Kent Redding

The expansion of religious affiliation: An explanation of the growth of church participation in the United States 1850–1930☆

Abstract This paper focuses on the period in U.S. history that experienced the most rapid rate of increase of church membership—the decades between 1850 and 1930—in order to explain synchronic and diachronic variation in those rates. Using pooled cross-sectional time series analysis, different predictions are derived and tested from theories of secularization/social control, comparative disadvantage, resource mobilization, and pluralism. The effects of spatial diffusion and the momentum of religious tradition also are estimated. Our conclusion is that religious monopoly—not diversity—fuels religious expansion. This finding is bolstered by the complementary result that ethnic homogeneity is also conducive to religious expansion. Together these results highlight the importance for mobilization of religious and ethnocultural dominance in a particular niche.

Ethnocultural cleavages and the growth of church membership in the United States, 1860–1930

Recent research on the expansion of overall church membership in the United States has led to conflicting conclusions as to whether religious diversity or monopoly increases participation. This investigation helps resolve the debate by distinguishing among different religious traditions. It is hypothesized that differences in participation can be traced to racial, ethnic, and doctrinal divisions, and moreover, that these divisions also provide the contingent conditions under which competition or monopoly effects operate. Using pooled cross-sectional time series, comparisons center on Catholics, Baptists, and Mainline denominations. Separate analyses are presented for white and black Baptists, and for the Northern Baptist Convention that emerged in the early 20th century as a relatively liberal Baptist denomination. The results suggest that ecumenical and liberal religious traditions did accompany religious diversity, but membership in such churches grew very slowly. In contrast, groups that faced discrimination as well as those that shielded themselves from progressive currents of modernism sustained high rates of growth. Their monopoly situations are evident in the low religious diversity of counties in which they grew (as well as by low ethnic or racial diversity) and by their increasing spatial concentration over time.

Estimating Levels and Modeling Determinants of Black and White Voter Turnout in the South, 1880 to 1912

etween 1880 and 191 2, votin rates of white southerners declined dramatically and black voters were substantially disfranchised, as is well known. Scholarly efforts to understand the processes that produced these patterns have been hampered by the paucity of reliable data on voter turnout by race (Kousser 1974). Although counts of the number of black and white voters are not available, substantial information on electoral demography is known. How can estimates of the racial components of the electorate be estimated from decennial census data and aggregated electoral returns? Gary King ( 1997) provided a new solution to this old problem (Achen and Shively 1995) and opened new avenues for historical research. This research has three purposes. First, it provides an evaluation from a practitioner’s perspective of the statistical software used to implement King’s method. The program, named EzI-A(n Easy) Program for Ecological Inference-is described in King (1997) and provided free via his Web site (http://gking.harvard.edu). EzI is a Windows-compatible shell for the GAUSS program EI, which is the calculation engine that implements the computer-intensive iterative solution King described. EzI is undoubtedly easier to use than EI, but its ease of use is misleading. EzI can readily produce poor estimates if model diagnostics and sources of independent validation information are ignored. We provide some suggestions for using EzI based on our experience and show that it can produce reasonable estimates of voter turnout by race.’ Second. we report estimates of black and white voter turnout for 1880, 1892, 1900, and 1912 for the eleven southern states calculated from averages of our county-level EzI estimation results. The estimates are broadly consistent with expectations derived from previous research (Kousser 1974). Estimates of black and white turnout rates are informative in their own right, but many researchers would like to evaluate th relative strength of various plausible determinants of racial differences in turnout. The third contribution of this research is to show how one can use the county-level estimates produced by King’s technique to evaluate the importance of various factors that produce racial differences in turnout. We show how the turnout estimates obtained from EzI can be used as dependent variables in a second-stage mobilization model in which the black and white voting rates are allowed to affect each other. We describe some solutions for common problems in regression-model specifications often used to estimate the determinants of voter turnouts. Preliminary results reported below indicate that other factors may have been as important as the poll tax and the literacy tests in restricting the turnout of black voters during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the South. Beyond the substance of the voter-turnout analyses, the methodological discussions developed below should prove useful for solving other ecological inference problems.

The Handbook of Political Sociology: Theories of Race and the State

Popular notions of race have putative biological origins, but the mechanisms through which certain human characteristics come to represent categorical identities and differences have always been created by social, historical, and political processes. In the latter instance, we simply mean that racial signification is necessarily about power and, we might add, not simply the power of one group over another, but the power of any such group to collectively form a racial identity and organize in defense of it. In spite of this intimate connection between race and politics, the literature on race and the social construction of race on the one hand, and the literature on political sociology on the other, have largely developed independently and with little dialogue between them. This chapter explores the implicit and increasingly explicit connections between the two literatures with an eye to how race theory and state theory can inform one another. First, we examine current constructivist theories of race and ethnicity, with special attention to issues concerning the political construction of race. Next, we argue that current research in the political sociology of race tends to ignore or deemphasize how states create and maintain racial identities. Race identities are typically viewed as the source of state-enforced racial policies, but are rarely seen as their effect. An examination of the social and political determinants of racial categories used by the U.S. Census provides a convenient illustration of how race identities are both causes and effects of state policies.

SPATIAL PROCESSES AND THE DUALITY OF CHURCH AND FAITH: A SIMMELIAN PERSPECTIVE ON U.S. DENOMINATIONAL GROWTH, 1900-1930

With information on all U.S. denominations of nontrivial sizes, this paper examines various spatial and temporal prcesses underlying religious expansion between 1900 and 1930. Simmels provocative and complex essay, “Soziologie des Raumes” (1903) poses the central paradox that religion is both faith—cultural constellations of beliefs—and church—social associations that are spatially situated. This distinction helps to clarify differences among denominations with regard to the extent to which they exert strong demands on their members, and leads to predictions about variation in denominational growth rates, in spatial dynamics, and in the extent to which denominations accommodate to contextual heterodoxy (diversity) or not. In these terms, we re-examine the debate about whether adherence rates increase in competitive markets (under conditions of diversity) or under monopoly conditions (under conditions of little diversity). We finally suggest that Simmels theoretical emphasis on spatial and temporal dynamics has relevance for understanding the nature of mobilization efforts of various kinds, not only by religious groups, but also by those that organize social and political movements

The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925.

This study examines the social origins of interest group politics in the USA. Between 1890 and 1925, a system centred on elections and party organizations was partially transformed by increasingly prominent legislative and administrative policy-making, and by the insistent participation of nonpartisan organizations, including farmers, workers and women, who invented strategies to circumvent the parties. Voters learned how to monitor legislative processes, to hold their representives accountable at the polls, and to institutionalize their ongoing participation in shaping policy. The text analyzes organizational politics in three American states, California, Washington and Wisconsin, seeking to demonstrate how the political opportunity structure of federalism allowed regional innovations to exert leverage on national political institutions.