Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Transcendent Accountability And Pro-Community Attitudes: Assessing The Link Between Religion And Community Engagement, Sung Joon Jang, Matt Bradshaw, Charlotte V. O. Witvliet, Young-Il Kim, Byron R. Johnson, Joseph Leman

Faculty Publications - College of Social Work

Prior research has established a positive relationship between religiosity and civic engagement but focused on public religiosity rather than private religiosity without explaining the relationship. We examined private religiosity as well as public religiosity in relation to community engagement, explaining the religiosity-community engagement relationship with two understudied mechanisms: ‘‘transcendent accountability’’ (seeing oneself as accountable to God or a higher power for one’s influence on other people or the environment) and pro-community attitudes. For this examination, we applied structural equation modeling to analyze data from a nationally representative survey. We found that survey respondents who believed in a higher power, privately …