Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Complex Religion: Toward a Better Understanding of the Ways in which Religion Intersects with Inequality

Item

Title

Complex Religion: Toward a Better Understanding of the Ways in which Religion Intersects with Inequality

Author

Wilde, Melissa J.

Tevington, Patricia

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Religious Institutions

Abstract

Sociologists have long known that religion is deeply interconnected with race, class, and ethnicity in the United States. However, modern sociologists typically study religion as if it is independent from other social structures. Profound class differences remain between American religious groups. Jews, Mainline Protestants and new immigrant groups such as Hindus are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. Conservative Protestants, both Black and White remain at the bottom. We therefore argue that religion is not independent of class and race and should almost always be examined in interaction with these and other social structures. We call this, theoretical approach “complex religion.”

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extracted text

Complex Religion: Toward a Better
Understanding of the Ways in which
Religion Intersects with Inequality
MELISSA J. WILDE and PATRICIA TEVINGTON

Abstract
Sociologists have long known that religion is deeply interconnected with race, class,
and ethnicity in the United States. However, modern sociologists typically study
religion as if it is independent from other social structures. Profound class differences remain between American religious groups. Jews, Mainline Protestants and
new immigrant groups such as Hindus are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
Conservative Protestants, both Black and White remain at the bottom. We therefore
argue that religion is not independent of class and race and should almost always be
examined in interaction with these and other social structures. We call this, theoretical
approach “complex religion.”

Classical sociologists understood that religion was a key place where Americans sorted by class (Baltzell, 1964; Demerath, 1965; Herberg, 1955; Pope,
1948). Contemporary scholarship has continued to confirm that these differences remain, especially in relationship to the lower socioeconomic status
of Conservative Protestants (Lehrer, 2004; Sherkat & Ellison, 1999; Wilde &
Glassman, 2016).
Researchers have also widely acknowledged that race has been and remains
an important dividing line within American religion, especially for Protestants (Edwards, Christerson, & Emerson, 2013). As Martin Luther King Jr.
once commented, “at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning … we stand in the
most segregated hour of America” (King, 1968).1
Despite acknowledging that religion always has been and continues to be
deeply intertwined with inequality in the United States, sociologists who
1. Although studies of multiracial congregations have increased, this is because these congregations
are the exception to the rule of the general pattern of religious racial segregation (Edwards, 2008; Marti,
2009).
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

study religion generally study it as a factor that is assumed to be independent
from other factors and one that has “congruence,” or that is never contradictory (Chaves, 2010). Because of the field’s reliance on survey data and regression techniques, researchers generally control on class and race if examining
religion, or on religion if examining other aspects of social life. As a result,
we have contradictory findings about the importance of religion relative to
other structures. For instance, some researches find that factors such as education, political affiliation, and income are more influential than religion on
political behaviors and beliefs, while others find that religion continues to
exert an influence even after controlling for these factors (Wilde & Glassman,
2016).
Searching for independent effects of religion does not allow for the very real
and important ways that religion is intertwined with other social structures
to be examined and considered causally. We argue that researchers should
not just think about religion or about race or about class, but should think
about the various combinations of these factors, how they differ in those
combinations, and how those combinations matter. We call this theoretical
argument and the methodological implications that derive from it “complex
religion.”
The term complex religion builds on theories of complex inequality (Choo
& Ferree, 2010; McCall, 2001). Researchers of complex inequality argue that
social stratification is multidimensional. Different kinds of disadvantages
lead to different outcomes and experiences. These researchers therefore
urge others to examine how inequalities of gender, race, or class interact to
create a unique impact on social experience. Complex religion extends these
theories to include religious group membership among the social structures
that matter for inequality.
Complex religion does not impose anything particularly new or counterintuitive to what we already know about religion. A complex approach to
religion simply means taking what researchers already take for granted and
operationalizing it more precisely. In other words, most religion scholars
would agree that the experiences and political outlooks of working class
White and Black Protestant men would be different from one another—and
also would be different from highly educated White Mainline Protestant
women. The point of a complex religion approach is making sure that these
realities are properly operationalized.
THE CURRENT PICTURE
The first step in taking a complex approach to the study of religion simply
requires acknowledging the extent of the class differences that exist among
American religious groups and the ways in which they intersect with race

Complex Religion

3

Percent of members with a BA or more

90
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Figure 1 Percent of bachelor’s degrees by religious group in the United States2
(age 25+). Source: GSS 1990–2016.

and ethnicity. Figure 1 provides a very simple but powerful illustration of
these differences by presenting information on the percent of the members
of each of the major religious groups in the United States that have at least a
bachelor’s degree.3
As Figure 1 indicates, today, White Conservative Protestants are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (Smith & Faris, 2005), with half of the proportion of bachelor’s degrees as White Mainline Protestants or those of no
religion.4 Figure 1 also demonstrates that, among the upper classes, some
of the most highly educated Americans are now of Hindu, Buddhist, and
Muslim faiths as a result of changes in immigration law since 1965 (Cadge &
Ecklund, 2007).
2. The Conservative Protestant category includes 100 whites from the Black Protestant category.
3. While admittedly, this is only one possible measure of many that can be used to examine class
differences, in other research we demonstrate that education is remarkably comparable to more complex
measures that also incorporate occupation and income, and thus we rely on it here (Wilde, Tevington, &
Shen, 2016a).
4. We employ the most widely used categorization scheme of religious traditions, called RelTrad,
(Steensland et al., 2000). However, we do not display the “Other Religion” category, as this is a “catch-all”
category which includes a wide array of religious groups such as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pagans,
and so on. Instead, we break out some important individual religious groups, such as Hindus, Buddhists,
and Muslims.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

How Did Things Get This Complex?
In employing the complex religion approach, we acknowledge many possible causes for the class differences that exist between American religious
groups. While there is some, primarily older, evidence that some people
may choose their religious affiliation because of their social class (Loveland,
2003; Sherkat & Wilson, 1995), we do not think that the vast majority of the
differences explained below result from such religious switching. Similarly,
although there is some limited evidence that some religious subcultures
discourage class mobility (Darnell & Sherkat, 1997; Lehrer, 2004), we also
do not argue that the differences illustrated above are primarily a result of
religious groups encouraging or discouraging class mobility. While both
these are possible mechanisms behind some of the differences between
American religious groups, a theory of complex religion posits that the
majority of these differences are a result of the processes of social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1984) set in place long ago by variations in immigration,
settlement, and mobility patterns over the course of American history. Once
established in the US, variation in access to opportunities, for example,
access to educational benefits via the GI Bill (Wuthnow, 1988), have also had
long-term effects.
Conditioned by immigration law and connected to processes of racialization (Wilde & Danielsen, 2014), the religion of immigrants was, and still is,
often synonymous with their nation of origin (Herberg, 1955) and the push
and pull factors behind various immigration patterns (Davidson & Pyle,
2011). Furthermore, different groups have come from different places with
different religions over time, allowing some groups much more time for
mobility and assimilation than others (Waters & Jiménez, 2005).
To put it in concrete terms, groups such as the Anglicans and Congregationalists, privileged since the founding of our country, made up the vast
majority of the signers of Declaration of Independence (Davidson & Pyle,
2011). Today, they remain at the top of the socioeconomic ladder of the United
States, as part of the group now commonly referred to as Mainline Protestants,
(Figure 1), a term that originates from these groups’ association with a series
of elite suburbs in Philadelphia (Coffman, 2013).
In comparison to the advantages that still remain among the religious
groups who descended from America’s founding fathers, Black religious
groups remain disadvantaged. Enslaved and oppressed since the founding
of our country, Blacks, who largely converted to Protestantism during
slavery but were excluded from participation in many White denominations
(Lincoln & Mamiya, 1991), remain at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
Figure 1 demonstrates that Black Protestants have the lowest educational
attainment of all the religious groups in the United States.

Complex Religion

100

White

90

Black

5

Other

80
70
60
50
40
30
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Figure 2 Percent of bachelor’s degrees by religious group and race in the United
States5 (age 25+). Source: GSS 1990–2016.

These two examples above help to demonstrate how (and why) religion
is so deeply intertwined with class and race in the United States. However,
these two groups are but two of many possible examples of how class remains
tied to religion within the American religious “marketplace” (Finke & Stark,
2005), far beyond those only at the highest and lowest rungs of the economic
ladder.
Catholics are a prime example. At the turn of the twentieth century, American Catholics’ lower class status, questionable Whiteness, and high fertility
was of deep concern to more elite Americans—driving their fears of “race
suicide” (Wilde & Danielsen, 2014). Today, these descendants of mostly Irish
and Italian immigrants have assimilated into the United States and many
have largely achieved middle class White status (Greeley, 1978). This has
made Catholics a very diverse group class-wise, especially given the more
recent waves of Latino immigrants. The ways in which the class, ethnicity,
and immigration cohort may vary among Catholics is roughly illustrated by
Figure 2, which breaks all the religious groups in Figure 1 up by race and
ethnicity. Latinos constitute the vast majority of those of “other” ethnicities
in the Catholic category in Figure 2.6
5. This figure includes all religious and racial groups with more than 10 respondents from the pooled
1990–2016 General Social Survey, age 25 or above.
6. According to the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape survey, 87% of American Catholics in the “other”
category are Latino (Pew Research Center, 2015).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Furthermore, as Figure 2 demonstrates, race and ethnicity remain deeply
intertwined with religion in complex ways, with people of color generally,
but not always, being disadvantaged relative to the White members of their
religious groups.
Wuthnow (1988) argues that the American religious field began restructuring after World War II as educational differences grew within (instead
of between) denominations. These differences created polarization within
some denominations, with more educated liberals on one side and the less
educated conservative members on the other. Thirty years later, as a result
of various processes (including mergers and schisms at the denominational
level and shopping and switching at the individual level), it is clear that the
American religious field has restructured and that consequently, educational
differences between religious groups are perhaps as big as they ever were,
if not bigger. Because of this restructuring, researchers now almost always
shift the unit of analysis to major religious traditions rather than denomination and almost universally separate Mainline versus Conservative
Protestants—doing little with denominational affiliations such as Episcopalian or Methodist in most analyses, even if denominational affiliation
remains an important part of some coding schemes (e.g., Steensland et al.,
2000).
Figure 1 also demonstrates that, just as historical immigration and
settlement patterns are crucial to understanding religion’s intersection
with various structures of inequality, the contours of immigration today
remain crucial. As we mentioned above, because of changes to immigration
laws, recent immigrants from other areas of the world (and of mostly
non-Christian faiths) are among the most educated of Americans today. For
example, almost 85% of American Hindus have at least a bachelor’s degree,
more than double the percent of Mainline Protestants.
Finally, no discussion of complex religion would be adequate without mentioning the relatively recent growth of those with no religion, often referred
to as Nones (Hout & Fischer, 2002), who are now 20% of the American population (Hout & Fischer, 2014). Theories of complex religion also help us to
understand this group. There is evidence that those with no religion are more
and more likely to be highly educated Americans who were raised religiously
but now reject religion as a reaction to the growth of the Religious Right (Hout
& Fischer, 2002, 2014; Margolis, 2016). Although not a focus of most research
to date, understanding how and why education seems to push some young
adults to rejecting religion altogether is squarely within the framework of
complex religion, will be crucial to understanding the future of American
politics, and is one of the most promising directions for future research.
In sum, religion is intricately interwoven in the fabric of American society.
It is thus part and parcel of the other social structures that we know stratify it.

Complex Religion

7

Properly operationalizing how and why those intersections matter is a crucial
task for emerging research in the field. Some researchers have begun to tackle
this immense task.
PROMISING FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Religion and Race
As Emerson, Korver-Glenn, and Douds (2015) note, despite the fact that
“American religious life is deeply stratified along racial lines” and although
religion “holds incredible sway in reproducing the U.S. racial order,” the
study of race and of religion are often segregated from one another. Other
researchers agree and continue to emphasize that fixing this problem would
allow us to understand many aspects of social life better.
For example, Barnes (2014) argues that researchers need to better understand the importance of the Black church in the Black community. Edgell
(2017) argues that we need to examine why Black and White Conservative
Protestants voted so differently in the most recent presidential election. In
addition to these agenda items, other questions remain to be answered. For
example, are Blacks who reject religion also more highly educated and liberal
than their peers, as is the case with Whites? Are there implications for political views in relationship to variations in Blacks’ religiosity? What explains the
overall lack of religious participation among Black men compared to women?
Religion and Immigration and Ethnicity
Sociologists of religion have long argued that religion is important both as
an avenue for assimilation and as a part of ethnic identity for American
immigrants (Cadge & Ecklund, 2007). However, unfortunately, just as it is
in relation to race, religion remains largely segregated from the study of
immigration more generally. Thus, we have a few, at this point older, studies
of Asian immigrant religion and we have much more research on Latino
Protestants than we do on Latino Catholics (e.g., Bartkowski, Ramos-Wada,
Ellison, & Acevedo, 2012; Ellison, Echevarría, & Smith, 2005; Kelly & Kelly,
2005; Kosmin & Keysar, 1995), although Protestants remain a relatively
small proportion—approximately 20% (Pew Research Center, 2014)— of the
Latino population in the United States.
As a result, interesting research questions remain to be explored in relation
to religion, immigration, and ethnicity. For example, will these newest waves
of immigrants hold onto their religion as Herberg (1955) predicted for previous waves of immigrants more than half a century ago? Will Latinos become
White as previous waves of Catholic immigrants did and will that Whiteness hinge on class? Will the process be similar or different for immigrants of

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

non-Christian religions, particularly for Muslims given the current political
climate?
Religion and Gender Although we have not mentioned it much in this essay,
gender is also obviously a key social structure that intersects in complex ways
with religion. Unfortunately, despite theoretical advances like “doing religion” that argue that one cannot “do religion” (Avishai, 2008) without “doing
gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987), gender and religion also tend to remain
distinct research areas from one another. Thus, those interested in gender and
religion bemoan “ … [the] marginalized status of gender within the subfield
of sociology of religion and the lackluster interest in religion among sociologists of gender.” (Avishai, Jafar, & Rinaldo, 2015a)
Recently, however, there has been some work in this area. These include
an entire special issue of Gender and Society on gender and religion (Avishai,
Jafar, & Rinaldo, 2015b), as well as recent work on Muslim converts’ experiences with polygamy by gender (Rao, 2015), the differences in religiosity
among high-income and low-income men and women (Schnabel, 2016), how
Conservative Protestant young men understand and practice masculinity
both before and after marriage (Diefendorf, 2015), and how unmarried heterosexuals and gay and lesbian members of conservative religions “do religion” (Irby, 2014).
Despite these exciting trends, many questions remain to be answered. For
example, although many have noticed and some have attempted to explain
them, questions remain about the significant gender differences in participation for most religious groups in the United States. In addition to questions
about participation, the ways that gender intersects with religion are surely
relevant to all of the other intersections discussed here. Some questions that
touch on these issues might be: How will the assimilation of new immigrants be affected by the sometimes more traditional gender norms of their
religions? How will members of these religious groups come to view reproductive rights and gender equality more generally?
Religion and Class
Recent research demonstrates that religion intersects with class differently
on attitudes towards abortion, homosexuality, economic redistribution, and
political party identification (Wilde, Tevington, & Shen, 2016b). Whereas
education liberalizes most Americans’ views especially on abortion and
homosexuality, this is not true for Conservative Protestants. This finding
may be due to the fact that many Conservative Protestants opt out of mainstream educational institutions, choosing homeschooling (Stevens, 2003),

Complex Religion

9

private Conservative Protestant high schools (Guhin, 2014), or colleges
affiliated with parachurch organizations (Council for Christian Colleges &
Universities, 2017). Much research needs to be done on the potential effects
of separate educational institutions for Conservative Protestants and other
groups—both in terms of survey data and ethnographic studies of the nature
and messages of these institutions.
That said, while qualitative studies of Conservative Protestants colleges
are lacking, there has been a relative boom of recent qualitative studies
that examine other combinations of religious and class differences. Tevington (2017) is studying the varied reactions to early marriage among
Conservative Protestants of different social classes, and finds that middle
class Conservative Protestants face sanctioning when they do not secure
educational and occupational footholds prior to starting their families.
Glassman (2016) shows that members of religious groups who reject all
forms of modern medicine are overwhelmingly working class, while those
who use “holistic and alternative medicine” are the highly educated of
many faith backgrounds. Ellis (2016) demonstrates that the status hierarchy
among American religious groups can reverse in prison, with the greater
resources allocated to Conservative Protestants giving them more social
and material advantages vis-à-vis other religious groups and especially
compared to inmates who are not active in any religious group.
Although we have already mentioned that how and why education seems
to push some young adults to reject religion seems like a fruitful area for
future research, many other questions about how class and religion intersect
remain. For example, given the overwhelming correlation of class and religion for many religious groups, is it possible to separate out the effects of
class and religion on important social issues and political beliefs?
CONCLUSION
In sum, while there is a substantial amount of research that looks at various
aspects of religion’s intersection with other social structures (and particularly
those that are relevant to inequality), such work is generally the exception
to the rule in a field where researchers are trained to look for independent
effects of religion. We hope that this essay will encourage more researchers
to think about the intersections so that we can better understand religion in
all its complexity.
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ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Pew Research Center (2014). The shifting religious identity of Latinos in the United States.
Washington D.C.: Author.
Pew Research Center. (2015). Religious landscape study. Retrieved January 3, 2017,
from http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/
Pope, L. (1948). Religion and the class structure. Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 256, 84–91.
Rao, A. H. (2015). Gender and cultivating the moral self in Islam: Muslim converts in an American Mosque. Sociology of Religion, 76(4), 413–435.
doi:10.1093/socrel/srv030.
Schnabel, L. (2016). The gender pray gap: Wage labor and the religiosity of high-earning women and men. Gender & Society, 30(4), 643–669.
doi:10.1177/0891243216644884.
Sherkat, D. E., & Ellison, C. G. (1999). Recent developments and current controversies in the sociology of religion. Annual Review of Sociology, 25(1), 363–394.
doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.25.1.363.
Sherkat, D. E., & Wilson, J. (1995). Preferences, constraints, and choices in religious
markets: An examination of religious switching and apostasy. Social Forces, 73(3),
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Smith, C., & Faris, R. (2005). Socioeconomic inequality in the American Religious
System: An update and assessment. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 44(1),
95–104.
Steensland, B., Park, J. Z., Regnerus, M. D., Robinson, L. D., Wilcox, W. B., & Woodberry, R. D. (2000). The measure of American religion: Toward improving the state
of the art. Social Forces, 79(1), 291–318.
Stevens, M. (2003). Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling
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Tevington, P. (2017). “Even if we’re living in a cardboard box”: Religious beliefs, financial readiness, and marital timelines. Presented at the Eastern Sociological Society,
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Wilde, M. J., & Danielsen, S. (2014). Fewer and better children: Race, class, religion, and birth control reform in America. American Journal of Sociology, 119(6),
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Wilde, M., & Glassman, L. (2016). How complex religion can help us understand politics in America. Annual Review of Sociology, 42(1), 407–425.
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Presented at the American Sociological Association, Seattle, WA.
Wuthnow, R. (1988). The restructuring of American religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.

MELISSA WILDE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Melissa J. Wilde (PhD in sociology, 2002, UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has studied topics including the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church;
the demographic factors that explain why American Protestantism has gone
from being majority Mainline to majority conservative; how race and class
intersect with American religious groups to explain early stances on birth
control; and currently, the relationship between race, class, religion and political views.
PATRICIA TEVINGTON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Tevington is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania. Her research interests include social class and inequality, sociology of religion, and sociology of the family. In particular, she studies how
class and religious background affect the pathways of young people in their
transition to adulthood.
RELATED ESSAYS
Understanding American Political Conservatism (Political Science), Joel D.
Aberbach
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
The Politics of Secularism in the United States (Political Science), David E.
Campbell and Geoffrey C. Layman
Insomnia and Sleep Disorders (Psychology), Elizabeth C. Mason and Allison
G. Harvey
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Gender Inequalities in the Home Sociology, Sonja Drobni˘c and Leah
Ruppanner
Intergenerational Mobility (Economics), Steve N. Durlauf and Irina
Shaorshadze
Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation (Sociology), Kevin J. Christiano
Racial Disenfranchisement (Political Science), Vincent L. Hutchings and
Davin L. Phoenix
The Emerging Psychology of Social Class (Psychology), Michael W. Kraus
Immigration and the Changing Status of Asian Americans (Sociology),
Jennifer Lee
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
Intergenerational Mobility: A Cross-National Comparison (Political Science),
Bhashkar Mazumder
Emerging Trends: Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
The Role of Death Denial in Culture and Consciousness (Psychology), Sheldon Solomon
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash



Complex Religion: Toward a Better
Understanding of the Ways in which
Religion Intersects with Inequality
MELISSA J. WILDE and PATRICIA TEVINGTON

Abstract
Sociologists have long known that religion is deeply interconnected with race, class,
and ethnicity in the United States. However, modern sociologists typically study
religion as if it is independent from other social structures. Profound class differences remain between American religious groups. Jews, Mainline Protestants and
new immigrant groups such as Hindus are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
Conservative Protestants, both Black and White remain at the bottom. We therefore
argue that religion is not independent of class and race and should almost always be
examined in interaction with these and other social structures. We call this, theoretical
approach “complex religion.”

Classical sociologists understood that religion was a key place where Americans sorted by class (Baltzell, 1964; Demerath, 1965; Herberg, 1955; Pope,
1948). Contemporary scholarship has continued to confirm that these differences remain, especially in relationship to the lower socioeconomic status
of Conservative Protestants (Lehrer, 2004; Sherkat & Ellison, 1999; Wilde &
Glassman, 2016).
Researchers have also widely acknowledged that race has been and remains
an important dividing line within American religion, especially for Protestants (Edwards, Christerson, & Emerson, 2013). As Martin Luther King Jr.
once commented, “at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning … we stand in the
most segregated hour of America” (King, 1968).1
Despite acknowledging that religion always has been and continues to be
deeply intertwined with inequality in the United States, sociologists who
1. Although studies of multiracial congregations have increased, this is because these congregations
are the exception to the rule of the general pattern of religious racial segregation (Edwards, 2008; Marti,
2009).
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

study religion generally study it as a factor that is assumed to be independent
from other factors and one that has “congruence,” or that is never contradictory (Chaves, 2010). Because of the field’s reliance on survey data and regression techniques, researchers generally control on class and race if examining
religion, or on religion if examining other aspects of social life. As a result,
we have contradictory findings about the importance of religion relative to
other structures. For instance, some researches find that factors such as education, political affiliation, and income are more influential than religion on
political behaviors and beliefs, while others find that religion continues to
exert an influence even after controlling for these factors (Wilde & Glassman,
2016).
Searching for independent effects of religion does not allow for the very real
and important ways that religion is intertwined with other social structures
to be examined and considered causally. We argue that researchers should
not just think about religion or about race or about class, but should think
about the various combinations of these factors, how they differ in those
combinations, and how those combinations matter. We call this theoretical
argument and the methodological implications that derive from it “complex
religion.”
The term complex religion builds on theories of complex inequality (Choo
& Ferree, 2010; McCall, 2001). Researchers of complex inequality argue that
social stratification is multidimensional. Different kinds of disadvantages
lead to different outcomes and experiences. These researchers therefore
urge others to examine how inequalities of gender, race, or class interact to
create a unique impact on social experience. Complex religion extends these
theories to include religious group membership among the social structures
that matter for inequality.
Complex religion does not impose anything particularly new or counterintuitive to what we already know about religion. A complex approach to
religion simply means taking what researchers already take for granted and
operationalizing it more precisely. In other words, most religion scholars
would agree that the experiences and political outlooks of working class
White and Black Protestant men would be different from one another—and
also would be different from highly educated White Mainline Protestant
women. The point of a complex religion approach is making sure that these
realities are properly operationalized.
THE CURRENT PICTURE
The first step in taking a complex approach to the study of religion simply
requires acknowledging the extent of the class differences that exist among
American religious groups and the ways in which they intersect with race

Complex Religion

3

Percent of members with a BA or more

90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10

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se

Bl

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Figure 1 Percent of bachelor’s degrees by religious group in the United States2
(age 25+). Source: GSS 1990–2016.

and ethnicity. Figure 1 provides a very simple but powerful illustration of
these differences by presenting information on the percent of the members
of each of the major religious groups in the United States that have at least a
bachelor’s degree.3
As Figure 1 indicates, today, White Conservative Protestants are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (Smith & Faris, 2005), with half of the proportion of bachelor’s degrees as White Mainline Protestants or those of no
religion.4 Figure 1 also demonstrates that, among the upper classes, some
of the most highly educated Americans are now of Hindu, Buddhist, and
Muslim faiths as a result of changes in immigration law since 1965 (Cadge &
Ecklund, 2007).
2. The Conservative Protestant category includes 100 whites from the Black Protestant category.
3. While admittedly, this is only one possible measure of many that can be used to examine class
differences, in other research we demonstrate that education is remarkably comparable to more complex
measures that also incorporate occupation and income, and thus we rely on it here (Wilde, Tevington, &
Shen, 2016a).
4. We employ the most widely used categorization scheme of religious traditions, called RelTrad,
(Steensland et al., 2000). However, we do not display the “Other Religion” category, as this is a “catch-all”
category which includes a wide array of religious groups such as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pagans,
and so on. Instead, we break out some important individual religious groups, such as Hindus, Buddhists,
and Muslims.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

How Did Things Get This Complex?
In employing the complex religion approach, we acknowledge many possible causes for the class differences that exist between American religious
groups. While there is some, primarily older, evidence that some people
may choose their religious affiliation because of their social class (Loveland,
2003; Sherkat & Wilson, 1995), we do not think that the vast majority of the
differences explained below result from such religious switching. Similarly,
although there is some limited evidence that some religious subcultures
discourage class mobility (Darnell & Sherkat, 1997; Lehrer, 2004), we also
do not argue that the differences illustrated above are primarily a result of
religious groups encouraging or discouraging class mobility. While both
these are possible mechanisms behind some of the differences between
American religious groups, a theory of complex religion posits that the
majority of these differences are a result of the processes of social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1984) set in place long ago by variations in immigration,
settlement, and mobility patterns over the course of American history. Once
established in the US, variation in access to opportunities, for example,
access to educational benefits via the GI Bill (Wuthnow, 1988), have also had
long-term effects.
Conditioned by immigration law and connected to processes of racialization (Wilde & Danielsen, 2014), the religion of immigrants was, and still is,
often synonymous with their nation of origin (Herberg, 1955) and the push
and pull factors behind various immigration patterns (Davidson & Pyle,
2011). Furthermore, different groups have come from different places with
different religions over time, allowing some groups much more time for
mobility and assimilation than others (Waters & Jiménez, 2005).
To put it in concrete terms, groups such as the Anglicans and Congregationalists, privileged since the founding of our country, made up the vast
majority of the signers of Declaration of Independence (Davidson & Pyle,
2011). Today, they remain at the top of the socioeconomic ladder of the United
States, as part of the group now commonly referred to as Mainline Protestants,
(Figure 1), a term that originates from these groups’ association with a series
of elite suburbs in Philadelphia (Coffman, 2013).
In comparison to the advantages that still remain among the religious
groups who descended from America’s founding fathers, Black religious
groups remain disadvantaged. Enslaved and oppressed since the founding
of our country, Blacks, who largely converted to Protestantism during
slavery but were excluded from participation in many White denominations
(Lincoln & Mamiya, 1991), remain at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
Figure 1 demonstrates that Black Protestants have the lowest educational
attainment of all the religious groups in the United States.

Complex Religion

100

White

90

Black

5

Other

80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
lic
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Figure 2 Percent of bachelor’s degrees by religious group and race in the United
States5 (age 25+). Source: GSS 1990–2016.

These two examples above help to demonstrate how (and why) religion
is so deeply intertwined with class and race in the United States. However,
these two groups are but two of many possible examples of how class remains
tied to religion within the American religious “marketplace” (Finke & Stark,
2005), far beyond those only at the highest and lowest rungs of the economic
ladder.
Catholics are a prime example. At the turn of the twentieth century, American Catholics’ lower class status, questionable Whiteness, and high fertility
was of deep concern to more elite Americans—driving their fears of “race
suicide” (Wilde & Danielsen, 2014). Today, these descendants of mostly Irish
and Italian immigrants have assimilated into the United States and many
have largely achieved middle class White status (Greeley, 1978). This has
made Catholics a very diverse group class-wise, especially given the more
recent waves of Latino immigrants. The ways in which the class, ethnicity,
and immigration cohort may vary among Catholics is roughly illustrated by
Figure 2, which breaks all the religious groups in Figure 1 up by race and
ethnicity. Latinos constitute the vast majority of those of “other” ethnicities
in the Catholic category in Figure 2.6
5. This figure includes all religious and racial groups with more than 10 respondents from the pooled
1990–2016 General Social Survey, age 25 or above.
6. According to the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape survey, 87% of American Catholics in the “other”
category are Latino (Pew Research Center, 2015).

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Furthermore, as Figure 2 demonstrates, race and ethnicity remain deeply
intertwined with religion in complex ways, with people of color generally,
but not always, being disadvantaged relative to the White members of their
religious groups.
Wuthnow (1988) argues that the American religious field began restructuring after World War II as educational differences grew within (instead
of between) denominations. These differences created polarization within
some denominations, with more educated liberals on one side and the less
educated conservative members on the other. Thirty years later, as a result
of various processes (including mergers and schisms at the denominational
level and shopping and switching at the individual level), it is clear that the
American religious field has restructured and that consequently, educational
differences between religious groups are perhaps as big as they ever were,
if not bigger. Because of this restructuring, researchers now almost always
shift the unit of analysis to major religious traditions rather than denomination and almost universally separate Mainline versus Conservative
Protestants—doing little with denominational affiliations such as Episcopalian or Methodist in most analyses, even if denominational affiliation
remains an important part of some coding schemes (e.g., Steensland et al.,
2000).
Figure 1 also demonstrates that, just as historical immigration and
settlement patterns are crucial to understanding religion’s intersection
with various structures of inequality, the contours of immigration today
remain crucial. As we mentioned above, because of changes to immigration
laws, recent immigrants from other areas of the world (and of mostly
non-Christian faiths) are among the most educated of Americans today. For
example, almost 85% of American Hindus have at least a bachelor’s degree,
more than double the percent of Mainline Protestants.
Finally, no discussion of complex religion would be adequate without mentioning the relatively recent growth of those with no religion, often referred
to as Nones (Hout & Fischer, 2002), who are now 20% of the American population (Hout & Fischer, 2014). Theories of complex religion also help us to
understand this group. There is evidence that those with no religion are more
and more likely to be highly educated Americans who were raised religiously
but now reject religion as a reaction to the growth of the Religious Right (Hout
& Fischer, 2002, 2014; Margolis, 2016). Although not a focus of most research
to date, understanding how and why education seems to push some young
adults to rejecting religion altogether is squarely within the framework of
complex religion, will be crucial to understanding the future of American
politics, and is one of the most promising directions for future research.
In sum, religion is intricately interwoven in the fabric of American society.
It is thus part and parcel of the other social structures that we know stratify it.

Complex Religion

7

Properly operationalizing how and why those intersections matter is a crucial
task for emerging research in the field. Some researchers have begun to tackle
this immense task.
PROMISING FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Religion and Race
As Emerson, Korver-Glenn, and Douds (2015) note, despite the fact that
“American religious life is deeply stratified along racial lines” and although
religion “holds incredible sway in reproducing the U.S. racial order,” the
study of race and of religion are often segregated from one another. Other
researchers agree and continue to emphasize that fixing this problem would
allow us to understand many aspects of social life better.
For example, Barnes (2014) argues that researchers need to better understand the importance of the Black church in the Black community. Edgell
(2017) argues that we need to examine why Black and White Conservative
Protestants voted so differently in the most recent presidential election. In
addition to these agenda items, other questions remain to be answered. For
example, are Blacks who reject religion also more highly educated and liberal
than their peers, as is the case with Whites? Are there implications for political views in relationship to variations in Blacks’ religiosity? What explains the
overall lack of religious participation among Black men compared to women?
Religion and Immigration and Ethnicity
Sociologists of religion have long argued that religion is important both as
an avenue for assimilation and as a part of ethnic identity for American
immigrants (Cadge & Ecklund, 2007). However, unfortunately, just as it is
in relation to race, religion remains largely segregated from the study of
immigration more generally. Thus, we have a few, at this point older, studies
of Asian immigrant religion and we have much more research on Latino
Protestants than we do on Latino Catholics (e.g., Bartkowski, Ramos-Wada,
Ellison, & Acevedo, 2012; Ellison, Echevarría, & Smith, 2005; Kelly & Kelly,
2005; Kosmin & Keysar, 1995), although Protestants remain a relatively
small proportion—approximately 20% (Pew Research Center, 2014)— of the
Latino population in the United States.
As a result, interesting research questions remain to be explored in relation
to religion, immigration, and ethnicity. For example, will these newest waves
of immigrants hold onto their religion as Herberg (1955) predicted for previous waves of immigrants more than half a century ago? Will Latinos become
White as previous waves of Catholic immigrants did and will that Whiteness hinge on class? Will the process be similar or different for immigrants of

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

non-Christian religions, particularly for Muslims given the current political
climate?
Religion and Gender Although we have not mentioned it much in this essay,
gender is also obviously a key social structure that intersects in complex ways
with religion. Unfortunately, despite theoretical advances like “doing religion” that argue that one cannot “do religion” (Avishai, 2008) without “doing
gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987), gender and religion also tend to remain
distinct research areas from one another. Thus, those interested in gender and
religion bemoan “ … [the] marginalized status of gender within the subfield
of sociology of religion and the lackluster interest in religion among sociologists of gender.” (Avishai, Jafar, & Rinaldo, 2015a)
Recently, however, there has been some work in this area. These include
an entire special issue of Gender and Society on gender and religion (Avishai,
Jafar, & Rinaldo, 2015b), as well as recent work on Muslim converts’ experiences with polygamy by gender (Rao, 2015), the differences in religiosity
among high-income and low-income men and women (Schnabel, 2016), how
Conservative Protestant young men understand and practice masculinity
both before and after marriage (Diefendorf, 2015), and how unmarried heterosexuals and gay and lesbian members of conservative religions “do religion” (Irby, 2014).
Despite these exciting trends, many questions remain to be answered. For
example, although many have noticed and some have attempted to explain
them, questions remain about the significant gender differences in participation for most religious groups in the United States. In addition to questions
about participation, the ways that gender intersects with religion are surely
relevant to all of the other intersections discussed here. Some questions that
touch on these issues might be: How will the assimilation of new immigrants be affected by the sometimes more traditional gender norms of their
religions? How will members of these religious groups come to view reproductive rights and gender equality more generally?
Religion and Class
Recent research demonstrates that religion intersects with class differently
on attitudes towards abortion, homosexuality, economic redistribution, and
political party identification (Wilde, Tevington, & Shen, 2016b). Whereas
education liberalizes most Americans’ views especially on abortion and
homosexuality, this is not true for Conservative Protestants. This finding
may be due to the fact that many Conservative Protestants opt out of mainstream educational institutions, choosing homeschooling (Stevens, 2003),

Complex Religion

9

private Conservative Protestant high schools (Guhin, 2014), or colleges
affiliated with parachurch organizations (Council for Christian Colleges &
Universities, 2017). Much research needs to be done on the potential effects
of separate educational institutions for Conservative Protestants and other
groups—both in terms of survey data and ethnographic studies of the nature
and messages of these institutions.
That said, while qualitative studies of Conservative Protestants colleges
are lacking, there has been a relative boom of recent qualitative studies
that examine other combinations of religious and class differences. Tevington (2017) is studying the varied reactions to early marriage among
Conservative Protestants of different social classes, and finds that middle
class Conservative Protestants face sanctioning when they do not secure
educational and occupational footholds prior to starting their families.
Glassman (2016) shows that members of religious groups who reject all
forms of modern medicine are overwhelmingly working class, while those
who use “holistic and alternative medicine” are the highly educated of
many faith backgrounds. Ellis (2016) demonstrates that the status hierarchy
among American religious groups can reverse in prison, with the greater
resources allocated to Conservative Protestants giving them more social
and material advantages vis-à-vis other religious groups and especially
compared to inmates who are not active in any religious group.
Although we have already mentioned that how and why education seems
to push some young adults to reject religion seems like a fruitful area for
future research, many other questions about how class and religion intersect
remain. For example, given the overwhelming correlation of class and religion for many religious groups, is it possible to separate out the effects of
class and religion on important social issues and political beliefs?
CONCLUSION
In sum, while there is a substantial amount of research that looks at various
aspects of religion’s intersection with other social structures (and particularly
those that are relevant to inequality), such work is generally the exception
to the rule in a field where researchers are trained to look for independent
effects of religion. We hope that this essay will encourage more researchers
to think about the intersections so that we can better understand religion in
all its complexity.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

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Finke, R., & Stark, R. (2005). The churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners
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Glassman, L. (2016). “In the Lord’s Hands:” Divine healing and sub-cultural identity in a
fundamentalist Christian church. Presented at the Society for the Scientific Study of
Religion, Atlanta, GA.
Greeley, A. M. (1978). American Catholic: A social portrait. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Guhin, J. (2014). Religion as site rather than religion as category: On the
sociology of religion’s export problem. Sociology of Religion, 75(4), 579–593.
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Herberg, W. (1955). Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An essay in American religious sociology.
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Hout, M., & Fischer, C. S. (2002). Why more Americans have no religious preference:
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Irby, C. A. (2014). Moving beyond agency: A review of gender and intimate
relationships in conservative religions. Sociology Compass, 8(11), 1269–1280.
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Kelly, N. J., & Kelly, J. M. (2005). Religion and Latino partisanship in the United
States. Political Research Quarterly, 58(1), 87–95. doi:10.2307/3595598.
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Loveland, M. T. (2003). Religious switching: Preference development, maintenance, and change. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 42(1), 147–257.
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Marti, G. (2009). A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church.
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University Press.

MELISSA WILDE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Melissa J. Wilde (PhD in sociology, 2002, UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has studied topics including the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church;
the demographic factors that explain why American Protestantism has gone
from being majority Mainline to majority conservative; how race and class
intersect with American religious groups to explain early stances on birth
control; and currently, the relationship between race, class, religion and political views.
PATRICIA TEVINGTON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Tevington is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania. Her research interests include social class and inequality, sociology of religion, and sociology of the family. In particular, she studies how
class and religious background affect the pathways of young people in their
transition to adulthood.
RELATED ESSAYS
Understanding American Political Conservatism (Political Science), Joel D.
Aberbach
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
The Politics of Secularism in the United States (Political Science), David E.
Campbell and Geoffrey C. Layman
Insomnia and Sleep Disorders (Psychology), Elizabeth C. Mason and Allison
G. Harvey
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Gender Inequalities in the Home Sociology, Sonja Drobni˘c and Leah
Ruppanner
Intergenerational Mobility (Economics), Steve N. Durlauf and Irina
Shaorshadze
Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation (Sociology), Kevin J. Christiano
Racial Disenfranchisement (Political Science), Vincent L. Hutchings and
Davin L. Phoenix
The Emerging Psychology of Social Class (Psychology), Michael W. Kraus
Immigration and the Changing Status of Asian Americans (Sociology),
Jennifer Lee
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
Intergenerational Mobility: A Cross-National Comparison (Political Science),
Bhashkar Mazumder
Emerging Trends: Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
The Role of Death Denial in Culture and Consciousness (Psychology), Sheldon Solomon
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash


Complex Religion: Toward a Better
Understanding of the Ways in which
Religion Intersects with Inequality
MELISSA J. WILDE and PATRICIA TEVINGTON

Abstract
Sociologists have long known that religion is deeply interconnected with race, class,
and ethnicity in the United States. However, modern sociologists typically study
religion as if it is independent from other social structures. Profound class differences remain between American religious groups. Jews, Mainline Protestants and
new immigrant groups such as Hindus are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
Conservative Protestants, both Black and White remain at the bottom. We therefore
argue that religion is not independent of class and race and should almost always be
examined in interaction with these and other social structures. We call this, theoretical
approach “complex religion.”

Classical sociologists understood that religion was a key place where Americans sorted by class (Baltzell, 1964; Demerath, 1965; Herberg, 1955; Pope,
1948). Contemporary scholarship has continued to confirm that these differences remain, especially in relationship to the lower socioeconomic status
of Conservative Protestants (Lehrer, 2004; Sherkat & Ellison, 1999; Wilde &
Glassman, 2016).
Researchers have also widely acknowledged that race has been and remains
an important dividing line within American religion, especially for Protestants (Edwards, Christerson, & Emerson, 2013). As Martin Luther King Jr.
once commented, “at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning … we stand in the
most segregated hour of America” (King, 1968).1
Despite acknowledging that religion always has been and continues to be
deeply intertwined with inequality in the United States, sociologists who
1. Although studies of multiracial congregations have increased, this is because these congregations
are the exception to the rule of the general pattern of religious racial segregation (Edwards, 2008; Marti,
2009).
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

study religion generally study it as a factor that is assumed to be independent
from other factors and one that has “congruence,” or that is never contradictory (Chaves, 2010). Because of the field’s reliance on survey data and regression techniques, researchers generally control on class and race if examining
religion, or on religion if examining other aspects of social life. As a result,
we have contradictory findings about the importance of religion relative to
other structures. For instance, some researches find that factors such as education, political affiliation, and income are more influential than religion on
political behaviors and beliefs, while others find that religion continues to
exert an influence even after controlling for these factors (Wilde & Glassman,
2016).
Searching for independent effects of religion does not allow for the very real
and important ways that religion is intertwined with other social structures
to be examined and considered causally. We argue that researchers should
not just think about religion or about race or about class, but should think
about the various combinations of these factors, how they differ in those
combinations, and how those combinations matter. We call this theoretical
argument and the methodological implications that derive from it “complex
religion.”
The term complex religion builds on theories of complex inequality (Choo
& Ferree, 2010; McCall, 2001). Researchers of complex inequality argue that
social stratification is multidimensional. Different kinds of disadvantages
lead to different outcomes and experiences. These researchers therefore
urge others to examine how inequalities of gender, race, or class interact to
create a unique impact on social experience. Complex religion extends these
theories to include religious group membership among the social structures
that matter for inequality.
Complex religion does not impose anything particularly new or counterintuitive to what we already know about religion. A complex approach to
religion simply means taking what researchers already take for granted and
operationalizing it more precisely. In other words, most religion scholars
would agree that the experiences and political outlooks of working class
White and Black Protestant men would be different from one another—and
also would be different from highly educated White Mainline Protestant
women. The point of a complex religion approach is making sure that these
realities are properly operationalized.
THE CURRENT PICTURE
The first step in taking a complex approach to the study of religion simply
requires acknowledging the extent of the class differences that exist among
American religious groups and the ways in which they intersect with race

Complex Religion

3

Percent of members with a BA or more

90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10

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se

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Figure 1 Percent of bachelor’s degrees by religious group in the United States2
(age 25+). Source: GSS 1990–2016.

and ethnicity. Figure 1 provides a very simple but powerful illustration of
these differences by presenting information on the percent of the members
of each of the major religious groups in the United States that have at least a
bachelor’s degree.3
As Figure 1 indicates, today, White Conservative Protestants are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (Smith & Faris, 2005), with half of the proportion of bachelor’s degrees as White Mainline Protestants or those of no
religion.4 Figure 1 also demonstrates that, among the upper classes, some
of the most highly educated Americans are now of Hindu, Buddhist, and
Muslim faiths as a result of changes in immigration law since 1965 (Cadge &
Ecklund, 2007).
2. The Conservative Protestant category includes 100 whites from the Black Protestant category.
3. While admittedly, this is only one possible measure of many that can be used to examine class
differences, in other research we demonstrate that education is remarkably comparable to more complex
measures that also incorporate occupation and income, and thus we rely on it here (Wilde, Tevington, &
Shen, 2016a).
4. We employ the most widely used categorization scheme of religious traditions, called RelTrad,
(Steensland et al., 2000). However, we do not display the “Other Religion” category, as this is a “catch-all”
category which includes a wide array of religious groups such as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pagans,
and so on. Instead, we break out some important individual religious groups, such as Hindus, Buddhists,
and Muslims.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

How Did Things Get This Complex?
In employing the complex religion approach, we acknowledge many possible causes for the class differences that exist between American religious
groups. While there is some, primarily older, evidence that some people
may choose their religious affiliation because of their social class (Loveland,
2003; Sherkat & Wilson, 1995), we do not think that the vast majority of the
differences explained below result from such religious switching. Similarly,
although there is some limited evidence that some religious subcultures
discourage class mobility (Darnell & Sherkat, 1997; Lehrer, 2004), we also
do not argue that the differences illustrated above are primarily a result of
religious groups encouraging or discouraging class mobility. While both
these are possible mechanisms behind some of the differences between
American religious groups, a theory of complex religion posits that the
majority of these differences are a result of the processes of social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1984) set in place long ago by variations in immigration,
settlement, and mobility patterns over the course of American history. Once
established in the US, variation in access to opportunities, for example,
access to educational benefits via the GI Bill (Wuthnow, 1988), have also had
long-term effects.
Conditioned by immigration law and connected to processes of racialization (Wilde & Danielsen, 2014), the religion of immigrants was, and still is,
often synonymous with their nation of origin (Herberg, 1955) and the push
and pull factors behind various immigration patterns (Davidson & Pyle,
2011). Furthermore, different groups have come from different places with
different religions over time, allowing some groups much more time for
mobility and assimilation than others (Waters & Jiménez, 2005).
To put it in concrete terms, groups such as the Anglicans and Congregationalists, privileged since the founding of our country, made up the vast
majority of the signers of Declaration of Independence (Davidson & Pyle,
2011). Today, they remain at the top of the socioeconomic ladder of the United
States, as part of the group now commonly referred to as Mainline Protestants,
(Figure 1), a term that originates from these groups’ association with a series
of elite suburbs in Philadelphia (Coffman, 2013).
In comparison to the advantages that still remain among the religious
groups who descended from America’s founding fathers, Black religious
groups remain disadvantaged. Enslaved and oppressed since the founding
of our country, Blacks, who largely converted to Protestantism during
slavery but were excluded from participation in many White denominations
(Lincoln & Mamiya, 1991), remain at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
Figure 1 demonstrates that Black Protestants have the lowest educational
attainment of all the religious groups in the United States.

Complex Religion

100

White

90

Black

5

Other

80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
lic
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Figure 2 Percent of bachelor’s degrees by religious group and race in the United
States5 (age 25+). Source: GSS 1990–2016.

These two examples above help to demonstrate how (and why) religion
is so deeply intertwined with class and race in the United States. However,
these two groups are but two of many possible examples of how class remains
tied to religion within the American religious “marketplace” (Finke & Stark,
2005), far beyond those only at the highest and lowest rungs of the economic
ladder.
Catholics are a prime example. At the turn of the twentieth century, American Catholics’ lower class status, questionable Whiteness, and high fertility
was of deep concern to more elite Americans—driving their fears of “race
suicide” (Wilde & Danielsen, 2014). Today, these descendants of mostly Irish
and Italian immigrants have assimilated into the United States and many
have largely achieved middle class White status (Greeley, 1978). This has
made Catholics a very diverse group class-wise, especially given the more
recent waves of Latino immigrants. The ways in which the class, ethnicity,
and immigration cohort may vary among Catholics is roughly illustrated by
Figure 2, which breaks all the religious groups in Figure 1 up by race and
ethnicity. Latinos constitute the vast majority of those of “other” ethnicities
in the Catholic category in Figure 2.6
5. This figure includes all religious and racial groups with more than 10 respondents from the pooled
1990–2016 General Social Survey, age 25 or above.
6. According to the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape survey, 87% of American Catholics in the “other”
category are Latino (Pew Research Center, 2015).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Furthermore, as Figure 2 demonstrates, race and ethnicity remain deeply
intertwined with religion in complex ways, with people of color generally,
but not always, being disadvantaged relative to the White members of their
religious groups.
Wuthnow (1988) argues that the American religious field began restructuring after World War II as educational differences grew within (instead
of between) denominations. These differences created polarization within
some denominations, with more educated liberals on one side and the less
educated conservative members on the other. Thirty years later, as a result
of various processes (including mergers and schisms at the denominational
level and shopping and switching at the individual level), it is clear that the
American religious field has restructured and that consequently, educational
differences between religious groups are perhaps as big as they ever were,
if not bigger. Because of this restructuring, researchers now almost always
shift the unit of analysis to major religious traditions rather than denomination and almost universally separate Mainline versus Conservative
Protestants—doing little with denominational affiliations such as Episcopalian or Methodist in most analyses, even if denominational affiliation
remains an important part of some coding schemes (e.g., Steensland et al.,
2000).
Figure 1 also demonstrates that, just as historical immigration and
settlement patterns are crucial to understanding religion’s intersection
with various structures of inequality, the contours of immigration today
remain crucial. As we mentioned above, because of changes to immigration
laws, recent immigrants from other areas of the world (and of mostly
non-Christian faiths) are among the most educated of Americans today. For
example, almost 85% of American Hindus have at least a bachelor’s degree,
more than double the percent of Mainline Protestants.
Finally, no discussion of complex religion would be adequate without mentioning the relatively recent growth of those with no religion, often referred
to as Nones (Hout & Fischer, 2002), who are now 20% of the American population (Hout & Fischer, 2014). Theories of complex religion also help us to
understand this group. There is evidence that those with no religion are more
and more likely to be highly educated Americans who were raised religiously
but now reject religion as a reaction to the growth of the Religious Right (Hout
& Fischer, 2002, 2014; Margolis, 2016). Although not a focus of most research
to date, understanding how and why education seems to push some young
adults to rejecting religion altogether is squarely within the framework of
complex religion, will be crucial to understanding the future of American
politics, and is one of the most promising directions for future research.
In sum, religion is intricately interwoven in the fabric of American society.
It is thus part and parcel of the other social structures that we know stratify it.

Complex Religion

7

Properly operationalizing how and why those intersections matter is a crucial
task for emerging research in the field. Some researchers have begun to tackle
this immense task.
PROMISING FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Religion and Race
As Emerson, Korver-Glenn, and Douds (2015) note, despite the fact that
“American religious life is deeply stratified along racial lines” and although
religion “holds incredible sway in reproducing the U.S. racial order,” the
study of race and of religion are often segregated from one another. Other
researchers agree and continue to emphasize that fixing this problem would
allow us to understand many aspects of social life better.
For example, Barnes (2014) argues that researchers need to better understand the importance of the Black church in the Black community. Edgell
(2017) argues that we need to examine why Black and White Conservative
Protestants voted so differently in the most recent presidential election. In
addition to these agenda items, other questions remain to be answered. For
example, are Blacks who reject religion also more highly educated and liberal
than their peers, as is the case with Whites? Are there implications for political views in relationship to variations in Blacks’ religiosity? What explains the
overall lack of religious participation among Black men compared to women?
Religion and Immigration and Ethnicity
Sociologists of religion have long argued that religion is important both as
an avenue for assimilation and as a part of ethnic identity for American
immigrants (Cadge & Ecklund, 2007). However, unfortunately, just as it is
in relation to race, religion remains largely segregated from the study of
immigration more generally. Thus, we have a few, at this point older, studies
of Asian immigrant religion and we have much more research on Latino
Protestants than we do on Latino Catholics (e.g., Bartkowski, Ramos-Wada,
Ellison, & Acevedo, 2012; Ellison, Echevarría, & Smith, 2005; Kelly & Kelly,
2005; Kosmin & Keysar, 1995), although Protestants remain a relatively
small proportion—approximately 20% (Pew Research Center, 2014)— of the
Latino population in the United States.
As a result, interesting research questions remain to be explored in relation
to religion, immigration, and ethnicity. For example, will these newest waves
of immigrants hold onto their religion as Herberg (1955) predicted for previous waves of immigrants more than half a century ago? Will Latinos become
White as previous waves of Catholic immigrants did and will that Whiteness hinge on class? Will the process be similar or different for immigrants of

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

non-Christian religions, particularly for Muslims given the current political
climate?
Religion and Gender Although we have not mentioned it much in this essay,
gender is also obviously a key social structure that intersects in complex ways
with religion. Unfortunately, despite theoretical advances like “doing religion” that argue that one cannot “do religion” (Avishai, 2008) without “doing
gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987), gender and religion also tend to remain
distinct research areas from one another. Thus, those interested in gender and
religion bemoan “ … [the] marginalized status of gender within the subfield
of sociology of religion and the lackluster interest in religion among sociologists of gender.” (Avishai, Jafar, & Rinaldo, 2015a)
Recently, however, there has been some work in this area. These include
an entire special issue of Gender and Society on gender and religion (Avishai,
Jafar, & Rinaldo, 2015b), as well as recent work on Muslim converts’ experiences with polygamy by gender (Rao, 2015), the differences in religiosity
among high-income and low-income men and women (Schnabel, 2016), how
Conservative Protestant young men understand and practice masculinity
both before and after marriage (Diefendorf, 2015), and how unmarried heterosexuals and gay and lesbian members of conservative religions “do religion” (Irby, 2014).
Despite these exciting trends, many questions remain to be answered. For
example, although many have noticed and some have attempted to explain
them, questions remain about the significant gender differences in participation for most religious groups in the United States. In addition to questions
about participation, the ways that gender intersects with religion are surely
relevant to all of the other intersections discussed here. Some questions that
touch on these issues might be: How will the assimilation of new immigrants be affected by the sometimes more traditional gender norms of their
religions? How will members of these religious groups come to view reproductive rights and gender equality more generally?
Religion and Class
Recent research demonstrates that religion intersects with class differently
on attitudes towards abortion, homosexuality, economic redistribution, and
political party identification (Wilde, Tevington, & Shen, 2016b). Whereas
education liberalizes most Americans’ views especially on abortion and
homosexuality, this is not true for Conservative Protestants. This finding
may be due to the fact that many Conservative Protestants opt out of mainstream educational institutions, choosing homeschooling (Stevens, 2003),

Complex Religion

9

private Conservative Protestant high schools (Guhin, 2014), or colleges
affiliated with parachurch organizations (Council for Christian Colleges &
Universities, 2017). Much research needs to be done on the potential effects
of separate educational institutions for Conservative Protestants and other
groups—both in terms of survey data and ethnographic studies of the nature
and messages of these institutions.
That said, while qualitative studies of Conservative Protestants colleges
are lacking, there has been a relative boom of recent qualitative studies
that examine other combinations of religious and class differences. Tevington (2017) is studying the varied reactions to early marriage among
Conservative Protestants of different social classes, and finds that middle
class Conservative Protestants face sanctioning when they do not secure
educational and occupational footholds prior to starting their families.
Glassman (2016) shows that members of religious groups who reject all
forms of modern medicine are overwhelmingly working class, while those
who use “holistic and alternative medicine” are the highly educated of
many faith backgrounds. Ellis (2016) demonstrates that the status hierarchy
among American religious groups can reverse in prison, with the greater
resources allocated to Conservative Protestants giving them more social
and material advantages vis-à-vis other religious groups and especially
compared to inmates who are not active in any religious group.
Although we have already mentioned that how and why education seems
to push some young adults to reject religion seems like a fruitful area for
future research, many other questions about how class and religion intersect
remain. For example, given the overwhelming correlation of class and religion for many religious groups, is it possible to separate out the effects of
class and religion on important social issues and political beliefs?
CONCLUSION
In sum, while there is a substantial amount of research that looks at various
aspects of religion’s intersection with other social structures (and particularly
those that are relevant to inequality), such work is generally the exception
to the rule in a field where researchers are trained to look for independent
effects of religion. We hope that this essay will encourage more researchers
to think about the intersections so that we can better understand religion in
all its complexity.
REFERENCES
Avishai, O. (2008). “Doing religion” in a secular world women in conservative religions and the question of agency. Gender & Society, 22(4), 409–433.

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MELISSA WILDE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Melissa J. Wilde (PhD in sociology, 2002, UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has studied topics including the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church;
the demographic factors that explain why American Protestantism has gone
from being majority Mainline to majority conservative; how race and class
intersect with American religious groups to explain early stances on birth
control; and currently, the relationship between race, class, religion and political views.
PATRICIA TEVINGTON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Tevington is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania. Her research interests include social class and inequality, sociology of religion, and sociology of the family. In particular, she studies how
class and religious background affect the pathways of young people in their
transition to adulthood.
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