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.