Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When looking at the United States, secularization critics either deny religious decline or, when acknowledging some decline, discount its significance by emphasizing the still high levels of American religiosity, the recent start of decline, or the slowness of decline. Defenders of the secularization thesis similarly recognize the theoretical import of the United States. For them, embarrassingly strong American religion presents a case with which they must grapple, a puzzle they must somehow solve to sustain the secularization thesis. Americans remain remarkably religious in both belief and practice, particularly as compared to people elsewhere in the West. The chapter shows that in a fundamental respect the American pattern of decline is remarkably similar to the pattern found throughout the West: the decline is driven by generational differences in religiosity. It focuses on comparisons with other English-speaking countries: Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it