Threatening Times and Fluctuations in American Church Memberships

Abstract

Building on the work of S. M. Sales, who related contemporaneous economic threat to authoritarian behaviors, two studies tested the hypothesis that threat is associated with relatively more attraction to authoritarian churches and less attraction to nonauthoritarian churches. The hypothesis was supported in Study 1, when the annual percentage of changes in memberships (1928-1986) for two authoritarian and two nonauthoritarian denominations were examined in relation to several annual social, economic, and political threat indices, and in Study 2, when changes in the proportion of the population having membership in 25 representative denominations were examined over periods of relatively low threat (1955-1964), high threat (1965-1974), and low threat (1965-1979). Both studies suggest that social and political threat as well as economic threat may activate authoritarian behaviors.