Knowledge that Transforms

Much recent sociological work on religion in the United States is written outside the field’s two established paradigms: secularization theory and the 1990s “religious economy” approach. Drawing together strands of recent theoretical innovation and contemporary religious developments that challenge the existing paradigms, we introduce elements of a twenty-first-century paradigm for the sociology of American religion. We argue that the shape-shifting nature of American religion (and secularity) can be productively conceptualized as an effect of unbundling—that is, a process by which religious goods once offered as a package by institutionalized religious authorities are now offered individually or repackaged into various hybrid and contested forms by a wide array of suppliers. We demonstrate the value of our approach by showing how two major religious traditions, Christianity and Buddhism, have become unbundled. In both cases, our approach positions us to apprehend a range of phenomena beyond traditional organized religion, as well as how organized religion adapts to fit this new de facto unbundled landscape. We offer criteria for delimiting the scope of this broader unbundled religious landscape, and discuss the implications of our approach for scholarship on religion, meaning making, and social change.

Low-income households in the United States draw on public and private resources to manage economic risk. Cross-national scholars describe a “credit–welfare state tradeoff” where credit markets become particularly important when state benefits are less supportive. The United States is frequently highlighted in this regard, with its often-inadequate market-first safety net. Both credit markets and the safety net are, however, highly unequal and segmented across U.S. states. We provide new empirical insights on the credit–welfare state nexus by leveraging a large national sample of credit record data that allows us to distinguish between credit instruments. We link these data to a comprehensive dataset on state safety nets with comparable measures of program supportiveness. We estimate two-way fixed-effects models that exploit temporal variation within states in safety net supportiveness. We find that living in states with more supportive safety nets is associated with a lower probability of high-cost alternative payday, installment, and personal finance loan use, and a higher probability of mainstream credit card access, particularly among low-income households. In the context of the relative inadequacy of the U.S. safety net, state safety net supportiveness matters less for whether people borrow than for what credit instruments they use. Our findings suggest that efforts to restrict the U.S. safety net are likely to increase reliance on high-cost loans among low-income households, furthering the unequal burden of interest and fees levied on these households.

Prior research on managerial attainment highlights inequalities based on gender and ethnicity, but the role of social origins has been neglected. Moreover, past research on intergenerational social mobility does not focus specifically on how parents’ and children’s occupations may be linked. We develop a theoretical model of intergenerational managerial status transmission that we test using event history analysis that tracks managerial attainment (2000 to 2019) for over half a million Danish workers (born 1965 to 1975). Results reveal that children of managers are substantially more likely to become managers than the children of non-managers, and this inheritance is stronger for sons and for those with senior managerial origins. For children of lower-level managers, this is primarily related to advantages in early life (parental economic capital, educational attainment), but descendants of senior managers additionally benefit from advantages that accumulate later (career trajectories, elite social connections). Gender and seniority effects intersect to produce a particularly striking advantage for the sons of senior-managerial fathers. Much of this advantage remains unexplained after testing a large set of potential mediators, implying a considerable role for male-dominated forms of elite cultural and social capital (e.g., membership in exclusive clubs) and underscoring the limits to formal organizational approaches to equalizing outcomes at the very top of the occupational hierarchy.