Congregations in Europe by Christophe Monnot & Jörg Stolz

Author:Christophe Monnot & Jörg Stolz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.5.3 Relationships

Field theories are built on the assumption that the established will try to preserve their privileges against newcomers. This is the second hypothesis that we attempt to test in our special case by looking at the actual behavior of Swiss congregations. Do established congregations exclude non-established groups to preserve their threatened privileges?

The most noteworthy result of our paper may be that this hypothesis fails (Table 6.4). Established Christian congregations do not seem to try to exclude other religious groups. On the contrary, they are both very inclined to be open to engaging in ecumenical and interreligious contacts, and comparatively tolerant concerning the religious and social diversity of their members. In the past year, established Christian congregations have engaged in a joint ritual with another congregation more often than any other religious tradition (83.3%). In roughly 70% of the cases, this other congregation was of a different religious tradition from theirs (against 56% for non-established Christians). In most cases, this common ritual was with another Christian congregation, and in roughly 1/3 of the cases with another non-established congregation. In comparison, these numbers show somewhat more openness to ecumenism and interreligious dialogue than among non-established Christians and clearly more openness than among all the other religious traditions (at least when it comes to the items used here). These results remain highly significant when controlling for other variables (confession of the canton, regulation regime, size of the congregation). In Fig. 6.2, these same findings are presented graphically. Yet another way of visualizing this finding is shown in Fig. 6.3a, b. Here, the left-hand side shows what might have been expected in a situation where established groups had completely excluded non-established groups from joint worship (our hypothesis). The right-hand side shows the actual relationships, where links are weighted by the means of the number of joint rituals. Again, we see strong relationships among established groups, but also relatively high numbers of links between established and non-established groups.Table 6.4Joint rituals and exclusivism according to confession

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.