193 - Religious Change in America

Religious Change in America
By Andrew M. Greeley
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989. 144 pp. $25.00.

It is widely believed that the nation has become secularized, that the overriding religion in America is civil religion, and that generally there is less religious commitment among American citizens. To the contrary, Andrew Greeley argues, using social scientific evidence dating back to 1940, that secularization is but a theory that has never been proven, and that, despite scientific advancements, people remain as religious today as in the past half century. Greeley's goal, then, is to measure religious commitment among the citizens of America.

In Western sociology of religion, church attendance-a public profession of religious commitment-has been the prescriptive variable for

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measuring religious participation. As criteria for such measurement, Greeley lists nine categories used by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. These categories, permitting a more detailed examination of church attendance, include those who attend church never, less than once a year, about once a year, several times a year, about once a month, two to three times a month, nearly every week, every week, and several times a week. Greeley also considers such other variables as membership in church-related organizations, personal religious experiences, and prayer. He says Americans are more likely to pray daily than to attend church, weekly.

I have used a model by sociologist Bruce Reed to measure religious participation. Greeley's more numerous categories initially appear to discount the mere trinary division used in Reed's The Dynamics of Religion: Process and Movement in Christian Churches (1978). Viewing religious participation as a swing (oscillation) from the daily life of self-autonomy (intradependence) to the world of worship (extradependence), Reed derives three categories: personal oscillation-normative weekly church attendance; representative oscillation-the infrequent church attender depends on the personal oscillation of relatives or friends; and vicarious oscillation-the complete nonattendance of persons who do not have individual representation, yet rely on the iconic presence of church, particularly in their community.

What is interesting, however, is that Greeley's summarization of the nine variables he has used as measures for levels of religious participation actually reduces to a trinary categorization that is essentially correlative to Reed's model of oscillatory types. Greeley's summary:

The analysis ... indicates that about two-fifths of the American population are quite religious (they pray and go to church regularly and participate in religious organizations); another two-fifths are somewhat religious (they pray and attend church, but not so regularly; they do not participate in religious associations but do accept major doctrinal tenets); and another one-fifth are rather unreligious (they rarely pray or go to church and do not believe in life after death or the divinity of Jesus but still believe in God).

Given the fact that Greeley's categories reduce to a more concise, trinary model, it is feasible to consider Greeley's further variables as still corresponding with Reed's model. For instance, Greeley says that sociologists have neglected to consider and analyze financial contributions to churches as an indicator of religion in the life of individuals. A decline in giving would indicate a decline in intensity of institutional affiliation, while persistence in giving would indicate continuity of religious affiliation. He also suggests that sociologists need to develop criteria for measuring religious experiences, which, stored in the memory as symbols, are summoned up in storytelling and renew hope. That which needs measuring he calls the "religious imagination":

Religious imagination items are more powerful predictors of human attitudes and behavior than most other religious measures; they are

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therefore potentially useful tools for future explorations of the relation between religious, social, and political behavior.

In his earlier book, God in Popular Culture (1988), Greeley did in fact employ the notion of the "religious imagination" in an attempt to measure religious experience.

Greeley's evidence and conclusion in Religious Change in America, relatively akin to Martin Marty's opinion in Religion and the Republic (1987), refutes the claim that religion is on the wane or is becoming increasingly secular. This means that America-with its pluralism of peoples who are "quite religious," "somewhat religious," and "rather unreligious"-is ripe for theological analysis. "With the exception of ... shifting denominational affiliations," concludes Greeley, "Protestantism has not changed in the last half-century. Catholicism has changed, but not much, and the change is over."

Jon Michael Spencer
The Divinity School
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina