This paper assesses the continued relevance of Robert Wuthnow’s seminal theory of “religious restructuring” for explaining the relationship between religious conservatism and political allegiances in the contemporary United States. Employing a comparative approach, we evaluate the link between doctrinal conservatism (or liberalism) and political conservatism across the seven largest US religious traditions, including Islam. We find that for most Christians and Jews, doctrinal conservatism continues to be tightly linked with conservative political attitudes, even after adjusting for demographic differences and religiosity. For Muslims, Black Protestants, and Latinx Catholics however, doctrinal conservatism is unlikely to be associated with political conservatism. In short, Wuthnow’s theory still holds, but only for religious traditions that are majority white. We speculate that being “racialized religious traditions” explains the lack of restructuring we observe among Muslims, Black Protestants, and Latinx Catholics. External social and political pressures have kept unifying racialized religious identities salient for each of these traditions, preventing the internal bifurcation still characteristic of other major American religions. Our findings and approaches contribute to the two growing trends within the sociological study of religion—the analytical integration of considerations of race and racial politics into scholarship on religious life (called “complex religion”) and a recognition of the importance of cultural “styles” of religion in shaping political and social behaviors.

Using worldwide data from the World Values Survey (WVS) gathered in 2010-2014, we examine two distinct ways in which Islam may be associated with women's employment. We show that, within their countries, Muslim women are less likely to be employed than women of other religions. We also examine between-country differences and find that, net of education and family statuses, the employment levels of women living in countries that are 90-100 per cent Muslim are not significantly different than those living in countries that are only 0-20 per cent Muslim. Then we test a prevailing view: that Islam discourages gender egalitarian values, and that these values - held by women themselves or people around them - explain why Muslim women are less likely to be employed than women of other religions within their own countries. Despite the rich measures of values in the WVS and a large sample, we find no evidence that values explain any of the lower employment of Muslim women, mainly because values have little or no effect on women's employment. Thus, we conclude that most of the world's gap in employment between Muslim women and other women is within-country and is not explained by gender ideology. Future research should examine alternative hypotheses, including ethno-religious discrimination.

Whether Muslim religiosity deters women's paid work is part of a broader question about the relationship between Islam and gender inequality. Muslim women's outcomes continue to be a subject of both scholarly and public debates, with the role of Islam hotly contested. Surveying the status of Muslim women around the world, several social scientists claim that Islam is inherently prone to curbing women's engagement in the public sphere, including but not limited to employment (Clark, Ramsbey, and Adler 1991; Fish 2011; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Tzannatos 1999). Most famously, Inglehart and Norris claim that "an Islamic religious heritage is one of the most powerful barriers to the rising tide of gender equality" (2003:49). Others say the relationship between the prevalence of Islam and diminished women's outcomes is spurious, better explained by other social conditions common to Muslim societies such as underdevelopment, the prevalence of oil in the economy or the dominance of Arab culture, whose patriarchy preceded Islam (Bayanpourtehrani and Sylwester 2013; Read 2004b; Ross 2008). Many qualitative scholars also point to the complex and often agentic ways in which women use religion in their communities

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