Three Essays on Religious Identity and the Cultural Authority of Science

Lee, John J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-hkq5-ga82

Work

Three Essays on Religious Identity and the Cultural Authority of Science

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

Broadly speaking, this dissertation project seeks to address the following question: how do religious people think about the cultural authority of science, and to what extent does this vary across different contexts? Despite the predictions of classical modernization theorists, religious institutions continue to significantly shape public discourse—and rule-making—in the vast majority of societies. The few exceptions to this are well-known, such as the increasingly secular countries of Western Europe. There is a growing sociological (and interdisciplinary) literature at the nexus of science and religion; and this dissertation attempts to contribute to ongoing areas of research by addressing existing limitations and debates using new analytical approaches. In Empirical Paper 1 (Chapter 2), I develop and test a new religio-political framework for studying the cultural authority of science in the U.S. context. Existing designs have tended to primarily consider the predictive effects of religious identity or political ideology/party identification. However, I argue that there are good reasons to expect differences among partisan subsets of major religious groups: Protestant literalists, Protestant non-literalists, and Catholics. The results show that there is significant evidence of within-group heterogeneity. Contrary to popular narratives, generalized trust in science has not declined broadly among Protestant fundamentalists (biblical literalists) since the 1980s—but rather, only among Republican literalists. The results also show that there are significant differences between Democratic and Republican literalists when it comes to specific contested scientific issues. For example, while both Democratic and Republican literalists are less likely to accept human evolution and the Big Bang, the impact of literalism is substantially greater among Republicans. The next two papers use data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to study the link between religious identity and the cultural authority of science in cross-national contexts. In Paper 2 (Chapter 3), I use an approach that combines resampling methods and unsupervised machine learning to measure cross-national variation in religiosity and science attitudes. There are a few papers that have used similar methods (i.e., latent class analysis) in the U.S. context, finding that a significant proportion of U.S. adults have favorable attitudes toward both religion and science (DiMaggio et al. 2018; O’Brien and Noy 2015). However, this paper extends the existing literature by demonstrating that there are significant numbers of post-secularists (pro-religion and pro-science) in most societies; and, by explicitly quantifying how key religio-scientific classes (traditionalists, modernists, post-secularists, postmodernists) are distributed across regions, countries/territories, and religious groups. Whereas Paper 2 is concerned with measuring latent religio-scientific classes, Paper 3 (Chapter 4) examines what happens when religion and science explicitly conflict in the public sphere. In particular, who chooses to support religion given a conflict—and to what extent is this predicted by science optimism, moral concerns about science, religiosity, and religious exclusivism? Overall, the results showed that despite the arguments of the cultural ascendancy and alienation theses, general science attitudes have a relatively weak predictive effect on the outcome. Instead, it is religiosity and (especially) religious exclusivism that have significantly stronger predictive effects. These differences are also largely consistent in models that assessed relationships within countries/territories and by major religious groups. I conclude Paper 3 with a discussion of why these results have implications for key social scientific theories and perspectives (e.g., modernization).

Creator