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This paper aims to offer a marketing perspective to the multidisciplinary debate on whether religion is expanding, declining or resurging in contemporary and allegedly secular society. Specifically, it examines the “secularization hypothesis”, which predicts that religion tends to lose its central role in people’s lives as secular reasoning spreads and scientific knowledge accumulates.

Borrowing from psychology literature, the authors identify the psychological and social needs satisfied by religion and in doing so uncover its functions. They then discussed whether religion can be claimed to be functionally obsolete.

The authors identified four functions of religion: explanatory, relieving, membership and moral. The content of religious doctrines offers consumers of religion unambiguous knowledge, absolute morality and promises of immortality, immanent justice and centrality in the universe. Religion also provides a social identity, through which people can build meaningful connections with others in the community and with their own history.

A change in the role of religion would be highly relevant for consumer research because religious ideologies shape consumption practices, social relations, products and brands. The authors observe that the content of religious answers is so well-crafted around human psychology that the explaining, relieving and moral functions of religion have not lost reliability. However, cultural change has weakened religion’s ability to gratify human psychology through social identity and meaningful socialization, which led to the marketization of religion, the rise of spirituality and the intensification of socialization around consumption.

The study aims to establish that religiosity has a positive link with government trust, making the secularization trend all the more likely to further erode this already fragile resource.

Through the use of data from the World Values Survey and European Social Survey the link between religiosity and trust in government is examined.

Religiosity and trust in government are positively linked in aggregate data.

The analysis is based on aggregated data, not individual countries, and religiosity is a complex concept to measure.

Secularization will have a long-term negative effect on government trust. Low levels of trust in government in the West are likely here to stay, or even worsen, as populations continue to secularize.

With less trust in government, it will be more difficult to govern effectively.

The author has not yet seen a full test on how secularization will impact trust in government. In fact, this study makes clear that the trend goes a long way explaining why trust in government has been falling in the developed world for decades.

This study was built upon earlier research by Ronald Blood, William Greenfield Jr. and Harry F. Wolcott and explored the informal socialisation of first, second, and third year Ohio Catholic elementary school principals. It identified the significant others and socialisation stages of 25 selected socialisation content items for the position. The items were related to four dimensions of their roles: i.e. personnel relations, administration/ management, curriculum/supervision and religious leadership. The investigation also reaffirmed the development of an “administrative perspective”.

Rural China has been undergoing the “religion fever” since the Reform and Opening-up. By comparing the intergenerational lock-in effects of religious belief with that of non-religious belief, the purpose of this paper is to explain why more and more peasants convert to religion especially Christianity in China.

Data used in this paper comes from a field survey conducted in villages, Funan county. The samples were obtained by the two-stage cluster probability proportional sampling method. Based on the collected survey data, econometric model on the intergenerational lock-in effects of belief was constructed and used for analysis.

Compared with non-religious believers, religious believers can transmit their beliefs more successfully. In addition, the intergenerational lock-in effects of religious beliefs is weakened by oblique socialization in contemporary rural China.

This is the first paper focussing on intergenerational transmission of belief in rural China; although many researchers did careful analyses on effects of parents’ belief or religiosity on children’s belief or religiosity in the West, few of them compared the success of intergenerational transmission between different beliefs. This paper fills this gap; as an interdisciplinary study, this paper tries to study religion in economics analysis approaches. This attempt extends research field in Economics and at the same time enriches analysis tools in Religion.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the factors that influence the use of Islamic banking (IB) services by religious leaders in Indonesia using the theory of reasoned action. Customers of sharia banks consist of Muslims and other religions. Based on this fact, this paper analyzes the influence of attitude (ATT), community influence (CI), religious obligation (RO) and subjective norms (SN) to predict the intentions of religious leaders in using IB services in Indonesia.

Data were randomly obtained from 119 religious’ leaders with the structural equation modeling technique used for analysis.

The empirical analysis data suggest that attitude (ATT) and religious obligations (RO) show a significant impact on the intentions of religious leaders to use IB services, while community influence and subjective norms have a negative impact on the intentions of Indonesian religious leaders in using IB services.

This study aims to assist Islamic bank managers in Indonesia to formulate appropriate Islamic marketing strategies and policies to increase customer trust through comprehensive socialization to religious communities. The strategy is a necessity, especially because the government is targeting a 10% growth by 2020. Furthermore, bank managers need to develop in-depth insights into their operations to attract religious leaders’ intentions. The fact shows that the stronger the understanding of individual religion, the greater their intention in using IB services.

Because of the increasing interest in adopting IB in Indonesia, this study claims three essential contributions. Firstly, it aims to examine the intention of religious leaders, namely, Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, in assisting IB managers to design a strategy better than conventional banks. Secondly, the study findings are expected to benefit the development of literature in accordance with the economic conditions of certain religions. Thirdly, this study provides an insight into the inclusive attitude of religious leaders and their intention to adopt the economic structure of other religions.

The purpose of this study is to examine the changing political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community towards Islamic political parties in general elections; to analyze the factors that influenced the political orientation of Air Tiris community in general elections; and to realize the political rights of the society including Air Tiris community.

The subject in this study is the political orientation of the Air Tiris community in the 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014 general elections with a period of research from 2009 to 2016. This qualitative research method consists of sources, data collection, informants, data collection techniques, data analysis and processing and writing systematics.

The results of the research indicate that there are three dominant factors affecting the change in the political orientation of the Air Tiris community towards Islamic political parties characterized by the deterioration of vote acquisition for Islamic political parties in Air Tiris village in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014 general elections. The weakening of the link between religious identity and voting behaviour, as well as the weakening of political movement. The identification or loyalty of the santri community towards Islamic parties has faded.

The originality of this research lies in the analysis of the political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community, in general, elections towards Islamic political parties. Traditionally, this community has more political orientation on religious/Islamic political parties but such orientation experiences developments and changes that lead to non-Islamic parties. This research contains new information about the analysis of the political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community in the general election of Islamic political parties.

The purpose of the present study is to tentatively contribute to paving the way for interdisciplinary research on the history of governance practices in ancient religious orders and on the significance of such governance for the orders’ performance and long-term survival.

The principal challenges of and proposed directions for such research on the comparative governance of old religious orders are illustrated through selected historic examples from Benedictine abbeys and Dominican monasteries, as they can be found in the yet scarce literature devoted to religious governance in the management field.

The authors’ review of research specifically devoted to the corporate governance of Benedictines and Dominicans illustrates the relevance of a hermeneutic grid derived from contemporary management research to better understand the historical dynamics of monastic governance and its relation to sustainability.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to establish a hermeneutic grid for the systematic and comparative study of the dynamics of governance systems in old religions organisations and their impact on organisational performance and sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role of stress and work from home and their influence on the frequency of praying (spirituality) and attending ritual services (religiosity).

Drawing from a data set from Understanding Society (COVID-19 study) in the UK from 5,357 participants, this study specifies a two-level mixed-effects ordered-probit regression to test the main hypotheses and chi-square (x²) analysis, gamma (γ) and tau-b (τ_b) for checking the robustness of this study results.

The findings of this study exhort with statistical confidence that spirituality is positively related to religiosity. Working from home positively influences individuals’ spiritual and religious needs, while attending religious services in person is associated with less stress. Females have been found to be more likely to pray rather than attend religious services.

This study investigates the role of work from home and stress on spirituality and religiosity, two key elements often forgotten in personal life and copying. This paper considers spirituality as the frequency of praying, while religiosity is the frequency of attending rituals, which religion has institutionalised.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the direct and indirect influences of locus of control on the communication patterns of Jordanian Muslim parents in the marketplace activities that directly influence their children’s consumption behaviour. The validity of locus of control components within the context of consumer socialisation and cultural perspectives has been taken into account before testing the hypotheses.

A total of 400 self-administered questionnaires were distributed to Muslim parents via their children aged from 8 to 12 years in 12 public schools that were randomly chosen from different areas of Amman metropolitan-Jordan. The principal component analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, paired sample t-test, the multiple regression analysis, and the bootstrapping test using structural equation modelling were used to validate the model’s constructs and to test the research hypotheses.

The communication patterns of Jordanian Muslim parents are more likely to be influenced by the high and low beliefs in the chance, whereas the highest degree of the indirect influences is associated with Muslims’ belief in powerful others.

It measured the mediation of socio-orientation, but neither concept-orientation nor the simultaneous interventions of the two dimensions were taken into consideration. The solicited sample has been relied on parents’ responses. Future research considering mothers-fathers, mothers–adolescents or fathers–adolescents dyadic perspectives may disclose the convergence and divergence among Muslim family members to better understanding the mediation process.

The local and global marketers may segment the Jordanian market into consensual, pluralistic and protective Muslim consumers; rely on reference groups on their promotion campaigns, as the Muslim parents in Jordan are more influenced by the powerful others; and use the concept of chance positively in their promotion campaigns.

Based on rigorous methodology, this is the first study that measures the direct and indirect influences of locus of control on the communication patterns of Jordanian Muslim parents in terms of marketing milieu and collectivist cultures.

This organizational climate empirical case study involves a religious organization in the United States of America, which has experienced a substantial decline in membership and weekly service participation numbers over the previous five years. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to reveal motivating factors that drive parishioners to leave or stay within a traditional protestant congregation and to uncover the strengths and weaknesses within the organization.

The methodology behind the study considers personal observation by the author and engages current and former members of the organization as well as front-line employees and senior leadership. Qualitative essays were completed through Qualtrics by participants and analyzed with the use of MAXQDA software for thematic frequency and organization.

During analysis, correlations were found to exist between the church's membership decline and ineffectiveness of senior leadership. Also, it is quite evident that the church's strengths were found in the quality of its members and the relationships they developed. This was found to be a significant motivation to stay within the organization.

The study provides value to practitioners within organizational development fields. Usage of this knowledge could assist in providing insights into possible reasons why religious organizations falter under ineffective leadership, which in turn could provide opportunities to implement improvements based on discoveries.