Kraig Beyerlein
Biographic Data
| ID | 3604340 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kraig Beyerlein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kraig |
| FAMILY NAME | Beyerlein |
| SIGNATURE | BEYERLEIN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0666-4938 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 592 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Effect of Congregational Context on Religious Leaders’ Political Activism
Theodicy and Crisis
Based on a national survey of U.S. adults conducted six weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, this article investigates how crisis affects religious faith. Almost no Americans reported losing or a weakening of faith in response to the pandemic at this time. By contrast, nearly one-third of believers indicated that the coronavirus outbreak had strengthened their faith. We theoretically develop and empirically test three religious factors—theodicy, pra…
Catholic Social Activism
For years, I have searched for a book that brings the theological tenets of Catholic Social Thought (CST) to life. Sharon Erickson Nepstad’s Catholic Social Activism ended the search. Nepstad defines CST as “...[the] Church’s ethical principles about human nature, purpose, and social justice” (8). In this well-written, solidly researched, and engaging book, Nepstad leverages not only papal encyclicals and other official documents, but also the “l…
How Do Religion and Sexual Orientation Affect Support for U.S. Presidential Candidates? Evidence from a Survey Experiment
A growing body of research has examined how candidates’ religion or sexual orientation affect voting likelihood among the U.S. public. No systematic study, however, has focused on the combined effect of these traits. We draw on the intersectionality literature to develop and test hypotheses for this neglected, but important, combination. Results from an original survey experiment conducted in late June 2019 demonstrate that all respondents, as we…
The Political Mobilization of America's Congregations
We use data from the National Congregations Study (NCS), including data from the fourth wave, to describe congregations' political activity in 2018-2019, and to examine change in that activity since 1998. Congregations have become more politically mobilized since 1998, with the majority of congregations (56 percent) engaged in at least one of the political activities asked about in 2018-2019. Black Protestant congregations in particular experienc…
Citizenship, Religion, and Protest
Does religion promote or deter political activism? Most arguments and evidence on this question do not account for variation by social position. We argue that for the 2006 spring immigrant rights marches understanding the influence of religion on participation requires a careful assessment of the relationship between various dimensions of religion and the risks, barriers, and motivations that are rooted in citizenship status of potential particip…
The 2017 Women's March
On January 21, 2017, over four hundred cities across the United States organized sister marches in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington. In this paper, we first compare the size of these marches to that of several significant protest-event sources to show how extraordinary turnout was that day. Then, analyzing a nationally representative sample of sister marches, we present univariate statistics for both event-level characteristics (su…
A New Picture of Protest
The National Study of Protest Events (NSPE) employed hypernetwork sampling to generate the first-ever nationally representative sample of protest events. Nearly complete information about various event characteristics was collected from participants in 1,037 unique protests across the United States in 2010 to 2011. The first part of this article reviews extant methodologies in protest-event research and discusses how the NSPE overcomes their reco…
Religious Resistance to Trump
Progressive faith communities joined the hundreds of thousands of others who took to the streets in downtown Chicago on January 21, 2017 to protest the Trump regime. The Women’s March on Chicago (WMC) provides an opportunity to shed new light on religious resistance given its unique features. Unlike protests in prior studies of progressive faith-based activism, the WMC was a secular event, involving little costs and risks, and for which religious…
The Migrant Border Crossing Study
Increased border enforcement efforts have redistributed unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States (US) away from traditional points of crossing, such as San Diego and El Paso, and into more remote areas along the US-Mexico border, including southern Arizona. Yet relatively little quantitative scholarly work exists examining Mexican migrants' crossing, apprehension, and repatriation experiences in southern Arizona. We contend that if sch…
Faith's wager
The Legitimacy of Protest
Activists seek attention for their causes and want to win sympathy from the broader public. Why do some citizens but not others approve when activists use protest tactics? This is a crucial but poorly understood aspect of social movements. While most prior research has focused on the personal determinants of attitudes toward movements, we argue that proximity to protest may cultivate positive views about a movement. Individuals living near center…
The Effect of Religion on Blood Donation in the United States
Based on quantitative analysis of a nationally representative sample of 1,589 self-reported eligible blood donors in the United States, this paper investigates how religion influences giving the gift of life. I find significant positive effects for both organizational and subjective dimensions of religion. The reasons these dimensions promote this generous act vary, however. Religious service attendance works entirely through religious ties. Thes…
It takes two
Prayers, Protest, and Police
Do police treat religious-based protest events differently than secular ones? Drawing on data from more than 15,000 protest events in the United States (1960 to 1995) and using quantitative methods, we find that law enforcement agents were less likely to show up at protests when general religious actors, actions, or organizations were present. Rather than reflecting privileged legitimacy, we find that this protective effect is explained by religi…
Who Violates The Principles of Political Liberalism
Recent debates in political theory have seen political liberals advocate and defend a doctrine of restraint, according to which citizens may not rely solely on religious reasons when supporting their favored public policies. This debate notwithstanding, very rarely have social scientists assessed the extent to which citizens actually violate this doctrine. This article evaluates the “political decision-making” model of political liberalism. Data …
Educational Segregation, Tea Party Organizations, and Battles over Distributive Justice
Competing visions of who is deserving of rewards and privileges, and different understandings of the fairness of reward allocation processes, are at the heart of political conflict. Indeed, social movement scholars generally agree that a key component of most, if not all, social movements is a shared belief that existing conditions are unfair and subject to change (Gamson 1992; McAdam 1982; Snow et al. 1986; Turner and Killian 1987). In this arti…
Individualism revisited
The Effect of Religious Short-Term Mission Trips on Youth Civic Engagement
Religious short-term mission trips are an increasingly popular form of American religious practice, especially among young people. Both organizers and participants often emphasize their transformative nature. However, scholarly efforts to evaluate systematically the social consequences of religious short-term mission trips are lacking. To address this neglect, our article investigates whether going on a religious short-term mission trip significa…
Black Voting During the Civil Rights Movement
This article examines why some black Southerners but not others were politically active during the early stages of the civil rights movement. Using a survey of more than 600 black Southerners in 1961, we investigate whether perceptions about opportunity and threat, politicized social capital and individual orientations toward social change shaped voting in the 1960 Presidential election. Perceptions of solidarity in the black community and repres…
Sorrow and Solidarity
Why did some Americans volunteer to provide relief to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack victims, their families, or workers? This paper uses data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey, a nationally representative sample of adult Americans, which show that 10 percent of Americans volunteered to help victims of the terrorist attacks in some way to address this question. We argue that the act of volunteering in response to Septembe…
A Two-Stage Model for a Two-Stage Process
We model differential participation in protest as a two-stage mobilization process: willingness to engage in protest and conversion of willingness into participation. Treating mobilization as a two-stage process resolves an important puzzle in the literature on differential participation: the lack of constraining effects for biographical unavailability. Using a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States, we find that whi…
From Pews to Participation
"This article identifies two important conditions under which participation in religious congregations influences active involvement in civic organizations that provide charitable services to and establish other types of linkages with residents in the wider community. We find that while the frequently employed measure of religious service attendance has minimal effects on participation in bridging types of civic organizations, congregation activi…
Social Capital, Too Much of a Good Thing? American Religious Traditions and Community Crime
"Using American religious traditions as measures of bonding and bridging social capital in communities, we empirically test how these different forms of social capital affect crime rates in 3,157 U.S. counties in 2000. Our results suggest that the bonding networks evangelical Protestants promote in communities explain why counties with a greater percentage of residents affiliated with this tradition consistently have higher crime rates. Conversel…
Specifying the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Educational Attainment
Recent studies have demonstrated that conservative Protestantism negatively affects educational advancement. However, these studies have treated conservative Protestantism as a monolithic religious bloc that uniformly constrains achieving higher education. Disaggregating conservative Protestantism into fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and evangelicals reveals that the relationship between conservative Protestantism and educational attainment is mor…
From Pews to Participation
"This article identifies two important conditions under which participation in religious congregations influences active involvement in civic organizations that provide charitable services to and establish other types of linkages with residents in the wider community. We find that while the frequently employed measure of religious service attendance has minimal effects on participation in bridging types of civic organizations, congregation activi…
Social Capital, Too Much of a Good Thing? American Religious Traditions and Community Crime
"Using American religious traditions as measures of bonding and bridging social capital in communities, we empirically test how these different forms of social capital affect crime rates in 3,157 U.S. counties in 2000. Our results suggest that the bonding networks evangelical Protestants promote in communities explain why counties with a greater percentage of residents affiliated with this tradition consistently have higher crime rates. Conversel…
The National Congregations Study
The National Congregations Study (NCS) was conducted in conjunction with the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS). The 1998 GSS asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation, thus generating a nationally representative sample of religious congregations. Data about these congregations were collected via a one-hour interview with one key informant - a minister, priest, rabbi, or other staff person or leader - from…
A Two-Stage Model for a Two-Stage Process
We model differential participation in protest as a two-stage mobilization process: willingness to engage in protest and conversion of willingness into participation. Treating mobilization as a two-stage process resolves an important puzzle in the literature on differential participation: the lack of constraining effects for biographical unavailability. Using a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States, we find that whi…
The Political Activities of Religious Congregations in the United States
In recent decades, much research has focused on how religious congregations affect individuals' political participation. However, only scant attention has been paid to examining the various ways in which religious congregations engage in political activism as formal organizational entities. Using data from the 1998 National Congregations Study (NCS), a survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,236 religious congregations, we begin to fill…
Specifying the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Educational Attainment
Recent studies have demonstrated that conservative Protestantism negatively affects educational advancement. However, these studies have treated conservative Protestantism as a monolithic religious bloc that uniformly constrains achieving higher education. Disaggregating conservative Protestantism into fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and evangelicals reveals that the relationship between conservative Protestantism and educational attainment is mor…
Educational Segregation, Tea Party Organizations, and Battles over Distributive Justice
Competing visions of who is deserving of rewards and privileges, and different understandings of the fairness of reward allocation processes, are at the heart of political conflict. Indeed, social movement scholars generally agree that a key component of most, if not all, social movements is a shared belief that existing conditions are unfair and subject to change (Gamson 1992; McAdam 1982; Snow et al. 1986; Turner and Killian 1987). In this arti…
Individualism revisited
Black Voting During the Civil Rights Movement
This article examines why some black Southerners but not others were politically active during the early stages of the civil rights movement. Using a survey of more than 600 black Southerners in 1961, we investigate whether perceptions about opportunity and threat, politicized social capital and individual orientations toward social change shaped voting in the 1960 Presidential election. Perceptions of solidarity in the black community and repres…
A New Picture of Protest
The National Study of Protest Events (NSPE) employed hypernetwork sampling to generate the first-ever nationally representative sample of protest events. Nearly complete information about various event characteristics was collected from participants in 1,037 unique protests across the United States in 2010 to 2011. The first part of this article reviews extant methodologies in protest-event research and discusses how the NSPE overcomes their reco…
Theodicy and Crisis
Based on a national survey of U.S. adults conducted six weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, this article investigates how crisis affects religious faith. Almost no Americans reported losing or a weakening of faith in response to the pandemic at this time. By contrast, nearly one-third of believers indicated that the coronavirus outbreak had strengthened their faith. We theoretically develop and empirically test three religious factors—theodicy, pra…
The Political Mobilization of America's Congregations
We use data from the National Congregations Study (NCS), including data from the fourth wave, to describe congregations' political activity in 2018-2019, and to examine change in that activity since 1998. Congregations have become more politically mobilized since 1998, with the majority of congregations (56 percent) engaged in at least one of the political activities asked about in 2018-2019. Black Protestant congregations in particular experienc…
Prayers, Protest, and Police
Do police treat religious-based protest events differently than secular ones? Drawing on data from more than 15,000 protest events in the United States (1960 to 1995) and using quantitative methods, we find that law enforcement agents were less likely to show up at protests when general religious actors, actions, or organizations were present. Rather than reflecting privileged legitimacy, we find that this protective effect is explained by religi…
The Effect of Religious Short-Term Mission Trips on Youth Civic Engagement
Religious short-term mission trips are an increasingly popular form of American religious practice, especially among young people. Both organizers and participants often emphasize their transformative nature. However, scholarly efforts to evaluate systematically the social consequences of religious short-term mission trips are lacking. To address this neglect, our article investigates whether going on a religious short-term mission trip significa…
Sorrow and Solidarity
Why did some Americans volunteer to provide relief to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack victims, their families, or workers? This paper uses data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey, a nationally representative sample of adult Americans, which show that 10 percent of Americans volunteered to help victims of the terrorist attacks in some way to address this question. We argue that the act of volunteering in response to Septembe…
The 2017 Women's March
On January 21, 2017, over four hundred cities across the United States organized sister marches in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington. In this paper, we first compare the size of these marches to that of several significant protest-event sources to show how extraordinary turnout was that day. Then, analyzing a nationally representative sample of sister marches, we present univariate statistics for both event-level characteristics (su…
Religious Resistance to Trump
Progressive faith communities joined the hundreds of thousands of others who took to the streets in downtown Chicago on January 21, 2017 to protest the Trump regime. The Women’s March on Chicago (WMC) provides an opportunity to shed new light on religious resistance given its unique features. Unlike protests in prior studies of progressive faith-based activism, the WMC was a secular event, involving little costs and risks, and for which religious…
The Migrant Border Crossing Study
Increased border enforcement efforts have redistributed unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States (US) away from traditional points of crossing, such as San Diego and El Paso, and into more remote areas along the US-Mexico border, including southern Arizona. Yet relatively little quantitative scholarly work exists examining Mexican migrants' crossing, apprehension, and repatriation experiences in southern Arizona. We contend that if sch…
It takes two
How Do Religion and Sexual Orientation Affect Support for U.S. Presidential Candidates? Evidence from a Survey Experiment
A growing body of research has examined how candidates’ religion or sexual orientation affect voting likelihood among the U.S. public. No systematic study, however, has focused on the combined effect of these traits. We draw on the intersectionality literature to develop and test hypotheses for this neglected, but important, combination. Results from an original survey experiment conducted in late June 2019 demonstrate that all respondents, as we…
The Effect of Religion on Blood Donation in the United States
Based on quantitative analysis of a nationally representative sample of 1,589 self-reported eligible blood donors in the United States, this paper investigates how religion influences giving the gift of life. I find significant positive effects for both organizational and subjective dimensions of religion. The reasons these dimensions promote this generous act vary, however. Religious service attendance works entirely through religious ties. Thes…
Who Violates The Principles of Political Liberalism
Recent debates in political theory have seen political liberals advocate and defend a doctrine of restraint, according to which citizens may not rely solely on religious reasons when supporting their favored public policies. This debate notwithstanding, very rarely have social scientists assessed the extent to which citizens actually violate this doctrine. This article evaluates the “political decision-making” model of political liberalism. Data …
Faith's wager
Citizenship, Religion, and Protest
Does religion promote or deter political activism? Most arguments and evidence on this question do not account for variation by social position. We argue that for the 2006 spring immigrant rights marches understanding the influence of religion on participation requires a careful assessment of the relationship between various dimensions of religion and the risks, barriers, and motivations that are rooted in citizenship status of potential particip…
The National Congregations Study
The National Congregations Study (NCS) was conducted in conjunction with the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS). The 1998 GSS asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation, thus generating a nationally representative sample of religious congregations. Data about these congregations were collected via a one-hour interview with one key informant - a minister, priest, rabbi, or other staff person or leader - from…
The Political Activities of Religious Congregations in the United States
In recent decades, much research has focused on how religious congregations affect individuals' political participation. However, only scant attention has been paid to examining the various ways in which religious congregations engage in political activism as formal organizational entities. Using data from the 1998 National Congregations Study (NCS), a survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,236 religious congregations, we begin to fill…
Specifying the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Educational Attainment
Recent studies have demonstrated that conservative Protestantism negatively affects educational advancement. However, these studies have treated conservative Protestantism as a monolithic religious bloc that uniformly constrains achieving higher education. Disaggregating conservative Protestantism into fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and evangelicals reveals that the relationship between conservative Protestantism and educational attainment is mor…
Social Capital, Too Much of a Good Thing? American Religious Traditions and Community Crime
"Using American religious traditions as measures of bonding and bridging social capital in communities, we empirically test how these different forms of social capital affect crime rates in 3,157 U.S. counties in 2000. Our results suggest that the bonding networks evangelical Protestants promote in communities explain why counties with a greater percentage of residents affiliated with this tradition consistently have higher crime rates. Conversel…
A Two-Stage Model for a Two-Stage Process
We model differential participation in protest as a two-stage mobilization process: willingness to engage in protest and conversion of willingness into participation. Treating mobilization as a two-stage process resolves an important puzzle in the literature on differential participation: the lack of constraining effects for biographical unavailability. Using a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States, we find that whi…
From Pews to Participation
"This article identifies two important conditions under which participation in religious congregations influences active involvement in civic organizations that provide charitable services to and establish other types of linkages with residents in the wider community. We find that while the frequently employed measure of religious service attendance has minimal effects on participation in bridging types of civic organizations, congregation activi…
Black Voting During the Civil Rights Movement
This article examines why some black Southerners but not others were politically active during the early stages of the civil rights movement. Using a survey of more than 600 black Southerners in 1961, we investigate whether perceptions about opportunity and threat, politicized social capital and individual orientations toward social change shaped voting in the 1960 Presidential election. Perceptions of solidarity in the black community and repres…
Sorrow and Solidarity
Why did some Americans volunteer to provide relief to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack victims, their families, or workers? This paper uses data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey, a nationally representative sample of adult Americans, which show that 10 percent of Americans volunteered to help victims of the terrorist attacks in some way to address this question. We argue that the act of volunteering in response to Septembe…
The Effect of Religious Short-Term Mission Trips on Youth Civic Engagement
Religious short-term mission trips are an increasingly popular form of American religious practice, especially among young people. Both organizers and participants often emphasize their transformative nature. However, scholarly efforts to evaluate systematically the social consequences of religious short-term mission trips are lacking. To address this neglect, our article investigates whether going on a religious short-term mission trip significa…
Individualism revisited
Who Violates The Principles of Political Liberalism
Recent debates in political theory have seen political liberals advocate and defend a doctrine of restraint, according to which citizens may not rely solely on religious reasons when supporting their favored public policies. This debate notwithstanding, very rarely have social scientists assessed the extent to which citizens actually violate this doctrine. This article evaluates the “political decision-making” model of political liberalism. Data …
Educational Segregation, Tea Party Organizations, and Battles over Distributive Justice
Competing visions of who is deserving of rewards and privileges, and different understandings of the fairness of reward allocation processes, are at the heart of political conflict. Indeed, social movement scholars generally agree that a key component of most, if not all, social movements is a shared belief that existing conditions are unfair and subject to change (Gamson 1992; McAdam 1982; Snow et al. 1986; Turner and Killian 1987). In this arti…
Prayers, Protest, and Police
Do police treat religious-based protest events differently than secular ones? Drawing on data from more than 15,000 protest events in the United States (1960 to 1995) and using quantitative methods, we find that law enforcement agents were less likely to show up at protests when general religious actors, actions, or organizations were present. Rather than reflecting privileged legitimacy, we find that this protective effect is explained by religi…
The Legitimacy of Protest
Activists seek attention for their causes and want to win sympathy from the broader public. Why do some citizens but not others approve when activists use protest tactics? This is a crucial but poorly understood aspect of social movements. While most prior research has focused on the personal determinants of attitudes toward movements, we argue that proximity to protest may cultivate positive views about a movement. Individuals living near center…
The Effect of Religion on Blood Donation in the United States
Based on quantitative analysis of a nationally representative sample of 1,589 self-reported eligible blood donors in the United States, this paper investigates how religion influences giving the gift of life. I find significant positive effects for both organizational and subjective dimensions of religion. The reasons these dimensions promote this generous act vary, however. Religious service attendance works entirely through religious ties. Thes…
It takes two
The Migrant Border Crossing Study
Increased border enforcement efforts have redistributed unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States (US) away from traditional points of crossing, such as San Diego and El Paso, and into more remote areas along the US-Mexico border, including southern Arizona. Yet relatively little quantitative scholarly work exists examining Mexican migrants' crossing, apprehension, and repatriation experiences in southern Arizona. We contend that if sch…
Faith's wager
The 2017 Women's March
On January 21, 2017, over four hundred cities across the United States organized sister marches in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington. In this paper, we first compare the size of these marches to that of several significant protest-event sources to show how extraordinary turnout was that day. Then, analyzing a nationally representative sample of sister marches, we present univariate statistics for both event-level characteristics (su…
A New Picture of Protest
The National Study of Protest Events (NSPE) employed hypernetwork sampling to generate the first-ever nationally representative sample of protest events. Nearly complete information about various event characteristics was collected from participants in 1,037 unique protests across the United States in 2010 to 2011. The first part of this article reviews extant methodologies in protest-event research and discusses how the NSPE overcomes their reco…
Religious Resistance to Trump
Progressive faith communities joined the hundreds of thousands of others who took to the streets in downtown Chicago on January 21, 2017 to protest the Trump regime. The Women’s March on Chicago (WMC) provides an opportunity to shed new light on religious resistance given its unique features. Unlike protests in prior studies of progressive faith-based activism, the WMC was a secular event, involving little costs and risks, and for which religious…
Citizenship, Religion, and Protest
Does religion promote or deter political activism? Most arguments and evidence on this question do not account for variation by social position. We argue that for the 2006 spring immigrant rights marches understanding the influence of religion on participation requires a careful assessment of the relationship between various dimensions of religion and the risks, barriers, and motivations that are rooted in citizenship status of potential particip…
Catholic Social Activism
For years, I have searched for a book that brings the theological tenets of Catholic Social Thought (CST) to life. Sharon Erickson Nepstad’s Catholic Social Activism ended the search. Nepstad defines CST as “...[the] Church’s ethical principles about human nature, purpose, and social justice” (8). In this well-written, solidly researched, and engaging book, Nepstad leverages not only papal encyclicals and other official documents, but also the “l…
How Do Religion and Sexual Orientation Affect Support for U.S. Presidential Candidates? Evidence from a Survey Experiment
A growing body of research has examined how candidates’ religion or sexual orientation affect voting likelihood among the U.S. public. No systematic study, however, has focused on the combined effect of these traits. We draw on the intersectionality literature to develop and test hypotheses for this neglected, but important, combination. Results from an original survey experiment conducted in late June 2019 demonstrate that all respondents, as we…
The Political Mobilization of America's Congregations
We use data from the National Congregations Study (NCS), including data from the fourth wave, to describe congregations' political activity in 2018-2019, and to examine change in that activity since 1998. Congregations have become more politically mobilized since 1998, with the majority of congregations (56 percent) engaged in at least one of the political activities asked about in 2018-2019. Black Protestant congregations in particular experienc…
Sociology (25 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (19 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (10 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (7 works)