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Abstract
Subjective social class identities—lower, working, middle, and upper—are conditioned by culture and social interactions. I argue that conservative Christianity influences subjective class identification because conservative Christian social networks are highly insular, and its culture prioritizes lower- and working-class ideologies. Using nationally representative data, I find that conservative Christians—operationalized with views of the Bible and religious tradition—are relatively likely to identify as lower and working class, and unlikely to identify as middle and upper class; that these associations are partially but not wholly mediated by higher education and family income; and that there are robust associations between religion and subjective class among those with a bachelor's degree and above-average family incomes, but not among less-educated and lower-income Americans. These results indicate that conservative Christianity promotes a specific class culture, and that this class culture more closely aligns with biblical literalism than with affiliation with evangelical Protestant churches.

AbstractObjectiveCombining insights from socio‐criminological theories of (hate) crimes and the moral communities perspective, this article examines how the religious makeup of a county—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Catholic adherence rates—affects county‐level hate crime patterns.MethodsZero‐inflated negative binomial regressions were conducted on a unique county‐level data set that included reported hate crimes, religious adherence rates, and related correlates of hate crimes for three distinct temporal periods: 2003–2007, 2008–2012, and 2013–2017.ResultsResults demonstrate that a county's total adherence rate, mainline Protestant rate and, to a lesser degree, Catholic adherence rate are associated with fewer hate crimes. We find no evidence that the evangelical Protestant adherence rate is associated with the number of hate crimes.ConclusionThese results support the moral communities hypothesis, extend research on the religion–crime nexus, and highlight the distinction between religious and secular organizations in community‐level crime patterns, particularly hate crimes.

Cohort replacement is one widely implicated, but seldom studied, mechanism of long-term change in public opinion toward environmental protection. A key difficulty in extant research has been empirically distinguishing cohort effects from those of age. Applying recent methodological advances in age–period–cohort models, we examine the disaggregated effects of age, time period, and birth cohort on changes in Americans' support of federal spending for environmental protection between 1973 and 2016. Results suggest that cohort replacement provides little explanatory power. Instead, we find large age effects, with the young more likely to be pro-environmental in their views, and substantial changes across time periods (but not steady rising support). These results suggest that there is no inexorable march toward greater environmentalism as younger cohorts with greater environmental awareness replace older ones, and highlight the relative lack of explicit theorizing about the relationship between age and the environment.

AbstractIn this article, we further the understanding of both changes in public opinion on capital punishment in the United States and changes in the factors associated with public opinion on the death penalty. Support for the death penalty may be motivated by events happening during specific time periods, and it can vary across birth cohorts as a result of cohort‐specific socialization processes, demographic changes, and formative events that are specific to each generation. An explication of the sources of and variation in death penalty attitudes over time would benefit from the accounting for the age of the respondent, the year of the survey response, and the birth cohort of the respondent. We improve on previous research by using multiple approaches including hierarchical age–period–cohort models and data from the General Social Survey (N = 41,474) to examine changes in death penalty attitudes over time and across birth cohorts. The results showed curvilinear age effects, strong period effects, and weak cohort effects on death penalty support. The violent crime rate explained much of the variation in support for the death penalty across periods. The examination of subgroup differences suggests that support for the death penalty is becoming concentrated among Whites, Protestants, and Republicans.

The present study examined whether declines in religiousness across adolescence precede religious deidentification in young adulthood. Data came from the National Study of Youth and Religion. Participants were religiously affiliated for the first three waves of the longitudinal study (N = 1144). Latent growth curve models found significant declines across adolescence in church attendance, prayer, scripture study, religious importance, and spirituality, whereas doubt was stable across time. Then, logistic regression models specified the latent intercepts and slopes as predictors of later (Wave 4) deidentification. Significant negative links were found for the intercepts and slopes on church attendance, prayer, scripture study, religious importance, and spirituality. For doubt, a significant, positive link was found for the intercept.

Using sci-fi's metaphors, ideal types, and counterfactuals to consider our real-world problems, old and new.

Picture books often play an important role in childhood socialization. Given the seriousness of environmental problems, we ask how natural, modified, and built environments have been portrayed in children's books. To answer this question, we analyze the 296 books receiving Caldecott awards from 1938 to 2008. Two possibilities are explored with respect to content change. Growing concern about critical environmental problems, such as decline in biodiversity and deforestation, may have led to an increase in illustrations and stories about wild animals and the natural environment. Alternatively, the increasing isolation of people from the natural world may have resulted in a decline in the perceived relevance of these environmental issues and resulted in fewer stories and depictions. Our findings support the isolation hypothesis. There have been significant declines in depictions of natural environments and animals while built environments have become much more common. These findings suggest that today's generation of children are not being socialized, at least through this source, toward an understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the place of humans within it.