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A ‘WalMartization’ of Religion? The Ecological Impact of Megachurches on the Local and Extra-Local Religious Economy

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

This study explores the impact megachurches have on local and extra-local congregations. Arguing that the two commonly held theories concerning the effect of megachurches on local congregations—that they are either harmful because they undercut local competition, or are beneficial because they increase local competition—are under-specified, we add the concept of religious niches to an organizational ecology model to predict how megachurches will differentially impact local congregations of various affiliation. Following new methodological directions charted by Blanchard et al. (Soc Forces 86(4):1591–1620, 2008), we test how the presence of megachurches differentially impacts congregational change rates among Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Conservative Protestants and three disaggregated Conservative Protestant sub-groups—Evangelical, Pentecostal and Fundamentalists, using county-level data from the 1990 and 2000 Churches and Church Membership datasets and megachurch data from the Database of Megachurches in the US. We find support for the variable impact of megachurches on local congregations in differing niches. For local congregations in dissimilar niches the presence of megachurches seems to be beneficial, whereas for local congregations inhabiting similar niches the presence of megachurches seems to be harmful. In addition to the local impact of megachurches, we find that they also have an impact upon the vitality of congregations in neighboring counties.

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Notes

  1. The data on mega-churches was initially at the place-level so intermediate steps had to be taken to geographically link it to the county level. First, the megachurch data was aggregated to the place-level and “joined” to a place-level geographic shapefile. Next, using the center of mass tool in ArcGIS, the centroid of each place with a megachurch was obtained. Once the centroids were overlaid on a county shapefile, a “spatial join” was implemented linking each place to its larger county “container” based on the rule that it was located geographically inside of the county. This allows for the appending of a unique county identification code (FIPS), which in turn allows for the aggregation of the number and attendance of megachurches in a given county. Ultimately, this was linked to a full county coverage, resulting in 3,067 counties ranging from 0–43 mega churches and 0–216,502 attendants [Harris County, TX (Houston) had the maximum in both cases with 216,502 members across 43 churches].

  2. Conservative Protestant denominations were identified as those that were classified as Evangelical Protestant in the ASARB data. These were then separated into Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal using the denominational profiles from the ARDA American Denominations Project. The remaining non-Pentecostal denominations were classified as Evangelical or Fundamentalist based on an index drawn from pooled 1984–2006 General Social Survey data. This index was based on all respondents in this time frame that were classified by Steensland et al. (2000) as Evangelical Protestant. The index measured two distinctions between Evangelicals and Fundamentalists: scriptural views and secular association memberships (for a fuller treatment, including the list of religious groups and denominations in each category see the Appendix in Blanchard et al. 2008). This data includes congregations without denominational ties as well; unaffiliated and independent congregations were coded using the same methods (see Blanchard et al. 2008).

  3. One million was used as the standardizing rate to increase variation for subsequent analyses and because megachurches are shown to concentrate in areas of high population (see Fig. 1).

  4. Using ArcGIS, counties were first identified that had a megachurch within their borders, following; a rule was implemented to identify all counties whose boundaries intersected the boundary of a county with a megachurch. Finally, all left over counties were identified as not having a megachurch or being spatially adjacent.

  5. The nearest feature tool in ArcGIS allows for the identification of the spatial relationship in distance between two features of interest. For this project, the purpose is to identify each counties distance in miles from the nearest county with an identified megachurch. The rule put into place to create this variable was the center of each county to the nearest center of a county with a megachurch. The center of the county was chosen as an arbitrary “mean”, due to the fact that each of the megachurches may be located at any place within the county and may pull members from any point in the sending county. Ultimately, this procedure resulted in a variable with the distance of all 3,067 counties to the nearest county with a megachurch ranging from 0 (for counties that had megachurches within their borders) to 318 miles (Aroostook County, Maine).

  6. For sensitivity purposes, the median was also examined but the results did not significantly vary. The category that did change moderately was the Fundamentalist Conservative Protestant sub-group, which had a positive median rate for the core counties (6.59), negative for adjacent (−21.55), and then positive for nonadjacent (2.28) and national (1.99). The difference here is minimal since the relationships move in the same direction as the means and does not affect the analysis.

  7. Again, the population change during the time period was controlled for by taking into account the annual migration change over the same period of time. The changes in adherent and membership changes represent the excess amount of change in relation to the average change for the county from migration. We understand that there are some issues concerning the selectivity of migration and especially the selectivity of certain denominational groups to migrate at rates differing from other groups. However, as that data is not available, we do use the overall migration rates as a “best” indicator of patterns of population change in the county throughout the decade.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98125, USA

    Jason Wollschleger

  2. Graduate Center, Brooklyn College and Institute for Demographic Research, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Jeremy R. Porter

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  1. Jason Wollschleger
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  2. Jeremy R. Porter
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Correspondence to Jason Wollschleger.

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Wollschleger, J., Porter, J.R. A ‘WalMartization’ of Religion? The Ecological Impact of Megachurches on the Local and Extra-Local Religious Economy. Rev Relig Res 53, 279–299 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-011-0009-2

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