Recent Articles about Religious Competition

In an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, we read about what happens to empty church buildings no longer being used by congregations.  Some buildings are repurposed, some are razed, and some have various parts salvaged.

An article in The Atlantic describes some of the ways that Catholicism has adapted over the last couple centuries.  While it had "dogmatically opposed modernity" at times, it has also found an active public profile.

Finally, an article at NPR discusses some ways that churches are experimenting with alternative ways to engage with people.  Think gardening!

USCIRF Religious Freedom Designations and the 2022 Annual Report

Last week the USCIRF issued a press statement about its designated Countries of Particular Concern.  The following twelve countries were given this designation:

• Burma
• China
• Cuba
• Eritrea
• Iran
• Nicaragua
• North Korea
• Pakistan
• Russia
• Saudi Arabia
• Tajikistan
• Turkmenistan

Check out the 2022 Annual Report (pdf) for information about religious freedom in these and other countries.  This report was published back in April 2022.

COVID-19 Restrictions on Religion Around the World

The Pew Research Center just published two days ago a report titled "How COVID-19 Restrictions Affected Religious Groups Around the World in 2020."  Read the entire summary page here, and if you want to learn more then check out the full report here (pdf).

Several main findings are reported.  For example, 23% of all countries had some sort of penalties for violation of COVID-19 restrictions on religious gathering, 27% of all countries had religious groups that spoke out against the COVID-19 restrictions, and religious groups in many countries were blamed for helping to spread COVID-19.  In other words, there were both government restrictions and social hostilities towards religious groups during the pandemic.  There were also many cases religious groups working with government officials to slow down the spread of COVID-19.

When the pandemic first started and restrictions on religious practice were being instituted here in the U.S., I wrote several posts that tracked the ongoing developments and debates.  So if you want to learn more about these developments, you can see the posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

USCIRF Report on State-favored Religions

Last week the USCIRF (which you will learn about on Homework 7) issued a report on state-favored religions.  Here's the press release, and here is the entire report (pdf).

Some of the key points include:

• 73% of the 78 countries that have an official or favored religion, also have policies or laws that led to repression or discrimination.
• Religious minorities and women are among the mostly likely victims of this repression and discrimination.

The report is only 8 pages, so read the entire report.  Ask yourself the following questions as you read:

• Of the 78 countries with an official or favored religion, in how many is Islam the favored religion?  What about Christianity?  What other religions may be favored?
• In what parts of the world are countries with favored religions located?  Where are the ones that have discriminatory laws and policies?  Where are the ones that do not have discriminatory policies?
• Do you see any patterns?
• What types of repression and discrimination occur?
• What is the connection between having a favored religion and having discriminatory laws and policies?
• Are non-religious persons also victims?  Why or why not?

Which is Better: Conducting the Survey Online or Over the Phone?

A recent article at Religion News Service describes a new study of survey responses for the General Social Survey (GSS).  This study finds that the move from conducting the GSS via phone calls to conducting surveys online has led to a change in the set of people to agree to participate in the survey, and that this can lead to mistakes in how we interpret trends in the data.  In particular, the study finds that highly religious individuals are less likely to participate in the online surveys, and that this skews the survey results so that the surveys overstate the decline in religiosity.

There is a counterargument, however, that is also mentioned in the RNS article, namely, that the phone interviews were already overstating American religiosity so the move to online survey is producing more representative data.

This debate illustrates how, even when two people agree on what the data literally report, they may still disagree on the best way to interpret what the data actually mean.

The Church Like Me

Last week, Christianity Today published an article titled "More Americans Want Their Church to Share Their Politics."  The "more" in the title refers to a finding that the percent of U.S. Protestant churchgoers who want their fellow churchgoers to share their political views has increased.

The figure below is from that article.  According to the blue bars, compared to 2017, more people now somewhat agree or strongly agree with the statement "I prefer to attend a church where people share my political views."  According to the red bars, there has also been a similar shift in people's perceptions of whether their fellow churchgoers' views match their own.

This trend is not a new one in the American religious marketplace.  In their 2010 book American Grace, Putnam and Campbell show that this trend has been in place for decades.  Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into religious groups of people who are more like themselves.

This sorting a natural consequence of a vibrant religious marketplace in which people are able to switch religious groups at relatively low cost, thereby increasing the chance that they find a religious group that better matches their tastes.  Though it is fair to ask about the consequences of this trend.  Of course, the main one is that this sorting further reduces the diversity in the already someone homogenous churches.  Overcoming this homogeneity is difficult, an issue that is discussed in Section 11.5 of the book.

Read this article and Section 11.5 of the book to better understand the challenges with creating and fostering a diverse church.

The Religious Value of Trunk or Treats

 A "trunk or treat" is a Halloween activity held in a parking lot or large open field in which adults decorate their automobile trunks with Halloween decorations and hand out candy to children who walk from car to car in their Halloween costumes.

This article at RNS discusses how churches have become suppliers of trunk or treats.  Read the entire article and ask yourself why churches have become suppliers of trunk or treats.  Who attends the trunk or treat?  Why can a trunk or treats be an effective religious activity?  What religious purposes can a trunk or treat serve?

The Market for Communion Wafers

A recent article titled "How Nuns Got Squeezed out of the Communion Wafer Business" tells the story of the market for Catholic communion wafers.  Groups of nuns began producing communion wafers for churches over a hundred years ago.  There was an intensity to the work as, during the first half of the 20th Century, the nuns would cut each wafer individually.  We are talking about millions of wafers, so this was in part a labor of love.  Then a priest asked a man named John Cavanagh to build a machine that would cut the wafers at a larger scale.  Cavanagh not only built the machine for the nuns to use; he also entered the market himself. The company he founded is now the dominant supplier of wafers in the U.S., producing about three-fourths of the wafers used in Catholic churches.  But in becoming the dominant supplier of wafers, Cavanagh's company has also driven out of the market many of the nuns who had been suppliers.

The main plot of this story is the non-profit nuns competing -- and ultimately losing out to -- the for-profit Cavanagh.  That alone makes the account worth reading.

Yet there are other elements that add color to the account and should not be overlooked.  For example:

• An increase in the demand for wafers in the middle of the 20th Century as many Catholics began to partake in communion weekly instead of monthly meant that new supply needed to be provided, and Cavanagh provided that supply.
• There was a recent, sharp decline in the demand for wafers during the Covid pandemic
• There have been several innovations in the ingredients and designs of new wafers -- both by Cavanagh's company and by the nuns.
• In recent decades, the changes in this market have occurred simultaneously with an overall decline in the number of nuns.

The article conveys a sadness about the loss of nuns as suppliers of communion wafers, but there is an underlying ambivalence.  The nuns were prescient entrepreneurs in this market over a hundred years ago, and that is an impressive feat.  But where the nuns showed the way, others soon followed and perhaps even did better.  Cavanagh's company is the largest supplier in this market now, but you never know if a future competitor will emerge and ultimately push out Cavanagh.

The Costs and Benefits for Different Kinds of Religiosity

Chapter 4.2 of the book of the text discusses the relative importance or "nature" and "nurture."  According to studies, both nature and nurture influence religiosity, but the relative importance of each differs by the type of religiosity.  In particular, religious affiliation tends to be more stable and influenced by one's parents throughout one's life than church attendance.

Consider one way this pattern is manifested. Suppose an individual grows up in a religious household, takes upon themselves the religious identification of their parents, and is a regular participant in the activities of their parents' religious group throughout their childhood.  As they advance through adulthood, their interest in religion declines.  Although they continue to maintain their identification with the same religious group. they rarely participate in church activities.  That is, they originally inherited the "belonging" and "behaving" of their parents as a child but now have an adult have only retained the "belonging."

Why would this pattern come to realization?  Some simple cost-benefit analysis of an example can provide a clue.

First consider the affiliation decision.  There are probably some benefits to an individual to retaining their religious affiliation, while there is little benefit to switching.  By keeping their identification, they keep their parents happy to an extent.  They can also attend church with their parents on major holidays, thereby maintaining some family cohesion.  But it is also the case that keeping the religious identification does not involve any costly action.  Although it will differ across individuals, retaining their identification can involve as little as periodic verbal acknowledgement of their affiliation in conversation.  So even if there are relatively few benefits for retaining the affiliation, having a little cost to retaining the affiliation means that a person can retain their inherited affiliation for a long period of time without much pressure to change.

The church-attendance decision is quite different.  Attending in any given week involves clear costs because the time spent at church can be spent on so many other activities -- sleeping, exercising, studying, earning money, practicing a hobby, enjoying time with friends, streaming a movie online, and so on.  Time-allocation decisions are frequent and regular with pretty clear costs.  So even though the decision to attend any particular week might seem to be a less significant decision than the decision of one's religious affiliation, the fact that there are clear and obvious costs to attending church means that the decline in religious participation may occur more steadily with a decline in religious demand and long before a change -- if any -- in religious affiliation.

This simple analysis illustrates one of the reasons why religiosity is complex, namely, that the costs and benefits of different types of religiosity can change in different ways, and this can result in different trends in those different types of religiosity even for the same individual.

The U.S. Catholic Church's Internal Self-evaluation

In October 2021, Pope Francis asked the worldwide membership of the Catholic Church to reflect on the church, its mission, and their membership.  As part of a two-year "Synod of Synodality" (you can see the Vatican's web site for the Synod here), leaders of local congregations (parishes) and local collections of congregations (dioceses) were to engage in dialogues with their members to gather information about their members' experiences and perspectives.  In the U.S., the local reports from this process were then to be sent to the national U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who would then create a summary for Catholicism as a whole in the U.S.  This summary -- called the National Synthesis -- was completed and sent to the Vatican in August 2022 and can be found here in pdf format.

This document provides an excellent look at the key issues and concerns of American Catholics who remain the largest religious denomination in the U.S.  So this study is worth a look.  It intends to reflect contributions from about 700,000 persons, so this was a large collective effort.

Several key issues are identified in the report as being of extreme importance to the study participants, and I will mention just a few of them.

The first issue mentioned is the sexual abuse within the Church.  The report states: "The sin and crime of sexual abuse has eroded not only trust in the hierarchy and the moral integrity of the Church, but also created a culture of fear that keeps people from entering into relationship with one another and thus from experiencing the sense of belonging and connections for which they yearn" (p. 5).

Another issue was "to be a more welcoming Church where all members of the People of God can find accompaniment on the journey. ...  People want the Church to be a home for the wounded and broken, not an institution for the perfect" (p. 7).  LGTBQ+, divorced, and those with special needs (e.g., deaf) members were identified as particularly in need of this welcoming, and there was a desire for women to have more leadership roles.

A third issue, called "co-responsibility" in the report (p. 11), is to find a better balance of the religious work between the clergy (the appointed religious leaders) and the laity (the member volunteers).  There was an expression that the laity can do more than they have been doing.

Yet other issues are mentioned so you can see the report for more details.  Of course, this report reflects the concerns of American Catholics who participated, and the concerns of Catholics in other countries can and will differ.  Nonetheless, a lesson for our class is that religious groups -- even ones as old and established as the Catholic Church -- must continue to adapt and innovate when confronting changing circumstances and challenges.  Only by doing this can they keep up in an ever changing religious marketplace.

Burkinis in the Public Swimming Pool

In June of this year, an administrative court in France upheld a ruling that women are not allowed to wear burkini swimwear in public swimming pools in the city of Grenoble.  The burkini is a head-to-ankle swimsuit that covers the woman's entire body except for her face.  Responding to vocal locals, city leaders had previously determined the burkinis would be allowed, but then a higher-ranking government official (the prefect) stopped this decision.  The administrative court upheld the prefect's decision that burkinis not be allowed.

See this article.  The primary direct effect of this ruling is that many Muslim women will no longer be swimming in the pool because they would only swim there if they could wear burkinis.

Some other French cities do allow burkinis in their public pools, so it might seem strange to not allow them in Grenoble's pools.  The court's reasoning behind not allowing them in Grenoble is not that burkinis should be prohibited in general but rather that the Grenoble city leaders whose decision -- later overturned -- to allow women to wear burkinis in public pools made their decision based in part of religious reasons, which violates a principle of separation of church and state.  Those cities that allow burkinis in public pools made their decisions to allow burkinis as part of general loosening of swimwear restrictions and not specifically to satisfy a particular religious demand.

The article does not make any prediction about what will happen next, however the ruling does seem to leave open a path for burkinis to be allowed in Grenoble in the future.  The key is for the burkini proponents to advocate for a more general loosening of swimwear restrictions rather than a specific burkini privilege.  Whatever happens, this case demonstrates the intricate interplay between religious persons and government officials that leads to the religious rules and regulations that we observe in the real world.

The Future of American Religion

The Pew Research Center published a new report titled Modeling the Future of Religion in America (full pdf here).  The main idea is to make projections of religious affiliation rates going forward fifty years.  Making projections is a tricky sort of business because it is all about identifying which of the current trends will continue, which will not, and what not-yet-experienced trends may occur.

This report proceed by considering a few different levels of switching out of Christianity.  With no switching, Christianity remains the majority religious tradition by affiliation in 2070, but with other switching scenarios, Christianity loses its majority status by 2070.

The report also discusses some of the nuts and bolts underlying the projections.  For example, the projections need to make various assumptions about not just rates of religious disaffiliation, but also about fertility, mortality, migration, and intergenerational religious transmission.

With so many moving parts, it is impossible to get everything correct, but making a perfect projection is too high of a standard.  What this report can do -- and does pretty well in my opinion -- is provide a limited number of plausible future scenarios.

Millennials and Digital Worship

According to this article at RNS, a recent research study found that 32% of American and Canadian millennials consume religion digitally but only 5% said they consume digitally without also participating in person. The millennials are an interesting population because they grew up before smart phones.

The author of this research study, sociologist Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, left it up to the respondents to define digital religion themselves.  Here are a few quotes from her:

"For the most part, people are both involved in person and supplement that through digital religion."

"There are a lot of savvy religious users using it to complement existing ties (to religion)."

"The overall takeaway for me was that digital religion is definitely a thing, but it's a thing that only a chuck of the (millennial) population does."

These findings match what we have discussed in class previously, namely that online and digital resources tend to supplement other existing forms of religion rather than displace them.  As children who grew up with smart phones enter adulthood, new studies will be needed to see if they manifest the same pattern.

Zoroastrianism's Uncertain Future

This AP News article from 1 July 2022 describes some of the challenges facing Zoroastrians today.  Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest religious groups, but despite its historic past, its future is highly uncertain.  The religious group has only about 125,000 members worldwide, and its prospects for growth are grim.  It does not conduct missionary work, and it has only limited retention of children  --  in part because children of mixed-faith marriages are not considered Zoroastrians.

The future of Zoroastrianism will be one of the discussion topics at the upcoming World Zoroastrian Conference 2022 held in New York City this weekend.

"Praedicate Evangelium" and Reforms in the Catholic Church

On 19 March 2022, Pope Francis, published the Praedicate Evangelium ("Preach the Gospel"), a constitution that details reforms in the Catholic Church.  These reforms officially took effect on 5 June 2022.  It redefines and reforms how the Roman Curia (the administrative institutions of the Vatican) operates.  Many reforms have been discussed and planned in the years since Pope Francis began his term in 2013, so this publication was highly anticipated.  The full text in English of the Praedicate Evangelium can be on the Vatican web site here.

The document is a kind of constitution, so it defines and describes operations.  Some of its content describes reforms that have already occurred under Pope Francis's leadership.  One of these was the creation of an office to police financial matters within the Vatican.  Other reforms are innovations that are now just made public. Yet, there is an underlying, unifying theme that is captured by the title of the document, i.e., that the church's primary function is missionary work.

It is difficult to understand the significance of many of the changes without some insider knowledge of the Roman Curia's structure, but some developments are understandable to outsiders.  One of these later changes is that many Vatican offices will now be open to lay leadership.  This is significant because many leadership positions can now be filled by women whereas previously that was not possible.  Nuns will be likely candidates for many of these positions, but they do not have to be nuns.  Just today, Pope Francis announced that three women will serve on the council that that vets bishop nominations -- see this RNS news post.  Two of these women are nuns, but the other has been serving as the leader of Catholic women's organization.

If you are interested in learning more about these developments, Thomas Reese provides a nice discussion of the reforms on this blog post at RNS.

Religious groups must continually adapt to changing circumstances in the religious marketplace, and the Catholic Church is no different in this regard.  What makes the Catholic Church unique is its immense size, its long history, and its long-standing organizational institutions.  But even a group as old as the Catholic Church must still confront the challenges of being relevant and impactful in the world today.

To Be a Jehovah's Witness in Russia

This article in the Associated Press provides a glimpse into what life is like for Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia.  Consider the following questions as you read this article:

• How have Jehovah's Witnesses been treated in Russia?
• What justification has the Russian government given for this type of treatment?
• What is distinctive about Jehovah's Witnesses teachings?
• In what other countries have Jehovah's Witnesses experienced persecution?
• How do many Jehovah's Witnesses respond to the persecution?

The Russia-Ukraine War and Religious Minorities

The title of this article in Religion & Politics asks an important question about the Russia-Ukraine war:  What does the Russian Invasion Mean for Religious Minorities in Ukraine?

Read the article to find out.  Here are some key questions for you to ask yourself as you read the article:

• What religious minorities currently exist in Ukraine?
• What types of challenges have religious minorities recently faced in Ukraine?
• What does the experience of religious minorities in Russia tell us about what the experience of religious minorities in Ukraine might be in regions of Ukraine that are taken over by Russia?
• Does the experience of what has happened in Crimea since Russia invaded in 2014 provide any clues?

These questions matter far beyond the scope of this class.  As the author states near the end of the article, "The protection of the rights of religious minorities is often the litmus test for democracy."  There is research to support this claim -- indeed the case of what has happened in Russia during the last two decades is itself evidence that religious protections are among the first to disappear when on a path that diverges from democracy.

Global Methodist Church to Begin Officially in May

Schism in the United Methodist Church is taking another turn.  During the last couple years, leaders of the UMC have been negotiating a peaceful way for the UMC to split into separate progressive and conservative groups.  The vote over a proposed plan was delayed due to the COVID pandemic, but various members and leaders in the church have sought to move forward without waiting any longer for the vote.  One group of members have set up a new Methodist denomination -- the Global Methodist Church -- announced yesterday that this new denomination will officially begin on May 1 of this year.  See this article at Religion News Service.

This is not the first new group to form as a result of the prolonged internal disputes over same-sex marriage and gay clergy.  The Liberation Methodist Connexion formed in January 2020 as a progressive alternative.  The Global Methodist Church is theologically conservative.

This schism is yet another case for us to consider using the sect-to-church theory.  The United Methodist Church began as an upstart sect and then transitioned to a low-tension church.  It has experienced revival efforts from within, but the progressive voices seem to have gained the upper hand, thereby compelling the conservative faction to break off and form their own group.  This summary matches the sect-to-church theory well on the surface, but of course there are other aspects of the case that do not fit the theory so easily.  For example, the formation of the progressive Liberation Methodist Connexion is a break-away sect with lower (not higher) strictness than its parent organization.  Examining cases like these can help us to modify and amend the basic sect-to-church theory.

If you are interested, you can see two earlier blog posts on the Methodist schism here and here.

The Russia-Ukraine War and Religion

Religion remains a significant part of national identity in many European countries, and this is true for both Russia and Ukraine.  Both have historical ties to the Eastern Orthodox Church, yet there have also been divisions.  Since the end of Soviet rule in 1991, religion and the official status of religious groups in both Russia and Ukraine have undergone significant changes and not without disagreement.

Three Orthodox churches have played the most significant roles in Ukraine, one of which has strong ties to Moscow.  As recently as 2018, there was a unification of the three into a single Orthodox Church of Ukraine -- although some of those with ties to Moscow did not join the unification.  This development was supported by many Orthodox leaders worldwide and gained official support by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 2019.  However, it was criticized by Russian political leaders and leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church who want Ukrainian Orthodox Christians to exist under the direction of Orthodox religious leaders in Moscow.

Read this article about religion in Russia-Ukraine war from the Religion News Service, and think about the following questions.  What key religious developments have occurred in Ukraine?  What is the significance of religious developments in Ukraine?  What role has religion played in the war?

Students' Beliefs and Academic Success

This article by Ilana Horowitz at Religion News Service reports on interesting findings on the relationship between religiosity and academic success.  Religiously devout American students get higher grades and are more likely to graduate from college, on average, than students who are much less religious, but they also attend less selective colleges.  Read the article to see the explanation, and to see what the research reveals about atheist students.

The Nuns of TikTok

The Daughters of St. Paul have created a splash on TikTok, getting millions of views for their videos.  They also got some attention in the latest issue of the Economist Magazine (gated).

Their videos reveal the creative and humorous sides to these nuns from outside of Boston -- especially Sister Orianne Pietra Rene and Sister Danielle Lussier.  As explained in that Economist article, the videos have also created opportunities for them to share their beliefs and develop new friendships.  Even if these videos were not intended to serve a missionary purpose, they still do, which goes to show you that publicity can take many forms.  And different forms allow the nuns to reach different people.

The Benefits and Costs of Streaming Church Services

The COVID pandemic has affected social interactions in many ways, and this is also true for religious interactions.  One of the biggest changes for churches is is that many congregations began live streaming their church services online.  Some did this because large worship services were temporarily prohibited by law, while others did it to enable members with health concerns who would not attend in person to watch remotely, or both.

As COVID infection rates have continued to fluctuate, congregations that started live streaming during the pandemic must decide whether or not to continue streaming their services.  But as with any type of activity, the streaming of church services has benefits and costs.  Let us consider some of these here.

Benefits:

1. Streaming allows people who would not participate in person to participate remotely.  Streaming thus allows those people to maintain their religious capital -- or to prevent it from depreciating as rapidly as it would if they did not participate at all.  This is the most important reason to stream and is the main motivation for beginning to stream during the pandemic.  Some members might be especially served by streaming services, including those who are out of town and those whose health prevents them from attending in person.
2. Streaming allows the congregation to more easily reach and recruit new members.  Attending a congregation for the first time can be a scary experience.  When a person is invites you to attend church you have not previously attended, you might hesitate to go because you are unsure of what the experience will be like.  Watching a service remotely entails a much lower cost and risk because you can easily stop the stream or watch anonymously.  Streaming the service thus allows potential recruits an easier entry into the congregation.  Some people might be too afraid to go in person but be willing to watch remotely, and maybe they will come in person once they determine that they like the congregation. 
3. Streamed services can be recorded, thereby allowing some people to have a form of engagement with a church service that they missed synchronously.  As with 1 and 2 above, the ability to watch a recorded services enable people to reinforce their religious capital when they might not have been able to do so otherwise.

Costs:

1. Some people who would attend in person if there was no remote option might switch to remote attendance rather than attend in person.  If this happens, then the lower in-person attendance can reduce the vitality of the in-person meetings.  It also means that those who switch to remote viewing will have fewer chances to develop friendship and other ties at church services, thereby causing their religious capital to be lower than it would be without the remote option.  Worshipping together and fellowshipping each other are two of the main benefits of in-person church attendance, and these are missed when people switch from in-person participation to remote viewing.  Lower in-person participation can thus bring a lower quality of collective religious production.
2. Some equipment and software may need to be purchased, and a volunteer will need to run the live stream.  The technical requirements for streaming a church service are not that large.  A smart phone and a Zoom account can be enough to do a simple live stream, and a tripod and good microphone can improve the quality. More sophisticated set-ups with multiple audio feeds and viewer participation are also possible, and a volunteer will be needed to run the live stream.  Note that many of these technical costs are set-up costs that are paid when first beginning the live streams and not thereafter.  The ongoing costs of continuing to live stream are fairly low.

The size of these benefits and costs will differ across congregations.  A congregation that places a high value on in-person participation will be less comfortable with an easy remote option that creates an added incentive for members to skip church because of the convenience of remote viewing.  Another congregation that values a low cost of initial participation for potential new members will like having the remote option for new recruits.  There might also be innovations in how to grant access to the live stream or the recordings that try to balance different desires.  For example, a congregation can limit access to its live stream, e.g., limit to only those who are unable to attend in person due to health.  By limiting the remote access, the in-person participation is promoted while still making a remote option available for some of the members.

A key point to take away from this discussion is that we should expect to see wide variation across congregations in how streaming is used going forward.  Some will continue their live streams while others will stop them, and among those that continue there will be variation in how open or restricted the access is to those live streams.

Roller Derby and Religious Competition

One of the important premises that follows from using an economic approach to religion is that competition exists and many different margins, and religious groups are not immune to this competition.  Religious groups must compete with other religious groups, but they must also compete with secular alternatives to religion.  An academic article just published in the journal Sociological Inquiry argues that roller derby can be understood as one of these secular alternatives.

The reference is:  Jason Wollschleger, 2022, "Roller Derby as a Secular Alternative to Religion" , Sociological Inquiry (it is currently in early view and so does not have an assigned issue yet). The author is a sociologist, not an economist, and he draws from ideas that have been developed outside of economics.  Some ideas that are important in the economic approach have corresponding ideas from other other approaches, and this should not be surprising because good ideas are found in many places.

From the abstract:

[R]oller Derby functions as a secular competitor to religion in the lives of these skaters in three key ways: (1) roller Derby participants make a significant investment of time, energy, money, and physical well-being into their sport; (2) roller Derby does, in fact, satisfy most if not all of the individual needs traditionally satisfied by religion as identified by Stolz et al (2016)...; and, (3) participation in roller Derby does conflict with individuals’ formal religious involvement.

Skim the article to find its main points and the types of evidence used by the author.

Note:  You will probably need to use UCI VPN to access this article from your home.

A Trade-off Between Friendliness and Security

A recent RNS article discusses a trade-off that several synagogues find themselves facing, i.e., that between offering synagogue services that are open to strangers and services that ensure the safety for congregants.  This comes after a newcomer was welcomed into a synagogue in Texas and took several hostages at gunpoint.  The hostages eventually escaped, and the newcomer was killed.

Leaders of other synagogues who are fearing similar attacks have stepped up security at their services, but this has come at a cost of reducing friendliness.  It is a trade-off that many synagogues are willingly taking.  Doors are locked during services, guards are hired, cameras installed, and more, including turning away newcomers if the clergy do not know they were coming.

Religious groups must always make trade-offs in carrying out their religious mission, but this is not one that we normally think of.  It is a trade-off that a religious group -- usually a new religious movement or a religious minority -- must consider when it finds itself faced with threats of violence.

A New Reformed Church Denomination

Many American religious groups -- especially mainline Protestant denominations -- have experienced schism as a result of internal disagreement about what should be their official stance on LGBTQ issues.  In the last 15 years, the Anglican Church in North America split from the Episcopal Church in 2008, the North American Lutheran Church split from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 2010, and ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians split from the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2012.  In each case, conservative members organized a new denomination so that they would not have to accept policy changes on LGTBQ matters in the parent denomination.

We can now add another denomination to this list:  the Alliance of Reformed Churches split from the Reformed Church in America in 2021.  This split now involves 125 congregations leaving the parent church and trying to join the new group.

Read this article from the Religion News Service for a summary of the situation.  LGTBQ policies take central stage, but there are other factors that are also part of the conversation, including church finances, organizational structure, and growth strategies.

Additional changes are also in the works for the United Methodist Church, though these have been put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  You can see previous blog posts on this topic here and here.

Schism is one type of dynamism in the American religious marketplace.  Members of religious groups must continually negotiate a myriad of contentious issues, and when a satisfying compromise cannot be reached then schism is one possible outcome.

Rain, Church Attendance, and Crime

Yesterday, the University of Texas at San Antonio web site published an article about one of their economics professor's research on the relationship between rain, church attendance, and crime.  See the article here.  This is the economic approach to religion in action!

The research question asks what is the effect of church attendance in a community on crime in that community.  To answer this question, you cannot just merely look at the correlation between church attendance and crime across communities because there are many other factors that may muddy those correlations.  Ideally, we would run an experiment in which we (the experimenters) randomly assigned some community members to attend church and others to not attend church, but this experiment is not really possible (or ethical) to run.

When social scientists are unable to run the ideal experiment, they often look for situations in which there is something in the real world that has some features of an experiment.  In this case, Professor Moreno-Medina uses rainfall as a type of experimental treatment because rainfall during the times of a church service causes a decrease in church attendance.  The rainfall provides a kind of exogenous, random experimental treatment -- what economists call a natural experiment.

Read the article to see what he finds.  It is a short article, so read it entirely.  Pay attention to how the article describes the potentially complex relationship between church attendance and crime.

Big-data Missionary Work

On 26 December 2021, the NY Times published an article titled "Churches Target New Members, With Help From Big Data."  As a UCI student you can get free access to the NY Times, but you will probably need to use the UCI VPN if accessing it from home.

The gist of the article is that a small company, Gloo, analyzes online data to identify individuals who might be most likely to respond positively to churches' missionary outreach.  And just what does the analysis identify as indicators of possible positive responsiveness to outreach?  People dealing with physical and mental-health challenges, for starters, although the company no longer uses mental-health data.  But tens of thousands of churches are using Gloo's services, so a large number of religious leaders evidently see this use of big data as a promising way to court new members.

Companies in many industries use online data in their advertising efforts, so this is not really a new idea in and of itself.  Perhaps this is one of the earliest applications to evangelizing, but I cannot really say for sure.  I can say that this is one of many examples of how churches will use a variety of methods that perceive to be useful to pursue their missions, even when those methods are copied from secular businesses.  Indeed, churches have historically been some of the earliest adopters of new technologies (think of the printing press!).