Search

We use the National Survey of Religious Leaders (NSRL) to extend prior research on clergy's political activism and agendas. We find that christian clergy engage in political cue giving at similar rates across religious traditions, though evangelical clergy are less likely than other clergy to engage in direct action. Regarding issue priorities, evangelical clergy focus almost exclusively on a moral reform agenda, with a particular focus on abortion. Both mainline Protestant and Black Protestant clergy often address a social justice agenda, but Black Protestant clergy tend to focus more on community empowerment while mainline Protestant clergy tend to pursue social justice activism that seeks to transcend class and national boundaries. Catholic clergy are more likely than others to advance a wide range of issues. Taken together, these findings update and extend our knowledge about clergy political activities, broadening the traditional two-agenda characterization of clergy political agendas into a four-agenda account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positive relationship between family formation and regular weekly religious service attendance is well established, but cross-sectional data make it difficult to be confident that this relationship is causal. Moreover, if the relationship is causal, cross-sectional data make it difficult to disentangle the effects of three distinct family-formation events: marrying, having a child, and having a child who reaches school age. We use three waves of the new General Social Survey panel data to disentangle these separate potential effects. Using random-, fixed-, and hybrid-effect models, we show that, although in cross-section marriage and children predict attendance across individuals, neither leads to increased attendance when looking at individuals who change over time. Having a child who becomes school aged is the only family-formation event that remains associated with increased attendance among individuals who change over time. This suggests that the relationships between marriage and attending and between having a first child (or, for that matter, having several children) and attending are spurious, causal in the other direction, or indirect (since marrying and having a first child make it more likely that one will eventually have a school-age child). Adding a school-age child in the household is the only family-formation event that directly leads to increased attendance.