Charismatic Christianity’s Impact on Growth and Revival in Singapore: The Case of the Methodist Church from 1889–2012

This paper aims to explain patterns of Charismatic revival by utilizing a quantitative lens on church growth in Singapore during the mid-1900s. The research digitized and then analyzed data from the archives of the Methodist Church of Singapore between the years 1889 and 2012. The annual conference reports recorded several variables over this 123-year period such as church membership, baptisms, and professions of faith. In recent years, it also records the average Sunday attendance at each of 23 churches throughout Singapore. This paper presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the historical data and concludes that, in line with predictions from the cognitive science of religion (CSR), religious revival can serve to energize religious communities that are primarily reliant on rituals with high frequency and low-arousal (see Whitehouse 2004). Typically, high frequency and low-arousal rituals allow for high levels of consensus and social identification among large religious groups. However, as a byproduct of their high frequency and low-arousal, the repeated rituals are predicted to suffer from the effects of tedium, which lowers motivation for the information presented during the rituals and can have negative effects on group cohesion. The ethnographic and historical records investigated within the theory of Divergent Modes of Religiosity (DMR) have suggested that short bursts of reinvigoration can be used to revitalize motivation in doctrinal religions. While the data from Singapore’s Clock Tower Revival events in the 1970s suggest that such an event did occur, the DMR, as traditionally formulated, is unable to capture the dynamics of Singaporean Christian demographics because 1) it does not clearly account for the high number of converts who have entered the religion and 2) it cannot account for the sustained presence of high-arousal rituals in the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in Singapore since the Clock Tower Revival. Demographic data from Singapore, in particular the Singaporean Methodist church, complicate CSR’s current approach to tedium because it appears that the religious communities in Singapore have not only sustained their motivation, they have grown since the initial revival period in the 1970s, suggesting that new amendments to our approach to tedium in doctrinal religions may be appropriate (Lane, 2021, 2019; Lane, Shults, & McCauley, 2019). As such, this paper discusses how the data from the Methodist church in Singapore are more easily explained through the use of a new approach toward understanding social cohesion in religions that relies on a cognitive (i.e., information processing) approach that links social and personal information schemas with rehearsal, memory, and personal experiences. The theory also aims to formulate its claims with sufficient specificity to be modeled in computer simulations (Lane 2018, 2013) to be further tested against other historical groups, which this paper discusses in regards to future directions for the research.

The World by Religion

The following tables represent the results of analysis of data on religion for all of the countries of the world which appear in the World Religion Database (Johnson and Grim 2008). These data are collected at the national level from a number of sources including censuses, surveys, polls, religious communities, scholars, and others.

Projecting Global Religious Populations, 2020–50

This article presents a series of projections for religious communities worldwide from 2020 to 2050. It offers details related to the projection methodology used to generate the estimates and comments on trends and patterns among Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists. It concludes with suggestions on how such projections might be improved in the future.

Measuring the Size of the U.S. Jewish Population: New Estimates from a Pew Research Center Survey of Jewish Americans

This paper presents new estimates of the U.S. Jewish population based on a 2019–2020 Pew Research Center survey, which used a stratified address-based sample of all Americans to screen more than 68,000 respondents and complete full interviews with more than 5,800 adults who are Jewish or have some kind of connection to Judaism. We estimate there are about 5.8 million adult Jews living in the United States, including 4.2 million who identify as Jewish by religion and 1.5 million who are Jews of no religion. In addition, 1.8 million children live with at least one adult Jew and are being raised Jewish in some way. Altogether, about 7.5 million people, or 2.4% of the total U.S. population, are Jewish. We present population estimates for additional detailed categories of Jewish adults and children in Jewish households that not available in any other recent source.

Religions by Continent

This article offers analysis of religious affiliation for 18 categories of religion for the globe and six continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Northern America, and Oceania. Estimates of religious affiliation are made for four dates, 1970, 2000, 2020, and projections for 2030. Annual average growth rates are provided for two 30-year periods, 1970–2000 and 2000–2030. These global and continental tables are aggregated from country data in the World Religion Database.

Religious Affiliation and Environmental Challenges in the 21st Century

There is lack of studies of global variation in religious affiliation alongside environmental change worldwide. The aim of the current study is to help fill this gap by exploring variation in religious affiliation alongside environmental change worldwide. We study this relationship by analysing religious affiliation, a variety of environmental stressors and environmental outcomes.

Gender Violence and the Price of Virginity: Theory and Evidence of Incomplete Marriage Contracts

This paper builds and tests a model of marriage as an incomplete contract that arises from asymmetric virginity premiums and examines whether this can lead to social inefficiencies. Contrary to the efficient households hypothesis, women cannot prevent being appropriated by men once they enter marriage if they command lower marriage market opportunities upon divorce. Because men cannot or do not commit to compensating women for their lower ex post marriage market opportunities, marriage is an incomplete contract. Men may seek to lower women’s ex ante “market wages” in order to induce entry into joint production. Inefficient or abusive marriages are less likely to separate. Equalizing virginity premiums may reduce domestic and non-domestic violence. Female circumcision and prices women pay doctors to appear virgin before marriage in many countries suggest asymmetric virginity premiums continue to exist. Evidence from China and the US suggest asymmetric virginity premiums persist over economic development. Asymmetric virginity premiums are strongly positively correlated with female but not male virginity premiums. I use variation in religious upbringing to help estimate the effect of virginity premiums on gender violence in the US. The OLS relationship between virginity premiums and female reports of forced sex may be biased downwards if shame is associated with abuse and this shame is greater for women with higher virginity premiums. But the OLS relationship for males might not be biased downwards. Asymmetric virginity premiums are positively correlated with men forcing sex on women and paying women for sex. The model complements a growing empirical literature on inefficient households and human rights abuses, visible manifestations of female appropriability across time and space.