A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Statistical Test of an Hypothesis That Children Were the Source of the American "Religious Revival"

Abstract

TN ATTEMPTING TO EXPLAIN the postwar in America, Nash and Berger questioned a sample of recent joiners of the CongregationalChristian churches in a middle-class New England suburb.' They found that in the vast majority of instances it was the prospect or the presence of children which wholly or partly occasioned the act of joining by their parents.2 Going beyond their sample, the authors offered a demographic hypothesis to account for the increase in the number (and percentage) of church members in America. They say: If what has happened in our churches is representative of America during the period of the Revival, we suggest that the upsurge in church membership is due at least partly to an increase in the number of children who enter the church and parents who follow.3 Nash and Berger went on to speculate that if motivations related to joining remained constant, variation in church membership would follow the rise and fall in the number of American families with children. This paper offers a statistical test of this predicted correlation between church membership and the number of families with children. year-by-year measures for the variables relevant to the hypothesis now exist from 1950 (at a point in time close to the beginning of the Revival) through 1966 (close to the end). Yearbook of American Churches,4 reports church membership (which rose from approximately 57 per cent of the American population in 1950 to 64.4 per cent in 1964 and declined to 63.9 per cent in 1966). U. S. census figures for gross population, number of families, and families with children under 18 are available for almost all of this period.5 These data are presented in Table 1. * I wish to thank my colleagues, Herbert Kaufman, Edward Stockwell, and Jerold Heiss for technical and editorial assistance. 1 See Dennison Nash and Peter Berger, Church Commitment in an American Suburb: An Analysis of the Decision to Join, Archives de Sociologie des Religions, 13 (June, 1962), 105-120; The Child, Family, and Religious Revival in Suburbia, Journal for thr Scientific Study of Religion, 2 (October, 1962), 85-93. 2 Nash and Berger, The Child, the Family, and the Religious Revival in Suburbia, op. cit. 89. 3 Ibid, 91. 4 Yearbook of American Churches, New York Council Press. 5 Department of Commerce, U. S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-20. 1954 data for families with children under 18 are not available. 1950 data are not included in the present analysis because data for numbers