Praying for a Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Church Growth [Beckworth]
David Beckworth
Texas State University
A widely-held view is that economic distress increases religiosity and vice versa. This understanding implies there should be an inverse relationship between the business cycle and religiosity. This possibility is empirically explored in this paper by examining the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and Protestant church growth in the United States. The findings of this paper suggest there is a countercyclical component to church growth for Protestant denominations, particularly for evangelical Protestants.
File: praying_for_a_recession1.pdf [376.04KB]
Published 11/02/2007
Filed under: (2007), *beckworth, @asrec'07, business cycle, church attendance, growth, recession, religiosity
Never on Sun(ny)Days? Lessons from Congregational Attendance Counts [Iannaccone, Everton]
Laurence R. Iannaccone; Sean F. Everton
Abstract: In a world where “there is no new thing under the sun” the deck most certainly is stacked against original research. And all the more so for a subject like church attendance wherein scholars have wearied their flesh in the making of many books for more than forty years (Ecclesiastes 1:9, 11:12). Researchers have sliced and diced their data in every conceivable manner. With hundreds of surveys and scores of statistics, they have produced thousands of findings on the causes, consequences, and characteristics of church attendance, to say nothing of its long-run trends, demographic correlates, and cross-national variation.
File: Iannaccone - Sunny Days.pdf [137.51KB]
Published 12/01/2002
Filed under: *everton, *iannaccone, church attendance, seasonality, time series, trends