Review of 'The faces of God in America: Revealing religious diversity across people and politics'

Review of the co-authored paper: Jackson JC, Hester, Gray K (2018) The faces of God in America: Revealing religious diversity across people and politics. PLoS ONE 13(6)

by Dr Frédéric Lefrançois

The paper co-authored by Joshua Conrad Jackson, Neil Hester and Kurt Gray, covers a wide range of psychosocial issues pertaining to the general perception of God's bodily appearance.

The study is a rigorous and well-structured one which provides valuable insights for the academic community. It is related to many fields of research in connection with social theory, like self-interaction,  ethno-psychoanalysis and political science.

The graphs are aptly used and demonstrate the hypothesis in a convincing way.

The team of researchers involved in this work has based their results and conclusions from data collected with coherent, state-of-the-art methods and research tools. The average "face of God" construed from their survey seems to escape the determinism of ideological paradigms or stereotyped preconceptions which could introduce some bias.

However, the reader may wonder how the correlation between the politically correct face of God (a more Conservative-friendly one) is to be matched with the morphed picture which looks more Latino than purely Caucasian. Why the Asian segment of the American Christians seems to have been left out of the sampling is also a matter of methodological concern.

It is probable that this first study will open up fresh perspectives on further research on the political and socio-ethnic factors which contribute to generating a reflective image of God, depending on the circumstances and conditions of social interaction.

The article is, on the whole, very well-written and accessible to nonspecialists.  A highly recommendable paper.