Abstract
Either despite or because of their non-traditional approach, megachurches have grown significantly in the United States since 1980. This paper models religious participation as an imperfect public good which, absent intervention, yields suboptimal participation by members from the church’s perspective. Megachurches address this problem in part by employing secular-based group activities to subsidize religious participation that then translates into an increase in the attendees’ religious investment. This strategy not only allows megachurches to attract and retain new members when many traditional churches are losing members but also results in higher levels of an individual’s religious capital. As a result, the megachurch may raise expectations of members’ levels of commitment and faith practices. Data from the FACT2000 survey provide evidence that megachurches employ groups more extensively than other churches, and this approach is consistent with a strategy to use groups to help subsidize individuals’ religious investment. Religious capital rises among members of megachurches relative to members of non-megachurches as a result of this strategy.
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Notes
We thank an anonymous referee for pointing out that the analysis of our paper is consistent with the literature on club theory. The interested reader is directed to Sandler and Tschirhart (1980) for an excellent review of club theory.
Wuthnow (1994) identifies many channels through which group activities benefits other members, for example receiving encouragement from other members, hearing other members’ views, having discussion partners, etc. Putnam and Campbell (2010) go further commenting on the fact that belonging to a religious social network is a more important factor than religiosity in being a “good neighbor,” further extending the nature of the positive externality.
This parameter need not be the same across goods or individuals as is assumed here for simplicity. Note that the individual is not only concerned with the match of their existing religious capital with the new church, but also with the quality or match of other individuals’ religious capital. Hence, the individual might want a certain “type” of individual to join the church. Again, these considerations are beyond the scope of this paper but present a possibly interesting avenue of additional research.
For a complete solution of a model of impure public goods and the related comparative statics, the reader is referred to Cornes and Sandler (1996, pp. 290–299).
We are indebted to Warren Bird whose 2007 Ph.D. thesis made us aware of the data set and who also applied similar tests to some of these questions. Our results support and extend his results.
While it may be argued that Historic Black churches may be treated as Protestant, and thus potentially be included in our megachurch sub-sample, we follow Coreno (2002) and Welch et al. (2004), who argue for a separate classification for Black Protestant denominations because of the unique historic experience of black denominations.
While it would be preferable to illustrate more details regarding the number of groups relative to the size of the church, the specific phrasing of the survey questions does not allow more detailed analysis than a difference of means test.
A survey such as the US Congregational Life survey does cover attendance at services. It, however, does not allow us to distinguish whether the person surveyed attended a megachurch or not. Though the FACT2000 survey was completed by a “key informant,” we argue that any bias this may introduce will be common across responders, thus still allowing reasonable statistical comparisons across churches.
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von der Ruhr, M., Daniels, J.P. Subsidizing Religious Participation Through Groups: A Model of the “Megachurch” Strategy for Growth. Rev Relig Res 53, 471–491 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-011-0024-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-011-0024-3