Abstract
Background
How do religious and cultural sensibilities influence attitudes towards congregational involvement in the arts? Although religion’s role in constructing symbolic boundaries influences adherents’ behaviors both inside and outside of sacred spaces, a predominant focus on economic and cultural factors in the scholarship on cultural tastes and practices has tended to relegate religion to a marginal position in the literature. Theories of class-based cultural tastes and omnivorousness have only rarely been applied to the study of religion and even less so to the intersection between tastes or practices and the sacredness of congregational contexts.
Purpose
This study aims to bridge the gap between the sociology of religion and of culture by showing how considerations about congregational spaces present a complex set of boundaries for practitioners when it comes to the arts, such that acceptance or rejection of the latter is conditioned by the form it takes. The study also examines the extent to which the inclusionary effects of cultural omnivorousness, by volume and composition, apply to attitudes about these sacred spaces.
Methods
This study uses data from the Arts and Religion Survey to run logistic regressions on attitudes towards a range of forms of congregational participation in the arts.
Results
The results show that religious conservatism and such attitudes are not intrinsically opposed. Instead, conservatism is consistently negatively related only when artistic inclusion does not have well-defined symbolic boundaries (i.e., is culturally atypical). Cultural omnivorousness also has varied effects. Omnivorousness by volume but not by composition predicts openness to congregational involvement in the arts, albeit only for well-defined and recognizable artistic forms.
Conclusions and Implications
It is cultural atypicality (rather than variety) that is antithetical to conservative conceptions of the sacred. Moreover, because religious conservatism offers specifically religious understandings of legitimacy for sacred spaces, omnivorousness by composition, which deals in matters of (cultural) legitimacy, has little to offer, and it is only omnivorousness by volume that extends its inclusivity to attitudes about congregational involvement in the arts. The study concludes with a discussion of data limitations and recommendations for further research.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aarons, Haydn. 2018. Moral Distinction: Religion, Musical Taste and the Moral Cultural Consumer. Journal of Consumer Culture 21: 296–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540518787584.
ARDA. 2019. The Association of Religion Data Archives. http://www.thearda.com/. Accessed February 9.
Atkinson, Will. 2011. The Context and Genesis of Musical Tastes: Omnivorousness Debunked, Bourdieu Buttressed. Poetics 39: 169–186.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2010. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bryson, Bethany. 1996. “Anything But Heavy Metal”: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes. American Sociological Review 61: 884–899.
Chan, Tak Wing, and John H. Goldthorpe. 2007. The Social Stratification of Cultural Consumption: Some Policy Implications of a Research Project. Cultural Trends 16: 373–384.
Chaves, Mark. 2004. Congregations in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chaves, Mark. 2011. American Religion Contemporary Trends. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Darwin, Helana. 2018. Omnivorous Masculinity: Gender Capital and Cultural Legitimacy in Craft Beer Culture. Social Currents 5: 301–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329496517748336.
Davis, Nancy J., and Robert V. Robinson. 1996. Are the Rumors of War Exaggerated? Religious Orthodoxy and Moral Progressivism in America. American Journal of Sociology 102: 756–787. https://doi.org/10.1086/230996.
DiMaggio, Paul J., and Francie Ostrower. 1990. Participation in the Arts by Black and White Americans. Social Forces 68: 753–778.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York, NY: Routledge.
Dueck, Jonathan. 2017. Congregational Music, Conflict and Community. New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315546247.
Durkheim, Émile. 2008. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Edited by Joseph Ward Swain. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.
Ellison, Christopher G., and March A. Musick. 1993. Southern Intolerance: A Fundamental Effect. Social Forces 72: 379–398.
Ferrant, Coline. 2018. Class, Culture, and Structure: Stratification and Mechanisms of Omnivorousness. Sociology Compass 12: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12590.
Flemmen, Magne P., Vegard Jarness, and Lennart Rosenlund. 2019. Omnivorousness and Openness: Comments to Tak Wing Chan. The British Journal of Sociology 70: 807–815. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12653.
Glevarec, Hervé, and Michel Pinet. 2017. Is Cultural Eclecticism Axiological and a New Mark of Distinction? Cultural Diversification and Social Differentiation of Tastes in France. Cultural Sociology 11: 188–216.
Goldberg, Amir, Michael T. Hannan, and Balázs Kovács. 2016. What Does it Mean to Span Cultural Boundaries? Variety and Atypicality in Cultural Consumption. American Sociological Review 81: 215–241.
Gormly, E. 2003. Evangelizing through Appropriation: Toward a Cultural Theory on the Growth of Contemporary Christian Music. Journal of Media and Religion 2: 251–265.
Graham, Roderick. 2009. The Function of Music Education in the Growth of Cultural Openness in the USA. Music Education Research 11: 283–302.
Holt, D.B. 1997. Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu’s Theory of Tastes from its Critics. Poetics 25: 93–120.
Hulsether, Mark. 2007. Religion, Culture and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Ingalls, Monique M. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Cathryn, Timothy J. Dowd, and Cecilia L. Ridgeway. 2006. Legitimacy as a Social Process. Annual Review of Sociology 32: 53–78.
Katz-Gerro, Tally. 2002. Highbrow Cultural Consumption and Class Distinction in Italy, Israel, West Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Social Forces 81: 207–229. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2002.0050.
Katz-Gerro, Tally, Sharon Raz, and Meir Yaish. 2009. How Do Class, Status, Ethnicity, and Religiosity shape Cultural Omnivorousness in Israel? Journal of Cultural Economics 33: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-008-9088-5.
Kelman, Ari Y. 2018. Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Lahire, Bernard. 2008. The Individual and the Mixing of Genres: Cultural Dissonance and Self-Distinction. Poetics 36: 166–188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2008.02.001.
Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. 2002. The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–195. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141107.
Lamont, Michèle, Sabrina Pendergrass, and Mark Pachucki. 2015. Symbolic Boundaries. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences: 850–855https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.10416-7
Lizardo, Omar, and Sara Skiles. 2012. Reconceptualizing and Theorizing “Omnivorousness”: Genetic and Relational Mechanisms. Sociological Theory 30: 263–282. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275112466999.
Marsden, Peter V. 2001. Religious Americans and the Arts in the 1990s. In Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life, 71–102.
Mood, Carina. 2010. Logistic Regression: Why We Cannot Do What We Think We Can Do, and What We Can Do About It. European Sociological Review 26: 67–82. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcp006.
Nekola, Anna. 2011. US Evangelicals and the Redefinition. In Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio-Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century, 131–143. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.
O’Brien, John, and Eman Abdelhadi. 2020. Re-examining Restructuring: Racialization, Religious Conservatism, and Political Leanings in Contemporary American Life. Social Forces 99: 474–503. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa029.
Oleschuk, Merin. 2017. Foodies of Color: Authenticity and Exoticism in Omnivorous Food Culture. Cultural Sociology 11: 217–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975516668709.
Ollivier, Michèle. 2008. Modes of Openness to Cultural Diversity: Humanist, Populist, Practical, and Indifferent. Poetics 36: 120–147.
Patterson, Nile DeGray. 2020. Who Goes to Shows? Race-ethnicity and the Visual and Performing Arts. Cultural Sociology 14: 22–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975519885467.
Peterson, Richard A. 1992. Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore. Poetics 21: 243–258.
Peterson, Richard A. 2005. Problems in Comparative Research: The Example of Omnivorousness. Poetics 33: 257–282.
Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. 1996. Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore. American Sociological Review 61: 900–907. https://doi.org/10.2307/2096460.
Peterson, Richard A., and Albert Simkus. 1992. How Musical Taste Groups Mark Occupational Status Groups. In Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier, 152–168. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Porter, Mark. 2016. Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group.
Purhonen, Semi, Jukka Gronow, and Keijo Rahkonen. 2010. Nordic Democracy of Taste? Cultural Omnivorousness in Musical and Literary Taste Preferences in Finland. Poetics 38: 266–298.
Rhodes, Jeremy. 2012. The Ties That Divide: Bonding Social Capital, Religious Friendship Networks, and Political Tolerance among Evangelicals*: The Ties That Divide. Sociological Inquiry 82: 163–186. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.2012.00409.x.
Rimmer, Mark. 2012. Beyond Omnivores and Univores: The Promise of a Concept of Musical Habitus. Cultural Sociology 6: 299–318.
Robette, Nicolas, and Olivier Roueff. 2014. An Eclectic Eclecticism: Methodological and Theoretical Issues about the Quantification of Cultural Omnivorism. Poetics 47: 23–40.
Romanowski, William D. 1992. Roll over Beethoven, tell Martin Luther the News: American Evangelicals and Rock Music. Journal of American Culture 15: 79–88.
Roose, Henk, Koen van Eijck, and John Lievens. 2012. Culture of Distinction or Culture of Openness? Using a Social Space Approach to Analyze the Social Structuring of Lifestyles. Poetics 40: 491–513.
Schaefer, Nancy A. 2012. “Oh, You Didn’t think Just the Devil Writes Songs, Do Ya?”: Music in American Evangelical Culture Today. Popular Music and Society 35: 53–70.
Schwadel, Philip, and Christopher R H. Garneau. 2019. Sectarian Religion and Political Tolerance in the United States. Sociology of Religion 80: 168–193. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sry032.
Sherkat, Darren E., Melissa Powell-Williams, Gregory Maddox, and Kylan Mattias de Vries. 2011. Religion, Politics, and Support for Same-Sex Marriage in the United States, 1988–2008. Social Science Research 40: 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.08.009.
Smith, Christian. 1998. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. 2000. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Thomson, Robert A., Jerry Z. Park, and Diana Kendall. 2019. Religious Conservatives and TV News: Are They More Likely to be Religiously Offended? Social Problems 66: 626–644. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spy024.
Stichele, AlexanderVander, and Rudi Laermans. 2006. Cultural Participation in Flanders: Testing the Cultural Omnivore Thesis with Population Data. Poetics 34: 45–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2005.09.002.
Veenstra, Gerry. 2015. Class Position and Musical Tastes: A Sing-Off between the Cultural Omnivorism and Bourdieusian Homology Frameworks. Canadian Review of Sociology/revue Canadienne De Sociologie 52: 134–159.
Verter, Bradford. 2003. Spiritual Capital: Theorizing religion with Bourdieu against Bourdieu. Sociological Theory 21: 150–174.
Warde, Alan, David Wright, and Modesto Gayo-Cal. 2007. Understanding Cultural Omnivorousness: Or, the Myth of the Cultural Omnivore. Cultural Sociology 1: 143–164.
Warde, Alan, David Wright, and Modesto Gayo-Cal. 2008. The Omnivorous Orientation in the UK. Poetics 36: 148–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2008.02.004.
Woodberry, Robert D., and Christian S. Smith. 1998. Fundamentalism Et Al: Conservative Protestants in America. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 25–56.
Wuthnow, Robert. 1999. Arts and Religion Survey [computer file]. Gallup Organization.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2006. All in Sync: How Music and Art are Revitalizing American Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editor, as well as Timothy Dowd and Kjerstin Gruys, for their feedback on early drafts of the paper. Thanks also to Mariah Evans for productive conversations about operationalizing complex variables.
Funding
Not applicable.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author declare that he/she has no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bok, J. The Arts in Sacred Spaces: How Religious Conservatism and Cultural Omnivorousness Influence Attitudes About Congregational Involvement in the Arts. Rev Relig Res 64, 77–101 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-021-00467-w
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-021-00467-w