Evangelical Protestant Denominations Research Articles

The values of religious nones, dones, and sacralized Americans: Links between changes in religious affiliation and Schwartz values.

Religious identification is associated with specific values, particularly conservation values that focus on social rather than personal interest. Recent research, however, suggests that the psychological repercussions of religious commitment can persist after people cease identifying as religious. We examine if this religion residue effect leads to differences in values between those who were once religious but no longer identify as religious and those who never identified as religious. We use longitudinal survey data to examine how changes in identification with religion are associated with Schwartz's circle of values. Results show that religious affiliates were more likely than both those who disaffiliated across waves and those who consistently had no affiliation to endorse each of the social focus values except universalism. As hypothesized, when it came to conservation values, those who disaffiliated from religion were more similar to affiliates than were those who were consistently unaffiliated. Additional analyses showed that (a) associations between religious identification trajectories and values were largely consistent across genders, and (b) those who disaffiliated from evangelical Protestant denominations stood out from other disaffiliates. We conclude with a discussion of how these findings further understanding of the association between religion and personal values.

Racial-Ethnic Diversity and the Decline of Predominantly-White Mainline and Evangelical Protestant Denominations: A Spatial Fixed-Effects Approach

Predominantly white Mainline and Evangelical Protestant denominations are in a state of stagnation or decline in the United States. This is partially because these denominations fail to thrive in the ever-growing racial-ethnic diversity of the U.S. In fact, despite increases in the non-white population, diversity within these Protestant groups remains low. The organizational ecology approach asserts that the mismatch between the potential pool of adherents and the demographic niche occupied by the white Protestant groups encourages decline in areas that are diversifying. Past research supporting this theory, however, have relied on limited samples/timeframes and neglected the spatial autocorrelation of religious adherent rates and its predictors. This study re-examines the linkage between racial-ethnic minority growth and white denominations’ adherent decline using a fixed-effects spatial Durbin model to predict the adherent rates of Mainline and Evangelical Protestants in U.S. counties from 1980 to 2010. Results from the non-spatial fixed effects model fail to identify a significant association for Mainline denominations, but adjusting for spatial dependency reveals a direct effect for Mainline denominations and a spatial spillover effect for Evangelicals. Future studies on religious change and diversity must take their spatial structure into account.

Assessing the Denominational Identity of American Evangelical Colleges and Universities, Part I: Denominational Patronage and Institutional Policy

In an effort to better understand the role of denominational identity among its member institutions, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) commissioned a three phase study of its institutions, faculty, and students. This article provides an overview of the study as a whole, as well as an in depth examination into the responses from the institutional portion of the study. Seventy-nine of the CCCU's member institutions in the United States responded to the online survey, yielding a response rate of 72%. Results suggest that a number of policies and practices currently in place at many church-related colleges serve to maintain denominational identity. In particular, college governance practices, annual appropriations from ecclesiastical bodies, and employment policies were generally found to support the denominational character of the institutions sampled. However, longitudinal trends suggest potential challenges on the horizon, as denominations have provided smaller annual appropriations and fewer students who identify with the sponsoring denomination are enrolling in church-related colleges and universities. In short, study findings indicate that American evangelical Protestant denominations continue to provide a measure of oversight and funding to their affiliated postsecondary institutions, and the policies and practices of these institutions privilege their ecclesiastical patrons in varying degrees. Subsequent articles from this study will examine faculty perspectives and practices as well as the student experience at CCCU institutions.

Praying for a Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States

Some observers believe the business cycle influences religiosity. This possibility is explored in this paper by empirically examining the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and religious participation by U.S. Protestants. The findings of this paper suggest that there is a strong countercyclical component to religious participation in evangelical Protestant denominations while for mainline Protestants there is on balance a procyclical component to religious participation.

God as the ultimate attachment figure for older adults

Attachment to God among older adults is an area of research that has been neglected thus far. The existence of such an attachment was explored in a study of 109 elders aged 70–97. A modest proportion of elders displayed a strong attachment to God, assessed by coding interview data for indicators of attachment. Strength of attachment to God was related (p lt; .05) to greater religiosity, greater fear of death, loss of other attachment figures, religious affiliation, and being younger in age, Black, and of lower socioeconomic status. Participants belonging to fundamentalist or evangelical Protestant denominations had a stronger attachment to God than those with other affiliations. Findings are interpreted in relation to existing literature on attachment to God.

Acts of Faith: Churches and Political Engagement

Many observers suggest that white evangelical Protestant churches serve to mobilize their members into politics, while others argue that they encourage withdrawal from political life. This paper reconciles these two claims. I hypothesize that the time members of evangelical Protestant denominations spend in service to their church comes at the expense of participation in the wider community, contrary to the way mainline Protestant and Catholic churches foster civic activity among their members. However, I further hypothesize that the tight social networks formed through this intensive church activity can at times facilitate rapid and intense political mobilization. Data from the Citizen Participation Study supports the first hypothesis, while applying King's method of ecological inference to two elections in Alabama supports the second.

The Political Activity of Evangelical Clergy in the Election of 2000: A Case Study of Five Denominations

This article focuses on the political participation of ministers from five evangelical Protestant denominations that differ in theology, polity, and history. Despite such differences, these clergy respond to political influences in much the same fashion. We find that the standard theories of political participation have varying success in accounting for their political involvement. Sociodemographic explanations provide little help, but psychological engagement with politics has more explanatory power. Professional role orientations are the best predictors of actual participation. And the clergy who see moral reform issues as the most important confronting the country—and who hold conservative views on such issues—are most likely to become engaged. Finally, membership in Christian Right organizations serves to elicit more activity than might occur if ministers were left to internally motivated participation. Despite the emphasis on other contextual variables in some work on clerical politics, we find that communications exposures, congregational influences, and even the support of clerical colleagues have very limited independent effects on political involvement.

Geographical Patterns of Religious Denomination Affiliation in Georgia, 1970-1990: Population Change and Growing Urban Diversity

The religious landscape of the South has long been dominated by a small number of evangelical Protestant denominations, most particularly the Baptists and Methodists. But the region has experienced a tremendous rate of in-migration from both inside and outside the United States in recent decades. Have these in-migrants altered the South's traditional geographic patterns of religious denomination affiliation? The central purpose of this study is to examine Georgia's denominational landscape between 1970 and 1990 to determine if changes have occurred, and are likely to continue in coming decades. The study's primary focus is upon seven denominations including Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, Mormons, and Pentecostals. Among its findings are that Southern Baptists and Methodists are slowly declining in their proportion of the state's population, most particularly in the state's metropolitan areas. In contrast, Catholics are rapidly increasing in the state's urban areas, and both Mormons and Pentecostals are growing very rapidly in a diverse set of rural and urban locations.

Fundamentalism and Femininity: Points of Encounter Between Religious Conservatives and Women, 1919–1935

“Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church,” H.L. Mencken once observed—strictly for the company. His book “in defense of women,” written at the close of World War I, systematically deflated the Victorian era's sentimental notions about the “fairer sex.” “They are growing less and less religious as year chases year,” he noted cheerfully. “The evangelical Protestant denominations will have a hard time holding them.” Others shared Mencken's conclusion, though less joyfully. “Women no longer accept Christianity as a matter of course because they happen to be women,” the Christian Century lamented in 1924. “They pause and question here as in all things else.”

Norwegian Immigrants Respond to the Common School: A Case Study of American Values and the Lutheran Tradition

In his book, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, Robert T. Handy stresses “the important role that the idea of civilization has played in the evangelical Protestant denominations that together made up the dominant religious subculture of nineteeth-century America.” Handy contends that the English-speaking evangelical Protestant denominations—he includes the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, United Brethren, and the evangelical wing in the Protestant Episcopal Church—thought of themselves as making up the “religious mainstream of the nation” and were motivated by the vision of a Christian America. They saw it as their task to work for the creation of a nation based on Christian principles, and they sought to utilize a number of institutions, voluntary organizations, and techniques to achieve that goal.

Confidence and Pertinacity in Evangelical Abolitionism: Lewis Tappan's Circle

IN HIS 1933 STUDY, The Antislavery Impulse, GILBERT HOBBS Barnes demonstrated for first time that not all antebellum American abolitionists were radical Garrisonians. There were also conservative abolitionists like Theodore Weld and James Birney who drew upon reformist aspects of Finneyite Great Revivals of 1820s and 1830s. Their aim was not social revolution; instead, they simply sought to make nation's religious and political institutions unambiguously antislavery. In more recent years, scholars have noted that all conservative abolitionists were not same. Although all conservatives were sympathetic with Liberty Party during 1840s, a number remained more concerned with reforming evangelical Protestant denominations than building an antislavery political movement. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's 1969 biography, Lewis Tappan and Evangelical War against Slavery, has been most sophisticated effort at characterizing these evangelical church-oriented conservatives. Wyatt-Brown's achievements were two-fold. Differing with Barnes, he demonstrated that evangelical conservatives did not restrict their activities to Midwest; various groups also operated throughout Northeast. Second, Wyatt-Brown showed how the evangelicals of [Lewis] Tappan's immediate circle formed most influential group of church-centered abolitionists through their dominant role on American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, American Missionary Association, and New York City Abolition Society, as well as through their funding of Oberlin and Oneida Institutes-the principal training grounds for evangelical antislavery clergy. But because Wyatt-Brown's focus was biographical, he was unable to provide detailed analysis of values and interactions within Tappan's immediate circle.