The Sociology of Religion Section’s Distinguished Article Award
2023: Ruth Braunstein, University of Connecticut, “A Theory of Political Backlash: Assessing the Religious Right’s Effects on the Religious Field.” Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, 83(3):293–323. 2022.
2023 Honorable Mention: Jesse Smith and Gary Adler, Pennsylvania State University,“What Isn’t Christian Nationalism: A Call for Conceptual and Empirical Splitting.” Socius, 8. 2022.
2022: Landon Schnabel, Cornell University, “Opiate of the Masses? Inequality, Religion, and Political Ideology in the United States.” Social Forces. 2021.
2022 Honorable Mention: Patricia Homan and Amy Burdette, Florida State University, “When Religion Hurts: Structural Sexism and Health in Religious Congregations.” American Sociological Review. 2021.
2021: John O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, “Re-Examining Restructuring: Racialization, Religious Conservatism, and Political Leanings in Contemporary American Life.” Social Forces, Volume 99, Issue 2, pp. 474–503. 2020.
2021 Honorable Mention: Aliza Luft, “Religion in Vichy France: How Meso-Level Actors Contribute to Authoritarian Legitimation.” European Journal of Sociology, Volume 61, Issue 1, pp. 67-101. 2020.
2020: Sarah Diefendorf, “Contemporary Evangelical Responses to Feminism and the Imagined Secular,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44(4):1003-1026. 2019.
2019: Brian Powell, Landon Schnabel, and Lauren Apgar, “Denial of service to same-sex and interracial couples: Evidence from a national survey experiment,” Science Advances 3(12). 2017.
2019 Honorable Mention: Paul Joosse, “Max Weber’s Disciples: Theorizing the Charismatic Aristocracy,” Sociological Theory 35(4):334-358. 2017.
2018: Mark Anthony Hoffman, Jean-Phillipe Cointet, Philipp Brandt, Newton Key, and Peter Bearman, “The (Protestant) Bible, the (printed) sermon, and the word(s): The semantic structure of the Conformist and Dissenting Bible, 1660–1780,” Poetics 68:89-103. 2017.
2018 Honorable Mention: Sorcha A Brophy, “Orthodoxy as Project: Temporality and Action in an American Protestant Denomination,” Sociology of Religion 77(2):123-143. 2016.
2017: Robert Braun, “Religious Minorities and Resistance to Genocide: The Collective Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust,” American Political Science Review 110(1):127-47. 2016.
2017 Honorable Mention: Landon Schnabel, “The Gender Pray Gap: Wage Labor and the Religiosity of High-Earning Women and Men,” Gender & Society 30(4):643-69. 2016.
2016: Conrad Hackett, Marcin Stonawski, Michaela Potančoková, Brian J. Grim, and Vegard Skirbekk, “The Future Size of Religiously Affiliated and Unaffiliated Populations,” Demographic Research 32:829-842. 2015.
2016: J. E. Sumerau, Ryan T. Cragun, and Lain A. B. Mathers, “Contemporary Religion and the Cisgendering of Reality,” Social Currents 3(3):293-311. 2015.
2014: Neal Krause, University of Michigan, “Valuing the Life Experience of Old Adults and Change in Depressive Symptoms: Exploring the Overlooked Benefit of Involvement in Religion,” Journal of Aging and Health 24(2):227-249. 2012.
2013: Robert D. Woodberry, “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” American Political Science Review 106(2):244-274. 2012.
2012: Nicholas Vargas, Purdue University, and Matthew Loveland, Le Moyne College, “Befriending the ‘Other’: Patterns of Social Ties between the Religious and Non-religious,” Sociological Perspectives 54(4):713-731. 2011.
2011: Douglas Marshall, University of South Alabama, “Temptation, Tradition, and Taboo: A Theory of Sacralization,” Sociological Theory 28(1):64-90. 2010.
2010: Nancy K. Davis, DePauw University, and Robert V. Robinson, Indiana University, “Overcoming Movement Obstacles by the Religiously Orthodox: The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Shas in Israel, Communione e Liberazione in Italy, and the Salvation Army in the United States” American Journal of Sociology 114(5):1302-1349. 2009.
2009: Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke, “Religious Persecution in Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulated Religious Economies?” American Sociological Review 72(4):633-658. 2007.
2008: Kelly H. Chong, “Negotiating Patriarchy: South Korean Evangelical Women and the Politics of Gender,” Gender and Society 20(6):697-724. 2006.
2007: Nancy Davis, DePauw University, and Robert Robinson, Indiana University, “The Egalitarian Face of Islamic Orthodoxy: Support for Islamic Law and Economic Justice in Seven Muslim-Majority Nations,” American Sociological Review 71(2):167-190. 2006.
2006: Fenggang Yang, Purdue University, “The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China,” The Sociological Quarterly 47(1):93-122. 2006.
2005: Prema Kurien, Syracuse University, “Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic Nationalism: The Development of an American Hinduism,” Social Problems 51(3):362-385. 2004.
2004: David Smilde, “Skirting the Instrumental Paradox: Intentional Belief Through Narrative in Latin American Pentecostalism,” Qualitative Sociology 26(3):313-329. 2003.
2004: Robert Wuthnow, Conrad Hackett, and Becky Yang Hsu, “The Effectiveness and Trustworthiness of Faith-Based and Other Service Organizations: A Study of Recipients’ Perceptions,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43(1):1-17. 2004.
2003: Michael Young, University of Texas, Austin, “Confessional Protest: The Religious Birth of U.S. National Social Movements,” American Sociological Review 67(5):660-688. 2002.
2002: Mansoor Moaddel, Eastern Michigan University, “Conditions for Ideological Production: The Origins of Islamic Modernism in India, Egypt, and Iran,” Theory and Society 30(5):669-731. 2001.
2001: Brian Steensland, Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Tegnerus, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Robert D. Woodberry, “The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of Art,” Social Forces 79(1):291-318. 2000.
2000: Rhys H. Williams, Southern Illinois University, “Visions of the Good Society and the Religious Roots of American Political Culture,” Sociology of Religion 60(1):1-34. 1999.
1999: Mark D. Regnerus and Christian Smith, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Selective Deprivation Among American Religious Traditions: The Reversal of the Great Reversal,” Social Forces 76(4):1347-1372. 1998.
1998: Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania, “An Asian Route to Capitalism: Religious Economy and the Origins of Self-Transforming Growth in Japan,” American Sociological Review 62(6):843-865. 1997.
1997: Paula D. Nesbitt, Iliff School of Theology, “First- and Second-Career Clergy: Influences of Age and Gender on the Career-Stage Paradigm,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34(2):152-171. 1995.
The Sociology of Religion Section’s Distinguished Book Award
2023: Korie Little Edwards, Ohio State University, and Michelle Oyakawa, Muskingum University, Smart Suits, Tattered Boots: Black Ministers Mobilizing the Black Church in the Twenty-First Century. New York University Press. 2022.
2022: Mark Massoud, University of California, Santa Cruz, Shari’a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics. Cambridge University Press. 2021.
2021: Tahseen Shams, University of Pennsylvania, Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World. Stanford University Press. 2020.
2021 Honorable Mention: Casey Ritchie Clevenger, Unequal Partners: In Search of Transnational Catholic Sisterhood. University of Chicago Press. 2020.
2020: Melissa Wilde, Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion. University of California Press. 2020.
2020 Honorable Mention: Brandon Vaidyanathan, Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South. Cornell University Press. 2019.
2019: John O’Brian, Keeping it Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys. Princeton University Press. 2017.
2019 Honorable Mention: Jaime Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out. Oxford University Press. 2018.
2018: Fareen Parvez, Politicizing Islam: the Islamic Revival in France and India. Oxford University Press. 2017.
2018 Honorable Mention: Tricia Bruce, Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church. Oxford University Press. 2017.
2017: Kelsy Burke, Christians under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet. University of California Press. 2016.
2016: Christopher Bail, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations became Mainstream. Princeton University Press. 2015.
2015: Vern Bengtson, Norella Putney, and Susan Harris, Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations. Oxford University Press. 2013.
2014: Anna Sun, Kenyon College, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton University Press. 2013.
2013: Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press. 2011.
2012: Susan Crawford Sullivan, College of the Holy Cross, Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. University of Chicago Press. 2012.
2011: Courtney Bender, Columbia University, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. University of Chicago Press.
2010: Melissa M. Wilcox, Whitman College, Queer Women and Religious Individualism. Indiana University Press. 2009.
2010: John R. Hall, University of California, Davis, Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity. Polity. 2009.
2009: Kelly Chong, University of Kansas, Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea. Harvard University Press. 2008.
2008: Anthony Gill, University of Washington, The Political Origins of Religious Liberty. Cambridge University Press. 2007.
2008: David Smilde, University of Georgia, Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. University of California Press. 2007.
2007: Mansoor Moaddel, Eastern Michigan University, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse. University of Chicago Press. 2005.
2007: Geneviève Zubrzycki, University of Michigan, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland. University of Chicago Press. 2006.
2006: Mark Chaves, University of Arizona, Congregations in America. Harvard University Press. 2004.
2006: Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota, Religion and Family in a Changing Society. Princeton University Press. 2006.
2005: Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Boston University, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners. University of California Press. 2005.
2004: Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press. 2003.
2003: Richard Wood, University of New Mexico, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America. University of Chicago Press. 2002.
2002: John H. Evans, Univeristy of California, San Diego, Playing God?: Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate. University of Chicago Press. 2001.
2001: Rodney Starke Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. University of California Press. 2000.
2000: Penny Edgell Becker, Cornell University, Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life. Cambridge University Press. 1999.
1999: Lutz Kaelber, Lyndon State College, Schoolof Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities. Pennsylvania State University Press. 1998.
1998: Lyn Rapaport, Pomona College, Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory. Identity, and Jewish-German Relations. Cambridge University Press. 1997.
1997: Paul Numrich, University of Illinois, Chicago, Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples. University of Tennessee Press. 1996.
The Sociology of Religion Section’s Student Paper Award
2023: Miray Philips, University of Toronto, “(Mis-)Representing Christian Persecution: On the Political Misuses of Quantification in Advocacy.”
2023 Honorable Mention: Md Abdus Sabur, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “Gender, Veiling, and Class: Symbolic Boundaries and Veiling in Bengali Muslim Families.”
2022: Valentina Cantori, University of Southern California, “Inclusive and Included? Practices of Civic Inclusivity of American Muslims in Los Angeles”
2022 Honorable Mention: Anthony Albanese, Pennsylvania State University, “Perceived Threat and Reactive Identification: Right-Wing Secularization in Germany, 1999-2017”
2021: Miray Philips, University of Minnesota, “‘We love martyrdom, but we also love life’: Coptic Cultural Trauma between Martyrdom and Rights”
2021 Honorable Mention: Michael Rotolo, University of Notre Dame, “Fight-or-Flight for America: The Development of Christian Nationalist Ideology during the Transition to Adulthood”
2020: Daniel Bolger, “The Racial Politics of Place in Faith-Based Social Service Provision,” Social Problems. 2020.
2020 Honorable Mention: Helana Darwin, “Navigating the Religious Gender Binary,” Sociology of Religion 81(2):185-205. 2020.
2019: Lindsay Glassman, University of Pennsylvania, “In the Lord’s Hands: Divine Healing and Embodiment in a Fundamentalist Christian Church”
2019 Honorable Mention: Michael Rotolo, University of Notre Dame, “Imagining Religion: The Unconscious Substructures of American Religious Understandings”
2018: Di Di, Rice University, “Navigating Gender Norms: Gender Agency in Buddhist Temples in Mainland China and the US”
2017: Rachel Ellis, “‘You’re Not Serving Time, You’re Serving Christ’: Neo-liberal Religious Messages in the Shadow of Mass Incarceration”
2017 Honorable Mention: Peter Harvey, “’It’s a Total Way of Life’: Catholic Priests, Identity Work, and Female Ordination”
2017 Honorable Mention: Landon Schnabel, “Secularism and Fertility Worldwide”
2016: Orestes P. Hastings, “Not a Lonely Crowd? Social Connectedness, Religious Service Attendance, and the Spiritual But Not Religious,” Social Science Research 57:63-79. 2016.
2015: Robert Braun, “Religious Minorities and Resistance to Genocide: The Collective Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust,” American Journal of Political Science 110:127-147. 2016.
2014: Eric W. Schoon and Joseph West, University of Arizona, “From Prophecy to Practice: Mutual Selection Cycles in the Routinization of Charismatic Authority,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(4):781-797. 2017.
2013: Jeffrey Guhin, “Why Worry?: Evolution and Narrative Path Dependence in Sunni and Evangelical High Schools”
2013: Jaime Kucinskas, “From Buddhist-Inspired Meditation to Mindfulness as a Secular Panacea: How Meditation Moves”
2012: Nicholas Vargas, Purdue University, “Retrospective Accounts of Religious Disaffiliation in the U.S.: Stressors, Skepticism, and Political Factors,” Sociology of Religion 73(2):200-223. 2012.
2011: Shane Sharp, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “How Does Prayer Help Manage Emotions?” Social Psychological Quarterly 73(4):417-437. 2010.
2010: Z. Fareen Parvez, University of California, Berkely, “Debating the Burqa in France: The Antipolitics of Islamic Revival,” Qualitative Sociology 34(2):287-312. 2011.
2009: Phillip Connor, Princeton University, “Contexts of Immigrant Receptivity and Immigrant Religious Outcomes: The Case of Muslims in Western Europe,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33(3):376-403. 2010.
2008: J. Shane Sharp, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Escaping Symbolic Entrapment, Maintaining Social Identities,” Social Problems 56(2):267-284. 2009.
2007: Christopher Scheitle, Pennsylvania State University, “Organizational Niches and Religious Markets: Uniting Two Literatures,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 3:1-29. 2007.
2006: Christopher P. Scheitle, Pennsylvania State University, “The Social and Symbolic Boundaries of Congregations: An Analysis of Website Links,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 1, article 6. 2005.
2006 Honorable Mention: Jenny Trinitapoli, University of Texas, Austin, “Religion and HIV Status in Sub-Saharan Africa: Examining Influence and Pathways”
2005: Omar Lizardo and Jessica L. Collett, University of Arizona, “Why Biology is not (Religious) Destiny: A Second Look at Gender Differences in Religiosity”
2004: Melinda Lundquist Denton, “Gender and Marital Decision Making: Negotiating Religious Ideology and Practice,” Social Forces 82(3):1151-1180. 2004.
2003: Kwai Hang Ng, University of Chicago, “Seeking the Christian Tutelage: Agency and Culture in Chinese Immigrants’ Conversion to Christianity,” Sociology of Religion 63(2):195-214. 2002.
2002: Kelly Besecke, Colorado College, “Religion as a Societal Conversation about Transcendent Meaning,” Sociological Theory 23(2):179-196. 2005.
2001: Rebecca Culyba, “Who Can Find A Virtous Woman? Gender Indiology and Culture in a Black Holiness Church”
2000: W. Bradford Wilcox, Princeton University, “Conservative Protestant Childrearing: Authoritarian or Authorotative?” American Sociological Review 63(6):796-809. 1998.
1999: Jason Schnittker, Indiana University, “When is Faith Enough?: The Effects of Religious Involvement on Depression,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40(3):393-411. 2001.
1998: Philip Zuckerman, University of Oregon, “The Sociology of Religious Schisms: The Call for Theoretical Innovation”
The Sociology of Religion Section’s Sandra Barnes Anti-Racist Scholarship Award
Award first presented in 2021; renamed for inaugural winner Sandra Barnes in 2022
2023: Prema Kurien, Syracuse University
2022: Elizabeth Becker, University of Heidelberg and David Eagle, Duke University
2021: Sandra Barnes, Vanderbilt University
The Sociology of Religion Section’s Early Career Award
Award established in 2021
2023: Landon Schnabel, Cornell University
2022: Daniel Winchester, Purdue University
2021: Ruth Braunstein, University of Connecticut
2021 Honorable Mention: Kelsy Burke, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
