Religious Certainty as Social Capital

Abstract

Background Recent scholarship on the social embeddedness of religion indicate that religious choices are often best explained through social ties, and religious belief and practice is influenced by congregational embeddedness. Berger's theory of secularization argued that plausibility structures were maintained by interactions with others with the same worldview, and that outgroup ties can reduce one's certainty in religion and be detrimental to the religious group. Taken together these approaches suggest that religious certainty functions like Coleman's conceptualization of social capital. Purpose The purpose of this present study is to begin to conceptualize religious certainty as a form of social capital: something that inheres in social relationships and serves as a resource for future religious action of the individual; as well as potentially serving a resource for congregations. Methods Using the Baylor Religion Study 2005 data I operationalize religious certainty as the certainty in the belief of the existence of God, and then perform logistic regression on certainty in God's existence using social ties variables. Then I operationalize religious participation as attendance and run a multiple regression on attendance using certainty in the belief of God as an independent variable. Results The findings from the logistic regression on certainty indicate support for the hypotheses concerning social ties and certainty. The study finds that family religiosity and the number of friends one has who attend the same congregation the higher odds of certainty; whereas and the number of non-religious friends one has decreases the odds of certainty in the existence of God. The multiple regression on attendance suggests that religious certainty, net of all other variables, has a strong positive influence on attendance. Conclusions and Implications The results offer preliminary support for the argument: religious certainty does in fact appear to be a form of social capital since it inheres in social relationships and serves as a resource for individual action. This has important implications for congregations as those with higher stocks of social capital will have greater resources for religious action. It also offers some empirical support for the microfoundations of Berger's theory of secularization.