Of all influences religion may have on health, the most intuitively plausible and uncontroversial concerns patients’ health-related habits and behaviors. At least part of the epidemiologic association between religious involvement and mortality is accounted for by inverse associations between religious involvement and detrimental health behaviors and less consistent positive associations betwee...

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percentage of adults who had been raised with no religion...

Even in predominantly religious societies, there are substantial individual differences in religious commitment. Why is this? One possibility is that differences in social conformity (i.e. the tendency to think and behave as others do) underlie inclination towards religiosity. However, the link between religiosity and conformity has not yet been directly examined. In this study, we tested the n...

Religious elites are active for peace in many violent conflicts. Normative explanations of‐ ten do not suffice to explain their engagement. In this paper we draw on the findings of social‐movement research to identify the factors that induce rationally acting religious el‐ ites to be active for peace. It is their relationships to the government, other religious elites, and believers that c...

Recent attention from media, scholars, and religious leadership has focused on the dating activities of college students, particularly in relation to casual physical encounters or what some have termed “hooking up.” In this article, we examine the impact of both individual and institutional religious involvement on “hooking up” in a national sample of college women (N = 1,000). The results of o...

Previous studies of the marital fertility transition in Europe have found religious differentials. Using data collected from the population registers of The Hague, our aim in this study is to search for answers to the following questions: whether religious differentials result from socio-economic characteristics; to what extent religious ideology explains the behaviour of religious groups; whic...

It is generally accepted that religion typically acts as a protective factor against suicidal behavior. However, there remains some debate over the various mechanisms that underlie this relationship and how these mechanisms may function across different religious traditions. The purpose of this illustrative review is to expand on previous themes in the literature that have focused primarily on ...

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...

Religiosity has long been known to promote volunteering in the US and elsewhere. Despite the growing body of research examining religious correlates of volunteering, however, few studies have focused on whether and how religious attitudes affect volunteering. With data from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS II), 2004–2006, we examine the influences of religious attitudes, name...