Studies of young evangelicals' dating patterns tend to analyze gender by focusing on ideology. This paper suggests a view of gender and religion that examines the two institutions as interrelated by considering how and when gender and religion emerge as salient in Christian dating. Drawing on a study of young evangelicals' relationships, I explain how ideal discussions of Christian dating emerged as gender-neutral against a backdrop of secular conceptions of romantic relationships but how their personal accounts reveal a series of divergent gendered evangelical worldviews when they turn to focus on their experiences constructing relationships within the evangelical subculture. The three worldviews of idealist, independent, and ambivalent each represent different patterns of how young evangelicals emotionally understand their life as both gendered and religious indicating more complicated patterns of gender, dating, and religion than presented in previous studies.

Studies of religious meaning-making, especially on young adults, tend to prioritize the views of religious elites and orthodox doctrines. By focusing on the everyday activity of romantic relationships, a topic that has no orthodox position, this article analyzes both how religious elites construct discursive fields of meaning and how laity negotiate this field. Drawing on a study of popular Christian relationship advice books and interviews with young evangelicals, I describe a disrupted landscape produced by evangelical cultural elite discourses that becomes an important context for how young adults imagine and pursue relationships. Yet these efforts, for both evangelical elites and young adults, operate within a broader cultural context of secular ''hooking up'' practices which serves to create some cohesion among the two groups while also challenging the relevance of the evangelical cultural elite discourses, requiring young adults to engage in their own process of religious meaning-making.After over a decade of analyzing the historical trajectories of modernity to see how it impacted religion (Finke and Stark, 2005;Warner, 1993), scholars have begun to turn their attention to the next generations to see how the life course options associated with late modernity impact the religiosity of young adults (Flory and Miller, 2008;Smith and Snell, 2009;Wuthnow, 2007). Rather than consider the period of general religious decline during young adulthood as a sign of secularization, most scholars argue that the cultural context of globalization and postmodernism has provided youth with the cultural autonomy to ''construct almost any identity they might desire . . . without having to rely on traditional

Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks have not been transformed, a process known as the missing feminist revolution. Yet, few have examined how the missing feminist revolution operates in specific subdisciplines and the mechanisms that sustain it. This article undertakes these tasks by analyzing religion and gender scholarship published in six sociology journals over the past 32 years. We find evidence of partial integration and continued marginalization. However, we also document disparate networks of interlocutors that operate in two distinct intellectual fields-religion and gender. We argue that this bifurcation partially explains the missing feminist revolution and that insularity of feminist conversations likely contributes to this process. Our findings shed light on obstacles to transforming mainstream disciplines.

Studies of gender regimes within conservative religion have often focused on the dynamics of intimate relationships to separately analyze women's agency and men's authority. By bridging studies of men and women in a variety of intimate relationships, this article provides a relational analysis of how gender and religion intersect in daily life. Given the importance of marriage within conservative religions, I first review studies of married women and married men to illustrate the varied ways these institutions intersect. Next, I present findings from the limited but burgeoning scholarship on those who have not yet or cannot live up to the religious goal of heterosexual marriage: unmarried heterosexuals and gay and lesbian relationships.In recent decades, sociologists have been both intrigued and puzzled by gender regimes in conservative religion. Initially, scholars were confounded by women who chose to remain in or join conservative religions that perpetuate women's subordination; thus, early work in this area asked "how and why…women are attracted to religious communities that offer such traditional definitions of gender" (Davidman 1991:43). As ethnographic studies turned to the lived experiences of these women, scholars realized that women did, in fact, face subordination but that they also felt empowered by their religions and were able to subvert, resist, and even use gender ideologies to their own advantage (Beaman 2001a;Brasher 1998;Chen 2005;Chong 2006;Davidman 1991;Griffith 1997). This tension between practice and rhetoric led many scholars to draw on agency theories because "these women's agency [represents] an interesting phenomenon to study, since agency is typically defined through intention and autonomy and those are characteristics not typically used to describe religious women" (Burke 2012:122, emphasis original).Recently, however, scholars have begun to critique these analyses of women's religious agency for their tendency to "juxtapose agency and complicity" (Avishai 2008: 410) and operate from a "tacit assumption…[that] religious women are oppressed or are operating with a false consciousness" (Avishai 2008:411). This paper extends these calls for more nuanced analyses of women's agency in conservative religion (Avishai 2008; Burke 2012) by drawing attention to how an additional theoretical lens on gender may be useful for deconstructing how religion and gender intersect as social institutions. Sociologists have refined our theorizing of gender to recognize how it operates as a system or structure that positions men and women in socially significant and often unequal ways (Connell 2009;Lorber 1994). Importantly, however, gender becomes meaningful in how it emerges through interactions and how it involves holding oneself and others accountable to cultural understandings of gender (West and Zimmerman 1987). Furthermore, as Connell (2009) notes, "gender arrangements are…at the same time, sources of pleasure, recognition and identity, and sources of injustice and harm" (7). While the agency approa...

Abstract:The religious lives of young adults have generally been investigated by examining what young people believe and their self-reported religious practices. Far less is known about young adults' organizational involvement and its impact on religious identities and ideas about religious commitment. Using data from site visit observations of religious congregations and organizations, and individual and focus group interviews with college-age black and white Christians, we find differences in how black and white students talk about their religious involvement; and with how they are incorporated into the lives of their congregations. White students tended to offer "organizational biographies" chronicling the contours of belonging as well as disengagement, and emphasizing the importance of fulfilling personal needs as a criterion for maintaining involvement. On the other hand, black students used "family" and "home" language and metaphors to describe how their religious involvement, a voluntary choice, was tied to a sense of "calling" and community. We show that this variation is aligned with organizational differences in black and white congregations that situate white youth as separate and black youth as integrated into the larger church community.