Role models can be highly influential in conveying ethical standards. This study investigates the influence various categories of role models have had on a population of over 1,600 undergraduate students in Texas, Oregon and Michigan. Those identifying clergy, boy scout leaders, friends and college advisors as role models exhibited less willingness to adopt questionable ethical behavior in negotation situations. Journalist and spouse role models tended to cause students to be more accepting of questionable behavior. Individuals with strong end-result and social (...) contract ethical philosophies, as well as males and those who served in the military exhibited strong tendencies toward less than ethical behavior. Individuals with strong rule ethical philosophy, high levels of religiousity, and those with a cooperative attitude in negotiations tended to adopt higher ethical standards in negotiations. (shrink)

Modern secularity as a historically specific hegemonic social formation that prevailed in the U.S. in the mid-20th century depended on and was, in part, constituted by the exclusion of fundamentalists and their Bible-based moral rhetorics from public life. This essay argues that the movements for temperance, prohibition, and prohibition repeal were an important context in which the political and cultural predominance of white theologically conservative Protestants was made, unmade, and finally gave way to emerging secular voices that repudiated Protestant campaigns (...) to "legislate morality." Science, reason, and an etiquette of civility and ecumenicism came together in the prohibition repeal movement as integral elements of the nascent normative religiousity and public morality that we know retrospectively as modern secularity. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between piety, social pressure, and riya’ among urban Muslim youth in Yogyakarta who use social media to express religiousity, and the way the youth negotiate to deal with the contradiction between displayed piousness and religious norms. Employing a phenomenological approach this article explore the negotiation of ambiguity among urban Muslim youth, in particular the urban students actively involved in lecture series branded Ngaji Filsafat conducted by Dr. Fahruddin Faiz. This article argue that not only (...) digital media provide space for youth to express their piety, it also offer bigger social pressure to gain social validation for their (digital) existence, in the form of likes and followers, for instance. The social pressure increases ethical ambiguity, where expressions of online piety can be considered as violating a moral principle of religiosity, namely riya’. Finally, this article contributes to debates on the intersection of religion and media, especially on the aspect of individual negotiation space in responding to biases and dilemmas arising from the hybridity of the two. (shrink)

We have used the term 'fetish' in a broader sense and especially related to the functions that a 'fetish' has in society. We are talking either about the tags that any 'fetish' receives [as undesirable, unwanted, forbidden, and peculiar], or about the uncertainty of its social approval, about the coagulating role it plays on individuals with the same repulsive vision/orientation that were previously unidentifiable, or many other aspects under which a so-called fetish works socially. The object or action in question (...) passes from individual preference to the group emblem and then determines its actions and ideas, internally as well as in social exchanges with other groups. This is done in a fetishistic way with everything that is 'new' emerging in society, either previously non-existent, or competitive with something already standardized, or - as in the case of many fetishes - forbidden and socially stigmatized. If the first category does not meet a social resistance and does not end up turning into a fetish, for the group and the society, the other two have all the advantages to do so. The odd - competitive and forbidden alternatives - becomes the fetish for the group that adopts it as its emblem because it later regulates all its actions, as well as for the Society, because it keeps around the group and its actions the atmosphere in the sphere of fetishism - equivocal, promiscuous, and detestable. But precisely these very fetishistic attributes are the same ones that determine society to fight against the group and its 'fetish', new and peculiar, that also help disparate individuals to identify with that fetus, to coagulate as a group borrowing precisely this infamous, shameless identity. Therefore, the question we try to find answers here is but legitimate: since and until when oddity is ‘odd’? (shrink)