23. Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard A. Kulka, The Inner American: A Self-Portrait from 1957 to 1975 (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
24. Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka, Inner American, 17.
25. Only the rubric of “social groups” (ranging from country clubs to sports teams), which accounted for roughly one membership in five, did not decline over these two decades; the rate of membership in this category rose from 13 percent to 16 percent.
26. Each of these survey archives is described in detail in appendix I.
27. In fifteen separate surveys between 1974 and 1994 the General Social Survey asked Americans “whether or not you are a member of” each of fifteen specific types of groups, from “fraternal groups” to “church-related groups,” as well as a catch-all category of “other.” Only limited subsamples of the GSS in 1993 and 1994 were asked the relevant question, so the results from those years are less reliable.
28. These data are drawn from the 1987 General Social Survey. A 1973 Louis Harris survey (study number 2343 at the University of North Carolina Institute for Research in the Social Sciences) found that 48 percent of all organizational members had served at one time as a club officer, virtually identical to the 1987 GSS figure.
29. Author’s analysis of data from Roper Social and Political Trends archive.
30. William Safire, “On Language,” New York Times, August 13, 1989.
31. See appendix I for methodological details.
32. John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). I am grateful both to Professor Robinson for sharing the Americans’ Use of Time archive and to Dan Devroye for careful analysis of the data. Our results differ slightly from those reported by Robinson and Godbey, because we have weighted the data 1) to correct for sampling anomalies in the 1965 survey; and 2) to assure equal weight to diaries from each day of the week. The most important of these adjustments corrects for the fact that the 1965 samples excluded households in communities of less than thirty-five thousand or in which everyone was retired.
33. Author’s analysis of Americans’ Use of Time archive.
34. The weekly scale-up formula used here assumes that a person who reported activity on Wednesday would not also have reported activity on Thursday. Since that approximation is probably slightly inaccurate, the overall figures in the text probably slightly overestimate the total fraction of people who participate over the course of a week. However, this rough approximation is very unlikely to affect the size and direction of change over time. All the trends in time usage reported in this book are highly significant in statistical terms.
35. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997, table 406, supplemented by unpublished data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce.
CHAPTER 4: RELIGIOUS PARTICIPATION
1. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Comment on Luckmann,” in Social Theory for a Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), 185–88, quotation at 187.
2. Phillip E. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment in America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), xiv.
3. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), esp. 16.
4. E. Brooks Holifield, “Towards a History of American Congregations,” in American Congregations, Volume 2: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, ed. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 23–53, quotation at 24.
5. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 6.
6. Sara Terry, “Resurrecting Hope,” The Boston Globe Magazine (July 17, 1994), p. 22.
7. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy, appendix A, 178–184; Holifield, “Towards a History of American Congregations,” 44.
8. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, esp. 282–83, 317–33, 377–84, and 518–21; Theodore F. Macaluso and John Wanat, “Voting Turnout & Religiosity,” Polity 12 (fall 1979): 158–69; John M. Strate, Charles J. Parrish, Charles D. Elder, and Coit Ford, III, “Life Span Civic Development and Voting Participation,” American Political Science Review 83 (June 1989): 443–64; Steven A. Peterson, “Church Participation and Political Participation: The Spillover Effect,” American Politics Quarterly 20 (January 1992): 123–39; Fredrick C. Harris, “Something Within: Religion as a Mobilizer of African-American Political Activism,” Journal of Politics 56 (February 1994): 42–68; Kenneth D. Wald, Lyman A. Kellstedt, and David C. Leege, “Church Involvement and Political Behavior,” in Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics, ed. David C. Leege and Lyman A. Kellstedt (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), esp. 130; Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America, 158.
9. Author’s analysis of General Social Survey and DDB Needham Life Style data, controlling for education, income, full-time employment, gender, marital and parental status, urban/rural residence, age, and race. This strong correlation between religiosity and associationism was reported in the 1950s by Hausknecht, The Joiners, 54, and Bernard Lazerwitz, “Membership in Voluntary Associations and Frequency of Church Attendance,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 2 (October 1962): 74–84.
10. Author’s analysis of 1996 National Election Study.
11. In the DDB Needham Life Style surveys, attendance at church and agreement that “religion is important in my life” are more powerful predictors of club attendance, volunteering, visiting with friends, and entertaining at home than is education. On virtually all measures of civic engagement in the Roper Social and Political Trends surveys, the difference between those who attended church last week and those who did not is as large as the difference between high school and college graduates.
12. Author’s analysis of a Scripps-Howard/Ohio University national survey of interpersonal communication, June 1997.
13. Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Murray S. Weitzman, Giving and Volunteering in the United States: 1996 Edition (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1996), 5, 14, 121–31; Virginia A. Hodgkinson, Murray S. Weitzman, and Arthur D. Kirsch, “From Commitment to Action: How Religious Involvement Affects Giving and Volunteering,” and Mordechai Rimor and Gary A. Tobin, “Jewish Giving Patterns to Jewish and Non-Jewish Philanthropy,” both in Faith and Philanthropy in America, ed. Robert Wuthnow, Virginia A. Hodgkinson, and associates (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), 93–114; 134–164. For partially contradictory evidence, see John Wilson and Thomas Janoski, “The Contribution of Religion to Volunteer Work,” Sociology of Religion 56 (summer 1995): 137–52.
14. Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 29–30. See also Strate et al., “Life Span Civic Development,” 452.
15. Ram A. Cnaan, Amy Kasternakis, and Robert J. Wineburg, “Religious People, Religious Congregations, and Volunteerism in Human Services: Is There a Link?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 22 (spring 1993): 33–51; Elton F. Jackson, Mark D. Bachmeier, James R. Wood, and Elizabeth A. Craft, “Volunteering and Charitable Giving: Do Religious and Associational Ties Promote Helping Behavior?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 24 (spring 1995): 59–78; John Wilson and Marc Musick, “Who Cares? Toward an Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work,” American Sociological Review 62 (October 1997): 694–713. In the DDB Needham Life Style surveys, church attendance is a much more powerful predictor of volunteering than is agreement that “religion is important to my life.”
16. Data in this paragraph are from the 1998 National Congregational Survey, as reported in Mark Chaves, “Religious Congregations and Welfare Reform: Who Will Take Advantage of ‘Charitable Choice’?” American Sociological Review 64 (1999)
: 836–46, and Mark Chaves, “Congregations’ Social Service Activities” (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, 1999). Somewhat higher but less representative rates of activity are reported in Virginia A. Hodgkinson, Murray S. Weitzman, and associates, From Belief to Commitment: The Community Service Activities and Finances of Religious Congregations in the United States: 1993 Edition (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1993), esp. 31, and Ram A. Cnaan, Social and Community Involvement of Religious Congregations Housed in Historic Religious Properties: Findings from a Six-City Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, 1997). See also John J. DiIulio Jr., “Support Black Churches: Faith, Outreach, and the Inner-City Poor,” The Brookings Review 17 (spring 1999): 42–45. Glenn C. Loury and Linda Datcher Loury, “Not by Bread Alone,” The Brookings Review 15 (winter 1997): 10–13; Samuel G. Freedman, Upon this Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); and Mark R. Warren, “Community Building and Political Power: A Community Organizing Approach to Democratic Renewal,” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (September 1998): 78–92.
17. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), quotation at 4. See also McAdam, Freedom Summer, and Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
18. Fredrick C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 59, 63–64; C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990); Mary Pattillo-McCoy, “Church Culture as a Strategy of Action in the Black Community,” American Sociological Review 63 (December 1998): 767–784. The greater religiosity of African Americans is confirmed by the General Social Survey, National Election Study, Roper Social and Political Trends surveys, and DDB Needham Life Style archives, as well as Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality.
19. C. Eric Lincoln, “The Black Church and Black Self-Determination” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Black Foundation Executives, Kansas City, Missouri, April 1989).
20. See Mayer, The Changing American Mind, 375–76. According to the Gallup poll (www.gallup.com/poll/indicators/indreligion.asp), the fraction of Americans who say that “religion is very important in my life,” fell from 75 percent in 1952 to 52 percent in 1978, but then recovered somewhat to 60 percent in 1999. According to the DDB Needham Life Style archive, the fraction who “definitely” or “generally” agree that “religion is important in my life” has slipped from 57 percent in 1981 to 50 percent in 1999. By contrast, the Princeton Religious Index, which measures belief in God, religious preference, belief that God can answer today’s problems, church membership, confidence in organized religion, feeling that clergy are honest, view of religion as very important in one’s life, and church or synagogue attendance fell sharply and more or less continuously from 1961 to 1994: C. Kirk Hadaway and David A. Roozen, Rerouting the Protestant Mainstream: Sources of Growth and Opportunities for Change (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1995), 43–44.
21. Professor Martin Marty of the University of Chicago, as quoted in “Spiritual America,” U.S. News & World Report, April 4, 1994.
22. Robert Wuthnow, The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), vi. On the secularization debate, see Jeffrey K. Hadden, “Toward Desacralizing Secularization Theory,” Social Forces 65 (March 1987): 587–611, Frank J. Lechner, “The Case against Secularization: A Rebuttal,” Social Forces 69 (June 1991): 1103–19; and the special “Symposium: Surveys of U.S. Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 63 (February 1998): 111–45.
23. R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (March 1993): 1044–93, esp. 1049.
24. Denominational data from Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 1984, ed. Constant H. Jacquet Jr. (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1984), 248, and later editions of this yearbook; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994; Benton Johnson, “The Denominations: The Changing Map of Religious America,” Public Perspective 4 (March/April 1993): 4. For a discussion of the methodological weaknesses of the denominational data, see notes in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 1984 and later editions of this yearbook. Gallup poll data from Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997 (table 86), based on surveys conducted by the Gallup Organization, Inc.; George Gallup Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1986 and other years), the Gallup Web site, www.gallup.com/poll/indicators/indreligion.asp, and Mayer, The Changing American Mind, 379. In later years this series combines multiple surveys into a single annual average. Norval D. Glenn, “The Trend in ‘No Religion’ Respondents to U.S. National Surveys, Late 1950s to Early 1980s,” Public Opinion Quarterly 51 (fall 1987): 293–314; Religion in America: 1992–1993, ed. Robert Bezilla (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1993), 40.
25. The longest-term, most widely reported evidence comes from a standard Gallup poll question, asked regularly since 1939, “Did you yourself happen to attend church [or synagogue] in the last seven days?” A similar question appears in the 1974–93 Roper Social and Political Trends archive: “Which of the following things have you personally done in the last week? … Gone to church or religious service.” Between 1952 and 1968 the National Election Studies asked respondents, “Would you say you go to church regularly, often, seldom or never?” and after 1968 they were asked, “Would you say you go to (church/synagogue) every week, almost every week, once or twice a month, a few times a year, or never?” Since 1967 the National Opinion Research Center (later the General Social Survey) has asked, “How often do you attend religious services?” and since 1975 the DDB Needham Life Style survey has asked, “How many times in the last twelve months did you attend church or other place of worship?” The weekly attendance estimate in the text represents the range of the Roper and Gallup results, and a similar figure is implied by the DDB Needham and GSS estimates of twenty to twenty-five church attendances per year.
26. These data are from the Gallup poll and the National Election Study series. The NIMH surveys cited in note 23 in chapter 3 found a 20 percent decline in church attendance between 1957 and 1976—a result consistent with the other survey evidence from that period.
27. The five archives, and the respective change that each records, are Gallup polls (down 4 percent from 1975–76 to 1998–99), National Election Studies (down 6 percent from 1970–72 to 1996–98), Roper Social and Political Trends (down 19 percent from 1974–75 to 1997–98), General Social Survey (down 13 percent from 1974–75 to 1997–98), and DDB Needham Life Style (down 15 percent from 1975–76 to 1998–99). A sixth archive graciously made available by Yankelovich Partners Inc. asks about at least “occasional” attendance; since this threshold is lower, the data are not sufficiently comparable to be included in figure 13, but this barometer, too, fell by nearly a quarter from 64 percent in 1978–80 to 49 percent in 1997–99.
28. Figure 13 is based on the average weekly church attendance figures from the Gallup poll (1940–99), the Roper Social and Political Trends polls (1974–96), the National Election Studies (1952–92), the DDB Needham Life Style polls (1975–99), and the General Social Survey (1972–98). Results from the last three of these archives have been recalibrated to match the “weekly church attendance” format of the first two archives. Alternative calibration formulas would alter the absolute level of church attendance reported, but would not alter the basic trends. The NES question format was changed in 1970 and again in 1990, but those changes did not substantially alter the results used to construct figure 13.
29. See C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Sho
w: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 58 (December 1993): 741–52; Mark Chaves and James C. Cavendish, “More Evidence on U.S. Catholic Church Attendance,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (December 1994): 376–81; and “Symposium: Surveys of U.S. Church Attendance.” According to the 1996 General Social Survey, only 2 percent of people who did not attend church “last week” report that they attended some other type of religious event or meeting. Thus the standard question does not “miss” a significant number of people who attend, say, prayer meetings instead of church services.
30. Surveys summarized here include the 1952 National Election Study, which found 23 percent membership in religious groups, excluding church membership; a 1955 survey, reported by Hausknecht, The Joiners (25 percent); the 1987 General Social Survey (14 percent); a 1989 survey, reported by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality ( 8 percent); and the 1996 National Election Study (13 percent). The wording of the relevant questions varied slightly across these five surveys, but since more probes were used in the later surveys, the decline in religious group memberships between the 1950s and the 1980s–1990s was, if anything, probably underestimated.
31. According to the General Social Survey, membership in a “church-related group” gradually declined from 43 percent in 1974 to 34 percent by the 1990s. The 1987 GSS discovered that roughly half of these reported memberships are simply church membership. Since church membership itself was not falling that fast, the gross figures must reflect a decline at least that sharp among respondents who participated in other religious groups. Further evidence that this question taps intense involvement in a religious community is the fact that barely one-third (32–35 percent) of mainline Protestants report membership in church-related groups as compared to nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Mormons. See Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion, 83–84, and Robert Wuthnow, “Mobilizing Civic Engagement: The Changing Impact of Religious Involvement,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Skocpol and Fiorina, 331–63.
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