Christopher D Bader
Biographic Data
| ID | 181710 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher D Bader |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher D |
| FAMILY NAME | Bader |
| SIGNATURE | BADER C D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Chapman University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8495-1919 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 302 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Support for Political Violence among the American Public: A Split-ballot Experiment
Mostly haunted: A socio-spatial analysis of ghost tourism in England and Wales
There is now a well-established literature on ghost tourism. However, much of this work examines aspects associated with the demand side of the industry, or the motivations and experiences of consumers. There are currently no studies that have sought to explore the supply of ghost tourism and the spatial, social, and economic relationships that exist between these places. Using Lower Tier Local Authorities (LTLAs) in England and Wales as the unit…
Measuring Religious Evil: Examining the Use of Single-Item Measures in Religious Research
Multiple-item indexes are ubiquitous within the sociology of religion. However, there are a growing number of articles in other disciplines that have advocated the use of single-item measures in specific circumstances. Using quantitative survey data taken from the United Kingdom, this article contributes to this literature by exploring the impact of single and multiple item measures of religious evil on a series of social and political attitudes.…
Marginalized, Secularized, and Popularized? The Prevalence and Patterns of Paranormal Belief in the United Kingdom
There is growing recognition of the prevalence of paranormal beliefs in Western countries. However, most of this interest has been focused on the United States and robust, comparative data remain limited. This study extends this literature to report findings from a national survey of the United Kingdom designed to assess the prevalence and patterns of paranormal beliefs. Although there are many similarities to previous research, the results also …
Sympathy for the Devil: Belief in Satan and Moral Beliefs
Previous research suggests that religious service attendance, biblical literalism, images of God, and other measures of religion are related to moral beliefs (i.e., that certain behaviors are wrong or deviant). Given previous theory and research on spiritual appraisals (particularly demonization and desecration), we argue that belief in Satan should also predict moral beliefs. Using the first four waves of the Baylor Religion Survey, we tested th…
Xenophobia, Partisanship, and Support for Donald Trump and the Republican Party
Fear of Crime on Community Engagement: Nonadditive and Nonlinear Effects by Gender
In this article, we propose that fear of crime has nonadditive and curvilinear effects on community engagement, and that this relationship varies by gender. We test our propositions utilizing the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 2. We find that fear of crime has a linear positive relationship with community engagement for men. For women, we find a curvilinear relationship. At low and average levels of fear, there is a positive relation…
Faithful Measures: New Methods in the Measurement of Religion
A venture into the art and science of measuring religion in everyday life In an era of rapid technological advances, the measures and methods used to generate data about religion have undergone remarkably little change. Faithful Measures pushes the study of religion into the 21st century by evaluating new and existing measures of religion and introducing new methods for tapping into religious behaviors and beliefs. This book offers a global and i…
Evaluating Survey Measures Using the Arda’s Measurement Wizard
"This chapter introduces a new resource for exploring and evaluating the survey items used in previous surveys, the Measurement Wizard, which allows for quick comparisons of survey items measuring the same concept. This resource offers a customized metadata archive that gives immediate access to thousands of questions from hundreds of surveys and provides an online tool for finding, comparing, and evaluating survey items. The majority of the chap…
Pathways to Discovery and Enlightenment: Amazon’s Recommendation System as a Source of Information on Religious and Paranormal Consumption Patterns
The Flesh and the Devil: Belief in Religious Evil and Views of Sexual Morality
We examine an understudied connection between religion and sexuality: beliefs about the reality of supernatural evil (Satan, hell, and demons). After controlling for multiple other aspects of religiosity, beliefs about religious evil remain a strong and consistent predictor of attitudes about issues involving sexuality, including abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and pornography use. Further, the effects of religious serv…
Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America
This slim volume, just 150 pages of text excluding front and back matter, presents an analysis of the Chapman University Annual Survey of American Fears using representative, scientific sampling methods. The survey has been conducted since 2014. The latest survey for this analysis was in 2018. The book does not include the survey instrument. The analysis relies on various forms of multivariate analysis with a several personal characteristics of t…
Deviance Management: Insiders, Outsiders, Hiders, and Drifters
Bigfoot: Undiscovered Primate or Interdimensional Spirit
For the Wrath of God: Fatalism and Images of God in Violent Regions of the World
Research has found that individuals use religion to understand one’s fate in life, which in turn impacts health outcomes. This may be particularly relevant in high conflict/violent regions of the world, where religious beliefs may be a particular important means to cope with one’s future in the wake of violence, instability, and uncertainty. In this article, we examine the role of images of God in predicting level of fatalism among individuals in…
A Bounded Affinity Theory of Religion and the Paranormal
We outline a theory of bounded affinity between religious experiences and beliefs and paranormalism, which emphasizes that religious and paranormal experiences and beliefs share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities. Despite these parallels, organized religious groups typically delineate a narrow subset of experiences and explanatory frames as acceptable and True, banishing others as either false or demonic. Accordin…
Desecration, Moral Boundaries, and the Movement of Law: The Case of Westboro Baptist Church
Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and legislative histories, we examine Westboro Baptist Church, a religious group infamous for homophobic rhetoric and funeral protests. Employing cultural and interactionist perspectives that focus on the semiotics of death, the sacred, and desecration, we outline how Westboro’s activities purposively violate deeply held signifiers of moral order through language, while simultaneously respecting…
The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
"Gordin (history, Princeton Univ.; Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly) presents here an account of what has become known as the Velikovsky affair. Immanuel Velikovsky, a Russian catastrophist who published Worlds in Collision in 1950, ignited a national controversy when he argued that Jupiter ejected Venus like a comet nearly 20,000 years ago and the passing planet caused Earth's orbit and axis to change, thus s…
A social anthropology of ghosts in twenty-first-century America
Although belief in ghosts or analogous concepts is prevalent cross-culturally, including in contemporary Western cultures, social scientific treatments of spirit belief and experience often dismiss such views as superstitious, or overlook this dimension of culture completely. Using mixed methods, we examine ghost belief, experience, and media consumption, as well as the practice of ‘ghost hunting’ in the United States. Results from a national sur…
Toward Assessing and Improving Survey Questions on Religion: The Arda's Measurement Wizard
Developing survey measures of religion is deceptively difficult. As religion in America becomes more diverse and research projects become more global, finding a shared vocabulary that taps into concepts of interest and selecting response categories that capture the full range of choices becomes ever more challenging. This research project introduces new tools and techniques for exploring and evaluating past survey measures of religion, including …
Religion, Self Control, and Substance Use
Previous research has examined a number of mechanisms through which religion might have an indirect influence on substance use. One potential intervening mechanism that has received little empirical attention is self control. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) we (1) examine the association between religion and self control, (2) determine if self control mediates the effect of religiosity on substanc…
Countervailing Forces: Religiosity and Paranormal Belief in Italy
Due to the unique cultural niche inhabited by 'paranormal' beliefs and experiences, social scientists have struggled to understand the relationship between religion and the paranormal. Complicating matters is the fact that extant research has primarily focused upon North America, leaving open the possible relationship between these two spheres of the supernatural in less religiously pluralistic contexts. Using data from a random, national survey …
The Ties That Bind: Network Overlap Among Independent Congregations
While the availability of Internet data on religious organizations has increased exponentially the use of such resources remains limited. The authors make use of a new research method involving weblink analysis to study nondenominational churches which are difficult to examine using conventional research techniques. One reason for this is the perception that independent churches lack the coherency of denominational populations, which creates meth…
What Does God Require? Understanding Religious Context and Morality
In God We Trust: Images of God and Trust in the United States among the Highly Religious
In this analysis, the authors use Greeley's 'religion as poetry' model to frame an analysis of images of God and trust among the highly religious. Using the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, the authors regress four ordinal measures of social trust on two images of God measures and a bank of religion and demographic controls. The authors find that having a loving image of God creates greater levels of trust in all four measures among the highly religi…
American Piety 2005: Content and Methods of the Baylor Religion Survey
The Baylor Religion Survey (BRS) is a national population survey of religious characteristics, orientations, and attitudes modeled after the General Social Survey. This article provides an overview of the content of the 2005 BRS along with a detailed description of our methods of data collection and some descriptive characteristics from our sample of 1,721 adults in the United States. A third of the survey is dedicated solely to religion items fo…
God in America: Why Theology Is Not Simply the Concern of Philosophers
As citizens of the most technologically advanced and economically developed country in the world, nearly all Americans stalwartly maintain their faith in God, much more so than residents of other postindustrial countries (Norris and Ingelhart 2004). But what is the content and meaning of this belief? Perhaps belief in God has become so pervasive in contemporary American culture that it reflects little about believers' deeper religious thoughts, i…
Unraveling Religious Worldviews: The Relationship between Images of God and Political Ideology in a Cross-Cultural Analysis
Not only do few studies address the issue of how religious belief relates to political ideology, but little attempt has also been made to analyze this relationship from a comparative perspective. Using data from the International Social Survey Program, we examine how images of God, as measured by God's perceived level of engagement and authority, relate to political ideology in seven Western industrial and postindustrial societies. We find that v…
Religion, Self Control, and Substance Use
Previous research has examined a number of mechanisms through which religion might have an indirect influence on substance use. One potential intervening mechanism that has received little empirical attention is self control. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) we (1) examine the association between religion and self control, (2) determine if self control mediates the effect of religiosity on substanc…
In God We Trust: Images of God and Trust in the United States among the Highly Religious
In this analysis, the authors use Greeley's 'religion as poetry' model to frame an analysis of images of God and trust among the highly religious. Using the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, the authors regress four ordinal measures of social trust on two images of God measures and a bank of religion and demographic controls. The authors find that having a loving image of God creates greater levels of trust in all four measures among the highly religi…
Do Moral Communities Play A Role In Criminal Sentencing? Evidence from Pennsylvania
theory developed by Rodney Stark. We suspect that Christian moral communities might shape notions of perceived blameworthiness for court community actors. Such moral communities might also affect notions of community protection - affecting perceptions of dangerousness, or perhaps rehabilitation, and might influence practical constraints/consequences (e.g., local political ramifications of harsh or lenient sentences). We examine these questions us…
A Bounded Affinity Theory of Religion and the Paranormal
We outline a theory of bounded affinity between religious experiences and beliefs and paranormalism, which emphasizes that religious and paranormal experiences and beliefs share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities. Despite these parallels, organized religious groups typically delineate a narrow subset of experiences and explanatory frames as acceptable and True, banishing others as either false or demonic. Accordin…
Countervailing Forces: Religiosity and Paranormal Belief in Italy
Due to the unique cultural niche inhabited by 'paranormal' beliefs and experiences, social scientists have struggled to understand the relationship between religion and the paranormal. Complicating matters is the fact that extant research has primarily focused upon North America, leaving open the possible relationship between these two spheres of the supernatural in less religiously pluralistic contexts. Using data from a random, national survey …
The Flesh and the Devil: Belief in Religious Evil and Views of Sexual Morality
We examine an understudied connection between religion and sexuality: beliefs about the reality of supernatural evil (Satan, hell, and demons). After controlling for multiple other aspects of religiosity, beliefs about religious evil remain a strong and consistent predictor of attitudes about issues involving sexuality, including abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and pornography use. Further, the effects of religious serv…
Desecration, Moral Boundaries, and the Movement of Law: The Case of Westboro Baptist Church
Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and legislative histories, we examine Westboro Baptist Church, a religious group infamous for homophobic rhetoric and funeral protests. Employing cultural and interactionist perspectives that focus on the semiotics of death, the sacred, and desecration, we outline how Westboro’s activities purposively violate deeply held signifiers of moral order through language, while simultaneously respecting…
Doing Field Studies of Religious Movements: An Agenda
Although the social scientific study of religion has seen the accumulation of numerous case studies, comparative work involving substantial numbers of cases is rare. In the absence of an accepted agenda for field research, field studies contain information relevant to the study at hand, but do not add systematically to a cumulative database. By contrast, field studies in anthropology may contain idiosyncratic information relevant to the author's …
Where Have All the Communes Gone? Religion's Effect on the Survival of Communes
Although previous research has found religion to have a significant effect on commune survival, these conclusions were typically based on bivariate analyses. Drawing on data collected by the Fellowship for Intentional Community, we present a multivariate analysis of communal survival using a comparatively large sample (N = 454) of modern American communes. Controlling for key factors suggested by the literature, we find that religion does not hav…
For the Wrath of God: Fatalism and Images of God in Violent Regions of the World
Research has found that individuals use religion to understand one’s fate in life, which in turn impacts health outcomes. This may be particularly relevant in high conflict/violent regions of the world, where religious beliefs may be a particular important means to cope with one’s future in the wake of violence, instability, and uncertainty. In this article, we examine the role of images of God in predicting level of fatalism among individuals in…
Marginalized, Secularized, and Popularized? The Prevalence and Patterns of Paranormal Belief in the United Kingdom
There is growing recognition of the prevalence of paranormal beliefs in Western countries. However, most of this interest has been focused on the United States and robust, comparative data remain limited. This study extends this literature to report findings from a national survey of the United Kingdom designed to assess the prevalence and patterns of paranormal beliefs. Although there are many similarities to previous research, the results also …
Sympathy for the Devil: Belief in Satan and Moral Beliefs
Previous research suggests that religious service attendance, biblical literalism, images of God, and other measures of religion are related to moral beliefs (i.e., that certain behaviors are wrong or deviant). Given previous theory and research on spiritual appraisals (particularly demonization and desecration), we argue that belief in Satan should also predict moral beliefs. Using the first four waves of the Baylor Religion Survey, we tested th…
Toward Assessing and Improving Survey Questions on Religion: The Arda's Measurement Wizard
Developing survey measures of religion is deceptively difficult. As religion in America becomes more diverse and research projects become more global, finding a shared vocabulary that taps into concepts of interest and selecting response categories that capture the full range of choices becomes ever more challenging. This research project introduces new tools and techniques for exploring and evaluating past survey measures of religion, including …
Supernatural Support Groups: Who Are the UFO Abductees and Ritual-Abuse Survivors
In the 1980s two different groups emerged that exhibited a strikingly similar combination of the quasi-religious and psychotherapeutic-UFO abductees and ritual-abuse survivors. Both movements focused on healing members from victimization they had experienced at the hands of beings of often supernatural power. Further, both movements attempt to use techniques developed in psychotherapeutic circles, such as hypnosis, art therapy, and role playing, …
The Ties That Bind: Network Overlap Among Independent Congregations
While the availability of Internet data on religious organizations has increased exponentially the use of such resources remains limited. The authors make use of a new research method involving weblink analysis to study nondenominational churches which are difficult to examine using conventional research techniques. One reason for this is the perception that independent churches lack the coherency of denominational populations, which creates meth…
Doing Field Studies of Religious Movements: An Agenda
Although the social scientific study of religion has seen the accumulation of numerous case studies, comparative work involving substantial numbers of cases is rare. In the absence of an accepted agenda for field research, field studies contain information relevant to the study at hand, but do not add systematically to a cumulative database. By contrast, field studies in anthropology may contain idiosyncratic information relevant to the author's …
Supernatural Support Groups: Who Are the UFO Abductees and Ritual-Abuse Survivors
In the 1980s two different groups emerged that exhibited a strikingly similar combination of the quasi-religious and psychotherapeutic-UFO abductees and ritual-abuse survivors. Both movements focused on healing members from victimization they had experienced at the hands of beings of often supernatural power. Further, both movements attempt to use techniques developed in psychotherapeutic circles, such as hypnosis, art therapy, and role playing, …
Where Have All the Communes Gone? Religion's Effect on the Survival of Communes
Although previous research has found religion to have a significant effect on commune survival, these conclusions were typically based on bivariate analyses. Drawing on data collected by the Fellowship for Intentional Community, we present a multivariate analysis of communal survival using a comparatively large sample (N = 454) of modern American communes. Controlling for key factors suggested by the literature, we find that religion does not hav…
God in America: Why Theology Is Not Simply the Concern of Philosophers
As citizens of the most technologically advanced and economically developed country in the world, nearly all Americans stalwartly maintain their faith in God, much more so than residents of other postindustrial countries (Norris and Ingelhart 2004). But what is the content and meaning of this belief? Perhaps belief in God has become so pervasive in contemporary American culture that it reflects little about believers' deeper religious thoughts, i…
American Piety 2005: Content and Methods of the Baylor Religion Survey
The Baylor Religion Survey (BRS) is a national population survey of religious characteristics, orientations, and attitudes modeled after the General Social Survey. This article provides an overview of the content of the 2005 BRS along with a detailed description of our methods of data collection and some descriptive characteristics from our sample of 1,721 adults in the United States. A third of the survey is dedicated solely to religion items fo…
Do Moral Communities Play A Role In Criminal Sentencing? Evidence from Pennsylvania
theory developed by Rodney Stark. We suspect that Christian moral communities might shape notions of perceived blameworthiness for court community actors. Such moral communities might also affect notions of community protection - affecting perceptions of dangerousness, or perhaps rehabilitation, and might influence practical constraints/consequences (e.g., local political ramifications of harsh or lenient sentences). We examine these questions us…
Unraveling Religious Worldviews: The Relationship between Images of God and Political Ideology in a Cross-Cultural Analysis
Not only do few studies address the issue of how religious belief relates to political ideology, but little attempt has also been made to analyze this relationship from a comparative perspective. Using data from the International Social Survey Program, we examine how images of God, as measured by God's perceived level of engagement and authority, relate to political ideology in seven Western industrial and postindustrial societies. We find that v…
In God We Trust: Images of God and Trust in the United States among the Highly Religious
In this analysis, the authors use Greeley's 'religion as poetry' model to frame an analysis of images of God and trust among the highly religious. Using the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, the authors regress four ordinal measures of social trust on two images of God measures and a bank of religion and demographic controls. The authors find that having a loving image of God creates greater levels of trust in all four measures among the highly religi…
What Does God Require? Understanding Religious Context and Morality
The Ties That Bind: Network Overlap Among Independent Congregations
While the availability of Internet data on religious organizations has increased exponentially the use of such resources remains limited. The authors make use of a new research method involving weblink analysis to study nondenominational churches which are difficult to examine using conventional research techniques. One reason for this is the perception that independent churches lack the coherency of denominational populations, which creates meth…
Countervailing Forces: Religiosity and Paranormal Belief in Italy
Due to the unique cultural niche inhabited by 'paranormal' beliefs and experiences, social scientists have struggled to understand the relationship between religion and the paranormal. Complicating matters is the fact that extant research has primarily focused upon North America, leaving open the possible relationship between these two spheres of the supernatural in less religiously pluralistic contexts. Using data from a random, national survey …
Religion, Self Control, and Substance Use
Previous research has examined a number of mechanisms through which religion might have an indirect influence on substance use. One potential intervening mechanism that has received little empirical attention is self control. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) we (1) examine the association between religion and self control, (2) determine if self control mediates the effect of religiosity on substanc…
The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
"Gordin (history, Princeton Univ.; Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly) presents here an account of what has become known as the Velikovsky affair. Immanuel Velikovsky, a Russian catastrophist who published Worlds in Collision in 1950, ignited a national controversy when he argued that Jupiter ejected Venus like a comet nearly 20,000 years ago and the passing planet caused Earth's orbit and axis to change, thus s…
A social anthropology of ghosts in twenty-first-century America
Although belief in ghosts or analogous concepts is prevalent cross-culturally, including in contemporary Western cultures, social scientific treatments of spirit belief and experience often dismiss such views as superstitious, or overlook this dimension of culture completely. Using mixed methods, we examine ghost belief, experience, and media consumption, as well as the practice of ‘ghost hunting’ in the United States. Results from a national sur…
Toward Assessing and Improving Survey Questions on Religion: The Arda's Measurement Wizard
Developing survey measures of religion is deceptively difficult. As religion in America becomes more diverse and research projects become more global, finding a shared vocabulary that taps into concepts of interest and selecting response categories that capture the full range of choices becomes ever more challenging. This research project introduces new tools and techniques for exploring and evaluating past survey measures of religion, including …
Desecration, Moral Boundaries, and the Movement of Law: The Case of Westboro Baptist Church
Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and legislative histories, we examine Westboro Baptist Church, a religious group infamous for homophobic rhetoric and funeral protests. Employing cultural and interactionist perspectives that focus on the semiotics of death, the sacred, and desecration, we outline how Westboro’s activities purposively violate deeply held signifiers of moral order through language, while simultaneously respecting…
A Bounded Affinity Theory of Religion and the Paranormal
We outline a theory of bounded affinity between religious experiences and beliefs and paranormalism, which emphasizes that religious and paranormal experiences and beliefs share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities. Despite these parallels, organized religious groups typically delineate a narrow subset of experiences and explanatory frames as acceptable and True, banishing others as either false or demonic. Accordin…
For the Wrath of God: Fatalism and Images of God in Violent Regions of the World
Research has found that individuals use religion to understand one’s fate in life, which in turn impacts health outcomes. This may be particularly relevant in high conflict/violent regions of the world, where religious beliefs may be a particular important means to cope with one’s future in the wake of violence, instability, and uncertainty. In this article, we examine the role of images of God in predicting level of fatalism among individuals in…
Deviance Management: Insiders, Outsiders, Hiders, and Drifters
Bigfoot: Undiscovered Primate or Interdimensional Spirit
Faithful Measures: New Methods in the Measurement of Religion
A venture into the art and science of measuring religion in everyday life In an era of rapid technological advances, the measures and methods used to generate data about religion have undergone remarkably little change. Faithful Measures pushes the study of religion into the 21st century by evaluating new and existing measures of religion and introducing new methods for tapping into religious behaviors and beliefs. This book offers a global and i…
Evaluating Survey Measures Using the Arda’s Measurement Wizard
"This chapter introduces a new resource for exploring and evaluating the survey items used in previous surveys, the Measurement Wizard, which allows for quick comparisons of survey items measuring the same concept. This resource offers a customized metadata archive that gives immediate access to thousands of questions from hundreds of surveys and provides an online tool for finding, comparing, and evaluating survey items. The majority of the chap…
Pathways to Discovery and Enlightenment: Amazon’s Recommendation System as a Source of Information on Religious and Paranormal Consumption Patterns
The Flesh and the Devil: Belief in Religious Evil and Views of Sexual Morality
We examine an understudied connection between religion and sexuality: beliefs about the reality of supernatural evil (Satan, hell, and demons). After controlling for multiple other aspects of religiosity, beliefs about religious evil remain a strong and consistent predictor of attitudes about issues involving sexuality, including abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and pornography use. Further, the effects of religious serv…
Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America
This slim volume, just 150 pages of text excluding front and back matter, presents an analysis of the Chapman University Annual Survey of American Fears using representative, scientific sampling methods. The survey has been conducted since 2014. The latest survey for this analysis was in 2018. The book does not include the survey instrument. The analysis relies on various forms of multivariate analysis with a several personal characteristics of t…
Psychology (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (8 works)