Journal of Religion and Society 2026

Religious socialization by parents, which encourages religious participation and affiliation, as well as family upbringing, which instills values like educational success, hard work, resilience, and respect, shape the everyday lives of second-generation Africans. This shaping influence remains central to ongoing scholarly debates, particularly in light of the growth of Pentecostal Christianity within African diaspora communities. Focusing on second-generation Nigerians, this paper explores the role of Christian faith in everyday life within multicultural Britain, thereby contributing to the wider debate on the religion and minority identity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and diaries written by a sub-sample of participants, this study finds that Christian faith offers guidance and influences participation and settlement among second-generation Nigerians in Britain. Religious lessons provide tools for understanding and drawing intra-racial and inter-racial boundaries, while values like patience, tolerance, and good sociability help individuals manage workplace racism, build broad interracial networks, and progress socioeconomically.

This paper explores the multifunctional roles of the Porta Mariae, a neoclassical arch built in Naga City, Philippines, in 2010 to mark 300 years of devotion to Our Lady of Peñafrancia. Beyond its devotional purpose, the monument serves as a civic landmark, cultural symbol, and political project. Using a qualitative case study approach—a combination of field observation, resident and pilgrim interviews, archival research, and digital ethnography—this study identifies five core functions: religious threshold, civic marker, collective memory anchor, participatory urban space, and product of church-state collaboration. Framed by theories of sacred space (Durkheim, Eliade), collective memory (Halbwachs, Nora), and the social production of space (Lefebvre), the analysis argues that religious monuments are dynamic, shaping spiritual, social, and spatial identities. The Porta Mariae illustrates how contemporary religious architecture continues to mediate between sacred devotion and civic life in modern Philippine society.

At the joint between religion and society, pastors must function in both domains and reconcile the two when necessary. As an example, this article follows the life of Howard Haines, an American Protestant pastor trained in the New York ecumenical/evangelical tradition of the early 1900s, whose sixty years of pastoring threaded through war and peace, the North and the South, the United States and abroad. The discussion highlights the formation of his key commitments to social action, particularly in bridging racial, class, and cultural divides. More broadly, the article attends to the nature of durability in pastoral values and commitments, durability that may seem at times to fade, yet later reappear. The article also underlines the methodological importance of having full biographical details of a pastor’s life, including materials that reflect both a pastor’s formal public statements (such as sermons and newspaper articles) and a pastor’s more private reckonings of personal and pastoral life (such as journals and correspondence).

Discursivities around migration have always shaped and defined the Kerala imaginary. Notwithstanding, there have not been any substantial engagements with Kerala’s rather deep history of internal migration. The Malabar migration that witnessed the large-scale movement of people from Travancore to British Malabar between the 1920s and 1970s is largely seen as a peasant migration incurred by the severe socio-economic conditions, including poverty and the Second World War. A notable specificity of the migration was the high composition of Syrian Christians among the peasants. To critically problematize this community specificity, this article closely analyses Vinoy Thomas’s novel Karikkotatakary (2014). This article argues that Malabar migration could be viewed as an instantiation of the Syrian Christian community’s assertion and contends further that Vinoy Thomas deploys Dalit Christianity as a critical pointer to respond to these latent historicities of Malabar migration, serving as a critique of Syrian Christian religiosity and community consciousness.

Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) kindred banners, hof district banners, and crests/coats of arms strategically combine Germanic symbolism with medieval heraldic tradition and motifs to assert an ideological narrative that presents and claims: (1) cultural legitimacy; (2) historical continuity to European history and mythology; and (3) a distinct ethnic identity. This effort at visual piety is not mindless but deliberate collective memory construction imbued with political identity meaning(s). Heraldic symbolism in this case: (1) attempts to legitimize AFA mythic conceptualizations of ancestral bloodline and claims to an Aryan identity; (2) represents a form of banal nationalism; (3) signals white European identity to others; and (4) functions as a tool for collective organization and community building and formation.

This paper investigates how gendered power operates within a religious community. It utilizes a close historical study of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo, Illinois between 1842 and 1844. It asserts that institutional authority given to the prophet’s wife, Emma Smith, expanded and contracted in response to her individual assertions of power. These expressions of power primarily involve Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy, which Emma generally did not agree with. This paper relies on recently published archives from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Spirituality and individual identity are necessary factors to fully understand physical and mental health outcomes in many communities. However, limited research has been conducted to assess the impacts of these constructs within American Indian communities despite rampant health disparities. To begin addressing this gap, a cross-sectional survey (N=968) was conducted in urban and reservation communities in the Plains region of the United States to assess how Native spirituality and identity were correlated with physical health perceptions and mental well-being. Results show that higher Native spirituality and identity were correlated with lower depression and anxiety, as well as lower perceived social support. These results highlight the importance of understanding historical and political factors influencing identities within Native communities as well as differing definitions and views on the concepts of religion, spirituality, and social support and highlight the need for longitudinal study to better understand these relationships.

This article examines whether religion fostered political withdrawal or civic engagement during Mexico’s 2022 presidential recall election. It contrasts the religious evasion hypothesis, which expects religious commitment to reduce participation when civic action competes with religious observance, with the religious involvement hypothesis, which emphasizes mobilization through congregational networks and elite cues. The recall coincided with Palm Sunday, creating a case in which religious observance competed directly with electoral participation in a low salience contest. District-level electoral data and original individual-level survey evidence show that states with relatively larger Protestant/Evangelical populations exhibited higher turnout, while higher Catholic and religiously unaffiliated shares were associated with lower participation. At the individual level, respondents prioritizing church attendance expressed political interest and support for the incumbent but were less likely to vote. The findings highlight how sacred and civic calendars shape conditional political engagement.

Finnish integration policies increasingly emphasize secular civic participation, yet Protestant Christianity remains central to how East African migrants navigate Finnish society. Drawing on twenty-four in-depth interviews with Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian Protestants and participant observation in three Helsinki congregations spanning the Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Anglican traditions, this article demonstrates that the relationship between religion and integration is dimension-specific rather than uniform. Protestant churches operate as mediating institutions that facilitate the social, cultural, and identity dimensions of integration. They provide belonging, dignity-affirming theological frameworks, and dense networks of mutual support, and shape civic-political participation in theologically contingent ways. At the same time, Protestant churches offer only limited leverage over structural integration into labor and housing markets, where racialized discrimination constrains outcomes regardless of migrants’ religious or individual resources. The article moves beyond the question of whether immigrant religion is a “bridge or barrier” to inclusion by demonstrating that the same religious community can simultaneously be both. The study extends scholarship on African diaspora Christianity, which has concentrated overwhelmingly on West African churches in Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, to East African Protestants in a Nordic secular-Lutheran welfare state. The findings indicate that an effective integration policy must recognize religious communities as legitimate institutional partners while pursuing structural reforms that churches alone cannot accomplish.