Research
Why do people lose trust in institutions and decide to stop participating in them?
My research focuses on how our understanding of community and authority shapes the way we participate in civic life. This work spans three big topics:
Trust & Conflict in the New Public Sphere
Studying how people navigate authority and conflict in public life.
Stewart, Evan, and Douglas Hartmann. “The New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” Sociological Theory 38, no. 2 (June 4, 2020): 170–91.
Edgell, Penny, Evan Stewart, Sarah Catherine Billups, and Ryan Larson. 2020. “The Stakes of Symbolic Boundaries.” The Sociological Quarterly 61(2):309–33.
Delehanty, Jack, Penny Edgell, and Evan Stewart. 2019. “Christian America? Secularized Evangelical Discourse and the Boundaries of National Belonging.” Social Forces 97(3):1283–1306.
Reexamining Religion in Social Problems
Studying how religious and nonreligious views shape attitudes about climate change, mental health, addiction and recovery, and other major social problems.
Stewart, Evan, Penny Edgell, and Jack Delehanty. 2018. “The Politics of Religious Prejudice and Tolerance for Cultural Others.” The Sociological Quarterly 59(1):17–39.
Role Exits & Value Systems
Studying role-exits —like religious disaffiliation— to understand how these transitions affect political attitudes, values, and behaviors.
Working Paper: Evan Stewart. 2020. “Rethinking Religion & Political Participation: Voting Among Nonreligious Americans.” Accepted at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association (cancelled due to COVID-19) & Presented at the BU Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs.
Edgell, Penny, Jacqui Frost, and Evan Stewart. 2017. “From Existential to Social Understandings of Risk: Examining Gender Differences in Nonreligion.” Social Currents 4(6):556–74.
Edgell, Penny, Douglas Hartmann, Evan Stewart, and Joseph Gerteis. 2016. “Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders: Moral Boundaries and the Non-Religious in the United States.” Social Forces 95(2):607–38.
Stewart, Evan. 2016. “The True (Non)Believer? Atheists and the Atheistic in the United States.” Pp. 137–60 in Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, edited by R. Cipriani and F. Garelli. Brill.