Church Attendance Rates Research Articles

Los Adaes, the First Capital of Spanish Texas by Francis X. Galán

Reviewed by: Los Adaes, the First Capital of Spanish Texas by Francis X. Galán Juliana Barr Los Adaes, the First Capital of Spanish Texas. By Francis X. Galán. Summerfield G. Roberts Texas History Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 400. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-878-8.) Francis X. Galán's new book is more than just a history of the Spanish community that was established around a presidio and a mission in the midst of Caddo country—on the ostensible border with French Louisiana—and that served as the capital of the Spanish province of Texas for much of the eighteenth century. If it were simply that, that would be enough, as Galán offers the most deeply researched study ever of Los Adaes, with an endless supply of entertaining, fascinating, and revealing stories of the mad and maddening range of characters who populated its ranks. Yet the book does so much more, providing through its numerous tales of imperial and individual rivalry and chicanery one of the most persuasive portraits yet of the ephemeral nature of borders claimed and drawn by wishful European empires in early America. Really, this is a "people's" history—featuring soldiers defrauded by a long line of Spanish governors who transformed them into debt peonage laborers (p. 8); Franciscans who at best ran their own smuggling rings in hopes of inveigling Native nations into trade ties that might finally lure neophytes into their lonely, long-empty missions (or, at worst, defied Spanish law by running guns and ammunition to Caddo neighbors in exchange for the humble bear grease essential to their households); Bidais and Orcoquisas who entertained any trader no matter their imperial affiliation as long as they produced the most desirable goods, especially French tobacco for their pipes; and Caddos whose sovereign power remained unquestioned through the eighteenth century—proved again and again in fine details such as the fact that it was Adaeseños (Spanish residents) who became conversant in the Caddo language (not the reverse) and who found employment as interpreters for Caddo leaders' diplomatic exchanges with Spanish officials well into the 1780s. And, oh those machinating governors, who reimagined the impoverished province as a petty fiefdom for personal aggrandizement, repurposed presidial forces as minions in illegal trafficking, and reduced the missions to mere storage facilities along supply routes connecting Caddo communities to New Orleans and Saltillo. Local Spanish and French officials did not use trade to expand imperial borders. Rather, they claimed borders to expand their personal trade or impede that of their rivals; accusations of border violations were really excuses to confiscate the others' goods. In such a world, the trade partnerships, kinship ties, church attendance, and desertion rates of community members told a tale of everyday people who had no recourse but to make common cause with others, no matter if they be French, Caddo, Bidai, or later British, and whose daily lives defied and denied any claim to reality for the borders drawn by officials in faraway lands. [End Page 517] Sharpening this community study still further, Galán engages with current historiography throughout the text, providing context for the happenings in Los Adaes through comparisons with other communities across New Spain's northern provinces and Latin America—thus not only Florida, Louisiana, and New Mexico but also Peru, Mexico, and the Yucatan. These well-timed and well-placed contrasts put Los Adaes on a stage far more expansive than that of provincial Texas and, in so doing, illuminate how events across North America and Bourbon Spain could reach into the quotidian struggles of Adaeseños or could measure such distance between them and the imperial core that it might as well have been on the moon. All in all, such compelling tales and arresting comparisons give the reader a far better understanding of what made the Los Adaes community unique and, equally often, what made it typical of Spanish colonial life in the Americas. Juliana Barr Duke University Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association

Religion and the Transmission of COVID-19 in The Netherlands

The aim of this study was to find out if the typical spread of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in The Netherlands, with significantly higher levels in the Dutch Bible belt and the southern, traditionally Catholic provinces, is related to the specific religious composition of the country. To do this, government statistics regarding the level of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 per municipality were combined with statistics regarding church attendance and church membership rates. Results showed that in the Dutch Bible belt the level of patients with COVID-19 was strongly related to church attendance, but in the southern, traditionally Catholic part of The Netherlands nominal church membership mattered more than church attendance. On the basis of these findings, the conclusion was drawn that religion probably facilitates the spread of the virus in both a direct and indirect way. It facilitates the spread of the virus directly through worship services but also indirectly by way of endorsing more general cultural festivities like carnival and maybe even by strengthening certain non-religious social bonds. Epidemiologists monitoring the spread of the virus are called upon to focus more on these possible indirect or latent effects of religion.

Unbuckling the Bible Belt: A State-Level Analysis of Religious Factors and Google Searches for Porn

While the link between individual religious characteristics and pornography consumption is well established, relatively little research has considered how the wider religious context may influence pornography use. Exceptions in the literature to date have relied on relatively broad, subjective measures of religious commitment, largely ignoring issues of religious belonging, belief, or practice. This study moves the conversation forward by examining how a variety of state-level religious factors predict Google searches for the term porn, net of relevant sociodemog raphic and ideological controls. Our multivariate findings indicate that higher percentages of Evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists in a state predict higher frequencies of searching for porn, as do higher church attendance rates. Conversely, higher percentages of religiously unaffiliated persons in a state predict lower frequencies of searching for porn. Higher percentages of total religious adherents, Catholics, or mainline Protestants in a state are unrelated to searching for porn with controls in place. Contrary to recent research, our analyses also show that higher percentages of political conservatives in a state predicted lower frequencies of porn searches. Our findings support theories that more salient, traditional religious influences in a state may influence residents—whether religious or not—toward more covert sexual experiences.

Religiosity and income: a panel cointegration and causality analysis

ABSTRACTIn this article, we examine the long-run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1930 to 1990. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test for the direction of causality. We show that there exists a negative long-run relationship between the level of religiosity, measured by church attendance, and the level of income, measured by the log of GDP per capita. The result is robust to alternative estimation methods, potential outliers, different samples, different measures of church attendance and alternative specifications of the income variable. Long-run causality runs in both directions, higher income leads to declining religiosity and declining religiosity leads to higher income.

Income and religion: a heterogeneous panel data analysis

A recent empirical literature has addressed the relationship between income and religion, but most of the studies are based on microdata. Macroeconomic analysis of the issue has largely ignored the potential heterogeneity between countries. Using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries between 1925 and 1990, we apply heterogeneous panel data estimators and reveal that the effect of participation in religious activities on income per capita is mostly non-significant. This is consistent with some of the recent research that casts doubt onto the influence of religion on income, once causality is taken into account.

Reported Church Attendance at the Time of Entry into HIV Care is Associated with Viral Load Suppression at 12Months.

The Southeast has high rates of church attendance and HIV infection rates. We evaluated the relationship between church attendance and HIV viremia in a Southeastern US, HIV-infected cohort. Viremia (viral load ≥200 copies/ml) was analyzed 12 months after initiation of care. Univariate and multivariable logistic regression models were fit for variables potentially related to viremia. Of 382 patients, 74 % were virally suppressed at 12 months. Protective variables included church attendance (AOR 0.5; 95 % CI 0.2, 0.9), being on antiretroviral therapy (AOR 0.01; 95 % CI 0.004, 0.04), CD4(+) T lymphocyte count 200-350 cells/mm(3) at care entry (AOR 0.3; 95 % 0.1, 0.9), and education (AOR 0.5; 95 % CI 0.2, 0.9). Variables predicting viremia included black race (AOR 3.2; 95 % CI 1.4, 7.4) and selective disclosure of HIV status (AOR 2.7; 95 % CI 1.2, 5.6). Church attendance may provide needed support for patients entering HIV care for the first time.

Churches: Lasting Sources of Civic Engagement? Effects of Secularization and Educational Expansion on Non-religious Volunteering in the Netherlands, 1988 and 2006

During the last three decades Dutch church attendance rates dropped considerably, while the relative share of volunteers in non-religious organizations decreased at a slower rate. This is an unexpected development given the positive association between religious involvement and volunteering. In this article, we try to account for this development by addressing the following question: Why has a massive and ongoing decline of church attendance in the Netherlands not resulted in a similar drop in the relative number of volunteers in non-religious voluntary organizations? In view of this question, we wonder if the negative effect of declining church attendance on volunteering is perhaps counterbalanced by a positive effect of educational expansion. Our findings reveal that this is indeed the case, but these counterbalancing effects are only modest.

Differences in Religiousness in Opposite-Sex and Same-Sex Twins in a Secular Society

Sex differences in religion are well known, with females generally being more religious than males, and shared environmental factors have been suggested to have a large influence on religiousness. Twins from opposite-sex (OS) and same-sex (SS) pairs may differ because of a dissimilar psycho-social rearing environment and/or because of different exposures to hormones in utero. We hypothesized that OS females may display more masculine patterns of religiousness and, vice versa, that OS males may display more feminine patterns. We used a web-based survey conducted in Denmark, which is a secular society. The survey included 2,997 twins aged 20-40 years, identified through the population-based Danish Twin Registry. We applied la Cour and Hvidt's adaptation of Fishman's three conceptual dimensions of meaning: Cognition, Practice, and Importance, and we used Pargament's measure of religious coping (RCOPE) for the assessment of positive and negative religious coping patterns. Differences between OS and SS twins were investigated using logistic regression for each sex. The analyses were adjusted for dependence within twin pairs. No significant differences in religiousness and religious coping were found for OS and SS twins except that more OS than SS females were members of the Danish National Evangelical Lutheran Church and fewer OS than SS females were Catholic, Muslim, or belonged to other religious denominations. Moreover, OS males at age 12 had higher rates of church attendance than did SS males. This study did not provide evidence for masculinization of female twins with male co-twins with regard to religiousness. Nor did it show any significant differences between OS and SS males except from higher rates of church attendance in childhood among males with female co-twins.

God Talk: Experimenting with the Religious Causes of Public Opinion

This is one book that does not suffer from a lack of ambition. Paul A. Djupe and Brian R. Calfano set out to change not only the way that scholars think about religion's influence on public opinion but also the methods that scholars use to investigate those relationships. Djupe and Calfano are critical of research based on what they term the “religious commitment” approach. Typically, this work begins by identifying an individual's religious tradition—mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, Jewish, and so on. The next step is to assess an individual's commitment to that tradition through measures of their beliefs and practices, for instance, their rate of church attendance. Finally, this information is used to document different types of political variation. For the authors, this strategy is indefensible because it assumes that message content is constant across a religious tradition. But the reality is that one Catholic priest may talk about social justice in every homily, while another scrupulously avoids political commentary. Hence, religion and politics research, Djupe and Calfano argue, must be seriously concerned with how people are exposed to religion.

Explanations of changes in church attendance between 1970 and 2009

We deduce hypotheses from theories on religious change to explain changes in church attendance rates. Using a new dataset with 51 countries across a long period we apply panel regression models, which enable us to test well-known theories in a more strict and dynamic fashion than do cross-sectional studies.Our results provide new evidence for a few old ideas, but also show striking lack of evidence for ideas that appear well-accepted. Tertiary education proved to be a strong predictor of changes in church attendance. Theories about individualization were also supported. The evidence of existential insecurity as a cause of change was ambiguous: economic development and life expectancy showed significant effects but income inequality did not. We found no support for theories on social globalization and social benefit policy. Finally, we found that income inequality and urbanization were driving forces of change during the 70s and 80s, but not since 1990.

Assembling the Puzzle of the Nonprofit-Economic Development Linkage

AbstractThis study seeks to quantify the impact of the nonprofit sector on economic development by more clearly defining the diverse roles that nonprofits may play in development – instrumental, expressive, and connective. We begin by summarizing existing research on nonprofit organizations and economic development. Using secondary data, we test our model in 360 U.S. metropolitan areas for the years 2001–2006. Do nonprofit organizations produce economic growth? Our statistical findings suggest, “Not really” and “It depends.” While some forms of nonprofit organizations (business associations) are positively related to growth, others such as congregations and social and fraternal associations may have a dampening effect. Overall, our findings suggest complex relationships between individual forms of capital, organizational structures, and development that may be place and time dependent. While our findings currently provide little guidance for policy makers attempting to promote economic development, our findings do have important implications for nonprofit and public policy scholars. Any attempt to explore the relationship between nonprofit activity and development must untangle indicators of individual behavior (church attendance or census return rates) from indicators of organizational structures (such as the number of specific organizations). Second, any effort to understand the impact of the nonprofit sector should disaggregate sector measures based upon a conceptual understanding of the diverse roles of various organizational types (for example, human service organizations versus social and fraternal organizations). Finally, growth and development and the role of the sector are contextual, exhibiting significant regional and temporal variation.

The ‘sectarian’ Church. Catholicism in Italy since John Paul II

Many surveys report that the rate of church attendance in Italy is still very high, one of the highest in Europe. Are these data reliable? Is there really a ‘Catholic effect’ in Italy, a persistent popular affection for the Catholic Church, a slower rate of secularization? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to these questions but there are many elements that would contradict the optimistic (for the Catholic Church) view: 1) different (and more pessimistic) data on church attendance; 2) the decreasing number of priests and their ageing; and 3) disaffection among the younger generation. A good part of the Catholic hierarchy, and the two last popes, firmly believe that the rise of new movements (Comunione and Liberazione, Neocatecumenals, Charismatic Renewals and others) may correct the secularization trend and the demise of traditional territorial parishes. But encouraging these movements requires promoting a fundamental change in the cultural and organizational form of Catholicism towards a sort of never-seen ‘sectarian Church’.

Religious decline in the 20th century West: testing alternative explanations

Retrospective questions from recent surveys let us estimate rates of church attendance among children and their parents in ten Western democracies throughout most of the 20th century. We combine these time series with standard sources to test competing theories of religious change. Although our attendance estimates affirm the prevalence of religious decline, our statistical tests offer no support for traditional theories of secularization (which link decline to changes in income, education, industrialization, urbanization, and family life). Nor can we attribute much of the observed decline to growth in the welfare state. But increased school spending by governments does reduce church attendance, and this effect is not the result of greater educational attainment. In shaping the content of schooling, governments may strongly influence long-run religious trends.

Religiosity and Income: A Panel Cointegration and Causality Analysis

In this paper we examine the long-run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1925 to 1990. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test for the direction of causality. We show that there exists a negative long-run relationship between the level of religiosity, measured by church attendance, and the level of income, measured by the log of GDP per capita. The result is robust to alternative estimation methods, potential outliers, sample selection, different measures of church attendance, and alternative specifications of the income variable. Long-run causality runs in both directions, higher income leads to declining religiosity and declining religiosity leads to higher income.

“Secularization of Consciousness” or Alternative Opportunities? The Impact of Economic Growth on Religious Belief and Practice in 13 European Countries

This research note contributes to an evaluation of the validity of secularization theory by studying the relationship between economic modernization and patterns of religious change. Both the disenchantment narrative of Berger and Weber and the existential security perspective of Inglehart hypothesize that economic development should be accompanied by a weakening of religious values. Using macro‐level panel regressions, my analysis reveals that while economic growth is directly associated with diminishing church attendance rates, it is not directly associated with a decline in belief. The relation between economic growth and religious decline is therefore not primarily mediated by a “secularization of consciousness.” Findings instead indicate that economic prosperity leads to a change in consumption patterns on the part of individuals due to increased income and availability of alternative, secular opportunities to meet needs previously fulfilled by traditional religion. A decline in religious belief may occur as a secondary consequence of this behavioral change, since diminishing worship attendance rates reduce the influence of religion on value socialization.

Contemporary Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of “Gathering”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the LDS, or Mormon church—has dominated the state of Utah both culturally and politically since joining the Union in 1896. Scholars note that LDS majorities in Utah and other parts of the Intermountain West foster a religious subculture that has promoted higher levels of Mormon church attendance and member retention than in other parts of the nation. However, after rising throughout most of the twentieth century, the percentage of Utah's population belonging to the church began declining in 1989. Some sources assert Utah is now less Mormon than at any time in the state's history. This article examines the degree to which this decline has affected LDS church activity and retention in Utah and adjacent environs. We find evidence suggesting church attendance rates may be falling, and clear evidence that rates of apostasy among Mormons have risen over the past decade.

Why Do Inefficient Black Churches Survive?

Why do Black American consumers continue to reflect higher rates of church attendance than the remainder of the U.S. population, and continue to obtain a significant amount of services from Black churches? When we hypothesize that the implicit prices of services that are produced by Black churches are higher than the price of low-cost substitute services, the preceding question raises curiosity all the more. The logical follow-on question is, “Why do Black churches, which appear to be inefficient in the production of services, continue to survive?” The analysis that is presented in this paper employs Consumer Expenditure Survey and American Time Use Survey data to reveal answers to these questions in the context of consumer optimization theory. We determine that, to answer these questions satisfactorily, one cannot overlook the role of culture.

Race, Religion, and Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage

Objective. We examine racial differences in support for same-sex marriage, and test whether the emerging black-white gap is a function of religiosity. We explore how religious factors play a crucial role in racial differences, and how secular factors have varying effects on attitudes for whites and African Americans. Methods. Using data from the General Social Surveys, we estimate ordinal logistic regression models and stacked structural equation models. Results. We show that the racial divide is a function of African Americans' ties to sectarian Protestant religious denominations and high rates of church attendance. We also show racial differences in the influence of education and political values on opposition to same sex marriage. Conclusions. Religious factors are a source of racial differences in support for same-sex marriage, and secular influences play less of a role in structuring African Americans' beliefs about same-sex marriage.

After the fall: the impact of government regulation on church attendance in Eastern Europe, 1990–2004

Previous literature modeling the demand for religion has identified socioeconomic factors, religious human capital and religious market structure as being the fundamental determinants of the level of participation in religious services and practices. Building on the existing literature, this study analyzes the effect of government regulation and intervention on religious activity. Using religion-related data as well as demographic and economic data from 22 Eastern European countries after the fall of Communism, the existence of any form of religious restrictions is found to reduce church attendance rates.

Why Are Danes And Swedes So Irreligious?

Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world today, measured by both church attendance rates as well as levels of belief in traditional religious tenets. This article attempts to account for Danish and Swedish irreligiosity by drawing upon several contemporary sociological explanations, the three most prominent being: 1) the effects of a longstanding Lutheran monopoly, 2) the result of being safe, secure, and successful societies, and 3) the influence of a high proportion of women in the paid workplace.