Religious Pluralism and US Church Membership: A Reassessment
This paper argues that church membership rates are lower in contemporary US counties having greater religious pluralism and that the same negative relationship is found in most historical data on US church membership. Finke and Stark find a positive relationship but in most cases only after statisti...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford Univ. Press
1999
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| In: |
Sociology of religion
Year: 1999, Volume: 60, Issue: 2, Pages: 149-173 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | This paper argues that church membership rates are lower in contemporary US counties having greater religious pluralism and that the same negative relationship is found in most historical data on US church membership. Finke and Stark find a positive relationship but in most cases only after statistically controlling for the percent of the population that is Catholic and/or Mormon. Breault has shown that these statistical controls create multicollinearity problems that distort the true, negative effects of pluralism. Finke and Stark counter that such multicollinearity is unavoidable because the statistical controls measure important substantive characteristics of Catholicism that are necessary to accurately observe pluralism's true, positive effects. This paper shows that the statistical controls do not measure substantive effects of Catholicism and that the resulting multicollinearity problems are the result of a mathematical artifact of the way pluralism is calculated and the cases Finke and Stark select for analysis. Without these problematic statistical controls, most contemporary and historical analyses of US data reveal a negative association between religious pluralism and church membership. |
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| ISSN: | 1759-8818 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Sociology of religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3711746 |