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!).