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The article presents a case of disruption, social location and interpretive practices in Wayne, New Jersey. Wayne's lack of social integration as a community is related not only to this highly fragmented and decentralized ecology, but also to the rapid growth in population and high turnover of residents in recent years. Social segregation did much to prevent these isolated incidents from erupting into an overt conflict between Christians and Jews. In fact, before the school board election incident, which is the subject of this paper, there was a prevailing belief in the tolerance and brotherhood of the community by all parties. The school board issue shattered this belief. The current article, thus, examine the interpretive responses made by the Jewish residents of Wayne, New Jersey, to religious allegations that arose in the course of a school board election. The most significant results were as follows: the positive relationship between Jewish participation-identification and increased enthnocentrism was stronger among those Jewish residents who did not discuss the issue with Gentiles, and likewise the negative relationship between cross-ties and increased ethnocentrism was stronger for the low discussion group.

Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are people quick to adopt status beliefs about a social difference that lead them to treat others unequally? In a test of status construction theory, two experiments show that men and women form equally strong status beliefs from only two encounters with others. Men act powerfully on these new beliefs in their next encounters with others but women do not, possibly because women face greater social risks for acting on ambiguous status advantages. Women are just as likely as men, however, to treat someone unequally on the basis of an established status distinction. This suggests that men are first movers in the emergence of status distinctions, but women eventually adopt the distinctions as well. Our results show that people readily transform social differences into status distinctions—distinctions that act as formidable forces of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does religious pluralism undermine or promote religious involvement? Some secularization theories contend that diversity breeds loss of belief and lower participation. The religious economies model counters that involvement is boosted by the availability of alternative religious suppliers and the competition that results, with each group working harder to gain adherents. The issue is sufficiently important that a recent review found 193 tests of this question in 26 published articles. Almost all of these findings (both positive and negative) should be abandoned. The associations reported do not reflect the effects of pluralism but a previously overlooked mathematical relationship between measures of religious participation and the index of pluralism. Even when pluralism has no effect on participation, the correlation between these two variables is likely to be nonzero. The sign and magnitude of this expected correlation depend on the nature of the size distributions of the religious groups across the areas studied. Results from several frequently cited studies closely match what would be expected from chance alone. Various alternative methods for studying pluralism in future research are examined, but currently there is no compelling evidence that religious pluralism has any effect on religious participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section comments on an article on the religious beliefs of Jews and Catholics by Greeley and Hout in the December 1999 issue of the American Sociological Review. Greeley and Hout make extended arguments about the religion and religious beliefs of Jews and Catholics. They present hypotheses and trends in those beliefs, which they claim to support with analyses of the 1973-1998 General Social Survey (GSS) and with examination of the traditional teachings of Judaism and Catholicism. Their arguments are crippled by critical errors in their statistical analyses and in their exposition of Jewish religious doctrine. In particular: in their comparisons of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews, Greeley and Hout claim to find no significant differences in beliefs in life after death. They do not mention that the GSS includes data on only 12 Orthodox Jewish respondents. They draw key substantive conclusions from statistically nonsignificant parameter estimates. They misrepresent traditional Jewish doctrine about life after death. Their assertions are inconsistent with well-known primary and secondary sources, including the traditional Jewish prayer book. They also claim to estimate cohort and age effects on beliefs.

Structural and interactionist theory share a parallel set of weaknesses in their ability to account adequately for the relationship between culture and action. Structural theory takes socialization as the major link between culture and conduct and thus generates an overdetermined and unrealistically rigid view of action. Interactionist theory, because of its focus on the improvisational and emergent character of action, finds it difficult to account for the massive fact that patterns of belief and action persist over time. The concept of aligning actions provides a bridge between structural and interactionist perspectives, lending the former a more satisfactory view of the formation of conduct and the latter a means of explaining persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine Glock and Stark's contention that certain Christian religious beliefs are causally related to anti-Semitism, using data from a 1964 national survey. Religious orthodoxy proves to be uncorrelated with anti-Semitism at the zero-order. A path anaIysis reveals that the relationships in the causal sequace hypothesized by Glock and Stark art weak. Furthermore, the influence of religious orthodoxy, religious libertarianism, religious particularism, and religious hostility to the historic Jew is not expressed solely through the intervening step of religious hostility to modern Jews; the coefficents for the direct paths to anti-Semitism are in some cases sizable. The five religious belief variables taken together in a simple additive model account for approximately 15 percent of the variance in anti-Semitism. When socioeconomic status, a number of other social attributes, and a number of social psychological traits are held constant, however, the five religious belief variables account uniquely for only 2 percent of the variance in anti-Semitism. Even here one must be cautious inferring a causal relationship, particulaly since some of the religious measures may simply reflect a more general anti-Semitic ideology. A revised model is presented which includes socioeconomic status and social psychological variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relatively new technique of smallest space analysis is used to analyze the formation of friendship relationships among 15 religious and 27 ethnoreligious groups. Three facets appear to account for the relative proximities of the 15 religious groups. First, there is confirmation of the well-known hypothesis that the American social structure is divided into three religious groupings: Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. Second, religious out group selection of friends follows the lines of similarity of socioeconomic status. And thirdly, similarity of religious beliefs and styles of worship may also be a factor, but some caution in accepting the relevance of this facet must be noted because of its relatively high association with the second facet, socioeconomic status. In order to assess the possible role of ethnic considerations in modifying this structure, we combined ethnic and religious attributes of respondents and their friends into 27 ethnoreligious groups. We found that the structure is differentiated into the three broad religious groupings and, within these groupings, along socioeconomic status lines; moreover, ethnic differences were also playing a role in channeling friendship formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tolerance and protection of the inept are pervasive features of all societies. This phenomenon is a response to the ubiquitous group Problem of what to do with the less able. Patterns of Protection are observed everywhere, and their Presence in modern societies is not so much an evasion of achievement norms as an honoring of other cherished values and beliefs. The actual patterns of protection found are a resolution of two great tensions, protection of the inept, and protection 0/the group from the inept. Descriptions of some processes and consequences of protecting the inept are followed by an attempt to account for variations in the extent to which these processes occur in diverse settings. The high productive level of modern economies then appears to be the result of more efficient utilization of the inept than was possible in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors review on the book "The Sociology of Religion," by sociologist Max Weber. According to the author 'The Sociology of Religion' reveals surprising integrity of structure, logic and aesthetics. The book is divided in to four parts based on the integrities. The first part of the book deals with the phenomenology of religion e.g., the origins of religion, primitive concepts of God, the relationship of men to supernatural forces, which take the form of prayer, sacrifice, and worship. The second part of the book discusses about the perspectives of sociology. Weber deals with prophet, priests, and laity in the relations of religious congregation, preaching and pastoral care. He scrutinizes the conflicting orientations of priests and prophets and the "rationalism" of different castes and classes, including the unprivileged groups. The third pat of the book explores value commitments, destiny-ideals, and life-ways, especially as these appear in the religions of salvation and rebirth. The fourth part surveys the relationship between culture religions and the world. According to the author Weber constantly laments the absence of brotherliness in modem capitalistic civilization and the attenuation of the spirit of charity as traditionalist close-knit communities give way to the rationalized bureaucratic organization of the great society.

Functionalist concern with social order is not wholly understandable as an expression of conservative bias. Interest in the social order is common to both functionalism and evolutionism. This common concern, so far as the problem of change is involved, derives from a shared conviction that processes of change are deducible from an analysis of order or structure. Basically, this conviction arises from a reluctance to accept time and place events as classifiable data for the study of both persistence and change. Theory of social change should be formulated in direct reference to happenings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]