Key Theorists - Organisations, Movements and Members Flashcards
Key Theorists - Miller and Hoffman (1995): Gender and Religion
WHAT DO THEY IDENTIFY?
- Two main reasons for gender differences in religious participation.
Key Theorists - Miller and Hoffman (1995): Gender and Religion
WHAT ARE THE TWO MAIN REASONS IDENTIFIED BY THIS THEORY FOR GENDER DIFFERENCES IN RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS PARTICIPATION?
- Differential socialisation
- Differential roles
Key Theorists - Miller and Hoffman (1995): Gender and Religion
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY MEAN BY DIFFERENTIAL SOCIALISATION?
- Females are taught to be more submissive, obedient nurturing than males.
- These traits are compatible with religiosity, as they are held in high regard by most religions.
- Men who internalise these norms tend to be more religious than men who do not.
Key Theorists - Miller and Hoffman (1995): Gender and Religion
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY MEAN BY DIFFERENTIAL ROLES?
- Females are less involved in paid work and therefore have more time for religious activities.
- Females need religion as a source of personal identity and commitment.
- Women have higher rates of childrearing and looking after the elderly, and so have to deal with life’s ‘bigger questions’ and concern for the family wellbeing.
Key Theorists – Hellas and Woodhead: Women and The New Age
WHAT DID THEY FIND?
- 80% of the participants in the holistic milieu in Kendal were female.
Key Theorist – Bruce (2011): Women and The New Age
WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?
- That women’s experience of childrearing makes them less aggressive and goal orientated, and more cooperative and caring – where men wish to achieve, women wish to feel. This fits the expressive emphasis of the New Age.
- Women may also be attracted to the New Age because it emphasises the importance of being ‘authentic’ rather than merely acting out roles – gender roles. Women may be more attracted to this than men because they are more likely to perceive their roles as restrictive.
- Women in paid work may experience a role conflict: between their masculinised, instrumental role in the world of work, and their traditional, expressive, feminine role in the private sphere of the family.
Key Theorist – Woodhead (2011): Women and The New Age
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY SUGGEST?
- For these women (who take on the instrumental role in the world of work and the expressive role within the family), New Age beliefs are attractive because they appeal to a third sphere (the individual sphere).
- The individual sphere is concerned with individual autonomy and personal growth rather than role performance. New Age beliefs bypass the role conflict by creating a new source of identity for women based on their ‘inner self’ rather than these contradicting social roles, giving them a sense of wholeness.
Key Theorist – Brown (2009): Women and The New Age
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY ARGUE?
- The New Age ‘self’ religions – those that emphasise subjective experience rather than external authority – attract women recruits because they appeal to women’s wish for autonomy.
Key Theorist – Brown (2009): Women and The New Age
HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED?
- Some women may be attracted to fundamentalism because of the certainties of a traditional gender role that it prescribes for them.
Key Theorist – Bruce: Women and The New Age
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY ARGUE?
- There are class differences in the types of religion that appeal to women. While New Age beliefs and practises emphasising personal autonomy, control and self-development appeal to some middle class women, working class women are more attracted to ideas that give them a passive role, such as a belief in an all-powerful God or fatalistic ideas such as superstition.
- These differences fit with other class differences in areas such as education, where the middle class belief in the ability of individuals to control their own destiny contrasts with fatalistic, working class attitudes.
Key Theorists – Glock and Stark (1969) and Stark and Bainbridge (1985): Religious Participation
WHAT DO THESE THEORISTS ARGUE?
- People may participate in religion because it offers compensation for social (sects attract poorer groups and women are more likely to be poor), organismic (stems from physical and mental health problems – women are more likely to suffer ill health and seek the healings that sects offer) and ethical deprivation (women tend to be more morally conservative. They are more likely to regard the world as being in moral decline and be attracted to sects, which often share this view).
Key Theorist – Bruce (2002): Cultural Defence and Cultural Transition
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY ARGUE?
- Religion in such societies offers support and a sense of cultural identity in an uncertain or hostile environment.
Key Theorist – Bird (1999): Cultural Defence
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY ARGUE?
- Religion among minorities can be a basis for community solidarity, a means of preserving ones culture and language and a way of coping with oppression in a racist society.
Key Theorist – Brierley (2013): Cultural Defence
WHAT DID THIS THEORY SHOW?
- A significant growth of new churches in London catering for specific languages and nationalities as a result of recent immigration.
Key Theorist – Pryce (1979): Cultural Defence and Cultural Transition
WHAT DID THIS THEORIST STUDY?
- The African Caribbean community in Bristol and showed that both cultural transition and cultural defence are important.
Key Theorist – Pryce (1979): Cultural Defence and Cultural Transition
WHAT DID THIS THEORIST ARGUE?
- Pentecostalism is a highly adaptive ‘religion of the oppressed’ that provided migrants with values appropriate to the new world in which they found themselves.
- Pentecostalism helped African Caribbean’s adapt to British society, playing a kind of ‘Protestant ethic’ role in helping its member’s succeed by encouraging self-reliance and thrift. It gave people mutual support and hope of improving their situation.
Key Theorist – Pryce (1979): Cultural Defence and Cultural Transition
HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED?
- On the other hand, Rastafarianism represented a different response for some African Caribbean’s radically rejecting the wider society as racist and exploitative.
Key Theorist – Hellas (2005): The Ageing Effect
WHAT DOES THIS THEORY ARGUE?
- People are more interested in spirituality as they age. As they approach death, they naturally become more concerned with spiritual matters and the afterlife, repentance of past misdeeds and so on. As a result, they are more likely to attend church.
Key Theorist – Voas and Crocket: Age and Religiosity
WHAT DID THEY FIND?
- In each succeeding generation, only half as many people are religious compared with the generation before it.
Key Theorist – Voas and Crocket: Age and Religiosity
WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?
- Secularisation is the main reason why younger people are less religious than older people.
Key Theorists – Arweck and Beckford: Age and Religiosity
WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?
- That the decline in religiosity is as a result of the ‘virtual collapse of religious socialisation’ after the 1960s. For example, traditional Sunday schools, which in the 1950s enrolled a third of all 14-year-olds, have all but disappeared.
Key Theorist – Voas (2003): Age and Religiosity
WHAT DID THEY ARGUE?
- Even parents who share the same faith (for example, we are both are Anglicans) have only a 50-50 chance of raising their child to be a churchgoer as an adult.
- When they are of different faiths, (which are on the increase), the chances fall to one in four.
- We are therefore likely to see a steadily ageing population of church goers. In 2015, one and three were aged 65 or over. By 2025, this will be over four in ten and without significant numbers of young people joining the congregations, within two or three generations of practising Christians will have become a very small and very old minority of the UK population.
