Which levels of religiosity are most associated with terrorism threat perception amid conflict and why? Using three waves of the Israel National Election Study conducted around national elections (2015, 2019, 2022; pooled N = 1,848), we estimate cumulative link models with multi-point religiosity measures to examine nonlinear effects. Results reveal a robust inverted U-shaped relationship: threat perception peaks at intermediate religiosity and declines among both the very religious and the secular. The pattern holds across election cycles and after adjusting for political orientation, gender, education, and age. We interpret these findings through the concept of existential clarity, arguing that coherent religious and secular worldviews provide stable interpretive frameworks that buffer perceived threat, whereas intermediate positions may reflect lower belief-system coherence. By integrating nonlinear modeling with religion–politics theory, the study reconciles inconsistent findings in the literature and clarifies how religiosity structures threat perception in democracies facing sustained insecurity.

Indonesia has ranked as the world’s most generous nation for seven consecutive years, yet the processes through which personal values shape humanitarian intention giving remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Norm Activation and Value–Belief–Norm (NAM/VBN) frameworks, warm-glow, and signaling/trust theories, this study examined donation intentions in Aceh—the nation’s most charitable province—using a moderated value–resources model that integrated socioeconomic position, altruistic, social, and emotional values and organizational reputation, with religiosity as a moderating factor. Data from 400 adult respondents were analyzed via Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), revealing that altruistic, social, and emotional values, together with organizational reputation, significantly influenced humanitarian giving, whereas socioeconomic status showed no effect. Religiosity amplified these relationships, acting as a moral compass that transformed personal values into durable commitments to donate. These findings indicate that, in Aceh, moral and religious principles rather than material wealth primarily drive sustained philanthropic behavior. Based on these results, humanitarian organizations can improve fundraising effectiveness by segmenting donors according to religiosity and value orientation, using faith-consistent messaging, and providing transparent, real-time reporting of fund utilization. By uniting individual, organizational, and religious dimensions in a theory-informed framework, the study advances understanding of value-based humanitarian engagement in Muslim-majority contexts. The results, therefore, offer operational guidance for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), policymakers, and faith-based institutions seeking to strengthen donor trust, engagement, and long-term participation.

Although many studies have examined how religion contributes to violence in Nigeria, there is a lack of research examining the reverse relationship. This study seeks to fill that gap by examining the correlation between exposure to violent conflict and religiosity. Religiosity is measured using an item in the World Values Survey (WVS) that asks respondents to rate the importance of God in their lives on a ten-point ordinal scale ranging from “not at all important” to “very important.” Exposure to violent conflict is assessed using the cumulative number of conflict incidents occurring within a 30 km radius of respondents’ dwellings. Using QGIS software, I construct the measure of conflict exposure by exploiting the geocoded dimensions of both the WVS and conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Regression analysis reveals that as conflict exposure increases, so does the importance Nigerians attach to God in their lives. The positive relationship persists when the data are disaggregated by religious affiliation (Muslims and Christians), gender (men and women), and region of residence (North and South), with models estimated for each subsample. A plausible explanation for this result is that the existential threat posed by violent conflict prompts individuals to rely on God as a coping strategy.

Non-profits require highly motivated and professional employees to fulfill their potential to contribute to community development and well-being. But what motivates jobseekers to seek employment in non-profits over governmental organizations, and what makes non-profits more attractive than governmental organizations? Leveraging positive religious and spiritual development and self-determination theories, we theorize that spiritual and religious individuals are more likely to prefer working for non-profits over governmental organizations. This preference occurs because religious and spiritual individuals have stronger traits of self-sacrifice and compassion that motivate them to take a job that offers more non-material incentives than material incentives, leading to a preference for non-profits over governmental organizations. The serial mediation model identifies how compassion and self-sacrifice mediate the effects of spiritual intelligence and religiosity on job motivation; while job motivation mediates the effect of self-sacrifice and compassion on career preference and sector attractiveness. We validate our serial mediation-based conceptual framework based on responses from 306 job seekers in India. The results support our hypotheses, where individuals high on spirituality and religiosity prefer working in non-profits over governmental sector, owing to higher compassion, and self-sacrificing tendencies.

This paper surveys the literature on gender differences in religiosity and on how religion shapes gender-related economic and social outcomes. Part I examines why women tend to be more religious than men, reviewing leading explanations from sociology, economics, and psychology. Part II analyzes how religion affects gender norms and attitudes, education, labor market participation, fertility, health, legal institutions, and discrimination. Across domains, we distinguish between effects driven by individual religiosity—such as beliefs and religious practice—and those driven by religious denomination. We emphasize studies that employ credible causal identification strategies, including natural experiments, instrumental variables, and policy reforms, while also reviewing correlational evidence for context. Overall, the literature suggests that religious teachings and participation often reinforce traditional gender roles, influencing women’s education, labor supply, and fertility decisions, though important heterogeneity and exceptions exist. We also highlight instances in which secular reforms or religious movements have altered these outcomes. The survey concludes by identifying gaps in the literature and outlining priorities for future empirical research.

Religion has long been considered an important determinant of voting behaviour. However, the secularisation of Western societies has changed its role. Secularisation not only limits the political relevance of religion, it may also affect the nature of religious cleavages themselves. While extant literature suggests that differences between religious denominations are in decline, with regard to differences between religious and non-religious voters there are two divergent expectations, (1) that these differences are also in decline and (2) that there is an increased polarisation between the religious and the non-religious. For the latter expectation, evidence has already been found regarding the United States. In this paper, we examine whether a similar change can be observed in Western Europe. Combining data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and information on parties’ positions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), we assess the nature of over-time changes in the connection between religion and the vote choice. The results point to an increased polarisation between members of a Christian church and the non-religious, however, we also find that non-Christians are more similar to the non-religious than to Christians. We also uncover a growing division between Catholics and Protestants that does not fit common expectations. These findings challenge earlier work on the political consequences of secularisation and lead to new research questions.

This paper deals with the question: To what extent do individual religious characteristics, in addition to collective religious characteristics, contribute to the explanation of formal and informal volunteering in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 21st century? To answer this research question, we used the SOCON 2005–2006 dataset. Our main finding concerns informal volunteering: we found that spirituality increases the likelihood of informal volunteering, implying that openness to other people’s needs increases the likelihood of the actual provision of help. There are no other aspects of religiosity that are related to informal volunteering. With regard to formal volunteering we found that, in line with previous research, religious attendance is related positively to formal volunteering, religious as well as secular volunteering, which can be regarded as support for the proposition that religious involvement is important for norm conformity. Further, having a more religious worldview decreases the likelihood of formal volunteering which might show that those with a strong religious worldview are more concerned with the ‘otherworldly’ and less so with what they do in this world. We found no influence of individual religious characteristics on formal volunteering. These results confirm the idea that integration into a religious community plays quite a large role in explaining formal volunteering. Informal volunteering, however, seems to be independent of social networks: it rather depends on individual motivation.

Research on volunteering has emphasized the positive role played by individual religiosity on this type of civic engagement. There are fewer studies on the relation between contextual religiosity and volunteer work. Several of them have concluded that the higher the macro-contextual religiosity, the higher the propensity to get involved in volunteering. Thereby, researchers might be inclined to conclude that secularization is a threat to this social participation. This article shows that such a conclusion is unfounded. From a data set including the 27 countries of the European Union and using a multilevel analysis to control for the compositional effects of the national sample, we obtain a negative correlation between macro-contextual religiosity and volunteering. From these results, we suggest that the relationship between volunteering and contextual religiosity cannot be considered as deterministic but it has to be comprehended in a more global cultural context.

This article analyzes the role of three antecedents of life satisfaction (LS) among healthcare volunteers in Malaysia. The antecedents are: personality traits, motives to volunteer, and spiritual capital. This study has empirically tested the impact of individual dimensions of personality traits, motives, and spiritual capital along with their inter-relationships in explaining the LS. The volunteers of St. John Ambulance participated in this study. The model has been tested using structural equation modeling and it has been found that the three constructs have an explanatory power of 53 %. The main results are: (1) neuroticism, value motives, protective motives, personal well-being, and spirituality have a direct impact on LS and (2) enhancement motives, social motives, and religiosity have an indirect impact on LS. These results can provide insights to researchers and managers regarding profiling the right volunteers, providing the necessary infrastructure, and providing proper training to the volunteers.

Recognition of the multi-cultural nature of the Canadian population has led companies across a wide array of business domains to reach beyond their traditional bases of support to focus on hitherto untapped communities as potential markets for their goods and services. Competitive conditions within the voluntary sector have pushed nonprofits along this same path. However, no systematic Canadian research reports on the attitudes, social norms, benefits sought, expectations, opportunities, experiences, or behaviors of sub-communities in the voluntary sector. This paper examines philanthropic behavior by religion using data from the Statistics Canada 2000 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating. The paper compares and contrasts the voluntary and philanthropic behaviors of the Canadian population across religious groups; compares and contrasts the motivations for and perceived impediments against such behaviors; and articulates and examines a model that traces the influence of religion on voluntary and philanthropic behavior in Canada’s multi-cultural society.

Individual motivation is the core of the actualization and continuity in voluntary work from both the standpoint of theoretical research and practical volunteerism. Volunteer motivation also provides an excellent research area for investigating the wider sociological theme of late-modern participation. This study, based on the data from 18 interviews, explores volunteer motivation utilizing a phenomenological approach to individual experience and the meaning of volunteerism. Using a phenomenological approach illuminates the nature of volunteer motivation more holistically. The research includes 767 motivational elements in 47 themes and develops an innovative four-dimensional octagon model of volunteer motivation—the theoretical and practical applications of which are discussed.

We examine the relationship between likelihood to volunteer and a range of human capital, social capital, religious capital and ubuntu variables in South Africa seven years after the official end of apartheid. Using the 2001 World Values Survey we find that education is positively associated with volunteering, but employment has a negative association with volunteering when including controls for wealth and income. Religiosity has a strong positive association with volunteering and a broad base, cutting across the socio-economic and racial divides. This suggest that religious congregations in collaboration with other sectors could be a vehicle to increase access to volunteer opportunities for those who lack the status to take part in other volunteering activities.