Using the secularization theory and the Marxist notion of religion as masking class conscience one would expect the importance of religion and religious involvement today to wane and be limited to lower class members. To challenge this expectation, using a representative national telephone survey of 2004 youth (ages 11–18) and their parents, we attempt to answer the following two questions: How...

As citizens of the most technologically advanced and economically developed country in the world, nearly all Americans stalwartly maintain their faith in God, much more so than residents of other postindustrial countries (Norris and Ingelhart 2004). But what is the content and meaning of this belief? Perhaps belief in God has become so pervasive in contemporary American culture that it reflects...

The propensity for religious belief and behavior is a universal feature of human societies, but religious practice often imposes substantial costs upon its practitioners. This suggests that during human cultural evolution, the costs associated with religiosity might have been traded off for psychological or social benefits that redounded to fitness on average. One possible benefit of religious ...

The current study examined whether religious affiliation in Utah County, Utah affected the production of several vowel mergers typical of the area (i.e., fell-fail, pool-pole-pull,card-cord). To do so, we asked selfidentified members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and self-identified nonMormons to produce these vowel contrasts. Next, three naïve raters trained in p...

The interactions between religious affiliation, education, HIV knowledge, and HIV-related sexual behaviors among African church youth are poorly understood. In this socio-demographic study, 522 unmarried youth 12-28 years old in rural central Mozambique were surveyed with a structured questionnaire. Using binary logistic regression analysis, we used religious affiliation and education to measur...

This paper provides a norm-based explanation for two features of the fertility transition that have been observed in many different settings: the slow response to external interventions and the wide variation in the response to the same intervention. Most societies have traditionally put norms into place to regulate fertility. When the economic environment changes, individuals gradually learn t...

Galen (2012), critically reviewing recent research on religion and prosociality, concludes that the religious prosociality hypothesis is a (congruence) fallacy. The observed effects are not real: They only reflect stereotypes and ingroup favoritism, are due to secular psychological effects, are inconsistent, and confound (e.g., by ignoring curvilinear relationships) those low in religiosity wit...