John W Compton
Biographic Data
| ID | 1001607 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John W Compton |
| GIVEN NAMES | John W |
| FAMILY NAME | Compton |
| SIGNATURE | COMPTON J W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Chapman University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1263-2665 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Does deference to religious authority predict support for political violence
Does deference to religious authority undermine support for democratic norms, including those forbidding the use of violence for political ends? Scholars have struggled to answer this question, in part, we believe, because they have typically employed proxies for religious deference (e.g. Biblical literalism, worship attendance, and self-reported religiosity) instead of measuring it directly. We develop a new measure of deference to religious aut…
Manufacturing a Protestant Consensus
The party regime concept is central to the study of American political development. Yet many questions about the processes through which party regimes are created, maintained, and dismantled remain unanswered. This article argues that religious bodies have historically played an important role in these processes. Specifically, I demonstrate that “mainline” Protestant groups made three distinct contributions to the entrenchment of the post–New Dea…
Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow
A review of Brendan J J Payne's Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South
Family Matters
The End of Empathy
The End of Empathy develops a theoretical framework to explain both the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth. The theory proceeds from the premise that religious conviction by itself is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically—for example, by championing reforms that transfer resources or polit…
End of Empathy
The Third Disestablishment
Steven K. Green, the author of several well-received books on U.S. church-state relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has now turned his attention to the post-World War II period. In The Third Disestablishment, he examines the critical three-decade period, beginning with Everson v. Board of Education (1947), in which the Supreme Court effectively ended teacher-led prayer and Bible-reading in the public schools, imposed new re…
Creaturely Communal Ontology in Practice
This article is born out of a deep concern for our current ecological crisis and serves as a beginning foundational work for how the Christian tradition can address global climate change. Our current way of being gives precedence to the autonomous individual, whose freedom is characterized by disregard for other creatures. John Zizioulas' communal ontology demonstrates that as the world was created out of God's loving will, it is comprised of rel…
Why the Covenant Worked
Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what …
Response to Benjamin Lynerd
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
First Amendment Religious Liberties
In First Amendment Religious Liberties, Tracy L. Cook examines more than six decades of polling data to determine whether there is “a pattern of congruence” between the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment's religion clauses, on the one hand, and “general public opinion,” on the other (p. 5). If the results are often inconclusive, the book nonetheless provides a highly useful overview of available public opinion data on a host of…
Political Theory in Institutional Context
In the aftermath of the Stamp Act, prominent American thinkers of otherwise unquestioned Whiggish affiliation adopted an expansive view of the king’s prerogative powers while simultaneously denying Parliament’s authority to interfere in the internal governance of the colonies. Scholars have generally attributed this stance, known as “patriot royalism,” to political necessity: with no other means of disputing Parliament’s oppressive actions, despe…
The Emancipation of the American Mind
Scholars have generally traced J.S. Mill's interest in the United States to the commercial and democratic aspects of American society. Yet Mill also suggested a third respect in which America was unique: it was the only existing nation founded on the basis of “abstract principles.” This insight provides the key to a fuller understanding of Mill's various writings on America. In his early essays, Mill worried that America's founding principles and…
Connecting Congress to World Legislatures
In the opening chapter of Exporting Congress, Timothy Power and Nicol Rae spell out an ambitious and commendable goal for their edited volume, namely, to bridge the vast divide between comparative legislative studies and the literature on the US Congress. Although the two streams of research are thriving independently, few scholars have examined the extent to which research findings on the US Congress are generalizeable to other legislatures, and…
Family Matters
Why the Covenant Worked
Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what …
Political Theory in Institutional Context
In the aftermath of the Stamp Act, prominent American thinkers of otherwise unquestioned Whiggish affiliation adopted an expansive view of the king’s prerogative powers while simultaneously denying Parliament’s authority to interfere in the internal governance of the colonies. Scholars have generally attributed this stance, known as “patriot royalism,” to political necessity: with no other means of disputing Parliament’s oppressive actions, despe…
The Emancipation of the American Mind
Scholars have generally traced J.S. Mill's interest in the United States to the commercial and democratic aspects of American society. Yet Mill also suggested a third respect in which America was unique: it was the only existing nation founded on the basis of “abstract principles.” This insight provides the key to a fuller understanding of Mill's various writings on America. In his early essays, Mill worried that America's founding principles and…
Connecting Congress to World Legislatures
In the opening chapter of Exporting Congress, Timothy Power and Nicol Rae spell out an ambitious and commendable goal for their edited volume, namely, to bridge the vast divide between comparative legislative studies and the literature on the US Congress. Although the two streams of research are thriving independently, few scholars have examined the extent to which research findings on the US Congress are generalizeable to other legislatures, and…
The Emancipation of the American Mind
Scholars have generally traced J.S. Mill's interest in the United States to the commercial and democratic aspects of American society. Yet Mill also suggested a third respect in which America was unique: it was the only existing nation founded on the basis of “abstract principles.” This insight provides the key to a fuller understanding of Mill's various writings on America. In his early essays, Mill worried that America's founding principles and…
Political Theory in Institutional Context
In the aftermath of the Stamp Act, prominent American thinkers of otherwise unquestioned Whiggish affiliation adopted an expansive view of the king’s prerogative powers while simultaneously denying Parliament’s authority to interfere in the internal governance of the colonies. Scholars have generally attributed this stance, known as “patriot royalism,” to political necessity: with no other means of disputing Parliament’s oppressive actions, despe…
Response to Benjamin Lynerd
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
First Amendment Religious Liberties
In First Amendment Religious Liberties, Tracy L. Cook examines more than six decades of polling data to determine whether there is “a pattern of congruence” between the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment's religion clauses, on the one hand, and “general public opinion,” on the other (p. 5). If the results are often inconclusive, the book nonetheless provides a highly useful overview of available public opinion data on a host of…
The Third Disestablishment
Steven K. Green, the author of several well-received books on U.S. church-state relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has now turned his attention to the post-World War II period. In The Third Disestablishment, he examines the critical three-decade period, beginning with Everson v. Board of Education (1947), in which the Supreme Court effectively ended teacher-led prayer and Bible-reading in the public schools, imposed new re…
Creaturely Communal Ontology in Practice
This article is born out of a deep concern for our current ecological crisis and serves as a beginning foundational work for how the Christian tradition can address global climate change. Our current way of being gives precedence to the autonomous individual, whose freedom is characterized by disregard for other creatures. John Zizioulas' communal ontology demonstrates that as the world was created out of God's loving will, it is comprised of rel…
Why the Covenant Worked
Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what …
The End of Empathy
The End of Empathy develops a theoretical framework to explain both the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth. The theory proceeds from the premise that religious conviction by itself is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically—for example, by championing reforms that transfer resources or polit…
End of Empathy
Family Matters
Manufacturing a Protestant Consensus
The party regime concept is central to the study of American political development. Yet many questions about the processes through which party regimes are created, maintained, and dismantled remain unanswered. This article argues that religious bodies have historically played an important role in these processes. Specifically, I demonstrate that “mainline” Protestant groups made three distinct contributions to the entrenchment of the post–New Dea…
Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow
A review of Brendan J J Payne's Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South
Does deference to religious authority predict support for political violence
Does deference to religious authority undermine support for democratic norms, including those forbidding the use of violence for political ends? Scholars have struggled to answer this question, in part, we believe, because they have typically employed proxies for religious deference (e.g. Biblical literalism, worship attendance, and self-reported religiosity) instead of measuring it directly. We develop a new measure of deference to religious aut…
Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · History (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (5 works) · History (4 works)