Mark Chaves

Regulation, Pluralism, and Religious Market Structure Explaining Religion's Vitality

At the macro level, the economics of religion implies that religion will be more vibrant where it is less regulated and hence more competitive. Recent attempts to support this hypothesis are weakened by the use of religious pluralism as a proxy measure for the extent to which the religious market is subsidized or regulated. This article extends the analysis of religious market structure by measuring directly the regulation of religious markets in 18 Western democracies. The analysis provides strong support for the hypothesized connection between religious competitiveness and vitality. The results show that (a) the relationship between subsidized religion and religious participation holds in both Protestant and Catholic countries and (b) its explanatory power is far superior to that of religious pluralism alone. However, certain features of the results suggest that the “economics of religion” should be supplemented with noneconomic variables to achieve adequate sociological explanation.

Congregations and Social Services: What They Do, How They Do It, and with Whom:

The charitable choice policy initiative has renewed attention to religion’s role in the U.S. social welfare system. The authors use data from the 1998 National Congregations Study to provide a portrait of congregations’ social service activities, emphasizing features of this portrait that are relevant to ongoing policy debates. In particular, they assess two claims often made about religiously based social services: Religious organizations represent an alternative to secular or government organizations by providing “holistic” and personalistic services focused on long-term solutions to individuals’ problems, and collaborations with secular, especially government, organizations threaten to undermine that approach to social services. Results support neither of these claims. Congregation-based social services are not an alternative to the world of secular nonprofit or government-supported social services; they are part of that world.

The National Congregations Study : Background, methods, and selected results

The National Congregations Study (NCS) was conducted in conjunction with the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS). The 1998 GSS asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation, thus generating a nationally representative sample of religious congregations. Data about these congregations were collected via a one-hour interview with one key informant - a minister, priest, rabbi, or other staff person or leader - from 1236 congregations. Information was gathered about multiple aspects of congregationssocial composition, structure, activities, and programming. This article describes NCS methodology and presents selected univariate results in four areas: denominational ties, size, political activities, and worship practices.

Religious congregations and welfare reform : Who will take advantage of Charitable Choice?

The Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 welfare reform legislation requires states that contract with nonprofit organizations for delivery of social services to include religious organizations as eligible contractees. This legislation altered the conditions under which religious organizations can provide publicly funded social services. I use data from the National Congregations Study, a 1998 survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,236 religious congregations, to address two questions: To what extent will congregations seek government support for social service activity? Which subsets of congregations are most likely to take advantage of these new opportunities? Univariate statistics show that more than one-third of congregations are potentially open to pursuing government funds to support social service activities. Multivariate analyses show that liberal and moderate congregations are much more likely than conservative congregations to pursue charitable-choice opportunities, and predominantly African American congregations are particularly likely to move in this direction. These results are consistent with sociological theory and research, but they are surprising in the context of the national politics of charitable choice

Comparing the Community Involvement of Black and White Congregations

Have the extra-religious functions of black congregations become attenuated in recent decades? We have addressed this question here via a comparative analysis of black and white churches with the only extant national probability sample of U.S. congregations. We found that in 1988 black congregations were not more active in secular activities in general, but they were significantly more active in certain kinds of non-religious activity : a) activity directed at serving disprivileged segments of the immediately surrounding community, and (b) civil rights activity. The observed differences between black and white congregations in these activities were not explained by differences in congregational size, resources, urban/rural setting, or southern/non-southern location. These results support the idea that black congregations continue to perform non-religious functions within their communities, although an intriguing interaction between race and a congregations founding date points to important variation within black religion

Secularization and Religious Revival : Evidence from U.S. Church Attendance Rates, 1972-1986

Etude fondee sur les releves quasi annuels du NORC, General Social Surveys (Etats-Unis). Elles met en evidence un double courant, de secularisation et de reveil religieux, simultanes, aussi bien chez les protestants que chez les catholiques

Denominations as Dual Structures: An Organizational Analysis

The central thesis of this article is that denominations are composed of two parallel structures overlying congregations: a religious authority structure and an agency structure. This artide elaborates the notion of religious authority structure, provides a brief overview of agency structure origins, and sociologically distinguishes the two structures. Placing denominational dual structure at the center of organizational analysis: (a) leads to a heretofore elusive sociological definition of religious organizations; (b) reveals the horizontal rather than vertical nature of intradenominational power shifts, thereby challenging the common (mis)perception that congregations are increasingly beholden to agencies; (c) highlights both the largely ignored role of agencies and the often overlooked top-down component in intradenominational conflict and schism; and (d) makes it easier to conceptualize and investigate processes of internal secularization. This approach to denominational organization is in line with a recent development in the sociology of organizations in which organizational subunits rather than organizational wholes occupy the center of attention. What are denominations, organizationally? In this article I argue that the national organizational structure of denominations has been misunderstood in a subtle but fundamental way. Contrary to how denominations usually are treated, they are not in general unitary organizations. Rather, they are essentially constituted by dual, parallel structures: a religious authority structure and an agency structure. This dual structure has been overlooked or, when noticed, underemphasized, and this has had great cost in terms of understanding a number of sociologically important developments within American religion. The primary purposes of this article are to elaborate the conceptualization of denominations as dual structures, and to illustrate how this insight alters our vision of organizational developments within American religion and points to new directions for research into

Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis

Virtually every discussion of secularization asserts that high levels of religiosity in the United States make it a decisive counterexample to the claim that modern societies are prone to secularization. Focusing on trends rather than levels, the authors maintain that, for two straightforward empirical reasons, the United States should no longer be considered a counterexample. First, it has recently become clear that American religiosity has been declining for decades. Second, this decline has been produced by the generational patterns underlying religious decline elsewhere in the West: each successive cohort is less religious than the preceding one. America is not an exception. These findings change the theoretical import of the United States for debates about secularization.

Did the Faith-Based Initiative Change Congregations

We use national surveys of congregations conducted in 1998 and 2006-2007 to assess whether or not the faith-based initiative increased congregations’ social service involvement, government funding, or collaborations with government or nonprofit organizations. More congregations indicated interest in social services and government funding in 2006-2007 than in 1998, but congregational involvement in social services, government funding, or collaborations has not increased since 1998. An in-depth local study of partnerships between congregations and nonprofit social service agencies leads to the same conclusion. The faith-based initiative did not change congregations’ behavior or expand their role in our social welfare system because it overlooked congregations’ longstanding role in community systems, and it was built on false assumptions about congregations’ latent capacity to expand that role and the extent to which they constitute a meaningful alternative to existing organizational networks of social support.

Full pews and empty altars : demographics of the priest shortage in United States Catholic dioceses

The Roman Catholic Church faces a huge loss of diocesan priests in the United States. Constructing a census-registry of 36,000 priests from 1966 to 1984, and using life-table techniques, the authors foretell a dramatic future loss of priests, while predicting a rise in the churchgoing population.