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Associations among religiousness, social attitudes, and prejudice in a national random sample of American adults

UNRAVELING RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEWS: The Relationship between Images of God and Political Ideology in a Cross-Cultural Analysis

American Piety 2005: Content and Methods of the Baylor Religion Survey

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Matthew Andersson and Paul Froese

Despite all the hype surrounding the "New Atheism," the United States remains one of the most religious nations on Earth. In fact, 95% of Americans believe in God--a level of agreement rarely seen in American life. The greatest divisions in America are not between atheists and believers, or even between people of different faiths. What divides us, this groundbreaking book shows, is how we conceive of God and the role He plays in our daily lives. America's Four Gods draws on the most wide-ranging, comprehensive, and illuminating survey of American's religious beliefs ever conducted to offer a systematic exploration of how Americans view God. Paul Froese and Christopher Bader argue that many of America's most intractable social and political divisions emerge from religious convictions that are deeply held but rarely openly discussed. Drawing upon original survey data from thousands of Americans and a wealth of in-depth interviews from all parts of the country, Froese and Bader trace America's cultural and political diversity to its ultimate source--differing opinions about God. They show that regardless of our religious tradition (or lack thereof), Americans worship four distinct types of God: The Authoritative God--who is both engaged in the world and judgmental; The Benevolent God--who loves and helps us in spite of our failings; The Critical God--who catalogs our sins but does not punish them (at least not in this life); and The Distant God--who stands apart from the world He created. The authors show that these four conceptions of God form the basis of our worldviews and are among the most powerful predictors of how we feel about the most contentious issues in American life. Accessible, insightful, and filled with the voices of ordinary Americans discussing their most personal religious beliefs, America's Four Gods provides an invaluable portrait of how we view God and therefore how we view virtually everything else.

America's Four Gods: What We Say about God--and What That Says about Us

What is your purpose in life? This simple question motivates some of our most life-altering decisions, deeply-held beliefs, and profound emotions, as well as the choices we make every single day. How we derive meaning from our existence is crucial to finding happiness, developing relationships, and building societies. In On Purpose, Paul Froese brings together data from large national and international surveys with interviews that illuminate the ways in which people from all walks of life grapple with their continuous search for reason, truth, sense, success, happiness, and-ultimately-transcendence. Froese argues that the desire to connect with something larger than oneself is a universal urge, manifested most directly, but far from solely, in religious communities. Written in vivid, accessible prose, On Purpose takes the reader on a journey through the complexities and consequences of life's most important question. From the start, Froese admits that the answer to the question is deceptively simple: our purpose is whatever we imagine it to be. But what we imagine our purpose to be depends on innumerable factors beyond our control: our wealth, race, education level, upbringing, past experiences, and community. Froese argues that one's surroundings serve as a kind of soil that can either nurture purpose or foster meaninglessness. Framing the book around six key questions, Froese refuses to collapse the meaning of life into a single authoritative answer, as self-help gurus do. Instead, he deconstructs each question to reveal the social pathways that guide people to distinctive answers.Through lively, engaging storytelling that mixes data and analysis with literary and historical examples of the quest for purpose, Froese sheds new light on a timeless and all-too-human quandary. The moral of the book is not that life has some ultimate meaning or no meaning at all, but rather that creating a purpose-driven life has always been a collective project.

On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life

Dr. Paul Froese is a professor of sociology and a research fellow for the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has been teaching and researching at Baylor since 2002. A prolific author of books and articles, his research interests include the sociology of meaning, religion, comparative historical sociology, political sociology and ideology.

Religion  Politics & Culture

Society's Images of God

Social Sciences and Study of Religion

Faculty Profile Page, Baylor University

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The pandemic altered our perception of time. Here's how.

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the-days-blur-together-study-shows-how-the-covid19-pandemic-affected-perceptions-of-time-and-our-mental-wellbeing

National Gallup data showed Americans experienced multifaceted time disorientation that heightened COVID-19 stressors and lessened our mental state

Professor of Sociology, Director of Baylor Religion Surveys

Associate Professor of Sociology

 Image Credit: Petrovich9/Getty Images Plus  Although time is a set duration of hours, minutes and seconds, the perception of time can vary dramatically based on the individual and especially during times of high stress and uncertainty such as disasters, recessions and most recently the COVID-19 lockdown. For example, ask anyone when a specific event occurred during the pandemic and they are likely to respond with, “That happened three months ago. Or did that happen three years ago?”

While there have been studies on the feeling that there is not enough time or experiencing time as moving too slowly, Baylor University sociologists Matthew Andersson, Ph.D., and Paul Froese, Ph.D., investigated this sense of multifaceted time perceptions during the pandemic and their effects on mental well-being. Their findings – using national Gallup data collected in spring 2021 in the middle of the pandemic – were published in the journal Time & Society.

“We know from existing research that people often experience time in altered ways whenever disasters strike, and we wanted to see if that was true during the pandemic as well,” Andersson said. 

The Baylor researchers found that Americans during the pandemic generally reported some degree of feeling rushed while also perceiving multiple types of time distortion involving slowness, quickness and days and weeks blending together.  This disorientation also was frequently reported alongside other pandemic-related stressors, including economic strain, working from home, homeschooling a child and severe household conflict.

Together, they complicated how people perceive time by disrupting routines and creating experiences of trauma, adding to the decline in mental well-being and an increase in feelings of loneliness. 

Time disorientation and mental well-being The top three findings of the study all demonstrate the connection between altered time perception and the mental states of an individual. 

“If time does not seem to be moving ‘normally,’ it is generally related to lower levels of mental well-being, such as increased depressive, anxiety symptoms or a lessened sense of control,” Andersson said. “We think this is because people tend to feel grounded or calm when they feel like time is moving as it should.” 

Secondly, the researchers found that individuals can often experience these time disorientations in multiple and contradictory ways, which can be related to even lower well-being.

“Feeling rushed and feeling that time is slow are kind of opposites, but they are both related to having this sense of multifaceted blending of time,” Froese said. “We can show very clearly how these new stresses that were brought on by the pandemic created heightened senses of disorientation in terms of time.”

More importantly, they found these time disorientations were affected by social, familial, physical and work situations, which created lower levels of mental well-being.

“Specific forms of stress we were seeing during the pandemic, such as financial hardship, homeschooling, working from home and severe household conflict, all had relationships to experiencing different kinds of time distortions,” said Andersson. 

This was more evident in younger people “because it [lockdown] probably upended their daily routines in a much more dramatic way than it would have in somebody who's retired,” said Froese.

Experience of time  The rushed pace of industrialized society existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the stressors associated with the pandemic added to the feelings of time being out of control.

“Our approach to capturing experiences of time rests on the assumption that individuals relate to time in complex ways,” Froese said. “We found original evidence to suggest that experiences of quickness, being rushed, slowness and indistinct boundaries of days all coincide, and that these multiple disorientations each relate to diminished mental wellbeing, to objective work and family demands, and to widespread exposures to pandemic-related stressors.”

The survey was conducted as part of the Baylor Religion Survey, one of the most extensive national surveys of American religious beliefs, values and behaviors that produces unique data concerning religion, health and community in America today. The 2021 data collection by Gallup contained a section devoted to how the pandemic affected Americans’ activities, including how the pandemic changed the emotional lives of Americans.


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Dr. Paul Froese is a professor of sociology and a research fellow for the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has been teaching and researching at Baylor since 2002. 

Dr. Matthew Andersson’s research focuses on health inequality as it unfolds across the life course. Specifically, he researches educational and socioeconomic inequalities in mental and physical well-being as they relate to childhood, adolescent and adulthood factors.

Both experts are available to speak with media about this important topic - simply click on either expert's icon to arrange an interview time today.




The Days Blur Together: Study Shows How the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Perceptions of Time… and Our Mental Well-being

00:03:04 What do we mean by a meaningful life?
00:09:25 Finding purpose in being a part of something bigger
00:17:40 How social context determines our understanding of meaning
00:28:20 Fantasies about uniting humanity: one cause, one God, one reality
00:34:45 Are we making moral progress?
00:47:30 Is it empowering or terrifying to think we create our own meaning?

Watch this conversation on MeaningofLife.tv http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/33475

Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero) and Paul Froese (Baylor University, On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life)

Recorded on 01/22/2016

Robert Wright &amp; Paul Froese [The Wright Show] (full conversation)

Symposium on World Christianity:
Paul Freston
Paul Froese
Virginia Garrard-Burnett
Robert Woodberry

In observation of the October 2010 Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa (www.lausanne.org), Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion will host this symposium to assess current and future trends in world Christianity. It will feature an address by Philip Jenkins (Baylor ISR/Penn State), as well as a panel discussion with Paul Freston (Baylor ISR/Wilfrid Laurier), Paul Froese (Baylor University), Virginia Garrard-Burnett (University of Texas-Austin), and Robert Woodberry (University of Texas-Austin).

Baylor ISR: Symposium on World Christianity (October 11, 2010)

Dr. Paul Froese at Baylor University has done a series of surveys on how Americans experience God. His book on this is called America’s Four Gods. In his remarks to David Beckmann’s class, he shared newly available data on how our images of God affect support for public policies that reduce poverty. People who believe that God is distant or non-existent tend to be less charitable but more supportive of policies to reduce poverty than religious people. Among religious people, those who believe that God is forgiving are more supportive of policies to reduce poverty than those who think God is stern.

In the discussion that followed this final presentation to Beckmann’s Union Seminary class, Beckmann noted that Jesus taught that God is forgiving and passionate about social justice. He expressed disappointment that Froese’s findings show that religious people in America tend to be less supportive of policies to reduce poverty than non-religious people. More religious teaching about the importance of public policy is clearly needed. Froese’s findings also suggest a deeper strategy: encouraging faith in the gospel of God’s forgiving love among religious people is important spiritually and would also strengthen religious support for economic justice.

~~~

This video is the last from the guest speakers in Rev. Dr. David Beckmann’s “Poverty, God, Politics” course at Union Theological Seminary. This course has explored seven effective ways to connect faith to the politics of poverty - electoral campaigns (Eli Valentin), organizations of low-income people (Liz Theoharis, Ralph McCloud), digital communication (Eric Sapp), faith and justice work in specific faith communities (Lisa Kimball, Anwar Khan/Jihad Saleh, Walter Kim, Lawrence Reddick/Thomas Brown, John Carr), legislative advocacy and bipartisan work (Dave Miner, Eugene Cho), and the gospel of God’s forgiving love (Paul Froese). Beckmann is Coordinator of the Circle of Protection, the leading religious voice on the Build Back Better legislation in Congress this year.

www.davidbeckmann.net

Paul Froese on youtube

Poverty, God, Politics | Ch 2, Ep 13: Paul Froese

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