollingdale (Trans.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural communication: A critical introduction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Cross-cultural and intercultural communication (pp. 35–51). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Simmel, G. (1950). The sociology of Georg Simmel . K. Wolff (Trans.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Stout, D. A. , & Buddenbaum, J. M. (Eds.). (1996). Religion and mass media: Audiences and adaptations . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Weber, M. (1963). The sociology of religion . London: Methuen.
• Wimal, D. (2007). Nagarjuna and modern communication theory. China Media Research , 3 , 34–41.
• Applegate, J. , & Sypher, H. (1988). A constructivist theory of communication and culture. In Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (Eds.), Theories of intercultural communication (pp. 41-65). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

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Religion and Globalization: New Possibilities, Furthering Challenges

As a contested term, globalization has many definitions, each worthy of merit. Generally, globalization is first thought of “in economic and political terms, as a movement of capitalism spreading across the globe.”[1] It calls to mind “homogenizing exports of the US” such as Nike, McDonald’s, and MTV.[2] However, since globalization can be defined as a process of an “ever more interdependent world”[3] where “political, economic, social, and cultural relationships are not restricted to territorial boundaries or to state actors,” globalization has much do with its impact on cultures.[4]

As goods and finance crisscross across the globe, globalization shifts the cultural makeup of the globe and creates a homogenized “global culture.”[5] Although not a new phenomenon, the process of globalization has truly made the world a smaller place in which political, social, and economic events elsewhere affect individuals anywhere.[6] As a result, individuals “search for constant time and space-bounded identities” in a world ever changing by the day.[7] One such identity is religion.

Generally, religion is a “system of beliefs and practices.”[8] More specifically, the word comes from the Latin “ religare ” which means “to bind together again that which was once bound but has since been torn apart or broken.”[9] Indeed, with the globalization of economics and politics, individuals feel insecure “as the life they once led is being contested and changed at the same time.”[10] Hence, “in order for a person to maintain a sense of psychological well-being and avoid existential anxiety,”[11] individuals turn to scripture stories and teachings that provide a vision about how they can be bound to a “meaningful world,” a world that is quickly changing day-by-day.[12]

Nonetheless, the relationship between globalization and religion is one with new possibilities and furthering challenges. On the one hand, while religion takes advantage of communication and transportation technology, it is at the same time the source of globalization’s greatest resistance by acting as a haven for those standing in opposition to its power.[13] On the other hand, because globalization allows for daily contact, religion enters a circle of conflict in which religions become “more self-conscious of themselves as being world religions.”[14] This essay argues that the relationship between religion and globalization is complex, one with new possibilities and furthering challenges. However, this essay cannot provide a comprehensive overview of religion and globalization, as the terrain is too vast. Still, it does provide several examples to illustrate the complex relationship between the two.

First, this essay explains how globalization engenders greater religious tolerance across areas such as politics, economics, and society. Second, it explains that as globalization does so, it also disrupts traditional communities, causes economic marginalization, and brings individuals mental stress, all of which create a backlash of religious parochialism. Third, although globalization paves the way in bringing cultures, identities, and religions in direct contact, this essay also explains that globalization brings religions to a circle of conflicts that reinforces their specific identities. Finally, using three paradigmatic individuals and their use of religious ideals in their human rights work, this essay provides some suggestions on how not just religions but humanity can use existing religious principles as ways to overlook religious and cultural differences.

Globalization Engendering Greater Religious Tolerance

Globalization brings a culture of pluralism, meaning religions “with overlapping but distinctive ethics and interests” interact with one another.[15] Essentially, the world’s leading religious traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—teach values such as human dignity, equality, freedom, peace, and solidarity.[16] More specifically, religions maintain the Golden Rule: “what you do not wish done to yourself, do not do to others.”[17] Therefore, through such religious values, globalization engenders greater religious tolerance in such areas as politics, economics, and society.

In political areas, globalization has built global political forums that integrate cultural, ethnic, and religious differences—ideologies that were once perceived as dividing the world—through a large number of international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO), as well regional organizations like the European Union (EU), the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), or the African Union (AU). When discussing issues such as international peace and security, health issues, poverty, and environment, these organizations generally share many of the same basic commitments as religious traditions—mainly peace, human dignity, and human equality, as well as conflict resolution in which they actively engage in negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy.[18]

In addition to these political organizations, religious communities such as the Roman Catholic Church, the World Council of Churches, and the Jewish Diaspora also take part in international affairs.[19] For instance, they have taken part in events such the Jubilee 2000, an international effort advocating for cancelling Third World debt by the year 2000, and the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an effort of international faith leaders along with the World Bank to support development agendas corresponding to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.[20] Furthermore, religious organizations have, themselves, been involved in interreligious dialogue. The Parliament of the World’s Religions of 1993, first conveyed during the 1893 Chicago World Exhibit, brought the world’s diverse faith traditions—from African indigenous religions, the major religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), to any forms of faith that would agree to civil dialogue through mutual encounter—to use their similar values and discuss world affairs.[21]

In terms of economics, as the economy of the major countries of the world has grown, the main religions of each of those countries have also grown financially, providing more financial resources for religions to spread their beliefs.[22] For example, although it may seem as an old tactic, missionary work—especially in light of globalization—is strong in many Third World countries where religious representatives convert the natives.[23] As a result, the major religions today have scattered across the globe—Christianity turning “southern” and “black,” Islam turning “Asian,” and Buddhism turning “white” and “western.”[24] Still holding on to their original territorial spaces where their shrines exist, religions are fulfilling their general purpose of spreading their beliefs to people all over the world.[25]

Finally, religion has tremendously benefited from technological advancements. For example, websites provide information and explanations about different religions to any person regardless of his or her geographical location, as well as provide the opportunity to contact others worldwide and hold debates which allow religious ideas to spread.[26] Furthermore, television allows for religious channels that provide visual religious teachings and practices.[27] Hence, by making the leap onto the information superhighway, which brings religious teachings into every home and monitor in a global setting, religions have come together into one setting.[28]

In short, globalization allows for religions previously isolated from one another to now have regular and unavoidable contact. As a result, globalization brings to the light the fact that since religions have similar values, not one of them is “correct” and, therefore, can be changed.[29] But as the next section shows, the same process that engenders greater religious tolerance also creates a backlash of religious parochialism.

Globalization Creating Backlash of Religious Parochialism

Since globalization is considered as “the first truly world revolution,” “all revolutions disrupt the traditions and customs of a people”—that is, “people’s very security, safety, and identity.”[30] As globalization disrupts traditional communities, causes economic marginalization, and brings mental stress, individuals feel these less desirable consequences of globalization. With religion’s power to “convey a picture of security, stability, and simple answers” through stories and beliefs—unlike economic plans, political programs, or legal regulations—individuals turn to religion.[31]

First, globalization breaks down traditional communities and replaces them with larger, impersonal organizations. As globalization creates a “global village,” it dramatically alters what individuals traditionally understood themselves by—“citizenship,” “nationality,” and “immigration.”[32] For instance, the European Union (EU) does not call their members by country of origin but rather by their greater title, European citizens. Moreover, such organizations set universal standards upon all members, causing individuals to believe that they are not fairly represented. As a result, feeling that these organizations have shattered their “protective cocoon” that has shielded them in the past, many individuals find comfort in religion.[33]

In giving individuals a sense of belonging, religious groups help them to find themselves in modern times. For instance, religious leaders, pointing to modern society’s loss of ethical values and increased corruption, preach, “the only answer to the current ‘decay’ is a return to traditional values and religious norms.”[34] Hence, religion supplies these individuals with a feeling of being a part of a group that represents their interests and allows them to regain their traditional sense of who they are.

Second, globalization brings economic marginalization. For example, as transnational corporations increasingly take over the role of the state’s involvement in the economic sector, the government loses its status as a welfare provider. Moreover, increasing the gaps between those who have benefit from the global market (generally the West) and those who have been left behind (generally the Global South), globalization is seen as “Western imperialism,” as well as “Americanization.”[35] For instance, globalization “encourage[es] people to buy American goods and services, which ultimately “undermines deep-rooted communal values.”[36] Simply put, individuals are bombarded with McDonald’s, Nike, and MTV.

By responding to individuals’ desire for welfare, as well as acting as a cultural protection against globalization, religion plays a social role and gains more recognition from the marginalized, particularly those in Third World countries.[37] For instance, religious organizations such as Catholic Relief Services, World Vision International, and Islamic Relief Worldwide help serve the disadvantaged in areas such as poverty relief, health care, the HIV/AIDs crisis, and environment problems.[38] In fact, even if only promising prosperity and hope of economic relief, these organizations draw massive followers as, by lacking “extensive transnational bureaucracies and chains of command,” they provide “the strength of collective identity and the depth of ethical commitments.”[39]

Last but not least, globalization causes mental stress. Although globalization allows for crisscrossing borders, it also leaves individuals worrying about losing work, status, or other privileges.[40] Moreover, since globalization favors material prosperity as the aim of life over inner peace, individuals focus on attaining some material possession such as a house, car, game, or simply any object.[41] When they attain such item(s), however, they find themselves empty inside and, therefore, realize that inner peace can never be achieved through material possessions.[42]

To these individuals then, religion provides them the way to inner peace and the sense of personal fulfillment. For example, individuals who feel insecure in the globalized world, in business or personal life, will often pray to God for his spiritual support.[43] In addition, these individuals realize that getting involved within their communities and organizing together in social movements for a good cause brings more satisfaction to them than do material possessions.[44] They see themselves as being part of something important and worthwhile.

In short, in face of rapid changes in the globalized world, to regain the sense of certainty, many individuals turn to religion for a clear explanation of what is going on in the world. With its strength as a powerful identity that brings the message of unity and security in times of crisis, religion provides the idea of a “home.”[45] But as the last section demonstrates, this religious identity becomes a major ingredient that reduces the self and the other to a number of cultural religious characteristics.

Religious Identity and Globalization: Furthering Challenges

As the previous section shows, since God has set the rules and has made them difficult to challenge, religion provides answers to questions concerning self-identity.[46] However, in providing such answers, religion also institutes a notion of “truth,”[47] which implies an automatic exclusion of the one—called an “abject”—who does not adhere to such “truth.”[48] In times of uncertainty like globalization, therefore, collective identity is reduced to a number of cultural religious characteristics —“them” and “us” and “they” and “our.”[49] In other words, the abject suddenly becomes recognized as a threat.

For example, since the 9/11 attacks, there has been a tendency of the West to link the religion of Islam with terrorist practices while Al-Qaeda links the US as Christian or a Judeo-Christian nation.[50] On the one hand, Al-Qaeda men who hijacked the planes on 9/11 saw the passengers and those working in the World Trade Center and Pentagon as “abjects” of Islam.[51] On the other hand, the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq turned into wars of “Islamofacism” and a “crusade” to the divine in getting rid of evil.[52] Moreover, other attacks on innocent people based on cultural religious characteristics occur today: Muslims in the United States, Western Europe, or India, Kurds in Iraq, and Jews in France.[53] In other words, though socially constructed, these cultural religious characteristics become a unifying force against others not adhering to a particular truth.

Interestingly then, the idea of religious identity in this era of globalization may hold in-line with Huntington’s thesis. According to Huntington (1990), while conflict during the Cold War occurred between the Capitalist West and the Communist Bloc East, current and future conflicts are most likely to occur between the world’s major civilizations, and not the states, including Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic (Chinese), Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese, and the African.[54] In a broader sense, having paved the way for religions to come in direct contacts with one another, globalization has, indeed, brought religions to a circle of competition and conflicts. As long as religions see themselves as “world religions” and reinforce their specific identities, the chance for religions to avoid conflict among one another is grey.[55] Luckily, the final section brings some hope on how religions can use their existing principles as ways to overlook their differences.

In a time in which globalization has yet to fully complete its process, religions must use the communication easily available through advanced technology to focus more on the humane and pluralistic forms of their teachings—values such as human dignity and human freedom—as means to manage religious diversity and avoid violence. In other words, religious should be open to other traditions and what they can teach. In fact, though having “fixed texts,” the major world religions do not have “fixed beliefs,” “only fixed interpretations of those beliefs,”[56] meaning their beliefs can be “rediscovered, reinvented, and reconceptualized.”[57]

As interesting examples, in their attempt to create the tradition of nonviolence from diverse religions and cultures, three paradigmatic individuals—Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—have, indeed, “rediscovered, reinvented, and reconceptualized” the beliefs of the world’s major religions.[58] The three individuals indicate that “it is possible for narrative diversity to generate a shared ethic without sacrificing the diversity of particular religions.”[59]

For instance, although coming from a gentry class in Russia and receiving fame and fortune from his novels, Tolstoy converted to Christianity in part after reading a story about how a Syrian monk named Barlaam brought about the conversion of a young Indian prince named Josaphat, who gave up his wealth and family to seek an answer to aging, sickness, and death.[60] Deeply indebted in Buddhism for his conversion to Christianity, Tolstoy, attempting to live his life by the teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, gave away all his wealth and spent the rest of his life serving the poor.[61] Nevertheless, the story about Barlaam and Josaphat has “worked its way into virtually all the world’s religions.”[62]

Similarly, Gandhi, when he encountered Tolstoy’s writings, drew his attention to the power of the Sermon on the Mount.[63] In encountering Jesus’ Sermon, Gandhi became motivated to “turn the great Hindu narrative from the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita, in order to find the message of nonviolence within his own religion and culture.”[64] By finding that Tolstoy’s understanding of the Sermon on the Mount lacked “nonviolence as an active rather than a passive virtue . . . capable of producing an active resistance to evil,” he found it present in the Bhagavad Gita.[65] As a result, Ghandi transformed the Bhagavad Gita from a story that authorized killing to one of nonviolence reflected from the story of Jacob wrestling with the stranger and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.[66]

Lastly, Martin Luther King, Jr. also drew insight from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Judaism.[67] For instance, connecting Gandhi with Jesus Christ, he saw Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence as similar to Jesus’ suffering on the cross.[68] Therefore, King’s theological theme was the idea that “unmerited suffering is redemptive,” meaning he constantly reminded blacks that they would experience a “season of suffering” before they would achieve justice.[69] In general terms, King’s theology focused on values grounded in religion—justice, love, and hope.[70] In short, as Tolstoy, Ghandi, and King illustrate, “narrative traditions are not mutually exclusive.”[71] They are connected through themes and, therefore, allow religions to engage in interreligious dialogue.

As this essay’s previous sections show, religions have, indeed, taken part in dialogues beforehand. As a further example, religious leaders gathered at the UN’s Millennium Peace Summit in September 2000 to mark the turn of the millennium.[72] A milestone in itself, as the UN is not a common ground in the sense of a ecumenical meeting inside a church, synagogue, or mosque but rather a global common ground, the Summit’s conversation encouraged that world’s religious communities stop fighting and arguing amongst themselves and begin working together for peace, justice, and social harmony.[73] As then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan addressed to the Summit, “Whatever your past, whatever your calling, and whatever the differences among you, your presence here at the United Nations signifies your commitment to our global mission of tolerance, development, and peace.”[74]

Moreover, as transnational corporations increasingly become actors in the international system, one could argue that religious communities have agreed on “the emerging global ethic” which consists of three major components: 1) corporations are prohibited from involving in bribes and corruption, 2) corporations are prohibited from discriminating on the grounds of race, religion, ethnicity, or gender in the conduct of business, and 3) corporations are prohibited from activities that pose a significant threat to human life and health.[75] Simply put, these components are, in themselves, religious values used to regulate the way transitional corporations increasingly engage in the global market.

The bottom line is that the pieces of interreligious dialogue to manage religious diversity and to avoid violence are there, but the problem may be of globalization’s intentional and/or unintentional consequence of making religions more conscious of themselves as “world religions,” as well as the undesirable consequences of disrupting traditional communities, causing economic marginalization, and bringing individuals mental stress—all reinforcing religious cultural characteristics and identities. Hence, the relationship between religion and globalization has brought new possibilities but also furthering challenges.

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[1] The Hedgehog Review, “An Annotated Bibliography on Religion and Globalization,” The Hedgehog Review 4 (2002): 116.

[3] Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “An Agenda for Peace, Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking, and Peace-Keeping” June 17, 1992, http://www.unrol.org/files/A_47_277.pdf (accessed April 25, 2014).

[4] Robert McCorquodale, and Richard Fairbrother, “Globalization and Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (1999): 735-736.

[6] Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” Political Psychology 25 (2004): 742.

[7] ibid., p. 743.

[8] Dwight N. Hopkins, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, & David Batstone, Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 9.

[9] Michael Perry, The Idea of Human Rights (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 14.

[10] Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security, supra note 6, p. 742.

[11] Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 38-39.

[13] Monaim El Azzouzi, “Religion and Globalization: Benefits and Challenges,” Romanian Review of Political Science and International Relations 10 (2013): 151.

[14] ibid., p. 152.

[15] Thomas Bandchoff, Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 5.

[16] ibid., p. 3.

[17] Hans Kung, “Explanatory Remarks Concerning a ‘Declaration of the Religious Global Ethic,’” http://globalethic.org/Center/kung.htm (accessed April 25, 2014).

[18] Thomas Bandchoff, Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics , supra note 15, p. 18.

[19] ibid., pp. 6-7.

[20] ibid., p. 22.

[21] ibid., p. 25.

[22] Richard Tiplady, One World Or Many?: The Impact of Globalisation on Mission (Pasadena, California: William Carey Library, 2003), p. 23.

[24] Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs (1993), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/48950/samuel-p-huntington/the-clash-of-civilizations (accessed April 25, 2014.

[25] Monaim El Azzouzi, “Religion and Globalization: Benefits and Challenges,” supra note 13, p. 150.

[26] ibid., p. 151.

[27] Luke Martell, The Sociology of Globalization (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2010), p. 70

[28] ibid., p. 75.

[29] Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London, United Kingdom: SAGE Publications, 1994), p. 2.

[30] James Kurth, “Religion and Globalization,” Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) – Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs, May 1999, http://www.fpri.org/articles/1999/05/religion-and-globalization (accessed April 25, 2014).

[31] Hans Kung, “Explanatory Remarks Concerning a ‘Declaration of the Religious Global Ethic,’” supra note 17.

[32] Sarah Azaransky, Religion and Politics in America’s Borderlands (Plymouth, United Kingdom: Lexington Books, 2013), p. 26.

[33] Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” supra note 6, p. 743.

[34] ibid., p. 759.

[35] Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization , supra note 29, p. 8.

[36] Jeffrey Haynes, An Introduction to International Relations and Religion (Harlow, England: Person Longman, 2007), pp. 75-76.

[37] Kenneth L. Woodward, “The Changing Face of the Church: How the Explosion of Christianity in Developing Nations is Transforming the World’s Largest Religion” Newsweek , April 2001, http://www.newsweek.com/changing-face-church-149993  (accessed April 25, 2014).

[38] Thomas Bandchoff, Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics , supra note 15, p. 11.

[39] ibid., p. 19.

[40] Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” supra note 6, p. 747.

[41] Phra Paisal Visalo, “The Dynamics of Religion in the Age of Globalization: Lessons from Indonesia, Philippines, and Japan,” http://www.visalo.org/englishArticles/Dynamics.htm .

[43] Scott M. Thomas, “A Globalized God: Religion’s Growing Influence in International Politics,” Foreign Affairs (2010), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66804/scott-m-thomas/a-globalized-god (accessed April 25, 2014).

[44] Thomas Bandchoff, Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics , supra note 15, p. 20.

[45] Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” supra note 6, p. 762

[46] ibid., 763.

[47] Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” supra note 6, p. 759

[48] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.

[49] Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” supra note 6, p. 761.

[50] Thomas Bandchoff, Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics , supra note 15, p. 29.

[51] ibid., p. 754.

[52] ibid. pp. 29-30.

[54] Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” supra note 24.

[55] Bryan S. Turner, “Globalization, Religion and Empire in Asia”, in Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman, Religion, Globalization, and Culture (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007), p. 146.

[56] Scott M. Thomas, “Religion and International Society,” in Jeff Haynes, Religion, Globalization, and Political Culture in the Third World (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), p. 37.

[57] ibid., p. 760.

[58] Darrell J. Fasching, “From Genocide to Global Ethics by Way of Storytelling,” in Sumner B. Twiss and Bruce Crelle, Explorations in Global Ethics: Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), p. 316.

[60] ibid..

[62] ibid., p. 317.

[64] ibid., p. 316.

[65] ibid., p. 317.

[66] ibid., p. 318.

[68] James H. Cone, “The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 10 (1986): 24.

[70] ibid., p. 21.

[71] Darrell J. Fasching, “From Genocide to Global Ethics by Way of Storytelling,” supra note 58, p. 318.

[72] Thomas Bandchoff, Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics , supra note 15, pp. 24-25.

[73] United Nations General Assembly, “United Nations Millennium Declaration,” 2000, http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm (accessed April 25, 2014).

[74] Kofi Annan, “Secretary-General, Addressing Millennium Summit of Religious, Spiritual Leaders, Urges Participants to Set Example of Interfaith Cooperation,” August 29, 2000, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2000/20000829.sgsm7520.doc.html (accessed April 25, 2014).

[75] Ronald M. Green, “Religions and the Ethics of International Business,” in John Kelsey and Sumner B. Twiss, Religion and Human Rights (New York, NY: Project on Religion and Human Rights, 1994), p. 237.

Written by: Daniel Golebiewski Written at: Columbia University Written for: Dr. Joseph Chuman Date written: May 2014

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• Computational Propaganda: Challenges and Responses
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30 Major Pros & Cons Of Religion

“ I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

Frederick Douglass, Author

Advantages & Disadvantages of Religion

Many religions had been around for thousands of years.

Billions of people all over the world rely on the value systems that are proposed by those religious movements.

Even though believing in religion can have numerous advantages, it also implies serious problems.

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In this article, the pros and cons of religion are examined in detail.

Audio Lesson

Advantages of religion, religion may help people to overcome insecurities, can help in hard times in life, may give people trust in life after death, can help to promote reasonable values, people may find meaning in life, may give people a reason to get up in the morning, religion may help to overcome anxiety, religion and art are closely connected, may prevent people from behaving in an animal-like manner, religion as anchor of stability, promotion of common social values, people may help each other, opportunity to socialize, may give people hope.

One important advantage of religion is that it can help people to overcome their insecurities.

Especially people who have quite low confidence levels are attracted to religion since they can get a feeling of community out of it.

While society will often not value them too much, they may play an important role in their religious community and may get plenty of confirmation out of it.

In turn, this may help those people to overcome their insecurities and to become a valuable member of a bigger picture.

Everyone of us faces quite hard times in our lives sooner or later.

While some people just push through those times and become stronger, others struggle quite a lot and may suffer from serious mental problems .

In such a case, religion can help people to get back on track since religions often promote values that give people stability in their lives.

Therefore, if you have a rather unstable personality and are not good at dealing with emotional pain, religion may help you to overcome difficult periods and horrible events in your life.

Many people are also quite afraid of death. We as humans are often not able to accept the fact that we will not be on this planet forever and that we have to go after a certain period of time.

Therefore, many people struggle to deal with death since they are afraid of what’s coming afterward.

Many people are also not willing to accept that their parents or other loved ones will have to leave this planet sooner or later.

In all those cases, religion may help people since religions often propose the concept of life after death and people may be more willing to accept their death if they have a perspective afterward.

If religion is practiced in a non-radical manner, chances are that some of the values that are spread by priests and other religious people may actually benefit our society.

For instance, altruism is one core value that is common amongst most religions and this may actually be a core value that is important for a peaceful life all around the world.

Therefore, there are also some important social values that are proposed by religions.

Some people also struggle with finding true meaning in their lives.

They get up in the morning, work in a job, come home, sleep and so on.

However, even though this might be necessary for many people to make a living, it is not really fulfilling for most of us.

This routine does not give us any sort of higher meaning in life and is therefore quite unsatisfying for a high fraction of the general public.

Many of us search for true meaning in life and religion is one way to find it since religions often propose that we live for a certain purpose and that we should live our lives in order to be rewarded later on.

Thus, if you miss true meaning in your life, religion may be able to help you in this regard.

Some people are also quite unsatisfied with their daily life.

They have to work in a shitty job for quite long hours and come home tired on a regular basis.

Over time, this may become a real pain and many people may lose all their motivation to get up in the morning.

Religion can help in such cases since it may give people a higher purpose in life and people may therefore stay motivated, even if they don’t like what they are doing.

Another advantage of religion is that it can help people to overcome their anxieties.

We all have things that we are afraid of.

Yet, it is crucial to overcome our fears in order to develop our personal character and to succeed in life.

Some people are able to overcome their fears on their own.

However, if you are not able to deal with your fears alone, religion can help you to do so since if you believe in a higher power that is on your side, you might have the courage to do things you would never do without having this belief that a higher power supports you.

History shows that art and religion are closely connected and that many artists got their inspiration from religious or spiritual practices .

In fact, even in our nowadays age, many artists are also quite spiritual persons and religion often plays a major role in their lives.

Hence, if we want to continue to see brilliant masterpieces of art, religious beliefs may be crucial to get the necessary inspiration for artists.

Another benefit of religion is that it may prevent us to act like animals.

In fact, we are animals in a certain sense and also have some of the raw and unpleasant traits animals have deep inside them.

Yet, religion can help us to control those negative attributes and may help us to create a society with positive social values.

In an ever-changing world, religion can also serve as an anchor of stability for many people.

Especially old people often have difficulties to adapt to technological changes and may feel increasingly lost in an age where technological progress is quite rapid.

For those people, religion can be an anchor of stability since religion does not change too much and for people who do not like change at all, believing in religion instead of dealing with reality may be quite tempting.

Religion can also be helpful when it comes to inventing or changing certain social value systems.

Since religions often propose values that foster social cohesion, the promotion of those values through religious practices may lead to a strong feeling of community for the general public.

Another upside of religion is that people may be more eager to help each other.

Especially people who have the same religious beliefs will help each other on a frequent basis since sharing the same values and world views can lead to strong social bonds.

Moreover, if your religion claims that you should help each other, chances are that you will also be more willing to help other people, even if you don’t know them at all.

Religion can also help you to socialize. If you go to church, you will have the opportunity to sit next to many different people over the years and you might be able to make many new connections.

Additionally, you can also join the church choir or participate in other activities that are organized by your church.

Through all those things, you can further socialize and find really good friends over time.

In difficult times of their lives, many people also lose all their hope for a better future.

Life can be tough and some people will not be able to deal with all that happens to them in a healthy manner.

Therefore, religion can greatly help people who lost their hope to get back on track and to continue to live their lives instead of just giving up in those situations.

Disadvantages of Religious Beliefs

Religion is often misused by fundamentalists, can lead to serious discrimination of minorities, religious arguments are often flawed, may be used to keep people under control, suppression of freedom, religion often claims to know too much, other spiritual views are often belittled, religious books are often hard to understand, can contribute to serious conflicts, may contradict with science, opponents often claim that religions are man-made nonsense, religion may take away responsibility from people, often prevents people from things they want to do, religion may slow down technological progress, may decrease the overall quality of life of people, can lead to bad decisions.

Apart from the many important advantages of religion, there are also some issues related to this.

One problem of religion is that it is often misused by fundamentalists.

Even though the majority of believers have moderate attitudes and want to practice their religion in a peaceful manner, there are small radical groups which try to use religion for their purposes in order to start radical movements and organizations, which in turn can lead to the death of many people all over the globe.

Therefore, if religious beliefs are misused by fundamentalists, this can lead to quite unpleasant outcomes.

While many religions propose social acceptance amongst their members, they often also claim that everyone who behaves not in line with the values of those religions should be socially excluded or even discriminated against.

In human history, there are plenty of examples where minorities with different belief systems greatly suffered and even in the present, there are still people who are discriminated against due to different religious attitudes.

Another issue of religion is that the arguments made by priests or other religious people are often flawed and can be disproved by rather simple arguments.

However, especially people who are not that smart often believe in those arguments, which may turn out in rather unpleasant outcomes for their future life.

Thus, you should always make sure to stay rather critical towards religious arguments in order not to believe in flawed arguments that may potentially lead to bad outcomes for your life.

Throughout the history of mankind, religions had also been used to keep the general public under control.

In fact, it was the perfect tool for political leaders to point to different religious aspects in order to keep people under control and to sustain their power.

Hence, religion has been used to control people over the course of human history and is still used to make people do certain things, even those things may not be in their own best interest.

In general, religion often takes away a great level of freedom of people.

People are often confined in their way of life since they have to make sure not to violate any rules that are proclaimed by their religion.

Moreover, believing in certain religions prevent people from believing the opposite, which leads to a quite narrow world view.

Thus, believing in religion may greatly reduce your overall level of freedom, which is almost never a good thing.

Many religions claim to have all the answers to life.

They often claim that if you act in a certain manner, you will be rewarded later on in your life or even after death since there is only one good way to live.

However, nobody knows exactly what’s the right way to live and if religious movements claim to know this, they are for sure not the thing you want to rely on.

Religion often claims way too much in terms of how the world works and also about life and death.

Therefore, I am personally quite skeptical about religions since in my opinion, nobody has a clue what’s waiting for us after we die.

Another downside of religious beliefs is that other religions are often belittled.

While the own religion is the gold standard regarding how to live in a proper manner, religions that state opposite values will often be belittled or even discriminated against.

Thus, this way of exclusive and narrow thinking will not benefit our society at all since through this way of thinking, we will lose many different ideas and valuable attitudes towards life.

Since they had been written thousands of years ago, religious books are often also quite hard to understand since the language that had been used is so different from the language style we use today.

Therefore, it is quite hard for many of us to verify what had been written in those holy books since we have to rely on translations instead of being able to read the original book.

Yet, those translations may often be incorrect or misleading and the true message of those holy scripts may be lost to a certain extent.

Religion often also leads to serious conflicts inside countries or even across country borders.

In fact, many people fight each other on a regular basis since they feel that they have to defend their religion against other people who do not believe in those religions at all.

Therefore, religion can also be a major factor for conflict and from an ethical perspective, this can never be regarded to be a good thing.

The arguments that are made by religious leaders can often be disproved by scientists.

Yet, religious leaders still often claim that their religion is much more important and insightful than scientific research and that people should rather rely on religion instead of science in order to understand life.

This can lead to quite dangerous outcomes since many concepts of science had been proven to work while many religious concepts will not work at all.

Thus, it might be better to rely on scientific research instead of religion when it comes to important decisions in your life.

While many people strictly believe in the values that are proposed by religion, opponents of religious practices often claim that religion is just man-made nonsense and that there is no reason to believe in those holy books at all.

In fact, quite little is known about the authors of those books and we should take the arguments made in those scripts with great care instead of just relying on them blindly.

Another problem of religion is that it generally takes away plenty of responsibility from people.

For instance, if the holy book says that we should act in a certain manner, people may just point out this fact to justify their actions, even if those actions might be quite harmful to our society.

Thus, taking away the responsibility for their actions from people is never a good thing since it will quite often lead to detrimental social outcomes.

Many religions also take all the fun out of our lives.

Many of the things that really create joy in our lives are forbidden and everyone of us should as themselves whether they really want to live their only life in a way that prevents them from having as much fun as possible.

Many religions are also against the invention of new technologies since they fear that their traditional values become eroded sooner or later.

This attitude towards life may significantly slow down our technological progress since there will be less subsidies for research and development due to religious concerns.

In turn, without enough technology and technological progress, humanity may not be able to solve our environmental problems and we may be doomed at one point in time.

Since a big fraction of individual freedom is taken away from people due to religious beliefs, religion may also greatly lower the overall quality of life of billions of people on our planet.

Freedom is one of the most valuable goods we have as humanity and everything that confines our level of freedom should be critically evaluated.

Another downside of religion is that it can lead to quite bad decisions for people who believe in those religious arguments.

For instance, in many religions, you are obliged to marry at some point in time.

Therefore, people decide to marry only for the purpose to be in line with their religious beliefs and not since they truly believe in this concept.

However, this may lead to a great level of unhappiness in the long run since it will lead to plenty of unhappy marriages and to family conflicts on a large scale.

Therefore, you should make important decisions based on your own preferences and not due to religious aspects since you might get in trouble otherwise in the long run.

Top 10 Religion Pros & Cons – Summary List

From the previous discussion, we can conclude that there are many advantages and disadvantages of religion.

In the end, you have to decide for yourself whether you want to be part of a religious movement or not.

However, in my opinion, you should never believe anything but rather evaluate every religious argument in a critical manner so that you can spot flawed arguments that may get you in trouble sooner or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

https://www.theregister.com/2006/10/06/the_odd_body_religion/

https://www.history.com/topics/religion

About the author

My name is Andreas and my mission is to educate people of all ages about our environmental problems and how everyone can make a contribution to mitigate these issues.

As I went to university and got my Master’s degree in Economics, I did plenty of research in the field of Development Economics.

After finishing university, I traveled around the world. From this time on, I wanted to make a contribution to ensure a livable future for the next generations in every part of our beautiful planet.

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Impact of Religion and Culture on Development Essay

Introduction, development, how religion and culture impact development.

This essay will define the meaning of development, its measurement parameters, and other development indicators. It then will identify some aspects of religion and cultural practices that interact with development; those interactions will then be quantified before finally assessing their individual impacts on the overall human and economic development. The questions that the essay is intended to answer are: What is development? How is development measured? How will people’s culture change upon development? What other factors apart from religion and culture affect development?

Development in a national context is defined as the improvement in a countries economic and social status. This is to say that the entire population in a given country has reached a certain standard of living where they are all comfortable in terms of management of their natural resources and in the creation of wealth. There are basically two types of development: Economic and Human developments. The former means the measure of how wealthy a country is and how that wealth is created, while the latter refers to the degree by which people get access to wealth (nutrition, health care, jobs, and political freedom, among other things).

Development indicators include Health-For a country to say that it is developed health-wise; it means that all its citizens are accessible to quality health care. The next indicator is Industry-Which tends to define the type of industries in a country (whether agricultural or manufacturing). Lastly is Education-The available institutions in a country as compared to the population. Also is the degree of literacy in a country.

The role played by religion in development is due to religious structure, organizations, and regulations. Economists have in the past neglected this role that religion play in shaping development. “Unless development economists acquaint themselves with the relevant socio-political literature, they will be working in the dark.” (Epstein, 1973, 6). It is common knowledge to all that a good education is a major ingredient required for any positive growth. This essay highlights those areas in education that are affected by religion. All the religions, be it Islamic, Hinduism, Christianity, or Buddhism, have doctrines that hinder education; such hindrances eventually impact development. Religious doctrines can either make or break human development, as illustrated below, by taking Christianity and Islam as examples.

Development is unlimited, and in a broad sense, means accessing whatever information is important for your advancement. Religious leaders have perceptions of the contents of the school syllabus. They oppose the idea that such things as sex education and all those subjects that are based on scientific theories should be scraped from the school syllabus. They also claim that girls have no right to education.

In the Christian setting, the children are taught that God is the Supreme Being and solutions to all problems lie with Him. They, therefore, have to believe only in their faith as the sole truth. One’s good life depends only on how well one follows the teachings. Such believers might get rooted so much in the beliefs and be tempted to make no effort to do anything but pray with hopes that prayers will improve their economic and social status.

Islamic teaching is compulsory at the lower levels of education, especially in the Middle East. Such teachings have their negative take on derailing development. For instance, teachers have to pass a religious exam before they are allowed to teach in Islamic schools. This is a form of discrimination and is in itself a milestone to the free passage of information. It is also a forbidden and a punishable offense for students to have free thoughts or to pursue any scientific advancement, thanks to the superstition that surrounds such acts. Another development indicator is freedom of expression and choice. The Islamic culture is male-dominated and teaches children that women are less superior to men and that they have no right of choice. In Islamic culture, women are ready for marriage at the early age of nine. They, therefore, drop out of school at lower levels. Women are pictured only as mothers and housewives. Such a belief in any society is an impediment to development (Hensman, 1987).

Islamic culture favors men more as compared to women. There is serious sexual segregation; whether in schools, workplaces, or in homes, women are separated from men. This is what (Azam Kamguian) calls “sexual apartheid.” Women are viewed as the source of evil and corruption in the community; they are the cause why men go astray. Their freedom of movement and to happily socialize is denied, their thoughts and minds are controlled, they are put under scrutiny by men from what they wear to what they say. That is a practice that never has and will never promote equality which is a major requirement in development.

Fertility influences the demography of a nation, and studies have shown that religion affects fertility (Lehrer, 2004; Mc Quillan, 2004). Other researchers argue that it as well plays a role in the political outcomes (Glaeser, Ponzetto and Shapiro, 2005).

Sex education in any school is religiously unacceptable, and most religious cultures prohibit acts like the friendship between boys and girls, which they perceive as secular. Since socializing is a component of development, such restrictions will only slow the rate of human development in every aspect; for any country to experience growth of any form, all sectors have to be coordinated and work as a unit. This coordination can never be achieved if different sexes are kept apart.

On a more positive note, we also find out that religion fosters trust among the faithful. This can result in a more cooperative behavior where people can accommodate one another in society. (Borooah and Iyer, 2005, 5) referred to this as “social capital,” where three aspects are emphasized: social networks, social norms, and social sanctions. (Ibid, 6) also examined the macro and micro consequences of religiosity and reported that several channels exist through which religious capital can impact economic growth. Some of which include; Exerting positive thoughts on human capital by promoting education among the believers and altering the way in which technology and human capital are used.

Religion, on the positive side, preserves the moral values required in a society. This would help in a situation where immoral acts brought about by the inversion by other cultures are not adopted because of the existing religious restrictions; such unaccepted acts will not be allowed to crop and get root into the society.

Several religious doctrines bar students from accessing important information by restricting them from holding onto certain beliefs and religious values. To spark a positive boost on the economy, the focus needs to be put both on the supply side(the structures of religious organization) and the demand side(preferences of consumers in religious economies). (Stark & Finke, 2000). Culture means the traditional practices of a particular people in a given society. Culture is said to be able to affect people’s preferences.

The way by which culture relates to development is by the tendency of various forms of tourism-another great indicator of development. Take the example given in (Robert 1993, 51) quoting (Valene Smith, 1997, 14: Ed. 1) “Hosts and Guests,” an anthology in tourism studies. “To be more negative than positive in impact.”

Strict observation of cultural practices from conservatives hinders any form of change, whether positive or negative. Culture is a natural conception of tradition-which in itself is a model of past practices. With good cultural practices, there will still be evidence of growth through tourism by the attraction of other individuals into the camp. “…culture is a process of ordering, not disruption. It changes and develops like a living organism; it does not normally ‘survive’ an abrupt alteration”. (Clifford 1988, 235). Modernization should therefore not be allowed to erode cultural identity.

“Culture can be wrapped and sold to tourists in the form of ancient sites, folk costumes, ritual ceremonies as well as the everyday life of ordinary people” (Cohen and Kennedy, 213).

Culture is that missing element in sustainable development (Michael L. Tan). Sustainable growth and development will be witnessed with good cultural interaction with governance and business in modern society. But to see this happen, there has to be cultural diversity and cultural freedom that allows for practice to develop this diversity. There need to be multicultural policies to spark development; people will therefore be free to be what they want to be and do whatever they want to do. Such policies should be able to recognize the relative cultural differences, a champion for diversity, and more importantly, allow for cultural freedom.

Societies that still embrace strong cultural values are stable. And stability is a major requirement in order to create a good foundation for development. People living in such a society have a strong sense of community bondage, and to add to that, they value both the inner and outer peace as well as respect for their relationship. Development, therefore, should be done within the context of the local culture in order to observe these norms and to make any new concept acceptable to the locals. Education has got its take on causing a shift in cultural practices. Those who have pursued education up to some level will tend to drop the activities that were practice by their ancestors and instead go for the more lucrative jobs. The ease by which this can be accepted in the community needs to be assessed to enable economists and other development partners to gauge the expected rate of growth and development of a given area.

In this essay, we have managed to identify those aspects of how religion and cultural practices interact and impact both human and economic development. Religion does this through its structural system, conservative leaders, organizational and regulations or doctrines. The overall perception of the religious leaders on secular matters touching on the economy together with economists’ ideas on religion, has been discussed in this essay. We, therefore, answered satisfactorily the questions laid on the introductory stage. It has elaborated clearly the meaning of development, how it is measured, its indicators, and how religion and culture affect it.

Examples of Christian and Islam doctrines were taken to give illustrations on the answers to the questions to be solved. From the facts in this article, it, therefore, will be right to say that….development in any sense goes hand in hand with religion and culture, and the two directly influence the measurements of development greatly. A compromise point should therefore be reached to help balance all the factors related to development indicators to reach a state that is considered to be comfortable to all. Before the introduction of any modern development in a community, the people live in harmony and look so happy. It is, therefore, a necessity to try before injecting a foreign practice into the people to get to know what aspects of the people’s culture lead them to be happy despite their hardships. When trying to bring development to a place, therefore, such aspects have to be preserved if development is to be appreciated and wholly accepted by the people.

We have to accept the fact that culture is a living thing, and like all other living things, its change is of the essence. This change is inevitable, especially as development takes root. A way, therefore, needs to be devised to gradually affect these changes in such a manner that it will not be too drastic to shake the very foundation that the culture was built. The indigenous people should devise a means to enable them to make a choice as well as to control the type of developments that affect their lives. Even though integrating education, health care, and better living standards will improve society’s condition, they still are supposed to be controlled and only introduced at the rate which can be accommodated by society.

Azam Kamguian Adapted from a speech given at the 5th symposium of the Arab Cultural Centre in London in 2000 and also at a seminar held by Save the Children in Stockholm.

Borooah & Iyer, 2005; “The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India”. Journal of Development Studies 41, 1369–404.

Cohen Robin and Kennedy Paul: Global Sociology . Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Chap.12, p.212-229. 213.

Glaeser, E., Ponzetto, G. and Shapiro, J. 2005. “Strategic extremism: why Republicans And Democrats divide on religious values”: Quarterly Journal of Economics 120, 1283–330.

Guiso Luigi, Sapienza Paola & Zingales Luigi, “Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?” 2006: CEPR Discussion Papers 5505, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

Hensman, Rohini. “Oppression within Oppression: The Dilemma of Muslim Women in India.” Women Living under Muslim Laws: Working Paper no.1, 1987.

Iyer, S. 2002. Demography and Religion in India . Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Kenworthy, L. Do social-welfare policies reduce poverty? A cross-national assessment: Social Forces, 77(3), (1999). 1119-1139.

Lehrer, E. 2004; “Religion as a determinant of economic and demographic behavior In the United States”: Population and Development Review 30, 707–26.

Marios. Cleovoulou “How does development affect culture?” 1998.

Michael L. Tan ” Mobilizing Truth for Integral Sustainable Development (ISD) 2004 | Pinoy Kasi, Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Paola, Luigi & Luigi Guiso, 2006. “Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?” NBER Working Papers; 11999, National Bureau of Economic Research.

Scarlett Epstein: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow , London: Macmillan, 1973; South India.

Stark, R. and Finke, R. 2000. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stark, R., Iannaccone, L. and Finke, R. 1996. “Religion, science and rationality”: American Economic Review 86, 433–7.

Syed, Anwar H. 1997: “Islamic Models of Development”. In Howard J. Wiarda (Ed) Non Western Theories of Development: Regional Norms Versus Global Trends . Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Wood, Robert E. 1993: “Tourism, Culture and the Sociology of Development”. Michael Hitchcock et al (Eds): Tourism in South-East Asia. London & New York: Routledge. P 48-69.

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Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays

Paul Draper and J. L. Schellenberg (eds.), Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays , Oxford University Press, 2017, 242 pp., $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198738909.

Reviewed by Adam Green, Azusa Pacific University

"A traveller of good judgment may mistake his way, and be unawares led into a wrong track . . . but when it ends in a coal-pit, it requires no great judgment to know that he hath gone wrong, nor perhaps to find out what had misled him." -Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind

The editors and authors of this volume think that philosophy of religion is in a coal pit that Christian analytic philosophers have been merrily digging for us with confessional work better suited to theology. The contributors disagree over how exactly we've gone wrong, how seriously we've gone wrong, and what charting a better route would look like. They are all in agreement, however, that philosophy of religion desperately needs to change. There is much that is of interest in the thirteen essays of this volume, but within the context of this short review, I will survey only a representative selection of the offerings. It is with regret that I pass over the contributions of John Bishop, Clare Carlisle, Robert McKim, Wes Morriston, Graham Oppy, J. Aaron Simmons, and Mark Wynn. For the essays below, I will convey the upshot of the piece along three dimensions -- what they say is wrong with contemporary philosophy of religion, how bad this fault is, and what the alternative is that the author recommends in response.

In "Rescuing Religion From Faith," Sonia Sikka claims that what is wrong with philosophy of religion is that its disproportionate focus on Christianity has obscured the fact that religion need not and probably should not be shackled to faith. In this context, faith seems to be construed as a non-negotiable commitment to creedal truths definitive of a religious position. From a more global perspective emphasizing various eastern viewpoints, Sikka finds more of an emphasis on process, dialogue, and open-ended debate than on defending and unpacking the proverbial deposit of faith. Philosophy of religion should empower people to explore their options rather than starting with a certain set of answers portrayed as authoritative.

In "Global Philosophy of Religion and Its Challenges," Yujin Nagasawa draws on Ninian Smart and John Hick to outline a program for doing global philosophy of religion. For Nagasawa, the problem with contemporary philosophy of religion isn't necessarily that what is being done is bad, as contrasted with Sikka's claims about the pernicious influence of faith. Rather, the work isn't bad; it's blinkered. Philosophers of religion work within their own tradition without paying much attention to the insights of any other, and this applies to more than just Christian philosophers. As opposed to older pluralistic projects like Hick's, Nagasawa's proposal is more methodologically than theoretically pluralistic. He doesn't want to force anyone to assume anything about how different religions relate to each other and what the relative status of different religions is vis-à-vis the truth. Rather, he stresses the importance of thinking about topics in the philosophy of religion in a multi-faceted way by bringing different global perspectives to bear on philosophical problems.

In "Against Ultimacy," Stephen Maitzen urges that the problem with contemporary philosophy of religion is that the idea that there is any sort of ultimate reality is incoherent. There is nothing ultimate ontologically, axiologically, or teleologically. Though he has various ways of applying it in his different sub-arguments, his over-arching idea seems to be that philosophers of religion fail to see that degreed properties don't imply an actual upper bound that maximizes the value in question. He appeals to mathematics by way of analogy. The set of real numbers, for instance, doesn't need to contain some particular highest number that maximizes numerical value. The series of numbers just goes on forever, and the application of numbers from the series to the real world doesn't imply that numbers higher up in the series are actually instantiated. Once we get over our concern with ultimacy, philosophy can provide us with all the transcendence we need by allowing us to transcend ordinary ways of thinking, and we can do that without ultimacy. Thus, in essence, for Maitzen, the philosophy of religion should be assimilated into philosophy proper.

In "Religion After Naturalism," Eric Steinhart thinks that philosophy of religion has gotten stuck because its conception of religion sets it against naturalism. As more and more people come to realize that naturalism is true, philosophy of religion is in danger of fading away much like theorizing about outdated science (e.g. no one bothers doing the philosophy of phlogiston). Once one realizes that there can be naturalistic religions, whether they be centered on energy, drugs, raves, or art festivals, we can make space for a philosophy of religion that survives the triumph of naturalism. In fact, "philosophers can become actively involved in designing new religions" (75) as well as critiquing them. Thus, while Sikka and Nagasawa's critiques both push in the direction of a globally representative philosophy of religion, we see that other contributors like Maitzen and Steinhart recommend abandoning all or almost all existing forms of religion in favor of alternatives.

In "North American Philosophers of Religion: How They See Their Field," we get a rather different kind of essay from Wesley J. Wildman and David Rohr. They did an empirical study based on fifty-one solicited blog entries on the topic "What is philosophy of religion?" By and large, the results of the study tend to confirm that there is a deep division between how at least two groups approach the field. To the extent that a given philosopher of religion teaches at a confessional religious school and is a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers, they will approach philosophy of religion more narrowly and confessionally. To the extent that one teaches at a secular school, is a member of the American Academy of Religion, and teaches in a religious studies department, one will approach the field in a more global, inclusive manner. Mixing those categories or falling outside of those categories produces more mixed results (e.g. religious schools that don't require statements of faith or persons who are members of the American Philosophical Association but not the SCP or the AAR). The essay provides some evidence that the sentiments of the contributors to this volume are representative of a larger class of people.

Finally, Jason Marsh pens the essay that perhaps most focally expresses a charge against contemporary philosophy of religion that runs throughout the contributions to the volume. In "On the Socratic Injunction to Follow the Argument Where It Leads," Marsh pits G.E. Moore and Socrates against each other in a struggle over what philosophy should be that is as much tempermental and aspirational as it is a dispute about particular philosophical claims. In essence, Moore and the Moorean stack the deck against philosophical innovation by requiring that philosophy's claims vindicate themselves before the tribunal of our antecedent commitments. Even Socrates needs starting points from which to reason and endorses some limits to legitimate inquiry like non-contradiction. The Moorean, however, makes it too easy to decide not to follow the evidence where it leads. It may be, for Marsh, that the Moorean approach is an acceptable hedge to put between us and skepticism about widely accepted claims of common sense such as that there is an external world. To be Moorean about religious claims, however, which do not command the same sort of consensus and are debated by reasonable persons, strikes Marsh as philosophically perverse. He singles out Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig for special castigation on this score. Thus, however the field is to proceed, it should do so more in the spirit of Socrates than of Moore.

In considering the volume as a whole, it is helpful to situate the animating concern of the contributors against familiar debates over the relationship between naturalism and science on the one hand and on the other hand against debates over public reason's role in disputes about fairness and the common good.

Consider the debate over whether there is something wrong with the idea of theistic science and whether methodological naturalism is neutral as between different worldviews. Proponents of methodological naturalism, whether theists or naturalists, often hold that we change the nature of what we are doing when we insert metaphysical claims about God's existence (or non-existence) into a discussion of natural phenomena. Whereas before we were doing biology, say, once we bring the idea of a creator into play we aren't doing biology anymore. Rather, we've taken up biological data into theological or atheological discourse. Methodological naturalist might think there is something dodgy or under-handed about trying to insert over-arching worldview concerns into a scientific discussion, but they need not. They might simply think that science of its nature has to bracket such considerations in virtue of what science is and that people who want to play rowdy worldview games should take them outside out of the laboratory.

In like manner, the various contributors have a problem with philosophy of religion being methodologically confessional. That approach seems partisan to them. It doesn't allow the philosophy of religion to have an integrity as a discipline that sets it apart from the special concerns of religious (or perhaps anti-religious) interest groups. Consequently, the contributors are reaching for a more principled, objective methodology that can be put in its place. They disagree over what that would look like. A number of them think that a more globally representative methodology would do the trick. Others want a more formal apparatus to guide the method, as with Oppy's piece (which we did not canvas). Still others like Steinhart would have us adopt a method which assumes some form of naturalism, perhaps in a way analogous to those who think methodological naturalism in science implies metaphysical naturalism.

Turning to our second parallel, in a pluralistic society in which one group has more power than the others, we get a familiar tension. The dominant group may have interests that are not shared by the rest of society and that may directly or indirectly impinge on the interests of other groups. If everyone pursues their own interests without any regulatory framework within which to situate those pursuits, then there is, of course, reason to think the dominant group will win out whenever its interests conflict with those of others. This, of course, raises concerns about fairness and the viability of pursuing a common good that covers all the members of society. And so it is in the case of the philosophy of religion.

The legacies of Plantinga and the other founders of the Society of Christian Philosophers include not just their own substantial works but also the way they inspired successive generations of young Christians to pursue careers in philosophy (and this reviewer is one of the throng). The figure of the covert apologist using reason as a tool to coerce others recurs in this volume, but I think that obscures the more representative phenomenon. The field of philosophy of religion is full of Christians of one stripe or another who are interested in thinking through philosophical questions that touch on their faith. They do so because there are a lot of such philosophical questions to think about and because their faith is deeply enmeshed with what they value and how they answer the perennial questions of philosophy. They would be overjoyed if they convinced anyone else to agree with them, but I would wager that the typical Christian philosopher does not even think that coerced faith is the genuine article. They certainly defend their positions and could stand to improve on turning the other check when they feel attacked. I don't see why any of that makes a Christian philosopher an apologist in the pejorative sense used in contexts like this, though we could all nominate a philosopher or two for the epithet. After all, if by apologist we were just to mean someone who defends their views in a public arena, then all philosophers would qualify.

Even if the critic does not impugn the integrity of the typical Christian philosopher, the concerns about fairness and the common good don't go away. If there is a glut of Christian philosophers in the field, there will be more articles, monographs, and anthologies on topics particular to Christianity like resurrection and atonement and work on more broadly applicable topics like the problem of evil or the religious aspects of human flourishing will be tilted in the direction of how Christians and their antagonists think about such topics. It may be harder to publish, promote, and gain appropriate disciplinary recognition for work that falls outside of the dialogical frameworks set up by a Christian dominated field.

Once again, the perspectives of the volume differ on what should be done in response, and they align with familiar options for dealing with the related problematics from social and political philosophy. On the one hand, one could try to institute confession-neutral criteria for participation in the philosophy of religion. Many of the contributors would like any work on a Christian topic or work from an obviously Christian perspective to be pushed out of philosophy into (Christian) theology. On this proposal, something will only count as a legitimate piece of philosophy of religion if it is confessionally neutral. Others don't want people's thick religious identities bracketed or excluded in this manner. A second proposal would have us more intentionally promote a diverse range of voices within philosophy of religion, boosting minority voices in the discipline rather than promoting neutrality. As with Nagasawa's piece, this second option could include the encouragement of projects diverse people have reason to value from within their religious or areligious identities.

But what should the takeaway be if you are a Christian philosopher and you think that Christianity is true? Many Christians hold that other religious and areligious perspectives are important sources of truth. It seems pretty easy to see how such a point could be parlayed into a reason to dialogue seriously with the more globalist proposals in the book. It's a little harder to see how a Christian's response to the Maitzen's of the world could take any form other than an attempted rebuttal. At the very least, this volume offers Christians like myself an opportunity for reflection in light of the discontent expressed within it. Other would be contributors to philosophy of religion find us inhospitable, ignorant, biased, and insufficiently curious. We should try very hard not to be any of those things.

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Jessica Grose

Get tech out of the classroom before it’s too late.

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Jaime Lewis noticed that her eighth-grade son’s grades were slipping several months ago. She suspected it was because he was watching YouTube during class on his school-issued laptop, and her suspicions were validated. “I heard this from two of his teachers and confirmed with my son: Yes, he watches YouTube during class, and no, he doesn’t think he can stop. In fact, he opted out of retaking a math test he’d failed, just so he could watch YouTube,” she said.

She decided to do something about it. Lewis told me that she got together with other parents who were concerned about the unfettered use of school-sanctioned technology in San Luis Coastal Unified School District, their district in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Because they knew that it wasn’t realistic to ask for the removal of the laptops entirely, they went for what they saw as an achievable win: blocking YouTube from students’ devices. A few weeks ago, they had a meeting with the district superintendent and several other administrators, including the tech director.

To bolster their case, Lewis and her allies put together a video compilation of clips that elementary and middle school children had gotten past the district’s content filters.

Their video opens on images of nooses being fitted around the necks of the terrified women in the TV adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It ends with the notoriously violent “Singin’ in the Rain” sequence from “A Clockwork Orange.” (Several versions of this scene are available on YouTube. The one she pointed me to included “rape scene” in the title.) Their video was part of a PowerPoint presentation filled with statements from other parents and school staff members, including one from a middle school assistant principal, who said, “I don’t know how often teachers are using YouTube in their curriculum.”

That acknowledgment gets to the heart of the problem with screens in schools. I heard from many parents who said that even when they asked district leaders how much time kids were spending on their screens, they couldn’t get straight answers; no one seemed to know, and no one seemed to be keeping track.

Eric Prater, the superintendent of the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, told me that he didn’t realize how much was getting through the schools’ content filters until Lewis and her fellow parents raised concerns. “Our tech department, as I found out from the meeting, spends quite a lot of time blocking certain websites,” he said. “It’s a quite time-consuming situation that I personally was not aware of.” He added that he’s grateful this was brought to his attention.

I don’t think educators are the bad guys here. Neither does Lewis. In general, educators want the best for students. The bad guys, as I see it, are tech companies.

One way or another, we’ve allowed Big Tech’s tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children’s education, with very little oversight and no real proof that their devices or programs improve educational outcomes. Last year Collin Binkley at The Associated Press analyzed public records and found that “many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games and tutoring websites.” However, he continued, schools “have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”

It’s not just waste, very likely, of taxpayer money that’s at issue. After reading many of the over 900 responses from parents and educators to my questionnaire about tech in schools and from the many conversations I had over the past few weeks with readers, I’m convinced that the downsides of tech in schools far outweigh the benefits.

Though tech’s incursion into America’s public schools — particularly our overreliance on devices — hyperaccelerated in 2020, it started well before the Covid-19 pandemic. Google, which provides the operating system for lower-cost Chromebooks and is owned by the same parent company as YouTube, is a big player in the school laptop space, though I also heard from many parents and teachers whose schools supply students with other types and brands of devices.

As my newsroom colleague Natasha Singer reported in 2017 (by which point “half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students” were, according to Google, using its education apps), “Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable”: potential lifetime customers.

The issue goes beyond access to age-inappropriate clips or general distraction during school hours. Several parents related stories of even kindergartners reading almost exclusively on iPads because their school districts had phased out hard-copy books and writing materials after shifting to digital-only curriculums. There’s evidence that this is harmful: A 2019 analysis of the literature concluded that “readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.”

“It seems to be a constant battle between fighting for the students’ active attention (because their brains are now hard-wired for the instant gratification of TikTok and YouTube videos) and making sure they aren’t going to sites outside of the dozens they should be,” Nicole Post, who teaches at a public elementary school in Missouri, wrote to me. “It took months for students to listen to me tell a story or engage in a read-aloud. I’m distressed at the level of technology we’ve socialized them to believe is normal. I would give anything for a math or social studies textbook.”

I’ve heard about kids disregarding teachers who tried to limit tech use, fine motor skills atrophying because students rarely used pencils and children whose learning was ultimately stymied by the tech that initially helped them — for example, students learning English as a second language becoming too reliant on translation apps rather than becoming fluent.

Some teachers said they have programs that block certain sites and games, but those programs can be cumbersome. Some said they have software, like GoGuardian, that allows them to see the screens of all the students in their classes at once. But classroom time is zero sum: Teachers are either teaching or acting like prison wardens; they can’t do both at the same time.

Resources are finite. Software costs money . Replacing defunct or outdated laptops costs money . When it comes to I.T., many schools are understaffed . More of the money being spent on tech and the maintenance and training around the use of that tech could be spent on other things, like actual books. And badly monitored and used tech has the most potential for harm.

I’ve considered the counterarguments: Kids who’d be distracted by tech would find something else to distract them; K-12 students need to gain familiarity with tech to instill some vague work force readiness.

But on the first point, I think other forms of distraction — like talking to friends, doodling and daydreaming — are better than playing video games or watching YouTube because they at least involve children engaging with other children or their own minds. And there’s research that suggests laptops are uniquely distracting . One 2013 study found that even being next to a student who is multitasking on a computer can hurt a student’s test scores.

On the second point, you can have designated classes to teach children how to keyboard, code or use software that don’t require them to have laptops in their hands throughout the school day. And considering that various tech companies are developing artificial intelligence that, we’re meant to understand, will upend work as we know it , whatever tech skills we’re currently teaching will probably be obsolete by the time students enter the work force anyway. By then, it’ll be too late to claw back the brain space of our nation’s children that we’ve already ceded. And for what? So today’s grade schoolers can be really, really good at making PowerPoint presentations like the ones they might one day make as white-collar adults?

That’s the part that I can’t shake: We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be, and too many people, myself included, didn’t initially realize it. Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.

Holly Coleman, a parent of two who lives in Kansas and is a substitute teacher in her district, describes what students are losing:

They can type quickly but struggle to write legibly. They can find info about any topic on the internet but can’t discuss that topic using recall, creativity or critical thinking. They can make a beautiful PowerPoint or Keynote in 20 minutes but can’t write a three-page paper or hand-make a poster board. Their textbooks are all online, which is great for the seams on their backpack, but tangible pages under your fingers literally connect you to the material you’re reading and learning. These kids do not know how to move through their day without a device in their hand and under their fingertips. They never even get the chance to disconnect from their tech and reconnect with one another through eye contact and conversation.

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” prescribes phone-free schools as a way to remedy some of the challenges facing America’s children. I agree that there’s no place for smartphones on a K-12 campus. But if you take away the phones and the kids still have near-constant internet connectivity on devices they have with them in every class, the problem won’t go away.

When Covid hit and screens became the only way for millions of kids to “attend” school, not having a personal device became an equity issue. But we’re getting to a point where the opposite may be true. According to the responses to my questionnaire, during the remote-school era, private schools seemed to rely far less on screens than public schools, and many educators said that they deliberately chose lower-tech school environments for their own children — much the same way that some tech workers intentionally send their kids to screen-free schools.

We need to reframe the entire conversation around tech in schools because it’s far from clear that we’re getting the results we want as a society and because parents are in a defensive crouch, afraid to appear anti-progress or unwilling to prepare the next generation for the future. “I feel like a baby boomer attacking like this,” said Lewis.

But the drawbacks of constant screen time in schools go beyond data privacy, job security and whether a specific app increases math performance by a standard deviation. As Lewis put it, using tech in the classroom makes students “so passive, and it requires so little agency and initiative.” She added, “I’m very concerned about the species’ ability to survive and the ability to think critically and the importance of critical thinking outside of getting a job.”

If we don’t hit pause now and try to roll back some of the excesses, we’ll be doing our children — and society — a profound disservice.

The good news is that sometimes when the stakes become clear, educators respond: In May, Dr. Prater said, “we’re going to remove access to YouTube from our district devices for students.” He added that teachers will still be able to get access to YouTube if they want to show instructional videos. The district is also rethinking its phone policy to cut down on personal device use in the classroom. “For me,” he said, “it’s all about how do you find the common-sense approach, going forward, and match that up with good old-fashioned hands-on learning?” He knows technology can cause “a great deal of harm if we’re not careful.”

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.