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When U.S. respondents to soda surveys are asked to report their attendance at religious services, approximately 40% of Protestants and 50% of Catholics claim to attend church in any given week. These survey findings have been widely disseminated. They are prominently and broadly cited though out scholarly, popular and textbook writing on American religion. Such extensive interest makes it all the more important to investigate whether these rates give a true or a distorted picture of religious practice in the United States. A recent paper has shaken confidence in the self-reported church attendance rates. Using counts of actual attendees at religious services rather than self-reports, the study has argued that the true weekly U.S. church attendance rate is approximately half the rate implied by the self-reports. The line of investigation is continued by collecting count-based church attendance data from an additional 31 Catholic dioceses. Including 17 dioceses reported on in the original paper, one is able to calculate count-based church attendance rates in 48 U.S. Catholic dioceses.

The process of socio-economic achievement is elaborated through an analysis of data from eight NORC surveys, combined to create a sample of members of six religio-ethnic groups. Correlational analysis indicates findings similar to earlier studies. Using Methodists as the comparison group, Scheffe tests indicate that Jews differ in education, occupational achievement and income, Episcopalians in occupational prestige, and Baptists in education and income, but no significant differentials existed for Irish and Italian Catholics. Further analysis using decomposition suggests that traditional Jewish emphasis on education is an important factor in explaining these differences, but that the factors included in the model explain only a small part of the Baptist and Episcopalian differentials. It is suggested that religious values and religious perspectives are important considerations in understanding these findings.
This paper will review research since 1960, and will seek to define the relationship among several social structural determinants of status within each of several religio-ethnic groups. Our guiding hypothesis is that religious values and beliefs interact differently with other variables across these groups in shaping socioeconomic achievement, and decomposition will be used to specify the effects of background factors on achievement among various religio-ethnic groups. The findings reported in this paper are consistent with those of earlier research concerning religio-ethnic differences in education, occupational achievement and income. Scheffe analysis indicated that the hypothesized differences in the relationships among the determinants of socioeconomic achievement are only partly supported. Not only did Irish and Italian Catholics not differ from Methodists on any of the measures used, but Episcopalian and Baptist differentials were smaller than those of Jews. Jews exceed Methodists in income, occupational prestige, and educational achievement,... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1980s, a growing body of academic literature has focused upon the 'evangelicalisation' of Latin America and other, less affluent world regions (e.g. Africa and Southeast Asia). Valuable for exploring a host of interconnected social, political, economic and cultural practices, this research has consistently pondered the implications of changing religious affiliations and what the effects of these changes might hold for society and space more generally. In Brazil, for example - with more Catholics than any country in the world and a rapidly growing evangelical population - researchers suggest that the country's spiritual shift may bring with it significant political and cultural change, particularly in the impoverished urban communities (i.e. favelas) where evangelical churches are most prominent. While numerous accounts exist to document these changes and reflect upon their potentialities, few geographers, as of yet, have contributed to these debates. Still unknown are the spatial changes that accompany this spiritual shift, the ways that neighbourhoods and cities are changing, and the day-to-day effects of new and syncretistic religious practices. Through a case study of a favela community in northeastern Brazil, this paper considers the socio-spatialities of religious diversity and change within Brazil's contemporary urban landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses evangelical identity politics and more generally religious competition in contemporary Mexico through a specific focus on the construction, dissemination and imagination of space. The imagination and occupation of a particular space determines the specific identity of its followers. Since the identity-space construct is primarily anchored in the political, religious, economic and funerary contexts in most societies, these four rubrics are woven together to assess of the evangelical Christian space-identity construct. The paper furthers research on religious space creation, dissemination and demarcation amongst evangelical Christians in Mexico, and it emphasises the extent to which the strategies of spatial expansion can lead to rigorous intra-faith competition and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that discourse on community as a socio-political problem needs to be located within historical, institutional, and socio-structural contexts if it is to be properly understood. In particular, it suggests that the role of religion in promoting forms of communitarian discourse and practice needs to be given greater attention than it has hitherto received within the social sciences. The article pursues this argument through examination of the religious discourse on community cultivated and promoted by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By providing an analysis of its role in Catholic responses to three major socio-political crises in Ireland between the 1890s and 1960s, the paper suggests that not only does socio-religious discourse on community constitute a powerful alternative to secular social-scientific discourses, but that such discourse is particularly effective in helping to constitute specific groups as communities, given favourable sociological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The higher education sector in Northern Ireland has been fully involved in the public policies designed to enhance equality. Starting with measures designed to secure greater employment between Catholics and Protestants, known as fair employment, the policies are now designed to promote equality of opportunity across nine designated groups together with the promotion of ‘good relations’ on the grounds of religion and race. The paper examines the implementation of this new policy framework in the universities and suggests that progress to date has been fairly limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past thirty years Catholics in Northern Ireland have experienced unprecedented upward social mobility. Some commentators have suggested that this has led Catholics not merely to adopt the lifestyles of the middle class but also to modify their constitutional preferences, leading to a decline in nationalism. In this paper I examine the relationship between social mobility, on the one hand, and, on the other, both constitutional preferences and political (left or right wing) preferences among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, using survey data collected in 1996. There is no evidence that Catholics' constitutional preferences are related to their mobility experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally thought that processes of modernization generic to industrialized societies have resulted in a process of secularization with respect to conventional religious participation and observance in most Western countries. It is not at all clear, however, whether the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe have followed this pattern. In this we paper we examine whether levels of religiosity in ten post-communist societies – five generally Catholic in orientation and five Orthodox – are consistent with secularization theory, or whether instead they display, as some have suggested, the impact of seven decades of atheistic communism followed by a recent resurgence among the young. For this purpose we examine denominational membership and church attendance using descriptive and multivariate analysis of large-scale national sample surveys conducted in the mid-1990s. We find that age and educational differences in participation rates follow patterns expected on the basis of secularization theory with no evidence of resurgence among younger groups. Also, however, Catholic participation rates are significantly higher than Orthodox ones, indicating the importance of denomination in understanding patterns of religiosity in the post-communist context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions about Mormons as an identifiable minority. Although the Canadian Constitution of 1982 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion (as well as ethnic or racial discrimination), examples of religious intolerance continue to be reported by the media. The focus of this paper is on the relationship between tolerance for Mormons and selected religious and non-religious factors. Of particular interest are two social familiarity factors. Data for both Catholics and Anglicans are included for comparative purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]