The UFO Contact Movement from the 1950\u27s to the Present

Since the beginning of the UFO movement in the late 1940s, beliefs about what the aliens are like and the purpose of their visits to Earth have changed numerous times. The first claims of extended contact with alien beings in the early 1950s were entirely different in form and content from the current, frightening UFO abduction tales. This article will trace the UFO movement from its origin in 1947 to the present, explaining how its prevailing paradigms have changed

Introduction to \u3cem\u3eAmerica\u27s Four Gods: What We Say about God and What That Says About Us\u3c/em\u3e

Despite all the hype surrounding the New Atheism, the United States remains one of the most religious nations on Earth. In fact, 95% of Americans believe in God--a level of agreement rarely seen in American life. The greatest divisions in America are not between atheists and believers, or even between people of different faiths. What divides us, this groundbreaking book shows, is how we conceive of God and the role He plays in our daily lives. America\u27s Four Gods draws on the most wide-ranging, comprehensive, and illuminating survey of American\u27s religious beliefs ever conducted to offer a systematic exploration of how Americans view God. Paul Froese and Christopher Bader argue that many of America\u27s most intractable social and political divisions emerge from religious convictions that are deeply held but rarely openly discussed. Drawing upon original survey data from thousands of Americans and a wealth of in-depth interviews from all parts of the country, Froese and Bader trace America\u27s cultural and political diversity to its ultimate source--differing opinions about God. They show that regardless of our religious tradition (or lack thereof), Americans worship four distinct types of God: The Authoritative God--who is both engaged in the world and judgmental; The Benevolent God--who loves and helps us in spite of our failings; The Critical God--who catalogs our sins but does not punish them (at least not in this life); and The Distant God--who stands apart from the world He created. The authors show that these four conceptions of God form the basis of our worldviews and are among the most powerful predictors of how we feel about the most contentious issues in American life.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/sociology_books/1007/thumbnail.jp

\u27Paranormal Science\u27 from America to Italy: A Case of Cultural Homogenisation

In this chapter we argue that the current popularity of paranonnal topics, in particular ghosts, \u27monsters\u27 (such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster), UFOs and UFO abductions, can be partially traced to key changes in the discourse about paranormal subjects since the 1970s. These changes have produced a paranormal \u27product\u27 that can be easily experienced by a wide variety of people and in this chapter we explore how American-exported paranormal \u27products\u27 have been impacting a country outside of the anglosphere: Italy.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/sociology_books/1001/thumbnail.jp

Images of God: The Effect of Personal Theologies on Moral Attitudes, Political Affiliation, and Religious Behavior

Social scientists often explain religious effects in terms of religious group affiliations. Typically, researchers identify religious groups by denomination or some broader popular categorization, such as “fundamentalist” or “evangelical.” To capture religious differences more effectively, Steensland et al. (2000) propose an intricate classification of American denominations that takes into account the theology and historical development of various American religious traditions to predict individual attitudes and behaviors. We believe that equal care and attention should be devoted to the development of key measures of belief that may cross denominational lines. In this article, we propose one such measure: personal conceptions or images of God. Our simple measure of conceptions of God predicts church attendance rates, belief in biblical literalism, political party identification, attitudes toward abortion, and attitudes about sexual morality. In addition, this indicator provides a means to understand variation within religious traditions. Views of God’s character provide a straightforward way to describe religious differences and an efficient means to demonstrate how religion affects the world

In God We Trust: Images of God and Trust in the United States among the Highly Religious

In this analysis, the authors use Greeley\u27s \u27religion as poetry\u27 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 religious. They also find that having an image of God as angry creates less trust in all four measures of trust. Implications for theory and research on trust and civic engagement are discussed in the conclusion

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. Accordingly, the theory provides a revised definition of the “paranormal” as beliefs and experiences explicitly rejected by science and organized religions. To demonstrate the utility of the theory, we show that, after controlling for levels of conventional religious practice, there is a strong, positive relationship between claiming Christian-based religious experiences and believing in, pursuing, and experiencing the paranormal, particularly among individuals not strongly tethered to organized religion. Bounded affinity theory makes sense of recent non-linear and complex moderation findings in the empirical literature and reiterates the importance of the paranormal for studies of religion

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\u27s orbit and axis to change, thus spurring the natural disasters mentioned by early mythologies and religions around the world. Gordin, who is remarkably evenhanded, tells the story of the man, his extraordinary ideas, their reverberations in academia and scientific communities, and their eventual discrediting through the present day. VERDICT This won\u27t put an end to the debates that rage between legitimate scientific research and other fringe doctrines, but it does lay the Velikovsky affair to rest with fairness and clarity and will help to put into perspective many of the controversies swirling around today\u27s scientific landscape. A good read for those interested in the history of science or pseudoscientific theories

Alien Attraction: The Subculture of UFO Contactees and Abductees

Bader details the history of alien contact and abduction stories, then probes into the two sides of the UFO subculture: contactees vs. abductees. Contactees tend to view alien encounters positively and often imbue them with themes of the sacred, while abductees report nonconsensual and negative encounters, often involving humiliating medical procedures. He delves into the different types of aliens reported by those who claim to have made contact, as well as claims of inserted implants and breeding experiments. Finally, he examines the evolution of the UFO subculture and the growing reflection on mankind\u27s relationship to its supposed alien visitors, as well as the sociological factors that draw people into the UFO subculture.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/sociology_books/1000/thumbnail.jp

Evaluating Survey Measures Using the ARDA\u27s 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 chapter is devoted to exploring a few examples of what we have found using this new metadatabase and software tool and demonstrating how even subtle shifts in question wording, response categories, or survey design can result in major changes in outcomes. Using the Measurement Wizard tool (and others), we can learn from past surveys to design better measures for the future.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/sociology_books/1016/thumbnail.jp

Xenophobia, Partisanship, and Support for Donald Trump and the Republican Party

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump distinguished himself from other candidates via his hardline stances on issues of immigration. Using data from national surveys conducted between 2014 and 2019, we identify three key findings about views of immigrants among the American public during the Trump era. First, xenophobia was the strongest predictor of Americans’ feelings—anger, fear, pride, and hope—about Donald Trump during his time in office, and the second strongest predictor of feelings about the Republican party (after partisan identification). Second, the influence of Americans’ levels of xenophobia on their feelings about the Republican Party were significantly mediated by their feelings about Trump, especially for negative affect (anger and fear). Third, there has been a backlash against xenophobia, such that political independents and Democrats became significantly more favorable toward immigrants after 2016. As a result, views of immigrants have become more favorable overall, but also more politically polarized. These findings support and extend immigration backlash theory, contribute to research on affective polarization, and document consequential trends in contemporary American politics