Overview

My social scientific research program is framed in the first place by a rich historical and theoretical understanding of the full sweep of Western liberal modernity: from the early-modern period of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe through modernity’s more recent characteristics and developments. Our more recent context goes by many names. Some call it “post-modernity”; others term it “late-modernity.” However, I prefer to call our present social milieu “hyper-modernity,” because some of the most basic assumptions of the modern liberal Enlightenment worldview (such as control over nature and individual autonomy) have not been rejected in our day but seem only to have intensified in our culture with time.

Within that bigger theoretical and historical frame, my research is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to various expressions of Christianity in the U.S., particularly with an emphasis on big-picture questions and difficult puzzles about the status of Christianity in present-day contexts. Our current world—the hyper-modern Western world—is increasingly secularized and in some ways hostile to historic Christian beliefs and practices. Following exemplars such as Peter Berger, Martin Riesebrodt, Phil Gorski, and James Davison Hunter, my research program drives to the center of this thorny issue and provides empirically-grounded and theoretically-rich accounts of the character and place of the Christian religion in today’s complex, modernized world.

Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2020).

One of the most significant movements in contemporary American Christianity, especially among younger evangelicals, is a groundswell of interest in the Reformed tradition. In Reformed Resurgence, Brad Vermurlen provides a comprehensive sociological account of this phenomenon—known as the New Calvinism—and what it entails for the broader evangelical landscape in the United States. Vermurlen develops a new theory for understanding how conservative religion can thrive in our current hyper-modern Western world. His novel approach uses and expands on “strategic action field theory,” a recent framework proposed for the study of movements and organizations but rarely applied to religion. This new approach to American religion moves beyond market dynamics and cultural happenstance and instead shows how religious strength can be fought for and won as the direct result of religious leaders’ strategic actions and conflicts. But the battle comes at a cost. For the same reasons conservative Calvinistic belief is experiencing a resurgence in its field, present-day American evangelicalism has turned in on itself. Vermurlen argues that, in the end, evangelicalism in the United States today consists of pockets of subcultural and local strength within the bigger process of secularization as "cultural entropy," in which longstanding religious meanings fall apart.

“The Ongoing Conservative Turn in the American Catholic Priesthood.” Sociological Spectrum 43, no. 2-3 (2023): 72-88. (with Mark Regnerus and Stephen Cranney)

Surveys of Catholic priests in the U.S. dating back to the 1980s have shown that newer priests—and the priesthood in the aggregate—are becoming more conservative on moral, ecclesial, political, and theological issues. The present study examined whether this long-observed conservative shift has continued up to the present day using data from two surveys of Catholic priests: a 2002 Los Angeles Times survey of priests and the 2020-21 Survey of American Catholic Priests, which largely replicated the former. Comparisons of means across surveys and analyses based on decade of ordination both revealed that Catholic priests in the U.S. are increasingly conservative on issues of moral belief, attitudes concerning who should and shouldn’t qualify for ordination, as well as on politics and theology. Regression models demonstrated that having been ordained more recently was consistently associated with holding more conservative beliefs, net of other factors. More religiously observant priests, captured by frequency of praying the Divine Office, were more likely to be conservative on every question asked. The major exception to the conservative shift are priests self-reporting as entirely homosexual, who tend to be more liberal than heterosexual priests on a range of topics.

“Sociology, Christianity, and Critical Realism,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology and Christianity. Ed., Dennis Hiebert. New York: Routledge. pp. 141-152.

Over recent decades, sociologists have taken interest in critical realism (CR) as an approach to sociological theorizing and research. This chapter explores the intersections of sociology, CR, and Christianity. It begins with a non-exhaustive introduction to CR, including some of the major associations, networks, journals, and sociologists commending it, followed by some of its most central and distinctive philosophical proposals. The chapter then moves on to reflect on CR’s relationship to Christianity so far as it is pertinent to sociology and sociologists. In particular, this chapter outlines what CR has to do with Christianity by specifying multiple points of contact between CR and consensual Christian thought relating to ontology, epistemology, and normativity. The goal is not to offer anything like a Christian defense of CR. Rather, the goal of this chapter is to demonstrate some of the resonances between CR and Christian thought, in other words, to show why a sociologist steeped in Christian thought would likely find CR an intuitive and compelling set of philosophical commitments with which to undergird their work. It thereby also provides some broad context for understanding ongoing debates about CR in sociology.

“Is the Catholic Church in America Experiencing Internal Secularization? Priests’ Assessments of Pope Francis and the Condition of the Church.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 62, no. 2 (2023): 397-418. (with Mark Regnerus and Stephen Cranney)

This study addressed internal secularization in the Catholic Church by testing the role of several factors in priests’ assessments of the state of the Church in the United States, priests’ views of whether the Church’s situation is getting better or worse, and their attitudes toward Pope Francis. Comparisons with identical questions fielded in 2002 revealed a striking pessimistic turn among priests over the last two decades. In addition, regression analyses using the 2021 Survey of American Catholic Priests revealed that “in-house” factors—namely, attitudes toward Pope Francis and perceptions of how well bishops have restored confidence in the Catholic Church following the sexual abuse crisis—most powerfully predicted priests’ current pessimism. On top of this, politically conservative priests and priests ordained more recently tended to be most critical of how Francis is handling his duties, signaling a pronounced tension inside the Catholic Church over religious authority, a defining feature of internal secularization.

“Religious Marketing Revisited: What Recent Scholarship on Calvinist Evangelical Leaders Tells Us.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 13, no. 1 (2023): 11-34.

In the social sciences, religious marketing, branding, and entrepreneurship are closely associated with the religious economies paradigm, which suffers multiple troubles. This article argues that the agentic side of religious organizations can be helpfully reformulated as strategic action within religious institutional fields—not markets. Traditional religious leaders can and do skillfully work for their own success in the modern world. To illustrate this point, the article draws from recent work in sociology on contemporary Calvinists in the United States—namely, William McMillan’s Yale dissertation Cosmopolitan Calvinists and my own book, Reformed Resurgence. The article concludes with a reiteration of its distinct contribution to studies of religion as well as addresses the question of generalizability by giving non-exhaustive examples of religious groups other than present-day Calvinists which can be understood vis-à-vis intentional strategic actions. This new thesis aligns well with recent scholarship on the “post-secular” character of contemporary societies.

“Attitudes in the U.S. Toward Hormonal and/or Surgical Interventions for Adolescents Experiencing Gender Dysphoria.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 51, no. 4 (2022): 1891-1902. (with Mark Regnerus)

In order to align with their inner sense of gender identity, adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria are increasingly being treated with cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries to alter their bodies. The present study is the first to examine attitudes about these recently emergent medical practices in a national population. We used data from the 2018 Post-Midterm Election Study, a survey representative of adults in the USA ages 20 to 65 years (N = 5,285), to examine the social factors associated with approval or disapproval of hormonal and/or surgical interventions for adolescents seeking medical treatment for gender dysphoria. Higher fertility, race/ethnicity (in this case, black), sex (male), and heterosexual self-identity were each robustly associated with disapproval. Nested regression models revealed that a range of religion measures were statistically significant (toward disapproval). However, all but evangelical self-identification were no longer significant after accounting for support for abortion rights, the spectrum of political self-identification, and voting behavior. These findings, prompted by a high percentage of variance explained, led us to consider perspectives on medical transitions for adolescents as fitting the “culture war” framework, largely polarized between a “progressive” worldview of bodily autonomy and an “orthodox” worldview of bodily integrity.

“Structural Overlap and the Management of Cultural Marginality: The Case of Calvinist Hip-Hop.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 4, no. 1 (2016): 68-106.

This study explains four ways cultural marginality is managed when it comes to the issue of cultural production, both by the producers themselves and by field-specific cultural authorities. To do so, it revives the prewar concepts of “the marginal man” and “marginal culture” and reframes them in terms of overlapping social structures. As a case of this phenomenon, this project investigates the public discourse and performances of 22 Calvinist hip-hop artists affiliated with five independent start-up record labels, showing how they navigate their place on the margins of both mainstream American hip-hop and their own conservative religious movement (i.e., the New Calvinism). The findings specify four causal mechanisms for the management of marginality. The first two pertain to the ways cultural authorities approach marginal artists as object, namely: authorities function as gatekeepers who grant moral acceptability upon the marginal product and who conspicuously display the marginal product and its producers in order to demonstrate their own commitments to diversity and inclusion. The second two mechanisms speak to the ways marginal artists, as subjects, manage their own marginality, namely: these artists draw symbolic boundaries to avoid being pigeonholed and they insist upon the unity of their self-understandings to foster authenticity. The article ends by discussing how this work contributes to the sociology of religion, sociological theory, and cultural sociology. The data are from publicly available online discourse.