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
Religion Reloaded: Scenarios for Spirituality in the 21st Century [Iannaccone]
Laurence R. Iannaccone
Abstract: Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the past thirty to forty years have been a period of surprisingly slow change throughout America – slow relative to the century that came before, slow relative to changes in the less developed or formerly communist countries, and slow, I suspect, relative to the decades to come.
Religious change has been especially slow. Christianity remains the dominant American faith, Catholics remain the largest denomination, and surveyed rates of church attendance, church membership, belief in God, and self-reported religiosity remain largely unchanged since the 1960s. Established trends have continued – including growth in the share of people identifying with new religions, non-Christian religions, and no religion – but the magnitude of change has been less than expected in the 1960s and far less than predicted by proponents of “secularization” theory or “Dead of God” theology…
File: Iannaccone - Religion Reloaded.pdf [25.18KB]
Published 09/01/2003
Filed under: *iannaccone, attendance, future of religion, religiosity, secularization, spirituality
Rationality and the “Religious Mind” [Stark, Iannacone, Finke]
Rodney Stark; Laurence R. Iannaccone; Roger Finke
Abstract: Scholars have long viewed religion as the irrational product of primitive minds and pre-scientific times. Economic perspectives were deemed irrelevant to the study of religion, and the secularization thesis, positing religious decline in the face of scientific advancement, dominated religious research. But a growing body of evidence challenges these traditional assumptions. The data suggest that religious involvement is associated with normal mental health, is sensitive to perceived costs and benefits, and is compatible with graduate education and scientific training. Professors, scientists, and other highly educated Americans are less religious than the general population, but these differences are comparable to the religious differences associated with gender, race, and other demographic traits. Within academia, religious faculty are far more common in the “hard” sciences than in the humanities or social sciences.
File: Iannaccone - Rationality and the Religious Mind-D.pdf [103.68KB]
Published 04/11/1997
Filed under: (1997), *finke, *iannaccone, *stark, faculty, rationality, religiosity, scientists, secularization
Religion, Values, and Behavioral Constraint [Iannaccone]
Laurence R. Iannaccone
Working Paper
George Mason University
Political and journalistic discourse these days is filled with talk about values, though most of it amounts to little more than hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Our nation is said to face a crisis of values. Increased rates of divorce, juvenile crime, and teen pregnancy are blamed on the deterioration in family values. Major social institutions – schools, churches, families, the entertainment industry, and government at all levels – find themselves under increasing pressure to do something about values. In such a climate, both rhetoric and reality impel social scientists to enter the fray.
Economists, however, find it difficult to talk about values. Part of this difficulty lies in their relatively precise approach to the study of human behavior; by economic standards, most values talk is hopelessly vague and politicized. But a deeper difficulty concerns the very foundations of economics, specifically the assumption of stable preferences. As Gary Becker (1976:5) observed some twenty years ago, it is the relentless and unflinching use of this assumption, together with the assumptions of maximizing behavior and market equilibrium, that “form[s] the heart of the economic approach” to human behavior.
File: Iannaccone - Values.pdf [66.40KB]
Published 01/01/1980
Filed under: *iannaccone, economics of religion, habits, religiosity, values