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The Differential Impact of Religion on Political Activity and Community Engagement

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

Many religions have an ethos of community betterment that can spur their members to contribute to society in meaningful ways. Yet much of the literature on religion and politics tends to focus on how places of worship increase explicitly partisan activities like voting or donating to a political campaign. Does religion affect community engagement in the same ways that it does political participation? A unique research design executed in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA brings together religious data on individual beliefs and behaviors, clergy messaging, and congregation culture to examine religion’s effects on both political activity and community engagement. The results demonstrate that religion influences both types of behaviors, but not always in the same ways. For instance, it appears as though many congregations tend to develop cultures that encourage either community engagement or political activity, rather than both, with Black Protestant churches as an exception. Additionally, individuals that hold providential religious beliefs tend to have higher levels of community engagement but lower levels of political activity. These findings indicate that religion influences different types of participation differently.

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Notes

  1. Religious tradition is categorized according to the method established by Steensland et al. (2000).

  2. In the analyses that follow, missing data were dealt with using multiple imputation. Multiple imputation generates more than one estimate for each missing value and is the best available technique for dealing with missing data (Horton and Lipsitz 2001; Penn 2007). Listwise deletion would have left a smaller dataset (the exact number depending on the model specifications), but multiple imputation allows for the retention of these cases and for greater confidence in the resulting estimates (King et al. 2001). I used the “ice” package created by Patrick Royston (2005a, b, 2009) to generate 10 imputed datasets for analysis.

  3. Spearman’s rho tests show that perception of clergy messages are independent of any of the individual-level religious variables. For instance, increased attendance is not correlated with increased perception of political topics sermons.

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Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the support of an Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Awan Civic Education research grant, administered by the American Political Science Association’s Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs. Data are available from the author upon request. The author wishes to thank Christopher Williams and Bob Lytle for helpful comments on previous versions.

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Glazier, R.A. The Differential Impact of Religion on Political Activity and Community Engagement. Rev Relig Res 62, 1–26 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-019-00388-9

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