BOWLING ALONE
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32. See also Stanley Presser and Linda Stinson, “Data Collection Mode and Social Desirability Bias in Self-Reported Religious Attendance,” American Sociological Review 63 (February 1998): 137–45. A striking 50 percent decline in time devoted to church appears in time diary data gathered from children aged three to twelve in 1981 and 1997, according to Sandra L. Hofferth and Jack Sandberg, “Changes in American Children’s Time, 1981–1997” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, Ill., August 1999), 30.
33. Author’s analysis of the GSS, Roper, NES, NIMH, and DDB Needham Life Style data, as well as the time diary data. (The Gallup data are not available for secondary analysis by outside scholars.) The statistical methodology underlying this conclusion is described in Firebaugh, “Methods for Estimating Cohort Replacement Effects.” See also James A. Davis, “Changeable Weather in a Cooling Climate atop the Liberal Plateau: Conversion and Replacement in Forty-Two General Social Survey Items, 1972–1989,”Public Opinion Quarterly 56 (fall 1992): 261–306, esp. 301.
34. On life cycle and generational patterns in American religious behavior, see Michael Hout and Andrew M. Greeley, “The Center Doesn’t Hold: Church Attendance in the United States, 1940–1984,” American Sociological Review 52 (June 1987): 325–345; Mark Chaves, “Secularization and Religious Revival: Evidence from U.S. Church Attendance Rates, 1972–1986,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28 (December 1989): 464–477; Glenn Fire-baugh and Brian Harley, “Trends in U.S. Church Attendance: Secularization and Revival, or Merely Lifecycle Effects,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30 (December 1991): 487–500; Ross M. Stolzenberg, Mary Blair-Loy, and Linda J. Waite, “Religious Participation in Early Adulthood: Age and Family Life Cycle Effects on Church Membership,” American Sociological Review 60 (February 1995): 84–103.
35. Author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends (1974–1998) and General Social Survey (1972–1998) archives.
36. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: Harper, 1993); David A. Roozen and William McKinney, “The ‘Big Chill’ Generation Warms to Worship: A Research Note,” Review of Religious Research 31 (March 1990): 314–322; Tom W. Smith, “Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep: Trends in Religious Preference Since World War II,” GSS Social Change Report, no. 26 (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, January 1991), 9; and Hadaway and Roozen, Rerouting the Protestant Mainstream, 40–42.
37. Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion, 18–19; 7–8; 32–33.
38. On religious mobility, see Smith, “Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep,” esp. 20; Hadaway and Marler, “All in the Family”; and Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); esp. 88–91. On cults, see Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990, 239–245.
39. Wade Clark Roof, “America’s Voluntary Establishment: Mainline Religion in Transition,” in Religion and America: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age, ed. Mary Douglas and Steven Tipton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 132, 137.
40. R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” 1076–78.
41. Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion, 170. See also John C. Green and James L. Guth, “From Lambs to Sheep: Denominational Change 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), 105, 114; and Smith, “Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep,” esp. 19–22.
42. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy, 7–8 (quotation), 30, 43, 55; Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
43. Presser and Stinson, “Data Collection Mode,” 144. Each of these two archives of time series data from youth surveys includes hundreds of thousands of respondents, so the trends are highly reliable.
44. The coefficient of variation for annualized measures of church attendance rose from 0.9 (1974–75) to 1.1 (1998–99) in both the General Social Survey and the DDB Needham Life Style archives and from 7.5 (1975) to 17.3 (1995) in the Americans’ Use of Time archive. See also Glenn, “Trend in ‘No Religion’ Respondents,” 309.
45. Between 1980 and 1990 the five states that experienced the greatest increase in adherence to a Christian church were Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia, while the five states that experienced the greatest decrease were Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Massachusetts. See Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1996, table 89. See also Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy, esp. 165. On the other hand, this regional polarization in religiosity does not appear in the General Social Survey, Roper Social and Political Trends, or DDB Needham Life Style data.
46. See Smith, “Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep”; Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion, 16; and Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, 248, on change between 1945–52 and 1985 in market share by denomination. The same pattern—increases in market share for Catholics and “none,” declines for Protestants and Jews—appears in the Gallup poll (1947–99), the National Election Studies (1948–88), the annual UCLA Survey of College Freshmen (1966–97), the Roper Social and Political Trends surveys (1974–94), and the General Social Survey (1974–98). Roper surveys report a decline in the Protestant share of the population from 62 percent in 1973–74 to 50 percent in 1991–92; Harris Poll, a decline from 67 percent in 1966 to 55 percent in 1992; the GSS, a decline from 63 percent in 1972 to 53 percent in 1998; and the Gallup poll, a decline from 70 percent in 1962 to 55 percent in 1999. A virtually identical decline of 22 percent in the Protestant share of U.S. population from 1966 to 1991 is implied in Hadaway and Roozen, Rerouting the Protestant Mainstream, 30. The Protestant share of the U.S. population also declined between 1890 and 1906, because of massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from southern and Eastern Europe, but that decline was almost surely less than 10 percent. See Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, 113.
47. The terms evangelical and fundamentalist are used somewhat loosely to refer to churches that emphasize acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal savior (the “born again” experience), a more or less literal reading of the Bible, and the obligation of Christians to spread the word of God, though there are sharp theological, social, and political differences within this broad category. On trends in evangelical and fundamentalist church membership, see Penny Long Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, “New Church Development and Denominational Growth (1950–1988): Symptom or Cause?” in Church and Denominational Growth, ed. David A. Roozen and C. Kirk Hadaway (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1993), 47–86; Smith, “Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep,” esp. 10 and 16; Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, esp. 248; Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion; Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion; Wuthnow, “Mobilizing Civic Engagement”; Tom W. Smith, “Are Conservative Churches Growing?” Review of Religious Research 33 (June 1992): 305–329; David Roozen, “Denominations Grow as Individuals Join Congregations,” in Roozen and Hadaway, Church and Denominational Growth, 15–35; and Wade Clark Roof, “America’s Voluntary Establishment: Mainline Religion in Transition,” 137–38.
48. Author’s analysis of GSS, Roper, NIMH, NES, and Americans’ Use of Time survey data. See also Hout and Greeley, “The Center Doesn’t Hold,” and Presser and Stinson, “Data Collection Mode.” Smith (“Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep,” 14) notes that between 1958 and 1986 the proportion of the U.S. population attending Protestant services in an average week dropped 6.6 percentage points, while the Catholic proportion dropped 4.6 percentage points. According to the Roper Social and Political Trends data, the comparable declines between 1974–75 and 1991–92 were 6.1 percentage points for Protestants and 2.1 percentage points for Catholics. Hout and Greeley argue that the entire decline in church attendance over the last
thirty years is due to a onetime jump in Catholic disaffection over Vatican social policies, but that thesis is inconsistent with two facts. First, the slump in participation rates among Catholics is a continuing one. Second, declining observance among Protestants appears not in lower rates of attendance among members, but in lower rates of membership itself.
49. Darren E. Sherkat and Christopher G. Ellison, “The Politics of Black Religious Change: Disaffiliation from Black Mainline Denominations,” Social Forces 70 (December 1991): 431–54, and Sherry Sherrod DuPree and Herbert C. DuPree, “The Explosive Growth of the African American Pentecostal Church,” in Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1993), 7–10. According to the Roper Social and Political Trends data, between 1974 and 1994 weekly church attendance declined by 2.7 percentage points per decade (or roughly 11 percent overall) among blacks, as compared with a decline of 3.2 percentage points (or roughly 15 percent overall) among nonblacks. Over the same period, according to the GSS data, membership in church groups declined by roughly 18 percent among blacks, as compared to 16 percent for nonblacks.
50. Finke and Stark, The Churching of America; Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
51. Wade Clark Roof, “America’s Voluntary Establishment: Mainline Religion in Transition,” 134.
52. Wuthnow, “Mobilizing Civic Engagement,” 6. Catholics are more likely than Protestants to attend church, but Protestants as a group are more likely to engage in other socioreligious activities; see Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, 246–47; 320–25.
53. Here I draw heavily on Wuthnow, “Mobilizing Civic Engagement” and Wilson and Janoski, “The Contribution of Religion to Volunteer Work,” 138, 149–50. For the contrary argument that evangelical Protestants are fully involved in civic affairs, see Smith, American Evangelicalism, but also the critical review of this book by Mark Chaves in Christian Century 116 (1999): 227–29.
54. George Marsden, “Preachers of Paradox: The New Religious Right in Historical Perspective,” in Douglas and Tipton, Religion and America, 150–168, quotation at 161; philanthropy figures calculated from the General Social Survey, 1987–89.
55. Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), George Will, “Chuck Colson’s Miracle,” Washington Post, May 30, 1999, p. B07; Joe Loconte, “Jailhouse Rock of Ages,” Policy Review 84 (July/August 1997): 12–14; Chaves, “Religious Congregations and Welfare Reform.”
56. Wuthnow, “Mobilizing Civic Engagement.”
57. Wuthnow, “Mobilizing Civic Engagement,” 14; see also Wilson and Janoski, “The Contribution of Religion to Volunteer Work,” 138, and Fredrick C. Harris, “Religious Institutions and African American Political Mobilization,” in Classifying By Race, ed. Paul E. Peterson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Wuthnow and Hodgkinson, Faith and Philanthropy in America, ch. 8, report that liberal Protestant churches are more involved than conservative churches in thirty-five different public activities—indeed all such activities except right-to-life protests.
CHAPTER 5: CONNECTIONS IN THE WORKPLACE
1. War is associated with increases in union membership throughout American history and also in other countries. See Richard B. Freeman, “Spurts in Union Growth: Defining Moments and Social Processes,” in The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 265–295; and Gary N. Chaison and Joseph B. Rose, “The Macrodeterminants of Union Growth and Decline,” in The State of the Unions, Industrial Relations Research Association Series, ed. George Strauss, Daniel G. Gallagher, and Jack Fiorita (Madison, Wis.: IRRA, 1991), 3–45, esp. 33.
2. A national survey in 1953 found that 23 percent of the respondents belonged to labor unions, the single most common type of membership in voluntary associations. See Charles R. Wright and Herbert H. Hyman, “Voluntary Association Memberships of American Adults: Evidence from National Sample Surveys,” American Sociological Review 23 (June 1958): 284–294. To be sure, union membership is more likely to be merely nominal than membership in other voluntary associations, in part because union shop rules mean that some union memberships are not voluntary at all. On the other hand, as late as 1987, according to the General Social Survey, nearly half of all union members (46 percent) said that they were actively involved in union affairs.
3. Paul Weiler, “The Representation Gap in the North American Workplace,” unpublished lecture, as quoted in Chaison and Rose, “The Macrodeterminants of Union Growth and Decline,” 13.
4. For various interpretations of union decline, see William T. Dickens and Jonathan S. Leonard, “Accounting for the Decline in Union Membership, 1950–1980,” Industrial & Labor Relations Review 38 (April 1985): 323–334; Leo Troy, “The Rise and Fall of American Trade Unions,” in Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1986), 75–109; Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Chaison and Rose, “The Macrodeterminants of Union Growth and Decline”; and Freeman, “Spurts in Union Growth.” Henry S. Farber, “Extent of Unionization in the United States,” in Challenges and Choices Facing American Labor, ed. Thomas A. Kochan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 15–43, statistic at 38, estimates that structural factors account for 40 percent of the total decline, whereas Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff, What Do Unions Do? (New York: Basic Books, 1984), put the figure at roughly 55–60 percent. Chaison and Rose, “The Macrodeterminants of Union Growth and Decline,” estimate that the change in industrial composition accounts for no more than 25 percent of the total decline.
5. Troy, “The Rise and Fall of American Trade Unions,” 87; and Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1997, table 691; Union Data Book 1998 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs, 1998).
6. Henry S. Farber and Alan B. Krueger, “Union Membership in the United States: The Decline Continues,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. W4216 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1992), 17–18.
7. Peter J. Pestillo, “Can the Unions Meet the Needs of a ‘New’ Work Force?” Monthly Labor Review 102 (February 1979): 33. In the DDB Needham Life Style surveys, agreement that “unions have too much power in America” dropped from 79 percent in 1977 to 55 percent in 1998.
8. For the 1950s, see Murray Hausknecht, The Joiners; and the 1952 National Election Study. For the 1980s and 1990s, see the General Social Survey; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality; and the 1996 National Election Study.
9. Author’s analysis of General Social Survey. On the other hand, the fraction of the population in professional or higher managerial jobs rose by about this same amount. Among those eligible to join professional associations there is a slight downward trend (not statistically significant) in membership rates over time.
10. Figure 15 is intended as a rough summary of the experiences of eight separate organizations. The standardization technique in figure 8 is used here. Since data are not available for all eight for the entire period, constructing yearly averages involves some arbitrariness. See appendix III for separate charts for each of the eight organizations. Membership figures were obtained from the national headquarters of the respective associations, numbers of professionals from Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975) and unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In each case I divided total membership by the number of people actually employed in that profession nationwide, cross-checking between government and associational statistician
s. Figures for employed mechanical engineers for 1930 and 1940 are estimates. Only CPAs may become members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, but consistent historical data are available only for all accountants, not just CPAs. Figure 15 thus understates membership among CPAs, but the broad trend—rising market share from 1900 to 1980–90 and then slipping—is probably accurate.
11. This pattern applies to a number of other professional associations, such as the National Society of Professional Engineers, but we were unable to construct satisfactory data series to chart the decline in detail.
12. Facing membership decline, many organizations added new categories of “affiliates” for students, apprentices, workers in allied fields, and so on. This practice raised the numerator of the “market share” fraction without any compensating adjustment in the denominator (people employed in that profession), so figure 15 tends, if anything, to understate the post-1970s slump.
13. The fraction of all surgeons who belong to the American College of Surgeons was 62 percent in 1975 and 64 percent in 1996. The fraction of all anesthesiologists in the American Society of Anesthesiology fell from 72 percent in 1970 to 65 percent in 1996.
14. Thanks to Kristin Goss and David Pinto-Duschinsky for exceptional help in preparing this section.
15. Alan Wolfe, “Developing Civil Society: Can the Workplace Replace Bowling?” The Responsive Community 8:2 (spring 1998), 41–47, quotations at 44. See also Maria T. Poarch, “Ties That Bind: U.S. Suburban Residents on the Social and Civic Dimensions of Work,” Community, Work & Family 1 (1998): 125–147.
16. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1998, table 644.